Fieldwork: Ecological Pedagogy in Modernist Fiction and Film, takes part in the growing re-evaluation of modernism's environmental and ecological entanglements. Pairing a comparative media studies approach with an historical emphasis on scientific methodology and science education, Fieldwork challenges early ecological science's reputation as an anthropocentric, control-oriented discipline. Rather, Fieldwork diversifies our historical understanding of the relationship between ecological science and modern cultures: in harnessing scientific and aesthetic pedagogies of interest, ecological science teaches ecological knowing and feeling as responsive to-and responsible for-a nature made of colliding agencies. To recover "the interesting" as an ecological category, the project traces the centrality of interested thinking, feeling, and aesthetics to ecological science's documentary methods. As a method of information collection and a formal aesthetic, this documentary practice-what I term lingering-intersected with various strains of modernist experimentation, both popular and avant-garde. I locate lingering ecological documents and documentaries-and thus the epistemological, ethical, and ontological values of interested ecology-in the work of ecologists like Sir Arthur Tansley, Lilian Clark, Gilbert White, and William Beebe as well as in writings by Virginia Woolf, the Surrealist Andre Breton, the "interest" films of Gaumont-British Instructional Films, and the films of para-Surrealist and marine scientist Jean Painleve. I contend that modernism is informed by ecological knowledge work-and that modernism teaches us to understand ecological science as the document of a world enlivened by interest's cognitive and affective lessons.Each chapter offers a case study in the role that media environments and material ecosystems play in teaching interested ecology. In Chapter One, Fieldwork: Modern Ecology's Picturesque Attachments, Sir Arthur Tansley's archive reveals how the founding father of British ecology thoughtfully deploys media difference in his popular science manuals to revitalize the art and science of ecological fieldwork, and rescue it from banality. Chapter Two, Garden Work: Prosaic Alightments Among Modern Ecology and Fiction, describes how the technologies available to women ecologists-prose and garden-teach interested thinking as an experimental protocol and ontological position, and which is archived within Virginia Woolf's fiction. Chapter Three, Camera Work: Secrets of Nature and the Eros and Ethics of Modern Ecology illustrates how this "interest" film series, drawing on the descriptive practices of field ecology, employs the cinema as a tool for teaching interested ecology's subtly erotic affective character and related ethical comportment. Chapter Four, Water Work: Three Species of Ecological Surrealism claims that Surrealist-ecologists teach a lyric fieldwork behavior through the poetic fluidity of merely interesting species lists. The chapters detail the cognitive, affective, and representational practices of interested ecology as they circulated and became inscribed within verbal and visual media. Fieldwork claims that forms of description and representation are critical to the construction of this scientific lyricism: indeed, modern ecological thinking exists and persists within this specific media environment.
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