Stacy Alaimo
Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the relations between various organisms as well as the relations between organisms and their environments. Although Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology” in the 1860s, writings that observe ecological interconnections, causal relations, and degradation were penned much earlier. Perhaps even more than in other scientific fields, one would be hard pressed to disqualify a staggering wealth of observations – agricultural and forestry manuals, medical texts, the accounts of colonizers, travel writing, nature writing, journals, and memoirs – from being considered part of the history of ecology. An obvious reason for this would be that the concerns of ecology arise from other human practices – including subsistence practices – that directly engage with the natural world. Studies of traditional ecological knowledges (TEK), for example, reveal that many, if not all, cultures produce systematic forms of ecological knowledge suited to each culture’s specific environment, social organization, and perspectives thereon. A systematic understanding of the ecology of a particular place may be provoked by the need or desire to protect that environment. As Richard Grove explains, what are “called conservation practices cannot, in fact, be distinguished clearly from the complex web of economic, religious, and cultural arrangements evolved by a multitude of societies to safeguard and sustain their access to resources” (Grove 1995: 16). Thus there may well be as many ecological “sciences” as there are cultures.
Postcolonial science and technology studies also insist upon multiple traditions of ecological knowledge. By emphasizing scientific traditions other than those of Euro-Americans, postcolonial science studies resists a triumphal narrative of Western rationality (Harding 2008: 130). Postcolonial science studies also stresses how the sciences of Europe have been indebted to indigenous, Asian, African, and Latin American cultures. Thus, in the broadest possible sense, the study of ecology and literature would include all cultures, all time periods, and all sorts of texts, including oral literatures and ceremonies (such as Shalako, the Zuni world renewal ritual). It would draw not only upon the disciplines of literary studies, ecology, science, and science studies, but also anthropology, sociology, political theory, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.
Rather than trying to reference the wealth of texts, criticism, and contexts worthy of inclusion here, this chapter will discuss a few examples of English-language literature and literary criticism that pertain to ecology. Two lines of inquiry will shape the chapter. The first gestures toward a central issue within the study of literature and science, namely the relation between literary texts and scientific knowledge, suggesting that, with regard to ecology, literature and science are not always worlds apart. Following from the first, the second line of inquiry examines how laypeople have practiced a kind of ecological science by observing and documenting ecological systems, changes, and harms. Along the way I will introduce a few ecologically oriented literary genres, and I will conclude by discussing how ecocriticism – the ecologically oriented school of literary analysis – can draw upon science and science studies.
Richard Grove’s monumental Green Imperialism argues that the European colonization of oceanic islands between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries provoked “remarkably sophisticated insights into the mechanisms and processes of ecological change” (Grove 1995: 474). Green Imperialism includes analyses of literature such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Godwin’s Man in the Moon, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to illustrate the “two-way process by which particular literary discourses powerfully shaped changing perceptions of nature and the globe, and in which literature was, in its turn, increasingly influenced by new understandings and ‘discoveries’ in an expanding European world system of economic dominion and ruling discourses” (Grove 1995: 476). The literary texts appear as a significant part of a much broader history in which Grove documents the ecological observations made by those who were not schooled in science, or at least not schooled in “ecology” (which did not exist as a separate scientific discipline until the late nineteenth century). For example, during the eighteenth century many physicians employed by the trading companies produced new environmental theories, as they were propelled by the “urgent need to understand unfamiliar floras, faunas and geologies, both for commercial purposes and to counter environmental and health risks” (Grove 1995: 58). Grove boldly concludes that modern environmentalism is not “exclusively a product of European or North American predicaments and philosophies,” but instead “emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule,” having been influenced both by the “natural processes in the tropics and by a distinctive awareness of non-European epistemologies of nature” (Grove 1995: 486).
In her studies of the nineteenth-century American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Laura Dassow Walls confronts the now entrenched divide between literature and science by contending that the imposition of this division distorts our understanding of the time and, especially, of the work of these two authors. Walls asserts that Thoreau “saw his task to be the joining of poetry, philosophy, and science into a harmonized whole that emerged from the interconnected details of particular natural facts” and that he developed “a working scientific methodology” (Walls 1995: 4, 8). The literary criticism of Thoreau, however, has, for the most part, “disciplined” his work, which has meant, for example, in the case of his essay “The Succession of Forest Trees,” driving “the literary and the scientific … back into their separate domains” (Walls 1995: 248). In Emerson’s Life in Science, Walls suggests that the very ease with which Emerson engaged with science may be misleading to contemporary scholars: “He took scientific literacy so much for granted that his scientific metaphors sink out of sight; worse, from his time to ours, the divorce between ‘the two cultures’ of literature and science has made his deep debt to science virtually invisible” (Walls 2003: 13).
It may be especially important to understand Thoreau’s scientific orientations, since his writing continues to shape environmentalism. Walls concludes that the end of all Thoreau’s writing “was not just to propose new scientific explanations, but to enact and then to model an alternative way of knowing, a situated, narrative science which traced all the multiple exchanges and connections which produced, simultaneously, the forest itself and the knowledge about the forest” (Walls 1995: 250). Walls suggests not only similarities between Thoreau’s work and Donna Haraway’s epistemology of “situated knowledges,” but also a kinship between Thoreau’s “style of world making” and Bruno Latour’s insistence on the many hybrids existing between the “poles of nature–science and culture– literature” (Walls 1995: 249). Thus, the work of both Grove and Dassow Walls suggests vital interconnections between human practices, literary works, and the production of “ecological” knowledges.
The epistemological practice with which Dassow Walls credits Thoreau may be a distinctive aspect of what has come to be known as the genre of “nature writing.” The most canonical “nature writing” text would be, of course, Thoreau’s influential book, Walden. Like other works that fit comfortably within this genre, Walden combines observations of the natural world with reflections on human ethics, values, politics, and modes of knowing. Nature writing, in fact, is usually propelled by the desire to artistically convey, in Dassow Walls’ phrase, both “the forest itself and the knowledge about the forest.” Even as nature writing suggests an atmosphere of quiet reflection, these ruminations are usually provoked by some sort of excursion – whether that be far afield into the wilds of the West, in John Muir’s case, or closer to home, as in the island garden of Celia Thaxter. The genre of “nature writing” may itself be a sort of “scientific” endeavor when it attempts to accurately observe interrelations between plants, animals, habitats, and environments. Indeed there is no clear demarcation between “nature writing” and “science” or “science writing,” especially in texts written before the twentieth century, as evidenced by the fact that The Norton Book of Nature Writing includes John Burroughs, James Audubon, and Charles Darwin. Although George Perkins Marsh is not included in this collection, his 1864 work, Man and Nature, which is considered an early, classic work of ecology, combines a scientific analysis of how humans have altered the environment with a conservationist philosophy.
Robert Finch and John Elder note that nature writers are the “children of Linneaus,” the eighteenth-century founder of taxonomy, “a framework within which all living things could be classified and identified” (Finch and Elder 2002: 21). Much “nature writing,” however, does not seek to categorize separate entities so much as to trace interconnections, processes, and changes. Furthermore, a Linnean epistemology becomes complicated by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development of evolution and ecological science, which stress transformation, contingency, emergence, and interdependence rather than the delineation of static categories.
Ecology, according to Sharon Kingsland, “developed along varying paths at different times and in different places” (Kingsland 2005: 3). Ecology, as a branch of the Western science of biology, has had a hard time establishing itself as a separate, coherent discipline, not only because it emerges from different scientific (and amateur) practices, but because its methodologies span the lab/field border. Kurt Jax identifies the nineteenth-century origins of ecology as “the old tradition of natural history on the one hand, and the then new ‘scientific’, i.e. physiological, biology on the other” (Jax 2001: 2). He notes that this “hybrid character of ecology is present to this day,” arguing that the tension between the two approaches – one which uses experiments to identify mechanisms, and one which proceeds via “description, comparison and classification”–gives ecology its “specificity and heuristic strength” (Jax 2001: 2).
Notwithstanding the debates over the methodology, coherence, or political entanglements of the science of ecology, ecological concepts have profoundly influenced Western worldviews (even if they have failed to alter many of our most environmentally harmful practices). Ecology’s most important concept is probably that of the “ecosystem,” a term coined in the 1930s, which entered popular usage in the 1950s. The term broadened the framework of ecology by enlarging its focus from that of the-organism-in-its-environment to a more complex analysis of systems of exchange, which included the cycles of nutrients, energy, and chemicals (Kingsland 2005: 184–85). It is hard to overestimate the importance of the concept of the “ecosystem,” both in the development of ecological science and in more popular understandings of how environments work. Kingsland points out an irony here, however, noting that the word “ecosystem” gained its cultural purchase during the 1960s through the 1980s in the U.S. partly because the word “conveyed the idea of an ecological machine”– a machine that could be understood via cybernetics and engineering (Kingsland 2005: 215).
The concept of the ecosystem carries with it the question – echoed throughout environmental politics, environmental philosophy, and environmental literatures – of whether or not human culture and human activities should be considered part of or separate from the ecosystem. If ecosystems include humans – both as humans affect those systems and as they are affected by them – then the disciplinary scope of ecology broadens to include anthropology, history, economics, sociology, political science, and other areas of inquiry far afield from biology as such. Linda Nash, for example, in Inescapable Ecologies, undertakes an “‘ecological’ history of human bodies,” explaining that in the nineteenth-century U.S., “the body’s physical well-being … offered a powerful way of understanding local environments” (Nash 2006: 3, 5). Nash documents how nineteenth-century immigrants, farmers, physicians, and public health officials in the western region of the U.S. analyzed the effects of their environments.
In the early twentieth century this sort of environmental medicine was displaced by “modern” medicine, which included germ theory. Modern medicine separated human bodies from environments, rendering nature “abstract space,” devoid of agency or particularity (Nash 2006: 90). By the middle of the twentieth century, however, a new conception of ecological bodies emerges. Braceros (people from Mexico brought to the U.S. as temporary agricultural laborers), for instance, who were interviewed in 1958 about “sanitation and lack of access to modern medical care,” responded by discussing the dangers of the new pesticides they were using in the fields, noting their harmful health effects (Nash 2006: 137). More generally, during roughly the same period, public knowledge about nuclear testing and the dissemination of radioactive particles made it increasingly difficult to imagine a nature separate from human actions and human bodies.
Nash notes that Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring also challenged the divide between humans and nature. Although the title of this text evokes the haunting absence of birds after they have been killed by pesticides introduced into the food chain, Nash argues that Carson powerfully links “the quality of soil, water, and air to animal and human physiology,” thus crossing the divide separating “the study of human bodies from the study of nonhuman environment” (Nash 2006: 157). Carson’s eloquent book, perhaps more than any other text written in English, has had a powerful impact on both ecology and environmentalism, as it has provoked a widespread understanding of interconnected ecological processes as well as the serious dangers of humanly made chemicals. It is now commonplace to credit Silent Spring with shaping the modern environmental movement (and its counterattacks), as it not only convinced many of its readers of the serious dangers of pesticides but provoked a backlash from chemical manufacturers and others who proclaimed the human benefits of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals.
As the controversy over Silent Spring illustrates, ecological science has developed within, not outside of, political contexts, which have their own complicated histories. Even though the term “ecology” is currently associated with an environmentalist orientation, Kingsland argues that it became a scientific discipline because it “addressed larger American goals related to economic development” (Kingsland 2005: 127). In short, in the early twentieth century American patrons funded ecological science because it promised “control over life” (ibid.) and the profits such control could bring. The history of ecology in the early twentieth-century U.S., then, not surprisingly, parallels the conservative history of Progressive Era conservationism, which was allied with race, class, and gender ideologies and which promoted a utilitarian conception of nature as a repository of “natural resources” (Alaimo 2000). Things shift by the latter half of the twentieth century, when more ecologists ally themselves with environmentalism, criticizing economic and industrial systems. The landscape of science and politics becomes even more complicated when we consider environmental justice frameworks in which ordinary citizens engage in scientific practices in order to prove that their neighborhoods or workplaces are unsafe (Di Chiro 1997).
In the face of staggering environmental crises of the late twentieth century, including global warming, pollution, toxins, radiation, the lack of fresh water, species extinction, habitat loss, and the collapse of entire ecosystems, it makes sense that ecology would proclaim itself as an invaluable science. In 1991, “The Sustainable Biosphere Initiative” presented a “call to arms for all ecologists” (Lubchenco et al. 1991: 371) to pursue three crucial areas of research: global change (including climate change), biological diversity, and sustainable ecosystems. The report concludes by noting that the success of this project will depend not only upon the participation of ecologists but also upon “the vision and abilities of policy-makers, funding agency administrators, government officials, business and industry leaders, and individual citizens to support, amplify and extend the actions we have initiated” (Lubchenco et al. 1991: 405). Although this list ignores them, science and nature writers have the potential not only to publicize particular environmental predicaments and their possible solutions but to bridge the gap between the discourse of scientific experts and the perspectives of the broader public.
Nature writing that advocates the value of wilderness, such as that of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Wallace Stegner, and Edward Abbey, has had a profound impact on environmentalism in the U.S., as Dan Philippon documents in Conserving Words (Philippon 2004). The wilderness tradition of nature writing, however, has been complemented by literature that portrays a “nature” inseparable from human cultures and practices. Terry Tempest Williams’s 1991 Refuge, for example, dwells upon the disturbing disjunctions between the natural and unnatural threats to both the people and the birds that inhabit nuclear landscapes. The title of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) makes his position clear – humans have transformed the world so thoroughly that the very idea of “nature” as something apart from the human no longer makes sense. Of course the very notion that nature is something outside of culture is a particularly Euro-American idea. Native American writers tend not to promote wilderness visions (the “wilderness” being a concept that has, historically, been used to erase their presence), but instead invoke storied landscapes inhabited by language, history, and culture.
“Nature writing,” and especially U.S. nature writing, has become not only an established genre within literary studies but the most populated site of inquiry for “ecocritics.” So populated in fact, that Armbruster and Wallace (2001) urged ecocritics to go, in their edited collection, Beyond Nature Writing. Moving away from the category of “nature writing” and toward a more inclusive sense of ecological literatures allows us to move away from the sense of “nature” as a world apart from the human. If literature is to be relevant for early twenty-first-century concerns, it must contend with many issues that confound the conceptual divide between nature and culture, such as global climate change, genetic engineering, and the dissemination of toxins across bodies and environments. There is, in fact, a wealth of contemporary literature in English that grapples with the interconnections between ecological, social, cultural, and technological forces. Here are just a few examples from North America, starting with indigenous literatures.
Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks represents the brutal destruction of the northern U.S. forests and the Anishinabe people and culture in the early twentieth century, as they were assaulted by colonialism, disease, logging, and the Dawes’ Act, which divided the tribal lands into individual, taxable parcels, many of which were lost or sold. Simon Ortiz (Acoma), in several of the poems collected in Woven Stone (1992), documents how Pueblo and Diné peoples have had to contend not only with how uranium mining assaulted the health of the land and of the people, but also how it rendered traditional ecological knowledges – which had been sufficient for thousands of years – suddenly inadequate for survival. The imperceptibility of radioactive substances necessitated non-native technologies and the frameworks of Western science (Alaimo 2010). Nonetheless, Ortiz promotes an ecological model of the land and the people working together, for “life/and its continuity” (Ortiz 1992: 325). Similarly the ethnobotanist Nancy J. Turner, in The Earth’s Blanket (2005), gathers the traditional ecological knowledges of First Nations peoples, mainly from British Columbia, asserting how their philosophies and practices exemplify ecological sustainability: “Being keen and vigilant observers, scientists in the broadest sense of the word, indigenous peoples have not only used the resources around them but maintained and enhanced them in various ways” (Turner 2005: 14).
The question of which knowledges qualify as “science” flourishes within a great many contemporary ecological literatures, in both their content and their form. These texts, which mix authoritative scientific discourse with the observations and vexed ruminations of the non-expert, dramatize life in risk society, as defined by Ulrich Beck (Alaimo 2010). Beck argues that citizens in a risk society cannot rely on their own perceptions, but instead require scientific information in order to assess the often invisible hazards of daily life: “Unlike news of losses in income and the like, news of toxic substances in foods, consumer goods, and so on contain a double shock. The threat itself is joined by the loss of sovereignty over assessing the dangers, to which one is directly subjected” (Beck 1992: 54). Susanne Antonetta’s vertiginous, disturbing memoir, Body Toxic (2002), dramatizes the psychological, epistemological, and political ramifications of inhabiting risk society, as the narrator struggles to make sense of how the toxic landscape of Pine Barrens, New Jersey has affected her. Against the pervasive denial of the dangers lurking in a landscape that literally becomes the substance of her body, Antonetta presents a counter-memory that emerges not only from personal reflection, but from historical, journalistic, and scientific research into the place that created her (Alaimo 2010).
Another recent ecological memoir wrestles with the inadequacies of scientific and medical information about cancer, even though its author, Sandra Steingraber, is herself a scientist. Living Downstream (1998) – a text hailed as the next Silent Spring – mixes scientific arguments and data with a personal account of her own bladder cancer. Here, and in Having Faith (2003), Steingraber portrays a thoroughly ecological vision, tracing the flows of fluids and substances through environments, non-human animals, and human bodies, thus presenting vivid arguments for environmental protection. Whereas Rachel Carson hid the fact that she was suffering from breast cancer, because she was concerned that this would invalidate her scientific arguments by making them less “objective” (indeed, the mere fact of being a woman already jeopardized her scientific authority), Steingraber uses her personal narrative to pull readers into scientific and political domains.
Even as ideals of scientific objectivity (and the problematic epistemologies upon which they rely) have hardly disappeared, there seems to have been a sea change that suggests readers may find personal accounts – even of scientific matters – to be more trustworthy or compelling than scientific modes of argument. Mark Lynas’s High Tide (2004) is a case in point. Climate change, as a stunningly complex global phenomenon, demands a multitude of mathematical calculations, technologically mediated data, and not just abstract, but virtual conceptualizations. Lynas, however, enters the vociferous debate about the existence of anthropogenic climate change by traveling around the world and recording the observations of people who are not experts or authorities – presumably, as the sub-title suggests, because they will offer the “truth” of the matter. The epistemological framework here is more complicated than this scenario would suggest, however, in that even though the people interviewed present their own observations about changes in their local landscapes, the observers are, of course, already informed by scientific and popular representations of climate change.
Since botany is a progenitor of ecology, it is fitting that several contemporary ecological texts place plants on center stage. Plants grab hold of us, and we reshape them. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire narrates a history of four different plants – apples, tulips, potatoes, and marijuana – exploring how they have seduced humans to do their bidding. Ruth Ozeki’s comic novel All Over Creation cross-pollinates genetic engineering, seed saving, environmental activism, religion, and different conceptions of biodiversity, encouraging readers to come to terms with the ethics and politics of contemporary agribusiness. Laurie Ricou’s Salal (2007) is an extraordinary text about a rather ordinary plant thriving around British Columbia. Ricou describes his unmethodical methodology: “Find out as much as possible about salal, in as many surrounds as possible, and then texture, intermingle, blur, and combine” (Ricou 2007: 59). Ricou offers compelling, self-reflective insights not only on this plant but also on the nature of ecology itself:
Ecology understands the natural world as an infinitely extending series of reflexive dependencies. Ideally, the ecology of salal should not be the primary focus of a discrete section in a book, even one titled “Depending.” The idea of ecology urges making the concept more explicit, proposing an ongoing set of intersections on almost every page. Which is to say – posing more questions.
(Ricou 2007: 57)
Another mode of ecological questioning may be found within science fiction. Science fiction – usually set worlds apart from traditional “nature writing”–has “no alibi” when it comes to engaging with ecological matters, according to Patrick D. Murphy, who points out that science fiction may make “specific environmental issues part of the plots and themes” and include a “wide array of scientific disciplines that bear on perceiving, interpreting, and understanding the world” (Murphy 2001: 263–64). Robert Markley’s Dying Planet (2005) offers a case in point. In his analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific and literary texts about Mars, Markley seeks to “analyze the dynamic interactions among planetary science, science fiction, and other disciplines, notably ecology, that have kept Mars on the front pages since the 1800s” (Markley 2005: 2). Markley investigates the interchanges between science fiction and science proper, the role of speculation in science, and the relations between ecological and sociopolitical ideals. Although it may be set on other planets, in other times, science fiction often grapples with (earthly) environmental concerns relevant to our present moment. Those interested in reading ecological science fiction may wish to begin with the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and Joan Slonczewski.
Scholars who study environmentally oriented literatures have different perspectives on the relations between ecological literatures and ecological science. Dianne Chisholm, for example, proposes that “there is an art of ecological thinking which is distinct from ecological science”; thus she seeks texts in which “literary art does not merely embellish science with humor, wit, and humanity or recast scientific discourse in satirical or parodying rhetoric but constitutes a substantially different form of ecological thinking” (Chisholm 2011). Whereas Chisholm seeks the distinctiveness of ecological literature, separating it from ecological science, Ursula K. Heise advocates an “eco-cosmopolitanism” that values “not only physical experience and sensory perception,” but also “the abstract and highly mediated kinds of knowledge and experience that lend equal or greater support to a grasp of biospheric connectedness” (Heise 2008: 62). Such mediated forms of knowledge would presumably include, among other things, ecological science.
Scholars in science studies bring an array of social theories, philosophical questions, and historical contexts to bear upon scientific matters, mixing analyses of literature, science, and political forces in complex ways that cannot be predicted in advance. Such scholarship does not pose science as an unmediated ground of truth or a methodological model for literary studies. Glen A. Love, on the other hand, rejects the notion that science is itself a cultural, historical, and political enterprise, arguing that ecocriticism should “emulate” the “standards of evidence and rational thought,” as well as “that spirit of rigorous methodology” found within science (Love 1999: 71). This form of literary studies, which divorces it from cultural critique and interdisciplinary social theories, is both epistemologically impoverished (see Clarke 2001) and politically retrograde. My own position is that both science and science studies have the potential to challenge and strengthen ecocriticism. Ecocriticism requires approaches to science that neither revere it as an unproblematic path to the truth of nature, nor subject it to an echo chamber of skeptical critique. Science studies, most notably that of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, grapples with the natural and the social, the discursive and the material, the sciences and the humanities. Latour, for example, urges scholars to trace how networks are “simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (Latour 1993: 6). Thus science studies may help ecocriticism connect ecological literatures, ecological science, and broader cultural and political forces.
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——(2010) Bodily Natures: science, environment, and the material self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Antonetta, S. (2002) Body Toxic: an environmental memoir, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.
Armbruster, K. and Wallace, K. (eds) (2001) Beyond Nature Writing: expanding the boundaries of ecocriticism, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
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Ortiz, S. (1992) Woven Stone, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Philippon, D. (2004) Conserving Words: how American nature writers shaped the environmental movement, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Ricou, L. (2007) Salal: listening for the northwest understory, Edmonton: NeWest Press.
Steingraber, S. (1998) Living Downstream: a scientist’s personal investigation of cancer and the environment, New York: Vintage.
——(2003) Having Faith: an ecologist’s journey to motherhood, New York: Berkley.
Turner, N. (2005) The Earth’s Blanket: traditional teaching for sustainable living, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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——(2003) Emerson’s Life in Science: the culture of truth, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.