Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends

Ecocriticism: Some Emerging TrendsLawrence Buell

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19, Number2, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 87-115 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

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EcocriticismSome Emerging Trends

lawrence buell

The Problem of the Unstable Signifi er

What is ecocriticism? The imprecision with which it has been de-fi ned and the increasingly disparate uses to which it and its cog-nates have been put recall Arthur Lovejoys classic essay On the Discrimination of Romanticisms (1924)by which Lovejoy meant the problem of distinguishing among confl icting usages that belies the implication of a coherent category implied by its custom-ary deployment in the singular.1

For romanticism, Lovejoy tried to impose a semblance of or-der through historicization, even though he was sorely tempted to throw up his hands. Romanticism has ceased to perform the func-tion of a verbal sign, he lamented. When a man is asked . . . to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or ten-dencies he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have fl our-ished, or in whom they are supposed to be chiefl y exemplifi ed (ODR, 232). In a similarly jaundiced mood, one might say the same of ecocriticism.

Although a term of much more recent coinage than romanticism was in 1924, in the two decades since it took off as something like a movement it too has generated initiatives or camps that draw

qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2 88

on increasingly discrepant archives and critical models, such that even most self-identifi ed ecocritics now read each others work se-lectively rather than comprehensively, and distinctions become in-creasingly hard to make between them and other environmentally oriented humanists who would resist being called ecocritics how-ever relevant their work seems to those who do. As Nirmal Selva-mony recently put it, ecocritics are not agreed on what constitutes the basic principle in ecocriticism, whether it is bios, or nature or environment or place or earth or land. Since there is no consensus, there is no common defi nition.2 Partly for that reason, even the choice of basic rubric has been challenged, by me among others.3 Ursula Heise rightly observes that ecocriticism has imposed itself as convenient shorthand for what some critics prefer to call en-vironmental criticism, [or] literary-environmental studies, [or] lit-erary ecology, [or] literary environmentalism, [or] green cultural studies.4

Indeed, ecocriticismto stay with the usual lumping term if only for convenience, even though I myself prefer environmental criticism for reasons that will shortly become clearhas a history both of strong position-taking by individual spokespersons and of reluctance to insist on a single normative, programmatic defi nition of its rightful scope, method, and stakes. By no coincidence, the most cited defi nition, by Cheryll Glotfelty in the introduction to the Ecocriticism Reader, characterizes it simply as the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.5

Nonetheless, it is possible to devise a usable narrative of that initiatives evolution and present agendas, including reasonable guesses about likely future directions.

From Inception until the Near-Now: The Two Waves

Until a few years ago, as a decent approximation one might char-acterize ecocriticism as a two-stage affair since its inception as a self-conscious movement in the early 1990s. What follows is an updated version of an earlier attempt to do so that seems to have gained fairly wide if not universal acceptance (FEC, 128).6

As a self-conscious critical practice calling itself such, ecocriti-

Buell: Ecocriticism 89

cism began around 1990 as an initiative within literary studies, specifi cally within English and American literature, from two semi-coordinated and interpenetrating epicenters: British romanticism, with a genre focus especially on poetry in that tradition (including its twentieth-century Anglo-American fi liations), and U.S. nature writing (ditto), with a genre focus especially on the Thoreauvian imprint.7 At this early stage, few ecocritics, if pressed about the matter, would have claimed that these particular generic and his-torical foci were to be considered the sole rightful provinces for ecocritical work. On the contrary, most would have granted read-ily enough that ecocritical work might comprehend any and all ex-pressive media, including not only visual, architectural, and other nontextual genres of practice but also even more purely instrumen-tal, functional discoursesof scholarly articles in the natural and social science, the texts of legislative documents and treaties, and so forth. The initial de facto concentration on selected literary genres within the long Anglo-American nineteenth century was contin-gent rather than inherent, a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit made additionally tempting by two sorts of infl uential prior criti-cal interventions. One, represented most prominently by cultural critic-historians Raymond Williams and Leo Marx, had called at-tention to the infl ection of literary practice at this pivotal moment by the accelerating destabilization of nature owing to urbaniza-tion and industrial capitalism.8 The other was the tendency in late-twentieth-century critical theory, especially its poststructuralist and new historicist avatarsboth of which inspired groundbreak-ing work in romanticism studiesto interpret ostensible concern for the natural world or literary representation thereof that was so salient during the romantic era and its aftermath as epiphenomenal if not nugatorya discursive and/or ideological screen.

So it befell that the primary agenda of fi rst-wave ecocriticism, which prevailed through the 1990s, became especially identifi ed with the project of reorienting literary-critical thinking toward more serious engagement with nonhuman nature in two differ-ent although related ways. The more distinctively humanistic was a range of post-Heideggerian phenomenological theoriesof-ten lumped together under the heading of deep ecology, a term


coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.9 According to this view, human being and human consciousness are thought to be grounded in intimate interdependence with the nonhuman living world. Two distinguished cases in point were the Stanford Univer-sity comparatist Robert Pogue Harrison, especially his 1993 book Forests: The Shadows of Civilization, and British romantic scholar Jonathan Bate, whose 1991 Romantic Ecology inaugurated Brit-ish ecocriticism and whose The Song of the Earth (2000) brought Heideggerian ecocriticism to its high point to date.10 The appeal of this model has since waned11 for reasons both politicalanxiety about the taint of Heideggers Nazismand philosophical: most immediately, resistance to the mystical-holistic dimension of deep ecology propagated especially by its popularizers but in the long run even more signifi cantly growing skepticism about the adequa-cy if not the inherent legitimacy of lines of analysis that privilege subjective perception/experience as against social context/human collectivities. All this is not to say that ecocritical interest in the idea of some sort of inherent affective if not also spiritual bond between individual humans and the nonhuman world has lost its holdindeed quite the contrary. One symptom of this is the very strong persistence of what Scott Slovic has called narrative schol-arship12 in ecocritical practicethat is, critical work constructed as a cross-pollination of autobiographical and/or reported witness-ing to personal experience and academic analysis.13 But the mean-ing of existential contact with environment today now tends to be more self-consciously framed as socially mediated, and the value set upon subjective individual experience of environment tends to be framed accordingly as a product of historical circumstance and acculturation.

The second most distinctive path taken by fi rst-wave ecocriti-cism was to try to make literary theory and criticism more scientifi -cally informed, meaning especially by ecology, environmental biol-ogy, and geology. This initiative was largely the work of American scholars who seized upon a book by the forgotten critic Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival (1972), now widely looked upon as the fi rst signifi cant ecocritical study.14 Meeker sought to retheo-rize comedy as a genre expressive of the sense of human survival as


enabled by strategies of adaptive behavior. His most prolifi c suc-cessor in this vein has been the American scholar Joseph Carroll, whose various works, including Literary Darwinism (2004), con-stitute the most sustained quest to bridge the gap between the hu-manities and the sciences by means of a literary theory obedient to conceptual models derived from life science.15 In its most sweep-ingly insistent forms, this vision has not won many adherents. But not so the fundamental call for literary critics and humanists gen-erally to attain greater science literacy that was framed by a num-ber of fi rst-wave ecocritics (perhaps most infl uentially by William Howarth and Glen Love).16 Although second-wave environmental criticism has generally paid less attention to conceptual models de-rived from science per se than to science studiesthat is, the study of scientifi c theory and practice as infl ected by its historico-cultural contextsthe aspiration continues to run strong17 to enlist scientifi c method and theory in the service of humanistic-literary analysis while avoiding the opposite pitfalls of scientistic reduc-tionism (e.g., genetic-determinist explanations of consciousness) and the humanistic reduction of science as cultural construct. And some recent environmental critics have approached the litera-ture-science interface from entirely new directions, as with Ursula Heises intensive exploration of the pertinence of risk theory for reading texts informed by a postmodern conception of the indeter-minacy of the signifying process.18

The most lastingly infl uential fi rst-wave attempt to fuse scien-tistic and humanistic thinking has so far probably been ecocritical work in the area of bioregionalisman eclectic body of thinking that interweaves fi ndings from ecology, geography, anthropology, history, phenomenology, and aesthetics in the service of the norma-tive claim that a persons primary loyalty as citizen should be to the bioregionor ecological regionrather than to nation or some other jurisdictional unit.19 Ecological literacy is seen as a crucial aspect of bioregional citizenship. Among Americanists, this biore-gional persuasion is especially associated with certain place-based creative writers who have also gained standing as critics, such as Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry.20

As already noted, fi rst-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-fo-


cused and especially as an Anglo-American romanticism-and-be-yond affair, focused on the two preferred genres of nature poet-ryas in the work of John Elder and Jonathan Bateand, on the American side, nonfi ctional nature writing.21 Second-wave ecocriti-cism has sought to press far beyond the fi rst waves characteristic limitations of genre, geography, and historical epoch. By the early twenty-fi rst century, environmental criticism was on the way to en-gaging the whole sweep of Western literary history from antiquity to the present. And it had also taken root in eastern and southern Asia as well as Anglo-Europe and the Anglophone diaspora. So, for example, as of now the leading ecocritic at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley is a specialist in early modernism; the lead-ing ecocritic at the University of Notre Dame is a neoclassicist; at Bucknell, a medievalist; at the universities of Wisconsin and Kan-sas, postcolonialists. In India, the fi rst generation of ecocritics has taken a special interest in the literatures and philosophical tradi-tions of the subcontinent.

American ecocritic Patrick Murphys 1998 edited collection Lit-erature of Nature: An International Sourcebook gives a panoram-ic view of the geographical expansion of ecocritical practice and textual reach in its fi rst stages, for which Murphy has continued to campaign in a series of single-authored essay collections that are extremely useful as bibliographical guides even if analytically somewhat thin.22 As of this writing, his most recent is Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies.23

The expansion of understanding of the rightful ecocritical can-on to encompass nothing less than all the literatures of the world, with critics throughout the world understood as having a rightful stake in ecocritical practice, clearly is still in its early stages. As the membership rolls of the Association for the Study of Litera-ture and Environment (ASLE) attest, by far the majority of self-identifi ed ecocritics remain Anglophone scholars working on An-glophone texts. (This article itself is symptomatic of that ongoing imbalance.) Even other major Europhone literary cultures are as yet relatively underexplored. But notable efforts to counteract this are under way on a number of fronts.24 Conversely, the autono-mous traditions of Asian, perhaps particularly Japanese, Korean,


and Sinophone, environmental criticism as well as the long-stand-ing investment of Sinophone creative writers in environmental is-sues seem to be on the verge of fi guring much more greatly in the thinking of Western ecocritics than they have hitherto, despite the degree to which ecocritics in China and Taiwan have been infl u-enced by Western models and Western texts.25 To date, the area in which ecocriticisms aspiration to expand its geographical horizons has so far come closest to realizing its potential has been its cross-pollination with (so far mostly Anglophone) postcolonial studies, on which more below.

With this still-incipient expansion of geographical and cul-tural horizons came a marked shift in ecocritical thinking about the exemplary landscape or landscapes it should seek to engage. First-wave ecocriticism typically privileged rural and wild spaces over urban ones. Against this, second-wave ecocriticism contend-ed that that wall of separation is a historically produced artifact, that throughout human history nature itself has been subject to human reshaping, and that especially since the industrial revolu-tion, metropolitan landscape and the built environment generally must be considered as at least equally fruitful ground for ecocriti-cal work. That is partly why bioregionalism remains infl uential; for despite tending to attach special value to ecosystemic contexts and to small-sized, place-based organic communities, bioregional-ism generally acknowledges at least in principle the signifi cance of metropolitan networks as part of regional history and culture.

Environmental criticism is still in the exploratory stages of learning how to theorize urban networks as part of its mandate. The attempts so far seem have been more earnest than resound-ingly successful, starting with the collections The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, edited by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague (1999), and City Wilds, edited by Terrell Dixon (2002).26 But even though ecocritics continue to devote a disproportionate attention to (representation of) open spaces compared to city space (except for open spaces within cities), this imbalance has been changing and will doubtless continue to do so in future. For even more fundamentally distinctive to the second wave of ecocriticism that started to predominate around the year


2000 than the diversifi cation of archives and landscapes per se was the turn toward cultural studies and cultural theory. This turn can be explained partly as a reaction against what was allegedwith some if not complete justiceto be fi rst-wave ecocriticisms naively pre-theoretical valorization of experiential contact with the natu-ral world and its trust in the power of artifacts either to render the natural world or to motivate return to it. Second-wave ecocriticism strove, by contrast, to make the movement look less like an out-lier within the contemporary critical theory scene, which in prac-tice meant to some extent as we shall soon see trying to infl ect it with one or another strand of poststructuralism. But this push was not solely motivated by the anxieties of intratribal professionalism. Second-wave critiques were also reacting against the philosoph-ic ecocentrism broadly presupposed if not explicitly advocated in most leading fi rst-wave work. This reaction was not merely theo-retic and notional but also pragmatic and political, against what was widelyalbeit lumpinglyperceived as the quietistic if not retrograde politics of ecocentric ecocriticism.

In this, second-wave ecocriticism was partly infl uenced by a more complex grasp of the longer history of environmentalism it-self. First-wave studies resonated with its preservationist edge as traditionally understood both by historians and by activists: en-vironmentalism equals nature protection in thinly populated re-mote areas. Second-wave ecocriticism, by contrast, affi liated itself more closely with the other main historical strand of environmen-talist thinking: public health environmentalism, whose geographic gaze was directed more at landscapes of urban and/or industrial transformation rather than at country or wilderness, and whose environmental ethics and politics were sociocentric rather than ecocentric. This sociocentric strand had actually been developing alongside the fi rst since the 1800s, but it was not until the 1980s that environmental historians and environmentalists regularly be-gan to think of issues like workplace safety and waste disposal as integral to environmentalismthat is, as part of the same com-posite fi eld. Indeed, even today, environmentalism connotes fi rst and foremost the realm of nonhuman nature, wild spaces, and so forth. In their valuable 1997 survey of environmental movements


worldwide, Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier ended with a chapter celebrating the urban and regional planner Lewis Mumford as The Forgotten American Environmentalist.27 Such insistence on the residual parochialism of Western environmental-ism no longer seems quite so urgent at a time of such cross-cutting environmental-humanistic symposia given over wholly or partly to ecological urbanism as the 2008 Berlin Transcultural Spaces conference and the 2009 Uppsala Counter Natures conferencealthough it remains a necessary counterbalance.28

But to continue with ecocriticism per se. Whereas fi rst-stage ecocritics privileged fi gures like British romantic poet John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, more consequential for sec-ond-stage ecocritics were the likes of Charles Dickens (who was deeply involved in Victorian-era public health environmentalism), the American muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, the Rachel Carson of Silent Spring, her Japanese successor and quasi-counter-part Michiko Ishimure, and the Nigerian writer-activist Ken Saro-wiwa, executed for his leadership of protests against the devasta-tion of his homeland by Big Oil interests in the Niger Delta.

Two conspicuous examples of second-wave attempts to infuse ecocriticism with greater theoretical sophistication have been the work of Dana Phillips and Timothy Morton. Phillipss 2003 The Truth of Ecology sternly indicts what he takes to be the episte-mological navet of virtually all fi rst-wave ecocriticism.29 Though the book overshoots its mark by denying any legitimacy whatso-ever to literature as a conduit of environmental representation (see FEC, 2961), it is a stimulating corrective to simplistic mimeti-cist readings, and even more useful for its interlinked critiques of the embedded holistic assumptions in much ecological theory and of humanistic overkill in attempted deconstructions of science as cultural construct. Mortons 2007 Ecology without Nature of-fers a more nuanced deconstruction of fi rst-wave commitment to ecomimesis, that is, the project of representing natures com-plications and internal contradictions.30 In contrast to Phillipss categorical rejection, Morton unfolds a series of ways in which literary and other aesthetic representations fi lter inputs from the material environment with such verve, intricacy, and panache as


to amountfor this reader, at leastto a quasi-rehabilitation of the project he sees himself as dismantling. Morton then further ar-gues (reminiscently of Lovejoy) that nature is so polyvalent and baggage-ridden a term that it should be banished from the lexicon. British ecocritic Greg Garrard, author of a respected book-length overview of ecocritical emphases (Ecocriticism, 2004), critiques Mortons baby-out-the-with-bathwater assertions in How Queer Is Green?31 Mortons subsequent The Ecological Thought (2010), characterized as a prequel to Ecology without Nature, offers a more sustained, less peremptory statement, albeit with similar penchant for aphoristic manifesto, of what he takes to be the vir-tues of his preferred signifi er: The ecological thought is the think-ing of interconnectedness, dynamic, borderless, interpenetrative (collapsing self-other fi rewalls whether we like it or not), hugely expand[ing] our ideas of space and time.32

However much Morton and Phillips sometimes shoot from the hip, their books are provocative tours de force in the worthy as well as the equivocal sense: wit and critical sophistication offset-ting whatever sententious excess. A more representative expression of the sociocentric thrust of second-wave ecocriticism, however, is the 2002 Environmental Justice Reader, which in a spirit of sober-toned moral and political conviction pits itself against the 1996 Ecocriticism Reader.33 This collection has not yet become the refer-ence point that the earlier one still remains, but the signifi cance of the shift of priorities toward a fusion of cultural constructionism and social justice concerns cannot be denied. The prioritization of issues of environmental justicethe maldistribution of environ-mental benefi ts and hazards between white and nonwhite, rich and pooris second-wave ecocriticisms most distinctive activist edge, just as preservationist ecocentrism was for the fi rst wave. Among its crucial contributions have been its salutary broadening intensifi -cation of ecocritical concentration on nonwhite writers other than Native and a reconception of the stakes of the latter;34 its facilita-tion of the recent synergy between ecocriticism postcolonial stud-ies described below; and a diversifi cation of the ecocritical ranks, hitherto (and still) a markedly Caucasian group, to include more scholars of color. A further mark of the reach and timeliness of en-


vironmental justice revisionist ecocriticism has been its resonance with concurrent environmental-humanistic work in areas where there seems no question of direct infl uence, such as cultural ge-ographer Jake Koseks Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (2006), a semi-autobiographical activist ethnography that assesses the clashing claims and memories as to the history, rightful ownership, and proper future policy for for-estlands in a district of the American Southwest between longtime Hispanic residents, Native Americans, U.S. government agencies, and environmental activists.

The paradigmatic environment for second-wave ecocriticism tends to be the compromised, endangered landscapes of Carsons Silent Spring, the modern locus classicus of toxic discourse (WEW, 3054). But second-wave ecocriticism has attached spe-cial importance, as Carson did not, to marginalized minority peo-ples and communities both at home and abroadand with texts that engage such concerns, both from high art and from vernacu-lar culture. Indeed, a committed environmental justice revisionist ecocritic would consider these two domains inseparablethat is, concern with issues of toxifi cation and concern for the plight of racial minorities.

What May Lie Ahead

The sociocentric thrust of environmental justice revisionism feeds into at least two strands of emergent ecocritical work, both of which demonstrate that sociocentric ecocriticism may well but need not necessarily direct itself toward issues of racial injustice specifi cally as top priority. The fi rst is exemplifi ed by American ecofeminist Stacy Alaimos work on the discourse of MCSliteral-ly multiple chemical sensitivity, commonly known as environ-mental illness. The cases she surveys include minority sufferers but not only those. The article from which I quote is incorporat-ed in her Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Mate-rial Self, which develops the idea of transcorporeality, that is, body as environmental construct. At fi rst sight, this might seem to reprise older notions of an ecological self from deep ecology


theory. Yet Alaimo is resolutely materialist, insisting that identity is fi rst and foremost biological, not phenomenological. Most conse-quential for our purposes is how this leads Alaimo, following revi-sionist work in science studies on which she draws, to critiqueas did Phillips, but with an activist edgethe reductiveness of social constructionism itself as a trap that can be used against MCS suf-ferers to claim that their symptoms are psychosomatic if not fi ctive (BN, 15).35 This leads her to a qualifi ed rehabilitation of ecomi-mesiscontending, for example, that environmental memoirs of cancer victims may possess substantive empirical content. I suspect that ecocritics also concerned with the relation between bodies and physical environment will continue to struggle with versions of this issue, whether the topic be the microcosm of the toxifi ed body or the macrocosm of climate change. Thats precisely the ground on which Garrard critiques Mortons anti-naturism (Without ecolo-gy, he insists, whats left is nothing more than a form of cultural creationism [HQG]). A more autobiographical complement to Alaimos study, no less consequential in its own way, is Harold Fromms wide-ranging The Nature of Becoming Human, a sus-tained mediation between and interweave of humanistic-subjective and scientifi c lines of explanation to the end of dramatizing the larger civilizational and planetary stakes of coming to terms with human embeddedness in techno-biotic actuality.

Environmental justice ecocriticisms investment in marginalized communities connects it with a second emergent initiative: postco-lonial environmentalism. The last half-decade has seen a dramat-ic increase in the synergy between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. Such work may direct itself centrally toward environmen-tal justice issues, as in Rob Nixons 2005 Environmentalism and Postcolonialism, which builds on the irony of the coincidence that ecocriticism fi rst attracted wide attention at the same histor-ical moment that Ken Saro-wiwa was executedbut to appear-ances remained completely oblivious of that event.36 Alternatively, Graham Huggans 2004 Greening Postcolonialism, which like Nixons essay seems to have been designed as the platform for a book project, conceives postcolonialism and ecocriticism more as complementary than as contrary forms of activist (or proto-


activist) intervention.37 And in one of the most ambitious single-authored projects completed so far, environmental justice issues fi gure as one among several constituent strands: George Handleys New World Poeticsa reconception of comparative hemispheric American ecocultural identity around the work of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott.38

The origins of ecocriticisms current turn toward postcolo-nial studies actually date back to Patrick Murphys wide-ranging work and, with respect to postcolonial theory more specifi cally, two books of 2000 in British romantic studies that focus in mu-tually quite different ways on imperial imagination of the exotic, and thus as part of the complex apparatus of subjugation: Timo-thy Mortons The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic and Alan Bewells Romanticism and Colonial Disease.39 Overall, as Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey suggest in a recent article, the postcolonial-ecocritical dialogue seems to have come more from the side of postcolonialism than vice versa, in a story line that goes roughly like this: ecocritics were somewhat tar-dily energized by an already thriving postcolonial studies, to which rising environmental justice concerns had predisposed them, since which postcolonialists have begun to take more notice of ecocriti-cism than they had before.40 But be that as it may, the last several years have seen such an astonishing surge in postcolonial ecocriti-cal studies41 that it is impossible to believe either that future eco-critical work focused on Western literatures will remain unin-fl uenced by it or that future postcolonial studies will be able to content itself as for the most part it once did with sociocultural frames of analysis that fail to take environmental dimensions of inquiry into account.

The precise future course of this ongoing cross-pollination re-mains to be seen, but two things seem certain: fi rst, debate will continue for some time to come as to the extent to which ecocriti-cal models generated in the fi rst world apply to developing-world contexts; and second, and relatedly, non-Eurocentric ecocriticism will generate alternative frameworks and vocabularies for enrich-ing reconceiving ecocritical categories. One coeditor of the fi rst In-dian ecocritical collection (Selvamonys) tentatively proposes as an


alternative framework the Tamil idea of tinai, a traditional world-view that rests on a fusion of domestic sphere, biological environ-ment, and the sacred (EE, xv). Whether or not this particular tri-fold gains much of a hearing, other such interventions may prove useful in helping relativize ecocriticisms preexisting Eurocentric (and in the fi rst instance Anglophonic) vocabulary and analytical biases.

One way the extension of ecocriticism to postcolonial geogra-phies and archives has already begun to do this is by sophisticat-ing the conception of place and place-attachment, both by taking into account a far greater variety of ecocultural particularisms and by conceiving placeness less centripetally, in more cosmopolitan and global terms. First-wave and to some extent even second-wave ecocriticism have tended to be strongly region and community-ori-ented, prioritizing local place-allegiance, ecological distinctiveness, and the like. Postcolonial texts and ecocritical analysis often also advocate for these; but, like postcolonial literature itself, they have also been much more proactive in substantive reconception of the local and the regional in terms of the impact of translocal, ulti-mately global forces.

So, for example, in Indo-Anglian novelist Amitav Ghoshs The Hungry Tide, which seems to have become a canonical text for postcolonial ecocritics since its 2005 publication, the swampland archipelago in the Bay of Bengalthe Sundarbansbecomes an arena of contending force fi elds as unstable as the ever-shifting island terrain itself, in which fi rst-world initiatives to study and protect an endangered species of fresh-water dolphins contend with institutionalized national (and international) regulations to protect the endangered Bengal tiger, which in turn becomes a pre-text for the Indian government to manipulate the displaced immi-grants and disadvantaged minority indigenes of this region that is now offi cially defi ned as parkland while rewarding cronyism in the form of a corrupt civil service.42 Some such multilayered, internally fractured model of conceiving the global within the local as we fi nd in The Hungry Tide, where all the characters are, to vary-ing degrees, migrants or refugees, is surely destined to become the primary ecocritical model of place-attachment as against the


comparatively self-contained ecocultural localism of Wordsworths Grasmere and Thoreaus Waldenat least as these authors have generally been read (PE, 116).

Not that postcolonialism is the only source from which revi-sionist critique of the parochialism of predominant early stage eco-critical thinking about place has come. This is clear from the single most important recent ecocritical contribution to revisionist place studies, Ursula Heises Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), which explores the possibilities of reinventing place-attachment on a planetary scale. It takes up postcolonial place construction as one dimension of this but puts more emphasis on such factors as the virtual networking of the planet through the information revo-lution and cyberfi ction, and the advent of a global culture of risk produced by post-nuclear fears of a contaminated planet.

Heises epilogue, which briefl y raises the subject of global warm-ing, points to another arena that environmental critics interested in developing the theory of a global ecoculture will surely explore more fully in the future than they have to date: climate change anxiety. So far, science fi ction and documentary fi lm are far ahead of ecocriticism here. Planetary overheating has been a staple sci-ence fi ction scenario for almost half a century. Admittedly, neither there nor in fi lm have the results been particularly distinguished by contrast to (say) the best postcolonial literature on other environ-mental issues. The most attention-getting result to date has been Al Gores documentary fi lm An Inconvenient Truth, which both as dramatic invention and as cinematography is quite pedestrian, as in the extended shots of Gores monologues at the blackboard about the import of the hockey-stick-shaped diagram charting the sudden rise of earths temperature during the past century.

Nothing generated within ecocriticism thus far comes close to matching intellectual historian Dipesh Chakrabartys brilliant short polemic The Climate of History: Four Theses, which re-fl ects on the irony of the complex interactions between the rise of post-Enlightenment democratic institutions and the advent of what today is increasingly been claimed as the Anthropocene Agea new geologic era marked by humankinds alleged emergence as the dominant infl uence on earths geologic change.43 Still, ecocriticism


has started to respond in at least four ways. First, through exten-sion of environmental justice criticism to the plight of imminent los-ers in this process, including nonhumans.44 Second, through exege-sis of such works of global warming imagination as exist, as with Anne Maxwell on the futurological ecofi ction of Australian writer George Turner.45 Third, by reinterpretation of texts from precon-temporary eras that engage issues of anthropogenic climate change, even if not global warming specifi cally, like American ecocritic Ken Hiltners analysis of the controversy over the burning of highly sulfurous coal in seventeenth-century London.46 Some work, like this essay, is painstakingly researched; some is quite impressionistic even if suggestive, such as a recent reinterpretation of the demise of the last portion of Beowulf as an unconsciously prophetic allegory of global warming in its narrative of natures revenge on human theft of earths resources by the fi re-breathing dragon in the third part.47 Finally, several ambitious historically oriented book-length environment-and-culture studies are now under way on the culture of fossil fuel dependence, including Stephanie LeMenagers on the middle-class disposition to react hypersensitively to vicissitudes of weather and bodily comfort that ironically aggravates both concern about climate destabilization and bonding to obsolete technologies for maintaining comfortable levels of heat and cold.48

Such projects as the latter re-pose, as have many other contri-butions reviewed here, the broader question suggested at the out-set: To what extent should ecocriticism be conceived as belonging to literature studies, as having fi rst allegiance to literary criticism and theory as against other disciplinary bases in expressive media across the board and in cultural theory generally? On the affi rma-tive side it can be argued not only that literature is the home dis-cipline of most critics surveyed here who identify themselves and/or are identifi ed with environmental criticism, but also, even more pertinently, thatat least up to a pointecocriticisms track re-cord of contributions to the study of mode (e.g., Gifford on pas-toral), genre (many American ecocritics on nature writing and/or autobiography), and metaphor (e.g., Moore on personifi cation), not to mention other aspects of stylistic representation, make for a natural fi t with literature studies.49 But to stress this home-


discipline affi nity beyond a point is to belie the extent to which the tribes of literature-trained environmental critics have always been markedly eclectic, cross-cutting, and hybridized and have patently become still more so.

First-wave ecocriticism showed this cross-cutting propensity in the engagements with phenomenology and evolutionary biol-ogy noted earlier. Two even more notable transdisciplinary initia-tives that have energized ecocriticism from the start, of which I have thus far omitted mention in my haste to get more quickly to the present, deserve if anything even greater emphasis, given both how pervasive their infl uence has been and how coming to terms with that infl uence requires one to qualify further any neat distinc-tion between fi rst-wave and individual person/experience orienta-tion as against second-wave and sociocentric or collective orienta-tion. One has been gender studies, meaning in the fi rst instance especially though not merely ecofeminism, a congeries of some-times confl icting, critical visions and practices focused on the re-lationfactical and/or fi ctivebetween women and environment. Environment-and-gender studies, from its inception well before 1990as in the revisionist literary history of Americanist Annette Kolodny and in intellectual historian Caroline Merchants anti-pa-triarchal remapping of the scientifi c revolution50has rested more on interdisciplinary gender theory than on literary theory per se and has achieved greatest force not as a project of literary herme-neuticsthough that has often been its ostensible focus51but also and more consequentially to the end of interrogating the cultural history and consequences of symbolic gendering of land as fe-male, and the implicit androcentrism of holistic models of selfness in deep ecology and other forms of person-centric ecotheory,52 as well as the roots of environmental justice (e.g., Seager).53 The same holds to an even greater extent for the more recent challenge to the heteronormativity of (some) early stage gender-and-environment studies by queer ecocriticism, where Catriona Sandilands stands out as the leading fi gure to date.54

A second case in point is environmental rhetoric studies, which tends to be directed away from the realm of literature entirely to-ward analysis of other disciplinary discourses, or of public poli-


cy debates, as in Killingsworth and Palmers 1992 Ecospeak, the case studies of the rhetorics of advocacy and controversy collect-ed in Green Culture, Frederick Buells expose of corporate gre-enwash rhetoric of environmental disinformation, and Koseks Understories.55

Still, it would be fair to say that during fi rst-wave ecocriticism the impression generally prevailed that the work of reconceiving artifacts made out of wordswhether understood aesthetically, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, politically, or in some combi-nation thereofwould remain central to ecocriticism. To be sure, ecocritics for whom literature was the preferred genre of practice have always enlisted other media very inventively (e.g., Christoph Irmscher on botanical illustration), refl ecting long-standing inter-ests by some of their pre-ecocritical predecessors.56 Conversely, en-vironmental criticism directed at other arenas of creative practice has regularly drawn upon the analogy of literary imagination as well as literary and literary-critical work (e.g., Angela Miller for art history, Anne Whiston Spirn for landscape architecture, Greg Mitman for fi lm).57 But only during the past dozen years or so has work on non-literary expressive media by critics operating outside literature as home discipline begun to characterize itself as eco-criticism; indeed, Irmscher and Braddocks A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009) may mark the fi rst really decisive turning point in this respect.58 Why so late? One explanation may simply be that disciplinary borders arent quite as porous as one would like to think. Another might be that wider recognition of an initially small vanguard operating at fi rst within a relatively delimited pair of niches needed to await the prolifera-tion of venues (the 2000s have seen a dramatic increase in ecocriti-cal journals from one to at least seven in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Asia) and such imprimaturs as the Library of Congresss 2002 adoption of Ecocriticism as a subject heading (see GTL). But a more decisive factor, without which these sun-dry forms of institutionalization might never have happened, has been that second-wave work has shifted the center of gravity in a cultures of environment direction, from ecocriticism as textual practice to environmental criticism as cultural practice. Not that


there is anything especially strange or unique about this shift. It mirrors the direction so-called literary scholarship has itself taken on the subject of race, class, and gender during the past twenty years: away from texts and canons, toward cultural formations. But with regard to the understanding of ecocriticisms proper range, the shift has contributed to undermining the assumptionnever solidly established as doctrine, anyhowas properly an arena of literary studies. The shift to a cultural practice emphasis exposes beyond power of refutation the quixoticism of any attempt to set fi xed disciplinary borders to ecocriticism, to adjudicate whether this or that scholar should be thought of as an ecocritic, and what should or should not count as ecocritical work.

I do not mean to make this essay sound like a sunny, much less imperial, narrative of environmental criticisms inexorable ad-vance. On the contrary, it must still be reckoned as a work in prog-ress. It remains an open question as to how, if at all, ecocriticism will adjudicate between a vision of critical practice as ultimately justifi ed by its commitment to criticism in the service of environ-mentalist social action as against a more academic-professional justifi cation of ecocritical practice as knowledge production or hu-manistic understanding. Although most ecocritics would probably argue that these aims are inseparable, one fi nds sharply confl icting positions expressed.59 Then, too, creative and critical practice of the environmental turn across the array of expressive mediaboth old and new, high and popular(to the extent that such distinctions hold anymore) remains more a menu of options than a coherent program: an expanding universe of bustling activity with limited cross-communication.60 Relatedly, some strange discon-nects obtain between environmentally-oriented work and other initiatives that at fi rst sight ought to seem more intimately allied. A notable case in point is the next-to-last issue Ill take up here: animal studies.

Animal studies are self-evidently a hot topic these days for criti-cal theoryhotter even than global warming. Not only life scien-tists and cultural anthropologists, but also neuroscientists, ethicists, epistemologists, legal theorists, and literary scholars have been speaking out at an unprecedented rate on the subject of human ob-


ligations toward the nonhuman world, the porousness or solidity of human-nonhuman border, interspecies communication, and so forth. Ecocriticism, for its part, has from its inception shown keen interest in the representation of animals, in the (re)conception of humans as animals, and in interspecies communication and ethics. Yet ecocritical scholarship in this area seems to have had little if any impact outside the movement. And even within it, ecocritics have clearly been listening less to each other than to the animal rights ethics of Peter Singer and others, the cyborg theory of cultur-al theorist Donna Haraway, and the late pronouncements of Derri-da and Agamben on the animal as a question-begging marker of human distinctiveness.61 Although three of the twelve contributors to the spring 2009 PMLA symposium on animal studies are closely associated with ecocriticism, even their contributions cite very little ecocritical work, and the other contributors virtually none at all.

One should not make too much of this particular example. His-torically, ecocriticism and animal studies have not been as closely allied as might be supposed. Many ecocritics suspect animal stud-ies of being insuffi ciently attentive to environmental or ecosystemic concerns, and of being likely to set problematic limits on human moral accountability to the nonhuman (as with Singers privileging of higher life-forms only) or to enlist beasts mainly as proxies for theorizing forms of human abjection, master-slave relationships, and so forth (particularly Agamben, and to a lesser extent Har-aways 2003 Companion Species Manifesto). Conceivably, such suspicions may moderate in future. Canadian ecocritics Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer plausibly argue, for instance, that the combination of common ground and complementary vulner-abilities in environmental and animal advocacies make it highly de-sirable to strive for closer rapprochement.62 At all events, ecocritics surely have a stake in generating the models for so-called post-humanist identity, one example of such concern, discussed above, being transcorporeality as a construal of being in the world that is simultaneously animal, technological, and environmental. But as yet, to adapt a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson, I look in vain for the ecocriticism I would describe. Time will tell if such in-


terventions as the postcolonial zoocriticism charted by Huggan and Tiffi n in Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the forthcoming spe-cial issue no. 11 on Animals from the British ecocritical journal Green Letters will generate something more robustly infl uential.

My fi nal thought about ecocritical futures is perhaps even more wishful, especially considering the skimpiness of my treatment here of ecocritical work outside the English-speaking world. As the movement continues to spread beyond its original Anglophone base, the problem of intercommunication between critical vocab-ularies becomes commensurately greaterand all the troubling because, as Heise rightly charges, most ecocritics remain focused on particular national archives and more often than not are either monoglots or limited in their command of languages other than their own. So environmental critics have not worried as much as likely we should about how there is no satisfactory word for envi-ronment in Chinese, no adequate term for wilderness in Span-ish. Or how watershed means something quite different in the United States than in Europe, even in the United Kingdom. Readers will doubtless think of many other examples to set beside these.

Environmental humanists would benefi t greatly from a col-laborative project that will help negotiate these differences and, perhaps, in the process also achieve a stronger shared critical vo-cabulary among the growing number of ecocritics worldwide. One such is in fact under way, an online lexicon of Keywords in the Study of Nature and Culture, coedited by the American ecocrit-ics Joni Adamson and William Gleason, as part of a larger cultural Keywords project sponsored by New York University Press.63 But this and other such projects will need to become much more than an Americanist, much more than an Anglophone affair, if it is to realize anything like its full potential, despite the status of English today as the worlds lingua franca. The planetary scope of the multiple environmental crises facing earth and earthlings in the twenty-fi rst century requires a capacity to communicate on a planetary scale, in simultaneous recognition of shared concerns and cultural particularities, for which we are only now starting to generate the requisite vocabularies.


Notes

1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, On the Discrimination of Romanticisms, Es-says in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). Hereafter cited as ODR.

2. Nirmal Selvamony, introduction, Essays in Ecocriticism, ed. Nirmal Selvamony, Nirmaldasan, and Rayson K. Alex (Chennai: OSLE-In-dia, 2007), xix. Hereafter cited as EE.

3. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1113, 138. Hereafter cited as FEC.

4. Ursula K. Heise, The Hitchhikers Guide to Ecocriticism, PMLA 121 (2006): 506. Hereafter cited as HGE.

5. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, ed., The Ecocriticism Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii. Hereafter cited as ER.

6. For another previous book-length survey of ecocriticism, see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004). Short analytic overviews include Loretta Johnson, Greening the Library: The Fun-damentals and Future of Ecocriticism, Choice (December 2009): 713 (hereafter cited as GTL); and, especially, HGE. Terry Giffords Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism, New Formations 64 (Spring 2008): 1524, provides a penetrating retrospective historical analysis in an essay-review of selected texts, including Garrards Eco-criticism and my FEC.

7. See, for example, Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imaging and the Bi-ology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); James C. McCusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martins, 2000); Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Es-says upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990) (hereafter cited as NWA); Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in Ameri-can Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1995) (hereafter cited as EI); Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Man-chester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999). The most conspicuous exception to this summary statement is Australian environmental criticism, an inter-disciplinary environmental-humanistic initiative, though not at fi rst indebted to scholarship in Anglo-American literature, whose results


have so far been by and large more impressive in history, philosophy, and social theory (for examples of each, see Tim F. Flannery, The Fu-ture Eaters: An Ecological History of Australasian Lands and People [Chatswood, NSW: Reed, 1994]; J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature [London: Routledge, 1993]), although from an early date literature was also on its map (see George Seddon, Landprints: Refl ections on Place and Landscape [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). Signifi cantly, the fi rst Australian work of literary criticism/theory by a self-identifi ed ecocritic to command wide attention from Euro-American ecocritics was probably Catherine Rigbys compara-tive study of German and British romanticism, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottes-ville: University of Virginia Press, 2004) (hereafter cited as TS).

8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

9. Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Move-ment: A Summary, Inquiry 16 (Spring 1973): 95100.

10. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadows of Civilization (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000).

11. For a stringent critique, see Gregg Garrard, Heidegger Nazism Eco-criticism, ISLE 17, no. 2 (2010): 251273.

12. Scott Slovic, Ecocriticism, Storytelling, Values, Communication, Con-tact, http://www.asle.umn.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994/slovic.html.

13. See John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1998); Ian Marshall, Peak Experiences: Walk-ing Meditations on Literature, Nation, and Need (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003); Joni Adamson, American Indi-an Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Jim Tarter, Some Live More Downstream Than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environ-mental Justice, in The Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Joni Ad-amson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Ari-zona Press, 2002), 21328; Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political


Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-sity Press, 2006) (hereafter cited as PLF); Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008); Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) (hereafter cited as NBH).

14. Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribners, 1972).

15. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).

16. William Howarth, Some Principles of Ecocriticism, ER, 6991; William Howarth, Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands, New Literary History 30 (Summer 1999): 50939; Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003).

17. See the discussions in the next section of Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Na-tures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: In-diana University Press, forthcoming) (hereafter cited as BN); Stacy Alaimo, MCS Matters: Material Agency in the Science and Practices of Environmental Illness, Topia 21 (Spring 2009): 725 (hereafter cited as MCSM); and NBH.

18. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmen-tal Imagination of the Global (New York; Oxford University Press, 2008), 11977.

19. See Michael Vincent McGinnis, ed., Bioregionalism (London: Rout-ledge, 1999).

20. Ecocritical explorations of the promise of this approach include John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1998); Michael Cohen, A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998); Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24365 (hereafter cited as WEW); Cheryll Glotfelty, ed., Literary Nevada: Tales from the Silver State (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008); PLF; and Tom Lynch, Xe-rophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (Lub-bok: Texas Tech University Press, 2008).

21. See, for example, NWA; Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992); EI.

22. Patrick Murphy, ed., Literature of Nature: An International Source-book (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).


23. Patrick Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

24. For example, for German, see TS and Axel Goodbody, Nature, Tech-nology, and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century German Litera-ture: The Challenge of Ecocriticism (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007); for Spanish, see Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), George Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Ath-ens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), and Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg, Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009); for Lusophone, see Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

25. See Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forth-coming 2011); Jincai Yang, Ecocritical Dimensions in Contempo-rary Chinese Literary Criticism (unpublished 2010 essay).

26. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities: Ec-ocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Terrell Dixon, ed., City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).

27. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environ-mentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997), 185201.

28. Stefan Brandt and Frank Mehring, eds., Transcultural Spaces, spe-cial issue of Yearbook of Research in English and American Litera-tures: REAL 26 (2010); Steven Hartman, ed., Counter Natures (orig. 2009 conference, University of Uppsala, forthcoming) (hereafter cited as CN).

29. Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

30. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

31. Greg Garrard, How Queer Is Green? in CN (hereafter cited as HQG).

32. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3, 7, 135.

33. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environ-


mental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: Uni-versity of Arizona Press, 2002).

34. See Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environ-mental Justice in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2008); Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, Guest Editors Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriti-cism, MELUS 34, no. 2 (2009): 524; Ian Finseth, Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery (Athens: Uni-versity of Georgia Press, 2009); Kimberley Ruffi n, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Geor-gia Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010) (hereafter cited as BNW).

35. See Michelle Murphy, The Elsewhere within Here and Environ-mental Illness; or, How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space, Confi gurations 8 (2005): 91.

36. Rob Nixon, Environmentalism and Postcolonialism, in Postcolo-nial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

37. Graham Huggan, Greening Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspec-tives, Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2004): 70133; Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffi n, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Ani-mals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010).

38. George Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagi-nation of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

39. Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alan Be-well, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

40. Cara Ciliano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism, ISLE 14, no. 1 (2007): 77.

41. See also, for example, Robert Marzec, An Ecological and Postcolo-nial Study of Literature: From Daniel DeFoe to Salman Rushdie (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2007); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacifi c Island Literatures (Hono-lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Laura Wright, Wilderness


into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Ath-ens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Upamanyu Pablo Mukher-jee, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contempo-rary Indian Novel in English (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) (hereafter cited as PE).

42. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Boston: Houghton, 2005).43. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses, Critical

Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197222.44. See Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, Climate Change, Environmental

Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies, Dis-course 20 (Spring and Fall 2007): 384410.

45. Anne Maxwell, Postcolonial Criticism, Ecocriticism, and Climate Change: A Tale of Melbourne under Water in 2035, Journal of Post-colonial Writing 45, no. 1 (2009): 1526.

46. Ken Hiltner, Renaissance Literature and Our Contemporary Atti-tude Toward Global Warming, ISLE 16, no. 3 (2009): 42942.

47. Diane Dumanoski, The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (New York: Crown, 2009), 83.

48. For example, Stephanie LeMenagers in-progress This Is Not a Tree: Cultures of U.S. Environmentalism in the Twilight of Oil in the larg-er work-in-progress represented by Michael Ziser, Home Again: Global Climate Change Ecocriticism and Oil-Shock Bioregionalism, in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-fi rst Century, ed. Stepha-nie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (New York: Rout-ledge, forthcoming 2011).

49. Gifford, Pastoral; Bryan L. Moore, Ecology and Literature: Ecocen-tric Personifi cation from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008).

50. See Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 16301860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976); and Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientifi c Revolution (San Francisco: Harpers, 1980).

51. See Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and MCSM.

52. See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).


53. See Joni Seager, Earth Follies: Coming to Terms with the Global En-vironmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993).

54. See Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 1999); and Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

55. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illi-nois University Press, 1992); Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown, eds., Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 338; PLF.

56. Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bar-tram to William James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999); see Leo Marx on Hudson River School painting in The Ma-chine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

57. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 18251875 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1993); Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Greg Mitman, Reel Na-ture: American Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

58. Christoph Irmscher and Alan Braddock, eds., A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009).

59. One such confl ict is between Robert Kern and Elizabeth Ammons; see Kerns EcocriticismWhat Is It Good For? ISLE 7 (Winter 2000): 932; and BNW.

60. Partly for this reason, the present essay, wide-ranging though it seeks to be, fails to do justice to a number of other signifi cant ecocritical trajectories. In theater studies, see especially Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Eleanor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/scape/theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). In fi lm studies see, e.g., Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Na-ture in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998); David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Holly-


wood Cinema (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Fred-erick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (London: Routledge, 2003); and Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film: Cin-ema on the Edge (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). In childrens literature studies, see especially Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, eds., Wild Things: Childrens Literature and Ecocriticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). In scholarship on literature before 1800 generally, see, for example, for medieval, Alf Siewers, Strange Beau-ty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), and Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval Literature (Manchester: Manchester Uni-versity Press, 2007); for early modern, Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and Diane Kelsey Mc-Colley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Alder-shot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); and for eighteenth century, Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and John Sitter, Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheory, Religion and Literature 1 (Spring 2008): 11370. Beyond this ad-ditional wealth of scholarship on fi ctive discourses, I must also omit mention of a much wider array of pertinent environmentally oriented studies across the disciplinesreligion, anthropology, history, science studies, political theory, developmental psychology, environmental science, etc.

61. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, rev. ed. (New York: Avon, 1990); Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, Peo-ple, and Signifi cant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Walls (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

62. Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, Animals are not believ-ers in ecology: Mapping Critical Differences between Environmental and Animal Advocacy Literatures, ISLE 14, no. 2 (2007): 12239.

63. Joni Adamson and William Gleason, Keywords in the Study of Na-ture and Culture, http://keywords.nyupress.org.

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Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends

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