"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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It [A Littoral Zone] might with equal justice have been called ‘A Marginal
Zone’. Often the characters are marginal … But more striking is the poet’s
marginality, his loss of assurance in the world. He is shown relatively powerless
to comfort or improve, at odds with other denizens of the shore – revellers,
fishermen, vandals, desecraters – countering all this with, at best, a fatalistic
ecological mysticism. (51)
Du Toit’s coupling of ecology and mysticism in fact negates the scientific ecological
insight which informs Livingstone’s collection. Julia Martin offers a more accurate
reading of the poet’s despair:
The poems … offer tough, ironic, tender, compassionate observations of people,
animals, and ecosystems, and recurrent demonstrations of human cruelty and
ignorance. The context in which these are situated is the ongoing work of an
ecological scientist: relentless activity in ‘rapt attendance of the sea’s health’ (48).
The work may be hopeless, yet it must continue… The poems resist the easy logic
of dualism, speaking rather of an attitude situated somewhere between despair and
dogged resilience, between loss of faith in religious discourse and an awed love of
‘creation’. (1999: 237, my italics)
The structure of A Littoral Zone
The sequence of poems in A Littoral Zone represents, in Livingstone’s words, “a
mythical sampling run” (LZ 62). The “run” refers to his journey along the Natal coast
where he collects water samples for microbial analysis of water pollution. The sequence
includes some of the sampling stations along the coast, other places, and three ‘traffic
interludes”. These interludes remind the reader of Livingstone’s journey, which is framed
by “Starting Out” and “Road Back”, the second and last poems in the collection. The
journey can be read as a quixotic quest for ‘truth’ and has links with the bioregional
narrative genre.
The American bioregional movement started in the mid-1970s, when Jim Cheney
coined the term. Karla Armbruster argues that the nature-writing tradition is not adequate
if literature is to show humankind how to live “with nature as a valued part of our local
communities”. A middle ground needs to be found:
One school of thought that demonstrates such a middle ground is the American
bioregional movement, which arose in the mid-1970s and has exhibited a deep
concern, on both theoretical and practical levels, with how humans can live
sustainably in collaboration with their local natural environments. While the
definitions of a bioregion and bioregionalism are somewhat contested, most
bioregionalists agree that a bioregion is characterized by its natural and cultural
attributes and that bioregionalism is committed to the goal of ‘developing