Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Jonathan Levin, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1097-1098.

ECOCRITICISM IS MARKED by a tremendously ambitious intellectual, ethical, political, and even (sometimes) spiritual agenda. Though there is already great diversity of opinion in the field, ecocritical dialogue often aims at nothing less than the transformation of human environmental and ecological consciousness. Roughly speaking, this means guiding the historically egocentric Western imagination--man a little lower than the angels but well above the rest of earthly creation, imposing rational design to improve his earthly habitat--toward a newly emerging ecocentric paradigm, with its deeper respect for the integrity of the many other forms of life with which humankind shares the earth. Unsurprisingly, this agenda has located ecocriticism beyond the traditional boundaries of literary studies. This is well and good, so long as literary ecologists retain some sense of what they can contribute distinctively to an interdisciplinary ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism is in some ways similar to the new cultural geography but puts greater emphasis on the biological processes and relations that precede and contribute to the sociocultural production of space. By and large, ecocritics tend to believe that a considered (and scientifically informed) appreciation of these processes can help restore a harmonious balance between nature and human cultures. Biologically oriented ecocritics are themselves divided between a kind of primitive naturalism that looks to pristine nature for redemptive recovery (as epitomized by Thoreau's often cited tag "In wildness is the preservation of the world") and a kind of postmodern interrogation of such concepts as nature, wildness, and wilderness that seeks a transformation of consciousness (and, by extension, of patterns of human action) by cultivating less-naturalized thinking about the world and the role of human beings in it. As this internal division reveals, one major intellectual challenge facing ecocritics is to determine the precise relation between nature and culture.

This is a topic about which there is currently much vigorous debate in a wide variety of disciplines, from literary studies to evolutionary psychology. What participants in this debate sometimes refuse to acknowledge is that nature and culture are mutually entangled in complex and inherently elusive ways. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the project of thinking rigorously about their relation but is rather to set that project on an alternative track, one less devoted to resolving once and for all a long-standing socio-philosophical problem than to entering the space of the problem in new ways. Literary ecologists should be poised to challenge their audience to recognize that reading texts and participating, as human beings, in natural ecologies are structurally similar processes: both involve interpretive postures that precede any specific experience, yet both unfold as primary experiences that themselves refine and recast interpretive postures. To say that nature and culture are subtly and intricately interconnected is to open human imaginations to the many diverse and often competing ways in which the natural world can be read and experienced, both in what has here been styled the literatures of the environment and in what might be called, more broadly, an environmental hermeneutics.

As I have already indicated, some ecocritics will still prefer to retain a stronger sense of the natural world that precedes the various cultural institutions and representations that intervene between humankind and nature. Some literary representations of the natural world are typically exempted from such radical naturalism (works by "environmental writers" like Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson come quickly to mind) but only to the extent that these representations can be identified with the effort to resist prevailing (which is to say environmentally destructive) cultural values. I think this view is mistaken in its failure to acknowledge that experience is necessarily mediated, in advance, by sociocultural attitudes. But I would also caution ecocritics from leaping to the conclusion that our theoretical sophistication about such inescapable attitudes should lead us to reject the perspective of experience. Much recent work, based in fields as diverse as phenomenology, pragmatism, communications theory, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science, encourages us to take seriously the ways in which our sense of the world, cognitively given as immediate experience, is indispensable to all intelligent activity. Experience is always situated, in ways that no amount of theoretical reflection can transcend, and no matter how valuable that reflection may be, we should recognize the advantages (evolutionary and cultural) of living as experientially situated beings. Our bodies, our language, our sociocultural environment all shape our distinctive styles of being in the world. Without them, we would not recognize the natural environment, let alone express concern for it. The choice is not between culture and nature, as if to locate redemption either in a fuller recovery of nature from culture or in a more complete and rational application of culture to nature, but rather among different styles of dwelling in the world. We need to pay careful attention to how we experience the natural world, as well as our literary representations of it, in order to devote a greater consideration to the many ways in which we invariably shape the world we inhabit, for good and ill.

Whether or not ecocritics will actually transform human environmental and ecological consciousness, they have already begun to reveal how cultures have historically rendered nature meaningful and with what particular consequences. Ecocritics should aim to understand how and with what effects we are implicated, as embodied individuals and as cultural agents, in natural environments. They should also offer models of how we might cultivate other styles of engagement with the world. It will fall more specifically to literary ecologists to underscore the ways in which language and literary and interpretive traditions mediate our relation to the natural world, from the Puritan idea of an "errand into the wilderness" to the current rage for things wild and uncultivated. While interdisciplinary approaches will (rightly) remain central to this project, literary ecologists should also retain a strong sense of their own distinctive contribution to ecocriticism's interdisciplinary mix.

JONATHAN LEVIN
Columbia University