One of the most interesting discussions of enjambment is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “A Poem is Being Written” from Tendencies. Writing of what she appealingly calls “the heroics of enjambment,” Sedgwick tells us that as a child she “visualized enjambment very clearly as not only … the poetic gesture of straddling lines together syntactically, but also a pushing apart of lines.” Critics pointing to instances of enjambment in the poems they’re discussing tend to focus either on the straddling together or the pushing apart; in what follows, I’ll try to keep both in mind. Paradoxically, if perhaps unsurprisingly, in running over the end of the line, enjambments draw attention to the very line endings they seem to disregard: they are simultaneously a breach and an observance, as Hamlet might say. An enjambment typically gives us a complete phrase, providing, for example, the noun modified by the adjective at the end of the line, but in so doing, it also acknowledges the power of the line as the basic unit of poetry. As Dominick Knowles and Mathilda Cullen put it in their recent collection: “enjambment scratches the line’s itch to / end – without ending –.” I pointed out in the introduction that a poem is a visual object, recognizable as verse by the blank spaces to the right of the printed words. Enjambment does not disturb this picture. Enjambments often change the nature of our experience of reading a poem, but they only exist because of the line. As Knowles and Cullen suggest, an enjambment is at once an ending and not an ending.

I wrote in the introduction that at each line ending, the poem renegotiates its relation to the world. This renegotiation is most perceptible with enjambment. An end-stopped line leads to something new, although of course this newness is qualified by our knowledge of how poetry operates and, often, by the fact that we know the line will rhyme with an earlier rhyme or, in the case of a sestina, will copy an earlier teleuton. With an enjambed line, we know something—the line to come will supply the direct or indirect object of a verb, for example—but not everything.

Oregon State and Lane County Fairs

The Oregon Country Fair is often described as a new cultural event of the late twentieth century. Yet as historian Lila Perl notes, “In their oldest and simplest form, fairs were a means of bringing people together to trade, by bartering or by buying and selling. Commerce and communication sprang from the primitive fairs of prehistory.” Fairs have been a way of life in the United States since King George II advocated in 1745 that the town of Trenton, New Jersey, hold one to promote its agricultural products. In fact, beginning in 1860, the big event in the life of those living in Oregon was the State Fair sponsored by the Oregon State Agricultural Society and held in Salem, the capital city. The art-rich Oregon Country Fair is a reflection not only of this centuries-old fair tradition but integrates a specific aesthetic twist and focus on sustainability that has been integral to the cultural history of Eugene.

In the late nineteenth century, families traveled by wagon and train to the Oregon State Fair for the opportunity to spend a week camping outside the State Fair's grounds and visiting with distant friends and relatives. “Fair-goers carried with them everything they would need for the entire week of camping. Flour, sugar, rice, coffee, with dried fruit for pies and home-made jams and jellies, home-based bread, fried and roasted chickens, baked ham, cakes and always the big coffee pot and the syrup keg.” Participation at early State Fairs was based on gender. Men visited farm and stock exhibits, machine sheds and farm equipment and later in the day the race track.

The recent government support to the UK nuclear industry was strongly contested for a flurry of nuclear-specific factors, ranging from its questionable commercial competitiveness, the safety and security stakes its very operations entail, the unresolved matter of waste management and finally the restrictions it levels for the development of alternative and more sustainable sources of energy production. The latest nuclear revival practically came as a bolt from the blue, as the 2006 Energy Review and 2007 White Paper revived the nuclear industry from the slumber it had fallen into since it had last been politically scrutinised in May 1995. The 1995 Energy Review had reached the conclusion that all new nuclear build projects were to be cancelled on the grounds that nuclear power was no longer deemed economically viable – a decision favoured by both the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) and Nuclear Electric at the time. Yet, as opposed to a sustained decline in political interest visible in many other Western countries, the British governments in power have remained steadfast in their will to carry the nuclear project through for the past fifteen years. The attachment of the British government to the nuclear technology has seemingly been second to none in the British industrial landscape. For many commentators, it was not necessarily the product of an ideological commitment to the industry, as opposed to the French case for instance, though; it has had more to do with the sector's constrained innovation capabilities, commonly known as technological entrapment or lock-in in industrial policies, or more broadly, path dependence in political science. First applied in economics and then developed in political science in the 1990s, the concept of path dependence refers to historical and in-built restrictions on policy change or shifts in political trajectories; this concept helps trace forms of continuity and discontinuity in public policy. In this line of analysis, changes in policy are mostly prompted by exogeneous shocks or critical junctures which tend to upset the established institutional order and create temporary windows of political opportunity to change political course.

This chapter thus acts as a scene-setter and offers to put recent political choices into historical perspectives, to understand today's governmental commitments and how they fall in line – or stray – from the original roots of the British nuclear venture in the late 1950s.

The February day is cold and windy. My car's window washers try to keep up with the driving rain that makes visibility uncertain. I stay focused on the road ahead of me as I drive along the coast highway toward Astoria, Oregon's first city and home of the FisherPoets festival. From the warmth of my car, I am reminded of Lewis and Clark's response to Oregon's northwestern coast during their winter encampment of 1805–06. Lewis and Clark and the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery lived in 50’ × 50’ Fort Clatsop (named for the Clatsop tribe) located near today's Astoria and surrounded by the forests and wetlands of the Youngs River estuary. Unlike the Clatsop, who were in their clothing style and longhouses adapted to the climate, the men of the Corps of Discovery got sick from the constant cold and wet. Lewis had intended to stay at Fort Clatsop until April but decided to leave early “to get out of the place” as the men were increasingly physically and emotionally debilitated by the climate.

Fur trader John Jacob Astor's expeditions (for which Astoria is named) had a similar experience. In order to expand the reach of his American Fur Company, Astor sent expeditions by ship and land to set up a site at the mouth of the Columbia River. His ship the Tonquin, captained by Jonathan Thorn, arrived in the spring of 1811. Once landed, they built, despite the rain and mud, Fort Astoria, on a hill overlooking the estuary of the Young and the Columbia Rivers. This was the first American settlement in the Oregon Country. Notwithstanding an adequate supply of food from the abundance of fish, deer, elk and root vegetables that were often supplied with help from the Clatsop, the men were so depressed by the constant rain that three of them deserted thinking they would escape to the Spanish missions a thousand miles to the south.

Introduction

John Varty did not come to wildlife filmmaking through any of the conventional routes. After the untimely death of his father meant that he had to give up plans to become a professional cricket player in England, he and his brother David persuaded their mother to let them take over the family hunting farm Sparta and turn it into a tourist destination. Both brothers have written important accounts of the development of Sparta into Londolozi (Varty 2008, 2014). Varty then became involved in wildlife filmmaking as a result of helping write scripts for Rick Lomba’s films that looked at the problems of excessive land use by commercial cattle farming and of new game fences. Varty was given a film camera as some kind of recompense when Lomba could not pay him and so ended up with the means to record animal behaviour.

Guides and Londolozi

The earliest Londolozi films showed Varty using his camera to record knowledgeable guides at Londolozi. The first, Focus on Africa (1983), starred Ian Thomas as photographer and him and his tracker Phineas Mhlongo as knowers of the bush. A fair amount of this film amounts to what one could see as advice to people thinking of going on a photographic safari: Thomas suggests what lenses would be optimal for use in (stills) photography and the film then shows him in action, for example intrepidly in a river with camera, trying to film hippos or animals drinking.

But the film had another motive besides giving photographic advice and the origin of the film lay for Varty in his sense that he should try to portray bush lore or what made for successful guides. Ian Thomas recalls:

Introduction

Any study like this faces the challenge of how to do justice to the individual energy and efforts of filmmakers like the Hugheses and Jouberts but also to indicate the other forces shaping the emergence and development of the genre in Southern Africa. No one study could do justice to thousands of films and television broadcasts that emerged during this period. At the same time, the description of the conditions favouring the development of a creative industry without a sense of the creative power of the product seems trivial.

But the analysis of books and Wikipedia entries about wildlife films and nature documentaries suggests that nobody really has much idea of what one should be saying about them. Should a scholarly study provide a chronology of films and filmmakers with some analysis of key developments (Bousé 2000; Mitman 1999), or a kind of check of the social acceptability and influence of the statements in the films (Chris 2006), or look at the inner workings of one production company like the NHU? (Davies 1998; Gouyon 2019; Louson 2018).

Let me put the problem a little differently. Imagine you are asked to say something intelligent about the opening scene of Kalahari – Wilderness without Water (1983) in which eyes emerge from the dark and then a mysterious and barely known animal, a brown hyena, comes into focus close to the camera and chews on some old bones, with commentary on how well adapted for survival in the Kalahari they are. Literary scholars produce annotated scholarly editions of important texts, and on Amazon Prime Video now, one can with a click of a computer mouse see all sorts of details about elements of the scene: the actors; the music playing; the original plot. What might an Amazon Prime Video or scholarly edition of an important wildlife film list? It seems to me that none of the scholarly studies has a coherent idea of what should be there or how that would help our understanding of the film and its strengths. It seems we need theory.

Landscape

The Columbia River Gorge began evolving 12 to 17 million years ago at the same time as the Cascade Range was forming. The most dramatic changes in the Columbia River Gorge took place at the end of the last Ice Age when the Missoula Floods cut the steep walls that exist today and left layers of volcanic rock exposed. The Gorge is 7,993 feet deep. The Columbia River is 1,243 miles long with a drainage basin that extends into seven states in the United States as well as British Columbia. Sixty sizeable rivers or streams flow into the Columbia River. The largest is the Snake River in northeastern Oregon with a watershed of 108,000 square miles (Figure 7).

Situated south of the Columbia River Gorge, the Columbia Plateau is a consequence of extensive lava flows. Seventeen million years ago a rising jet of lava, referred to as the Yellowstone hot spot, traversed five miles underground and sent lava flowing from a series of 10 to 25-mile-long fissures in northeastern Oregon. “Lava flooded from the cracks and spread out across the landscape burying forests, filling streams and forming dams that in turn caused impoundments or lakes much like cake icing fills the imperfections of a surface.” Other fissures and related lava flows continued for more than a million years and traveled 400 miles along the Columbia River from eastern Oregon to the coast. The sea stacks of Oregon's northern beaches are the remnant of the Columbia River basalt flows.

A variety of wetlands, such as potholes, marshes and meadows, are found throughout the Columbia Plateau. A crust of blue-green algae, lichens and mosses protects and enriches the soil. Aromatic shrubs such as sagebrush and bitterbrush offer good browsing to a wide range of wildlife from Sage Grouse and Pygmy Rabbits to Mule Deer and Rocky Mountain Elk. Forests of Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir grow from the foothills of the Columbia Plateau to the surrounding mountain ranges. Extending from the Columbia Plateau are the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. They are made up of several mountain ranges including the Ochoco and Maury Mountains, the Greenhorn Range, the Strawberry Mountains and the Wallowa Mountains.

The most disapproving view of rhyme is that it is a merely decorative element. This idea has been promoted by many writers for many years—and it may well be the dominant view now. Part of the objection to rhyme is the fear that rhyme may dictate the poetry, compelling poets to express themselves otherwise than they would have intended. An extreme illustration of the importance of rhyme is the once fashionable game of bouts-rimés, in which players were given the rhymes for a poem they would then have to write. An especially good example of what this could mean comes from an anonymous eighteenth-century poem, “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés”:

In its diction and its sentiments, this is clearly a very conventional poem of the period, one that conforms to received ideas about eighteenth-century poetry and about women’s poetry. What follows is, to put it mildly, less conventional: the only words in the remaining eight lines are the rhyme words, which appear in the following order: “desire,” “fire,” “lie,” “thigh,” “wide,” “ride,” “night,” “delight.” “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés” gestures toward the possibility of a poem that is only rhyme without anything else at all.

Rhyme is not usually as important as it in this poem, of course. To me, one of the most interesting looks at the limitations of rhyme comes from Andrew Marvell’s poem “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost,” which was first printed in 1674 in the second edition of Milton’s poem. After discussing the many strengths of the poem as a whole, Marvell addresses the then unusual fact that Milton’s epic does not rhyme: “Well mightst thou scorn thy Readers to allure / With tinkling Rime” (45-6). He goes on to dismiss rhyme as merely a kind of accessory that “we for fashion wear” (50) and then gracefully admits his own complicity in the matter: “I too transported by the Mode offend, / And while I meant to Praise thee must Commend” (51-2).

Energy is the lifeblood of all modern societies. As the central prerequisite to large-scale industrial development and economic growth since the Industrial Revolutions, energy has grown into the perennial symbol of modernity as well as into a formidable bargaining chip in political negotiations, whether national or international. Since the second half of the twentieth century especially, energy stakes have interlocked with security and dependence concerns, which granted them a singular place as a public policy domain of strategic national interest. As US political scientist George Gonzalez underlined, energy has been instrumental in triggering structural revolutions over the past 600 years:

In that sense, energy has always bolstered the sovereignty of the modern state which conversely has proven to be equally critical for its politicisation. As the several conflicts which have broken out in the Middle East since the 1990s or the more recent tensions between Russia and Western Europe over the Russian Pipeline Nord Stream 2 have revealed, energy remains a fundamentally hegemonic and geopolitical device.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, this dynamic had not abated – quite the opposite. Countless alarmist reports have one after the other drawn media attention onto the predicted end of the age of fossil fuels, heralding an escalation of fuel prices in a foreseeable future. According to energy economist Dieter Helm, these changes will cause future realignments in the balance of the world's international energy markets, which will be symptomatic of a paradigmatic shift similar to the advent of the oil age at the beginning of the twentieth century. This much-heralded energy transition has thus led industrial states to once again redefine and rethink their domestic energy strategies – if ever they existed. Since the 1970s’ oil shocks, most Western states’ policies have thus been guided by a strategic search for relative energy independence.

Introduction

While industry awards and insider accounts suggest, contra Wikipedia, that Southern African locales and filmmakers have been central to the genre in the past half-century, what have academics made of their contribution? In spite of its reach, there is almost no criticism within Southern Africa of the genre or its major figures or of Southern African practitioners from international critics. Part of the difficulty – and appeal – of doing this study is that there is so little scholarly material. Hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people may have watched and been influenced by these films, but there is hardly any analysis of them.

Studies of African Wildlife Documentary

The late Jean Hartley wrote the only book on African wildlife documentary: Africa’s Big Five and Other Wildlife Filmmakers (Hartley 2010). She had an unparalleled insider’s sense of the industry because she acted for a quarter of a century as the leading ‘fixer’ or local agent, based in Nairobi, for many British and American film crews wanting to film in Kenya or elsewhere in East Africa. She also had what must have been the world’s leading private collection of wildlife films on DVD and video as well as a large collection of books on wildlife film. When I visited her in Nairobi, she generously gave me access to her collection of filmed material and shared her insights and recollections.

Her major claim, as the title indicates, is that five major figures emerge as the most distinguished practitioners of African wildlife documentary: Des Bartlett, Alan Root, Bob Campbell, Simon Trevor, and Hugo van Lawick. (Only Van Lawick makes it onto Wikipedia.) What distinguishes these figures was that they settled in East Africa and worked there for long periods, knowing the animals and terrain intimately and often innovating in trying to find new ways of filming, as in Alan Root’s balloon trips or underwater contraption to film hippos at Mzima Springs.

Hartley quotes David Attenborough explaining why he did not try to make television programmes in East Africa: ‘I realized I was on a hiding onto nothing, with people like Armand Denis and Alan Root actually living there and being able to devote far more time than I could’ (99).

The sixth of February, 2020, brought a convoy of trucks driving through the streets of Salem and around Oregon's capital building honking their horns as an indication of their presence. They were organized by a group called Timber Unity that represents Oregonians who work the land as foresters, loggers, ranchers, truckers, miners, fishermen and farmers. They and their representatives were in opposition to the proposed cap-and-trade climate legislation that they believed would negatively impact their livelihoods. Their protest represented a cultural divide between the increasingly population dense areas of the cities along the Interstate 5 (I-5) corridor from Portland to Eugene and the rural less populated landmass of Oregon from the small towns along the Pacific coast to the river valleys of southern Oregon to the Cascade Range of central Oregon and the high desert and range land of eastern Oregon. Each honk of a truck was a reminder of Oregon's history as a resource-based economy from the time that the Indigenous groups settled the land 15,000 plus years ago through the arrival of fur traders and settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The following September on Labor Day weekend of 2020 a wind storm swept through Oregon's drought-ridden forests along the western Cascade Range downing trees and power lines and setting off the worst set of fires in the Oregon's history. The fires killed at least 10 people, burned more than 1,000,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of homes. Major population centers along the I-5 corridor from the suburbs of Portland to Salem and Eugene were threatened. The cities of Talent and Phoenix in southern Oregon were destroyed as well as towns along the Santiam Highway between Salem and Bend. Hazardous smoke was in the air for two weeks and people were cautioned to stay indoors. When the rain returned, the residue from the fires cascaded down the hills and mountains creating long-term problems for drinking water, and the denuded hillsides were at a risk for landslides. Scientists commenting on the situation suggested that in an era of global warming fires should not have come as a surprise.

The forest fires of September 2020 reignited the battle lines that have been the history of Oregon's decades-long environmental debate.

Introduction

While several Southern Africans had tried to make films in the Kruger National Park and elsewhere in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Wild Kingdom and Survival teams, the successes and themes of the foreign crews seem to have spurred several local initiatives in the early 1970s – some with distinctly political motivations attached to them. In particular, the South African Department of Information saw the positive possibilities of wildlife conservation highlighting South Africa’s successes at a time when its trusteeship of South-West Africa was coming under increasing scrutiny.

Before 1974

In his summary of developments in the KNP before 1945, Stevenson-Hamilton commented that:

David Bunn has analysed ways in which some local insiders had privileged access to water-holes or prime viewing spots for photography (Bunn 2003), but when it came to film, the foreign professionals seemed to enjoy privileges that were resented by locals who complained, for example, that the Americans could use ‘skerms’ or hides whereas they were not allowed to.

Beinart and Coates state that the Kruger had made several films attacking elephant poaching, but I have found no trace of those (Beinart and Coates 2002). The most influential of the local amateur film-makers may have been influential as an example of what not to do! Michael Rosenberg speaks in an interview of how he watched his father filming at random and then struggling to compose anything coherent with his footage. His father’s experiences led Rosenberg to decide to do things differently and to shoot more purposefully, but had his father not experimented and got things wrong, Rosenberg may never have started filming and editing in the way he did.

Rhinos

If one judged the influence of documentaries by how the culture at large takes them up, particularly in feature films, then the rescue of the white rhino from extinction in the Natal (now KZN) Parks Umfolozi and Hluhluwe should have been a central theme.

Landscape

Lush forests, towering mountains, plenty of rain and misty fog are the general image of Oregon. The High Desert, located primarily in Harney and Malheur Counties, has a total population of less than 50,000 in the 20,125 square miles in which 75 percent of the land is owned by the Federal government. New York Times travel writer Suzanne Carmichael wrote, “Oregon's remote high-desert country is a little-known and remarkably diverse region that covers nearly one-quarter of the state. Wind-seared desert and lush wetlands border stunning geologic formations; pelicans and trumpeter swans fly over pockmarked lava beds, and dry winds sweep through ghost towns where sheepherders used to spend the winter months.”

The terrain of the High Desert was formed by a series of lava flows that consistently erupted from miles-long vents from 10 to 30 million years ago. The consequence is that the area has been consistently pulled westward in a continuing geologic process that eventually causes earthquakes. The result is a series of Basins or valleys separated by mountain Ranges—Alvord Desert to Steens Mountain, Lake Albert to Albert Rim, Summer Lake to Winter Ridge. Divided into a southern region and a northern region, the southwest region is part of the Great Basin and the southeast is the lower Owyhee River watershed. The region averages 15 inches of annual rainfall; the Alvord Desert in southeast Oregon in the shadow of the Steens Mountains receives a bare 7 inches of rain each year (Figure 4).

There are a few places in the High Desert, such as the Jordan Craters lava field, where volcanism occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago. The continuing geological influence of the deep sources of underground heat accounts for the High Desert's geothermal resources, including Alvord Hot Springs, Lakeview's Hunter Hot Springs, as well as those located near Vale, Oregon.

This chapter covers another pillar of policy implementation: the economic and financial facets of market regulation (1989–2016). According to Christopher Hood's taxonomy, the allocation of financial resources, or treasure in its restricted meaning, is one of the four key instruments of state leadership capacity. Over the past thirty years, this economic incentive mechanism has undergone major changes. As previously stated, governance literature has extensively demonstrated how privatisation and deregulation policies substantially eroded states’ capacity to influence markets, which gained control over public services to steer industrial strategy as per the much fashionable mantra of ‘markets know best’. In turn, states have mainly acted to facilitate market expansion in a new neoliberal paradigm that US constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt had already dubbed ‘market state’ in 1989, subsequent to ‘the age of the nation-state’. Much has been written in state theory throughout the 1990s-early 2000s on how market states have thus sought to pursued a two-pronged mission to defend consumers’ interests while maximising markets’ economic opportunities through deregulation, subcontracting and outsourcing for service-providing activities. The state has thus adopted market practices while retreating from financial and economic circles to take on a role of market steerer through loose regulation, becoming a ‘regulatory state’.

These dynamics no doubt throve in the UK context and did not fail to affect the domestic electricity sector through the 1989 Electricity Act. In practice however, and as opposed to what is commonly assumed when referring to classical neoliberal theories, privatisation and deregulation did not equate the end of state financial support to the electricity industry. The first botched attempts to privatisation the UK nuclear sector between 1987 and 1989 had unearthed deep-rooted economic weaknesses that made the industry not competitive enough to stand on its own two feet in the future privatised energy sector. To straighten out the financial records of what later became British Energy, the Major government embraced several indirect interventionist economic mechanisms to prop up the economically unsound nuclear industry, taking advantage of the new international environmental imperatives to sanction polluting fossil fuels as discussed in Chapter Five. It would nonetheless be under the subsequent Labour government, by 2000, that these forms of indirect economic support would be phased out. Paradoxically enough, the erosion of state financial interventionism in the nuclear sector coincided with the general revival in interest for the new nuclear build project.