by Joel Hedgpeth
1997
Chapter 17
Steinbeck and the Environment -Interdisciplinary Approaches
Edited by Susan Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley Tiffney
University of Alabama Press
American Bald Eagle Breaking Through Littoral Salmon Flesh Kleptoparasitized From An American Osprey On A Wild California River's Outer Shore
by
Robert Roy van de Hoek
December 21, 2000
Winter Solstice
Malibu, California
A contemporary and colleague of both John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts, Joel Hedgpeth is also a native Californian, marine biologist, editor of Between Pacific Tides,and recipient of the Browning Award for Conserving the Environment. In short, he is eminently well equipped to discuss the coevolution of Steinbeck's environmental consciousness with that of the nation at large. Hedgpeth, who defines environmentalism as the recognition that "the human race is exceeding the earth's carrying capacity at an exponential rate by overpopulation" and that "continued exploitation of the earth's resources to support our elaborate material culture is not sustainable," concludes that Steinbeck's most sophisticated thinking about the environment occurs in his later works, especially inAmerica and Americans (1966), now sadly out of print.
Americans, even in these days of rising concern, still tend to look on nature through an eighteenth-century rose-colored window - Palladian is understood. I speak not only of the creationists, who still consider Moses the best biologist ever and vehemently reject the overwhelmingly testimony of scien- tists about evolution, but also of economists, politicians, manufacturers, and happy summer campers, for all of whom nature is forever infinitely generous, forgiving, and abundant. We cannot do any real damage to her, we still say to ourselves; she is now, as ever, a mother who never says no to her chil- dren. Eden survives for us, if only in the endlessness of our material expectations.
Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature(1993)
John Steinbeck was a country boy, born and raised in the small town of Salinas, the principal town of an agricultural and stock-raising region, the valley and flanking hills of the Salinas River. Not far to the west there was the sea, the broad bight of Monterey Bay, with the city of Monterey and its satellite Pacific Grove on the south, its beaches teeming with the life of the sea. As a boy Steinbeck roamed this country as his own beautiful passages, dripping with nostalgia, that added a sense of reality to his stories. That power to evoke the feeling of his natural environment remained with him all his life, and it was no surprise to see that the opening pages of East of Eden,the best of his later novels, were selected to accompany the 1850 painting of the Salinas Valley for that elegant collection of reproductions of paintings of California scences, O,California!(Vincent 1990).
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Unfortunately, few people, even some who have read many of Steinbeck's books, have ever read or heard of America and Americans. 7[footnote]
7.......America and Americansdeserves a better fate and should be reprinted in a more appealing format.
