TY - JOUR
AU - Dimick, Sarah
AB - While visiting the Morgan Library in New York City, the ecologist Sara Elizabeth Jones examined Henry David Thoreau’s charts of seasonal occurrences, acquiring photostat reproductions of two charts. “I am sending them on for you to see,” she wrote to Aldo Leopold in January of 1946. “They were the most legible of the lot and while I can read the one titled ‘Earliest Flowering of Flowers’ without too much trouble … the one concerned with general phenomena of May takes more concentration …. The titles under May are interesting enough: sunsets red, high winds, frost kills plants, fog, heavy dew, meadow fragrance, peculiar fragrance in air, plant my melons!” Thoreau’s meticulous records of phenological events—events driven by seasonal and climatic patterns—were of particular interest to Leopold and Jones in 1946. Compiling their own phenological record, encompassing a decade of observed blooming times and migratory arrivals and ice melt, they hoped to identify the environmental rhythms of southern Wisconsin, or—as they phrased it—the “datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year” (83). As they exchanged letters regarding this phenological study, they also sustained a discussion about Henry David Thoreau.1 Leopold mailed Jones an article from The Atlantic Monthly arguing that “if Thoreau was a scientist in any field, it was ecology, though he preceded the term” (Hyman 138). Jones sent him a copy of Walden. “While I had read Walden a couple of times before this summer,” she confided in September, “discovering Thoreau in the true sense of the word has been one of the most thrilling experiences I have known.” Immersed in their own observations of the landscape’s rhythms, Leopold and Jones recognized Thoreau’s attention to subtle seasonal change as a commitment to measuring and articulating the pulses of environmental time. Although Thoreau’s study of seasonal phenomena and Leopold’s phenological record are rarely considered in relation to their literary productions, both writers approached phenology as an investigation into the form of seasonality in the northern United States.2 If form, as Caroline Levine argues, is a concept extending far beyond the aesthetic, comprising “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference,” then seasonality is a prevalent form of environmental time (3). The seasons are rhythmic configurations, phenological beats and accents that cohere into recognizable temporal patterns.3 Each year, as Thoreau and Leopold recorded the appearance of skunk cabbage blossoms or the return of migrating geese, they were performing acts of scansion: noting recurrences, periodicities, and peaks. This work easily merged into the literary: “The seasons and all their changes are in me,” Thoreau wrote in 1857, “I see not a dead eel or a floating snake, or a gull, but it rounds my life and is like a line or accent in its poem” (HM10: 127).4 Moreover, Walden and A Sand County Almanac were redrafted and expanded during periods of intense phenological study, rhythms observed during fieldwork mapping onto textual structure and accentuating seasonal progression within these works of prose. All of this makes clear that Thoreau and Leopold pursued phenology and writing as linked practices. Indeed, the strongest intellectual current running between these two writers is a preoccupation with the form of environmental time, a fascination that simultaneously drives their research and structures their literary productions. If, as I suggest, seasonality intertwines environmental time and literary form, then climate change may have aesthetic as well as ecological ramifications. Drawing on Thoreau’s and Leopold’s records to establish baseline measurements, ecologists are currently investigating the degree to which the rise in global temperature has altered the phenological patterns that captured these writers’ attention. For instance, the biologist Richard Primack notes that Thoreau’s Journal records the average flowering date for the forty-three most common plant species in Concord as May 16. In notes kept by Concord naturalists at the close of the nineteenth century, this same group of plants flowered just a few days earlier, around May 12. By the early twenty-first century, as Primack resumed phenological observations in the Concord area, these same flowers blossomed on May 8. And in 2012, as the global temperature spiked, Primack observed these plants blooming on April 20 (49–50). These multi-century records document a rapid shift in temporal ecology: under the pressure of accumulating greenhouse gases, established environmental rhythms are moving toward new intervals. In response to these scientific discoveries, Kristen Case observes that “the question we’re left with, then, is, what does this work offer the contemporary humanities?” (195). How do shifts in seasonality reverberate within literature and the human imaginary? Is it possible that our production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases impacts narrative form? To understand not just that seasonality is disrupted but also what this disruption signifies or symbolizes—how it registers affectively as well as statistically—requires reading Thoreau’s and Leopold’s literary works in tandem with their phenological records. Read as conjoined manifestations of seasonal form, these works illustrate how climate change has enabled phenology—mere sequences of environmental rhythms—to generate the ethical force of a fully realized climatic narrative. Temporal Attentions In 1845, as concentrations of carbon dioxide began to rise, Henry David Thoreau “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (Walden 61). This famous declaration originated as a statement about his desire to attend more carefully to phenological events and environmental data. Thoreau referred to annually recurring events as “phenomena,” a term that features prominently in the first draft of Walden’s manifesto: “I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which were the phenomena or actuality the Gods meant to show us,—face to face, And so I came down here. Life! Who knows what it is—what it does?” (P2: 156). This craving for natural phenomena solidified into a recognizable phenological practice by mid-November of 1850, when Thoreau began consistently dating the field notes in his Journal (Dean ix–x). These time stamps reflected his increasingly methodological approach to environmental observation. On his daily walks through the outskirts of Concord, Thoreau was striving for temporal precision: I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, besides attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time. At the same time I had an eye for birds and whatever else might offer. (HM9: 158) In addition to the blossoming and leafing of plants, Thoreau observed the date each year that farmers sent cows “up country,” the date each winter he first observed boys skating on the pond, the date he abandoned his greatcoat and donned thinner clothes in the spring, and the date the weather allowed him to sit “with open window” (“Nature Notes”). In Stephanie LeMenager’s words, Thoreau observed “at which points in time and space human and nonhuman lives … might habitually touch one another,” developing a phenological practice that integrated the seasonal rhythms of human activity with the rhythms of nonhuman phenomena (396). These human and nonhuman rhythms did not follow an invariable annual meter—they did not occur on precisely the same date each year—and yet they were rhythmic insofar as they produced anticipated temporal patterns. “This is the case in this place every year,” Thoreau notes as he describes a peculiar ice formation on the river, “and no doubt this same phenomenon occurred annually at this point on the river a thousand years before America was discovered. This regularity and permanence make these phenomena more interesting to me” (HM9: 174). Scholarly experts on Thoreau’s later work believe that he spent the last decade of his life attempting to compile “a grand calendar of Concord, the fullest possible account of a natural year in his hometown” (Richardson 9).5 Thoreau certainly expresses interest in a text capable of conveying the nuances of seasonal progression: “No one to my knowledge has observed the minute differences in the seasons—Hardly two nights are alike … A Book of the seasons—each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors in its own locality” (P3: 253). Relying on the field notes contained in his Journal, Thoreau compiled month-by-month lists of fruit ripening, migratory bird arrivals, insect activity, and leafing of trees and shrubs (Richardson 5). Using these lists as reference points, he then sketched massive charts illustrating the general phenomena of each month. He listed phenomena down the left side of each page, creating rows, and then listed the years across the top of the page, producing columns. In the resulting boxes, Thoreau entered a number—indicating the day of the month the phenomena occurred—and occasionally included a brief explanatory note. As H. Daniel Peck observes, if Thoreau surveyed land as a vocation, his avocation might best be described as a “surveyor of time” (102).6 Time, like place, could be mapped and delineated: it could be understood as form.7 Thoreau’s phenological survey emerged within a broader nineteenth-century effort to reconceptualize time. As James R. Guthrie notes, advances in geology had begun to erode the assumption that time, humanity, and the planet were approximately contemporary with each other. “The new problem of conceptualizing time,” Guthrie suggests, “became inextricably entwined with the problem of determining time’s true ‘shape’—its orientations, rhythms, purposes” (8). Toward this end, the Smithsonian Institution distributed a circular titled “Registry of Periodical Phenomena” in the spring of 1851, inviting readers to observe and report on “the first appearance of leaves and flowers of plants; the dates of appearance and disappearance of migratory or hybernating animals, as mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, &c.; the times of nesting of birds, of moulting and litterring of mammals, of utterance of characteristic cries among reptiles and insects, and anything else which may be deemed noteworthy.”8 In addition to these reports on “animal and vegetable life,” the Smithsonian requested observations of “general phenomena of climate,” including the breaking up of ice on bays, the rise and fall of water in interior rivers, and the growing periods of “important annual staples.” Phenology blossomed into a national pastime, a trend Thoreau beheld with mild humor in 1852: “This is my year of observation, & I fancy that my friends are also more devoted to outward observation than ever before—as if it were an epidemic” (P5: 174). As Bradley Dean notes, the plants Thoreau began observing regularly bear a “striking resemblance” to the plants listed in the Smithsonian’s circular, suggesting that his phenological project was influenced by the Smithsonian’s inquiry (xi). For Thoreau, however, phenological observation was not a means of maximizing agricultural production or obtaining national statistics. Instead, Thoreau practiced phenology as a method of temporal attunement. If, as he writes in Walden, “we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” then phenology becomes a means of remaining alert (61). Justifying his frequent walks through the woods, Thoreau asks, “If by watching all day & all night—I may detect some trace of the Ineffable—then will it not be worth the while to watch? Watch & pray without ceasing” (P4: 53).9 Phenology honed this sense of vigilance, allowing Thoreau to “improve the nick of time,” and—by dating his observations in his Journal—“notch it on my stick too” (Walden 11).10 While Thoreau’s observations date from the onset of the American Industrial Revolution, Aldo Leopold’s phenological record narrowly predates the spike in global temperature and disruption of large-scale earth systems known as the Great Acceleration.11 Leopold’s record therefore represents a liminal period: in an atmosphere of increasingly concentrated greenhouse gases, Leopold observed phenological cycles established within an earlier atmosphere. “For a decade,” he explains in A Sand County Almanac, “I have kept, for pastime, a record of the wild plant species first in bloom” (50). “Every week from April to September there are, on average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom. In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them” (47). In order to track as many of these “anniversaries” as possible, Leopold approached phenology as a communal endeavor. Between 1935 and 1945, he supplemented observations from his family’s shack in Sauk County with records compiled by Jones and other scientists in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, data from the US Weather Bureau, and notes from ecologists and citizen scientists in his vast correspondence network. For example, a man named Joe Alexander sent Leopold a hand drawn chart recording the annual commencement of tree cricket chirping between 1921 and 1945, explaining, “they tune up at dark, then gradually fall into a synchronized pulsation until all in a wide area are on the same ‘beat.’” From these sources, Leopold assembled a detailed log of 328 environmental rhythms observed in southern Wisconsin, including the dates ring-necked pheasants began their first “fall cackling and crowing” (“Phenological Record” 101). While Leopold, who attended solely to nonhuman rhythms, may have had a narrower view of phenology than Thoreau, his outgoing correspondence during the 1940s documents his attempt to broaden the network of practicing phenologists. He sent the Thunder Bay Naturalists’ Club in Ontario a sample page from his own phenological record book, indicating they might adopt it to their own purposes: “The value [of phenological observations] is of course both local and with other spots that are keeping records.” Unlike Thoreau, Leopold sensed that phenology might have regional or even global implications. Clockwork, Thermometers, and Environmental Form Before anthropogenic climate change prompted a reinvestigation of annual environmental cycles, phenology was employed as a means of intuiting the clockwork embedded in a landscape. Thoreau notes in his Journal, “I think it was the 16th of July when I first noticed [the blue vervain’s flowers] …. It is very pleasant to measure the progress of the season by this & similar clocks—So you get not the absolute time but the true time of the season” (P4: 4–5). Measuring time through blue vervain and other natural clocks, Thoreau begins to understand time as “relational,” a phenomenon bound to ecological cycles (Walls 242). Phenological indicators—the blooming of the blue vervain or the call of the king bird—allow Thoreau to locate himself temporally within the passage of the year. Environmental time is therefore phenomenological; as a mode of temporality, it proceeds according to phenological coordinates such as the air’s temperature, the particular scent of foliage, the tenor and intensity of insect noise, and a host of other sensory data.12 For Thoreau, these phenomena propel as well as mark environmental time: “the year is the grasp of the crickets,” he writes, “& they are hurling it round swiftly on its axle” (P6: 287–88). Similarly, “by their various movements and migrations,” the animals Thoreau observes “fetch the year about” (HM8: 220). True time emerges from the embodied experience of these environmental rhythms. For both Thoreau and Leopold, the seasons are temporal configurations, synchronizations, and sequences of environmental rhythms. As Leopold notes, phenological events produce layered experiences recognized as representative of seasonal progression: “the tamaracks change from green to yellow when the first frosts have brought woodcocks, fox sparrows, and juncos out of the north” and “by the time the pasques are in full bloom our goose convention dwindles” (58, 24). Thoreau begins to attach seasonal language to these phenological convergences, rerouting temporal language away from the calendar and toward the landscape.13 For instance, in May of 1852, he writes: “These are the warm west wind-dream frog-leafing out-willowy-haze-days. Is not this summer? whenever it occurs—” (P5: 48). Even monthly language begins to signify renditions of the landscape: “the wind is Septemberish” he notes, or “the landscape from Fair Haven Hill looks Novemberry …. It is the month of withered oak leaves” (P5: 321; P5: 392). As his suffixes suggest, Thoreau is pushing on the limits of temporal language. Observing a striped squirrel on a hillside, he finally resorts to invention: “May not this season of springlike weather between the first decidedly springlike day and the first bluebird, already fourteen days long, be called the striped squirrel spring? In which we go listening for the blue-bird but hear him not” (HM7: 230). A season may become a configuration of phenological events that “no sooner comes than it goes,” and yet these fleeting formations produce a rhythm over the course of years, each season echoing and anticipating itself: “each annual phenomenon,” Thoreau insists, “is a reminiscence and a prompting” (HM9: 406). While calendrical time proceeds independently of its surroundings, Thoreau observes that environmental time is influenced by climatic conditions. Certain phenological rhythms are produced by humidity: the star fungi, he notes, “are hygrometers,” opening in moist conditions and closing during dry spells (HM8: 298). Others, like the blossoming of the white saxifrage, are responses to “the increased light of the year” (P6: 83). However, many of the phenological rhythms Thoreau studies are linked to temperature. Observing a patch of serviceberries in 1854, he records: I found an Amelanchier botryapium XX with its tender reddish green leaves already fluttering in the wind & stipules clothed with white silky hairs—& its blossom so far advanced that I thought it would open tomorrow—But a little farther there was another which did not rise above the rock but caught all the reflected heat which to my surprise was fully open—Yet a part which did rise above the rock was not open—What indicators of warmth. No thermometer could show it better. (P8: 102–3) If blooming advances the season, shifting environmental time forwards by a few degrees, then time is affected by temperature. Environmental time is a climatic mode of temporality. For Thoreau, this relationship between time and temperature is most easily discerned through observations of Walden Pond. “Though I perceive no difference in the weather, [the pond] does,” Thoreau writes in Walden. “Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring” (201). In this sense, Walden Pond is not only the geographic location of Thoreau’s experiment in deliberate living but also—like the blue vervain and the serviceberries—a seasonal gauge. The pond, perhaps the central image of Thoreau’s text, functions as an environmental timepiece: its unusual depth and lack of a through-stream allow its freezing and melting to “indicate better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season” (200). Its rhythms are regulated by the climate, seasonality bound to temperature. Identifying environmental rhythms embedded in the landscape often caused nineteenth and early-twentieth-century phenologists to marvel at what Leopold called “that ultimate enigma, the land’s inner workings” (“Phenological Record” 83). Despite phenologists’ focus on ordinary, recurring events, the apprehension of these rhythms was often cast as a sublime experience, an act that allowed committed observers to take the “pulse of life” (Bradley 9701). As Thoreau thrusts a thermometer into an opening in the pond ice on March 6th, 1847, recording a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, he is confirming the regularity of nature’s rhythms. “In 1845, Walden was completely open on the 1st of April,” he notes. “In ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April” (Walden 202).14 For Thoreau, these dates are infused with a sense of awe: the pond’s responsiveness to cycles in temperature demonstrates its animation and vitality. “The earth is alive and covered with papillæ,” he declares in a passage of Walden that now rings as eerily prescient. “The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube” (201). Thoreau’s ebullience as he observes the melting ice stands in marked contrast to contemporary anxiety over glacial ablation. In Walden and the Journal, the environment’s sensitivity signals its cohesion, not its vulnerability. The observational projects of Thoreau, Leopold, and other early phenologists were predicated on the belief in “a natural order,” a “deep structure to all vegetational patterns that could be ascertained by any diligent student” (Nabhan xvi). As Thoreau suggests, the limited timescale of an individual’s own observation may impede recognition of this natural order: “It takes us many years to find out that nature repeats herself annually. But how perfectly regular and calculable all her phenomena must appear to a mind that has observed her for a thousand years!” (HM13: 279). For Thoreau, as an American Transcendentalist, this pattern was inherently meaningful, the order of the natural world corresponding to a higher spiritual order. Despite his wariness of subjectivity in scientific work, Leopold inherited this Transcendental view of phenology, positing a link between environmental order and a sense of meaning. He writes: “From the beginnings of history, people have searched for order and meaning in [phenological] events, but only a few have discovered that keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search, and also the chance of finding order and meaning. These few are called phenologists” (“Phenological Record” 83). This assertion, from Leopold’s 1947 scientific publication, is reminiscent of Cleanth Brooks’s argument about literary form in The Well-Wrought Urn, published the same year. Brooks, who famously argued that “form is meaning” (72), hypothesizes that a text’s import is not derived solely from its content, but is instead partially generated by its form—by its patterns, orderings, and repetitions. In phenology as in literature, significance resides partially in form itself. In this sense, Thoreau and Leopold’s phenological projects are profound studies of environmental form. Seasonal and Climatic Narratives As Thoreau and Leopold studied the land’s phenological rhythms, they also began to arrange their prose according to seasonal progression. Between the initial draft of Walden, composed between 1846 and 1847, and the book’s publication in 1854, Thoreau’s text increases in phenological precision. For instance, in the initial draft, he mentions the sand cherries and sumac growing near Walden Pond, observing that the sumac berries turn red “in the fall.” Revising this paragraph in 1852, he contextualizes the sand cherries within the year’s annual cycle, noting that they produce flowers “near the end of May,” and then increases the accuracy of his description of the sumac berries, replacing “in the fall” with “in August” (Walden: A Fluid Text, Versions A and D, para. 4). Thoreau utilized his ongoing phenological observations to hone seasonal events within his narrative. Furthermore, while critics have frequently observed that Walden is structured around the seasonal cycle, it is worth noting that the seasons did not figure prominently in Thoreau’s account of his time at Walden Pond until the fifth draft, written during late 1852 and early 1853 (Shanley 66–67). Thoreau’s use of seasonality as a narrative form therefore emerges during a period of particularly engaged phenological observation, suggesting his interest in environmental phenomena produced an aesthetic proclivity for seasonally-driven narratives. Similarly, one of the many editors examining the collection that would become A Sand County Almanac observed that Leopold’s “manuscript will have more chance of publication if it has some sort of pattern, rather than just being a loose collection of essays with little or no relation to each other” (Clapesattle). Responding to this request for greater formal cohesion, Leopold organized his essays and literary sketches into an almanac between 1944 and 1947 (Ribbens 101). While Buell may be correct to label this revision as “accommodationism,” a response to “prodding by publishers and colleagues to make the book more accessible,” it is also true that the annual seasonal cycle was a habitual method of organization for Leopold, particularly near the peak of his phenological research in the mid 1940s (232). In fact, “A Phenological Record for Sauk and Dane Counties” and A Sand County Almanac are conjoined texts: Leopold borrowed passages from one manuscript to paste into the other. The opening paragraph of his almanac is a near textual replica of the opening paragraph of his scientific publication, suggesting a direct confluence between the composition of these texts. As Leopold and Thoreau searched for a greater sense of order and cohesion in their writing, it seems almost inevitable that they would choose to translate the “regular order” of their phenological observations into literary form. The annual rhythms of the landscape began to manifest in prose. Although prose forms are often conceptualized as static structures, “stilled and contained as in the well-wrought urn,” seasonal prose is a temporal formation (Levine 52). Building on Nicholas Dames, Caroline Levine argues that during the nineteenth century, the idea of narrative as a patterned movement through time was more prevalent, writers and critics analyzing prose works less as synchronic structures and more as diachronic forms characterized by patterns of duration, repetition, and sequence (Levine 52; Dames 48). Even in the mid-twentieth century, Kenneth Burke continued to theorize literary form temporally: “a work has form,” Burke writes, “in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence” (124). Within seasonal prose, environmental rhythms generate a sense of sequenced momentum, their patterned arrivals producing an anticipatory propulsion that drives the text. In Walden, as Robert Sattelmeyer notes, the new emphasis on the seasonal sequence transformed Thoreau’s writing from a loose set of recollections and philosophies into a work with a discernible form: with the annual cycle developed and amplified, there exists for the first time a “story” with a kind of plot …. Doubtless the addition of material about fall, winter, and the second spring contributes to verisimilitude and to a felt sense of the passage of a year. There is a satisfying structural coherence about this pattern as realized in the finished book, a kind of harmonic or tonic closure felt in arriving once more at spring. (434) The seasons provide momentum without generating suspense. They provide movement while maintaining order. Despite their continual revolutions, Buell argues that aestheticized seasons “counter, not further the vision of a chancy, indeterminate universe. They are the elements that stand most clearly for structure rather than anarchy” (239). While Thoreau chose a loose seasonal progression and Leopold employed a stricter almanac form, both writers structured their texts as composite years, Thoreau narrating his two-year residence at Walden Pond within a single seasonal cycle and Leopold condensing multiple years into a twelve-month time frame. The composite year and the composite season, common narrative structures in environmental prose, are predicated on the concept of climate itself.15 The geographer Mike Hulme suggests that unlike weather, which is constituted by discrete and often extreme events like storms or droughts, climate is “apprehended intuitively, as a tacit idea held in the human mind or in social memory of what the weather of a place ‘should be’ at a certain time of year” (177). This idea of climate as “a cultural form of aggregated order” underwrites composite seasonal narratives (177). A series of springs can be narrated as a single season because “spring” is a cultural form as well as a physical experience. Writing as a phenologist, Leopold echoes this understanding of seasonality as an idea, acknowledging that climatic rhythms lie somewhere between statistics and human thought: “It is not to be assumed, of course, that the sequence of averages repeats itself exactly each year, and still less that the average sequence for our region is identical with that for other regions,” he notes. “Indeed, the whole concept of a series of average dates is in one sense an abstraction, for it can never be found in toto in the field. Nevertheless it exists, and it is an important characteristic of the flora and fauna” (“Phenological Record” 84). This composite year that Leopold and Thoreau infer as phenologists—their trust in a discernible pattern of repetition—is a precondition for the narrative form of their literary works. If climatic rhythms shift within the physical world, the composite year as a literary device will be jarred. With the onset of climate change, seasonal variation is perceived as an indication of disorder: each year is understood as unique and unpredictable, not easily condensed into an aggregate form. The Belief in a Permanent Climate In Walden, Thoreau proclaims that it isn’t necessary to “trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may at last be destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads at any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s existence on the globe” (169). Writing at the close of the Little Ice Age, when prolonged or intense cold spells still raised specters of apocalypse in the public imaginary, Thoreau conceptualizes the climate as an agential force, capable of demolishing the human species through even subtle fluctuations.16 The climate chooses where to “put a period,” thereby sentencing humanity. Agency resides in the thermometer’s mercury, its rise and fall understood as a movement beyond the realm of human influence. And yet, through his study of Concord’s finely regulated phenological cycles and extensive reading in the field of climatology, Thoreau is ultimately persuaded that the climate is a reliable—if powerful—agent. “Every year men talk about the dry weather which has now begun as if it were something new and not to be expected,” he complains in 1853 (P8: 209). Thoreau’s years of phenological observation allow him to anticipate these seasonal rhythms, a practice that produces faith in environmental continuity. “Expectation,” he explains, “may amount to prophecy” (P4: 415).17 Thoreau often employs this form of prophecy—prophecy of reassurance and environmental stability—as a counterweight to apocalyptic visions. “Who could believe in the prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer while one Milkweed with faith matured its seeds!” he exclaims (P4: 96).18 Or, later: “Is the world coming to an end?—Ask the chubs. As long as fishes spawn … we do not want redeemers” (P4: 450). In contrast to the linear model of time underwriting apocalyptic narratives, Thoreau’s absorption in phenological rhythms predisposes him to a cyclical model of temporality: “as the planet in its orbit & around its axis—so do the seasons—so does time revolve” (P5: 343). Phenology, as Thoreau practiced it, was a science running counter to apocalypse: instead of forecasting calamity or momentous shifts, the landscape’s rhythms signaled environmental perpetuity. As an avid reader in the field of climatology, Thoreau was well aware of nineteenth-century debates over the climate’s relative permanence or malleability. He read the geologist Charles Lyell, who popularized the idea of a “great year” or “Annus Magnus” that the climate cycled through over the course of millennia, winter symbolizing periods of ice and summer symbolizing periods of warmth (9). While Thoreau, steeped in Lyell’s geology of “slow, gradual changes,” may have accepted the concept of climatic change over the course of deep time, he was less persuaded that the climate could shift perceptibly within the timeframe of human history (Thorson 33). Toward the end of his life, he read John Tyndall’s The Glaciers of the Alps, containing one of the earliest explanations of what is now known as the greenhouse effect. Tyndall insists that his experiments with gas and light have “proved that gaseous bodies varied among themselves, as to their power of transmitting radiant heat … the radiant heat of the sun does certainly pass through the atmosphere to the earth with greater facility than the radiant heat of the earth can escape into space” (245–46). Thoreau also perused Lorin Blodget’s Climatology of the United States, taking substantial notes on the chapter titled “Permanence of the Principal Conditions of Climate.” While Blodget’s chapter summarizes scientific arguments in favor of anthropogenic climate change, including Thomas Jefferson’s belief that increased cultivation had modified the American climate, Thoreau’s commonplace book—in which he transcribed passages of interest encountered during his reading—contains only quotations supporting the idea of a permanent climate. He records that there is “a strong array of independent proof that there has been no change in the climate of Europe within the historic period, and none in America since its settlement.” While interest should not be equated with endorsement, Thoreau’s selected transcriptions seem to suggest an inclination toward the idea of climatic permanence within the timeframe of human perception. “There is no French revolution in Nature,” he notes in his Journal. “She is warmer or colder by a degree or two” (P3: 252). For Leopold, writing nearly a century later, human modification of the climate was no longer a prime topic of scientific inquiry. However, Leopold suspected that the cyclical rise and fall of wildlife populations correlated with minor meteorological cycles. In July of 1931, he presented at the Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles, describing “a rhythm among the grouse and rabbits in Wisconsin and neighboring lake states” occurring over a period of nine or ten years, a pattern corresponding to the sun spot cycle (Gowanloch 15). This conference, organized by a committee including the infamous climatic determinist Ellsworth Huntington, morphed into the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, intended to widen “knowledge of fluctuations, to uncover further traces of periodicity, [and] to search for grounds and causes” in both ecological and economic arenas (Dewey). This network of researchers sustained Leopold’s interest in the effect of meteorological forces on the landscape. In Game Management, published two years after the Matamek Conference, he notes that “the seeming synchronism of cyclic phenomena, if not refuted by data from new regions, makes it necessary to postulate some cause operating simultaneously over the whole continent. Fluctuations in solar radiation, in electro-magnetic conditions, or in some other cosmic force might meet this specification” (67–68). Leopold surmised that environmental rhythms correlated with planetary-scale climatic conditions. However, for Leopold, deviations from annual or multi-year cycles did not carry affective charges. Instead of alarming indications of formal breakdown, variations in biological rhythms were viewed as data to be incorporated into an overarching pattern. For instance, in an April 1948 letter to Jones, Leopold mentions an unusually early spring without invoking suspicions of formal breakdown: “I have been thinking of you recently and wish you were here to talk phenology. Jim Zimmerman and I swapped notes yesterday and find that April is nine days ahead of last year, which of course was very late. Pasque flowers started this week, and I can well remember your first expedition to see one.” The early spring registers simply as a peculiarity, the possibility of humanity altering environmental time itself beyond the horizon of Leopold’s scientific understanding. “As If You Could Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity” In 1995, as Lawrence Buell reflected on Thoreau and Leopold’s writing, it remained possible to refer to seasonality as a “bedrock” literary structure (242). Buell noted that “seasonal succession … has not (yet) been affected more than marginally” by human influence (281). By 2014, however, scientists publishing on temporal ecology and phenological research had an entirely different understanding of humanity’s ability to impact seasonality and environmental time. While climate change has been most frequently measured and symbolized through increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising sea levels, scientists working with contemporary phenological data have recently described the Anthropocene—and climate change more specifically—as “the effective manipulation of time by humans” (Wolkovich 1356). As rising global temperatures shift growing dates and established phenological rhythms, they “fundamentally alter how organisms experience time” (1365). Environmental damage is often associated with toxicity or extinction, but climate change can also be gauged through asynchronies. Damage registers temporally. If damage registers temporally, it also registers aesthetically. In Walden and A Sand County Almanac, as in a vast array of environmental writing, environmental rhythms underpin aesthetic structure. If, as climate science demonstrates, seasonal patterns have begun to alter under the pressure of rising CO2 levels, the aesthetic device that has thus far symbolized environmental perpetuity will begin to symbolize environmental disorder. Indeed, literary seasonality is already developing structural anachronisms. In the section of A Sand County Almanac devoted to July, Leopold describes the compass plant, or cutleaf Silphium, “spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers” that commonly blooms on the 15th of the month (49). However, phenologists working at the Leopold Shack between 1994 and 2004 argue that the compass plant “would no longer find its place within the ‘July’ chapter” because its average date of first bloom is now June 26 (Wright 46). Leopold’s idea of July no longer matches the month’s manifestation on the material landscape. As climate and seasonality shift, literary genres like the almanac, which hinge on patterns of seasonal progression become unmoored from their physical references. Beyond almanacs, which have a particularly rigid relationship to environmental time, seasonal rhythms embedded in works like Walden will begin to register as historical temporalities. Rhythms establish a “metrical contract” with those who experience them: they are fundamentally patterns of anticipation (Fussell 33). Once this metrical contract has been established through sufficient repetition, a rhythmic pattern will proceed as an underlying temporal force even as a text’s pulses begin to deviate. A brief discrepancy between the metrical contract and the text’s rhythm will produce “prosodic tension,” interesting and even pleasant variation (17), but sustained or severe discrepancies will produce a sensation of arrhythmia. For instance, when Walden Pond’s ice cover lasted only ten days in the winter of 2012, it surpassed the point of prosodic tension, registering as a disruption of seasonal form. In this sense, climate change is producing environmental arrhythmias, phenological pulses experienced as disturbingly premature or delayed—perhaps even absent. As Richard Primack imagines Thoreau returning to Walden Pond in the year 2064, these arrhythmias predominate his vision: Thoreau would notice many changes. The winter weather is no longer as cold as it used to be …. Walden Pond no longer freezes over, and wood ducks remain on the pond all year long …. In the spring, there are hardly any wildflowers in the forests; the climate is now suited to more southern species, but they have still not migrated to the area. The trees are leafing out in March rather than in early May, and many seem sickly because of attack by newly arrived invasive insects. And there are not as many migratory birds as he remembered. Walden Pond has become too warm for trout. The swamps and bogs where the naturalist used to enjoy spring choruses of peepers and other frogs have now dried up and are silent. (212) Walden crafts a correspondence between spring and rejuvenation, the season’s arrival at the close of the narrative serving as reassurance of environmental continuity. If the arrival of spring now highlights climate change’s arrhythmias, is Thoreau’s joy in the thawing sand and clay based on a historic form of seasonal significance? Is it possible to rejoice in Thoreau’s textual spring if the contemporary rendition of the season produces an anxious affect? There’s a recursive argument to be made about the interplay between literature and seasonality in the age of climate change: part of the unease generated by disrupted phenology and weather is attributable to the disruption of seasonality’s literary resonances, and unstable seasonality and unpredictable weather shift established literary tropes in turn. Put more simply, climate’s literary significance impacts the way climate change is perceived while climate change’s effects on seasonality and weather impact the way literature is interpreted. Phenology’s Narratives As climate change disrupts seasonal form and complicates the idea of a composite narrative year, it simultaneously reanimates Thoreau’s and Leopold’s phenological records. As charts and logs, simple columns of phenological categories and dates, these representations of environmental time lack narrative force: they are, by Hayden White’s classification, annals, consisting “only of a list of events ordered in a chronological sequence” (5). Furthermore, while historical annals imply a linear temporality, each entry in a phenological records implies repetition, or, in Wai Chee Dimock’s expression, “the sense that there will be more, that whatever is happening now will happen again, a dilation of time that make the future an endless iteration of the present” (243). In contrast, the force of a narrative, according to White, is generated through peripeteia: a sense of change over time, a shift in meaning. Before the onset of climate change, the meaning of Thoreau’s and Leopold’s phenological records remained constant: the dates entered with each new year were a further accretion of seasonal form. For instance, the opening of Walden Pond on April 18, 1856, was a rhythmic pulse, another signal of the environment’s continuity. In this sense, as Laura Dassow Walls notes, the science of phenology resists literary conventions because its phenomena emphasize “continuance, rather than narrative closure” (182). Thoreau’s charts and Leopold’s phenological record were representations of rhythms that did “not so much conclude as simply terminate” once Thoreau and Leopold ceased recording (White 16). They were temporal patterns stretching off into eternity. With the onset of climate change, however, the significance of phenology has shifted: unlike Thoreau and Leopold, who practiced phenology as a means of intuiting the environment’s temporal order, current phenologists track environmental events to intuit change. They are taking the pulse of a shifting environment, attending to seasonal forms just as environmental temporalities begin to respond to a warmer world. Contemporary phenologists record the annual ice-out on Walden Pond or the blossoming of phlox in southern Wisconsin in order to detect environmental arrhythmias, not to confirm established rhythmic forms. As they juxtapose these environmental arrhythmias with the rhythmic forms Thoreau and Leopold observed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the peripeteia necessary for narrative emerges. If phenological pulses used to signify the climate’s continuity and vitality, they now serve as indicators of climatic disorder, and this shift in meaning constitutes the “passage from one moral order to another” that characterizes a “fully realized story” (White 23, 14). Phenology has become “the means to track such shifts of meaning, that is, narrativity” (24). The records that Thoreau and Leopold meticulously compiled now generate their ethical and affective force from the emerging story of anthropogenic impact on environmental time. In an age characterized by arrhythmia, the future is no longer easily anticipated. Footnotes 1 While Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold are frequently compared as canonical American environmental writers, literary critics have tended to characterize their relationship as “a matter of affinity rather than influence” (Buell 485). The unpublished correspondence between Leopold and Jones, which documents their deepening interest in Thoreau’s writing and scientific inquiries, complicates this interpretation. Insofar as phenology and environmental time are embedded in Leopold’s writing, Thoreau’s influence on Leopold’s work should not be underestimated. 2 Bradley P. Dean, H. Daniel Peck, Laura Dassow Walls, Kristen Case, and others have recently reinvigorated scholarship on Thoreau’s study of natural phenomena. To my knowledge, Leopold’s phenological study has yet to be discussed by literary critics. 3 Although seasonality is ubiquitous, its form clearly alters according to geographical location. Thoreau’s and Leopold’s records should be read as localized case studies of environmental time, not cultural or biological universals. 4 The Princeton UP edition of Thoreau’s Journal currently extends from 1837 through September 3, 1854. All quotations from this edition will be designated by a P preceding the volume number. From September 4, 1854 onwards, I quote from the Houghton edition of the Journal, designated here as HM. 5 The project that Thoreau occasionally refers to as his own Kalendar was influenced by John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense, but Thoreau’s charts are not intended to serve as agricultural or horticultural guides. Instead, Thoreau’s Kalendar is an aesthetic guide to Concord’s landscape, a representation of its temporal form. Thoreau also read Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, which contained phenological work more akin to his own project. 6 Thoreau often spoke of the seasons as a temporal landscape: “Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month … having as it were attained the ridge of the summer—commenced to descend the long slope toward winter—the afternoon & down hill of the year” (P8: 245). 7 As Alexandra Manglis observes, Thoreau often conceptualized time as “dendriform,” passing years registering in both the horizontal form of concentric tree rings and in the vertical form of the growing forest (3–4). Leopold’s vignette “Good Oak,” in the February chapter of Sand County, demonstrates a similar engagement with dendriform time. 8 Thoreau scholars, following Bradley Dean, suggest this circular was distributed in the spring of 1851. However, the Smithsonian Institution Archives suggest the “Registry of Periodical Phenomena” was established in May of 1852. See Dean p. x and siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_341. 9 As in the parable related in Mark 13:33–37, Thoreau’s unceasing observation is required because the shape of time has yet to be discerned: “Take ye heed, watch and pray… . ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” 10 Thoreau alludes to the post that Robinson Crusoe carved a notch in each day, creating a rudimentary calendar. This passage also references Thoreau’s own walking stick, notched in inches to double as a measuring device. 11 While climate change is often linked to the industrial revolution, scientists note that “evidence of large-scale shifts in Earth System functioning prior to 1950 is weak” (Steffen 93). Demonstrable phenological changes lagged behind the rise in greenhouse gases, becoming detectable only during the second half of the twentieth century. 12 H. Daniel Peck analyzes the link between phenology and phenomenology in Thoreau’s work. See pp. 77–8. 13 Laura Dassow Walls declares, ventriloquizing Thoreau, “Look not to the calendar but to the skies you walk under and the ground you walk on” (242). Ken Hiltner and H. Daniel Peck also analyze Thoreau’s evolving articulations of seasonality. See Hiltner pp. 330 and Peck pp. 92. 14 Richard Primack notes that Thoreau recorded ice-out dates on Walden Pond for fifteen years. During this time, ice-out occurred between March 15 and April 18, a range of five weeks. In contrast, ice-out on Walden between 1995 and 2009 occurred as early as February 22 and as late as April 12, a range of seven weeks. In 2012, Walden Pond nearly failed to freeze. Ice formed on January 19 that year, but ice-out was recorded on January 29, only ten days later (10). 15 From eighteenth-century texts such as James Thompson’s The Seasons through relatively contemporary environmental literature like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, the seasons have been sufficiently idealized or abstracted to permit the collapse of numerous years into a single seasonal round. Other texts, perhaps most notably John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, perform a related narrative move by incorporating episodes occurring over the course of many years into the space of a single season. 16 In his Journal, Thoreau explains how “the old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece” (HM7: 175). 17 Leopold echoes this idea of expectation as a form of prophecy in Sand County: “I like the bitter-sweet because my father did, and because the deer, on the 1st of July of each year, begin suddenly to eat the new leaves, and I have learned to predict this event to my guests. I cannot dislike a plant that enables me, a mere professor, to bloom forth annually as a successful seer and prophet” (77). 18 William Miller, a nineteenth-century Baptist minister, believed that the Book of Daniel contained textual evidence that the end of the world was near. 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TI - Disordered Environmental Time: Phenology, Climate Change, and Seasonal Form in the Work of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy053
DA - 2018-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/disordered-environmental-time-phenology-climate-change-and-seasonal-PLk0YfkWKy
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EP - 721
VL - 25
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