Ecocriticism's Genesis
ALTHOUGH WILLIAM RUECKERT is usually cited as the only true begetter of the term "ecocriticism" in his 1978 essay "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism," like just about everyone else I did not come across the term until much later. For me personally the only true begetter was Cheryll Glotfelty (formerly Burgess), from whom I received -- retrospectively considered -- a stunning letter in May of 1989, a form letter in fact that had also been sent out to two hundred other authors. It began, I'm a PhD candidate in American literature at Cornell University, purportedly finishing up my dissertation on representations of nature in the American women's literary tradition. The question that fires me incessantly is this: how can one, as a literary critic and teacher, contribute to the ecological health of the planet? It seems to me that ecological concerns are so pressing that they ought to eclipse every other concern. If I can't find a way to approach literature ecologically, then I will have to abandon this profession as frivolous. Cheryll realized literary-environmental writings were scattered far and wide, as were the practitioners of such writing, most of whom probably felt like solo voices crying in the wilderness. To support this claim, Cheryll attached an amazing bibliography that she had compiled of what would come to be called "ecocritical" writings -- it was to the authors of these that she mailed her letter as a twofold plea for help: to add to the bibliography and to help her to produce an anthology of the best of it. Her goal after accomplishing this, she concluded, was "to be the first professor of Literature and the Environment" once she finished her degree at Cornell and entered the job market (which in those days had not yet become bleak for the humanities). At the bottom of her form letter she appended a handwritten note, alluding to her enthusiasm for "From Transcendence to Obsolescence" and psyching me up for the sequels that were to follow.
I marveled that Cheryll had discovered all three of the essays that precede this chapter, since in those days there was no category in which to fit them and, as far as I knew, they had not been picked up in any bibliography or citation index. When I asked about this later on she reported that a professor friend of hers was using as text the Norton Reader, which had anthologized the "Transcendence" essay, appropriately positioned (in keeping with my primordial neuronal mix) between Plato and Woody Allen. Somehow, after reading it, she pressed on to find the other two.
When I responded to her letter with enthusiasm, I received powerful encouragement. After extremely high praise of my essay, she added a postscript in which she reproduced for me the note she had written to herself after reading it: "Although acutely aware of ecological balance, this essay is inveterately anthropocentric still, showing little regard or concern for how human activities affect other species, focusing instead on how human activities, given biological realities, backfire to affect humans. I think even Fromm's worldview stands to be enlarged."
How could I have resisted such a consciousness-raising challenge?
The letters that followed sprung more surprises, such as the invitation to be coeditor of the purported anthology. I agreed to the editorial job if I could give her most of the credit for the book (which I did), and in the winter of 1990 I came up with the idea of proposing the very first ecocritical session to be held at the Modern Language Association convention. With a call for papers in the MLA Newsletter for a session on the greening of literary studies, we were launched into the unknown. The response was encouraging: many more potential papers were offered than could be accommodated. I chose the most promising, wrote a formal proposal -- and MLA turned it down. Some of us sent angry complaints to the MLA office, asked to see the judges' reports, and were incensed even further by the reports' flimsiness. (This happened once again when I more recently proposed a session on Darwinian literary theory -- and the excuses were even flimsier.) Undaunted, we tried again the following year with an almost identical proposal and the very same panelists, this time with mysterious success. Not knowing what to expect, I asked for a meeting room to accommodate an audience of twenty-five.
On the 29th of December, however, I was astonished to see that our meeting room at the San Francisco Marriott was filling up rapidly and would probably be too small to accommodate the rapid influx of attendees. Managing to negotiate a room switch even as the crowd was pressing in, we ended up with more than a hundred enthusiastic auditors. Cheryll, as first speaker, introduced the subject of ecocriticism -- and the movement already under way began to take on the look of an institutionally sanctioned discipline. Not wanting to lose these mostly newfound allies, we passed around a sign-up sheet so that we could keep in touch.
Not long afterward, the Western Literature Association, which had been in existence since 1966 with particular literary emphasis on what had come to be called "nature writing," held their October 1992 conference in Reno. A special meeting took place to plant the seeds for a new organization to be devoted to nature writing. Ecocriticism is today a bona fide field of study with unofficial headquarters at the University of Nevada, Reno, where Cheryll, Michael Branch, and Scott Slovic have pioneered a program. And in 1990, Cheryll indeed became the first official Assistant Professor of Literature and the Environment.
For me, learning from Cheryll's introductory letter of 1989 that I was an ecocritic was an event much like the famous case of Moliere's Mon. Jourdain, who was astonished to discover he had been speaking prose all his life. But of my first three ventures into ecological writing (the three preceding chapters) the only one of the group that can be considered eco-criticism is "From Transcendence to Obsolescence," which treats ecological themes as variants of classical literary preoccupations. "On Being Polluted" was essentially ecology from a humanist's sensibility, but insofar as its hidden real theme was the effect of air pollution on the body and thence on consciousness, it marked the unwitting germination of a consciousness-oriented subtext to everything ecological that followed in my thinking. "Air and Being" was a much more explicit account of the environment/body/mind interrelation that became increasingly dominant each time I returned to seemingly "environmental" issues. Thus, most of what follows in this book shows ecology morphing bit by bit via Darwinian themes into consciousness studies. "After Darwin, Marx, and Freud," I had written in 1983, "the arena of human freedom has come to seem painfully shrunken. And after contemporary environmental studies, even less remains. But recognition of environmental constraints upon our behavior can at least inform our options, as we come to see how many 'choices' are actually made for us by the nature of things." (Compare that rather bland statement with the final chapter of this book.)
Writing about the environment hardly constituted a new genre. One could trace it back at least as far as Theocritus, through the Romans, the Medievals, the European Enlightenment, the Romantics, the American Transcendentalists, and so forth, not to mention the literature of the East. But the literary mode is almost always that of "nature writing," as it came to be called later on. When the activities now subsumed by ecocriticism generated ASLE, ISLE, and the various meetings held by the Western Literature and Modern Language Associations, the emphasis was still mostly on nature writing. Once ASLE was established, in the early 1990s, and once ISLE appeared in 1993 and The Ecocriticism Reader in 1996, the situation rapidly changed. The kind of writing we associate with Thoreau and Annie Dillard was quickly complemented by critical writings that were more self-conscious about their own genres. In The Ecocriticism Reader itself, some of the most influential selections dealt with religion, with toxic consciousness in the American novel, with eco-feminism, Native Americans, technology, and psychology. Environmental justice, the "nature" of cities, environmental law, evolution, biology, and sociobiology produced further expansions. Although one hears occasional complaints from critics such as the above-quoted editor from Cambridge about the insufficient theorization of ecocriticism and its failure to nail itself down into a well-defined theory of critique, this weakness, if it is a weakness, has a compensatory strength. Ecocriticism covers a broad spectrum. It serves as an umbrella term for very diverse activities, and it is unwilling to be hijacked by a single, theoretical, fetishistic perspective.
My own view is that unlike literary Marxism, feminism, and queer theory, ecocriticism will be around for a long time, able to shape itself to unanticipated developments in the arts, society, and even international relations in an age of global warming. As Lawrence Buell put it in The Future of Environmental Criticism, "A telltale index is the growth within the last decade of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from a localized North American ferment into a thousand-member organization with chapters worldwide from the UK to Japan and Korea to Australia-New Zealand. The 'Who's listening?' question which nagged me when I first entered the arena of environmental criticism has given way to 'How can I keep pace with all this new work?'"
The essays and articles that I produced after the initial eco-trio reveal some of the enlargements of ecocriticism I have pointed toward. They were not teased out by any theories but arose from an intuitive sense of the complexity of environmental matters in their social, philosophical, scientific, and political aspects. Like so much religious piety that is in fact a form of higher narcissism (e.g., the Big Bang took place 14 billion years ago in order to "save" my precious little "soul" today), "deep ecology" struck me as a painfully self-deceptive form of anthropocentrism. In the conflict between Dave Foreman and Murray Bookchin in chapter 6, my sympathies are clearly with Bookchin's attack on Foreman's over-the-top biocentrism. And Foreman himself began to moderate his positions as time went by, toning down the misanthropy. In dealing with Aldo Leopold (in chapter 7), I wanted both to represent him as an eco-saint while also pointing out his feet of clay: his biocentrism was not exactly what he thought it was, nor what many of his readers supposed. About Lawrence Buell's Environmental Imagination I had decidedly mixed feelings, as indeed Buell himself now does when he refers to it in The Future of Environmental Criticism. And in "The 'Environment' Is Us" (chapter 9) the quotes around "environment" are an early giveaway of my growing sense that there really is no environment, but that idea is not developed until much later (see chapter 17, "Ecocriticism's Big Bang").
In what is to date my favorite ecocritical insight, "Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 80" (chapter 10) turned out to be a contrapuntal weaving of environment, esthetics, and technology. Far from being a Luddite or indulging in Heideggerian moonshine, I acknowledge the ineluctable fact that even the most rarefied "spirituality" is beholden to technology and that almost everything human is enabled by what the Greeks called techne. Aldo Leopold is again a begetter in "Full Stomach Wilderness and the Suburban Esthetic" (chapter 11), where I use his full-stomach remark as an epigraph for another specimen of heterodoxy in which I acknowledge that even suburban expansion and destruction of the "wilderness" provide access to and appreciation of the very wilderness it partially destroys. And finally, for the present book at least, I try to unravel the ambiguities of J. M. Coetzee's ecological fictions.
Inevitably, however, ecology has to be seen as a component of Darwinian evolution and selection, the focus of part 2, and equally inevitable is the movement into consciousness studies in part 3. If there really is no environment, just morphing materiality, then natural selection goes a long way toward producing the sought-after Grand Theory, and consciousness, like trees and pollution, is just another one of its material products.