Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility

Abstract

In this book's most complex and moving essay, “Be Prepared for the Worst,” a narrative of grief and loss nearly disappears into non-chronological fragments of reflection and scholarship. Even when the story surfaces, the reader is pulled away into analyses of the literature and politics of population, environmental economics, extinction, and imperialist nostalgia. Midway through the author asks, “Do you feel it slipping away yet, the lyrical intensity of the narrative voice?” (50). But there is no compromise, and the essay courageously plunges onward, never retreating from the pose of the scholar even through nearly stifling self-reflexivity. The essay embodies the tension between the pull toward personal reflection and the imperative to attend to communities of knowledge and of action. Yet the book aims for more. Scott Slovic wants to see these urges as complementary. “Why must the cycling between engagement and retreat result in ‘torment’?” he asks. “I arise in the morning eager to savor and to save, hoping to draw upon each impulse in support of the other” (5).

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