Some Principles of Ecocriticism

by Don Scheese

1. The theory and practice of ecocriticism is inherently political. I feel about ecocriticism the way Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader does about feminism: "At its best, feminism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read." One of the main reasons I teach courses in nature writing and environmental history, and publish on these topics, is to make our students and the general public more sensitive towards and knowledgeable about the places in which they live. I echo Barry Lopez's hope that the practice and study of nature writing may someday "provide the foundation for a reorganization of American political thought."

2. Ecocriticism can benefit from integration with other literary theories. I don't find it useful to lambaste the MLA for its solipsism, its jargon-laden discourse, and its woeful neglect of the literature of the environment. We ought to engage other literary theories in a dialectic from which a better understanding of nature and nature writing might emerge. For example, I think there is some merit in the post-modernist claim that nature is a social and psychological construct, because all writing is anthropocentric in that it must be filtered through a human consciousness. I have also benefited from the perspectives of the New Historicists and their emphasis on "the textuality of history and the historicity of texts." We need an ecocriticism that is grounded in place, yes; we also need theory that is grounded in history, that historicizes the text--and its criticism. The challenge, as William Rueckert has put it, is this: "How can we resolve the fundamental paradox of this profession and get out of our heads? . . . How can we move from the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which ecology tells us. . . we belong to even as we are destroying it?"

3. Ecocriticism is inherently interdisciplinary. One of the startling discoveries I have made in teaching nature writing over the years is of the broad community of scholars across the disciplines who regularly incorporate the literature of place in their courses. Ecocriticism is most appropriately applied to a work in which the landscape itself is a dominant character, when a significant interaction occurs between author and place, character(s) and place. Landscape by definition includes the non-human elements of place--the rocks, soil, trees, plants, rivers, animals, air--as well as human perceptions and modifications. How an author sees and describes these elements relates to geological, botanical, zoological, meteorological, ecological, as well as aesthetic, social, and psychological, considerations. And then there is the historical vantage point. As Thoreau once wrote, there can be no history but natural history--if one believes that by "nature" we mean the human as well as non-human world.

4. Fieldwork on the part of scholars and students can improve the practice of ecocriticism. In teaching and publishing on various works of nature writing, I have benefited from visiting the sand counties of Wisconsin, the Maine woods, Yosemite Valley, Arches National Park--to compare and contrast my impressions with those of the authors, to trace the historical evolution of a place, to get the feel of a particular environment. Like an anthropologist we should engage in fieldwork; our informant is the land itself. Outdoor education goes hand-in-hand with ecocriticism because we and our students need to be reminded regularly that the earth was not made for humans alone. There's no such thing as "bad weather."

5. Ecocriticism must tolerate dissent. We should welcome the opinions of those who argue there is no ecological crisis, who hold that environmentalism has gone too far in its methods and goals, who think that nature writing smacks of purple prose. Diversity is healthy, both in the ecosystem and in the academic community.

Don Scheese, Gustavus Adolphus College