What is Ecocriticism?

by Nancy Cook

I don't often think of the work I do as ecocriticism, but at some level I suppose it is. I'm interested in place, how we place ourselves in the world and the biological, social, and political ways in which we define where we are. My work of necessity is interdisciplinary, and grows more so with every class I teach. As I prepared this statement I ranged from Mike Kowalewski's literary studies to Donald Worster's history, to Neil Evernden's environmental studies for guidance. Each has been informed by a different matrix of methodologies, different disciplines; all are useful and necessary.

I'm not sure I know what we mean by the term "ecocriticism," but it seems to be a term that is inclusive rather than exclusive. I'm uncomfortable with the term because I think already it comes associated with a particular set of political and social agendas, ones which although I may often share, predispose an audience to make value judgements. Thus, if the term "ecocriticism" assumes what in Montana disparagers call a "granola" mentality, then I hesitate to use the term. In my region it's a crucial task for me to get all of my students to analyze their assumptions about how they place themselves in the world, their assumptions about the word "nature," and their assumptions about environmental advocacies.

The battle lines in Montana have been rigidly drawn, and I hope, by using less familiar rubrics as well as liberal doses of various theoretical methods, I can get my students to come down from the battlements long enough to learn how the battle lines have been constructed. Interdisciplinarity remains crucial to such an enterprise. In order to historicize the term "nature," for example, I need to learn how to draw from biology, environmental history, geography, philosophy, cultural studies and literature, among other disciplines. Before we can successfully argue the merits of the next Wilderness Bill, my students and I need to be able to address such questions as: What is wilderness to us? What do we mean by "nature"? How do we represent where we are? How do we interact with the non-human world? How is that interaction mediated by such factors as historical period, regional location, race, gender, class?

In a sense I practice regional studies. But as Donald Worster has pointed out, "region derives its identity primarily from its ecologically adapted modes of production--or more simply from its ecological modes." So in order to understand my region or any region, I need to develop an ecological view. Politics enters my classroom obliquely and again regionally, for I urge my students to take heed of Barry Lopez's warning: "the more superficial a society's knowledge of the real dimensions of the land it occupies, the more vulnerable the land is to exploitation, to manipulation for short-term gain." While we should be skeptical of facile agreement as to what constitutes "exploitation," and "short-term gain," we need the tools to analyze both the land and our relation to it. And theory plays an important role here. How can we begin to examine a term such as "Nature" without some theoretical apparatus?

Nancy Cook, University of Rhode Island