Woodchucks

Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined this term in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which discusses a 1961 war crime trial in Israel against Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who organized the deportation of millions of Jewish people and other peoples to concentration camps. Arendt’s overarching question centers on whether a person can do evil without being evil. Eichmann appeared ordinary and nondescript. In his daily and mundane bureaucratic activities, he participated in great evil without active intent or specific motives. This disconnect caused Arendt to describe his actions as the banality of evil. Eichmann was responsible for a multitude of murders simply by going about his daily activities and following the law.

Arendt did not mean that evil was now ordinary or that the crimes of the Holocaust were unexceptional; rather, she argued that the ability to commit evil now existed in a daily, systematic way that people could accept and implement without moral or political indignation. This non-thinking becomes genocidal. The nuances of her theory attracted controversy. Arguments about Eichmann’s political ideology, definitions of evil, and the completeness of her theory persist to this day. Despite these disagreements, the core idea of evil as something ordinary-looking rather than monstrous remains in the contemporary cultural conversation.

Kumin extends this idea. Her poem features an unremarkable speaker who is doing a chore that would not be unfamiliar to a rural reader. The speaker engages in a daily, mundane task that results in the genocide of the woodchucks in the garden. Through an ecocritical lens, Kumin also criticizes the human relationship with nature. An interloper in the woodchucks’ natural habitat, the speaker destroys the ecosystem in service of the speaker's human needs. Allegorically, the speaker becomes a participant in the violence against the Jewish people without a purposeful intent to commit genocide.