Pigs. Mucky, horny, affectionate, inquisitive; suckling, grunting, nursing, and waddling their way through Vermont writer Ellyn Gaydos’s first book and memoir, Pig Years. Gaydos, who passes the book’s five-year span jobbing on a series of farms in her home state and rural New York, adores the curly-tailed creatures, buying two or three piglets from a local vendor each year and raising them for pork. Yet pigs represent only one spoke in the book’s sturdy wheel of growth, decay, and regeneration. Since Gaydos took her first job on a beef and vegetable farm at the age of eighteen, her 
life has assumed a seasonal regularity. She finds employment in Vermont or New York every spring, planting carrots and pattypan squash. In summer, she trellises tomatoes, attends county fairs, and gorges on unsalable strawberries. Fall is first about the root harvest, then about aftermath, as livestock is killed and gutted, and pounds of leftover cabbage are turned to sauerkraut. Over the winter, Gaydos moves in with her boyfriend, Graham, a painter in New York City, and—collecting seed packets in the interim—waits for the snow to lighten so she can pull on her steel-toed boots and head back for the fields.
Of course, there are deviations from year to year: new views out over the Adirondacks and Green Mountains, new crop species to plant and farmhands to find company among. In 2019, returning to her friends Sarah and Ethan’s vegetable farm in New York for a second season, Gaydos allows that: “Working at the farm again, I notice some changes. People added to the crew, more acres cultivated, another old tractor in the fleet.” She maintains, though, that “fundamentally, things are the same. The same low-slung Mount Lebanon and collective Shaker gravestone. The same weeds coming up in the fields, reseeded from so many generations” (119). To Gaydos, each working year unfolds with that reassuring, promising sameness, like tractor wheels following deeply wrought furrows to familiar destinations.
For agricultural memoirs to stress hard work and cycles is hardly exceptional. In fact, an emphasis on interdependent, laboriously earned recurrence is a hallmark of one of the oldest Western traditions of nature writing. As far back as the eighth century BCE, Greek poet Hesiod wrote of men who “plough and plant” and “never rest from labour”—who, so long as they remain just and “tend the fields which are all their care,” might “flourish continually with good things” as “the grain-giving earth bears them fruit.”[1] Virgil famously took up these themes in the Georgics, his four-book poem published circa 29 BCE, which observes that a “farmer’s work proceeds in / Cycles, as the shuttling year returns on its own track,” and calls for careful “attention” and “much expense of labour” as those cycles proceed.[2]
Many twenty-first-century writers engage directly with Hesiodic and Virgilian tradition.[3] Gaydos does not. Her memoir does not indicate that she is aware of the georgic mode, much less the genre’s express interest in natural cyclicality and good husbandry. But the term georgic encompasses more than a self-conscious set of literary conventions. Indeed, as modern American literature scholar William Conlogue suggests, the georgic might be best understood today as a kind of ecological “vision,” or a “mode of thought necessary to sustain human life,” in which “hard work is inevitable” and “humans ought to heed nature’s patterns.”[4] And Pig Years, with its “faith in the continuance of things, of reaping and sowing”—its insistence that there is “no ending and no beginning to an agricultural story, only a descent into a repeating cycle”—demonstrates that very thinking (x, 17).
The georgic thereby provides a useful ideological framework through which to consider Gaydos’s own “wild compound vision” (vii). At the same time, Gaydos’s memoir offers a ripe opportunity to evaluate the enduring relevance of that vision—its argument for interconnection, its emphasis on nature’s continuity and relatively dependable harvests begot by labor. Probably, the book’s lasting salience lies in its emphasis on the interdependence of human and nonhuman lives, or what eighteenth-century literature scholar Donna Landry characterizes as “the mutual imbrication” of (wo)man and nature.[5] Gaydos’s very prologue posits the impossibility of extracting the human from the nonhuman. She explains that her attempt to write as “a fly showcasing the world” and “buzzing at the margins” failed. As her prose is inevitably and intractably “influenced by [her] simple brown-eyed human gaze,” she enters instead into a complex “conversation with the fields, animals, and towns” surrounding her (vii).
The narrative thus hinges on the fundamentally georgic premise that “all [is] connected” (vii). Readers bear witness while, for lack of the distractions and distance imposed by cities and suburbs, Gaydos “act[s] on the world” and the world acts back (17).[6] Sometimes, those actions and their effects exhibit an alluring symbiosis, as the farmhand and her environment are cast as co-conspirators in a mutually beneficial process of “corralling life toward the desired fecundity” (18). At other times, the meeting of human and nonhuman worlds generates palpable tension. Just as Virgil’s farmer must “guard” against “the dangers of showery spring” and watch for “vile blight” which causes corn crops to fail, so too does Gaydos declare herself “answerable to weather or bugs”—although, significantly, the potential repercussions of these threats do not seem to extend beyond the next few months or seasons (17). Central to this frequently dark interspecies nexus are Gaydos’s pigs: shrieking as they are castrated shortly after birth; bleeding out as they are shot at close range mere months later; and generally offering omnipresent reminders of a grittier ecology, one in which life is “conjured and cut short” so that other life—often human life—might continue (x). Again, Gaydos focuses on more quotidian conjuring and cuttings, the kinds of beginnings and endings observable in immediate human time—of which her pigs are a prime example.
Navigating these concrete, day-to-day clusters of vulnerability and responsibility, Gaydos assumes appropriately georgic postures of curiosity, humility, and respect. Albeit implicitly, the book persistently raises questions which modern ecocritics Philipp Erchinger, Sue Edney, and Pippa Marland locate at the heart of interspecies coexistence: “How should we work to cultivate a fertile and sustainable relationship with our physical and social environment? How, in other words, are we supposed to live well?”[7] Gaydos’s memoir reaps at least one crucial, all-too-easily-forgotten answer, urging that “there is so much else to understand besides the clogged world of human activity” (18). It suggests that meaning might be made by observing other languages, calendars, and markers of success; that an alternate ecosystem of day-to-day frustrations and solaces exists—even overlaps—with our own.
Still, while Pig Years offers a timely reminder of human and nonhuman interdependence, it also rubs up against the limits of its georgic vision. In some respects, this friction feels counterintuitive: Would the georgic mode not logically lend itself to literary exploration of ecological disruption? Yet the book’s concentration on cyclicality and ultimate continuity leaves little acreage for exploration of lasting change, much less catastrophe. That Gaydos ends her memoir in early 2020 does not feel accidental. In doing so, she avoids discussion of COVID-19, not to mention its implications for food supply chains and local agricultural industries. Neither the retroactively written author’s note nor the epilogue, dated “Spring 2020,” engage with the global pandemic of which, by the time of the book’s compilation, Gaydos must surely have been aware. On the contrary, Pig Years’ final pages celebrate georgic renewal, averring that “when spring finally does come, it is with a sigh; it seems not hard-won at all but like an easy collapse into a well-worn groove of verdancy, everything perennial and resurrected but reborn perfectly: the first unblemished leaf, the white flowers on the apple trees” (206). In their reappropriation of a season when many felt betrayed by or uncertain about nature as they faced seismic disruption and devastating, irrecoverable losses, such paeans of “resurrection” and “rebirth” sound unnervingly out of tune.
The book’s apparent indifference to climate change strikes a conspicuously strange chord. 2016 to 2020, the years of which Gaydos writes, were some of the hottest on record.[8] Climate scientists have found the US northeast region in which she worked to be warming faster than the rest of the world; Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, has seen the largest recorded average winter temperature increase of any city in the US over the last fifty years.[9] And the summer of 2018, during which Gaydos lived and wrote about her experiences on a farm in central Vermont, proved the hottest month in Burlington to date—an anomaly of which the author, who presumably passed most of the season sweating beneath the sun’s record-setting rays, makes no mention.[10] More broadly, while Gaydos alludes to occasional heat and the vague possibility of drought or flood while out in the fields, she does not once invoke the terms global warming or climate change. To do so would be to undermine previous assertions of cyclicality and ongoingness central to the book’s georgic framework.
Similarly, Gaydos marvels at what she believes to be the enduring relevance of inherited agricultural wisdom. She writes that farming “is a profession based on so much work already done, the earth tricked so many centuries ago,” averring that the “whole thing feels predestined and the formulas predetermined in these carefully laid plans. Now what is left, each year renewed, is the work” (18). Again, this doctrine of natural predictability (even inevitability) feels out of step with reality. What about the substantial changes to agricultural practice which many Vermont and New York farmers have already been compelled to make?[11] What about the increasingly dramatic shifts which will surely be necessitated in years to come?
For all its georgic emphasis on the dirtier facets of interspecies coexistence, Gaydos’s insistently cyclical vision of labor and circumscribed growth thereby neglects our urgent ecological reality. Of course, this can be interpreted as a deliberate political or aesthetic choice, or else as an entirely unconscious omission. Either way, read alongside reports of impending climatological collapse—which, in its extreme potentiality, climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert refers to as an “extinction event”—the farmhand’s promises of “impending growth” begin to wilt (209).[12]
Readers might thus approach Pig Years with caution. One on hand, the book provides vivid views of the vital, mutually affective relationships between humans and nonhumans in pursuit of life and well-being. On the other, many of its georgic sensibilities risk propagating the increasingly untenable attitude which another Vermont writer, climate activist Bill McKibben, identified in 1989 as “our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and perceptibly if at all.”[13]
As such, Gaydos’s memoir raises salient questions about the role and responsibilities of environmental writing in our current climate. It highlights the need to expand old traditions of nature writing and thinking—to develop new frameworks and languages for understanding our relationship to the natural world. Crucially, these frameworks and languages must allow for rupture as well as recurrence. They must accommodate complex, interdependent shifts which are not only local and immediate but planetary in scale and geological in timeframe. And they must reconceptualize notions of labor and husbandry in service of longer-term, broader-reaching well-being. In short, we need to tend to our ecological visions with the same fierce, scrupulous care Gaydos bestows on her pigs, lest we find ourselves wanting when the cold—or, perhaps more appropriately, heat—comes.
Notes:
[1] Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 5, 15, 21.
[2] Virgil, The Georgics, in The Eclogues, The Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford University Press, 1983), 2.401–2, 2.61–62.
[3] See, for instance, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Days and Works (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2017) and Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days (New York: New Directions Books, 2016).
[4] William Conlogue, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 7–8.
[5] Donna Landry, “Georgic Ecology,” in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, eds. Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 256.
[6] Virgil, The Georgics 1.313, 1.150–54.
[7] Philipp Erchinger, Sue Edney, and Pippa Marland, “Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” ECOZON@ 12, no. 2 (2021): 1.
[8] “Global Temperature,” Vital Signs of the Planet, NASA Global Climate Change, July 26, 2023, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/.
[9] Stephen S. Young and Joshua S. Young, “Overall Warming with Reduced Seasonality: Temperature Change in New England, USA, 1900–2020,” Climate 9 no. 12 (2021): 176; Climate Central, “2022 Winter Package,” Climate Matters, November 29, 2022, https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/2022-winter-package.
[10] Elizabeth Murray, “July Was Officially Burlington’s Hottest Month Ever,” Burlington Free Press, August 1, 2018, https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/2018/08/01/july-officially-burlingtons-hottest-month-ever/877915002/.
[11] For these, see Chapter 5 of Gillian Galford et al., 2021 Vermont Climate Assessment, Gund Institute of Environment, University of Vermont, https://site.uvm.edu/vtclimateassessment/files/2022/08/VCA-entire-8-3-22-web.pdf.
[12] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2014).
[13] Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006 [1989]), 7.