-
Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105Ecocriticism
Pippa Marland*Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts,
University of Worcester, UK
AbstractIn the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from
its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorisedpreserve of
nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a
sophisticated array of earth-centredapproaches to cultural
criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of
disciplines in-cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology.
Ecocriticisms diversity also extends to engagingwith a variety of
literary forms as well as, increasingly, lm, TV, digital
environments and music, andto an interest in representations of the
urban. At its heart is the conviction both that we are living in a
timeof ecological crisis that requires us to reassess with some
urgency our modes of being in the world and thatour cultural
perceptions of nature and the human, and the relationship between
the two, have to alarge degree been responsible for these damaging
modes of being. Its role is to interrogate and critiquethese
perceptions, even within environmentalism itself, with some
ecocritics also committed to exploringalternative ways of
conceptualising our relationship with the non-human world. This
paper briey tracesthe history of ecocriticism, discussing its
initial development in the USA and Britain, outlining the
twostrands of social ecology and deep ecology that underpin its
ongoing formulation, and tracing the wavesof its development. It
then focuses on contemporary and emergent theorisations, in
particular the globalinection of current post-colonial ecocriticism
and the environmental justice movement, whichintroduces the new
paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics, and the recent formulation of
ecocritical post-humanism. This emphasises the imbrication of the
human in earths matrix, drawing on the insights ofecofeminism,
phenomenology and biosemiotics, and has its most recent incarnation
in the currentlyemerging eld of material ecocriticism, which, in
its engagement with the complex entanglement ofthe human and the
non-human, the social and the scientic, hints at a more dissonant
paradigm.
Introduction
Ecocriticism is an umbrella term for a range of critical
approaches that explore the representationin literature (and other
cultural forms) of the relationship between the human and the
non-human, largely from the perspective of anxieties around
humanitys destructive impact on thebiosphere. Other terms for the
eld include environmental criticism and green culturalstudies, the
latter term reecting the increasing diversity of the elds remit its
recent focuson lm, TV, virtual worlds and popular music, for
example, as well as its growing interest inrepresentations of urban
environments. How critics involved in this area choose to
denethemselves depends largely on their own position in relation to
environmental issues and to theirunderstanding of the implications
of the individual terms. The prex eco is preferred bysome for its
ecological connotations its emphasis on what Lawrence Buell calls
human andnon-human webs of interrelation (The Future of
Environmental Criticism, glossary, 138, emphasismine) but for
others it implies an overly close identication with one particular
strand ofscholarship that advocates a commitment to political
activism (Bergthaller, EASLCE website).1
The multiplicity of perspectives and objects of study outlined
above has perhaps contributedto an enduring perception in certain
quarters of the academy that ecocriticism lacks legitimacyor
coherence as an area of critical theory. Peter Barry, in his
inuential primer Beginning Theory,sees it as a eld that is still
distinctly on the academic margins [] and the movement still
does
not have a widely-known set of assumptions, doctrines or
procedures (239). In part this
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
is because of the enormity of the subject. As Timothy Clark
points out, The environment,
Ecocriticsm 847The Roots of Ecocriticism
Notwithstanding its broad remit, there is a shared perception
within ecocriticism that we areliving in a time of environmental
crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency ourmodes of
being in the world. Moreover, there is a general agreement that
these modes ofbeing have been, to a large degree, culturally
determined. Buell, in an early formulation ofthe role of
ecocriticism, identies the environmental crisis as a crisis of the
imaginationthe amelioration of which depends on nding better ways
of imaging nature and humanitysrelation to it (The Environmental
Imagination, 2). He believes that the ways in which we
haveconceived of ourselves and our relationship with the
environment have contributed to ourdestructive impact on the
planet. For Buell, then, the task of the ecocritic is both to
unraveland critique the conceptualisations that have been so
damaging and to identify traces of thosebetter ways of imaging
where we nd them. This remains the case for some ecocritics evenin
the most recent formulations of the movement.The 1960s are largely
seen as the decade that marked the beginning of the kind of
environmental consciousness that provides the backdrop to
ecocriticism, with the publicationof Rachel Carsons Silent Spring
in 1962 hailed as the beginning of modern
environmentalism(Garrard,Ecocriticism, 1).3 Although other works
emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that were seen asembodying early
forms of ecocritical practice, the movement was slow to establish
itself.4 It wasnot until 1992 that the rst professional
organisation of ecocritics, the Association for the Study
ofLiterature and Environment, was formed in the USA, followed in
1993 by the founding of itsjournal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and Environment. A sister organisation was setup in
the UK in 1998 (now encompassing the UK and Ireland), with its own
publication, thejournal Green Letters, rst published in 2000.after
all, is, ultimately, everything (203), an apparently unlimited area
of enquiry that is alsoin the process of constant change. It
follows that so complex and dynamic a concern as thehealth of the
biosphere and our place within it requires a broad range of
procedures and anability constantly to critique assumptions and
doctrines. It implies, as Greg Garrard suggests, thatthe ecocritic
must strive for a certain degree of ecological literacy
(Ecocriticism, 5), whichinvolves producing a uid and contingent
response in the face of both new forms of ecologicalunderstanding2
and the ongoing and widespread sense of deepening environmental
crisis. Clark,again, points up the magnitude of this challenge: to
try to conceptualise and engage themultiple factors behind the
accelerating degradation of the planet is to reach for tools
whichmust be remade even in the process of use (xiii).Lawrence
Buell, whose measured views often provide a touchstone for
ecocriticism,
acknowledges the diversity of perspectives: As literary
ecodiscourse becomes more widelypractised, more globally networked,
more interdisciplinary and thus even more pluriform,the
participants must become more increasingly aware of speaking from
some position withinor around the movement rather than for it
(Future, viii). For the purposes of this essay, I usethe term
ecocriticism throughout to facilitate the discussion of a variety
of environmental orearth-centred critical approaches that have
largely developed in the last 20 years and thatrepresent positions
from within or around the movement. In the paragraphs that follow,
I givea brief history of ecocriticism from its early incarnations
in the USA and Britain, through thesuccessive waves of its
theoretical development and their relation to the enduring major
strandsof ecological thought deep and social ecology to its
increasingly international platform andthe emergence of the
signicant contemporary formulations of global eco-cosmopolitics
andpost-humanist material ecocriticism, which are introducing new
paradigms to the eld.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
In her introduction to the early collection of ecocritical
essays The Ecocriticism Reader, published
848 Ecocriticsmin 1996, Cheryll Glotfelty points up the dearth
of environmental criticism existing at that time:
If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you
could infer from the major pub-lications of the literary
profession, you would quickly discern that race, class, and gender
were thehot topics of the late twentieth century, but you would
never suspect that the earths life supportsystems were under
stress. Indeed you would never know that there was an earth at all.
(xvi)
One of the factors inuencing this slow progress was perhaps the
uncertainty within thehumanities of involving themselves with what
was generally perceived to be a scienticproblem, the domain of the
environmental sciences.5 Another issue was the difculty ofspeaking
for the earth itself. Other areas of theory that were gathering
momentum in the1970s such as feminism and post-colonialism both of
which critiqued the political andsocial effects of othering had
more identiable means of locating and giving the spacefor
articulation to those voices silenced by dominant ideologies.But,
in particular, there was a feeling in these early ecocritics that
critical theory itself was
thwarting their attempt to establish any kind of advocacy for
the earth. John Parham rightlynotes a belligerent attitude to
theory in rst-wave ecocriticism (The Poverty of EcocriticalTheory,
25). Rather than necessarily representing a rejection of theory per
se,6 this was morethe result of a frustration with the particular
linguistic turn present in the structuralism andpost-structuralism
of the 1970s and 1980s that viewed language as a closed system,
suggesting,at least in what Wendy Wheeler and Hugh Dunkerley call
the less subtle Anglophoneinterpretations of continental theory
(Introduction,New Formations, 7), that it is not possibleto discuss
the realworld because reality is constructed in language and there
is nothing outsidethe text.7 Similarly, in the context of the
NewHistoricism, Alan Liu made the much-contestedassertion: there is
no nature except as it is constituted by acts of political denition
madepossible by particular forms of government (104). Terry
Gifford, responding to this statement,argued that While Liu is
right to identify the word nature as a mediation, he is wrong
todeny the general physical presence that is one side of that
mediation (Green Voices, 15).The role of early ecocriticism, then,
while not necessarily denying the linguistic construction
of nature, was largely to create the theoretical space in which
to discuss that general physicalpresence on the other side of the
mediation, which the proliferation and habits of consumptionof the
human race (albeit with an uneven global distribution of that
consumption, as discussedbelow) were putting in jeopardy. Kate
Rigby calls this endeavour the ecocritical reinstatementof the
referent (154) and, in an oft-quoted rebuff to extreme applications
of the linguistic turn,Kate Soper reminds us: it is not language
that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thingcontinues to
be polluted and degraded even as we rene our deconstructive
insights at the levelof the signier (151).8
The First Wave Reinstating the Real
Accordingly, the rst wave of ecocriticism, especially in the
USA, focused on the representationin literature of the world beyond
the text, devoting much of its energy to the search for theforms of
literary expression which could best convey an environmental
message. In TheEnvironmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell formulated
a checklist of four ingredients of anenvironmentally orientated
work:
1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing
device but as a presence that begins tosuggest that human history
is implicated in natural history. []
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only
legitimate interest. []Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the texts
ethical orientation. []
Ecocriticsm 8494. Some sense of the environment as a process
rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in
thetext. [] (78, italics in original)
Buells questioning of the texts ethical orientation in
particular points up an important,though contested, element of
ecocriticism, which is what Buell calls a spirit of commitmentto
environmentalist praxis (Environmental, 430). As a theoretical eld
based around concernsspreading out from the cultural to the
political, there is a desire in some ecocritics to have apractical,
real-world impact to educate our broader interactions with the
non-human worldand to form a counter-canon of texts which are seen
tomodel a more ecologically sustainablemode of being and dwelling
in the world than that which has predominated in the lived
realityof the modern era (Rigby, 159). For others, the focus is
more on interrogation than activism,though political intervention
may be a (positive) outcome of that interrogation.9
Cheryll Glotfelty also provided a comprehensive checklist in her
introduction to TheEcocriticism Reader this time of questions
reecting the way in which an (American) ecocriticreads. As well as
incorporating aspects of Buells ingredients, she also pregured many
ofthe concerns of subsequent waves of ecocriticism. For this
reason, I include her full list inAppendix 1 as a still useful
orientation for anyone wishing to carry out practical
ecocriticism.In the USA, despite the breadth of Glotfeltys
questioning, the rst wave of ecocriticism was
predominantly associated with the championing of non-ction
nature writing. Writers such asHenry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mary
Austin, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and AnnieDillard were lauded
for the quality of their environmental imagination. The landscapes
theyengaged with were often wilderness or semi-wilderness, and
their writings reect the legacyof American Transcendentalism, with
its emphasis on the educative value of wild nature andon intense
individual connection with the landscape. This approach has been
described ascelebratory (Head, Ecocriticism and the Novel, 236;
Barry, 242), suggesting a relativelyuncritical understanding of
nature.10
First-wave British ecocriticism also concerned itself with the
recuperation of forms ofwriting that foregrounded the non-human
world and that might foster environmentalsensibility, though here
the emphasis was on poetry. It was spearheaded by Jonathan Bate,who
in two inuential works, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the
Environmental Tradition(1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000),
undertook the rehabilitation of the Romantic Poets,especially
William Wordsworth, as poets of nature. For Bate, Romantic poetry
enables us tothink fragility (Song, 112) to apprehend our
ecological embeddedness and sharedvulnerability with the non-human
world.Bate diverges from Buell, however, when it comes to
environmental praxis. Basing his
argument on Heideggers ideas of dwelling a manner of being in
the world that is receptiveto the self-disclosure of nature and is
revealed through poetry Bate characterises ecopoetry asa
phenomenological and pre-political form, which draws us into
communion with the earththrough its emphasis on presencing rather
than representation, bodying forth that presencingin part through
its rhythms and sounds. He suggests that, while it might be
appropriate forMarxist or feminist critics to believe that they are
contributing towards social change, greencritics should not
approach poetry with a set of assumptions or proposals about
particularenvironmental issues, but as a way of reecting upon what
it might mean to dwell with theearth (Song, 266). For Bate,
Ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness. When itcomes to
practice, we have to speak in other discourses (266).Nevertheless,
there is a sense in which the British landscape and its literary
evocations are
inextricably intertwined with the social and the political.
Bates own discussion of the peasantpoet John Clare identies the way
in which he viewed the rights of man and the rights ofLiterature
Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley
& Sons Ltd
-
nature as co-extensive and co-dependent (Song, 164), with his
poetry foregrounding the
and identify ourselves within a broader circle of living things,
then our societal problems may
850 Ecocriticsmalso nd resolution.12
Social ecologists believe that the very notion of the domination
of nature by manstems from the very real domination of human by
human (Bookchin, 65).13 Thus, in aparadigmatic reverse of deep
ecology, they suggest that we must rst address the problemsof
social inequality and oppression before we can remedy our
dislocation from the environ-ment. Both of these movements have
been strongly critiqued; deep ecology for its presumedlack of a
social dimension,14 social ecology for its perhaps nave
underestimation of thedurability of existing social systems.
However, it is important not to make reductive readingsof either
strand,15 as these are perspectives that continue to develop in
complexity andreceive more nuanced workings as they inform ongoing
theorisations of ecocriticism. Broadlyspeaking, rst-wave
ecocriticism leaned more toward deep ecology in its emphasis on
personalconnection, or re-connection, with nature (though, as we
have seen, the minatory aspectrunning through British ecocriticism
also hinted at a more social inection), whereas the secondwave owed
more to social ecology. In discussion of the third and fourth waves
of ecocriticism,the two areas of thought come into closer
orbit.mutual suffering of the earth and the rural poor as a result
of the enclosure of common landand the ensuing destruction of
ancient habitats. For Peter Barry, British ecocriticism is
alwaysminatory: that is, it seeks to warn us of environmental
threats emanating from governmental,industrial, commercial, and
neo-colonial forces (242). In the absence of vast stretches
ofwilderness to evoke, in English literature wild nature invariably
co-exists with agriculturalor industrial activity, or human
settlement, migration or leisure patterns, each shaped,
partially,by the dominant modes of production and social
organisation (Parham, Two-Ply, 113).Dominic Head, discussing the
difference between, for example, the work of Thomas Hardyand D. H.
Lawrence and American wilderness writing, states, we are confronted
with naturalimages in which questions of social history and sexual
politics are inscribed on the scene or in thelandscape
(Ecocriticism and the Novel, 236).These questions of social and
economic history and sexual politics began to emerge with more
force on both sides of the Atlantic as ecocriticism progressed.
The rst wave had carried out anecessary rehabilitation of the
referent but fell short when ecocritics themselves began to
challengethe theoretical limitations of the movement, thus
signalling the second phase of ecocriticism.
Deep and Social Ecology
Before moving on to discussion of the second wave, however, it
is important to differentiatebetween two strands of thought deep
and social ecology which exist within ecocriticismand which feature
throughout the trajectory of its development.Deep ecologists see
the need for a radical reconceptualisation of humanitys place on
the
planet. They adopt a biocentric/ecocentric perspective that
proposes a biospherical egalitarianism(Naess, 95) in which the
interest of the biosphere overrides the interests of individual
species,including the human. They believe in raising ecological
awareness through an individualadjustment of values, suggesting
that a change in our relationship with the environment canonly come
about through rst grounding ourselves in the dark of our deepest
selves (Snyder,ix) in order to rediscover our profound connection
with the more-than-human world.11
Deep ecology challenges the anthropocentrism at the heart of
modern society and the kind ofshallow ecological standpoints that
see the natural world as merely a resource for humanityand that
presuppose that human needs and demands override other
considerations. And, putsimply, it asserts that if we rst address
our hierarchical attitudes towards the natural worldLiterature
Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley
& Sons Ltd
-
The Second Wave Debating Nature
of the developments in ecofeminism that demonstrate its
signicance in the ecocritical trajectory.
Ecocriticsm 851As Buell suggests, though the second wave revised
ecocriticism, it carried through elements ofthe rst wave,
maintaining its awareness of the general physical presence of
nature anddeveloping and rening its engagement with form and the
search for the environmentalimagination. Where it diverged was in
its re-engagement with the critical theory it had initiallypulled
against. In the UK, the philosopher Kate Soper suggested in What is
Nature? that thenature-endorsing approach typical of early
ecocriticism should be balanced with a morenature-sceptical
sensibility, able to reect on the way in which nature has been
constructedand deployed to reinforce dominant ideologies, but that
neither perspective should be allowedto dominate. In fact, they
should be informed by reection on each other. Laurence Coupe
gavethis dual awareness a specically ecocritical spin in a
memorable phrase in his introduction to TheGreen Studies Reader
(2000): green studies debates Nature in order to defend nature
(5).In the US, Dana Phillips launched a more polemical challenge to
ecocriticism to re-engage
with critical theory, stating that:
The rst generation of ecocritics has embraced a curatorial model
of literary scholarship and hasspurned literary theory, apparently
without having reaped the benets of its close acquaintance.This has
made ecocriticism seem overly devotional, and hostile to the
intellect at times. (ix)16
Phillips also suggested a rethinking of the search for an
environmental literature, questioning whatthe function of a
literary criticism that focused on largely mimetic or directly
representational writing might be: Realistic depiction of the
world, of the sort that we can credit as reasonableand
uncontroversial, is one of literatures more pedestrian, least
artful aspects (8).17 In the UK,Dominic Head also broached the
question of form, specically calling for an engagement withthe
novel: If ecocriticism is to realise its full potential, it will
need to nd a way of appropriatingnovelistic form (Ecocriticism and
the Novel, 236).Ecocriticisms second wave ushered in a more reexive
approach that provided the scope
to address the complex intertwining of nature, Nature, and
social and sexual politics, andthat, as well as critiquing and
reframing the forms that had already come under its scrutinyto
reect a more complex understanding of these interweavings (e.g.
post-pastoral, newnature writing and ecopoetry),18 did indeed turn
to the novel and to new novelisticAlthough he was the instigator of
the notion of ecocritical waves, Lawrence Buell himselfqualies this
imagery, suggesting that the waves are indistinct and offering
palimpsest as abetter metaphor:
No denitive map of environmental criticism in literary studies
can [] be drawn. Still, one canidentify several trend-lines marking
an evolution from a rst wave of ecocriticism to a secondor newer
revisionist wave or waves increasingly evident today. This
rstsecond wave distinctionshould not, however, be taken as implying
a tidy, distinct succession. Most currents set in motionby early
ecocriticism continue to run strong, and most forms of second-wave
revisionism involvebuilding on as well as quarreling with
precursors. (Future, 17)
Perhaps because of this sense of indistinct succession and
concurrence of perspectives, there is alack of consensus about what
actually constitutes eachwave. Greta Gaard, for example, argues
thatthe accounts of the secondwave underestimate the importance of
feminist thinking: the retellingof ecocritical roots and
perspectives marginalizes both feminist and ecofeminist literary
perspec-tives (643). In the broad account of the second wave that
follows, I include discussion of someLiterature Compass 10/11
(2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons
Ltd
-
additions to the canon to explore the ways in which its more
self-conscious textuality might
852 Ecocriticsmarticulate the complex entanglement of self and
world, social and environmental history.19
Two important areas of cultural theory that were already
established andwell placed to bring toecocriticism an understanding
of the way in which nature had been constructed and deployed
toreinforce dominant ideologies of gender, class and racewere
ecofeminism and post-colonial ecocriticism.They also represented a
necessary corrective to ecocriticisms previous apparently
blanketapportioning of human environmental culpability,
foregrounding notions of environmental justicethat recognised the
inequitable distribution of environmental benets and risk among the
globalpopulation, and challenging the predominantly (white, male)
Anglo-American search for theenvironmental imagination. The
ecofeminist Sylvia Mayer points up the common groundbetween these
two social ecological perspectives when she states:
Together with environmental justice scholars, ecofeminists claim
that it is not humankind as such that isresponsible for
environmental damage. The responsibility lies predominantly with
those human beingsand social milieus whose position in
socioeconomic power relations has enabled them to take
politicaldecisions and prot from their results in many societies
largely, but not only, a male elite. (118)
Although some ecofeminists have registered their opposition to
the patriarchal dominationof both women and the environment by
embracing and celebrating the idea of woman ascloser to nature,20
others have resisted the implications of biological essentialism
containedwithin this view, dubbing it as motherhood
environmentalism (Sandilands, xiii). For thelatter group, the way
to address the inequities of the male/female, culture/nature divide
isnot by moving privilege from one side of the dichotomy to the
other, in what ValPlumwood calls uncritical reversal (31), but by
interrogating and challenging the veryexistence of that dichotomy.
Plumwood powerfully summarises the way in which the con-struct of
nature has been wielded to legitimate both dualistic ways of
thinking and thepower relationships they enable.
The category of nature is a eld of multiple exclusion and
control, not only of non-humans, but ofvarious groups of humans and
aspects of human life which are cast as nature. Thus racism,
colonialismand sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from
casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference ascloser to the animal
and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form
of humanitylacking the full measure of rationality or culture.
(4)
Like Plumwood, Donna Haraway has also emphasised the necessity
of identifying anddisrupting the hierarchies typical of western
post-Enlightenment thought, which have all beensystemic to the
logics and practices of domination of women, people of color,
nature, workers,animals (Haraway, 177). In fact, one of the key
contributions of feminist and ecofeministthought to contemporary
ecocriticism is its unsettling of binaries such as
culture/nature,male/female, mind/body, civilised/primitive,
self/other, reason/matter, human/nature and so on.Another important
legacy of this process has been an apprehension of the complex
entanglement of the environment and the body as the site of
shared damage. Carolyn Merchant,demonstrating again the links
between ecofeminism and environmental justice issues, refers to
thedisproportionate siting of environmental hazards such as landll,
incinerators and toxic wastedumps in underprivileged minority
areas. She states, Women experience the results of toxicdumping on
their own bodies (sites of reproduction of the species), in their
own homes(sites of the reproduction of daily life), and in their
communities and schools (sites of socialreproduction) (161). While
this view perhaps retains elements of the identity politics
Sandilandscritiques the troubling assumption that the fact of being
a woman is understood to lie at theLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013):
846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
base of ones experience of ecological degradation (Sandilands,
5) it nevertheless foregrounds
(Nixon, 4). Even more disturbing is the idea that the further
environmental degradation
Ecocriticsm 853of poor nations might be carried out in order to
appease rich nation environmentalistswho campaign against the
dumping of waste and industrial efuent in their own backyard. Rob
Nixon prefaces his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of
the Poor(2011) with a leaked World Bank memo expressing the
political expediency of dumpingtoxic waste in the lowest wage
country and suggesting that the World Bank should beencouraging
more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed
Countries(1). These arguments have challenged ecocritics to engage
in more globally nuancedterms (DeLoughrey and Handley, 9).
Slow Violence Towards a Global Ecocriticism
Nixons book has been extremely inuential in drawing attention to
the complex interplayof the local and the global in environmental
terms. Describing environmental issues such asclimate change, the
thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnication, deforestation,
theradioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans (2), Nixon
suggests that their effects are oftenhard to track and quantify. He
describes this as slow violence a violence that occursgradually and
out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed
across time andspace, an attritional violence that is typically not
viewed as violence at all (2) and he askshow this can be
represented in a global culture that is accustomed to an ever more
immediateow of information and sensation, and that conceptualises
violence as event focused, timebound and body bound (3). Like
Lawrence Buell, he is in search of forms of writing thatcan
adequately convey an environmental message, not this time to
foreground the real, materialpresence of nature as such but to
render the invisible visible. For Nixon, the answer lies in thework
of writer activists authors who are fuelled by rage and hunger for
redress and whoseimaginative writing can help the unapparent
appear, making it accessible and tangible byhumanizing drawn-out
threats inaccessible to the immediate senses thus offering us a
differentkind of witnessing: of sights unseen (15). Some
post-colonial ecocritics have identied thisability to make the
unapparent apparent with the use of the novelistic device of magic
realism.the notion of an interplay between environment and body, a
theme to which I return indiscussion of Stacy Alaimos recent
concept of trans-corporeality and the development of thefourth wave
of ecocriticism (discussed below).Post-colonial criticism has also
long understood the integral connection between
ideological constructions of nature and the oppression and
exploitation of colonised peoplesand their environments:
Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issuesnot
only as central to the projects of European conquest and global
domination, but alsoas inherent in the ideologies of imperialism
and racism on which those projects historically and persistently
depend (Huggan and Tifn, 6). The persistently is signicant
here,since the contemporary neo-liberal era has intensied assaults
on resources (Nixon, 4)and perpetuated the environmental and social
damage suffered by the worlds poor inever-developing forms of
neocolonialism.This sense of the continuation of colonialist
practices in new guises has had an important
impact on ecocriticism, demonstrating the need to reappraise
environmentalism itself. InVarieties of Environmentalism: Essays
North and South (1997), Ramachandra Guha and JuanMartinez Alier use
the phrase environmentalism of the poor to distinguish between
therich-nation environmentalism of the northern hemisphere and that
of the global South.This reects the feeling that environmental
discourses are all too often neo-colonial,Western impositions
inimical to the resource priorities of the poor in the global
SouthLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, for example, in Postcolonial
Environments, nds in Indra Sinhas
realism discussed by Mukherjee, above, is a form) as an
identiable homology across literatures
854 Ecocriticsmglobally, used for expressing aspects of the
catastrophic upheavals in ecologies brought about bythe expansion
of global capital that would otherwise defy representation.
Eco-Cosmopolitics and the Third Wave
In another response to this global imperative, Scott Slovic and
Joni Adamson hailed thearrival of ecocriticisms third wave in 2009
a development which recognises ethnic andnational particuliarities
and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries, exploring
allfacets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint (67).
Broadly speaking, thisdescribes the paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics.
In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: TheEnvironmental Imagination
of the Global (2008), Ursula Heise describes the genesis of
thisconstruct in the recuperation of the term cosmopolitanism in a
range of elds in the late1990s, with theorists striving to model
forms of cultural imagination and understanding thatreach beyond
the nation and around the globe (6). She discusses this in terms
ofdeterritorialisation, stating that the increasing connectedness
of societies around the globeentails the emergence of new forms of
culture that are no longer anchored in place (10).For her, the
challenge that this deterritorialisation poses for the
environmental imagination is:
to envision how ecologically-based advocacy on behalf of the
non-human world as well as onbehalf of greater socioenvironmental
justice might be formulated in terms that are premised nolonger as
primarily on ties to local places but on ties to territories and
systems that are understoodto encompass the planet as a whole.
(10)
What she proposes is an ecologically inected world citizenship
(10). It is in the spirit ofthis world citizenship that the
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth wasnovel
Animals People, which is based on the Bhopal disaster, a magic
realism t to expressthe horrors of a reality that threatens to
escape the ordinary boundaries of stylistics (153).The diffusive
temporal and spatial nature of the results of slow violence and the
fact that we are
now living in a geological epoch informally termed the
anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer) todenote the magnitude of human
impact on environmental change, suggest the need for anecocritical
paradigm that is not only more globally nuanced but also more
globally embracing in other words, one which, while sensitive to
environmental justice issues at a local level, is alsoable to
register the temporal and planetary implications of anthropogenic
environmental destruc-tion in a world where no act or result of
damage can be seen as purely local.A recent issue of Green Letters
(Spring 2012) devoted to Global and Postcolonial Ecologies
employs broadly social ecological, Marxist constructs for
discussing the global, in particular JasonMoores term
world-ecology, which denotes the epochal reorganization of world
ecology thatmarked the rise of the capitalist world-economy
(Niblett, 16). For the editor Sharae Deckard,this has enabled a
tentative worlding of post-colonial literary criticism which
seeks:
not only to generate an understanding of the political,
cultural, and aesthetic differences betweenliterary and critical
approaches to the environment across multiple national traditions,
but also todetect structural homologies and similarities of
concern, particularly in those ways in which literaturesrespond to
the uneven development projects of global capital and their impact
on local environmentsand subjects. (Deckard, 1011, emphases in
original)
Michael Niblett, for example, identies the literary device of
irrealism (of which the magicLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013):
846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
adopted at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change in
Cochabamba, Bolivia, in
effects of slow violence register indiscriminately on the bodies
of the human and the
Ecocriticsm 855non-human, disrupting both the nature/culture
binary and human social distinctions.Referencing the work of Stacy
Alaimo and Susan Hekman in Material Feminisms, Adamsonexplains:
An oil spill, for example, studied from a culturalnatural
perspective that does not separate the tworealms, reveals how a
toxin may affect the workers who produce it, the community in which
it isproduced, and the humans and animals (domesticated and wild)
that ingest it. (Adamson, 148)
This notion of movement of matter across bodies in a multiple
entanglement leads me todiscussion of the fourth wave of
ecocriticism.
The Fourth Wave Material Ecocriticism: Post-Human and
Post-Nature
The fourth wave should be regarded as co-existent with rather
than superseding the third(or indeed the other strands of
ecocriticism) and has only very recently been identied. Itis the
emergent eld of material ecocriticism. For Scott Slovic, it is
Stacy Alaimos discussionof trans-corporeality in Material Feminisms
that has helped to launch an entire newdirection in contemporary
ecocriticism (443). This concept has developed out of
earlyecofeminist apprehensions of the impacts of environmental
justice on the human body andthe more recent material turn, which
has found a powerful voice in the work of feministthinkers in a
range of disciplines, including Karen Barad and Claire Colebrook,
as well asAlaimo and Susan Hekman. Alaimo denes trans-corporeality
as a construct that deals withthe material interchanges across
human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider materialworld (States,
476) and that has engendered a new materialist and post-humanist
sense ofthe human as substantially and perpetually interconnected
with the ows of substances andthe agencies of environments (States,
476).For Alaimo, this interconnection calls for rich, complex modes
of analysis that travel
through the entangled territories of material and discursive,
natural and cultural, biologicaland textual (Trans-corporeal, 238).
In this, she echoes Bruno Latours sense in We Have2010. The
declaration stresses that we are all part of Mother Earth, an
indivisible, livingcommunity of interrelated and interdependent
beings with a common destiny (). It seeks to recognise the
environmental damagewrought by global capitalism and promotes
social and environmental justice but withinthe framework of a
biospherical egalitarianism similar to that advocated by deep
ecologistArne Naess.This advocacy for the non-human extends the
notion of environmental justice (usually
applied to human concerns relating to the environment) to the
environment itself, and bringstogether parties whose interests
might previously have been deemed separate. Joni Adamsonrecounts a
protest in Peru in 2006 attended by a coalition of indigenous
peoples,environmentalists and academics (148) that opposed a mining
concession sited at the footof the mountain Ausangate. The
protesters argued that the mountain should have the rightto exist
in a proper relationship with its surrounding mountains (148). For
Adamson (citingde la Cadena), the notable aspect of this protest
was the way in which those involved, someof whom would not
personally subscribe to the notion of a sentient mountain, were
able tojoin together in a commitment to a politics of nature that
included disagreement on thedenition of nature itself (149).Another
reason for these new alliances is a realisation of the ways in
which the diffusiveLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Never Been Modern that false distinctions between the worlds of,
for example, science and
The notion of shared materiality has initially been seized on in
ecocriticism to take forward
856 Ecocriticsmand develop some ecocritical formulations of
post-humanism in a broadly deep ecologicalspirit. Post-humanism
de-centres and interrogates the human, challenging the construct
ofthe Great Chain of Being, which places man at its head. Cary
Wolfe states that the human,we now know, is not now and never was
itself (Zoontologies, xiii). In a similar vein, JacquesDerrida has
questioned the construct of the animal. His neologism animot (which
plays onthe French homophones maux of animaux [animals] and mot
[word]) is designed tobreak down the traditional semantic boundary
between human and animal and encompassthe heterogeneous
multiplicity of the living (399) in which man is just one of
manyspecies. There is, in fact, a strand of post-humanist enquiry
specically dedicated to animalstudies, and a degree of tension
exists between this strands exploration of the
sentience,subjectivity and rights of non-human animals and
ecological perspectives that see valueresiding in an ecosystem as a
whole rather than in individual species or, indeed,
individualanimals. For Timothy Clark, there is a real, intractable
dispute here (181), particularly inthe apprehension that even
apparently biocentric approaches may mask an
inherentanthropocentrism.21 Cary Wolfe contends that, in general,
academic discourse remainslocked within an unexamined framework of
speciesism (Animal Rites, 1, emphasis inoriginal), pointing up one
of the fault lines of post-humanism: most of us remain humaniststo
the core, even as we claim for our work an epistemological break
with humanismitself (1).In an early discussion of the implications
of post-humanist thought for ecocriticism, Louise
Westling borrows Derridas term, formulating the phrase animot
post-humanism. Thisattempts to blend the notion of decentring the
human with an exploration of animalpolitics, the natural and the
social, have restricted our ability adequately to assess ourmanner
of being in the world. Our material selves cannot be separated from
networks thatare simultaneously economic, political, cultural,
scientic, and substantial (Alaimo,States, 476). Apprehending the
extent of these entanglements challenges us epistemologicallyand
ethically:
Emphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality
with the more-than-humanworld, and at the same time acknowledging
that material agency necessitates more capaciousepistemologies,
allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend
with numerouslate-twentieth-century/early-twenty-rst-century
realities in which human and environmentcan by no means be
considered as separate: environmental health, environmental
justice, the trafcin toxins, and genetic engineering, to name a
few. (Alaimo, Trans-corporeal, 238)
This paragraph foregrounds three key issues of material
ecocriticism. First is the premisethat there is a shared
materiality between the human and non-human world that
rendersobsolete the distinctions between human and environment,
moving beyond the constructof nature altogether; second is the idea
that all of this shared matter has agency; and thirdis the ethical
and political challenges the complexity and hybridity of these
materialinterminglings suggest. In the paragraphs below, I discuss
each of these issues in turn, detail-ing their ongoing impacts on
current ecocritical theory. Returning to Timothy Clarksoutlining of
one of the challenges to ecocriticism, cited in my introduction,
this paradigmis very much an example of ecocritical tools being
remade even in the process of use (xiii).
Shared Materiality and Post-HumanismLiterature Compass 10/11
(2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons
Ltd
-
subjectivity and emphasises our imbrication in the matrix of
earths life (Literature, 26).
Ecocriticsm 857Developing ideas drawn from Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and David Abram, Westling suggeststhat this imbrication is revealed
to us through a phenomenological immersion in the world.She makes a
deliberate distinction between animot post-humanism and what she
termstechno or cyborg post-humanism,22 believing that the latter is
less relevant to ecocriticismsince it deals in the concept of the
transhuman the perfectible, technological human that isable to
surpass its environment and its own body a concept that perpetuates
damagingdualistic modes of thinking.For Serenella Iovino, an
understanding of the shared materiality between human and
non-human proposed by the new materialists makes the imbrication
Westling describes allthe more tangible, dissolving the
human/nature binary and enabling an ecologicalhorizontalism and an
extended moral imagination (Iovino, Material, 52) in other
words,reaching, in part, towards the biospherical egalitarianism of
deep ecology.
The Agency of Matter
A second key theme of material ecocriticism is the notion that
matter is an agentic force, againremoving one of the distinctions
that has traditionally been drawn between human andnon-human and
reinforcing the idea of horizontality rather than hierarchy. Matter
is seen asmanifesting an inherent creative power, a vitality which
is not that of a static being but of agenerative becoming (Iovino,
Material, 53), establishing a multiply-tiered ontology in
whichthere is no denitive break between sentient and nonsentient
entities or between material andspiritual phenomena (Coole and
Frost, 10).In biosemiotic and ecosemiotic perspectives, such as
those advanced by the philosopher and
ecocritic Wendy Wheeler (The Whole Creature) and the
ecophilosopher David Abram(Becoming Animal), one of the ways matter
reveals its agency is through its production andembodiment of signs
that invest the non-human world with its own systems of
signicationand meaning. A biosemiotic perspective also helps to
bridge the culture/nature divide. In thisparadigm, culture, like
language, is an emanation of our material being.Wheeler describes
cultureand nature as inextricably intertwined and co-dependent and
co-evolving (Whole Creature, 41),and Iovino talks of nature and
culture as a circulating system (Stories, 454) that should betterbe
termed (following Donna Haraways lead) natureculture (Stories,
454).So far, this is a fairly harmonious picture of
interrelationship and shared qualities a broadly
deep ecological notion of agential kinships (Iovino, Material,
66). However, as Iovino andothers ongoing theorisations recognise,
the implications of shared materiality also involve amore
disorientating hybridity, for example in the trafc in toxins and
genetic engineeringAlaimo mentions, where the complex entanglements
of human and non-human and theirdiffusive effects present
ontological and ethical dilemmas. For Bruno Latour, the
combinationof the human and its technology sets in motion a mutual
expansion of agentic potential whereall of the component parts,
both human and non-human the actants are in the process
ofexchanging competencies, offering one another new goals, new
possibilities, new functions(Pandoras Hope, 182). But these new
functions are unpredictable, with matter at times evolvingdeviant
agencies (Alaimo,Bodily, 139) as it manifests its creative power
and crosses into bodiesand environments.
Thing Power: Ethical Challenges
Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things,
stresses that the onto-story (4) ofshared materiality she proposes
is not one of unproblematic interrelationship: in contrast tosome
versions of deep ecology, my monism posits neither a smooth harmony
of parts nor aLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
diversity unied by a common spirit (ix). In fact, the complex
entanglement of human and
858 Ecocriticsmnon-human, biology and politics renders the terms
deep and social ecology as redundant asnature. To demonstrate the
more disturbing manifestations of what she calls thing power(2),
she cites Robert Sullivans description of a New Jersey garbage hill
outside Manhattan,which powerfully evokes the physical agency of
the dump, as toxic elements mingle andcombine, warm and fresh,
ready to seep into the groundwater.23 This is an ongoing
agencywhich is non-human, and yet whose genesis is in the detritus
of human consumerism.Similarly, the image below not only provides
further evidence of the temporal and spatial
reach of slow violence but also graphically illustrates
trans-corporeality in action, asman-made substances nd new agential
roles. Chris Jordan, the photographer, explains:
On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000
miles from the nearest continent,the detritus of our mass
consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs
ofthousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed
lethal quantities of plastic by theirparents, who mistake the
oating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted
PacicOcean. http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#about
Fig. 1. Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, used with
permission.
For Iovino, trans-corporeality entails a hybridity that blurs
boundaries and distinctionssuch that it becomes less and less
possible to differentiate between human and non-humanagency.
Referencing the work of feminist science critic Karen Barad, who
devised the termpost-humanist performativity (Barad, 120), she
describes it as a process where thepost-human replaces the
human/nonhuman dualism and overcomes it in a more dialecticand
complex dimension (Stories, 459). While this is undoubtedly the
case, as theMidway image also graphically exposes, these ongoing
expansions of agential possibility oftenbegin with the technicity
of the human, perhaps suggesting a need to engage with
theimplications of the cyborg post-humanism rejected by Westling
and to explore further whatCary Wolfe describes as the embodiment
and the embeddedness of the human being in notjust its biological
but also its technological world (What is Posthumanism? xv).This is
the point at which ecocriticism now stands theoretically
investigating the complex
ontological, epistemological and ethical implications of this
multiple embeddedness. For Bennett,the hope is that the
[onto-]story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that
surroundsand infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of
the complicated web of dissonantconnections between bodies, and
will enable wiser interventions into that ecology (4).
OtherLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
thinkers with less interventionist perspectives are more
sceptical of the notion that it is possible
as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and
Green Letters; and ecocriticism is the
Ecocriticsm 859focus of a host of international conferences.
However, it continues to be a movement thatquestions its own
function. In a recent exchange in successive issues of the Journal
of Ecocriticism,two different perspectives were aired on the
effectiveness and future of ecocriticism. WilliamMajor and Andrew
McMurry speak of a desperate optimism (1) in the face of whatthey
see as our species elaborate and protracted endgame (1). They doubt
the valueof their work (and that of ecocriticism as a whole, by
implication) and feel that themovement has become enmeshed in
institutional frameworks. Somehow the originalmission to reinstate
the referent has been diverted, the commitment to
environmentalpraxis dissipated. Nevertheless, we go on, of course,
even in the face of a difcultfuture. After all, what choice do we
have? (7).In the subsequent issue, however, Roman Bartosch and Greg
Garrard come back with a
more upbeat rejoinder. Resisting what they see as the
apocalypticism (2) of Major andMcMurry, they speak of a risky,
exciting and unprecedented future (5)26 and, at the sametime,
express a refusal to be hurried by the urgency of environmental
issues: we believe thatthe contribution of ecocriticism is
inherently and valuably gradual: making us think anewabout the
world, nature, and the place of the human animal (2). As their
methodology theypropose close, slow reading, reecting the reticent,
obdurate fragility of literature, to whichcritics ought to bear
patient witness even to the crack of doom (5) and echoing (at least
inpart) Mortons call to action in Ecology without Nature to
decelerate our thinking and, throughfor a theory to offer solutions
to ecological problems. John M.Meyer, in his 2001 work
PoliticalNature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western
Thought, warned against what he saw asthe common and misplaced
desire in environmentalist thinkers and writers to develop a
newworldview that could form the basis of an alternative
relationship between humanity andthe rest of nature (22). In a more
recent essay, Hannes Bergthaller, drawing on NiklasLuhmanns work on
social systems theory and second-order cybernetics, stresses that
modernhuman society is divided into autopoietic functional units
(such as law, politics, science, religionand the economy), each of
which creates its own reality, and none of which is in a positionto
control the operations of any of the others (Cybernetics and Social
Systems Theory, 225).The implication for ecocriticism is that it
cannot hope to change society as a whole but shouldrecognise its
limitations in terms of praxis and focus instead on interrogating
the nature andblind spots of environmentalism itself.24 Timothy
Mortons ecological thought, which,conversely, denotes an
apprehension of the complex interrelation of all things,25
neverthelessrepresents a similar challenge. While not necessarily
eschewing the political radicalisms thatseek to create new forms of
collectivity out of the crisis of climate disruption, Morton
insiststhat we must at all times apply a rigorous and remorseless
theoretical radicalism that opensour minds to where we are, about
the fact that were here (The Ecological Thought, 104). Theseare
provocative interventions and useful reminders that ecocriticism
should continue to critiqueits own assumptions and doctrines in the
course of its earth-centred explorations.
The Future of Ecocriticism Despair, Excitement and Slow
Reading
In its short history, ecocriticism has progressed from its
initial relatively uncritical endorsementof non-ction
nature-writing to its current engagement with a wide range of
cultural forms,theoretical sophistication and pluriform status. The
Association for the Study of Literatureand Environment now has ten
afliate organisations worldwide with more under discussion;there
are a large number of ecocritical and environmental journals in
existence includingEcozon@, The Journal of Ecocriticism, Indian
Journal of Ecocriticism and Studies in Ecocriticism as
wellLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
painstaking attentiveness, to identify anomalies and paradoxes
in received opinion in order to
860 Ecocriticsmgo against the grain of dominant normative ideas
about nature, but to do so in the name ofsentient beings suffering
under catastrophic environmental conditions (12).In the last two
decades, ecocriticism has shown itself more than able to respond to
the
challenge of engaging with critical theory. It has established
environmentality as apermanent concern in the humanities, fostered
a broader understanding of ecologicalresponsibility and
environmental justice on a global scale and emphasised our
compleximbrication in a material world that has taken us post-human
and post-nature but leftus with the exciting challenge of
continuing to untangle the coordinates of those
states.Counter-intuitive though it may seem in the face of
accelerating environmental degradation,perhaps Bartosch and Garrard
are right. Perhaps the time has now come for a reinvigorationof
slow and close reading, which, whether in the hope of generating
environmental praxis orin a more purely investigative mode, applies
these new paradigms in full-length engagementswith cultural forms,
interrogating from every possible angle the imagings that reect
andinuence our ongoing modes of being in the world.
Glossary
Anthropocene: The unofcial name for the current geological
epoch, suggested by Paul J.Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000.
It signies the extent of human (or anthropogenic)impact on
environmental change since the industrial revolution. The period
since the1950s has seen a rapid intensication of those
anthropogenic effects and has been calledthe Great
Acceleration.
Anthropocentrism: A system of beliefs that places the interests
of humans over those of non-humans.
Autopoietic: A term devised by Chilean biologists and
philosophers Francisco Varela andHumberto Maturana to describe the
workings of biological organisms, and applied tosocial systems by
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann: Autopoietic systems close
themselvesoff from their environment in order to maintain their own
structure; they draw energy fromtheir surroundings only in order to
maintain the boundary that separates them from theenvironment
(Bergthaller, Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory, 222).
Biocentrism: A system of beliefs that holds that the interests
of the biosphere as a whole takeprecedence over those of any
individual species, including the human, and that all species
haveinherent value.
Eco-cosmopolitics: An earth-centred global politics that
recognises ethnic and nationalparticuliarities and yet transcends
ethnic and national boundaries [], exploring all facetsof human
experience from an environmental viewpoint (Adamson and Slovic,
67). It extendsthe concept of environmental justice to the
environment itself, involving at times legaladvocacy for the
non-human world.
Deep ecology: A perspective that regards the question of our
proper place in the rest of na-ture as logically prior to the
question of what are the most appropriate social and
politicalarrangements for human communities. That is, social and
political questions must proceedfrom, or at least be consistent
with, an adequate determination of this more fundamentalquestion
(Eckersley, 28).Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Dwelling: A complex concept, developed in the work of the
philosopher Martin Heidegger
Ecocriticsm 861to explore and dene our manner of being in the
world hence its interest for ecocritics amanner of being that is
receptive to the self-disclosure of nature, the apprehension of
whichis revealed through poetry.
Ecocentrism: Similar to biocentrism, ecocentrism is a system of
beliefs that recognises the valueof all elements of the biosphere,
both animate and inanimate.
Ecocriticism: An umbrella term for a range of critical
approaches that explore the representa-tion in literature (and
other cultural forms) of the relationship between the human and
thenon-human, largely from the perspective of anxieties around
humanitys destructive impacton the biosphere.
Ecofeminism: Broadly speaking, a political, cultural and
intellectual movement rooted in thebelief that the destruction of
the environment and the historical oppression of women aredeeply
linked (T. Clark, 111), particularly inuential in ecocriticism in
terms of challengingdualistic, hierarchical conceptions, and making
the links between toxicity and the body thatinform Stacy Alaimos
notion of trans-corporeality.
Ecology: The relationship between organisms and their
environment, and the scientic studyof that relationship.
Ecopoetry: Described by J. Scott Bryson as poetry that embodies
ecocentrism, a humbleappreciation of wildness, and a scepticism
towards hyperrationality and its resultant overrelianceon
technology (7).
Environmental justice:Amovement that recognises and seeks to
redress the unjust apportioning ofboth environmental risk and benet
globally for example the siting of waste dumps andpolluting
industries in areas occupied by disempowered social groups.
Material ecocriticism: An emerging paradigm based on the notion
of shared materiality betweenhuman and non-human. In this paradigm,
all matter is seen as agentic.
Neocolonialism: The ongoing socio-economic and political
domination of post-colonial terri-tories by colonial powers, for
example through terms of trade, the power of
multinationalcorporations, and domination of international
organisations such as the United Nations andthe World Bank
(Garrard, Ecocriticism, 208).
NewNature writing:NewNature writers were dened by Jason Cowley
in a special NewNaturewriting issue ofGranta in 2008: They share a
sense that we are devouring our world, that thereis simply no
longer any natural landscape or ecosystem that is untouched by
humans. But theydont simply want to walk into the wild to
rhapsodize or commune: they aspire to see with ascientic eye and to
write with literary effect (9).
Phenomenology:Grounded in the work of Husserl, developed in the
writings of Merleau-Pontyand, later, David Abram, and given a
specically ecocritical focus by critics such as LouiseWestling
(2006), phenomenology emphasises the centrality of the body in
perception, withreection as secondary to perception, existing only
as a result of our embodiment in andongoing reciprocity with the
physical world.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Post-colonial ecocriticism: Like ecofeminism, this is a broad
and inuential area of ecocritical
depend (Huggan and Tifn, 6).
862 EcocriticsmPost-humanism: An emergent and multi-stranded
interrogation of the construct of thehuman, in ecocriticism focused
both on our immersion in the matrix of earths life(Westling, 26)
and the embodiment and the embeddedness of the human being in not
justits biological but also its technological world (Wolfe,
xv).
Post-pastoral: A form of pastoral that is both socially and
environmentally aware, the term wasdevised by the ecocritic Terry
Gifford and explored in his inuential work Pastoral (see note
18).
Social ecology: A perspective based on the belief that our
dislocation from and destructive impactupon the non-human world
originates in hierarchical social systems that have projected
thedomination of human by human into an ideology that man is
destined to dominate Nature(Bookchin, 65).
Trans-corporeality: Dened as the material interchanges across
human bodies, animal bodies,and the wider material world (Alaimo,
States, 476), trans-corporeality is a concept that hasengendered a
new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as
substantially andperpetually interconnected with the ows of
substances and the agencies of environments(Alaimo, States,
476).
World-ecology: A concept developed in the work of Jason W. Moore
to explore the globalecological implications of the capitalist
world-system: The interaction of multiple local andregional
ecologies became far more than the total of their respective parts,
as capitalism beganto create a new relational universe for
ecosystems no less than social actors (323).
Short Biography
PippaMarland is writing an ecocritical thesis on constructions
of islandness in the Anglophoneliterature of four islands/island
groups around the British and Irish archipelago. The researchlooks
at the place of the island in our cultural imagination, and in
particular explores the ideaof the island as a heightened space for
the negotiation of self and world. The thesis has an
inter-disciplinary base that includes the emergent eld of island
studies, formulations of place drawnfrom cultural geography,
archipelagic perspectives in critical and creative writing, and, as
anoverarching framework, contemporary ecocritical theorisations of
post-humanism. She is basedat the University ofWorcester where she
teaches on modules in English Literature and CulturalStudies. She
is co-editing an issue of the journal Green Letters (forthcoming,
2014) and is areviewer for New Welsh Review.
Notes
* Correspondence: Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts,
University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester,Worcestershire,
United Kingdom, WR2 6AJ. Email: [email protected] which
recognises a fundamental link between environmental issues and
colonialism:Postcolonial studies has come to understand
environmental issues not only as central tothe projects of European
conquest and global domination, but also as inherent in
theideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects
historically and persistentlyLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013):
846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
1 Richard Kerridge, though expressing a preference for
ecocriticism himself, suggests that environmental criticism is
Ecocriticsm 863considered by some to imply a more appropriate
academic distance from the broader environmental movement (cited
inRamos-Prez).2 For example, some early articulations of
ecocriticism were based on a view of ecological harmony and
equilibriumthat has now been superseded by postequilibrium views.
Daniel Botkins book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecologyfor the
Twenty-First Century was particularly inuential in introducing a
more discordant, dynamic and mutable modelto ecocriticism. In this
postequilibrium ecology, The Earth is perhaps better seen as a
process rather than an object(Garrard, Ecocriticism, 204).3
Although important work has been carried out in tracing the
beginnings of ecological thought to earlier periods forexample,
Richard Groves exploration of environmental awareness relating to
colonial practices inGreen Imperialism: Co-lonial Expansion,
Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism,
16001860: As colonial expansion proceeded,the environmental
experiences of Europeans and indigenous peoples living at the
colonial periphery played a steadilymore dominant and dynamic part
in the constructions of new European evaluations of nature and in
the growingawareness of the destructive impact of European economic
activity on the peoples and environments of the newlydiscovered and
colonised lands (3); Jonathan Bates (and others) discussion of
ecological thought in the work ofthe Romantic poets; and John
Parhams detailed study of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Green Man
Hopkins, whichdevelops a theory of the Victorian ecological
imagination.4 These proto-ecocritical works include Leo Marxs The
Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal inAmerican
Culture (1964), Raymond Williams The Country and the City (1973),
Joseph Meekers The Comedy of Survival(1974) and William Ruekerts
1978 essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism
(which is often citedas the rst use of the term ecocriticism).5
Richard Kerridge hails ecocriticism as environmentalisms overdue
move beyond science, geography and socialscience into the
humanities (Writing the Environment, 5).6 As Axel Goodbody and Kate
Rigby point out in their introduction to Ecocritical Theory: New
European Approaches, therejection of critical theory by early
ecocritics was its own theoretical moment (1).7 As Barry notes,
this quotation from Derridas Grammatology is often taken out of
context to justify an extremetextualism, whereby it is held that
all reality is linguistic, so that there can be no meaningful talk
of a real world, whichexists without question outside language
(68).8 Though as Garrard observes, this phrase inadvertently points
up the cultural construction of even the most apparentlyempirical
information, the ozone hole in fact being a metaphor for the
phenomenon of ozone depletion.9 Roman Bartosch and Greg Garrard,
for example, contend that Ecocriticism must resist the
instrumentalising ofliterature even in its own interests (2,
emphasis in original).10 In fact, some rst-wave ecocritics chose to
reject certain conventions of critical discourse altogether and to
present theirwork instead in the form of narrative scholarship,
which brings autobiographical accounts of interaction with the
natural worldinto responses to literature. This has been
characterised byMichael P. Cohen as the praise song school of
ecocriticism (21).11 This phrase was devised by David Abram (The
Spell of the Sensuous) to unsettle hierarchical conceptualisations
thatplace man above nature, and to reinforce a deep ecological
sense of the inherent value of the non-human.12 The ecocentrism
espoused by deep ecologists:
regards the question of our proper place in the rest of nature
as logically prior to the question of what are the mostappropriate
social and political arrangements for human communities. That is
social and political questions must proceedfrom, or at least be
consistent with, an adequate determination of this more fundamental
question. (Eckersley, 28)
13 In an introduction to the 1991 edition of his inuential work
The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin made thefollowing summary
of his views on the sources of our environmental dislocation:
I tried to point out that these problems originate in a
hierarchical, class, and today, competitive capitalism system
thatnourishes view of the natural world as a mere agglomeration of
resources for human production and consumption.This social system
is especially rapacious. It has projected the domination of human
by human into an ideology thatman is destined to dominate Nature.
(65)
14 It has also, on occasion, been accused of misanthropy. One of
the eight points of Arne Naess and George SessionsPlatform for Deep
Ecology (1984) is the necessity for a substantial decrease in human
population (cited in Denton, 80).This point has sometimes been
interpreted in anti-humanist ways, for example the apparent
welcoming of epidemicdisease and famine as forms of population
control by early Earth First activists (Denton, 87). However, other
deepecologists have rmly rebuffed accusations of anti-humanism and
stressed that humans are just as entitled to live andblossom as any
other species, provided they do so in a way that is sensitive to
the needs of other human individuals,communities and cultures and
other life-forms generally (Eckersley, 56, emphasis in original),
also emphasising theirrecognition of the fact that not all humans
are equally implicated in environmental damage. For Greg Garrard,
theproblem of human over-population is one which ecocriticism
continues to fail adequately to address (Review of 2010).15 John
Clark, in particular, gives a complex and nuanced reading of social
ecology in his essay A Social Ecology.16 This seems a particularly
reductive reading of rst-wave ecocritics ignoring, for example,
Buells consciousness fromthe start of the power of cultural
construction and the specic engagement of certain early ecocritics
with contemporaryLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
theory for example Sue-Ellen Campbells essay The Land and
Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-
creative and destructive forces coexist in nature; third, the
realisation that inner human nature is illuminated by its
relationshipto external nature; fourth, a simultaneous awareness of
the cultural constructions of nature, and of nature as culture;
fth, a
864 Ecocriticsmconviction that human consciousness should
produce environmental conscience; and sixth, the realisation that
environmen-tal exploitation is generated by the same mind-set that
results in social exploitation. (Head,Modern British Fiction,
193).
New Nature writers aim to see with a scientic eye and to write
with literary effect (Cowley, 9). Ecopoetry is broadlydescribed by
Scott Bryson as poetry that embodies an ecocentric stance, a
humility in its relation to the non-human and a distrustof
hyperrationality.19 Even before these challenges were being laid
down, work was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic that
engagedwith these issues, setting the tone for the second wave.
Louise Westling, in The Green Breast of the New World
(1996)interrogates the presence of gender in the treatment of
landscape and environment in 20th century ction; David Mazel,in
American Literary Environmentalism (2000) delves into the
ideological construction of wilderness and its implication
incolonialist endeavour; and Richard Kerridge, in Ecological Hardy
(2001) explores the ways in which Thomas Hardy isconcerned with the
multiplicity of uses material, cultural and emotional that human
beings have for the naturalenvironment (126).20 TimothyClark
identies aspects of this perspective in L. ElizabethWallers
ecofeminist reading of VirginiaWoolfsTheWavesin her essay Writing
the Real: VirginiaWoolf and an Ecology of Language in which Woolfs
compositional method is seen toopen a usually blocked path to a
supposedly lost and unalienated human nature, located in the female
body (Clark, 116).21 Timothy Clark, citing the work of Tom Regan,
gives the example of an ecological restoration scheme in the
Galpagosislands that involved the culling of feral goats,
questioning what the biocentric commitment of ecologists might be
in asimilar situation that required the culling of human animals
(181).22 She associates Donna Haraway with this cyborg
post-humanism, perhaps missing the point of Haraways
self-confessedlyironic political myth (Haraway, 191). Haraway uses
the gure of the cyborg to create a focus for post-human thought
bypositing a radical being in which the boundaries of human and
animal and machine have been erased. The cyborg, shebelieves, is a
construct through which we can properly interrogate the human.23
Robert Sullivans description of a New Jersey garbage dump:
There had been rain the night before, so it wasnt long before I
found a little leachate seep, a black ooze tricklingdown the slope
of the hill, an expresso of refuse. In a few hours this stream
would nd its way down into the groundwater of the Meadowlands; it
would mingle with toxic streams But in this moment, here at its
birth, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil
and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium,copper,
lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this uid my
ngertip was a bluish caramel colour and itwas warm and fresh.
(Sullivan, 1998, cited in Bennett, 6)
24 Bergthaller states:Only to the extent that ecocriticism is
something other than the academic wing of the environmental
movement can itrender that movement a service which is perhaps more
valuable than general consciousness-raising or the recruitment
ofnew personnel. (Cybernetics, 227)
25 This has much in common with the insights of new materialism
Mortons idea of the mesh (Ecological, 8) echoingthe imbrication
discussed above, and his hyperobjects (19) (such as plutonium and
styrofoam) exemplifying thedisturbing agentic potential and slow
violence of the products of human/non-human entanglement.26
ForMorton, it is a future which has, in a sense, already arrived.
In a passage that provides a corrective to the elegiac tone ofmuch
environmental writing, he states:
Environmentalism is often apocalyptic. It warns of, andwards
off, the end of the world. The title of Rachel Carsons SilentSpring
says it all. But things arent like that: the end of the world has
already happened. We sprayed the DDT. We ex-ploded the nuclear
bombs. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the
end of the world. Today is notthe end of history.Were living at the
beginning of history. The ecological thought thinks forward. It
knows that we haveonly just begun, like someone waking up from a
dream. (Ecological, 98)
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage,
1996.Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York:
Pantheon Books, 2010.structuralism Meet in The Ecocriticism
Reader.17 Again, this summation does not do justice to the range of
voices, complexity and, indeed, artfulness involved inexamples of
that non-ction writing.18 Terry Gifford devised the term
post-pastoral to denote an environmentally and socially aware
version of pastoral:
There are six aspects to Giffords post-pastoral: rst, an awe in
response to the natural world; second, the recognition
thatLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Adamson, Joni. Indigenous Literatures, Multinaturalism, and
Avatar: The Emergence of Indigenous Cosmopolitics.
Ecocriticsm 865American Literary History 24.1 (2012):
143162.Adamson, Joni and Scott Slovic. Guest Editors Introduction.
The Shoulders We Stand on: An Introduction to Ethnicityand
Ecocriticsm. MELUS 34.2 Ethnicity and Ecocriticism (2009): 524.
Alaimo, Stacy. Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space
of Nature. Material Feminisms. Eds. Stacy Alaimo andSusan Hekman.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 237264.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the
Material Self. Bloomington IN: Indiana UniversityPress, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy. States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment19.3 (2012):
476493.
Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman. Eds. Material Feminisms.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.Barad, Karen.
Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter. MaterialFeminisms. Eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan
Hekman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.
120157.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and
Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress,
2009.
Bartosch, Roman and Greg Garrard. The Function of Criticism: A
Response to William Major and AndrewMcMurrays Editorial. Journal of
Ecocriticism 5.1 (2013): 16.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the
Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.Bate, Jonathan.
The Song of the Earth. Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador,
2000.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010.Bergthaller,
Hannes. Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory. Ecocritical Theory:
New European Approaches. Eds. AxelGoodbody and Kate Rigby.
Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
217229.
Bergthaller, Hannes. What is Ecocriticism? 27 April 2013.
[Online]. Retrieved from:
http://www.easlce.eu/about-us/what-is-ecocriticism/
Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and
Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland, CA: AKPress, 2005.
Botkin, Daniel. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the
Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.Bryson,
J. Scott. Ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2002.Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental
Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism:
Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, Oxford
andVictoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Campbell, Sue Ellen. The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep
Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet. TheEcocriticism Reader. Ed.
Cheryl Glotfelty. Athens and London: The University of Georgia
Press, 1996.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin Books,
2000.Clark, John. A Social Ecology. 2000. [Online]. Retrieved on 15
Feb. 2013 from:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/pdfs/a4/John_Clark__A_Social_Ecology_a4.pdf
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the
Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Cohen,
Michael P. Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique.
Environmental History 9.1 (2004): 936.Coole, Diana and Samantha
Frost. Eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.
Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2010.
Coupe, Lawrence. Ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism
to Ecocriticism. London and New York:Routledge, 2000.
Cowley, Jason. Editors Letter: The new nature writing. The New
Nature Writing, Granta 102 (2008): 712.Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene
F. Stoermer. The Anthropocene. Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000):
1718.Deckard, Sharae. Editorial. Green Letters: Studies in
Ecocriticism 16 (2012): 515.DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B.
Handley. Eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the
Environment. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011.
Denton, Ted. Deep Ecology. The Sage Handbook of Environment and
Society. Eds. Jules Pretty, Andrew S. Ball, TedBenton, Julia S.
Guivant, David R. Lee, David Orr, Max J. Pfeffer and Hugh Ward.
London and New Delhi: SagePublications Ltd., 2007. 7891.
Derrida, Jacques and David Wills. The Animal that Therefore I am
(More to Follow). Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002):369418.
Eckersley, Robyn. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward
an Ecocentric Approach. Albany, NY: State University ofNew York
Press, 1992.
Gaard, Greta. New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More
Feminist Ecocriticism. Interdisciplinary Studies in Lit-erature and
Environment 17.4 (2010): 643665.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London and New York:
Routledge, 2012.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868,
10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism Review of 2010 12 Feb. 2013.
[Online]. Retrieved from: http://www.academia.edu/
866 Ecocriticsm1522099/Ecocriticism_Review_of_2010Gifford,
Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.Gifford, Terry.
Pastoral. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.Glotfelty, Cheryll
and Harold Fromm. Eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in
Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: Universityof Georgia Press, 1996.
Goodbody, Axel and Kate Rigby. Eds. Ecocritical Theory: New
European Approaches. Charlottesville and London:University of
Virginia Press, 2011.
Grove, Richard H.Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600
1860.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Guha, Ramachandra and Juan Martinez-Alier. Varieties of
Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London and NewYork:
Routledge (Earthscan), 1997.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.Head, Dominic.
Ecocriticism and the Novel. The Green Studies Reader: From
Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed. LaurenceCoupe. London and New
York: Routledge, 2000. 235242.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British
Fiction, 19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The
Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford
UniversityPress, 2008.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tifn. Postcolonial Ecocriticism:
Literature, Animals, Environment. Abingdon and New York:Routledge,
2010.
Iovino, Serenella. Material Ecocriticism. Matter, Text, and
Posthuman Ethics. Literature, Ecology, Ethics. Eds. TimoMller and
Michael Sauter. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2012a.
Iovino, Serenella. Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing
Material Ecocriticism [part of Serenella Iovino andSerpil Oppermann
Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych] Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment19.3 (2012b): 448475.
Kerridge, Richard. Ecological Hardy. Eds. Karla Armbruster and
Kathleen R. Wallace. Beyond Nature Writing:Expanding the Boundaries
of Ecocriticism. Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 2001.
126143.
Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells. Eds. Writing the
Environment. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1998.Latour,
Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Latour, Bruno.
Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense
of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.Major,
William and Andrew McMurry. Introduction: The Function of
Ecocriticism; or, Ecocriticism, What Is It GoodFor? The Journal of
Ecocriticism 4.2 (2012): 17.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress,
1964.
Mayer, Sylvia. Ecofeminism, Literary Studies and the Humanities.
Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: TransatlanticConversations
on Ecocriticism. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006. 113128.
Mazel, David. American Literary Environmentalism. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2000.Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of
Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner,
1974.Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New
York: Routledge, 1995.Meyer, John M. Political Nature:
Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought.
Massachusetts: MITPress, 2001.
Moore, Jason W. The Modern World System as Environmental
History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism. Theoryand Society 32.3
(2003): 307377.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress,
2007.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010.Mukherjee, Pablo Upamanyu. Postcolonial
Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in
English.Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Naess, Arne. The shallow and the deep, long range ecology
movement. A summary. Inquiry 16.1 (1973): 95100.Niblett, Michael.
World-Economy, World-Ecology, World-Literature. Green Letters:
Studies in Ecocriticism Global andPostcolonial Ecologies 16 (2012):
1531.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011.Parham, John. The Poverty
of Ecocritical Theory: E.P. Thompson and the British Perspective.
New Formations64 (2008): 2538.
Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian
Ecological Imagination. Amsterdam and New York:Rodopi,
2010.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
-
Parham, John. Two-Ply: Discordant Nature and English Landscape
in Alice Oswalds Dart. Revista Canaria deEstudios Ingleses 64
(2012): 111129.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and
Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003.Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London:
Routledge, 1993.Ramos-Prez, Isabel. Interview with Richard
Kerridge. Ecozon@ 3.2 (2012): 135144.Rigby, Kate. Ecocriticism
Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Ed. Julian Wolfreys.
Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2002.
Rueckert, William. Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in
Ecocriticism. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks inLiterary
Ecology. Eds. Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1996. 105123.
Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and
the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis, MN: Universityof Minnesota
Press, 1999.
Slovic, Scott. Editors Note. Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012): 4434.Snyder, Gary.
The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1999.Soper,
Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995.Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother
Earth. 2010. [Online]. Retrieved on 15 Feb. 2013 from:
http://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/.
Wolfe, Cary. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003a.Wolfe, Cary.
Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of
Ecocriticsm 867Chicago Press, 2003b.Wolfe, Cary. What is
Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2010.
ASLE and afliate websites
http://asle.org.uk/https://sites.google.com/site/asletaiwan/http://www.alecc.ca/http://www.aslec-anz.asn.au/http://www.asleindia.webs.com/http://www.asle-japan.org/http://www.aslekorea.org/modules/doc/index.php?doc=introhttp://www.asle.org/http://www.easlce.eu/Waller,
L. Elizabeth. Writing the Real: Virginia Woolf and an Ecology of
Language. New Essays in Ecofeminist LiteraryCriticism. Ed. Glynis
Carr. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000.
137156.
Westling, Louise. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape,
Gender, and American Fiction. Athens, GA: University ofGeorgia
Press,