Four Ways of Looking at Ecocriticism

by Stan Tag

1. It wrestles with, embraces, and seeks to understand Walt Whitman's declaration in "A Song of the Rolling Earth":

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth.

2. As pedagogical practice, it means encouraging and enabling students to explore the natural world firsthand. To read the earth--carefully, closely, and often; to pay attention to its rhythms, patterns, intricacy. Students need to get to know the earth, not just discuss it. Such outdoor experiences will enliven their reading of books, and even sharpen their thinking and writing. It means creating assignments that get students out of the classroom, or that challenge students to study any given subject within the larger contexts of their campus environments, their towns, watersheds, continents, planet. We must give students time and space to experience the natural world. One student who spent much of her semester writing project watching a hillside change from winter to spring wrote: "I can't believe how wrong I've been about this bush so many times. At first, I thought it was dead--and it grew buds. Then I watched it grow and the buds mature, thinking it was a young tree or some plant I'd never seen before--and it has turned into a lilac bush. My town's backyards sport quite a few lilacs; my own is no exception. My brother and friends and I used to chase the dog through them, and each other. How could I have not recognized this bush? Maybe it's because I watched it so closely. I studied it carefully, not knowing what it was, with no preconceptions of how it should look or any idea of what it was. Before, I knew the flower of the lilac bush, and I knew the leaf, but I didn't really know the plant. I didn't see how it grew from a clump of kinked, dead-looking sticks into a full bouquet of wiry branches weighted with mini-pineapples. Now I know the plant better, the whole bush instead of just the flower or the leaf. This hillside is like that bush now. I know the whole place better, having watched it take on new life with no preconceived ideas, no expectations. If I brought someone down here now they would see the flower and the leaf. I see the whole bush."

3. As scholarly and pedagogical practice, it means exploring (reading, discussing, writing about) language as an on-going product of evolution. Language is not inherently separate from the natural world, as some theories may suggest, but is evolving out of the same evolutionary processes as the earth itself. Arguments about whether language represents the world, or whether it distances us from the world, sidetrack us from the more important things we have to learn about how language already functions within our experiences of the world. When we study the relationships between language and landscape, text and terrain, or words and woods, we are not studying two separate things (as if we lived in some dualistic universe), but interdependencies, particular manifestations (even processes) of the thing we call life, each interconnected to the other, and both wholly dependent upon such basic natural elements for their survival as sunlight, water, and air. No literary theory would be worth a whit if the sun burnt out tomorrow. (Some aren't anyway.) Ecocritical scholarship also needs to be interdisciplinary. Just as a healthy ecosystem depends upon a diversity of plant and animal life, healthy ecocriticism depends upon a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives. A fully ecological analysis of any text can only happen within a community of readings. Such an approach to studying literature, according to Don Elgin (The Comedy of the Fantastic, 1985), "is a frightening one, for it means dealing with infinitely more complex systems than simply philosophies and/or theories of art and literature. It means investigating the manner in which politics, economics, science, religion, language, medicine, and countless other matters go into the making of a piece of literature. It means trying to see the whole, and the whole is so enormous and complex that the temptation is to retreat to the comfort of specialized knowledge, information that is reassuring precisely because it has simplified the world to the point at which it can be understood" (15).

4. It means always keeping in mind that--as Thoreau recognized--"The universe is larger than our views of it."

Stan Tag, Albertson College of Idaho (now at Western Washington University)