On "humankind & nature"

Graphic from the homepage for the course "Human Nature and Human Diversity" at Rutgers University.

The following text was included in a call for submissions sent out earlier this year for our journal of nature poetry:

      Hawk & Whippoorwill, whose theme is “man and nature,” is now reading submissions for our December issue. We invite you to submit yourselves, or, to share this call for submissions with other writers in your circle.
      Originally published back in the 60s, H&W has been host to poets from all walks of life, and we hope to continue that tradition with the “new series” revival of the magazine ... We will gladly accept any unpublished poems which deal with our theme of man and nature. (Of course, we read “man” as “humanity” here, not as a gendered term. While we inherit the original tagline, we are definitely interested in challenging its restrictive implication!)

Among the replies we received to this solicitation, we got a particularly thought-provoking email from Barbara Ras. She wrote:

      I applaud your mission. As an editor and poet whose work both professionally and personally has revolved around themes of people, nature, landscape, sustainability, etc, I have to register my concern about you have positioned your publication about "man and nature." It is very much out of sync with what I perceive as the current ethos, despite your disclaimers that "man" is not a gendered or exclusionary term. There are so many ways you could position your work as inclusive of humans, beyond the out-of-date descriptive "man." I urge you to try to do so. Otherwise, I think you will come off as a bit out of pace with contemporary norms, where gender is a lot more fluid than simply male or female. Aren't we all humans, striving to do our best for our home planet?
I, for one, would not submit to your publication given your restrictive use of the term "man."
      That said, I do wish you all success in fulfilling your mission and in giving much-needed attention to the issues that plague the intersection of humans and nature in the world.

She closed with sincere best wishes, leaving us to wrestle with the question of how to keep faith with the history of the magazine we revived, without compromising our values by using exclusionary language. Her message deserved a long response, so I wrote:

     It was the founding editor, August ("Augie") Derleth, who launched the journal in the 60s with the tagline "poems of man & nature"; we inherited that language when we received permission from his daughter, April Derleth, to revive the publication in a new series. When we write, "we read 'man' as 'humanity'", that's a statement of editorial intent to position the new Hawk & Whippoorwill inclusive of a broader view than that implied, passively but insidiously and pervasively, by the gendered terms of an earlier generation.
      Is it naive of me (at least, I don't feel it is faint-hearted) to wish to keep the original "man and nature" language, while also spotlighting, in our outreach, in our editor's notes, and in all other points of articulation, our repudiation of that kind of gendered terminology and its related thinking? We've discussed this time and again in our back of the house conversations, and the wary consensus has been that if we replace "man and nature" with "humanity and nature", we've washed the spot off, so to speak, but we've lost the obvious occasion to beat the drum for a more expansive view of human belonging.
      So, to be clear -- I agree with you. Back in 2008, at the launch of the new series, we decided to keep the "man and nature" phrase as a historical feature of the magazine, and to accept the risk of being misunderstood as endorsing its outdated implications. The advantage of doing so, in my view, is that this gives us an ongoing occasion to explicitly repudiate those implications.
     It was good of you to take the time to write. I'll share your email with the other Pen & Anvil principals, and we'll revisit the question of whether we want to make a different choice moving forward. We may keep the phrasing or we may change it, but I can assure you we won't make the decision thoughtlessly.
      Aren't all humans, striving to do our best for our home planet? Not the kleptocrats, the kakistocrats and the plutocrats, and the voters who look to those classes as aspirational models. Those cousin tribes have found a renewed sense of common purpose, and it isn't in a shared morality of inclusiveness, or a shared ethic of respect for the natural world.
      This year happens to be the 40th anniversary of Arkham House, the publishing enterprise founded by Augie and which carries on to this day under April's leadership. Perhaps that's a good occasion to undertake an essay on the relationship between our human tendency to category and dichotomize, and the continuities and fluidities of nature, and the relationship between language and values, and language and being. Perhaps with some attention as well to the question of whether humankind is a part of nature, or whether it has been set upon this earth to reign over it. I'd have thought that we were evolved enough in values to realize that only the former could possibly be true, but then I read of what Zinke and Pruitt and their ilk, and their counterparts in industry and in other nations, are getting up to, and one feels the heart harden. Would you permit me to quote your email in such an essay, if it comes about?
      I'll let you know whether we decide to stay with the "man and nature" tagline, or update it.

Reading this over now, my reply then strikes me as a bit curt! I have a habit of being prolix, and I was in 2018 making a game effort to be more concise. (Perhaps we all hate to look at our past correspondence, just as we don't like the sound of our own voice when recorded and played back?) In any case, Barbara soon replied:

I'm overwhelmed by your thoughtful and eloquent response to my email. It's clear you've already wrestled with this issue at great length and depth. You honor me to provide so much background to your efforts and so much information about the history of your publication. Of course, you can quote me any way you'd like.

Not all of my editorial letter-writing is so full of good will and generosity. I ended up not finding the time to write that essay this year, but I remain preoccupied by the questions Barbara and I discussed and touched upon over email. And of course, I continued to think about the phrase "man & nature," discussing the issue with H&W contributors and with our new editor Cory Willingham. I quote my email exchange with Barbara here on the blog in order to provide a bit of context for the following announcement...

Henceforth, the mission of Hawk & Whippoorwill will be the publication of  "poems of nature & humankind."

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The following note from me will appear on the website for our forthcoming winter solstice issue, as "A post-script from the Publisher":

I invite you to note the change of our tagline, live in this issue and reflected on the cover and throughout our webpage. We've gone from "poems of man and nature" to "poems of nature and humankind." We value the legacy we inherited when we re-started the magazine founded by Augie Derleth, but we don't think we're breaking faith with any important principle by updating our language. As a practical matter, there's no reason we need to be shackled to outdated language; and as a moral matter, we aren't interested in even incrementally contributing to the persistence of certain old and in many ways ugly attitudes about gender, sex, identity, and human worth. - ZWB

I'm personally grateful to Barbara for being bold enough to let us know it was a mistake to continue uncritically using the language we inherited from an earlier era.

Text quoted from emails has been edited for concision and clarity.