Readers’ Forum: Literary Biodiversities — Introduction

In my copy of the 1999 field guide Mammals of Alberta, written by Don Pattie and Chris Fisher, there is a single joke. The field guide is not intended as a joke book, but the authors—presumably with the full knowledge and participation of the editors and publisher at Lone Pine Publishing—have inserted a typically Albertan bit of humour. The joke exists in the entry for the Norway Rat, rattus norvegicus. As many people know, there are no rats in Alberta, or at least not officially. The province maintains an active “rat patrol”—formally known as the Alberta Rat Control Program—that is the subject of much common interest, myth, and lore. In practice, the rat patrol is a small government agency tasked with investigating and eliminating any rats found in the province, keeping Alberta, as the agency puts it on their website, free from “the menace of rats since 1950” (Government of Alberta). So, then, there should be no need for an entry on the Norway rat in Mammals of Alberta. Why is it there? The entry provides a full description of the rat and its habits, in keeping with the other entries in the book. But then, with a sly swerve, the field guide provides a spurious entry on the best location to spot Norway rats in Alberta—at first seemingly in keeping with the pattern of the book, which provides interested readers with potential sites for spotting each of the book’s mammals in situ. What are the best places in Alberta to spot Norway rats? According to my guidebook, these are the places: “British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Montana, Toronto, Ottawa” (154). These jokes are not marked in any way, but they are evidently comical, identifying as they do locations that lie outside of Alberta. Naming these places as sites for spotting Norway rats also plays to persistent Albertan cultural patterns: first, disparaging the United States, and even Montana specifically, which is mythologized as the historical point of entry for bootlegged alcohol during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, poking fun at neighbouring provinces British Columbia and Saskatchewan is an easy bit of humour. Third, and jointly, disparaging Ottawa and Toronto is a common pastime in Albertan politics, since Ottawa—as the centre of government “back East” or in “Upper Canada”—and Toronto—as an uppity finance capital—are the supposed origin points of Western alienation.

This joke can serve as an opening point for thinking about the ways in which cultural objects that purport to be scientifically neutral—objects like field guides—can very quickly become literary objects. Biodiversity—of the sort taxonomized and captured in guidebooks—is not a neutral concept, even though it may seem like it, or even though it has been naturalized as such. In the first instance, biodiversity is simply the diversity of life, the variety of biological forms associated with specific places. However, as the contributions that follow each observe in their own ways, biodiversity is a concept that is also imbued with history, politics, and culture. Like my guidebook, it is not neutral, even if it is at times understood as such. The invocation of biodiversity is always a cultural moment, and it can become a literary moment, too, in the hands of creative practitioners. It is something like this process of taking a seemingly neutral scientific term and subjecting it to literary scrutiny that might, to my mind at least, make the idea of literary biodiversities a productive one.

This Readers’ Forum for Canadian Literature endeavours to provide opening points to the nascent idea of literary biodiversities.¹ Between July 18 and 22, 2023, a group of scholars and writers joined together in a workshop at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to begin to tease out this idea. We were a deliberately small group, all situated in Canada’s westernmost provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. This restraint was an effort both to render ourselves as impervious to the vagaries of the pandemic as possible and to minimize our carbon footprints. We were brought together by shared concerns over the climate crisis and the relationship between scientific research and literary writing, as well as by the question of what something like “literary biodiversities” might mean for us. We were supported in this endeavour by a series of institutions, specifically, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary; and the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies and the Centre for Literatures in Canada at the University of Alberta.

What follows is a short series of interventions that arise from our group’s conversations in Banff. These are offered not as solutions or any sort of closure to the question of literary biodiversities; indeed, our time together raised far more questions than it solved. These interventions are by turns critical, scholarly, research-creation, and creative ones. As one of our throughlines in our conversations has been about the risks of taxonomizing and categorizing forms of life and animacy, though, I will avoid narrowly assigning these labels to individual pieces. Assembling them for this Readers’ Forum, I am struck by their range, their generosity, and their nuance. I thank (in alphabetical order) Jordan Abel, Nicholas Bradley, Sarah Krotz, Stephanie Oliver, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, and Tathagata Som for their willingness to participate in this project. At a time when scholars and non-governmental organizations—as well as some governments—are calling for renewed and sustained focus on environmental concerns connected to the climate, it is my hope that the interventions in this Readers’ Forum might serve as a means of spurring further dialogue.

Notes

1. While this forum offers a range of ways of thinking about literary biodiversities, neither I nor the contributors claim this term itself as a new; it appears in different ways in recent thinking. See, for instance, Niall Binns, “Ornithological Competence and Literary Biodiversity in Spanish American Poetry,” and Lars Langer et al., “The Rise and Fall of Biodiversity in Literature,” for a sense of the diversity of recent work.

Works Cited

Binns, Niall. “Ornithological Competence and Literary Biodiversity in Spanish American Poetry.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 29, no. 3, 2022, pp. 638–57.

Government of Alberta. “Alberta’s Rat Control Program.” Alberta.ca, 2023, alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx.

Langer, Lars et al. “The Rise and Fall of Biodiversity in Literature: A Comprehensive Quantification of Historical Changes in the Use of Vernacular Labels for Biological Taxa in Western Creative Literature.” People and Nature, vol. 3, no. 5, 2021, pp. 1093–109.

Pattie, Don, and Chris Fisher. Mammals of Alberta. Lone Pine Publishing, 1999.

Kit Dobson lives, works, and writes in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory, in southern Alberta. A professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, he is the primary investigator of the SSHRC-funded project Literary Biodiversities in Western Canada. Kit is the past author or editor of eight books, including the books Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization, Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada, and Fieldnotes on Listening, the latter of which was listed as one of the CBC’s top non-fiction books of 2022. His debut novel, We Are Already Ghosts, is scheduled for publication in 2024. You can usually find him outside somewhere.