THE TRACES OF GAIA IN THE GAVILAN: RECONSIDERATIONS FOR A PLANETARY LAND ETHIC IN THE ENCOUNTER OF AN ECOCRITIC AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST

Cemal SAYDAM; Ufuk ÖZDAĞ

Makale detayları

THE TRACES OF GAIA IN THE GAVILAN: RECONSIDERATIONS FOR A PLANETARY LAND ETHIC IN THE ENCOUNTER OF AN ECOCRITIC AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST

Yazarlar:

Cemal SAYDAM | Ufuk ÖZDAĞ

Yayıncı:

Bülent AYYILDIZ

Ana Başlıklar:

Edebiyat

Dergi:

MOLESTO: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 2020 Vol.3 Issue 1, pp.178-202

Belge Tipi:

Makale

Yayın Tarihi:

2/2020

Belge Dili:

İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.):

2000572303

Sıklık:

İki Yıllık

eISSN:

2636-798X

Özet:

 


Cross-disciplinary collaboration has gained new ground in research environments. In this article, an ecocritic and an environmental scientist will focus on the Gavilan, in Sierra Madre Occidental, to reconsider Leopold’s holistic “land organism.” Aldo Leopold, in an essay he left unpublished in his lifetime (“Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” 1923), had “sketched, ever so sparingly, the Gaia Hypothesis” (Callicott 2017), a living Earth. Leopold’s explorations, in  the  late  1930s,  in  Mexico’s  Sierra  Madre  Occidental,  in  the  Rio  Gavilan  watershed,  may illuminate his idea of a living Earth, a “metabolism” and its “organs with coordinated functions.” The healthy ecosystem of the Gavilan impacted Leopold’s comparative research on land health in the subsequent years of his life; he proposed this wilderness area to be a “land laboratory,” a control region to assess the health of the lands—a task he gave to the future scientists by teaming up in an “international research enterprise.” The future research would reveal the mechanism of, in  Leopold’s  terms,  “a  biota  still  in  perfect  aboriginal  health,”  as  well  as  its  “capacity  for  self-renewal” (“land health”). As the Sierra Madre Occidental is unique in terms of atmospheric dust transfers  from  the  major  deserts  of  the  world,  feeding  the  lands  from  across  the  Atlantic  and Pacific  Oceans,  Leopold’s  proposal  for  a  “research  enterprise”  will  be  meaningful  in  terms  of Gaian science. The article will take up dust transfers to Sierra Madre Occidental as an exemplary case  for  a  self-regulating  Gaia  in  that  the  health  of  the  land  is  maintained  through  interacting ecosystems.  The  authors  will  propose  dust  transfers  and  its  wet  deposition  over  the  receiving bodies  as  the  basis  of  land health.  Research  on  this  healthy  ecosystem  may  finally  inspire  “the science of land health” that Leopold envisioned.

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Makale detayları

THE TRACES OF GAIA IN THE GAVILAN: RECONSIDERATIONS FOR A PLANETARY LAND ETHIC IN THE ENCOUNTER OF AN ECOCRITIC AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST

Yazarlar: Cemal SAYDAM | Ufuk ÖZDAĞ

Yayıncı: Bülent AYYILDIZ

Ana Başlıklar: Edebiyat

Dergi: MOLESTO: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 2020 Vol.3 Issue 1, pp.178-202

Belge Tipi: Makale

Yayın Tarihi: 2/2020

Belge Dili: İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.): 2000572303

Sıklık: İki Yıllık

eISSN: 2636-798X

Sayı

Yazarlar:

Cemal SAYDAM | Ufuk ÖZDAĞ

Yayıncı:

Bülent AYYILDIZ

Ana Başlıklar:

Edebiyat

Dergi:

MOLESTO: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 2020 Vol.3 Issue 1, pp.178-202

Belge Tipi:

Makale

Yayın Tarihi:

2/2020

Belge Dili:

İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.):

2000572303

Sıklık:

İki Yıllık

eISSN:

2636-798X