Bill Conlogue. Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania's Working Landscapes. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. 216 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-271-06081-1; $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-06080-4.
Reviewed by Aaron Cowan (Slippery Rock University)
Published on H-Pennsylvania (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Allen J. Dieterich-Ward (Shippensburg University)
Caring for Local Places in a Global Society
The landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley is a messy one, composed of mountains, ridges, scars, gorges, and ripples shaped by continental collisions and thrust faults formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Much like its subject, Bill Conlogue’s Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes is not, at first glance, a rational or ordered topography; part history, part literary criticism, and part a deeply personal memoir of the author’s own life and work, the book is a mélange of stories with overlapping connections. A closer look, however, reveals a valuable book that, through exploration of historical uses of the northeastern Pennsylvania landscape, challenges readers to reconsider the importance of “here” (local places) and its relationship to the “there” brought on by the dizzying blur of globalization.
It is worth noting at the outset that the title of the book--while likely chosen by the publisher and not the author--is somewhat misleading. Readers expecting explorations of equally significant “working landscapes” like western Pennsylvania steel mills or the timber industry in the forests at the state’s center will be disappointed. Conlogue’s story keeps readers firmly situated in the Scranton-Lackawanna Valley region.
Here and There is organized around different types of land use and the work that accompanies each. The historical stories of each of these chapters are paired with analysis of literary texts--poems, novels, plays, and films--that are set in the region or echo themes of the historical narrative. Chapter 1, “Working Watersheds,” opens with debates over Marcellus Shale drilling’s impact on water, and explores the broader context of historical water pollution from extractive industry. Chapter 2 examines the damage, both human and ecological, wrought by the region’s historical coalmining industry. The third chapter examines maps and property boundaries, challenging the reader to consider the importance of such definitions for making a place, but also the irrelevance of artificial metes where ecological systems are concerned. Conlogue follows this with a chapter about the history of dairy farming in the region, drawing on his own family’s struggles to adapt their family farm amidst the tumultuous evolution of agriculture in postwar America. The author acknowledges that the arduous work of the dairy farm is “work that I no longer know” (p. 100), but in chapter 5 he transitions into his current work of teaching and compares the “practical” education first offered in 1891 by the Scranton-based International Correspondence Schools (and ICS’s philosophical descendant, the University of Phoenix) to the educational goals of his liberal arts university. Conlogue asks whether liberal learning can cultivate the awareness, appreciation, and empathy necessary for proper care of a landscape. The final chapter, “Rendering the Mounds of Home,” exposes the instability of the region’s landscape: its sinkholes and subsidences resulting from undermining, the mounds of culm waste from strip mining operations, and the “megafill” garbage dump operated by the Waste Management corporation. In a coda, Conlogue returns to the question of contemporary natural gas drilling in Marcellus Shale, implying that the story will likely parallel its historical antecedents: damage to the local landscape in the service of global demands.
Conlogue, an English professor at Scranton’s Marywood University, writes from the perspective of a native son who has seen a bit of the world and returns to the homeplace with new perspective: clear-eyed about its flaws, but with a rediscovered appreciation for its virtues. Reflections on the author’s own life--attempts to put meaning and context on memories of his and his family’s place in the larger story--are often powerfully affecting. Conlogue is no ivory-tower humanities scholar critiquing cultures from a privileged distance. The son of a Lackawanna farm family, he writes of his own historical relationship to the land: rising before daybreak to milk cows, birthing calves, putting up hay, mending barbed-wire fences, and hunting deer. His story of mounting a tractor and pulling down his family’s obsolete post-and-beam dairy barn, over the anguished objections of his father, is a moving evocation of the emotional ties established by working and knowing a place. At the same time, readers looking for a more standard historical account may find many of these interwoven stories frustrating, to the point that they can seem like tangents. At times his “discontinuous history” (p. 76) can also become incoherent or frustratingly obtuse.
In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” author and environmentalist Wendell Berry differentiated between two types of Americans--“boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers see a place only for what profit they can get out of it, while stickers are “motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” A society that truly takes responsibility for environmental stewardship, asserts Berry, can only come from the affection of the sticker.[1] Conlogue’s purpose and ideals are closely resonant. Here and There fits well within the literature of environmental history that regards “wilderness” and “nature” as problematic and even dangerous concepts. A core assertion of his book is that the local, unglamorous working landscapes also deserve careful attention. Conlogue wants readers to see, to notice the world around them, and, much as a reader comes to appreciate a text, to "read" a place and appreciate its unique value. “A renewed sense of home will be increasingly important to us all,” he writes, “as more and more local cultures ... disappear into the global industrial economy’s regimentation and homogenization” (p. 5). With that renewed appreciation of local place will come the question of our own relationship and responsibility, as “our lived experience demands that we think carefully about our answers to this question: How am I at work in the world?” (p. 6). Thoughtful readers of Here and There will find a rewarding book whose stories, while sometimes dismal, are never without a note of hope that affection, empathy, and compassion can provide the basis for redeeming work in the world.
Note
[1]. As Berry readily acknowledged, the “boomer/sticker” categorization is a concept originally outlined by his mentor Wallace Stegner. Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection,” 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, April 23, 2012. Available from http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture.
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Citation:
Aaron Cowan. Review of Conlogue, Bill, Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania's Working Landscapes.
H-Pennsylvania, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43315
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