Ecocriticism

By Nicholas Birns

Ecocriticism is literary criticism concerned with the relationship between humans and

the environment. Although ecocriticism, which often involves an explicit political agenda

and sharp critiques of traditional man-nature and human-animal hierarchies, is not simply

a radicalization of romanticism, it could not have existed without the criticism and poetry

of the Romantic period. Many before Wordsworth had grown up in the country and then

attended universities; most made their career in the capital and wrote about courtly

matters in imitation of the classics. Wordsworth’s turn to nature—something well beyond

earlier “pastoral” brought the relationship between humans and his environment into the

forefront. But the Romantic poet most important for ecocriticism was not Wordsworth—

whose poems often take matters beyond nature, into transcendence or some other sort of

overall rationale—was John Clare (1790-1864). Clare, who saw the rural countryside of

his youth drastically changed by the process of enclosure, which divided grazing fields

into smaller lots designed for ownership and production, wrote about nature “in itself,”

and his address towards nature involved a solicitation of its radical otherness. Ecocritics

such as Jonathan Bate (1958- ) called attention to Clare’s “self-identification” with

animals and even with landscape itself. Another set of texts from which ecocriticism

partially emerged was the Transcendentalist work of Emerson and his peers. Lawrence

Buell (1939- ) was both the leading transcendentalist scholar of his generation and a

founder of environmental criticism, combining the transcendental interest in Asian and

other world cultures with their sense of nature as ground and metaphor to create the
specter of not just “global” but truly “planetary” criticism. The relationship between the

global and the ecological had already been traced by the “geopoetics” of the France-

residing Scottish poet Kenneth White (1938- ), who lucidly, if portentously, gestured to

the coastlines and the polar extremities of Earth to stand for ontological limit-experiences

that connected rather than estranged. A host of avant-garde poetics also potentially could

and id, converge here. But ecocriticism privileged the local as much as the global, if not

in fact more so. In Reading the Mountains of Home (1998) John Elder examined the

poetry of Robert Frost and the changes in the land—including the reforestation of

formerly agricultural land as seen in Frost’s poem “Directive” (1947).

Emerson, Thoreau, and Frost kept themselves as free as was then possible from

urban living. But in the following century, two professors at a big-city university were

among the movement’s early precursors. Joseph Wood Krutch was an early practitioner

of environmental criticism, or at least belles lettres from an environmentalist perspective,

and his Columbia University colleague Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894-1981), in

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), analyzed how different attitudes towards

nature imaged contrasting stances toward progress in early modernity. Krutch, who

moved to Arizona for health reasons, heralded the productive association between

ecocriticism and the literature of the American West, obvious both for that region’s

natural beauty and sense of environmental risk, but which had the supplementary effect

of, perhaps for the first time, having the leading practitioners of a field by west of the

Mississippi, though new historicism came close. The Western orientation of the criticism,

as practiced by such figures as Scott Slovic (1960- ), Tom Lynch (1955- ), Glen A.

Love (1932- ), and Susan Kollin (1965- ), also had the advantage of disestablishing
European norms of what sort of landscapes are “natural” and “poetic,” a critique also

joined by Australian and Canadian creative and critical work. Equations like this, though,

cannot be made too simply. It is true that there was a close alliance between ecocriticism

and the environmental movement as it had grown (in the US since the first Earth Day in

1970) and responded to danger such as toxic waste and climate change. This was indeed

far closer relationship than that which existed between say, African American or feminist

criticism and the respective political movements which had helped give birth to them;

compared to those, ecocriticism was far less preoccupied by theory, and the impact of

deconstructive approaches was far less. There was no ecocritical equivalent of the henry

louis gates jr. But ecocriticism was not simply environmentalism in the English

department, It is not for nothing that William H. Rueckert (1926-2006), often credited

with coining the term “ecocriticism,” was the leading early scholar of Kenneth Burke and

wrote the first significant work on Burke. Ecocriticism also called on the other sense of

the word “ecology,” that of a systemic relation between various entities in a situation of

mutual dependence—used even in terms such as “media ecology.” Ecocriticism was not

about finding peace or redemption in nature, but about investigating the structural

relations between humans, nature, and textuality. The relationship of natural phenomena

to structural economic equality here—for example, how an earthquake in Haiti causes far

more damage than an earthquake of the same strength in southern California—became

apposite here. Appalachia in the US—at once ecologically fascinating and economically

deprived—also became a geographical locus of ecocritical studies for the way it

epitomized both natural and cultural crises. Ecocriticism did not exclude history or

politics. It actively sought social connections, even as the increasing evidence of climate
change in the twenty-first entry made ecological concerns far more urgent. Nor did it

monolithically adhere to the Romantic lyric; ecopoetics represented the dialogue between

ecology and various experimental practices of poetic thought and the journal Ecopoetics,

edited by Jonathan Skinner from 2001, strayed far from the formalist renditions of

demurely bucolic views of nature that for the layman, the idea of ecological poetry no

doubt first conjured. These practices were influenced by theorized postmodernism but

also by more independent approaches such as the rigorous if playful consciousness-

raising of Jack Collom (1931- ).

Ecofeminism, equally, was not just Goddess-worship or dithyrambic praise of

Mother Earth. Though Francoise d’Eaubonne (1920-2005), who coined the term, did not

gain the Anglophone English Department celebrity that French feminists such as Cixous

or Irigaray had, d'Eaubonne was a far more systematic thinker than Starhawk (1951- ;

ps. Miriam Simos) who was the most visible American figure in the movement, and the

early literary-academic books in the field, such as Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (ed.

Greta C. Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 1998), made clear that ecofeminism was not just

a “nature movement” but involved cultural critiques generally shared with those in other

identity-based modes of criticism. The “deep ecology” of Arne Naess (1912-2009) was

never popular in the literature department. Naess’s call for valuing nature itself above

humans went not only against traditional human norms but ecofeminism’s discernment of

nature as being a category in which patriarchy and discrimination was constituted.

This difference between simply “defending” nature and seeing ecology as an arena and

critique can be imaged in the generational difference between “ecological” poets such as

the Australian Judith Wright (1915-2000) or the American Gary Snyder (1930 -) and a
more consciously “ecocritical” poet such as the Australian John Kinsella (1963- ).

Wright and Snyder lived in devoted intimacy with nature and wrote in passionate defense

of it. However, there is something in their work of nature as a separate entity outside of

man, soliciting veneration, respect and deference, but unimplicated in human systems of

domination and order. This had been part of a critique of Romanticism as early as ruskin,

who for all his veneration of nature saw the turn to wilderness as a reflection of the

wreckage of society by mechanization, and at times Wright and Snyder seemed on the

other side of this Ruskin-style awareness of the socioeconomic preconditions of

ecological awareness. Kinsella, whose most conventional mode was a very dark form of

pastoral, and who otherwise wrote in highly experimental, non—objective terms, totally

veered away from seeing nature as a respite or recourse, as mill saw literature. “Nature”

was no longer a cordoned-off reserve that would be the receptacle for quasi-hypocritical

musings by self-pitying elitists, but the arena for a fundamental criticism of entrenched

paradigms. Kinsella, in a way both “post-humanist' and “post-natural,” was a “vegan

anarchist” (ecocriticism was one of the few literary movements where what one ate

mattered), the deformation and recoalescence of form in Kinsella’s work signaled an

“ecopoetics” that echoed the etymological suggestions of “totality” and “making” in the

poems. Though Aristotle, who would have totally understood what the word “ecology”

mean (its roots are in the Greek oikos, household) would have been shocked at the non-

mimetic character of Kinsella’s poetry, he might well have appreciated the way it brought

the literary canon and such diverse landscapes as the denuded wheatbelt of Western

Australia and the brackish fens of Cambridgeshire in England into tense, dense
confrontation. Kinsella’s general attitude was close to what Timothy B. Morton meant

when he called for “ecology without nature.”

By 2010, ecocriticism had strayed well beyond its original canon of texts, namely

environmental musings by privileged white men, and became a term used with respect to

all manner of texts by people of color and pre-Romantic Europeans, embracing dissident

sexualities as well as those formerly considered exclusively “natural.” Robert N. Watson

(1953- ) speciaized in ecocriticism of renaissance texts. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (1968-

) wrote, for instance, about ecocriticism in Caribbean and Pacific island contexts. Though

the term was bandied about so much sometimes as to lose its original meaning, this

pluralization made the term a less (to use Stanley fish’s phrase) boutique one. As much

as ecocriticism brought the distinct claims of nature to the forefront, the waning of nature

as a master term enabled ecocriticism to be a systematic mode of critique.

Bibliography

Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Buell. Lawrence, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and

Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Felstiner, John, Can Poetry Save The Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Writing. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Gaard, Greta D., and Patrick D. Murphy, Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Lynch, Tom, Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature, Lubbock:

Texas Tech University Press, 2008.

Morton, Timothy B. Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.