Ecocriticism: Some Emerging TrendsLawrence Buell Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 87-115 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v019/19.2.buell.html Access provided by Jawaharlal Nehru University (10 Jan 2014 09:40 GMT) Ecocriticism Some Emerging Trends lawrence buell The Problem of the Unstable Signifier What is ecocriticism? The imprecision with which it has been defined and the increasingly disparate uses to which it and its cognates have been put recall Arthur Lovejoy’s classic essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924)—by which Lovejoy meant the problem of distinguishing among conflicting usages that belies the implication of a coherent category implied by its customary deployment in the singular.1 For romanticism, Lovejoy tried to impose a semblance of order through historicization, even though he was sorely tempted to throw up his hands. Romanticism “has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign,” he lamented. “When a man is asked . . . to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or tendencies he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have flourished, or in whom they are supposed to be chiefly exemplified” (“ODR,” 232). In a similarly jaundiced mood, one might say the same of ecocriticism. Although a term of much more recent coinage than romanticism was in 1924, in the two decades since it took off as something like a movement it too has generated initiatives or camps that draw 88 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2 on increasingly discrepant archives and critical models, such that even most self-identified ecocritics now read each other’s work selectively rather than comprehensively, and distinctions become increasingly hard to make between them and other environmentally oriented humanists who would resist being called ecocritics however relevant their work seems to those who do. As Nirmal Selvamony recently put it, “ecocritics are not agreed on what constitutes the basic principle in ecocriticism, whether it is bios, or nature or environment or place or earth or land. Since there is no consensus, there is no common definition.”2 Partly for that reason, even the choice of basic rubric has been challenged, by me among others.3 Ursula Heise rightly observes that “ecocriticism has imposed itself as convenient shorthand for what some critics prefer to call environmental criticism, [or] literary-environmental studies, [or] literary ecology, [or] literary environmentalism, [or] green cultural studies.”4 Indeed, ecocriticism—to stay with the usual lumping term if only for convenience, even though I myself prefer “environmental criticism” for reasons that will shortly become clear—has a history both of strong position-taking by individual spokespersons and of reluctance to insist on a single normative, programmatic definition of its rightful scope, method, and stakes. By no coincidence, the most cited definition, by Cheryll Glotfelty in the introduction to the Ecocriticism Reader, characterizes it simply as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”5 Nonetheless, it is possible to devise a usable narrative of that initiative’s evolution and present agendas, including reasonable guesses about likely future directions. From Inception until the Near-Now: The Two Waves Until a few years ago, as a decent approximation one might characterize ecocriticism as a two-stage affair since its inception as a self-conscious movement in the early 1990s. What follows is an updated version of an earlier attempt to do so that seems to have gained fairly wide if not universal acceptance (FEC, 1–28).6 As a self-conscious critical practice calling itself such, ecocriti- represented most prominently by cultural critic-historians Raymond Williams and Leo Marx. would have claimed that these particular generic and historical foci were to be considered the sole rightful provinces for ecocritical work. had called attention to the inflection of literary practice at this pivotal moment by the accelerating destabilization of “nature” owing to urbanization and industrial capitalism. most would have granted readily enough that ecocritical work might comprehend any and all expressive media. functional discourses—of scholarly articles in the natural and social science. and U. architectural. especially its poststructuralist and new historicist avatars—both of which inspired groundbreaking work in romanticism studies—to interpret ostensible concern for the natural world or literary representation thereof that was so salient during the romantic era and its aftermath as epiphenomenal if not nugatory—a discursive and/or ideological screen.8 The other was the tendency in latetwentieth-century critical theory.7 At this early stage. including not only visual. became especially identified with the project of reorienting literary-critical thinking toward more serious engagement with nonhuman nature in two different although related ways. One.” a term . and other nontextual genres of practice but also even more purely instrumental. which prevailed through the 1990s. the texts of legislative documents and treaties. a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit made additionally tempting by two sorts of influential prior critical interventions. with a genre focus especially on poetry in that tradition (including its twentieth-century Anglo-American filiations).S. if pressed about the matter. So it befell that the primary agenda of first-wave ecocriticism. specifically within English and American literature. few ecocritics. The more distinctively humanistic was a range of post-Heideggerian phenomenological theories—often lumped together under the heading of “deep ecology. from two semicoordinated and interpenetrating epicenters: British romanticism. with a genre focus especially on the Thoreauvian imprint. and so forth. The initial de facto concentration on selected literary genres within the long Anglo-American nineteenth century was contingent rather than inherent. nature writing (ditto). On the contrary.Buell: Ecocriticism 89 cism began around 1990 as an initiative within literary studies. critical work constructed as a cross-pollination of autobiographical and/or reported witnessing to personal experience and academic analysis. especially his 1993 book Forests: The Shadows of Civilization. and British romantic scholar Jonathan Bate. whose 1991 Romantic Ecology inaugurated British ecocriticism and whose The Song of the Earth (2000) brought Heideggerian ecocriticism to its high point to date. meaning especially by ecology. One symptom of this is the very strong persistence of what Scott Slovic has called “narrative scholarship”12 in ecocritical practice—that is. The second most distinctive path taken by first-wave ecocriticism was to try to make literary theory and criticism more scientifically informed. human being and human consciousness are thought to be grounded in intimate interdependence with the nonhuman living world.9 According to this view. The Comedy of Survival (1972). no. All this is not to say that ecocritical interest in the idea of some sort of inherent affective if not also spiritual bond between individual humans and the nonhuman world has lost its hold—indeed quite the contrary. and geology. Two distinguished cases in point were the Stanford University comparatist Robert Pogue Harrison.19.90 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.14 Meeker sought to retheorize comedy as a genre expressive of the sense of human survival as .2 coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. now widely looked upon as the first significant ecocritical study. environmental biology. and the value set upon subjective individual experience of environment tends to be framed accordingly as a product of historical circumstance and acculturation. This initiative was largely the work of American scholars who seized upon a book by the forgotten critic Joseph Meeker.13 But the meaning of existential contact with environment today now tends to be more self-consciously framed as socially mediated. resistance to the mystical-holistic dimension of deep ecology propagated especially by its popularizers but in the long run even more significantly growing skepticism about the adequacy if not the inherent legitimacy of lines of analysis that privilege subjective perception/experience as against social context/human collectivities.10 The appeal of this model has since waned11 for reasons both “political”—anxiety about the taint of Heidegger’s Nazism—and “philosophical”: most immediately. 18 The most lastingly influential first-wave attempt to fuse scientistic and humanistic thinking has so far probably been ecocritical work in the area of bioregionalism—an eclectic body of thinking that interweaves findings from ecology. such as Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. genetic-determinist explanations of consciousness) and the “humanistic reduction” of science as cultural construct. phenomenology. His most prolific successor in this vein has been the American scholar Joseph Carroll. And some recent environmental critics have approached the literature-science interface from entirely new directions.g. history. first-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-fo- . geography. this vision has not won many adherents. and aesthetics in the service of the normative claim that a person’s primary loyalty as citizen should be to the bioregion—or ecological region—rather than to nation or some other jurisdictional unit. whose various works.19 Ecological literacy is seen as a crucial aspect of bioregional citizenship. But not so the fundamental call for literary critics and humanists generally to attain greater science literacy that was framed by a number of first-wave ecocritics (perhaps most influentially by William Howarth and Glen Love). as with Ursula Heise’s intensive exploration of the pertinence of risk theory for reading texts informed by a postmodern conception of the indeterminacy of the signifying process.16 Although second-wave environmental criticism has generally paid less attention to conceptual models derived from science per se than to “science studies”—that is. anthropology.20 As already noted.15 In its most sweepingly insistent forms.Buell: Ecocriticism 91 enabled by strategies of adaptive behavior. Among Americanists.. constitute the most sustained quest to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences by means of a literary theory obedient to conceptual models derived from life science. including Literary Darwinism (2004). this bioregional persuasion is especially associated with certain place-based creative writers who have also gained standing as critics. the study of scientific theory and practice as inflected by its historicocultural contexts—the aspiration continues to run strong17 to enlist scientific method and theory in the service of humanistic-literary analysis while avoiding the opposite pitfalls of scientistic reductionism (e. nonfictional nature writing. on the American side. But notable efforts to counteract this are under way on a number of fronts. focused on the two preferred genres of nature poetry—as in the work of John Elder and Jonathan Bate—and. clearly is still in its early stages. by far the majority of selfidentified ecocritics remain Anglophone scholars working on Anglophone texts.23 The expansion of understanding of the rightful ecocritical canon to encompass nothing less than all the literatures of the world.2 cused and especially as an Anglo-American romanticism-and-beyond affair. So. perhaps particularly Japanese. the autonomous traditions of Asian.19.92 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. at the universities of Wisconsin and Kansas. (This article itself is symptomatic of that ongoing imbalance.24 Conversely. no. for example. American ecocritic Patrick Murphy’s 1998 edited collection Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook gives a panoramic view of the geographical expansion of ecocritical practice and textual reach in its first stages. a medievalist. postcolonialists. In India. the leading ecocritic at the University of Notre Dame is a neoclassicist. with critics throughout the world understood as having a rightful stake in ecocritical practice. for which Murphy has continued to campaign in a series of single-authored essay collections that are extremely useful as bibliographical guides even if analytically somewhat thin. geography.21 Second-wave ecocriticism has sought to press far beyond the first wave’s characteristic limitations of genre. Korean. at Bucknell. and historical epoch.22 As of this writing.) Even other major Europhone literary cultures are as yet relatively underexplored. As the membership rolls of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) attest. environmental criticism was on the way to engaging the whole sweep of Western literary history from antiquity to the present. the first generation of ecocritics has taken a special interest in the literatures and philosophical traditions of the subcontinent. By the early twenty-first century. his most recent is Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies. And it had also taken root in eastern and southern Asia as well as Anglo-Europe and the Anglophone diaspora. . as of now the leading ecocritic at the University of California–Berkeley is a specialist in early modernism. That is partly why bioregionalism remains influential. this imbalance has been changing and will doubtless continue to do so in future. Against this. despite the degree to which ecocritics in China and Taiwan have been influenced by Western models and Western texts. bioregionalism generally acknowledges at least in principle the significance of metropolitan networks as part of regional history and culture. the area in which ecocriticism’s aspiration to expand its geographical horizons has so far come closest to realizing its potential has been its crosspollination with (so far mostly Anglophone) postcolonial studies. Environmental criticism is still in the exploratory stages of learning how to theorize urban networks as part of its mandate. With this still-incipient expansion of geographical and cultural horizons came a marked shift in ecocritical thinking about the exemplary landscape or landscapes it should seek to engage. and City Wilds. and that especially since the industrial revolution. For even more fundamentally distinctive to the second wave of ecocriticism that started to predominate around the year .26 But even though ecocritics continue to devote a disproportionate attention to (representation of) “open spaces” compared to city space (except for open spaces within cities). environmental criticism as well as the long-standing investment of Sinophone creative writers in environmental issues seem to be on the verge of figuring much more greatly in the thinking of Western ecocritics than they have hitherto. on which more below. The attempts so far seem have been more earnest than resoundingly successful. starting with the collections The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. for despite tending to attach special value to ecosystemic contexts and to small-sized. second-wave ecocriticism contended that that wall of separation is a historically produced artifact. edited by Terrell Dixon (2002).25 To date.Buell: Ecocriticism 93 and Sinophone. metropolitan landscape and the built environment generally must be considered as at least equally fruitful ground for ecocritical work. that throughout human history nature itself has been subject to human reshaping. edited by Michael Bennett and David W. First-wave ecocriticism typically privileged rural and wild spaces over urban ones. Teague (1999). place-based organic communities. 94 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. This turn can be explained partly as a reaction against what was alleged—with some if not complete justice—to be first-wave ecocriticism’s naively pre-theoretical valorization of experiential contact with the natural world and its trust in the power of artifacts either to render the natural world or to motivate return to it. no. and so forth. This reaction was not merely theoretic and notional but also pragmatic and political. “environmentalism” connotes first and foremost the realm of nonhuman nature. In this. Indeed. whose geographic gaze was directed more at landscapes of urban and/or industrial transformation rather than at country or wilderness. But this push was not solely motivated by the anxieties of intratribal professionalism. and whose environmental ethics and politics were sociocentric rather than ecocentric. First-wave studies resonated with its preservationist edge as traditionally understood both by historians and by activists: environmentalism equals nature protection in thinly populated remote areas. as part of the same composite field. This sociocentric strand had actually been developing alongside the first since the 1800s. even today. but it was not until the 1980s that environmental historians and environmentalists regularly began to think of issues like workplace safety and waste disposal as integral to “environmentalism”—that is. Second-wave critiques were also reacting against the philosophic ecocentrism broadly presupposed if not explicitly advocated in most leading first-wave work. to make the movement look less like an outlier within the contemporary critical theory scene. second-wave ecocriticism was partly influenced by a more complex grasp of the longer history of environmentalism itself. by contrast. wild spaces. Second-wave ecocriticism. In their valuable 1997 survey of environmental movements . which in practice meant to some extent as we shall soon see trying to inflect it with one or another strand of poststructuralism.2 2000 than the diversification of archives and landscapes per se was the turn toward cultural studies and cultural theory. Second-wave ecocriticism strove.19. by contrast. affiliated itself more closely with the other main historical strand of environmentalist thinking: public health environmentalism. against what was widely—albeit lumpingly—perceived as the quietistic if not retrograde politics of ecocentric ecocriticism. the project of representing nature’s complications and internal contradictions. Two conspicuous examples of second-wave attempts to infuse ecocriticism with greater theoretical sophistication have been the work of Dana Phillips and Timothy Morton.Buell: Ecocriticism 95 worldwide. executed for his leadership of protests against the devastation of his homeland by Big Oil interests in the Niger Delta. her Japanese successor and quasi-counterpart Michiko Ishimure. intricacy. Phillips’s 2003 The Truth of Ecology sternly indicts what he takes to be the epistemological naïveté of virtually all first-wave ecocriticism. it is a stimulating corrective to simplistic mimeticist readings.29 Though the book overshoots its mark by denying any legitimacy whatsoever to literature as a conduit of environmental representation (see FEC. 29–61). and even more useful for its interlinked critiques of the embedded holistic assumptions in much ecological theory and of humanistic overkill in attempted deconstructions of science as cultural construct. and panache as . Morton unfolds a series of ways in which literary and other aesthetic representations filter inputs from the material environment with such verve. and John Muir. the Rachel Carson of Silent Spring.”27 Such insistence on the residual parochialism of Western environmentalism no longer seems quite so urgent at a time of such cross-cutting environmental-humanistic symposia given over wholly or partly to ecological urbanism as the 2008 Berlin “Transcultural Spaces” conference and the 2009 Uppsala “Counter Natures” conference— although it remains a necessary counterbalance. Henry David Thoreau. and the Nigerian writer-activist Ken Sarowiwa.28 But to continue with ecocriticism per se. Whereas first-stage ecocritics privileged figures like British romantic poet John Clare. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier ended with a chapter celebrating the urban and regional planner Lewis Mumford as “The Forgotten American Environmentalist. Morton’s 2007 Ecology without Nature offers a more nuanced deconstruction of first-wave commitment to “ecomimesis.30 In contrast to Phillips’s categorical rejection. more consequential for second-stage ecocritics were the likes of Charles Dickens (who was deeply involved in Victorian-era public health environmentalism). the American “muckraking” novelist Upton Sinclair.” that is. at least—to a quasi-rehabilitation of the project he sees himself as dismantling. British ecocritic Greg Garrard. but the significance of the shift of priorities toward a fusion of cultural constructionism and social justice concerns cannot be denied.”32 However much Morton and Phillips sometimes shoot from the hip.19. Among its crucial contributions have been its salutary broadening intensification of ecocritical concentration on nonwhite writers other than Native and a reconception of the stakes of the latter. however. less peremptory statement. critiques Morton’s baby-out-the-with-bathwater assertions in “How Queer Is Green?”31 Morton’s subsequent The Ecological Thought (2010).2 to amount—for this reader.33 This collection has not yet become the reference point that the earlier one still remains. “hugely expand[ing] our ideas of space and time. The prioritization of issues of environmental justice—the maldistribution of environmental benefits and hazards between white and nonwhite. Morton then further argues (reminiscently of Lovejoy) that “nature” is so polyvalent and baggage-ridden a term that it should be banished from the lexicon. borderless. hitherto (and still) a markedly Caucasian group. which in a spirit of sobertoned moral and political conviction pits itself against the 1996 Ecocriticism Reader. and a diversification of the ecocritical ranks. is the 2002 Environmental Justice Reader. A more representative expression of the sociocentric thrust of second-wave ecocriticism. of what he takes to be the virtues of his preferred signifier: “The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. author of a respected book-length overview of ecocritical emphases (Ecocriticism. characterized as a “prequel” to Ecology without Nature. their books are provocative tours de force in the worthy as well as the equivocal sense: wit and critical sophistication offsetting whatever sententious excess. 2004).96 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. interpenetrative (collapsing self-other firewalls whether we like it or not).34 its facilitation of the recent synergy between ecocriticism postcolonial studies described below. no. just as preservationist ecocentrism was for the first wave. albeit with similar penchant for aphoristic manifesto.” dynamic. A further mark of the reach and timeliness of en- . offers a more sustained. to include more scholars of color. rich and poor—is second-wave ecocriticism’s most distinctive activist edge. the modern locus classicus of “toxic discourse” (WEW. The paradigmatic environment for second-wave ecocriticism tends to be the compromised. a semi-autobiographical activist ethnography that assesses the clashing claims and memories as to the history. such as cultural geographer Jake Kosek’s Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (2006). rightful ownership. Native Americans. 30–54). both from high art and from vernacular culture. U. concern with issues of toxification and concern for the plight of racial minorities. Indeed. The first is exemplified by American ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo’s work on the discourse of MCS—literally “multiple chemical sensitivity. and environmental activists.S. both of which demonstrate that sociocentric ecocriticism may well but need not necessarily direct itself toward issues of racial injustice specifically as top priority. government agencies. body as environmental construct. At first sight.Buell: Ecocriticism 97 vironmental justice revisionist ecocriticism has been its resonance with concurrent environmental-humanistic work in areas where there seems no question of direct influence. The article from which I quote is incorporated in her Bodily Natures: Science. endangered landscapes of Carson’s Silent Spring. a committed environmental justice revisionist ecocritic would consider these two domains inseparable—that is. But second-wave ecocriticism has attached special importance.” that is.” commonly known as “environmental illness. and proper future policy for forestlands in a district of the American Southwest between longtime Hispanic residents. which develops the idea of “transcorporeality.” The cases she surveys include minority sufferers but not only those. this might seem to reprise older notions of an “ecological self” from deep ecology . Environment. as Carson did not. to marginalized minority peoples and communities both at home and abroad—and with texts that engage such concerns. What May Lie Ahead The sociocentric thrust of environmental justice revisionism feeds into at least two strands of emergent ecocritical work. and the Material Self. The last half-decade has seen a dramatic increase in the synergy between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. insisting that identity is first and foremost biological. no. A more autobiographical complement to Alaimo’s study.” which builds on the irony of the coincidence that ecocriticism first attracted wide attention at the same historical moment that Ken Saro-wiwa was executed—but to appearances remained completely oblivious of that event.35 This leads her to a qualified rehabilitation of ecomimesis—contending. Graham Huggan’s 2004 “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism. as in Rob Nixon’s 2005 “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.98 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. following revisionist work in science studies on which she draws. Most consequential for our purposes is how this leads Alaimo.2 theory. Environmental justice ecocriticism’s investment in marginalized communities connects it with a second emergent initiative: postcolonial environmentalism. whether the topic be the microcosm of the toxified body or the macrocosm of climate change. not phenomenological.19. what’s left is nothing more than “a form of cultural creationism” [“HQG”]). Such work may direct itself centrally toward environmental justice issues. is Harold Fromm’s wide-ranging The Nature of Becoming Human. for example.” which like Nixon’s essay seems to have been designed as the platform for a book project. a sustained mediation between and interweave of humanistic-subjective and scientific lines of explanation to the end of dramatizing the larger civilizational and planetary stakes of coming to terms with human embeddedness in techno-biotic actuality.36 Alternatively. I suspect that ecocritics also concerned with the relation between bodies and physical environment will continue to struggle with versions of this issue. no less consequential in its own way. but with an activist edge—the reductiveness of social constructionism itself as a trap that can be used against MCS sufferers to claim that their symptoms are psychosomatic if not fictive (BN. that environmental memoirs of cancer victims may possess substantive empirical content. conceives postcolonialism and ecocriticism more as complementary than as contrary forms of activist (or proto- . That’s precisely the ground on which Garrard critiques Morton’s anti-naturism (“Without ecology. 15). to critique—as did Phillips.” he insists. Yet Alaimo is resolutely materialist. and Derek Walcott. The precise future course of this ongoing cross-pollination remains to be seen. since which postcolonialists have begun to take more notice of ecocriticism than they had before.38 The origins of ecocriticism’s current turn toward postcolonial studies actually date back to Patrick Murphy’s wide-ranging work and. the last several years have seen such an astonishing surge in postcolonial ecocritical studies41 that it is impossible to believe either that future ecocritical work focused on “Western” literatures will remain uninfluenced by it or that future postcolonial studies will be able to content itself as for the most part it once did with sociocultural frames of analysis that fail to take environmental dimensions of inquiry into account. but two things seem certain: first. non-Eurocentric ecocriticism will generate alternative frameworks and vocabularies for enriching reconceiving ecocritical categories. One coeditor of the first Indian ecocritical collection (Selvamony’s) tentatively proposes as an . as Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey suggest in a recent article.37 And in one of the most ambitious singleauthored projects completed so far. in a story line that goes roughly like this: ecocritics were somewhat tardily energized by an already thriving postcolonial studies. with respect to postcolonial theory more specifically. debate will continue for some time to come as to the extent to which ecocritical models generated in the first world apply to developing-world contexts. and thus as part of the complex apparatus of subjugation: Timothy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic and Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease. two books of 2000 in British romantic studies that focus in mutually quite different ways on imperial imagination of the exotic. environmental justice issues figure as one among several constituent strands: George Handley’s New World Poetics—a reconception of comparative hemispheric American ecocultural identity around the work of Walt Whitman. Pablo Neruda. and second.39 Overall. and relatedly. to which rising environmental justice concerns had predisposed them.40 But be that as it may. the postcolonial-ecocritical dialogue seems to have come more from the side of postcolonialism than vice versa.Buell: Ecocriticism 99 activist) intervention. So. which seems to have become a canonical text for postcolonial ecocritics since its 2005 publication. other such interventions may prove useful in helping relativize ecocriticism’s preexisting Eurocentric (and in the first instance Anglophonic) vocabulary and analytical biases.” is surely destined to become the primary ecocritical model of place-attachment as against the . like postcolonial literature itself. but. internally fractured model of conceiving the global within the local as we find in The Hungry Tide.2 alternative framework the Tamil idea of tinai. and the sacred (EE. migrants or refugees. a traditional worldview that rests on a fusion of domestic sphere.100 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. where “all the characters are.19. to varying degrees. which in turn becomes a pretext for the Indian government to manipulate the displaced immigrants and disadvantaged minority indigenes of this region that is now officially defined as parkland while rewarding cronyism in the form of a corrupt civil service. One way the extension of ecocriticism to postcolonial geographies and archives has already begun to do this is by sophisticating the conception of place and place-attachment. in Indo-Anglian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. for example. Whether or not this particular trifold gains much of a hearing. both by taking into account a far greater variety of ecocultural particularisms and by conceiving placeness less centripetally. in which first-world initiatives to study and protect an endangered species of fresh-water dolphins contend with institutionalized national (and international) regulations to protect the endangered Bengal tiger. First-wave and to some extent even second-wave ecocriticism have tended to be strongly region and community-oriented.42 Some such multilayered. prioritizing local place-allegiance. and the like. biological environment. Postcolonial texts and ecocritical analysis often also advocate for these. no. the swampland archipelago in the Bay of Bengal—the Sundarbans—becomes an arena of contending force fields as unstable as the ever-shifting island terrain itself. ecological distinctiveness. xv). ultimately global forces. in more cosmopolitan and global terms. they have also been much more proactive in substantive reconception of the local and the regional in terms of the impact of translocal. Planetary overheating has been a staple science fiction scenario for almost half a century.43 Still. The most attention-getting result to date has been Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. 116). points to another arena that environmental critics interested in developing the theory of a global ecoculture will surely explore more fully in the future than they have to date: climate change anxiety. This is clear from the single most important recent ecocritical contribution to revisionist place studies. Admittedly.” which reflects on the irony of the complex interactions between the rise of post-Enlightenment democratic institutions and the advent of what today is increasingly been claimed as the Anthropocene Age—a new geologic era marked by humankind’s alleged emergence as the dominant influence on earth’s geologic change. So far. science fiction and documentary film are far ahead of ecocriticism here. which briefly raises the subject of global warming. Heise’s epilogue. as in the extended shots of Gore’s monologues at the blackboard about the import of the “hockey-stick”-shaped diagram charting the sudden rise of earth’s temperature during the past century. and the advent of a global culture of risk produced by post-nuclear fears of a contaminated planet.Buell: Ecocriticism 101 comparatively self-contained ecocultural localism of Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Thoreau’s Walden—at least as these authors have generally been read (PE. which explores the possibilities of reinventing place-attachment on a planetary scale. neither there nor in film have the results been particularly distinguished by contrast to (say) the best postcolonial literature on other environmental issues. Nothing generated within ecocriticism thus far comes close to matching intellectual historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s brilliant short polemic “The Climate of History: Four Theses. ecocriticism . It takes up postcolonial place construction as one dimension of this but puts more emphasis on such factors as the virtual networking of the planet through the information revolution and cyberfiction. which both as dramatic invention and as cinematography is quite pedestrian. Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). Not that postcolonialism is the only source from which revisionist critique of the parochialism of predominant early stage ecocritical thinking about place has come. some is quite impressionistic even if suggestive. and metaphor (e. like American ecocritic Ken Hiltner’s analysis of the controversy over the burning of highly sulfurous coal in seventeenth-century London.102 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. like this essay..g. as having first allegiance to literary criticism and theory as against other disciplinary bases in expressive media across the board and in cultural theory generally? On the affirmative side it can be argued not only that literature is the home discipline of most critics surveyed here who identify themselves and/ or are identified with environmental criticism.45 Third. as have many other contributions reviewed here. Gifford on pastoral). even if not global warming specifically. First.48 Such projects as the latter re-pose. the broader question suggested at the outset: To what extent should ecocriticism be conceived as belonging to literature studies. Moore on personification).46 Some work. including Stephanie LeMenager’s on the middle-class disposition to react hypersensitively to vicissitudes of weather and bodily comfort that ironically aggravates both concern about climate destabilization and bonding to obsolete technologies for maintaining comfortable levels of heat and cold. several ambitious historically oriented book-length environment-and-culture studies are now under way on the culture of fossil fuel dependence. such as a recent reinterpretation of the demise of the last portion of Beowulf as an unconsciously prophetic allegory of global warming in its narrative of nature’s revenge on human theft of earth’s resources by the fire-breathing dragon in the third part. genre (many American ecocritics on nature writing and/or autobiography). make for a “natural” fit with literature studies.47 Finally. through exegesis of such works of global warming imagination as exist. but also.g. by reinterpretation of texts from precontemporary eras that engage issues of anthropogenic climate change.19. even more pertinently. through extension of environmental justice criticism to the plight of imminent losers in this process. as with Anne Maxwell on the futurological ecofiction of Australian writer George Turner. is painstakingly researched. that—at least up to a point—ecocriticism’s track record of contributions to the study of mode (e.. no.44 Second. including nonhumans. not to mention other aspects of stylistic representation.49 But to stress this home- .2 has started to respond in at least four ways. meaning in the first instance especially though not merely “ecofeminism.52 as well as the roots of environmental justice (e. given both how pervasive their influence has been and how coming to terms with that influence requires one to qualify further any neat distinction between first-wave and individual person/experience orientation as against second-wave and sociocentric or collective orientation. or of public poli- . where Catriona Sandilands stands out as the leading figure to date. critical visions and practices focused on the relation—factical and/or fictive—between women and environment. which tends to be directed away from the realm of literature entirely toward analysis of other disciplinary discourses.54 A second case in point is environmental rhetoric studies. Two even more notable transdisciplinary initiatives that have energized ecocriticism from the start. cross-cutting. Seager). and hybridized and have patently become still more so. of which I have thus far omitted mention in my haste to get more quickly to the present.Buell: Ecocriticism 103 discipline affinity beyond a point is to belie the extent to which the tribes of literature-trained environmental critics have always been markedly eclectic. from its inception well before 1990—as in the revisionist literary history of Americanist Annette Kolodny and in intellectual historian Caroline Merchant’s anti-patriarchal remapping of the scientific revolution50—has rested more on interdisciplinary gender theory than on literary theory per se and has achieved greatest force not as a project of literary hermeneutics—though that has often been its ostensible focus51—but also and more consequentially to the end of interrogating the cultural history and consequences of symbolic gendering of “land” as female. First-wave ecocriticism showed this cross-cutting propensity in the engagements with phenomenology and evolutionary biology noted earlier..g. Environment-and-gender studies.” a congeries of sometimes conflicting. and the implicit androcentrism of holistic models of selfness in deep ecology and other forms of person-centric ecotheory.53 The same holds to an even greater extent for the more recent challenge to the heteronormativity of (some) early stage gender-and-environment studies by queer ecocriticism. One has been gender studies. deserve if anything even greater emphasis. from ecocriticism as textual practice to environmental criticism as cultural practice. Greg Mitman for film). Not that .2 cy debates. and Asia) and such imprimaturs as the Library of Congress’s 2002 adoption of “Ecocriticism” as a subject heading (see “GTL”). the United States. Frederick Buell’s expose of corporate “greenwash” rhetoric of environmental disinformation. To be sure. or in some combination thereof—would remain central to ecocriticism. has been that second-wave work has shifted the center of gravity in a “cultures of environment” direction.g. politically.57 But only during the past dozen years or so has work on non-literary expressive media by critics operating outside literature as home discipline begun to characterize itself as “ecocriticism”. reflecting long-standing interests by some of their pre-ecocritical predecessors.g.56 Conversely.55 Still. as in Killingsworth and Palmer’s 1992 Ecospeak. environmental criticism directed at other arenas of creative practice has regularly drawn upon the analogy of literary imagination as well as literary and literary-critical work (e. no. the case studies of the rhetorics of advocacy and controversy collected in Green Culture. spiritually...104 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. Anne Whiston Spirn for landscape architecture. and Kosek’s Understories. ecocritics for whom literature was the preferred genre of practice have always enlisted other media very inventively (e. Christoph Irmscher on botanical illustration).58 Why so late? One explanation may simply be that disciplinary borders aren’t quite as porous as one would like to think.19. Another might be that wider recognition of an initially small vanguard operating at first within a relatively delimited pair of niches needed to await the proliferation of venues (the 2000s have seen a dramatic increase in ecocritical journals from one to at least seven in the United Kingdom. without which these sundry forms of institutionalization might never have happened. philosophically. ethically. indeed. Angela Miller for art history. But a more decisive factor. it would be fair to say that during first-wave ecocriticism the impression generally prevailed that the work of reconceiving artifacts made out of words—whether understood aesthetically. Irmscher and Braddock’s A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009) may mark the first really decisive turning point in this respect. ecocriticism will adjudicate between a vision of critical practice as ultimately justified by its commitment to criticism in the service of environmentalist social action as against a more academic-professional justification of ecocritical practice as knowledge production or humanistic understanding. Animal studies are self-evidently a hot topic these days for critical theory—hotter even than global warming. On the contrary. and literary scholars have been speaking out at an unprecedented rate on the subject of human ob- . the shift has contributed to undermining the assumption—never solidly established as doctrine. and what should or should not count as ecocritical work. ethicists. legal theorists. too. It mirrors the direction so-called literary scholarship has itself taken on the subject of race. creative and critical practice of the environmental turn across the array of expressive media—both “old” and “new. narrative of environmental criticism’s inexorable advance. it must still be reckoned as a work in progress.60 Relatedly. and gender during the past twenty years: away from texts and canons. A notable case in point is the next-to-last issue I’ll take up here: animal studies.59 Then. if at all. epistemologists. anyhow—as properly an arena of literary studies. I do not mean to make this essay sound like a sunny. The shift to a cultural practice emphasis exposes beyond power of refutation the quixoticism of any attempt to set fixed disciplinary borders to ecocriticism. class. But with regard to the understanding of ecocriticism’s proper range.Buell: Ecocriticism 105 there is anything especially strange or unique about this shift. much less imperial. some strange disconnects obtain between “environmentally”-oriented work and other initiatives that at first sight ought to seem more intimately allied. Not only life scientists and cultural anthropologists. but also neuroscientists. Although most ecocritics would probably argue that these aims are inseparable.” “high” and “popular”—(to the extent that such distinctions hold anymore) remains more a menu of options than a coherent program: an expanding universe of bustling activity with limited cross-communication. It remains an open question as to how. one finds sharply conflicting positions expressed. toward cultural formations. to adjudicate whether this or that scholar should be thought of as an ecocritic. being transcorporeality as a construal of being in the world that is simultaneously animal. Many ecocritics suspect animal studies of being insufficiently attentive to environmental or ecosystemic concerns. master-slave relationships.62 At all events. for instance. One should not make too much of this particular example. has from its inception shown keen interest in the representation of animals. that the combination of common ground and complementary vulnerabilities in environmental and animal advocacies make it highly desirable to strive for closer rapprochement. ecocriticism and animal studies have not been as closely allied as might be supposed.19. interspecies communication. and so forth. and in interspecies communication and ethics. the cyborg theory of cultural theorist Donna Haraway.106 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. And even within it. But as yet. I look in vain for the ecocriticism I would describe. and so forth (particularly Agamben. Ecocriticism. no. one example of such concern. technological. and environmental. and the other contributors virtually none at all. Historically. the porousness or solidity of human-nonhuman border. discussed above. in the (re)conception of humans as animals. ecocritics have clearly been listening less to each other than to the animal rights ethics of Peter Singer and others. Time will tell if such in- .2 ligations toward the nonhuman world. and of being likely to set problematic limits on human moral accountability to the nonhuman (as with Singer’s privileging of higher life-forms only) or to enlist beasts mainly as proxies for theorizing forms of human abjection. such suspicions may moderate in future. and the late pronouncements of Derrida and Agamben on “the animal” as a question-begging marker of human distinctiveness. for its part. Canadian ecocritics Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer plausibly argue. and to a lesser extent Haraway’s 2003 Companion Species Manifesto). Conceivably. ecocritics surely have a stake in generating the models for so-called posthumanist identity. to adapt a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet ecocritical scholarship in this area seems to have had little if any impact outside the movement. even their contributions cite very little ecocritical work.61 Although three of the twelve contributors to the spring 2009 PMLA symposium on animal studies are closely associated with ecocriticism. the problem of intercommunication between critical vocabularies becomes commensurately greater—and all the troubling because.” coedited by the American ecocritics Joni Adamson and William Gleason. in the process also achieve a stronger shared critical vocabulary among the growing number of ecocritics worldwide. The planetary scope of the multiple environmental “crises” facing earth and earthlings in the twenty-first century requires a capacity to communicate on a planetary scale. no adequate term for “wilderness” in Spanish. even in the United Kingdom. as Heise rightly charges. One such is in fact under way. Or how “watershed” means something quite different in the United States than in Europe. for which we are only now starting to generate the requisite vocabularies. an online lexicon of “Keywords in the Study of Nature and Culture. as part of a larger cultural “Keywords” project sponsored by New York University Press. So environmental critics have not worried as much as likely we should about how there is no satisfactory word for “environment” in Chinese. 11 on “Animals” from the British ecocritical journal Green Letters will generate something more robustly influential. perhaps.Buell: Ecocriticism 107 terventions as the postcolonial “zoocriticism” charted by Huggan and Tiffin in Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the forthcoming special issue no. My final thought about ecocritical futures is perhaps even more wishful. Readers will doubtless think of many other examples to set beside these. especially considering the skimpiness of my treatment here of ecocritical work outside the English-speaking world. Environmental humanists would benefit greatly from a collaborative project that will help negotiate these differences and. . despite the status of English today as the world’s lingua franca. if it is to realize anything like its full potential. As the movement continues to spread beyond its original Anglophone base. most ecocritics remain focused on particular national archives and more often than not are either monoglots or limited in their command of languages other than their own. much more than an Anglophone affair. in simultaneous recognition of shared concerns and cultural particularities.63 But this and other such projects will need to become much more than an Americanist. Ecocriticism (London: Routledge. 1991). 1995) (hereafter cited as EI). Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imaging and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press. 1995). Hereafter cited as “ODR. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. James C. Scott Slovic. The Ecocriticism Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 7. 4.” New Formations 64 (Spring 2008): 15–24. 2000). 1996). an interdisciplinary environmental-humanistic initiative. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism. Hereafter cited as ER.” Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.. Terry Gifford. Pastoral (London: Routledge. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press. whose results . 1999). Ursula K. 1990) (hereafter cited as NWA). 1994). Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Peter Fritzell. Hereafter cited as “HGE.” Choice (December 2009): 7–13 (hereafter cited as “GTL”). 1948). Nirmaldasan. 6. Alex (Chennai: OSLE-India. Nirmal Selvamony. McCusick. 138. 2004). and. Terry Gifford. though not at first indebted to scholarship in Anglo-American literature. 3. and Rayson K. Hereafter cited as EE. See.” 5. Jonathan Bate. 1992). Martin’s. Short analytic overviews include Loretta Johnson.19. ed. Arthur O. “HGE.” 2. Karl Kroeber. Nirmal Selvamony. The most conspicuous exception to this summary statement is Australian environmental criticism. provides a penetrating retrospective historical analysis in an essay-review of selected texts. xviii.” PMLA 121 (2006): 506. 2007). Hereafter cited as FEC. “Greening the Library: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism. Lovejoy. Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge. ed.108 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. introduction. 2005). “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms. Essays in Ecocriticism. xix. 11–13. For another previous book-length survey of ecocriticism. including Garrard’s Ecocriticism and my FEC. Lawrence Buell. especially. Heise. Lawrence Buell.2 Notes 1. no.” Terry Gifford’s “Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism. for example. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. see Greg Garrard. The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell. 2 (2010): 251–273. Val Plumwood. “Ecocriticism. 2003). American Indian Literature. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge.” ISLE 17. 13. Values. Understories: The Political . although from an early date literature was also on its map (see George Seddon. 1999]. J. Joni Adamson. Raymond Williams. Jonathan Bate. NSW: Reed. Robert Pogue Harrison. 10. Joni Adamson. E. have so far been by and large more impressive in history. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press. Environmental Justice. 1993]). Mei Mei Evans. Jim Tarter. Gender. See John Elder. 1997]). “Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism. 1973). philosophy. 213–28. 1994]. Jake Kosek. Forests: The Shadows of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. see Tim F.html. For a stringent critique. Malpas. Leo Marx. 1998). 1993). 2004) (hereafter cited as TS). and Environmental Justice. “Some Live More Downstream Than Others: Cancer. the first Australian work of literary criticism/ theory by a self-identified ecocritic to command wide attention from Euro-American ecocritics was probably Catherine Rigby’s comparative study of German and British romanticism. see Gregg Garrard. Scott Slovic.umn. Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Contact.asle. Ian Marshall. Jonathan Bate. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press. 1964). 2001).” http://www. The Song of the Earth (London: Picador. Communication. Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 11. Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature. and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 12. ed. Nation. 9.” in The Environmental Justice Reader. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000). “The Shallow and the Deep. Storytelling. Flannery. Arne Naess. 2002). no. and Need (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.” Inquiry 16 (Spring 1973): 95–100. Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary. and social theory (for examples of each. 1991). Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Buell: Ecocriticism 109 8. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature [London: Routledge.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994/slovic. The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of Australasian Lands and People [Chatswood. Significantly. Patrick Murphy. and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Oxford University Press. Ecocritical explorations of the promise of this approach include John Elder. Scott Slovic. NC: Duke University Press. 2008). Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (Lubbok: Texas Tech University Press. Michael Cohen. “MCS Matters: Material Agency in the Science and Practices of Environmental Illness. 1998). 15. Joseph Carroll. 2001). and Literature (New York: Routledge. Literary Darwinism: Evolution. Bioregionalism (London: Routledge.2 14. 243–65 (hereafter cited as WEW). PLF. 17. Love. Harold Fromm. William Howarth. Bodily Natures: Science. Biology. 1972). 2008). Joseph Meeker. 2008). Stacy Alaimo.110 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. 69–91. and NBH. and the Environment (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 119–77.. Going Away to Think: Engagement. Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. 19. ed.” Topia 21 (Spring 2009): 7–25 (hereafter cited as “MCSM”). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York. Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. ed. Retreat. William Howarth. 1992).” New Literary History 30 (Summer 1999): 509–39. ed. 1998). 2006) (hereafter cited as PLF). A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (Reno: University of Nevada Press.19. Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003). no. Human Nature. and Tom Lynch. Ursula Heise.. 2008). 16. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature. Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham. 20. forthcoming) (hereafter cited as BN). Cheryll Glotfelty. 1998). and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribner’s. “Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands. 18. 1999).” ER. 21. See the discussions in the next section of Stacy Alaimo. EI. 2004). Literary Nevada: Tales from the Silver State (Reno: University of Nevada Press. See. NWA. Lawrence Buell. See Michael Vincent McGinnis. 2009) (hereafter cited as NBH). Glen A. Environment. “Some Principles of Ecocriticism. Scott Slovic. . 22. for example. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. For example. See Karen Thornber. 31. and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century German Literature: The Challenge of Ecocriticism (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.. and Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg. and Rachel Stein. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. “How Queer Is Green?” in CN (hereafter cited as “HQG”). Dana Phillips. 135. 2003). 27. and Fields (Lanham. Jincai Yang. 32. eds. 2009 conference. City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press. forthcoming 2011). The Truth of Ecology: Nature. eds.. Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press. eds. Greg Garrard. see Candace Slater. for Lusophone. 25. University of Uppsala. Steven Hartman. “Transcultural Spaces. Stefan Brandt and Frank Mehring. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences.. 185–201. and Walcott (Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Joni Adamson. Boundaries. Michael Bennett and David W. 2002). 2007). MD: Lexington Books. forthcoming) (hereafter cited as CN). Patrick Murphy. Culture. The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2010). Nature. 26. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan. 1999). and Literature in America (New York: Oxford University Press. 2009). Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier. “Ecocritical Dimensions in Contemporary Chinese Literary Criticism” (unpublished 2010 essay). 2002). 29.. 2005).” special issue of Yearbook of Research in English and American Literatures: REAL 26 (2010). 2007). Neo-Colonialism. Technology. ed. Timothy Morton. Terrell Dixon. Counter Natures (orig. for German. 24. 30. 2007). 1997). The Environ- . Neruda. 7. 33. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman. 3. George Handley.Buell: Ecocriticism 111 23. ed. 2009). see TS and Axel Goodbody. Timothy Morton. for Spanish. and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. see Jennifer French. 28. Nature. Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mei Mei Evans. Teague. no. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Georgia Press. for example. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives. 35. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel DeFoe to Salman Rushdie (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2007). Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2007). 2005). Alan Bewell. 2009). Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2000). New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman. and Elizabeth Ammons. See Jeffrey Myers. ed. 37. Converging Stories: Race. “Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism. and Walcott (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 3 (2004): 701–33. 36. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2008). Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Animals. “Wilderness . Ian Finseth. Kimberley Ruffin. Ecology. Ania Loomba et al. 2010). NC: Duke University Press. 2010) (hereafter cited as BNW). 2007). 2005). and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. “The ‘Elsewhere within Here’ and Environmental Illness. Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000). 2002). 41. Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic. no.112 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. Graham Huggan. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin.” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. (Durham. Robert Marzec. Elizabeth DeLoughrey.” ISLE 14. no. Poetics. See also. George Handley. How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space. and Environmental Justice in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2010).2 34. Paul Outka. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism. See Michelle Murphy.” Modern Fiction Studies 50. or. 2 (2009): 5–24.” Configurations 8 (2005): 91. no. Cara Ciliano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Laura Wright. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism. mental Justice Reader: Politics. Rob Nixon.19. Neruda. Timothy Morton. 40. 38. Environment (London: Routledge. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1 (2007): 77.” MELUS 34. 39. ” ISLE 16. ed. Ken Hiltner. “Home Again: Global Climate Change Ecocriticism and Oil-Shock Bioregionalism. no. Teresa Shewry. and “MCSM. See Louise Westling. and Caroline Merchant. 1984). 44. 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1 (2009): 15–26. 1976). and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press.” Discourse 20 (Spring and Fall 2007): 384–410. . Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. 1996). 1993). Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge. 83. Environmentalism in the Twilight of Oil” in the larger work-in-progress represented by Michael Ziser. Diane Dumanoski. 48. and Climate Change: A Tale of Melbourne under Water in 2035. Bryan L.Buell: Ecocriticism 113 42. See Annette Kolodny. 52. Moore. “Climate Change. 2010). “The Climate of History: Four Theses. The Death of Nature: Women. 47. See Michael Ziser and Julie Sze. “Postcolonial Criticism. 1980). Gifford. 2009). Environmental Aesthetics.S. Gender. 50. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers.” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-first Century. For example. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Anne Maxwell. Stephanie LeMenager’s in-progress “This Is Not a Tree: Cultures of U. 51. and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper’s.” See Val Plumwood. The Hungry Tide (Boston: Houghton. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape. The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (New York: Crown. “Renaissance Literature and Our Contemporary Attitude Toward Global Warming. 49. Pastoral. 2010) (hereafter cited as PE). Dipesh Chakrabarty. 46. 2008). Stephanie LeMenager. 43. Amitav Ghosh. Postcolonial Environments: Nature. 45. and Ken Hiltner (New York: Routledge. 2005). Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. Ecocriticism. no. 3 (2009): 429–42. into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45. and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies. forthcoming 2011). Annette Kolodny.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Ecology. eds. Brown. 1995). eds. Novel. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Holly- . 1999). 2010). 56. Herndl and Stuart C. The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press. Nature. 1998). 1999). 1964). 60. and Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. One such conflict is between Robert Kern and Elizabeth Ammons. Carl G. M. the present essay. 54. 2002). Politics. 2003). 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. See Catriona Sandilands. 1993).19. 57. Reel Nature: American Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. 1993).g.. 58. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1992).. Frederick Buell. Christoph Irmscher and Alan Braddock. The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. fails to do justice to a number of other significant ecocritical trajectories. Angela Miller. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics. and BNW.2 53. 1999). 1998). Greg Mitman. wide-ranging though it seeks to be. 1996). Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film. 55. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. see Kern’s “Ecocriticism—What Is It Good For?” ISLE 7 (Winter 2000): 9–32. 3–38. e. See Joni Seager. eds. Land/scape/theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Queer Ecologies: Sex. A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer. and Theory (Moscow: University of Idaho Press. Partly for this reason. David Ingram. no. Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Christoph Irmscher. see especially Una Chaudhuri. 2009). Earth Follies: Coming to Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge. Anne Whiston Spirn. Jhan Hochman.. and Eleanor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri.114 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol. PLF. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (London: Routledge. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. In theater studies. see Leo Marx on Hudson River School painting in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press. eds. 59. In film studies see.. “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheory. American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (Albany: SUNY Press. In children’s literature studies.org. 2009). Kidd. The Open: Man and Animal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2003). anthropology. People. and for eighteenth century. Beyond this additional wealth of scholarship on fictive discourses. political theory. Dobrin and Kenneth B. and Giorgio Agamben. for example.nyupress. 2008).. Wild Things: Children’s Literature and Ecocriticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Heumann. Haraway. rev. etc. (New York: Avon. for medieval. 62.Buell: Ecocriticism 115 wood Cinema (Exeter. and John Sitter. 2 (2007): 122–39. 2009). 2007). MarieLouise Mallet. I must also omit mention of a much wider array of pertinent environmentally oriented studies across the disciplines—religion. In scholarship on literature before 1800 generally. The Animal That Therefore I Am. 2006). Watson.” http://keywords. Murray and Joseph K. Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. history. 2000). and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2002). Joni Adamson and William Gleason. Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer.” ISLE 14. 2003). see. UK: University of Exeter Press. Donna J. 2007). eds. see especially Sidney I. for early modern. developmental psychology. no. 63. Timothy Sweet. Animal Liberation. Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot. Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press. environmental science. “Keywords in the Study of Nature and Culture. ed. and Robin L.” Religion and Literature 1 (Spring 2008): 11–370. and Diane Kelsey McColley. Jacques Derrida. trans. and Gillian Rudd. 61. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (London: Routledge. Alf Siewers. ed. science studies. 2004). UK: Ashgate. Robert N. Peter Singer. Frederick Buell. 2006). . The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs. “‘Animals are not believers in ecology’: Mapping Critical Differences between Environmental and Animal Advocacy Literatures. David Walls (New York: Fordham University Press. 1990).