Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends

Author(s): Lawrence Buell

Source: Qui Parle , Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 87-115
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0087

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Ecocriticism
Some Emerging Trends

lawrence buell

The Problem of the Unstable Signifier

What is ecocriticism? The imprecision with which it has been de-

fined and the increasingly disparate uses to which it and its cog-
nates 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 custom-
ary deployment in the singular.1
For romanticism, Lovejoy tried to impose a semblance of or-
der through historicization, even though he was sorely tempted to
throw up his hands. Romanticism “has ceased to perform the func-
tion of a verbal sign,” he lamented. “When a man is asked . . . to
discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or ten-
dencies he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have flour-
ished, 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

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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 se-
lectively rather than comprehensively, and distinctions become in-
creasingly hard to make between them and other environmentally
oriented humanists who would resist being called ecocritics how-
ever relevant their work seems to those who do. As Nirmal Selva-
mony 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 en-
vironmental criticism, [or] literary-environmental studies, [or] lit-
erary 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 char-

acterize 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-

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 89

cism began around 1990 as an initiative within literary studies,

specifically within English and American literature, from two semi-
coordinated and interpenetrating epicenters: British romanticism,
with a genre focus especially on poetry in that tradition (including
its twentieth-century Anglo-American filiations), and U.S. nature
writing (ditto), with a genre focus especially on the Thoreauvian
imprint.7 At this early stage, few ecocritics, if pressed about the
matter, would have claimed that these particular generic and his-
torical foci were to be considered the sole rightful provinces for
ecocritical work. On the contrary, most would have granted read-
ily enough that ecocritical work might comprehend any and all ex-
pressive media, including not only visual, architectural, and other
nontextual genres of practice but also even more purely instrumen-
tal, functional discourses—of scholarly articles in the natural and
social science, the texts of legislative documents and treaties, and so
forth. The initial de facto concentration on selected literary genres
within the long Anglo-American nineteenth century was contin-
gent rather than inherent, a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit
made additionally tempting by two sorts of influential prior criti-
cal interventions. One, represented most prominently by cultural
critic-historians Raymond Williams and Leo Marx, had called at-
tention to the inflection of literary practice at this pivotal moment
by the accelerating destabilization of “nature” owing to urbaniza-
tion and industrial capitalism.8 The other was the tendency in late-
twentieth-century critical theory, especially its poststructuralist
and new historicist avatars—both of which inspired groundbreak-
ing 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.
So it befell that the primary agenda of first-wave ecocriticism,
which prevailed through the 1990s, became especially identified
with the project of reorienting literary-critical thinking toward
more serious engagement with nonhuman nature in two differ-
ent although related ways. The more distinctively humanistic was
a range of post-Heideggerian phenomenological theories—of-
ten lumped together under the heading of “deep ecology,” a term

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90 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.9 According to this

view, human being and human consciousness are thought to be
grounded in intimate interdependence with the nonhuman living
world. Two distinguished cases in point were the Stanford Univer-
sity comparatist Robert Pogue Harrison, especially his 1993 book
Forests: The Shadows of Civilization, and British romantic scholar
Jonathan Bate, whose 1991 Romantic Ecology inaugurated Brit-
ish ecocriticism and whose The Song of the Earth (2000) brought
Heideggerian ecocriticism to its high point to date.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, 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 adequa-
cy if not the inherent legitimacy of lines of analysis that privilege
subjective perception/experience as against social context/human
collectivities. 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. One symptom of this is the very
strong persistence of what Scott Slovic has called “narrative schol-
arship”12 in ecocritical practice—that is, critical work constructed
as a cross-pollination of autobiographical and/or reported witness-
ing to personal experience and academic analysis.13 But the mean-
ing of existential contact with environment today now tends to be
more self-consciously framed as socially mediated, and the value
set upon subjective individual experience of environment tends to
be framed accordingly as a product of historical circumstance and
acculturation.
The second most distinctive path taken by first-wave ecocriti-
cism was to try to make literary theory and criticism more scientifi-
cally informed, meaning especially by ecology, environmental biol-
ogy, and geology. This initiative was largely the work of American
scholars who seized upon a book by the forgotten critic Joseph
Meeker, The Comedy of Survival (1972), now widely looked upon
as the first significant ecocritical study.14 Meeker sought to retheo-
rize comedy as a genre expressive of the sense of human survival as

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 91

enabled by strategies of adaptive behavior. His most prolific suc-

cessor in this vein has been the American scholar Joseph Carroll,
whose various works, including Literary Darwinism (2004), con-
stitute the most sustained quest to bridge the gap between the hu-
manities and the sciences by means of a literary theory obedient to
conceptual models derived from life science.15 In its most sweep-
ingly insistent forms, this vision has not won many adherents. But
not so the fundamental call for literary critics and humanists gen-
erally to attain greater science literacy that was framed by a num-
ber of first-wave ecocritics (perhaps most influentially by William
Howarth and Glen Love).16 Although second-wave environmental
criticism has generally paid less attention to conceptual models de-
rived from science per se than to “science studies”—that is, the
study of scientific theory and practice as inflected by its historico-
cultural 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 reduc-
tionism (e.g., genetic-determinist explanations of consciousness)
and the “humanistic reduction” of science as cultural construct.
And some recent environmental critics have approached the litera-
ture-science interface from entirely new directions, as with Ursula
Heise’s intensive exploration of the pertinence of risk theory for
reading texts informed by a postmodern conception of the indeter-
minacy of the signifying process.18
The most lastingly influential first-wave attempt to fuse scien-
tistic 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, geography, anthropology,
history, phenomenology, and aesthetics in the service of the norma-
tive 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.19 Ecological literacy is seen as a crucial
aspect of bioregional citizenship. Among Americanists, this biore-
gional persuasion is especially associated with certain place-based
creative writers who have also gained standing as critics, such as
Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry.20
As already noted, first-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-fo-

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92 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

cused and especially as an Anglo-American romanticism-and-be-

yond affair, focused on the two preferred genres of nature poet-
ry—as in the work of John Elder and Jonathan Bate—and, on the
American side, nonfictional nature writing.21 Second-wave ecocriti-
cism has sought to press far beyond the first wave’s characteristic
limitations of genre, geography, and historical epoch. By the early
twenty-first century, environmental criticism was on the way to en-
gaging the whole sweep of Western literary history from antiquity
to the present. And it had also taken root in eastern and southern
Asia as well as Anglo-Europe and the Anglophone diaspora. So,
for example, as of now the leading ecocritic at the University of
California–Berkeley is a specialist in early modernism; the lead-
ing ecocritic at the University of Notre Dame is a neoclassicist; at
Bucknell, a medievalist; at the universities of Wisconsin and Kan-
sas, postcolonialists. In India, the first generation of ecocritics has
taken a special interest in the literatures and philosophical tradi-
tions of the subcontinent.
American ecocritic Patrick Murphy’s 1998 edited collection Lit-
erature of Nature: An International Sourcebook gives a panoram-
ic view of the geographical expansion of ecocritical practice and
textual reach in its first stages, 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.22 As of this writing, his most recent is Ecocritical
Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies.23
The expansion of understanding of the rightful ecocritical can-
on to encompass nothing less than all the literatures of the world,
with critics throughout the world understood as having a rightful
stake in ecocritical practice, clearly is still in its early stages. As
the membership rolls of the Association for the Study of Litera-
ture and Environment (ASLE) attest, by far the majority of self-
identified ecocritics remain Anglophone scholars working on An-
glophone texts. (This article itself is symptomatic of that ongoing
imbalance.) Even other major Europhone literary cultures are as
yet relatively underexplored. But notable efforts to counteract this
are under way on a number of fronts.24 Conversely, the autono-
mous traditions of Asian, perhaps particularly Japanese, Korean,

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 93

and Sinophone, environmental criticism as well as the long-stand-

ing investment of Sinophone creative writers in environmental is-
sues seem to be on the verge of figuring much more greatly in the
thinking of Western ecocritics than they have hitherto, despite the
degree to which ecocritics in China and Taiwan have been influ-
enced by Western models and Western texts.25 To date, the area in
which ecocriticism’s aspiration to expand its geographical horizons
has so far come closest to realizing its potential has been its cross-
pollination with (so far mostly Anglophone) postcolonial studies,
on which more below.
With this still-incipient expansion of geographical and cul-
tural horizons came a marked shift in ecocritical thinking about
the exemplary landscape or landscapes it should seek to engage.
First-wave ecocriticism typically privileged rural and wild spaces
over urban ones. Against this, second-wave ecocriticism contend-
ed that that wall of separation is a historically produced artifact,
that throughout human history nature itself has been subject to
human reshaping, and that especially since the industrial revolu-
tion, metropolitan landscape and the built environment generally
must be considered as at least equally fruitful ground for ecocriti-
cal work. That is partly why bioregionalism remains influential;
for despite tending to attach special value to ecosystemic contexts
and to small-sized, place-based organic communities, bioregional-
ism generally acknowledges at least in principle the significance of
metropolitan networks as part of regional history and culture.
Environmental criticism is still in the exploratory stages of
learning how to theorize urban networks as part of its mandate.
The attempts so far seem have been more earnest than resound-
ingly successful, starting with the collections The Nature of Cities:
Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, edited by Michael Bennett
and David W. Teague (1999), and City Wilds, edited by Terrell
Dixon (2002).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), this
imbalance has been changing and will doubtless continue to do so
in future. For even more fundamentally distinctive to the second
wave of ecocriticism that started to predominate around the year

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94 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

2000 than the diversification of archives and landscapes per se was

the turn toward cultural studies and cultural theory. 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 natu-
ral world and its trust in the power of artifacts either to render the
natural world or to motivate return to it. Second-wave ecocriticism
strove, by contrast, to make the movement look less like an out-
lier within the contemporary critical theory scene, which in prac-
tice meant to some extent as we shall soon see trying to inflect it
with one or another strand of poststructuralism. But this push was
not solely motivated by the anxieties of intratribal professionalism.
Second-wave critiques were also reacting against the philosoph-
ic ecocentrism broadly presupposed if not explicitly advocated in
most leading first-wave work. This reaction was not merely theo-
retic and notional but also pragmatic and political, against what
was widely—albeit lumpingly—perceived as the quietistic if not
retrograde politics of ecocentric ecocriticism.
In this, second-wave ecocriticism was partly influenced by a
more complex grasp of the longer history of environmentalism it-
self. First-wave studies resonated with its preservationist edge as
traditionally understood both by historians and by activists: en-
vironmentalism equals nature protection in thinly populated re-
mote areas. Second-wave ecocriticism, by contrast, affiliated itself
more closely with the other main historical strand of environmen-
talist thinking: public health environmentalism, whose geographic
gaze was directed more at landscapes of urban and/or industrial
transformation rather than at country or wilderness, and whose
environmental ethics and politics were sociocentric rather than
ecocentric. This sociocentric strand had actually been developing
alongside the first since the 1800s, but it was not until the 1980s
that environmental historians and environmentalists regularly be-
gan to think of issues like workplace safety and waste disposal as
integral to “environmentalism”—that is, as part of the same com-
posite field. Indeed, even today, “environmentalism” connotes first
and foremost the realm of nonhuman nature, wild spaces, and so
forth. In their valuable 1997 survey of environmental movements

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 95

worldwide, Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier ended

with a chapter celebrating the urban and regional planner Lewis
Mumford as “The Forgotten American Environmentalist.”27 Such
insistence on the residual parochialism of Western environmental-
ism 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.28
But to continue with ecocriticism per se. Whereas first-stage
ecocritics privileged figures like British romantic poet John Clare,
Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, more consequential for sec-
ond-stage ecocritics were the likes of Charles Dickens (who was
deeply involved in Victorian-era public health environmentalism),
the American “muckraking” novelist Upton Sinclair, the Rachel
Carson of Silent Spring, her Japanese successor and quasi-counter-
part Michiko Ishimure, and the Nigerian writer-activist Ken Saro-
wiwa, executed for his leadership of protests against the devasta-
tion of his homeland by Big Oil interests in the Niger Delta.
Two conspicuous examples of second-wave attempts to infuse
ecocriticism with greater theoretical sophistication have been the
work of Dana Phillips and Timothy Morton. Phillips’s 2003 The
Truth of Ecology sternly indicts what he takes to be the episte-
mological naïveté of virtually all first-wave ecocriticism.29 Though
the book overshoots its mark by denying any legitimacy whatso-
ever to literature as a conduit of environmental representation (see
FEC, 29–61), it is a stimulating corrective to simplistic mimeti-
cist readings, 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. Morton’s 2007 Ecology without Nature of-
fers a more nuanced deconstruction of first-wave commitment to
“ecomimesis,” that is, the project of representing nature’s com-
plications and internal contradictions.30 In contrast to Phillips’s
categorical rejection, Morton unfolds a series of ways in which
literary and other aesthetic representations filter inputs from the
material environment with such verve, intricacy, and panache as

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96 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

to amount—for this reader, at least—to a quasi-rehabilitation of

the project he sees himself as dismantling. Morton then further ar-
gues (reminiscently of Lovejoy) that “nature” is so polyvalent and
baggage-ridden a term that it should be banished from the lexicon.
British ecocritic Greg Garrard, author of a respected book-length
overview of ecocritical emphases (Ecocriticism, 2004), critiques
Morton’s baby-out-the-with-bathwater assertions in “How Queer
Is Green?”31 Morton’s subsequent The Ecological Thought (2010),
characterized as a “prequel” to Ecology without Nature, offers
a more sustained, less peremptory statement, albeit with similar
penchant for aphoristic manifesto, of what he takes to be the vir-
tues of his preferred signifier: “The ecological thought is the think-
ing of interconnectedness,” dynamic, borderless, interpenetrative
(collapsing self-other firewalls whether we like it or not), “hugely
expand[ing] our ideas of space and time.”32
However much Morton and Phillips sometimes shoot from the
hip, their books are provocative tours de force in the worthy as
well as the equivocal sense: wit and critical sophistication offset-
ting whatever sententious excess. A more representative expression
of the sociocentric thrust of second-wave ecocriticism, however, is
the 2002 Environmental Justice Reader, which in a spirit of sober-
toned moral and political conviction pits itself against the 1996
Ecocriticism Reader.33 This collection has not yet become the refer-
ence point that the earlier one still remains, but the significance of
the shift of priorities toward a fusion of cultural constructionism
and social justice concerns cannot be denied. The prioritization of
issues of environmental justice—the maldistribution of environ-
mental benefits and hazards between white and nonwhite, rich and
poor—is second-wave ecocriticism’s most distinctive activist edge,
just as preservationist ecocentrism was for the first wave. Among
its crucial contributions have been its salutary broadening intensifi-
cation of ecocritical concentration on nonwhite writers other than
Native and a reconception of the stakes of the latter;34 its facilita-
tion of the recent synergy between ecocriticism postcolonial stud-
ies described below; and a diversification of the ecocritical ranks,
hitherto (and still) a markedly Caucasian group, to include more
scholars of color. A further mark of the reach and timeliness of en-

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 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, such as cultural ge-
ographer Jake Kosek’s Understories: The Political Life of Forests
in Northern New Mexico (2006), a semi-autobiographical activist
ethnography that assesses the clashing claims and memories as to
the history, rightful ownership, and proper future policy for for-
estlands in a district of the American Southwest between longtime
Hispanic residents, Native Americans, U.S. government agencies,
and environmental activists.
The paradigmatic environment for second-wave ecocriticism
tends to be the compromised, endangered landscapes of Carson’s
Silent Spring, the modern locus classicus of “toxic discourse”
(WEW, 30–54). But second-wave ecocriticism has attached spe-
cial importance, as Carson did not, to marginalized minority peo-
ples and communities both at home and abroad—and with texts
that engage such concerns, both from high art and from vernacu-
lar culture. Indeed, a committed environmental justice revisionist
ecocritic would consider these two domains inseparable—that is,
concern with issues of toxification and concern for the plight of
racial minorities.

What May Lie Ahead

The sociocentric thrust of environmental justice revisionism feeds

into at least two strands of emergent ecocritical work, both of
which demonstrate that sociocentric ecocriticism may well but
need not necessarily direct itself toward issues of racial injustice
specifically as top priority. The first is exemplified by American
ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo’s work on the discourse of MCS—literal-
ly “multiple chemical sensitivity,” commonly known as “environ-
mental illness.” The cases she surveys include minority sufferers
but not only those. The article from which I quote is incorporat-
ed in her Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Mate-
rial Self, which develops the idea of “transcorporeality,” that is,
body as environmental construct. At first sight, this might seem
to reprise older notions of an “ecological self” from deep ecology

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98 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

theory. Yet Alaimo is resolutely materialist, insisting that identity is

first and foremost biological, not phenomenological. Most conse-
quential for our purposes is how this leads Alaimo, following revi-
sionist work in science studies on which she draws, to critique—as
did Phillips, but with an activist edge—the reductiveness of social
constructionism itself as a trap that can be used against MCS suf-
ferers to claim that their symptoms are psychosomatic if not fictive
(BN, 15).35 This leads her to a qualified rehabilitation of ecomi-
mesis—contending, for example, that environmental memoirs of
cancer victims may possess substantive empirical content. I suspect
that ecocritics also concerned with the relation between bodies and
physical environment will continue to struggle with versions of this
issue, whether the topic be the microcosm of the toxified body or
the macrocosm of climate change. That’s precisely the ground on
which Garrard critiques Morton’s anti-naturism (“Without ecolo-
gy,” he insists, what’s left is nothing more than “a form of cultural
creationism” [“HQG”]). A more autobiographical complement to
Alaimo’s study, no less consequential in its own way, is Harold
Fromm’s wide-ranging The Nature of Becoming Human, a sus-
tained 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.
Environmental justice ecocriticism’s investment in marginalized
communities connects it with a second emergent initiative: postco-
lonial environmentalism. The last half-decade has seen a dramat-
ic increase in the synergy between ecocriticism and postcolonial
studies. Such work may direct itself centrally toward environmen-
tal justice issues, as in Rob Nixon’s 2005 “Environmentalism and
Postcolonialism,” which builds on the irony of the coincidence
that ecocriticism first attracted wide attention at the same histor-
ical moment that Ken Saro-wiwa was executed—but to appear-
ances remained completely oblivious of that event.36 Alternatively,
Graham Huggan’s 2004 “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism,” which like
Nixon’s essay seems to have been designed as the platform for a
book project, conceives postcolonialism and ecocriticism more
as complementary than as contrary forms of activist (or proto-

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 99

activist) intervention.37 And in one of the most ambitious single-

authored projects completed so far, 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 Derek Walcott.38
The origins of ecocriticism’s current turn toward postcolo-
nial studies actually date back to Patrick Murphy’s wide-ranging
work and, with respect to postcolonial theory more specifically,
two books of 2000 in British romantic studies that focus in mu-
tually quite different ways on imperial imagination of the exotic,
and thus as part of the complex apparatus of subjugation: Timo-
thy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and
the Exotic and Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease.39
Overall, as Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey suggest in a
recent article, the postcolonial-ecocritical dialogue seems to have
come more from the side of postcolonialism than vice versa, in a
story line that goes roughly like this: ecocritics were somewhat tar-
dily energized by an already thriving postcolonial studies, to which
rising environmental justice concerns had predisposed them, since
which postcolonialists have begun to take more notice of ecocriti-
cism than they had before.40 But be that as it may, the last several
years have seen such an astonishing surge in postcolonial ecocriti-
cal studies41 that it is impossible to believe either that future eco-
critical work focused on “Western” literatures will remain unin-
fluenced 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.
The precise future course of this ongoing cross-pollination re-
mains to be seen, but two things seem certain: first, debate will
continue for some time to come as to the extent to which ecocriti-
cal models generated in the first world apply to developing-world
contexts; and second, and relatedly, non-Eurocentric ecocriticism
will generate alternative frameworks and vocabularies for enrich-
ing reconceiving ecocritical categories. One coeditor of the first In-
dian ecocritical collection (Selvamony’s) tentatively proposes as an

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100 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

alternative framework the Tamil idea of tinai, a traditional world-

view that rests on a fusion of domestic sphere, biological environ-
ment, and the sacred (EE, xv). Whether or not this particular tri-
fold gains much of a hearing, other such interventions may prove
useful in helping relativize ecocriticism’s preexisting Eurocentric
(and in the first instance Anglophonic) vocabulary and analytical
biases.
One way the extension of ecocriticism to postcolonial geogra-
phies and archives has already begun to do this is by sophisticat-
ing the conception of place and place-attachment, both by taking
into account a far greater variety of ecocultural particularisms and
by conceiving placeness less centripetally, in more cosmopolitan
and global terms. First-wave and to some extent even second-wave
ecocriticism have tended to be strongly region and community-ori-
ented, prioritizing local place-allegiance, ecological distinctiveness,
and the like. Postcolonial texts and ecocritical analysis often also
advocate for these; but, like postcolonial literature itself, they have
also been much more proactive in substantive reconception of the
local and the regional in terms of the impact of translocal, ulti-
mately global forces.
So, for example, in Indo-Anglian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The
Hungry Tide, which seems to have become a canonical text for
postcolonial ecocritics since its 2005 publication, 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, 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, which in turn becomes a pre-
text for the Indian government to manipulate the displaced immi-
grants 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.42 Some such multilayered, internally
fractured model of conceiving the global within the local as we
find in The Hungry Tide, where “all the characters are, to vary-
ing degrees, migrants or refugees,” is surely destined to become
the primary ecocritical model of place-attachment as against the

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 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, 116).
Not that postcolonialism is the only source from which revi-
sionist critique of the parochialism of predominant early stage eco-
critical thinking about place has come. This is clear from the single
most important recent ecocritical contribution to revisionist place
studies, Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008),
which explores the possibilities of reinventing place-attachment on
a planetary scale. 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 revo-
lution and cyberfiction, and the advent of a global culture of risk
produced by post-nuclear fears of a contaminated planet.
Heise’s epilogue, which briefly raises the subject of global warm-
ing, 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. So far, science fiction and documentary film are far ahead
of ecocriticism here. Planetary overheating has been a staple sci-
ence fiction scenario for almost half a century. Admittedly, neither
there nor in film have the results been particularly distinguished by
contrast to (say) the best postcolonial literature on other environ-
mental issues. The most attention-getting result to date has been
Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which both
as dramatic invention and as cinematography is quite pedestrian,
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.
Nothing generated within ecocriticism thus far comes close
to matching intellectual historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s brilliant
short polemic “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” which re-
flects 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.43 Still, ecocriticism

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102 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

has started to respond in at least four ways. First, through exten-

sion of environmental justice criticism to the plight of imminent los-
ers in this process, including nonhumans.44 Second, through exege-
sis of such works of global warming imagination as exist, as with
Anne Maxwell on the futurological ecofiction of Australian writer
George Turner.45 Third, by reinterpretation of texts from precon-
temporary eras that engage issues of anthropogenic climate change,
even if not global warming specifically, like American ecocritic Ken
Hiltner’s analysis of the controversy over the burning of highly
sulfurous coal in seventeenth-century London.46 Some work, like
this essay, is painstakingly researched; some is quite impressionistic
even if suggestive, 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.47 Finally, several ambitious historically oriented book-length
environment-and-culture studies are now under way on the culture
of fossil fuel dependence, 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.48
Such projects as the latter re-pose, as have many other contri-
butions reviewed here, the broader question suggested at the out-
set: To what extent should ecocriticism be conceived as belonging
to literature studies, 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 affirma-
tive side it can be argued not only that literature is the home dis-
cipline of most critics surveyed here who identify themselves and/
or are identified with environmental criticism, but also, even more
pertinently, that—at least up to a point—ecocriticism’s track re-
cord of contributions to the study of mode (e.g., Gifford on pas-
toral), genre (many American ecocritics on nature writing and/or
autobiography), and metaphor (e.g., Moore on personification),
not to mention other aspects of stylistic representation, make for
a “natural” fit with literature studies.49 But to stress this home-

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 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, cross-cutting, and hybridized and have patently
become still more so.
First-wave ecocriticism showed this cross-cutting propensity
in the engagements with phenomenology and evolutionary biol-
ogy noted earlier. Two even more notable transdisciplinary initia-
tives that have energized ecocriticism from the start, of which I
have thus far omitted mention in my haste to get more quickly to
the present, deserve if anything even greater emphasis, given both
how pervasive their influence has been and how coming to terms
with that influence requires one to qualify further any neat distinc-
tion between first-wave and individual person/experience orienta-
tion as against second-wave and sociocentric or collective orienta-
tion. One has been gender studies, meaning in the first instance
especially though not merely “ecofeminism,” a congeries of some-
times conflicting, critical visions and practices focused on the re-
lation—factical and/or fictive—between women and environment.
Environment-and-gender studies, from its inception well before
1990—as in the revisionist literary history of Americanist Annette
Kolodny and in intellectual historian Caroline Merchant’s anti-pa-
triarchal 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 herme-
neutics—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 fe-
male, and the implicit androcentrism of holistic models of selfness
in deep ecology and other forms of person-centric ecotheory,52 as
well as the roots of environmental justice (e.g., Seager).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, where Catriona Sandilands stands
out as the leading figure to date.54
A second case in point is environmental rhetoric studies, which
tends to be directed away from the realm of literature entirely to-
ward analysis of other disciplinary discourses, or of public poli-

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104 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

cy debates, as in Killingsworth and Palmer’s 1992 Ecospeak, the

case studies of the rhetorics of advocacy and controversy collect-
ed in Green Culture, Frederick Buell’s expose of corporate “gre-
enwash” rhetoric of environmental disinformation, and Kosek’s
Understories.55
Still, 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,
philosophically, spiritually, ethically, politically, or in some combi-
nation thereof—would remain central to ecocriticism. To be sure,
ecocritics for whom literature was the preferred genre of practice
have always enlisted other media very inventively (e.g., Christoph
Irmscher on botanical illustration), reflecting long-standing inter-
ests by some of their pre-ecocritical predecessors.56 Conversely, en-
vironmental 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.g., Angela Miller for
art history, Anne Whiston Spirn for landscape architecture, Greg
Mitman for film).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 “eco-
criticism”; indeed, 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.58 Why so late? One
explanation may simply be that disciplinary borders aren’t quite
as porous as one would like to think. 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 prolifera-
tion of venues (the 2000s have seen a dramatic increase in ecocriti-
cal journals from one to at least seven in the United Kingdom, the
United States, and Asia) and such imprimaturs as the Library of
Congress’s 2002 adoption of “Ecocriticism” as a subject heading
(see “GTL”). But a more decisive factor, without which these sun-
dry forms of institutionalization might never have happened, has
been that second-wave work has shifted the center of gravity in a
“cultures of environment” direction, from ecocriticism as textual
practice to environmental criticism as cultural practice. Not that

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 105

there is anything especially strange or unique about this shift. It

mirrors the direction so-called literary scholarship has itself taken
on the subject of race, class, and gender during the past twenty
years: away from texts and canons, toward cultural formations.
But with regard to the understanding of ecocriticism’s proper range,
the shift has contributed to undermining the assumption—never
solidly established as doctrine, anyhow—as properly an arena of
literary studies. The shift to a cultural practice emphasis exposes
beyond power of refutation the quixoticism of any attempt to set
fixed disciplinary borders to ecocriticism, to adjudicate whether
this or that scholar should be thought of as an ecocritic, and what
should or should not count as ecocritical work.
I do not mean to make this essay sound like a sunny, much less
imperial, narrative of environmental criticism’s inexorable ad-
vance. On the contrary, it must still be reckoned as a work in prog-
ress. It remains an open question as to how, if at all, ecocriticism
will adjudicate between a vision of critical practice as ultimately
justified by its commitment to criticism in the service of environ-
mentalist social action as against a more academic-professional
justification of ecocritical practice as knowledge production or hu-
manistic understanding. Although most ecocritics would probably
argue that these aims are inseparable, one finds sharply conflicting
positions expressed.59 Then, too, creative and critical practice of
the environmental turn across the array of expressive media—both
“old” and “new,” “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.60 Relatedly, some strange discon-
nects obtain between “environmentally”-oriented work and other
initiatives that at first sight ought to seem more intimately allied.
A notable case in point is the next-to-last issue I’ll take up here:
animal studies.
Animal studies are self-evidently a hot topic these days for criti-
cal theory—hotter even than global warming. Not only life scien-
tists and cultural anthropologists, but also neuroscientists, ethicists,
epistemologists, legal theorists, and literary scholars have been
speaking out at an unprecedented rate on the subject of human ob-

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106 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

ligations toward the nonhuman world, the porousness or solidity

of human-nonhuman border, interspecies communication, and so
forth. Ecocriticism, for its part, has from its inception shown keen
interest in the representation of animals, in the (re)conception of
humans as animals, and in interspecies communication and ethics.
Yet ecocritical scholarship in this area seems to have had little if
any impact outside the movement. And even within it, ecocritics
have clearly been listening less to each other than to the animal
rights ethics of Peter Singer and others, the cyborg theory of cultur-
al theorist Donna Haraway, and the late pronouncements of Derri-
da and Agamben on “the animal” as a question-begging marker of
human distinctiveness.61 Although three of the twelve contributors
to the spring 2009 PMLA symposium on animal studies are closely
associated with ecocriticism, even their contributions cite very little
ecocritical work, and the other contributors virtually none at all.
One should not make too much of this particular example. His-
torically, ecocriticism and animal studies have not been as closely
allied as might be supposed. Many ecocritics suspect animal stud-
ies of being insufficiently attentive to environmental or ecosystemic
concerns, 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, master-slave relationships,
and so forth (particularly Agamben, and to a lesser extent Har-
away’s 2003 Companion Species Manifesto). Conceivably, such
suspicions may moderate in future. Canadian ecocritics Rebecca
Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer plausibly argue, for instance, that
the combination of common ground and complementary vulner-
abilities in environmental and animal advocacies make it highly de-
sirable to strive for closer rapprochement.62 At all events, ecocritics
surely have a stake in generating the models for so-called post-
humanist identity, one example of such concern, discussed above,
being transcorporeality as a construal of being in the world that
is simultaneously animal, technological, and environmental. But
as yet, to adapt a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson, I look in
vain for the ecocriticism I would describe. Time will tell if such in-

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 107

terventions as the postcolonial “zoocriticism” charted by Huggan

and Tiffin in Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the forthcoming spe-
cial issue no. 11 on “Animals” from the British ecocritical journal
Green Letters will generate something more robustly influential.
My final thought about ecocritical futures is perhaps even more
wishful, especially considering the skimpiness of my treatment
here of ecocritical work outside the English-speaking world. As
the movement continues to spread beyond its original Anglophone
base, the problem of intercommunication between critical vocab-
ularies becomes commensurately greater—and all the troubling
because, as Heise rightly charges, 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. So environmental critics have not worried as much as
likely we should about how there is no satisfactory word for “envi-
ronment” in Chinese, no adequate term for “wilderness” in Span-
ish. Or how “watershed” means something quite different in the
United States than in Europe, even in the United Kingdom. Readers
will doubtless think of many other examples to set beside these.
Environmental humanists would benefit greatly from a col-
laborative project that will help negotiate these differences and,
perhaps, in the process also achieve a stronger shared critical vo-
cabulary among the growing number of ecocritics worldwide. One
such is in fact under way, an online lexicon of “Keywords in the
Study of Nature and Culture,” coedited by the American ecocrit-
ics Joni Adamson and William Gleason, as part of a larger cultural
“Keywords” project sponsored by New York University Press.63
But this and other such projects will need to become much more
than an Americanist, much more than an Anglophone affair, if it
is to realize anything like its full potential, despite the status of
English today as the world’s lingua franca. 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, in simultaneous recognition of shared concerns
and cultural particularities, for which we are only now starting to
generate the requisite vocabularies.

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108 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

Notes

1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” Es-

says in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1948). Hereafter cited as “ODR.”
2. Nirmal Selvamony, introduction, Essays in Ecocriticism, ed. Nirmal
Selvamony, Nirmaldasan, and Rayson K. Alex (Chennai: OSLE-In-
dia, 2007), xix. Hereafter cited as EE.
3. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), 11–13, 138. Hereafter cited as FEC.
4. Ursula K. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” PMLA
121 (2006): 506. Hereafter cited as “HGE.”
5. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, ed., The Ecocriticism Reader
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii. Hereafter cited as ER.
6. For another previous book-length survey of ecocriticism, see Greg
Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004). Short analytic
overviews include Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Library: The Fun-
damentals and Future of Ecocriticism,” Choice (December 2009):
7–13 (hereafter cited as “GTL”); and, especially, “HGE.” Terry
Gifford’s “Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism,” New Formations 64
(Spring 2008): 15–24, provides a penetrating retrospective historical
analysis in an essay-review of selected texts, including Garrard’s Eco-
criticism and my FEC.
7. See, for example, Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth
and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Karl
Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imaging and the Bi-
ology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); James
C. McCusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York:
St. Martin’s, 2000); Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Es-
says upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990)
(hereafter cited as NWA); Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in Ameri-
can Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992);
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1995) (hereafter cited as EI); Terry Gifford,
Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Terry Gifford, Pastoral
(London: Routledge, 1999). The most conspicuous exception to this
summary statement is Australian environmental criticism, an inter-
disciplinary environmental-humanistic initiative, though not at first
indebted to scholarship in Anglo-American literature, whose results

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 109

have so far been by and large more impressive in history, philosophy,

and social theory (for examples of each, see Tim F. Flannery, The Fu-
ture Eaters: An Ecological History of Australasian Lands and People
[Chatswood, NSW: Reed, 1994]; J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience:
A Philosophical Topography [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999]; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
[London: Routledge, 1993]), although from an early date literature
was also on its map (see George Seddon, Landprints: Reflections
on Place and Landscape [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997]). Significantly, 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 compara-
tive study of German and British romanticism, Topographies of the
Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2004) (hereafter cited as TS).
8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964).
9. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Move-
ment: A Summary,” Inquiry 16 (Spring 1973): 95–100.
10. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadows of Civilization (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jonathan Bate, Romantic
Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London:
Routledge, 1991); Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London:
Picador, 2000).
11. For a stringent critique, see Gregg Garrard, “Heidegger Nazism Eco-
criticism,” ISLE 17, no. 2 (2010): 251–273.
12. Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism, Storytelling, Values, Communication, Con-
tact,” http://www.asle.umn.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994/slovic.html.
13. See John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1998); Ian Marshall, Peak Experiences: Walk-
ing Meditations on Literature, Nation, and Need (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2003); Joni Adamson, American Indi-
an Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle
Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Jim Tarter, “Some
Live More Downstream Than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environ-
mental Justice,” in The Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Joni Ad-
amson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press, 2002), 213–28; Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political

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110 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-

sity Press, 2006) (hereafter cited as PLF); Scott Slovic, Going Away
to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno:
University of Nevada Press, 2008); Harold Fromm, The Nature of
Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) (hereafter cited as NBH).
14. Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology
(New York: Scribner’s, 1972).
15. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and
Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).
16. William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” ER, 69–91;
William Howarth, “Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands,”
New Literary History 30 (Summer 1999): 509–39; Glen A. Love,
Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003).
17. See the discussions in the next section of Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Na-
tures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, forthcoming) (hereafter cited as BN); Stacy
Alaimo, “MCS Matters: Material Agency in the Science and Practices
of Environmental Illness,” Topia 21 (Spring 2009): 7–25 (hereafter
cited as “MCSM”); and NBH.
18. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmen-
tal Imagination of the Global (New York; Oxford University Press,
2008), 119–77.
19. See Michael Vincent McGinnis, ed., Bioregionalism (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999).
20. Ecocritical explorations of the promise of this approach include John
Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1998); Michael Cohen, A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of
Change in the Great Basin (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998);
Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 243–65 (hereafter cited as WEW);
Cheryll Glotfelty, ed., Literary Nevada: Tales from the Silver State
(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008); PLF; and Tom Lynch, Xe-
rophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (Lub-
bok: Texas Tech University Press, 2008).
21. See, for example, NWA; Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American
Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992); EI.
22. Patrick Murphy, ed., Literature of Nature: An International Source-
book (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 111

23. Patrick Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural

Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2009).
24. For example, for German, see TS and Axel Goodbody, Nature, Tech-
nology, and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century German Litera-
ture: The Challenge of Ecocriticism (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2007); for Spanish, see Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism,
and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover: Dartmouth
College Press, 2005), George Handley, New World Poetics: Nature
and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), and Beatriz Rivera-Barnes
and Jerry Hoeg, Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape
(New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009); for Lusophone, see Candace
Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002).
25. See Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East
Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forth-
coming 2011); Jincai Yang, “Ecocritical Dimensions in Contempo-
rary Chinese Literary Criticism” (unpublished 2010 essay).
26. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities: Ec-
ocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1999); Terrell Dixon, ed., City Wilds: Essays and Stories about
Urban Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
27. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environ-
mentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997),
185–201.
28. Stefan Brandt and Frank Mehring, eds., “Transcultural Spaces,” spe-
cial issue of Yearbook of Research in English and American Litera-
tures: REAL 26 (2010); Steven Hartman, ed., Counter Natures (orig.
2009 conference, University of Uppsala, forthcoming) (hereafter cited
as CN).
29. Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature
in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
30. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
31. Greg Garrard, “How Queer Is Green?” in CN (hereafter cited as
“HQG”).
32. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 3, 7, 135.
33. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environ-

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112 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

mental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: Uni-

versity of Arizona Press, 2002).
34. See Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environ-
mental Justice in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2005); Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism
to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2008);
Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The
Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriti-
cism,” MELUS 34, no. 2 (2009): 5–24; Ian Finseth, Shades of Green:
Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery (Athens: Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 2009); Kimberley Ruffin, Black on Earth:
African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Geor-
gia Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How
Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2010) (hereafter cited as BNW).
35. See Michelle Murphy, “The ‘Elsewhere within Here’ and Environ-
mental Illness; or, How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space,”
Configurations 8 (2005): 91.
36. Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” in Postcolo-
nial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).
37. Graham Huggan, “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspec-
tives,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2004): 701–33; Graham
Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Ani-
mals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010).
38. George Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagi-
nation of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2007).
39. Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and
the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alan Be-
well, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000).
40. Cara Ciliano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Against Authenticity:
Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism,” ISLE 14, no. 1
(2007): 77.
41. See also, for example, Robert Marzec, An Ecological and Postcolo-
nial Study of Literature: From Daniel DeFoe to Salman Rushdie (New
York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2007); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and
Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Laura Wright, “Wilderness

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 113

into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Ath-

ens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Upamanyu Pablo Mukher-
jee, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contempo-
rary Indian Novel in English (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010)
(hereafter cited as PE).
42. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Boston: Houghton, 2005).
43. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical
Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222.
44. See Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, “Climate Change, Environmental
Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,” Dis-
course 20 (Spring and Fall 2007): 384–410.
45. Anne Maxwell, “Postcolonial Criticism, Ecocriticism, and Climate
Change: A Tale of Melbourne under Water in 2035,” Journal of Post-
colonial Writing 45, no. 1 (2009): 15–26.
46. Ken Hiltner, “Renaissance Literature and Our Contemporary Atti-
tude Toward Global Warming,” ISLE 16, no. 3 (2009): 429–42.
47. Diane Dumanoski, The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must
Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (New York:
Crown, 2009), 83.
48. For example, Stephanie LeMenager’s in-progress “This Is Not a Tree:
Cultures of U.S. Environmentalism in the Twilight of Oil” in the larg-
er work-in-progress represented by Michael Ziser, “Home Again:
Global Climate Change Ecocriticism and Oil-Shock Bioregionalism,”
in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Stepha-
nie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (New York: Rout-
ledge, forthcoming 2011).
49. Gifford, Pastoral; Bryan L. Moore, Ecology and Literature: Ecocen-
tric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (New
York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008).
50. See Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience
of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1984); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land:
Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976); and Caroline
Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: Harper’s, 1980).
51. See Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape,
Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1996); and “MCSM.”
52. See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London:
Routledge, 1993).

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114 qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2

53. See Joni Seager, Earth Follies: Coming to Terms with the Global En-
vironmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993).
54. See Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism
and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1999); and Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds.,
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010).
55. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric
and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illi-
nois University Press, 1992); Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown,
eds., Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary
America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Frederick
Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the
American Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 3–38; PLF.
56. Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bar-
tram to William James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1999); see Leo Marx on Hudson River School painting in The Ma-
chine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
57. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation
and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1993); Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Greg Mitman, Reel Na-
ture: American Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
58. Christoph Irmscher and Alan Braddock, eds., A Keener Perception:
Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2009).
59. One such conflict is between Robert Kern and Elizabeth Ammons; see
Kern’s “Ecocriticism—What Is It Good For?” ISLE 7 (Winter 2000):
9–32; and BNW.
60. Partly for this reason, the present essay, wide-ranging though it seeks
to be, fails to do justice to a number of other significant ecocritical
trajectories. In theater studies, see especially Una Chaudhuri, Staging
Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995); and Eleanor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds.,
Land/scape/theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
In film studies see, e.g., Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Na-
ture in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow: University of Idaho Press,
1998); David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Holly-

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 Buell: Ecocriticism 115

wood Cinema (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Fred-

erick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis
in the American Century (London: Routledge, 2003); and Robin L.
Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film: Cin-
ema on the Edge (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). In children’s literature
studies, see especially Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, eds.,
Wild Things: Children’s Literature and Ecocriticism (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2004). In scholarship on literature before 1800
generally, see, for example, for medieval, Alf Siewers, Strange Beau-
ty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (New York:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), and Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical
Readings of Late Medieval Literature (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2007); for early modern, Robert N. Watson, Back to
Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and Diane Kelsey Mc-
Colley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Alder-
shot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); and for eighteenth century, Timothy Sweet,
American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American
Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and
John Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheory,”
Religion and Literature 1 (Spring 2008): 11–370. Beyond this ad-
ditional wealth of scholarship on fictive discourses, I must also omit
mention of a much wider array of pertinent environmentally oriented
studies across the disciplines—religion, anthropology, history, science
studies, political theory, developmental psychology, environmental
science, etc.
61. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, rev. ed. (New York: Avon, 1990);
Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, Peo-
ple, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2003); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-
Louise Mallet, trans. David Walls (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008); and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
62. Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, “‘Animals are not believ-
ers in ecology’: Mapping Critical Differences between Environmental
and Animal Advocacy Literatures,” ISLE 14, no. 2 (2007): 122–39.
63. Joni Adamson and William Gleason, “Keywords in the Study of Na-
ture and Culture,” http://keywords.nyupress.org.

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