What is Ecocriticism?

by Allison B. Wallace

Wendell Berry has called the latter twentieth-century ecological crisis an inevitable result of several other crises, those of American character, agriculture, and culture. Underlying them all may be a much larger, more deeply rooted crisis of imagination. At their best, both ecoliterature and ecocriticism address and redress this general American failure to participate as fully--that is, as imaginatively--as possible in all the nonhuman, Other life going on around, within, and in spite of us.

When I talk about ecoliterature, I'm talking about any writing that focuses on place, on the thousands of local landscapes that make up not scenery through car windows, not Sierra Club calendars nor slick ads for hiking gear, but rather our daily contexts, what David Quammen calls our "matri[ces] for destiny." Writing that examines and invites intimate human experience of place's myriad ingredients: weather, climate, flora, fauna, soil, air, water, rocks, minerals, fire and ice, as well as all the marks there of human history. Writing that sifts carefully among old metaphors regarding natural phenomena (again, including humans) and casts about for new ones, conscious that metaphors serve not only as our links to these things but also as our provisional truths about them.

When I talk about ecocriticism, I stick (for now) to a basic and rather old-fashioned charge: ecocriticism must work to make American writing about place more prominent in academic journals and undergraduate classrooms, whether the discipline is English, history, American studies, philosophy, economics, geography, ecology, geology, biology, whatever. These fields concentrate on human life on the one hand or nonhuman life on the other--rarely do they make any significant marriage between the two their aim. Ecocriticism stands poised to integrate the field that does--ecoliterature--into virtually all the standard disciplines. Why should this matter? Because this kind of reading points to human participation in nature that enriches and enlarges the mind and spirit; because our best hope for our imperiled places lies in this imaginative involvement, as readers and as agents of change, insofar as it fosters in us a sense of sympathy and belonging. That accomplished, then a multi-layered, rewarding sense of place-as-home can begin to supplant any amorphous notion of "the environment"--surely a concept evolved by large numbers of homeless (albeit affluently housed) people.

But to return to ecocriticism per se: I envision this to include writing that continues to bring--as it already has to an extent--nonfiction texts regarding place into the literary canon(s);  focuses on the ecological (again, eco = place) concerns within and ramifications of all literary texts, no matter the genre; reaches out to an interdisciplinary audience in an effort to get ecoliterature into classrooms typically unconcerned with literary texts; offers an ongoing cultural critique of American relationships to places and their countless components.

Allison B. Wallace, Unity College of Maine (now at University of Central Arkansas)