Blues In The Green, continued
Go Back to Blues in the Green, part 1
Crossroads
SO, ONCE upon a time, ecocriticism was born out of the perceived disjunction between business as usual in the university and the environmental crisis. The crisis was and is real, and ecocritics proposed to meet that crisis, using the skills that literary studies possess. At that moment, simple and straightforward positions and strategies seemed possible. Since then, the perceived dimensions of environmental crisis have enlarged and spread from local to global. Scientists have responded with ideas like island biogeography, terms like biodiversity, and disciplines like conservation biology. Social activists have also responded with terms like environmental justice, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. Using such terms puts critics inside specific arguments.
I have said in years past that, "by definition, ecological literary criticism must be engaged. It wants to know but also wants to do. ... Ecocriticism needs to inform personal and political actions, in the same way that feminist criticism was able to do only a few decades ago."78 I have not changed this view, but have come to see its complications.
One purpose of environmental literature, as literature, is to express not just the joy of the wide-open spaces, but also what it feels like to be "nuked" in southern Utah, be a victim of toxics, be deprived of an ancestral place in the sun. The responsibility of ecocritics includes valuing these experiences when they become literature. But literature also must bear scrutiny and make sense under the lens of interdisciplinary study.
I have come to recognize more acutely the degree to which informed political action requires taking advice from others with greater expertise. Like environmental history, ecocriticism must seek authority from perspectives outside itself, including those outside academia, including victims, because it engages and applies insights, methods, and theories that are outside the authority of literary criticism. That is the reason for, and insistence upon, interdisciplinary activity. Because it wishes to be informed, and wishes to create alliances with other workers in other disciplines, as well as with other members of other communities, to meet the crisis. Because the modern world and the nature of the crisis demand it do so.
Crisis always includes the dimension of perception: Do we perceive crossed intentions and possibilities accurately? No movement can operate successfully and healthily unless it takes account of and absorbs critique. Otherwise, the result easily can become "doing or advocating the wrong thing for the right reason." Environmentalists have been accused of this error.
An already historical case in point might be the storm over Cronon's "The Trouble," not merely because so many ecocritics followed their leaders, nature writers like Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams, in responding negatively and often ad hominem to Cronon's argument. Cronon argued strenuously against the ecocentrist position advocated by deep ecology. Because deep ecology is widely supported by ecocritics, Cronon, like Leo Marx, had been taken by some to be an opponent.
Something similar seems to be happening with Dana Phillips's recently published The Truth of Ecology. Phillips argues that "ecocriticism ought to be less devoted to pieties: that it ought to offend." Yet speaking for the wild requires civility and this is no paradox. Even when making interesting points, Phillips defeats himself by acting the wild man, in a bad-tempered savaging of canonical writers of ecocriticism and contemporary American nature writing. He adds a gratuitous attack on the work of environmental historians Donald Worster and Carolyn Merchant, for good measure. I believe that the institutional culture of ASLE must bear part of the responsibility for the tone of the Phillips critique. ASLE's design space, or landscape, has no place within for voices of critique, and can expect more rhetoric that storms its culture, from outside.
Consequently, the response to the Phillips book is shaping up to be one measure of the maturity of the ecocritical community. In a recent review published in Orion, Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE, admits that more people than Phillips believe "the community of nature writers and ecocritics has become too chummy and self congratulatory—too self-satisfied and self righteous." Slovic argues, unfortunately, given his misunderstanding of the experience or the science behind chemotherapy, that "Reading The Truth of Ecology is like enduring a dose of chemotherapy—if it doesn't kill you (or your spirit), it will make you stronger." Slovic does not answer the challenge, except to say "that words—including nature writing and ecocriticism—have the potential to be nourishing and therapeutic." Does this nourishment apply to the reader or the writer? In a review published by ISLE, Sean O'Grady condescendingly argues that the book "misbehaves ... [Y]et, like a bright, refractory child, it is not without merit."79
I hope I express my point more gently. Phillips is more frequently accurate and acute than most ecocritics seem to be able to bear. He offers a challenge. A healthy ecocriticism should be capable of accepting critique and using it constructively, because it speaks within a cultural context. What Lawrence Buell calls praxis, and most of us call activism will continue to resist critique: In an age of environmental crisis, nothing is more depressing than the prospect of environmentalists fighting interminably among themselves. But the story within environmental organizations should be a caution to scholars. The fallout from David Brower's resistance to criticism when he was executive director of the Sierra Club should be a reminder of what happens when people fail to listen.
A Return to Roots?
SURELY THE crisis within ecocriticism was born of its peculiarly American conception, as it canonized American writers (Thoreau and Muir and their tradition) and American critics (Leo Marx, Roderick Nash, Joseph Meeker, Annette Kolodny, Lawrence Buell, and their traditions), but the roots of its crisis of ideology are historically deeper. Perhaps some ecocritics still desire to say "Look for nature, in all literature, at every reasonable opportunity, externally, toward environment, and internally, toward human nature!" But to what extent does accepting such a universal or panoramic priority of nature over culture translate an idea of Alexander Pope into modern critical terms?
Unerring Nature! Still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and universal light
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.80
As "source, and end, and test," and as the form of his couplets signal, Pope's theory expresses a desire for an all-purpose model that gives congruent answers and closure to all questions of representation, of external and human nature, of the purpose of literature, of modes and sources of literary production, and of the critic's mission.
To put this another way, in Pope the transactions of representer and represented are shaped by a mystified union of human mind, human language, and human culture, and are based on an essentialized version of the "external world." This view is not unknown in the writing of some ecocritics, but it is an unstable grounding for the future.
The really big question might be how to continue the tradition, confront a complex, global crisis, critique the Pope position—and other unexamined positions in ecocriticism—without going through a period of internecine battle, where Young Turks displace the old dogs, and without producing an academic discourse so arcane it has no readers in the real world.81
How can ecocriticism be more analytical without becoming less politically efficacious? As the young critics disdain the loose thinking of some of their elders, shall ecocriticism replace the Thoreauvian father with other fathers, or better yet, with mothers, or read Thoreau more carefully? Can ecocriticism be re-grounded in ecofeminism or postcolonial studies to meet racial and ethnic inequalities? What about globalization? Where do the roads of inquiry meet and where do they diverge; what happens at these crossroads? One thing is certain: traditional theories of representation are under attack because of the narrowness of their interests and especially because younger critics have become suspicious of personal narratives about nature produced from privileged positions of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Some English professors decided to follow a decidedly not-majority path in their careers. As we used to say, "If you are not part of the solution," well, we know the rest. Ecocritics wish to be part of some solution, or at least part of the dialogue about possible solutions. They wish to avoid certain risks of academic business as usual, where research is driven by the market and by the need for professional advancement. They face risks in giving autonomy to those in other disciplines, especially when the information and methods of those other disciplines are rapidly changing. But the worst risk is of speaking only to themselves, or of dying out, like frogs from the Sierra Nevada.
I have spent most of my career examining textual strategies, including those produced through institutional rhetoric, for preserving wild lands and biological diversity. I consider that much of this work falls almost exactly midway between environmental history and ecocriticism, and I consider this a productive place for both literary scholars and environmental historians to work. Of one thing I am certain: Good writing is more effective and important for these purposes than bad writing, but what is good is not such a simple matter. Books are tools for seeing the world: Which tools help perception is a question to be answered partly by those who specialize in the literary structure of books.
One begins literary analysis by decomposing texts into their constituent parts. What goes into green writing that is indispensable? Part of the goal is to recompose the writing. How can these elements be composed more successfully, made more powerful, for the purposes of making a better world? The role of the ecocritic is not only to celebrate, but it is also not only to disassemble. The goal is to facilitate clearer thinking about human transactions with environments, and to facilitate better nature writing in the future. This role seems remarkably congruent with the role of environmental history.
Perhaps Robert Johnson didn't have to sell his soul to the devil at the crossroads to learn how to play that mean guitar. "Poor Bob," as Johnson called himself in his song, went home and practiced. Ecocritical practice will not be as enjoyable as we had once hoped, but it will determine what kind of music we make.
Michael P. Cohen's books are The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (1984), The History of the Sierra Club 1892–1970 (1988), and A Garden of Bristlecone Pines: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (1998). More recently he has embarked on a study of the groundings of ecocriticism in the historically changing ideas of ecology, evolutionary theory, and the politics of wilderness. He is a visiting professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Notes
1.ASEH News 12 (Summer 2001): 2.
2. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).
3. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
4. David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 126.
5. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).
6. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Ethics," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentriccia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 387–405.
7. Ibid., 400, 404.
8. Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 1–12; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
9. The Wilderness Act, sec 2 a., c.: PL 88–577, 88th Congress S.4., 3 September 1964.
10. Glen A. Love, "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism," in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed., Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 237.
11. Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 1.
12. Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," in Excursions and Poems, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906). Note that the third chapter of Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990) uses the language of Thoreau to place itself within a tradition.
13. See Kolodny, The Lay of the Land.
14. Snyder, The Practice of the Wild; William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 69–90; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
15. I discuss this issue in "Resistance to Wilderness,"Environmental History 1 (1996): 33–42. The term "real work" is used by Gary Snyder in the poem "I Went Into The Maverick Bar," Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 9.
16. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–29.
17. See Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, "Introduction," in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), xiii–xxiii; and the ASLE website: http://www.asle.umn.edu/.
18. Gioia Woods, Graduate Handbook: http://www.asle.umn.edu/pubs/handbook/lit.html.
19. Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press: 1992); John P. O'Grady, Pilgrims to the Wild (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press: 1993).
20. These regional studies sometimes are called "bioregional studies." See David Robertson, Real Matter (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997); David Robertson, West of Eden: A History of Art and Literature of Yosemite (Berkeley, Calif.: Wilderness Press, 1984); For a non-literary genre, see David Rothenberg, Sudden Music: Improvisation, Sound, Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
21. Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xix. Some basic texts and anthologies of ecocriticism include Buell, The Environmental Imagination; Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998); Michael P. Branch et al., eds. Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998); Patrick Murphy, Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington, eds. Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000); and Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).
22. William Rueckert, "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism," in Glotfelty and Fromm, Ecocriticism Reader, 105–23.
23. Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribners, 1972). For a superficial critique of ecology as ground for ecocriticism, See Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 153–65.
24. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Robert H. Peters, A Critique for Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley, The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
25. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 6–8.
26. Some anthologies of and about nature writing include John Elder and Robert Finch, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990); Tom Lyon, ed., This Incomperable Lande (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989); Robert M. Torrence, ed., Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998); and John Elder, ed., American Nature Writers, 2 vols. (New York: Charles M. Scribner's Sons, 1996). See also Lorraine Anderson, ed., Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature (New York: Vintage, 1991); Scott Slovic and John P. O'Grady, ed., Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture (1999).
27. Elaine Showalter, "Introduction: The Feminist Critical Revolution," in New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 3–17. See also Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 179–206.
28. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Susan Fenimore Cooper, Essays on Landscape and Culture, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Michael P. Branch, ed. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming 2004).
29. Branch and Slovic, The ISLE Reader.
30. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), ix–xiv.
31.New Literary History 30 (Summer 1999): 505.
32. Lawrence Buell, "Letter," PMLA 114 (October 1999) 1090–1. This and other letters are collected under the title "Forum on Literatures of the Environment," PMLA 114 (October 1999), 1089–1104.
33. Ursula K. Heise, "Letter," PMLA 114 (October 1999): 1096–7.
34. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). One also could include Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Ecological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and many other historical and scientific studies to show the ubiquity of this kind of question.
35. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmodes, and John Toobey, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford 1992), 31–48; Steven Pinker, Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002); Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1995); Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal; On the Biogenic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
36. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999); Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999); and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
37. Recent reviews by Leo Marx included the following texts and critical works on Thoreau: Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed., The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972–1983); Bradley P. Dean, ed., Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851, with an introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin, 1993); Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto "Lost Journal" (1840–1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary, ed. Perry Miller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); George Sessions, ed., Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1995); Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Buell, The Environmental Imagination; Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
38. David Mazel, ed., A Century of Early Ecocriticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
39. J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); Beyond the Land Ethic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).
40. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); The Middle Ground (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For environmental history read by ecocritics, see Glotfelty and Fromm, Ecocriticism Reader, 393–400; William deBuys and Alex Harris, River of Traps: A Village Life (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).
41. Laurence Coupe, ed., The Green Studies Reader (Routledge: London, 2000); Kerridge and Sammells, Writing the Environment.
42. David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985); George Session, ed. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century; David Rothenberg, ed., Wild Ideas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Peter Reed and David Rothenberg, eds., Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg, eds., Beneath the Surface; Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
43. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). This exercise of reading was invented for the exploration of fiction. But with such investigations as Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), the mode of analysis has been applied to non-fiction.
44. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 69–90; Robert Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness," The Scientific Monthly 30 (1930) 141–48.
45. Cronon, "Trouble with Wilderness," 69.
46. Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness,"141.
47. Cather quoted in Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness," 142.
48. Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness," 141; Cronon, "Trouble with Wilderness," 69.
49. John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); William L. Fox, The Void, The Grid, & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000) and Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002); Ian Marshall, Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Peak Experiences (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003); Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1994) and Wanderlust: a History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000); Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1984).
50. Field studies are explored in David Orr, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992); Gregory Smith and Dilafruz Williams, eds., Ecological Education in Action (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999); John Tallmadge, Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher's Path (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997); Hal Crimmell, ed., Teaching in the Field: Working with Students in the Outdoor Classroom (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003); Corey Lewis, "'Reading the Trail,' Exploring the Literature of the Pacific Crest" (Ph.D. diss., University of Nevada, Reno, 2003).
51. Scott Slovic, "Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact," (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association, Salt Lake City, Utah, 5–8 October 1994), discussed in Marshall, Story Line, 7–8. When asked, one literary-critic colleague at the University of Nevada will say, "All criticism is narrative."
52. Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home, 26, 237.
53. John Elder, Vallombrosa: Pilgrimage to Stewardship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
54. Richard White warned against this problem, that a vision of "transcendent nature" might "wash away the boundaries that time creates" in imagining "a universal language shared by author and subject." "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review, 54 (1985): 297–304.
55. See the review of Peter Matthiessen's The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes: Richard White, "The Natures of Nature Writing," Raritan 22 (Fall 2002): 145–61.
56. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 86. I will spare the reader my own indulgences into this kind of narrative voice.
57. A few of the volumes in the Credo Series by Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, Minn.) include John Nichols, An American Child Supreme: The Education of a Liberation Ecologist (2001), Rick Bass, Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism (1999), Scott Russell Sanders, The Country of Language (1999), John Elder, The Frog Run: Words and Wilderness in the Vermont Woods (2001), Pattiann Rogers, The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation (1999), Ann Haymond Zwinger, Shaped By Wind and Water: Reflections of a Naturalist (2000), and William Kittredge, Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief (1999). Each contains a substantial profile of the author by Scott Slovic. In addition, see SueEllen Campbell, "The Credo Series: Language/Nature/Cherishing," Western American Literature 37 (Fall, 2002): 361–9.
58. Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Pantheon, 1991); Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (New York: Addison Wesley, 1997).
59. Paul Wapner, "Leftist Criticism of 'Nature': Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age," Dissent: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/.
60. William Cronon, "The Riddle of the Apostle Islands," Orion 22 (May/June 2003): 36–42. Virginia J. Scharff, ed. Seeing Nature Through Gender (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) comprises an excellent collection of ecocriticism by historians.
61. Jim Cheney, "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117–34; Dan Flores, "Place: An Argument for Bioregional History,"Environmental History Review (Winter 1994): 1–18.
62. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Renaissance Refashionings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gun, Redrawing the Boundaries: A Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992).
63. William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–76.
64. David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
65. In a session on "Lynching Trees" (as in the song, "Strange Fruit") at ASLE in Boston, one scholar commented that in the African-American community the pine tree logo used for Timberland Products was coded as meaning: "Stay Away!"
66. Lynton Keith Caldwell, The National Environmental Policy Act: An Agenda for the Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 55–56.
67. See Simon C. Estok, "A Report Card on Ecocriticism," AUMLA: The Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 96 (November 2001): 220–38.
68. The letter can be found at http://www.asle.umn.edu/about/diversity.html.
69. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 7. See also Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2001); and Rachel Stein, Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers' Revisions of Nature, Gender and Race (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1997).
70. "Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion with Simon Ortiz, Teresa Leal, Devon Pena, and Terrell Dixon," in The Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Adamson, Evans, and Stein, 23–24.
71. See Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1999); Terrell F. Dixon, ed., City Wilds (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
72. Valsecchi's reading list and proposed questions for her M.A. examination at the University of Nevada, Reno, included Adamson, Evans, and Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader; Devon Pena, ed. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1990); Cronon, Uncommon Ground; Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Jose Rivera, Acequia Culture: Water, Land, Community in the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Jimmie M. Killingsworth and Jaqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); Kerridge and Sammels, Writing The Environment; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderland—La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1991); and Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002).
73. Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 138.
74. Ibid., 185–239.
75. Within evolutionary studies, Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995) have gained some influence. Francisco J. Varella, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosh, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) is pregnant with possibility. Andy Clark, Being There (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997) tests the construction of various ecological models of representation.
76. Leo Marx, "The Struggle Over Thoreau," New York Review of Books 46 (24 June 1999); Leo Marx, "The Full Thoreau," NYRB 46 (15 July 15 1999); "An Exchange on Thoreau" with letters by Lawrence Buell, and Leo Marx followed: NYRB 46 (2 December 1999). The protracted discussion between Buell and Marx has reproduced, in print and in a session at the 2003 ASLE conference, well-known basic philosophical distinctions between the anthropocentric and biocentric positions that found environmental ethics, as in Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 9–10. But the discussion has made no progress. Steven Marx (no relation to Leo) has pointed out that, rather than polarizing ecocentric vs. homocentric, or nature vs. culture, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory claims that these categories overlap, and Schama mocks the distinction in somewhat the same way that Cronon does in "The Trouble With Wilderness." (http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Nature/Buell.html).
77. Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 6.
78. Michael P. Cohen, "Letter," PMLA 114 (October 1999): 1092–3.
79. Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 241. John P. O'Grady, review of The Truth of Ecology, ISLE 10 (Summer 2003): 278–9; Scott Slovic, review of The Truth of Ecology, Orion 22 (September/October 2003): 75–6.
80. Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," in Vincent B. Leitch, et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (1711, reprint; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 442.
81. See Donald Worster et al., "A Roundtable: Environmental History" Journal of American History 76 (March 1990), 1087–1147.