The Ecocritical Heritage

by Ian Marshall

Like would-be discoverers of a New World of scholarship, we ecocritics of ASLE feel ourselves embarking on a vast journey. Our mission: to map our territory, lay out its boundaries. We're not quite Adamic, given the privilege of naming, but we at least get to assume the act of defining what it is we do, or think ought to be done. It's exciting to be part of something new, and it's liberating to think that we can make things up as we go along. But let's not forget that even the scholarly world is round. Let's learn from the ethno- and self-centric excesses of past explorers and be aware of those who were here before us. I got my doctorate at a conservative university, where I studied under a conservative, tradition-minded early Americanist, and the word "ecology" never came up in any of my classes--and yet during my studies I read a whole lot of literary criticism about human attitudes toward nature and landscape, criticism by people like Norman Foerster, R.W.B. Lewis, Hans Huth, Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, Edwin Fussell, Howard Mumford Jones, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Leo Marx, and Roderick Nash--to name very few, all writing major works before the 1970s. I suspect that there is an equally rich tradition in environmental studies.

I hope that definitions of ecocriticism can be broad as well as deep. Put as simply and loosely as possible: it's literary criticism informed by ecological awareness. But if ecological awareness means either scientific or spiritual recognition of the interconnections of living things, including humans, with each other and with their environment--then what we're doing really is not entirely new. Just as there is precedent for ecologically sensitive thinking even before there was such a word as ecology (by people like Henry Thoreau, William Bartram, the Cherokee, the Apache, and so on), there is such a thing as an ecocritical heritage. Those critics who have defined, studied, and applied concepts such as "pastoral," "romanticism," "transcendentalism," or "the frontier," or in American literature those critics who have pointed out that in the nineteenth century the land served as a determinant and symbol of the national character--weren't they all exploring the relationship between humanity and the natural world?

I don't mean to suggest that there's nothing new to do. The contemporary ecocritic undoubtedly should take recent scholarship, new ideas, new awarenesses into account. The science of ecology, for instance. Or post-structuralism--as much as it seems to ignore the real world in order to engage in mental and linguistic gymnastics, its emphasis on de-centering is entirely compatible with ecological thought. Or feminism, which has already given rise to the branch of ecocriticism called ecofeminism--a branch that at present is bigger than the rest of the tree.

So what should we do as ecocritics? Among other things, we could reinvigorate traditional studies of such topics as "the frontier" by respectfully reexamining past assumptions based on the new kinds of knowing inherent in ecology. And we might argue our case for the importance of our subject in part by emphasizing the scholarly tradition that we are heir to.

Ian Marshall, The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona