What is ecocriticism

1.1 What is ecocriticism The starting-point for the ecocriticism is acknowledging that there really is an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and that this crisis poses some of the great political and cultural questions of our time.1 So the challenge environmentalism poses to literature is this: show how it feels, here and now. Make contact between the public and the personal, in accordance with the Green maxim: “Think globally, act locally.”2 Even today, in the early twenty-first century, there are those who look at the world as if nature were inexhaustible and pristine, despite the phenomenon of industrial revolution, which has radically depleted a broad range of nature resources, contributed to the extinction or endangerment of numerous plant and animal species, and spewed vast quantities of toxins into the environment.3 Ecological disaster is a punishment for human transgression: the necessary consequence of going too far, tampering with nature, usurping the pace of divine providence. Often this perception leads to the idea that the consequences will worsen until humanity is forced to return to a more “natural” way of life.4 The real, material ecological crisis is also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation. The inability of political cultures to address environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative. Yet these concerns will not be kept out of narrative. Environmental preoccupations are registering, now, across a wide range of texts and discourses, some of them not obviously concerned with ecology or “nature”5coined by the German biologist Ernest Haekel in 1869, the term ecology has since gained a wide popularity only a century later, and its key concept has been a common assumption of nature-conscious people in the second half of the twe ntieth century: “All units of the ecosystem are mutually dependent. This is a good point to keep in mind when we are tempted to extol the importance of some group of organisms in which we happen to be especially interested.” Humankind is “a part of …complex? biological cycles”6 dependent on the food web of eating and being eaten.It may seem obvious that ecological problems are scientific problems rather than objects of cultural analysis. However, according to John Passmore, …ecological problems? are “featu res of our society, arising out of our dealings with nature, from which we should like to free ourselves, and which we do not regard as inevitable consequences of what is good in that society.”7 An ecological perspective strives to see how all things are interdependent, even those apparently most separate. Nothing may be discarded or buried without consequences. Literature is not leisure, not separate from science or politics, any more than “nature”can be separate from human life, or someone?s backyard be immune from pollution. There are local ecosystems, but all are subject to the global ecosystem, a totality which excludes nothing and can be rid of nothing.8 Early beginnings of a distinctly contemporary, consciously environmentalist criticism, with its “spirit of commitment to environmental praxis,” first stirred in the 1960s, in widespread public concerns over nuclear annihilation, runaway population growth, loss of wild and natural areas, accelerated species extinction, and increasing contamination of th e earth?s air, water, and land.9 By the end of the sixties the word ecology had surfaced from a subfield of biology to encompass the same root conflict whose history and cultural implications. Environmentalism, an awkward media term, signified not only a part of the pervasive political and social unrest of a decade, but a permanent national and global concern, a check to a blind faith in progress and to the juggernaut of technology. The present state of this movement, for which the blanket term ecocriticism has come to be accepted, is one of ferment and experimentation. What is emerging is a multiplicity of approaches and subjects, including---under the big tent of environmental literature---nature writing, deep ecology, the ecology of cities, ecofeminism, the literature of toxicity, environmental justice, bioregionalism, the lives of animals, the revaluation of place, interdisciplinarity, eco-theory, the expansion of the canon to include previously unheard voices, and the reinterpretation of canonical works from the past. As Buell notes, “the phenomenon of literature-and-environment studies is better understood as a congeries of semioverlapping projects than as a unitary approach or set of claims”10 A coherent and broadly based movement embracing literary-environmental interconnections is commonly termed “ecocriticism.”11 As a method of literary analysis, ecocriticism emerged in the late twentieth century as a means of investigating the relation between literary texts and their environmental context s. The 1992 founding of the new Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and in 1995 the publication of ASLE?s journal, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) are generally regarded as the landmark of ecocriticism. The term “ecocriticism”was first devised in 1978 by William Rueckert in his pioneering essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.”12Rachel Carson sparked the formation with the publication of her book Silent Spring (1962). According to Greg Garrard, the rhetorical strategies, use of pastoral and apocalyptic imagery and literary allusions with which Carson shapes her scientific material may well be amenable to a more …literary? or …cultural? analysi s.13 Such analysis is called …ecocriticism?: What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of relationship between literature and the physical environment. As feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender conscious perspective and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.14 Ecocriticism is naturally an avowedly political mode of analysis. Ecocritics generally tie their cultural anal yses explicitly to a …green? moral and political agenda. In this respect, ecocriticism is closely related to environmentally oriented developments in philosophy and political theory. Developing the insight of earlier critical movements, ecofeminists, social ecologists and environmental justice advocates seek a synthesis of environmental and social concerns. Richard Kerridge?s definition in the mainly British Writing the Environment(1998) suggests a broader cultural ecocriticism: Ecocritics wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.15 Both as a science and as a socio-political movement, …ecology? itself is shifting and being contested. However, the emphasis on the moral and political orientation of the ecocritic and the broad specification of the field of study are essential.16From the point of view of academics, ecocriticism is dominated by the Association for the Literature and the Environment (ASLE). Many early works of ecocriticism were characterized by an exclusive interest in Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, but in the last few years ASLE has turned towards a more general cultural ecocrticism, with studies of popular scientific writing, film, TV, art, architecture and other cultural artifacts such as theme parks, zoos and shopping malls. As ecocritics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to analyze and criticize the world in which we live, attention is increasingly given to the broad range of cultural processes and products in which, and through which, the complex negotiations of nature and culture take place. Indeed, the widest definition of the subject of ecocritism is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history and ent ailing critical analysis of the term …human? itself.17 Ecocriticism is unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories because of its close relationship with the science of ecology. For all of the reasons, ecocriticism offers the most effective and relevant means of literary analysis in an era of increasing human impact upon the terrestrial environment. Perhaps the most significant and useful tool that modern science offers to the literary critic is the concept of the ecosystem, which, as a consequence of recent environmental research, is now regarded as a much more chaotic and unstable structure than the classic scientific understanding of the “balance of nature”might have suggested.18Ecological literature and ecocrticism are articulated as a joint attempt to give voice to the nonhuman subject. David Mazel, in his book A Century of Early Ecocriticism, collects brief examples of “proto-ecocriticism” works of literary scholarship in America and England from 1864-1964 that address the representation and consideration of nature in literature. Interest in the natural world is nothing new among literary artist. “Some people are inclined to point to later writers such as Henry David Thoreau as the originators of the tradition of American writing about nature, but this view is mistaken.”19In fact, Thoreau and his contemporaries began to write about social and environmental concepts together, demonstrating that human experience necessarily includes relationships to other human beings and to the larger planet. Thoreau frames his investigation into the possibility of living a simple and “deliberate” life in proximity to nature within the context of “slavery.”20