That Bright Glimmering: Extinction as Appalachian Value in the Anthropocene Epoch

This paper uses the geo-historiography of Paul Crutzen and the ecofeminism of Val Plumwood to examine two writers’ dramatization of the blood-drenched exploitation of Appalachia in the Anthropocene Epoch. James Fenimore Cooper popularized an iconic Boone-figure in his Leatherstocking Tales. Operating under various names—Leatherstocking, Hawkeye, Natty Bumppo, and so on—this hero-witness is instrumental in settling Appalachia, eventually becoming a self-exile from the exploited wilderness, a grief-stricken eulogist for “hills and hunting-grounds [that] have seen stripped of the gifts of the Lord, without remorse or shame!” Cooper’s most explicit account of environmental ruination appears in The Pioneers. Set in the late eighteenth century, the prescient “Slaughter of the Pigeons” depicts the massacre of passenger pigeons, an attempt at extermination that would not succeed till decades after Cooper’s own death. Faced with his colonist-neighbors’ mechanized bloodlust (these “pioneers” use cannon to blast birds out of the sky), the Boone-figure issues a warning—Nature can’t survive what we are doing to it—retiring from the scene on that apocalyptic note. Throughout his career, Ron Rash has synecdochized the existential precarity of Appalachia through its extinct or threatened life (Carolina parakeet, speckled trout,, acony bell, ginseng). This paper focuses on one living marker of industrial incursions into the “virgin” wilderness. In his fiction and poetry, “relict” big cats (jaguars, catamounts) re-appear—not as “survivors” of human predation but as metaphorical ghosts haunting a spoiled land, witness-victims of the ongoing Death of Nature in the Anthropocene