Conclusion

In this conclusion, the author reemphasizes arguments made within the preceding chapters. The Green Depression argues that depression-era American literature (and some films) depict ideas that would become associated with environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century. She focuses on authors from the period whose work echoes changes in conservationist thought, in three areas in particular. Witnessing the severity of the period’s dust storms, widespread flooding, and use of atom bombs, depression-era authors began to more fully articulate the apocalyptic effects that humans can have on the environment. The conclusion highlights other questions that suggest the abundance of further work that can (and should) be done on the role of environmentalist thought in cultural works of the period.

The Last Frontier

This chapter identifies ways that American authors and filmmakers during the 1930s and 40s depict the ecological, economic, and/or cultural value of wilderness spaces and inhabitants. While Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942) celebrates the value of nonthreatening forest animals through innovative animation techniques and critiques of human carelessness and hunting, Aldo Leopold, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway acknowledge the ecological importance of nonhuman predators in their hunting stories. In his novel The Surrounded (1936), D’Arcy McNickle critiques the social and environmental legacy of the frontier by uncovering the environmental, social, and cultural effects of frontier practices on indigenous communities and lands.

Back to the Land

This chapter focuses on ways that southern depression-era authors contributed or responded to a renewed interest in the “old” South during the period. While the Southern Agrarians, William Alexander Percy, and filmmakers like Victor Fleming and William Wyler created nostalgic depictions of antebellum southern life, Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell responded with “antipastoral” depictions of sharecropping that expose the exploitive social, economic, and environmental effects of plantation agriculture. The chapter also identifies ways that Zora Neale Hurston creates alternative forms of social and environmental thought through her depictions of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935).

Futuramas and Atom Bombs

This chapter shifts away from geographical landscapes to focus on technology during the period. Not only does the chapter examine debates over the “technological sublime” at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, it examines ways that science fiction authors use the “sf grotesque” to highlight the potentially devastating environmental and social consequences of uncritical forms of technological progress. The early work of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril calls attention to the apocalyptic threat of the atom bomb by exposing its effects on the natural world as well as on human communities and bodies. Merril and George Schuyler also call attention to ways that ideologies associated with Western notions of science and progress have been used to support gender and racial inequality. In Black Empire (1938), Schuyler envisions innovative forms of renewable energy created by Black scientists that allow them to establish independence from Euro-American control.