ursula heise_hitchhicker's guide to eco criticism

8/3/2019 Ursula Heise_Hitchhicker's Guide to Eco Criticism

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the changing profession

The HitchhikersGuide to Ecocriticism

ursula k. heise

UrsUla K. Heise, oct pofo

of engh nd comptv ttu

t stnfod Unvty, th utho

of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and

Postmodernism (Cmbdg UP, 1997).

sh fnhng book mnucpt

nttd sn of Pc nd sn of

Pnt: Th envonmnt imgnton

of th Global.

The Emergence of Ecocriticism

THe firsT few frames of THe BelGian ComiC-sTriP arTisT raymond

maCHeroTs worK les CroqUillards (1957) Provide a sHorTHand

or some o the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism,one o the most recent elds o research to have emerged rom the rap-idly diversiying matrix o literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. Aheron is prompted to a lyrical reection on the change o seasons by alea that gently oats down to the surace o his pond (see the next p.):Ah! the poetry o autumn . . . dying leaves, wind, departing birds. . . .Tis last thought jolts him back to reality: ButIm a migratory birdmysel! . . . Good grie! Whatve I been thinking? And of he takes onhis voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the eld ratsChlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell o a bad cold),

who hitch a ride to Arica with him. Are you traveling on business?he asks his newound passengers. No, or our health, they answer.

Te scene unolds around two conceptual turns relevant to eco-criticism. Te speaking animal, a staple o comic strips, is creditedwith an aesthetic perception o nature that relies on the long Westerntradition o associating beauty with ephemerality: autumns appealarises rom its proximity to death, decay, and departure, a beautyt wnd w cy wy n n ntnt. Bt oncy t Romntc

valuation o nature separates the heron rom his innate attunementto its rhythms: the alling lea makes him sink into autumnal rev-

erie and orget to seek out warmer latitudes. As soon as he takesight, however, Macherot once again twists the idea o seasonal mi-gration by turning the heron into a sort o jetliner on bird wingstransporting what might be business or leisure travelers. What is (orshould be) natural or the bird is not so or the rats, whose illnesshints at another type o ailure to adapt to seasonal rhythms. On onehand, this comic strip humorously raises the question whether anaesthetic appreciation o nature brings one closer to it or alienateson om t; on t ot, t ggt t tnon btwn bond to

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nature that are established by innate instinct,those that arise through aesthetic valuation,and those that are mediated by modern-daytravel. Te herons ight remains comically

suspended between the vocabularies o na-ture, art, and international business. In whatwy do gy vovd nd -w bngrelate to nature? What roles do language, lit-erature, and art play in this relation? Howhave modernization and globalization pro-

cesses transormed it? Is it possible to returnto more ecologically attuned ways o inhab-iting nature, and what would be the culturalpqt o c cng?

his is a sample o issues that are otenraised in ecocriticism, a rapidly growing eldin literary studies. Te story o its institutionalormation has been told in detail and romseveral perspectives (Cohen 914; Garrard 315; Glotelty, Introduction xviixviii, xxii

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xxiv; Love 15; Branch and Slovic xivxvii):scattered projects and publications involvingthe connection between literature and the en-

vironment in the 1980s led to the ounding o

ASLE, the Association or the Study o Litera-ture and the Environment, during a conven-tion o the Western Literature Association in1992. In 1993 the journal ISLE: Interdisciplin-ary Studies in Literature and Environmentwasestablished, and in 1995 ASLE started hold-ing biennial conerences. Seminal texts andanthologies such as Lawrence Buells Te En-vironmental Imagination (1995), Kate SopersWhat Is Nature?(1995), and Cheryll Glotelty

and Harold Fromms Ecocriticism Reader(1996) ollowed, as well as special journal is-sues (Murphy, Ecology; Ecocriticism). At thesame time, newly minted ecocritics began totrace the origins o their intellectual concernsback to such seminal works in American andBritish literary studies as Henry Nash SmithsVirgin Land(1950), Leo Marxs Te Machinein the Garden (1964), Roderick Nashs Wilder-ness and the American Mind(1967), RaymondWilliamss Te Country and the City (1973),

Joseph Meekers he Comedy o Survival(1974), and Annette Kolodnys Te Lay o theLand(1975). ASLE membership grew rapidly,topping a thousand in the early years o thenew century, and ofspring organizations inAustraliaNew Zealand, Korea, Japan, India,and the United Kingdom were ounded, aswas, most recently, the independent EuropeanAssociation or the Study o Literature, Cul-ture and Environment (EASLCE).

Given the steadily increasing urgency oenvironmental problems or ever more closelyinterconnected societies around the globe,the explosion o articles and books in the eldmy not t on ptcy png.But what is remarkable about this burst o ac-ademic interest is that it took place at such alate date; most o the important social move-mnt o t 196 nd 197 t mon literary criticism long beore environmen-

talism did, even though environmentalism

succeeded in establishing a lasting presencen t potc p. Wy t dy?

Te main reason lies no doubt in the de-velopment o literary theory between the late

1960s and the early 1990s. Under the inuenceo mostly French philosophies o language,literary critics during this period took a reshlook at questions o representation, textuality,narrative, identity, subjectivity, and histori-cal discourse rom a undamentally skepti-cal perspective that emphasized the multipledisjunctures between orms o representationand the realities they purported to reer to. Inthis intellectual context, the notion o nature

tended to be approached as a socioculturalconstruct that had historically oen servedto legitimize the ideological claims o specicsocial groups. From Roland Barthess call in1957 always to strip down Nature, its lawsand its limits, so as to expose History there,and nally to posit Nature as itsel historical(Mythologies 175; trans. mine) to Graemeurners claim in 1990 that Cultural Studiesdenes itsel in part . . . through its ability toexplode the category o the natural (qtd. in

Hochman 10), the bulk o cultural criticismwas premised on an overarching project odenaturalization. Tis perspective obviouslydid not encourage connections with a socialmovement aiming to reground human cul-tures in natural systems and whose primarypragmatic goal was to rescue a sense o the re-ality o environmental degradation rom theobcton o potc dco.

By the early 1990s, however, the theoreti-

c pnom n ty td d cngdconsiderably. New historicism had shaded intoAmerican cultural studies, which styled itselantitheoretical as much as theoretical, sig-nng not o mc t dvnt o nw p-dgm t tnton o t dcpn nto d o dv pct nd mtodoogno longer ruled by any dominant ramework.Ecocriticism ound its place among this ex-panding matrix o coexisting projects, which

in part explains the theoretical diversity it

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has attained in a mere dozen years. But thisdiversity also results rom its relation to thesociopolitical orces that spawned it. Unlikeeminism or postcolonialism, ecocriticism did

not evolve gradually as the academic wing oan inuential political movement. It emergedwhen environmentalism had already turnednto vt d o convgng nd conctngprojects and given rise to two other humanis-tic subdisciplines, environmental philosophyand history. his diversity resonates in thediferent names by which the eld has beenidentied: ecocriticism has imposed itsel asa convenient shorthand or what some crit-

ics preer to call environmental criticism,literary-environmental studies, literary ecol-ogy, literary environmentalism, orgreen cul-tural studies ( B, Future 1112).

Changes in the perceived cultural rel-evance o biology also helped to open up theconceptual space or ecocriticism. Sociobio-logical approaches that had been rejected inthe 1970s reentered debate in the 1990s as ge-netic research and biotechnologies began toshed new light on old questions about innate

and acquired behavior. While many o thesequestions have remained intensely controver-sial among scientists and humanities scholarsand while many ecocritics are highly criticalo sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,there can be no doubt that the 1990s ofered aclimate very diferent rom that o earlier de-cades or investigating the relation betweennature and culture. Tis is not to say that theearly 1990s marked an altogether welcoming

moment or the articulation o an environ-mentalist perspective on culture. he so-called science wars, brewing since the 1980s,came to a head with Paul Gross and NormanLevitts polemical repudiation o constructiv-ist approaches to science in their bookHigherSuperstition (1994). Te physicist Alan Sokalsx-pottctt y on qntm m-chanics in the journal Social extin 1996took the conrontation between scientists and

their critics to a new level o erocity as well as

public awareness. Ecocriticism, with its tripleallegiance to the scientic study o nature, thescholarly analysis o cultural representations,and the political struggle or more sustain-

able ways o inhabiting the natural world, wasborn in the shadow o this controversy. Eventhough the grounds o the debate have shiedsince then, the underlying issues o realismand representation that inormed the sciencew contn to po cng o coct-c toy.

Bc o t dvty o potc ndco-dcpny nnc tt wnt ntoits making, ecocriticism is not an easy eld to

mmz. Evn coctc, pp motn ot cdmc co, t ong o sense o community and shared holistic ideals,the reality is that they diverge widely in their

vw. Rcnt vgoo ctq nd potare healthy signs o a rapidly expanding eld.Somwt ct td, coctcmcoheres more by virtue o a common politicalpojct tn on t b o d tot-cal and methodological assumptions, and thedt o ow t pojct od tnt

nto t tdy o ct contny b-ject to challenge and revision. For this reason,coctcm o bcom d wocompxt by now q t boo-ngtintroductions that have appeared over the lasttwo years: Greg Garrards Ecocriticism (2004),Buells Te Future o Environmental Criticism(2005), and, shorter and sketchier, Walter Ro-

jas Prezs La ecocrtica hoy (2004).

Environmentalism and the Critique

o Modernity

L mnm nd ctc c td, co-ctcm ttd wt ctc concp-tzton o modnt noton o mnpycoogc dntty nd potc bjct-hood. Te ecocritical attempt to think beyondconcpt dcotom tt modnty, tEngtnmnt, nd cnc w togt to

v mpod on Wtn ctt p-


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ton o bjct nd objct, body nd nv-onmnt, nt nd cttctdt, t dd n ot d, tog tcombnton o nytc mod o cdmc

dco wt mo xpnty bdom o wtng tt Scott Sovc cdntv cop (Ecoctcm). Btcoctcm n t t tg dfd pyrom other orms o postmodern thought intt t ogt to dn t mn bjctnot o mc n ton to t mn otthat subjecthood had traditionally excluded asin relation to the nonhuman world. Environ-mentalism and ecocriticism aim their critique

o modnty t t pmpton to now tnt wod cntcy, to mnpt ttcnoogcy nd xpot t conomcy,nd tby tmty to ct mnp pt om t n toc poctt y bd pog. T dom-nation strips nature o any value other than asa material resource and commodity and leadsto gd dtcton tt my n t nddpv mnty o t b o btnc.Sc domnton mpt mn o t

signicance it had derived rom living in andwt nt nd nt ndvd ndcommunities rom their rootedness in place.

Projected alternatives to this kind o mo-dnty xtnd om dp coogy to occoogy. Dp coogy ogond t vo nt n nd o t, t q gt oot pc, nd t mpotnc o mcommnt. Soc coogy, by contt,tnd to v nt pmy n t mn

nd nt wt potc poo-p ngng om ncm nd ocmto mnm. Dp coogy, octd onwt vton o wd nd pc,-cncy, n o pc, nd ocnowdg nd omtm wt n tn-tv ptty, pyd n mpotnt pt nthe early stages o ecocriticism. Especially orAmericanists, this philosophy resonated withwt om o (n ctn dng

o wo) to Wnd By, Edwd Ab-

by, nd Gy Snyd. Fom t t 199on, however, the eld gradually moved to themo oc-coogc poton tt dom-nate ecocriticism today (Buell, Future 9798).

his shit was prompted in part by thesheer numerical expansion o the eld, whichled scholars rom a wide variety o intellectualbackgrounds to bring their interests to bear onenvironmental issues. In part it also emergedunder the pressure o explicit challenges tothe eld: like other areas o cultural theory,ecocriticism saw its initial assumptions ques-tioned or what they had socially excluded,historically erased, and textually orgotten (or

reused) to account or. Te historicization othe wilderness concept by the environmentalhistorian William Cronon is undoubtedlyone o the most important critiques. Unlikeecological movements in other parts o theworld, Cronon argues, environmentalism inthe United States tends to hold up an ideal olandscapes untouched by human beings as thestandard against which actual landscapes aremeasured. But this standard is problematic inits relation to past and uture. It conceals the

act that the apparently transhistorical idealo wilderness only acquired connotationso the sublime and sacred in the nineteenthcentury and that the cultural valuation opristine and uninhabited areas led to the dis-placement o native inhabitants and in somecases to the creation o ocial parks. Far rombeing nature in its original state, such wilder-nesses were the product o cultural processes.Te wilderness concept makes it dicult or a

political program to conceptualize desirableorms o human inhabitation, relying as itdoes on the categorical separation o humanbeings rom nature.

For ecocritics, who had oen reerred tostatements such as Toreaus In wildness isthe preservation o the world as touchstones,Cronons critique prompted a reexamina-tion o established environmental authors aswell as a broadening o the canon. Greater

attention to womens and Native American

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literature shied the emphasis to more com-munal engagements with a natural worldconceived as always intertwined with hu-man existence. But greater inclusiveness also

brought more challenges, since not all mi-noty tt povd y to mtinto ecocritical concerns as Native Americantexts, many o whose authors had long beenactive in the environmental movement. A-rican American literature, or example, asMichael Bennett and others have shown, isdicult to address with standard ecocritical

vocabulary, since Arican American authorstend to associate rural lie and sometimes

even wild places with memories o slaveryand persecution rather than with peaceulreuge (see Wallace and Armbruster). [O]what use is ecocriticism i the culture underconsideration has a diferent relationship withpastoral space and wilderness than the idealkinship that most nature writers and eco-critics assume and seek? Bennett asks, andhe emphasizes that even the most invitingphysical environment cannot be consideredseparately rom the sociopolitical structurestt p t nd b (19, 21).

Critiques such as these led to increasedemphasis on urban spaces (Bennett andeague; Dixon; MacDonald) as well as on is-sues o social inequality that environmentalproblems oen overlap. From the turn o themillennium, environmental-justice criticismincreasingly inluenced the ield by draw-ing attention to social and racial inequali-ties in both access to natural resources and

xpo to tcnoogc nd coogc (Martnez-Alier; Adamson, Evans, and Stein).Aesthetic appreciation o nature has not onlybeen a class-coded activity, but the insulationo the middle and upper classes rom the mostbrutal efects o industrialization has playeda crucial role in environmental devastation,. V. Reed argues in his call or an ecocriti-cism that uses concerns or natural preserva-tion with those or distributive justice (151).

Along with the emergence o a ully post-

structuralist ecocriticism (about which morelater on), this critical agenda has opened upthe ull gamut o concepts and methods romct td o nvonmnt ctcm.

Te shi to a more in-depth engagementwith the sociopolitical raming o environ-mental issues has also undamentally, i notalways explicitly, altered the way in whichmost ecocritics view the relation betweenmodernity and nature. In earlier types o en-

vonmnt cop, nt tndd to benvisioned as a victim o modernization butalso as its opposite and alternative; nature isnow more oten viewed as inextricably en-

twined with modernityboth as a conceptand in the material shape in which we experi-ence it today. More than that, environmental-ists and ecocritics have begun to see how theirsearch or a more authentic relation to natureis itsel a product o modernization. Te ge-ogp Dvd Hvy pont ot tt

the problem o authenticity is itsel peculiarlymodern. Only as modern industrializationseparates us rom the process o production

and we encounter the environment as a in-ished commodity does it emerge. . . . Te nal

victory o modernity . . . is not the disappear-ance o the non-modern world, but its articialpreservation and reconstruction. . . . Te searchor an authentic sense o community and o anauthentic relation to nature among many radi-cal and ecological movements is the cutt ingedge o exactly such a sensibility. (30102)

Understanding itsel in this way, as both de-

rived rom and resistant to modernity, mayalso help ecocriticism develop modes o cri-tique o the modern that are less dependentthan they have been so ar on recourse to pre-modn om o nbtton nd ct.

Scientifc Intersections

Ecocriticisms engagement with moderniza-tion has been partly shaped by environmen-

talists ambivialence toward scientic inquiry


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(see Heise). On one hand, science is viewed asa root cause o environmental deterioration,both in that it has cast nature as an object tobe analyzed and manipulated and in that it

has provided the means o exploiting naturemore radically than was possible by premod-ern means. On the other hand, environmen-talists are aware that the social legitimation oenvironmental politics and their own insightsinto the state o nature centrally depend onscience. In ecocriticism, this ambivalence hastranslated into divergent perceptions o howt cnc od nom ct nqy.

At one end o the spectrum, a small num-

ber o ecocritics, such as Joseph Carroll andGlen Love, would like to make the lie sci-ences in general and evolutionary theory inparticular the oundation o literary study,ollowing E. O. Wilsons idea o consilience.Starting rom the idea that culture is based onthe human adapted mindthat is, a bio-logically constrained set o cognitive and mo-tivational characteristics (Carroll vii)thisgroup seeks to explain cultural phenomenain terms o what they accomplish or human

adaptation and survival. Many scholars inthe humanities almost instinctively recoil inhorror rom such a sociobiological agenda,associating it with social Darwinism or Nietz-schean ideology and the legitimations theyhave historically provided or various ormso political hegemony. But, in airness, Dar-winian theory should not simply be conatedwith such ideological appropriations: Carrollcategorically dismisses social Darwinism as a

value-laden misinterpretation o evolutionarytoy (xv).

Te more crucial question is what con-tribution an adaptationist approach, withits concept o human nature as a universal,species-typical array o behavioral and cog-nitive characteristics (vii), might be able tomake to a discipline that has recently investedmost o its theoretical capital in historical andcultural diversity. One answer is that there is

no compelling reason why cultural inquiry

has to ocus on cultura l dierences rathertn mt. F nogty ct-cism certainly used to be more interested inuniversals than it has been in the last three

decades. I the adaptationist approach canproduce an analysis o cultural and literaryuniversals that is descriptive rather than nor-mative and that does not rely on the valueso one particular culture dressed up as hu-man nature (as was usually done in earlier at-tempts to dene universals), it deserves to beheard as part o a ull theory o culture. Obvi-ously, an important part o such an analysiswould have to be a careul examination o the

terms used to describe the object o study:wod c literature, aesthetics, narrative,and culture itsel have complex cultural his-tories and cannot be taken or granted in aboogcy bd ppoc.

What is less clear is how such an adap-tationist understanding might inect the vastareas o literary study that are concerned withhistorically and cultural ly specic phenom-ena. Human anatomy and physiology havenot changed substantially over the last ew

thousand years, whereas cultural orms havevaried enormously over the same time period.While a biological perspective might providea general background, it seems at present un-likely to transorm the study o such varia-tions in the near uture. In this sense, literaryDarwinism ofers not so much a competingtheoretical approach as the outline o a difer-ent research area (culture, in its most abstractand universally human dimensions and evolu-

tionary unctions) that only partially overlapswith what most cultural scholars ocus on to-day (cultures, in their historically and locallyspecic dimensions and social unctions).

Most ecocritical work is shaped by sci-nc n mo ndct bt no mpotntway. Ecology, or many environmentalists acountermodel against normal analytic sci-ence, has opened the way or a holistic un-derstanding o how natural systems work

as vast interconnected webs that, i let to

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themselves, tend toward stability, harmony,and sel-regeneration. A ully mature ecosys-tem, the climax community o classical ecol-ogy, consists o a set o animals and plants

ideally adapted to their environment. Withsuch a standard in mind, science can be eas-ily associated with a set o ideal values anda code o ethics: Ecology . . . seemed to be ascience that dealt with harmony, a harmonyound in nature, ofering a model or a moreorganic, cooperative human community(Worster 363). Understood in this way, sci-ence can help determine what kinds o hu-man interventions into the natural world are

acceptable and what types o cultures are tobe considered superior or inerior, and it canhelp ecocriticism evaluate texts that engagewith nature. A powerul image behind an im-potnt oc movmnt, t d o otc,sel-regenerating ecosystems has catalyzedpolitical, legal, and cultural changes that haveunquestionably beneited the environmentnd mn w (487).

But by the time ecocriticism emergedin the 1990s, this idea had already been ex-

posed as no longer in accord with the stateo knowledge in ecological science. Even bythe 1960s, ecology had become a more ana-lytic, empirical, and mathematical eld thanit was at its emergence in the late nineteenthcentury. Holistic notions o universal con-nectedness, stability, and harmony had lostmuch o their credibility among ecologicalscientists, or the most part engaged in spe-cialized research (37279). As environmental

ton zd, coogy no ong ofda general oundation or morality and cau-sality: Historians thought ecology was therock upon which they could build environ-mental history; it turned out to be a swamp(White 1113, 1114). he biologist DanielBotkins popular scientic bookDiscordantHarmonies (1990) brought such insights to abroader public by presenting a diferent andmore complex image o ecosystems as dy-

namic, perpetually changing, and oen ar

rom stable or balanced: We have tended toview nature as a Kodachrome still-lie, much tot-gd tton . . . bt nt movng pct ow (6).

his idea is taken up in the irst book-length critique o ecocriticism, Dana PhillipssTe ruth o Ecology (2003), which lambastsenvironmental scholars or adhering to anobsolete notion o ecological science and ortranserring ecological terms to literary studyby means o mere metaphor (4282). Phillips iscertainly right in cautioning ecocritics againstundue metaphorization, moralization, or spir-itualization o scientic concepts and in call-ing or more up-to-date scientic literacyaliteracy that, one should mention, would min-imally require some training in quantitativemethods that does not to date orm part ocultural scholars education. Yet a comprehen-sive alternative model or linking ecology andecocriticism does not emerge rom his analy-sis. Perhaps, given the varied and controver-sial nature o current connections between thehumanities and sciences, such a model wouldbe a rather tall order. Nevertheless, because o

the importance o ecological science or en-vironmentally oriented criticism, Garrard issurely right that dening their relation moreclearly is one o the key challenges or ecocriti-cal scholarship (178).

Tose ecocritics who situate their workat the poststructuralist end o the spectrumwould go one step urther than Phillips bynot only criticizing particular ideas about theenvironment wrongly believed to derive rom

science but also exposing the concept o theenvironment itsel as a cultural construct. Inhis study o antebellum American literature,or example, David Mazel emphasizes thathis analysis

is not . . . about some myth othe environment,as i the environment were an ontologicallystable, oundational entity we have a mythabout. Rather, the environment is itsela myth,a grand able, a complex iction, a widely

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ubiquitous narrative. . . . []his study treatsthe environment as a discursive construction,something whose reality derives rom theways we write, speak, and think about it. (xii)

Mazel examines how early Americas sel-deinition as Natures Nation generatesenvironmental discourses that end up bolster-ing conservative social agendas despite theirpod pogv potc (x). T o-lutely constructivist and politically orientedargument is quite amiliar rom new histori-cism and cultural studies. o the extent thata scientic view o nature orms part o theanalysis at all, it is to study sciences role inthe emergence o a socioculturally groundedconception o the environment. Most ecocrit-ics have been reluctant to go as ar as Mazelin reducing nature to a discursive reality, buthe illustrates one extreme o the theoreticalspectrum: while literary Darwinists subor-dinate cultural phenomena to scientic ex-planation, ecopoststructuralists subordinatematerial reality and its scientic explanationto ct ny. Ecoctc nqy, mot

o which adopts a more dialectical perspectiveon the relation between culture and science,plays itsel out in the tension between thesetwo xtm.

Realisms: Perception and Representation

Tis tension between realist and constructiv-ist approaches crucially involves questionsabout how our perception o the environ-

ment is culturally shaped and how that per-ception is mediated through language andliterature. One strand o ecocriticism criticalo modernist thought has tended to privi-lege philosophies and modes o writing thatseek to transcend divisions between cultureand nature, subject and object, and body andenvironment. Te European phenomenologi-cal tradition has provided some o the mostpowerul impulses or thinking beyond such

dichotomies. Te German philosopher Mar-

tin Heideggers notion o dwelling as parto human essence and as a orm o existencethat allows other orms o being to maniestthemselves (16064) has been interpreted as

proto-environmentalist by some. Te Frenchphenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Pontysemphasis on bodily experience, and especiallyt otc mtpo tt ndgd t m-bc o t o t wod, pd ot nhis Le visible et l invisible, (18895, 30204),has been taken up by some ecocritics as away o envisioning the physical interrelat-edness o body and habitat. Te Norwegianphilosopher Arne Naesss deep ecology, -

nally, itsel inuenced by Heidegger, portraysenvironmentalism as the realization o a selthat encompasses both the individual and thecomo (17176).

T nnc o t pnomnoogcapproaches makes itsel elt in numerous lit-erary works and critical analyses that ocuson the importance o a sense o place, ondwelling, reinhabitation (Snyder), or anerotics o place (. Williams). Sometimesthis cognitive, afective, and ethical attach-

ment to place is envisioned in terms o epi-phanic usions with the environment: EdwardAbbey describes in Desert Solitaire how aera prolonged solitary stay in the wilderness,he began to perceive a lea when he lookedat his hand (251); Snyders Second ShamanSong and one o Aldo Leopolds sketcheseature similar experiences o total immer-sion. Tis emphasis on interrelatedness hadled some ecocritics to revise assumptions o

conventional rhetoricor example, the pa-thetic allacy, which is a allacy only to theego clencher, as Neil Evernden puts it: Tereis no such thing as an individual, only . . .individual as a component o place, denedby place (101, 103). Since metaphor is a par-ticularly easy way o establishing such con-nections between mind, body, and place, it isnot surprising that ecocriticism has engagedpoetry more than other schools o criticism

v n cnt dcd.

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Te interest in modes o thought and lan-guage that reduce or nulliy the distance be-tween the experiencing body and experiencedenvironment has been productive or ecocrit-

icism and set it apart rom other theoreticalapproaches. Yet the diculties o such a per-spective are also quite obvious. In the pursuito physical connectedness between body andenvironment, language and texts might ini-tially unction as mediating tools but can inthe end be little more than obstaclesas theyare or Macherots lyrically minded waterowl(see also Phillips 1120). Physical closenessalso usually reers to the individuals en-

counter with nature, but some eminist andindigenous perspectives understand this en-counter as a undamentally communal one.Phenomenological approaches tend not to o-er clear models or mediated and collectiveexperiences o nature; neither do they providethe means or explaining how the authentic-ity o natural encounters is itsel culturallyshaped. o the extent that this postulation oauthenticity relies on the assumption that allmodern subjects are alienated rom nature,

it is dicult to describe the particular ormso alienation sufered by socially disenran-cd gop.

his is not to say that attention to thereal di erences that class, gender, and racemake in the experience o nature does notcome with its own set o representationalproblems. As Buell has convincingly shown,many instances o toxic discourseac-counts o pollution, health threats, and the

displacement o native inhabitantsthat atrst sight look realistic rely in act on tropesand genres with long traditions in Americanliterary history (Writing3554). Te rhetori-cal power o such accounts derives preciselyrom their reliance on such traditions. o giveone well-known example, Rachel Carsonsinuential indictment o pesticide overuse inSilent Spring(1962) skillully uses tropes ot pto, bbc pocyp, nc

(in her comparisons o chemical contamina-

tion with radioactive allout), and 1950s anti-Communism (a grim specter has crept uponus almost unnoticed [3]; Killingsworth andPalmer 2732). Problems o textuality and

literariness thereore surace at both ends othe ecocritical spectrum, in phenomenologi-cally inormed explorations o the encounterbetween body and environment as well as inpolitically oriented approaches to the disjunc-tions between body, community, and naturethat result rom environmental pollution andoc oppon.

Poststructuralists circumvent such di-culties by presenting nature as a purely dis-

cursive construction. But like eminists andrace theorists who emphasized the culturalrather than biological grounding o theirobjects o study, these critics must ace theobjection that such a view plays into the ene-my nd by obctng t mt tyo environmental degradation. Tis problemmay be a minor one or academic culturaltoy, wc y tnd to b ncd bythe poststructuralist approach, as Mazel ar-gues (xv), but it is serious or green politics.

In the end, it seems likely that strong con-structivist positions will be less convincingto ecocritics, many o whom are also greenactivists, than weak constructivist ones thatanalyze cultural constructions o nature witha view toward the constraints that the realenvironment imposes on them (see Hayles;Soper 15155). Tis would also seem the mostpromising theoretical ground rom which topursue the analysis o environmental litera-

ture in its relation to cultural and rhetoricaltraditions, on one hand, and social as well ascntc t, on t ot.

Thinking Globally

Along with its theoretical diversity and in-terdisciplinarity, the rapid expansion o itsanalytic canon is one o the most strikingeatures o ecocriticism. British Romanti-

cism and twentieth-century American lit-


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erature initially proved the most ertile eldso inquiry, as two cultural moments with adecisive inluence on current conceptionso nature. Jonathan Bates Romantic Ecology

(1991) and Song of the Earth (2000) as wellas Karl Kroebers Ecological Literary Criti-cism (1994) blazed the environmental trailin studies o Romanticism; Slovics Seeking

Awareness in American Nature Writing(1992)and Buells Environmental Imagination ore-grounded the importance o nature writingor the American literary canon. Slovics andBuells eforts were accompanied by a multi-tude o other studies o American literature,

oen with a ocus on nonction and naturepoetry by such writers as Toreau, Emerson,John Muir, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeers,Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry,Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez. A secondwave o publications placed greater emphasison women writers, rom Willa Cather andAdrienne Rich to erry empest Williamsand Karen ei Yamashita, and on NativeAmerican literature, rom Leslie MarmonSilko to Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, and Joy

Harjo. Tis shi in themes and authors wasaccompanied by a broadening o the generichorizon. Science ction came into view as agenre with important environmental dimen-sions, as did lm and computer games. At thesame time, ecocritics have developed analyseso cultural institutions and practices outsidethe arts, rom landscape architecture andgn conmm to vo om o to-m nd t nton p ytm.

Critics such as Patrick Murphy and Slovichave also made sustained eorts to spreadecocritical analysis to the study o other cul-tures and languages, though their success hasbeen limited. Ecocriticism has achieved airlygood coverage o Australian, British, Cana-dian, and United States literatures, but eco-critical work on languages other than Englishis still scarce, and some o it is not well con-nected to scholarship in English. Murphys

monumental anthologyLiterature of Nature:

An International Sourcebook (1998) repre-sents a rst heroic efort to put ecocriticismon a truly comparatist and global basis. Yetits coverage remains uneven, not only because

t mo y on ngopon tn onother literatures but also because essays onsome countries cover several hundred years(India), others only one literary period (ai-wan), and yet others a single author (Brazil).Te surprising selectiveness o the bibliogra-phies in some o these essays is symptomatico broader international disjunctures. Workson British or American environmental litera-ture tend to reer to one another but not to

work like Jorge Marcones and Candace Slat-ers on Latin American texts or Axel Good-bodys and Heather Sullivans on Germanliterature, even though much o this work isavailable in English. Critical anthologies areusually not received by anglophone ecocriticswhen their ocus o study lies outside English-bd tt. Ecoctcm good dmore international than cultural studieswas initially, but its geographic scope is notevident in most o the published work. Obvi-ously, part o the problem is linguistic: mono-lingualism is currently one o ecocriticismsmost serious intellectual limitations. Te en-

vironmentalist ambition is to think globally,but doing so in terms o a single language isinconceivableeven and especially when thatngg gmonc on.

Precisely because ecocritical work encom-passes many literatures and cultures, it wouldo tnd to gn om co nggmnt

with theories o globalization (Garrard 178).o date, environmental-justice ecocriticism isthe only branch o the eld that has addressedgobzton n ny dpt. o pt tsomewhat simplistically, this type o ecocriti-cm jct conomc gobzton, wct ndtnd to b domntd by tnn-ton copoton, bt wcom ctbod cong nd nc, pcywn ty nttd by t dnn-

cd n t cnt conomc wod od.

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T ntdpndnc o t two om ogobzton, owv, dv co to-retical scrutiny. Ecological issues are situatedat a complex intersection o politics, economy,

technology, and culture; envisioning them int gob mpcton q n ngg-ment with a variety o theoretical approachesto gobzton, pcy, o coctc,to tt oc on t ct dmnon.Wt c totc mwo to ntogether the pieces o its international and in-terdisciplinary mosaic, ecocriticism promisesto become one o the most intellectually excit-ing and politically urgent ventures in current

literary and cultural studies.

Notes

1. See also the useul typology o ecocriticism in Reed14849.

2. See Cohen or a more chronological account ot cng.

3. Space constraint makes it impossible or me to givea detailed account o the role o ecoeminism here, whose

intellectual trajectory and complexity deserve an essayo t own.

4. As Levin sums it up, Much recent [ecocritical]work can be divided into two competing critical camps:realists, who advocate a return to nature as a means ohealing our modern/postmodern alienation, and socialconstructionists, who see that nature as a discursivestrategy and adopt a more skeptical stance with regard toits alleged healing properties. . . . []he dialectical crit-ics rom the two diferent camps appear to have more incommon with each other than the more and less sophis-tctd pnttv o t m cmp (17).

5. On Snyder, see Buell, Environmental Imagination

16667; on Lopod, Btod-Bond 224.

6. Admittedly, the emphasis has been on airly con-ventional orms o poetry rom Romanticism to the pres-ent. More recently, however, experimental poetry hascome into ocus, rom the ounding o the journal Ecopo-etics, in 2001, to Coopermans work on Olson, Harts onEgn, nd Ftc on Aby (17224).

7. Research by Americanists outside the United Statesincludes work by Hollm; Mayer; and Suberchicot. In her2004 presidential address to the American Studies As-sociation, Shelley Fisher Fishkin oregrounded the im-portance o more sustained attention to such research inAmcn td t g (4).

8. Even in single national traditions, some o theomissions are surprising: the essay on Brazil does notreer to Soaress critical anthologyEcologia e literatura(1991), and none o the our pieces on Japan in Murphysanthology mentions Col ligan-aylors Te Emergence of

Environmental Literature in Japan (199).9. For example, Larsen, Njgaard, and Petersens Na-

ture: Literature and Its Otherness (1997).

10. Guhas critique o American environmentalismand Guha and Mar tnez-Aliers Varieties o Environmen-

talism povd good ttng pont o c n nqy.

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thechanging

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ursula heise_hitchhicker's guide to eco criticism

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