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America after Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment

Annual Conference, German Association for American Studies

12.06.2014 – 15.06.2014

61st Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies

Location: Würzburg

The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society is sponsoring workshops taking place at the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies. 

For details on all the workshops being offered at the conference, please see the conference website.

Workshop 4: Tracing the Roots and Evolution of American Environmental Politics

Organizers: Andreas Etges (LMU Munich) / Andreas Grieger (Rachel Carson Center)

At a time when issues such as global climate change or energy security are a major focus of international discourses and discussions, the critical role of the United States in these areas has become an important topic for scholarship. Yet as new studies look at the complex combinations of interests, processes, and institutions of American environmental policy-making, they often lack a historical dimension. However, a historic understanding of America’s relationship with the environment can be crucial in order to assess current policy debates. Just as issues such as climate change, water and land pollution, or the ever-increasing demand for and use of natural resources have become global, American concerns about the environment have also become more international in character. Thus, by looking at political histories of American environmentalism, important continuities as well as discontinuities that mark new directions in American environmental concerns and policy-making can be revealed. Furthermore, looking at the historical emergence and evolution of American environmental consciousness and politics can provide new insights into the various ways America became involved with a globalized world.

This workshop will address the question of when, why, and how the environment entered into American politics in the era of globalism. Presentations can focus on specific events such as global environmental conferences or treaties or try to highlight the role of actors on the state as well as non-state level. This could address America’s involvement in international organizations as well as the transnational exchanges of ideas and cooperation among environmental activists, movements and organizations. 

Speakers:


  • Michelle Mart (Penn State University), “National Audubon Society and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics”
  • Anna-Katharina Wöbse (University of Geneva), “The Americanization of Environmental Diplomacy after World War II”
  • Ella Müller (Freiburg), “Now or Never? Why Anti-Environmentalism Failed to Prevent the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969”
  • Andreas Grieger (Rachel Carson Center/LMU Munich), “Global 2000 and the Struggle over American Environmental Diplomacy in the early 1980s”

Workshop 11: The American National Narrative and the Global Environmental Challenge


Timo Müller (Augsburg) / Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt/Rachel Carson Center)
 
Ecocriticism today increasingly examines the discursive framing of environmental issues. This panel wants to contribute to this strand by analyzing the impact of today’s environmental challenges on the national narrative of the United States as a self-contained cultural, political and geographical unit, a clearly defined “homeland” with defendable and controllable borders. This narrative is undermined by the impacts of climate change and other global environmental problems, by the increasing recognition that “bioregions” often transcend national boundaries, by the inability of such boundaries to prevent environmental migration (both human and nonhuman), and by the global implications of the resource-intensive consumer culture “exported” by the United States. As a political concept, the nation-state is additionally questioned by its inadequacy in negotiating effective environmental policies that can address such global problems and by the pressing concerns of international environmental justice. The global environmental challenge, then, seems to require a re-imagining of the American nation with a focus on what Wai Chee Dimock has called the “connective tissue” that binds the United States to the rest of the world. In recent years this insight has led to the emergence of a transnational ecocriticism, and scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Greg Garrard, and Ursula Heise have called for a “transnational turn” in environmental studies. We welcome papers from all disciplines in American Studies that discuss these developments and/or their impact on the American national narrative. Topics might include but are not limited to:
  • the depiction of global environmental challenges or catastrophes in American literary and cultural narratives;
  • the re-examination of American nationalism in various disciplines against this background;
  • the negotiation of alternative geographies (e.g., bioregions) in such narratives;
  • the negotiation of environmental migration and dislocation in an American context;
  • transnational perspectives in American environmental writing;
  • the role of the nation-state in transnational environmental debate;
  • the global impacts of American consisting and emerging modes of eco-cosmopolitanism.


Speakers:


  • Yvonne Kaisinger (Salzburg), “Traversing Boundaries: Radiation and Pollution in Contemporary Hawaiian Literature”
  • Christian Klöckner (Bonn), “‘What goes around, it comes back around’: (Eco-)Systemic Interdependencies in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest”
  • Hanna Straß (Munich), “Ecological Indians, Ecocide, and Environmental Preservation: Environmental Discourses in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008)”
  • Antonia Mehnert (Munich), “‘The World is Beating a Path to Your Door’: Climate Change, Butterflies and Ethical Glocalism in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior”
  • J. Jessie Ramírez (Frankfurt/Main), “Green Futures: Toward a Postnational Ecology”
  • Alexa Weik von Mossner (Klagenfurt/Munich), “American Eco(dys)topias and the Transnational Dimensions of Ecological Citizenship”