Meta Post: Voice and Story

This week our debates centered around how our human understandings of nature and landscape influence the ways we interact with, empathize with, and write about the natural world. Classmates asked questions such as, why isn't the land a main character in more stories? Are humans just so self-centered it's impossible for us to write from the voice of the land?

Commenters noted that perhaps we have trouble writing landscapes as characters because "land doesn't have thoughts." It's easier for us to imagine, some argued, that animals have thoughts, but not geography or land. I wonder if this is because it seems that humans and animals both make choices, and these choices change their lives. It's not just that we have thoughts, it's that we act on those thoughts. Landscapes aren't usually seen as actors in a larger story, perhaps because we don't assume they make choices. A mountain will always be a mountain, won't it? Perhaps this requires more of a Carrier Bag approach. Perhaps there don't need to be choices made over one thing or another. Perhaps the landscape just is, and instead the story is in the process or evolution, not the direct action and change.

Other comments proposed that perhaps this misunderstanding of landscape stems from a human distance from nature. "Have modern advances dehumanized us from seeing nature the way it was supposed to be seen?" one blogger asked. This question is interesting to me in two ways. First, it supposes that we are most human when we are empathetic to the natural world, instead of defining ourselves against it. Second, I wonder if maybe we can fall into another trap where we demonize technology. How would our understanding of the world change if we wrote from the perspective of technology? What if the internet had a voice? We can apply the same ideas we're playing with for nature to technology. In the end, when we do so, it takes away our ultimate control over one or the other. If technology is a character in its own story, we have less control, just as if nature and landscape is a character then we must give up some control there, too. How might this change our stories?

In the end, at the base of all our posts is a fundamental set of questions: who do we write from and how do we write, what does this say about us, and how does it change the way we see the world? Maybe it is time to expand our humanness by bringing other, nonhuman, agents to the foreground.