Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 9, 1991 TAG: 9104090406
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
"There's not enough hope in all of you to get a fire started in the desert," author, teacher and literary critic Alfred Kazin told an audience of mostly college students Monday night.
Young people in the '90s are the most cynical, disillusioned and disenchanted bunch he's run across in all his years of teaching, he said.
"I'm disgusted with you."
And he smiled, and laughed.
Hope, he said, and individual participation can pull us through the environmental perils ahead.
Kazin came to Radford University as the first speaker in a weeklong conference called "Environmental Sanity."
A diminutive man of enormous reputation in literary and intellectual circles, Kazin is best known for his ground-breaking study of American writing, "On Native Grounds," published in 1942.
The 76-year-old New York City native also has taught at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
"There's no sense of community at all, and this is what bothers me most," he said. "There's only organized selfishness in big cities."
He went on to say that Western civilization has exploited the earth - as it has Native Americans and wildlife - with the same destructive results.
"I don't think people can see very far into the future," he said, unlike 19th century thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill.
Kazin described for the crowd of about 100 the changing role of nature in American literature.
Reading from writers of the American frontier, Kazin said the first explorers saw a seemingly unending landscape, awesome, untamed and rich in resources.
He read from Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson - who questioned man's drive to conquer nature and wrote of the ferocity with which nature sometimes strikes back.
Kazin then read descriptions of destruction of nature: the mass shooting of the now-extinct passenger pigeons; the killing of bison for their tongues, or simply for sport; and the havoc wreaked on the soil in the Midwest by agriculture that led to John Steinbeck's novel of the Dust Bowl days, "Grapes of Wrath."
Bringing up the present, Kazin noted other accounts of environmental disaster - radioactive soil at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, ruby-throated hummingbirds getting electrocuted by power lines, the disappearing ozone layer.
"One could go on and on," he said at the end of his talk.
Although a struggle still exists between the government, especially at the federal level, and environmentalists, Kazin said the power of change lies within each individual - and the more cooperation, the better.
"There's no good guys, there's no bad guys," he said. "There's just lazy guys."
by CNB