Harold Fromm
Although ecocriticism’s Big Bang around 1991 was not exactly a creation ex nihilo, it was pretty close. Scattered enthusiasts from the humanities had already given it a name, reputedly invented in 1978 by William Rueckert, and like any good big bang, it quickly sprang an expanding universe that today even includes a ravenous formal academic existence. The session I produced at the Modern Language Association’s 1991 convention in San Francisco was listed as “Ecocriticism: The Greening of Literary Studies”—thanks to Cheryll Glotfelty’s promulgation of that term—and the startlingly large attendance emitted a multitude of fertilizing photons that greened many academic sprouts. Moreover, when Glotfelty and I put our heads together in the early 1990s to produce The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, we had no trouble finding many appropriate (“classic” to us) texts and commissioning new ones. But as far as professional organizations and journals were concerned, all we had were The American Nature Writing Newsletter, Fred Waage’s Teaching Environmental Literature, and the Western Literature Association (WLA)—pretty pioneering for the time. Then, at a meeting in 1992, WLA proposed a new professional organization to be dedicated to ecocriticism, which materialized a year later as the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and subsequently its journal, ISLE, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
This is not to say that the real substance of what is now called ecocriticism had failed to produce prose and poetic masterpieces going back to Virgil and Theocritus. What was new around 1991 was the groundswell to achieve legitimacy in the academy as a distinct, self‐conscious, modern critical method. Glotfelty’s attempt to define this in her introduction to the Reader quickly became as canonical as the book itself: “Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.” But an examination of the table of contents reveals that by its publication date of 1996 this ad hoc definition was already excluding too much. Even some of its own essays—“Beyond Ecology,” “American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism,” “Is Nature Necessary?,” “From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map”—were like fledgling cracks from neonatal beaks pecking away at their confining eggshells.
In this earliest of stages, proto‐ecocriticism had been heavily dependent on writings with a fairly conventional understanding of “nature” as green stuff out there. A romantic pastoral tradition, with transcendent vibrations about the sacredness of unspoiled landscapes, prevailed. For English and American literature since the seventeenth century, Nature, even when minutely explored as landscape, tended to serve as a yardstick of normality, virtue, spirituality, and timeless truth (Homer and Nature are the same, Alexander Pope told us). Wordsworth’s autobiographical magnum opus, The Prelude, is a veritable archetype of the relationship between nature and human psychological development, the growth of the poet’s mind. Thoreau became an exemplary model of urban withdrawal in favor of “wildness,” as did John Muir exploring the Sierras, Gary Snyder exploring Japan and Buddhism, Aldo Leopold devising a “Land Ethic” in Wisconsin, Annie Dillard mystically adventuring around Tinker Creek, awed by the weirdness of Nature, even early Bill McKibben’s Adirondacks in The End of Nature, all with a focus on nature as mostly benign landscape in peril. The word “Nature” was thrown around relatively thoughtlessly as a goes‐without‐saying reification of … of what? The striking exception was Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring had a very specific post‐World War II basis, a model different from Thoreau’s, coming from a scientific education rather than just the humanistic American transcendent wilderness tradition with its exclamations of O Altitudo! (an expression of spiritual exaltation made famous by Sir Thomas Browne about 1643). Yet even the writings of so classic a “nature” icon as Emerson, a contemporary of Darwin who may never have had the opportunity to read much of him, has been shown by Laura Walls to have morphed into what we would now regard as a pre‐Darwinian proponent of human evolution, while his “transcendence” was becoming increasingly earthbound.
My own earliest environmental writing, now more than forty years in the past, seems uncannily prescient, despite its off‐the‐road origins. I did not realize in the late 1970s that I was writing “ecocriticism” until Cheryll Glotfelty told me so around 1988, as she tracked me down for what ultimately issued as The Ecocriticism Reader. What I was really writing back then has recently been reborn as “Material Ecocriticism,” or at least “transcorporeality.” At the time, my body‐oriented environmentalism failed the sniff test of academic authenticity, but today bodies are now indisputably “in.” As a result of a new academic job in 1968, moving with only partial awareness into one of the most air‐polluted areas of the entire USA, I found myself in a blue‐collar steel mill culture whose natives’ lives depended for aliment on the super‐toxic diet of effluents from the spewings of the mills. My five‐acre farmette in paradise turned out to be situated in hell. And I began to write about the physical and psychological experiences of breathing a polluted brew quite different from the one I was used to from a New York City childhood or even the upper Midwest, where I had also lived. My life was literally redirected like a pinball hitting a particularly hard bumper fashioned by U.S. Steel. The result was “On Being Polluted,” “From Transcendence to Obsolescence,” and “Air and Being: The Psychedelics of Pollution,” written in a white heat of epiphany. Fifteen or so years later, Glotfelty tracked them down in their original journals—and the rest is history. (They are collected in Fromm 2009.)
As early as mid‐twentieth century a series of classic works about nature, spoiled and unspoiled, was being produced on wilderness, the wild, the “naturalness” of native American subcultures, and the anthropomorphism whose blindness prevented us from accurately assessing the so‐called quasi‐eternal “environment” that we were destroying. Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness (1991), and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1989), with its focus on a “Land Ethic” eventually gave way, however, to a sense of larger threats that were often more philosophic than purely “ecologic.” So William Cronon’s celebrated “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” could say, contra Thoreau’s “In Wildness is the preservation of the World,” that “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [natural wildness] is quite profoundly a human creation,” not a “pristine sanctuary” removed from humankind’s depravities (Cronon 1996: 69). Even the notion of a stable, virginal, and eternal planet earth had already been disparaged by writings such as Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies (1990), a book that invalidated the sentimental belief in an accessible pristine “Nature” that transcended our bodily depredations. And an entirely different set of interest groups could be addressed by such landmark feminist productions as Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1975), or a relatively obscure book such as Janet Biehl’s Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991), or such well‐known novelists as Margaret Atwood in Surfacing and Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony, whose fictions embodied ecological themes.
Attempts to de‐anthropomorphize self‐regarding humanity by focusing on an indefinable “Other” have had a relatively brief shelf life, most notably the notion of biocentrism with its dream of cultivating a bodiless disinterest in ourselves, as if we could live our lives for the sake of the planet’s survival rather than our own. The locus classicus was Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (1985) by Bill Devall and George Sessions. It provided a fairly comprehensive summary of what had been happening during the 1980s in both ideology and practice regarding “nature.” Echoing Heidegger, the authors pushed away from the assumption that the planet was made to service humanity by a god predisposed to the human species that “he” created, a view, unsurprisingly, that permeates the Hebrew Bible, whose drama is dominated by a god that is more or less a summary of our human limitations, his divine bluster serving as a smokescreen for his time‐bound lack of transcendence. The message from Devall and Sessions was that the stuff of our planet has “intrinsic value” entirely apart from its accidental benefits for us. But biocentrism, as a philosophy, was sadly deficient. In fact, the notion of “intrinsic value” verges on the nonsensical, since without a valuer nothing has any value.
Since mid‐century, the revolution generated throughout the humanities by Darwinian evolution, as well as neuroscience, is visible in prescient underground books of this early eco‐phase, such as David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism (1978), with its attacks on a multitude of sacred cows, the most daring being its disparagement of Reason itself, or at least the Enlightenment’s form of it. Ehrenfeld speaks of our unquestioning faith in rational power that can control a nature we barely understand and the quasi‐religious faith in our technology’s ability to overcome any catastrophe. But “deep within ourselves we know that our omnipotence is a sham, our knowledge and control of the future is weak and limited, our inventions and discoveries work … in ways we do not expect, our planning is meaningless, our systems are running amok—in short, that the humanistic assumptions upon which our societies are grounded lack validity” (Ehrenfeld 1978: 58). The seeds of this view, however, later to be called “posthumanism,” go back much further. For instance, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Horkheimer and Adorno, also traces our vulnerabilities to the cocky self‐assurance of the Enlightenment. “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944: 4). This is what the authors disparagingly mean by “rationality”: reducing everything to dehumanized and bodiless techniques for control that technology, mass production, statistics, and now computers and data‐mining, can exploit. Greg Garrard, in his comprehensive Ecocriticism, comments (after reviewing the unsatisfactory antinomies of mind vs. body, fact vs. myth): “The choice between monolithic, ecocidal modernism [e.g. reliance on data] and reverential awe [e.g. mushy numinosity] is a false dichotomy that ecocriticism can circumvent with a pragmatic and political orientation” (Garrard 2012: 79).
Ehrenfeld’s attack on humanism has by now many updates. One of the most powerful comes from John Gray, a philosophical English economist whose The Silence of Animals is a brutal retort to the meliorist view of progress, a dispiriting survey of the horrors of violence and self‐deception witnessed by two world wars and destruction since then. “Like cheap music, the myth of progress lifts the spirits as it numbs the brain. The fact that rational humanity shows no sign of ever arriving only makes humanists cling more fervently to the conviction that humankind will someday be redeemed from unreason.” Science misleads us in that regard for “[H]uman knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same” (Gray 2013: 80–1). Though Gray does not refer explicitly to ecocriticism, I would call him a Negative Ecocritic, who shares our horror at humanity’s destruction of the world, but who rejects conventional religion, rationalism, atheism, nature worship or any other method of “solving” the radically savage nature of our species, leaving only what his critics call Rational Mysticism, the living of life in the present contemplative moment, without discursivity, like the other animals. A pretty hard sell.
The growing underground “faults” (a conveniently duplicitous term), the clashing tectonic plates of an evolving ecocriticism from Rueckert in 1978 well into the 1990s, are summarized with polemical and scholarly skill by Michael Cohen and can serve as a somewhat arbitrary capstone to this putative “early period.” His “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism Under Critique” (2004) underscores how the early ecocritics were singing complacent praise songs in tune with the traditions of classic American literary studies, a text‐based world of nature, wildness, and preservation, even as they were cultivating an awareness of the manifold ways in which nature was now looking more like culture, a human construction. As skilled professional reader/writers very attentive to verbal texts, ecocritics have had a tendency, he claims, to review the classic nature‐writings as fixed landmarks instead of providing an analytical theory to support and justify their whole enterprise in the first place. Their real goal, Cohen writes, should be to access a world outside words, the world of informed political action, as in the writing of Environmental Impact Statements for government action.
In 1999, a Caucus for Diversity erupted at ASLE that cited “clear evidence of growing interest in environmental and social justice issues, and in the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nature” (quoted in Cohen 2004: 24). This has been followed by a gradual disavowal of the anti‐anthropocentrism of deep ecology, a result of the growing Darwinian and biological turn in more and more of the humanities disciplines. To attempt to eliminate the body from humanities discourse is to eliminate the grounds for all human disciplines and human life altogether, since what source can generate them but the materialities of our planet and our biological needs?
The age‐old humanistic belief that the truth shall make us free, and more recently that we are born free but everywhere in chains, has now pretty well reached its sell‐by date. Dana Phillips’s essay “Is Nature Necessary?” appeared first in 1993, even before it was collected in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), to alert us to the fact that technology was overtaking “Nature,” which was gradually becoming dispensable as a concept and a thing. The high‐tech fishing equipment featured in Hemingway’s “Big Two‐Hearted River” was hardly bucolic, he demonstrated. It served for Phillips as a preview of what has come to be known as “hyper‐reality,” typified by Disneyland and similar artifacts of culture that “improve” upon the natural (i.e. the biological) to the point of ignoring it altogether.
By 2003, Phillips’ magnum opus, the misleadingly titled The Truth of Ecology, began to come down hard on nature‐writing itself, and ultimately on ecology, environmentalism, and ecocriticism. Lifting the expression “truth of ecology” from Umberto Eco, Phillips writes: “I am persuaded that the truth of ecology must lie somewhere, if it lies anywhere at all, in nature‐culture, a region where surprising monsters dwell” (Phillips 2003: 39) but the reader needs to get fairly far into this too learned and too uncontrolledly wide‐ranging excursus before the meaning of the title is clarified: “What is the truth—if any—of ecology?” (Even when rephrased it leaves much to be desired.) Lots of bashing of almost everything takes place in this book, Number One surely being “nature‐writing” and the innocence of believing there is such a thing as “nature” as generally employed during the early years. This is compounded for him by ecocriticism’s unreflective “realism” and its concomitant vehicle, “representation,” often through personal narratives.
By the time of ISLE’s winter 2015 issue, Phillips’s “Posthumanism, Environmental History, and Narratives of Collapse,” much clearer and more focused than his big book, might be a better summary piece for an attack on most of the major eco‐concepts. Phillips is not to be taken as a Luddite, however, despite the monkey wrenches he hurls at all the careless and unreflective uses of key ecological concepts. Still, what he really wants as a corrective remains unclear, even after repeated circlings around such matters as “What is the truth of ecology, insofar as this truth is addressed by literature and art?” (Phillips 2003: 39) In a final summary chapter, he remarks that ecocriticism “must acquire not only more theoretical savvy but a less devotional attitude toward its subject matter, both literary and otherwise, as well” (2003: 240). Not very enlightening after 240 pages of myriad concepts refined and overrefined out of existence.
This trend to deconstruct both Nature and Ecocriticism, fueled by many books and articles, has gradually been superseded by a return to the body, encouraged and enabled by Darwinian evolution, a turn to prehistory, archaeology, anthropology, biochemistry, and the neurosciences. The underground rumblings badmouthing Reason, as seen in Horkheimer, Adorno, and David Ehrenfeld, as well as quite contrary tremors from E. O. Wilson’s Consilience (1998), start to break out more vigorously. “The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences” (Wilson 1998: 8). Wilson’s pro‐Enlightenment stance here differs from that of the badmouthers, who distrusted the controlling ethical, technological, and metaphysical claims of Reason (which they associated with Fascism), whereas for Wilson the physical sciences rescue us from superstition, ignorance, barbarism, and the fantasies of religion. Consilience, or the jumping together of the various branches of knowledge, is a concept that Wilson derives from his overall thesis about human understanding as a product of evolution. “The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of the stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics” (Wilson 1998: 266). This means that to treat human faculties as special creations from above rather than growths from below going back many hundreds of millions of years is to ignore the facts of evolutionary history. Indeed, a brilliant book by the redoubtable Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, traces us stage by stage from Homo sapiens back through our hominid precursors, mammals, fish, and insects, to the primal slime of singled‐celled creatures that precede contemporary biology.
Controversial as these thoughts have been at the time of their issue, they are quite rapidly being naturalized into the various assumptions of the arts (after much resistance). In the realms of ecology, environmentalism, and ecocriticism (categories that tend to be merged and confused), we see more and more incorporation of themes from biology, physics, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and whatnot. The transcendent preenings of a humanity that fancies itself the image of God (whatever that means), as opposed to all the lowlife of creation, begin to seem tragi‐comic in an era of biochemistry and paleo‐archaeology. Everything begins to be seen as Nature, including culture, even as Nature itself has been largely evaporated as a concept. Nor is there such a thing as “the environment,” however convenient the everyday use of the term for “environmentalism” and for ecocriticism as well. Nothing “surrounds” a human being who is made of some special substance that can be distinguished from the “surroundings.”
“Posthumanism” has begun to supplant the traditional underpinnings of our vaunted humanism. As I write today, the latest fossil find from South Africa reveals a thus‐far unknown variant branch of our line that disposes of any remaining notions of our uniqueness. “The problem is that we keep assuming that there is a point at which we became human,” writes Frans de Waal in the New York Times. “This is about as unlikely,” he continues, “as there being a precise wavelength at which the color spectrum turns from orange into red. The typical proposition of how this happened is that of a mental breakthrough—a miraculous spark—that made us radically different. But if we have learned anything from more than 50 years of research on chimpanzees and other intelligent animals, it is that the wall between human and animal cognition is like a Swiss cheese” (de Waal: 2015).
Before taking a look at the present moment and entertaining hopes for the future of ecocriticism in an atmosphere, both physical and intellectual, growing ever more discordant and tumultuous, some retrospective reflection is in order. What became ecocriticism in the last quarter of the twentieth century emerged from a nebulous pre‐academic past of nature writing seen as a child (or stepchild) of “natural history.” To us sophisticates, that early nature writing seemed naively “realistic,” in the philosophic sense of a “realism” that assumes our perceptions and feelings are accurate reflections of a world existing out there beyond our narrative and representational subjectivities. (Could Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek ever be found on earth?) In less than fifty years, however, our now canonical academic field has moved on, for good or ill. If the old defined ecocriticism (see Cheryll Glotfelty’s introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader) as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment”(Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xviii) served its purpose for the day, since then ecocritical writing is no longer so consciously “literary,” the environment has disappeared except as a convenient figure of speech, and a reified “Nature” or “nature,” like Nietzsche’s “God,” looks to be pretty well dead.
Moreover, a major expansion of ecocriticism’s world can be credited to a book such as Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), a tour de force of broadening vistas. Nixon writes: “By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space … typically viewed as not violence at all” (Nixon 2011: 2). This means not only climate change and its consequences, not only war, deforestation, ocean acidification, radioactive longevity at Chernobyl and Fukushima, but Nixon’s real subject: “The writers I engage with are geographically wide ranging—from various parts of the African continent, from the Middle East, India, the Caribbean, the United States and Britain … alive to the uninhabited impact of corrosive transnational forces, including petro‐imperialism, the mega‐dam industry, outsourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices, corporate and environmental deregulation, and the militarization of commerce, forces that disproportionally jeopardize the livelihoods, prospects, and memory banks of the global poor” (Nixon 2011: 5). The environmental justice movement will be kept busy for decades from the “slow violence” fallout of Union Carbide’s 1984 Bhopal India catastrophe, in which 3500 people were killed instantly; thousands died later, and tens of thousands have been maimed more slowly (2011: 274). BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout gushed 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of more than three months. And so on. Nixon’s incendiary book succeeds in making the traditional Americanist ecocriticism seem excessively “aesthetic.”
Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010) can stand here as representative of an outpouring of ecocritical books related to the body, if not the old‐time body that we thought we knew so well. Her key term, “transcorporeality,” is a guiding leitmotif throughout the book. “Imagining human corporeality as trans‐corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more‐than‐human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’” The “trans” acknowledges “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (Alaimo 2010: 2). Alaimo is particularly focused on environmental justice and environmental health, especially multiple chemical sensitivities. Or as she memorably puts it, “Word, flesh, and dirt are no longer discrete” (2010: 14). The biological, social, and political are separated by porous mediating membranes, to echo her words, which she reinforces by a quotation from Lorraine Code to the effect that with ecology, “anthropocentric projects of mastery are superseded by projects of displacing Enlightenment ‘man’ from the center of the universe’” (Alaimo 2010: 17). In all of this, Alaimo never loses sight of or interest in the phenomenal/phenomenological world of everyday human life.
It’s a cosmic jump from Bodily Natures to the new byroad of “material ecocriticism” and the heavyweight collection of essays by that title. Material Ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann 2014) repeatedly references Alaimo’s book, lifting her “transcorporeality” from the phenomenal world (in which she remains firmly planted) into the role of godmother of a quasi‐noumenal soup of inapprehensible particles of “being” (my term). The editors, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, in their startling introductory essays, are nonetheless able to talk about this purportedly ultimate but rather occult world by somehow providing a rationale for importing it all back into discrete discursive entities, such as stones, cells, and words. But to talk about it in that conventional way, as they do, masks its essential inapprehensibility with regard to the phenomenological daily life in which we finite subjects of consciousness dwell. Their occult and animistic, “agentic,” “entangled,” world, unconvincingly loaded with neologisms echoing quantum physics, replaces the comprehensible world of our mortal senses that have produced ecocriticism. A tiny, very tame, sample from the editors’ introduction must suffice to exemplify the extravagant mantra of jargon and hyperbole that characterizes much of the collection: “If bacteria can learn how to operate a nuclear plant, establish communication networks, and move toward their favorite food, they exemplify the narrative agency of storied matter, pointing to the world’s dynamic performativity” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 33). And further on, “stone, like any other matter, moves, desires, and creates” (2014: 34).
It’s a hard sell to believe that the editors are really involved with ecocriticism at all, sounding more like the channeling of the Duke from As You Like It, finding “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” But not all the contributors follow the party line. Cheryll Glotfelty, after an obeisance to the dogma she ultimately ignores, goes on to produce an excellent essay about a little known photographer of sites of devastation, while Stacy Alaimo, even as “transcorporeal” godmother, devotes her essay to the pollution of the ocean by plastic bags, as she continues to write elsewhere about environmental health and multiple chemical sensitivities.
Other recent books demonstrate how ecocriticism is functioning today, in some cases with minimal self‐consciousness that it is doing so. As one of the most exemplary specimens from the sciences, and, however unwittingly, a demonstration of ecocriticism’s “transcorporeality,” Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5‐Billion‐Year History of the Human Body (2008) is a masterpiece of scholarly research, hands‐on field work, rhetorical skill, and the art of constructing a “book.” (The PBS television series unfortunately lacked the book’s rhetorical artistry and power.) After six years on and off at Ellesmere Island in arctic Canada on hands and knees in the snow, Shubin and his colleagues finally discovered the transitional creature they were looking for, which they named Tiktaalik (or “large freshwater fish”) in deference to the language of the Inuits who gave them multiple kinds of localized help. “Like a fish, it has scales on its back and fins with fin webbing. But, like early land‐living animals, it has a flat head and a neck. And, when we look inside the fin, we see bones that correspond to the upper arm, the forearm, even parts of the wrist. The joints are there, too: this is a fish with shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints. All inside a fin with webbing” (Shubin 2008: 23). Herewith, a type of planetary ecocriticism, heroic in scope and a major contribution to knowledge, as “literary” as you please.
Exemplary of disciplines too otherwise engaged to call themselves ecocriticism (which they may even know nothing about) rather than paleontology, genomics, and so on, Shubin’s ecological laboratory was arctic snow. Svante Pääbo’s hunt for lost genomes in his Neanderthal Man (2014) had him scrounging around for ten years amid bones and high‐tech instruments for traces of Neanderthal DNA that also form part of our own genomes. There’s Daniel E. Lieberman’s mega‐tome, The Evolution of the Human Head (2011): “This book explores the premise that the many derived features that make the human head distinctive occurred from tinkering, beginning with modifications to a common ancestor with the great apes” (Lieberman 2011: 15). Lieberman’s own Tinker Creek is a 756‐page tour of the evolving innards of our heads that make us who we are.
More traditionally humanistic books from the second decade of the twenty‐first‐century echo the kind of ecocriticism that drew the majority of its adherents into the fold during the first twenty‐five years, but these too reveal traces of the subsumption of ecocriticism by the various human and physical sciences (and vice versa) that distinguish the latest vintage. Two in particular return to rivers as vehicles for much more. Ken Lamberton’s Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz (2011) may seem like a throwback to nature‐writing but is a tough‐minded literary tour de force, a virtuoso southwest exploration, selective autobiography, and a philosophical meditation on land, people, and ecology. Starting at Nogales, Arizona, Lamberton traces the alternately dry and wet path of the Santa Cruz through what amounts to a landscape‐oriented, ethnic, nationalist but also deeply historical account of what the river runs through—the buildings, settlements, uses of the earth—and what becomes of the river itself as the Spanish, Indians, and white man express their conquests and values while molding the terrain.
Quite different, but also river‐based, is a self‐conscious, somewhat anomalous production (i.e., more than just a book) created by an ensemble of disciplinary skills emanating from the University of Arizona in 2012, Ground|Water: The Art, Design, and Science of a Dry River. This is a more palpable specimen of a kind of material ecocriticism that evades animism and “entanglements” while focusing on the very materials that comprise the physical book. Using recycled paper for its odd cardboard cover and pages, and vegetable‐based inks for its printing, the contents are a miscellany of texts, essays, photos, drawings, all derived from the presence of the Rillito River that runs through Tucson, totally dry except when flooded by heavy monsoonal rains. This drainage confluence reveals the ecological history of the Sonoran Desert and the effects of population growth, culture, and urban development as the water sources were increasingly pumped and overpumped to meet local needs.
More urban than rural, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (2011), by Andrew Ross, is a focused ecological muckraking of the greater Phoenix area. What started out as Arizona State University’s invitation for Ross to explore the relationship between downtown Phoenix and various arts organizations escalated into the much more extensive project in environmental sociology and green sustainability. Calling to mind Rob Nixon’s environmentalism of the poor, Ross’s explorations ranged through politics, economics, water scarcity, industrial pollution, wildcat real estate speculation, and the underlying prehistoric settlements of the Hohokam precursors of the Phoenix metro area. We learn why Ross claims that Zip Code 85040 on the south side of Phoenix is considered the dirtiest in the nation and why environmental injustice there is so great as the rich grow richer in the northeast suburbs while the poor become more impoverished and polluted from the spewings of industry in the south.
Finally, it is hard to do justice here to Elizabeth Kolbert’s wide‐ranging book, The Sixth Extinction (2014). which may very well rate as today’s Silent Spring. Kolbert, an ideal ecologist‐ecocritic like Rachel Carson, is exemplary in knowledge, intrepid in hands‐on fieldwork, and skilled as a New Yorker writer for a general educated audience. The first half of her book is an account of species already “disappeared” over the vast period of the first five extinctions. Supplying a good deal of social background, science, history, and ecology, she writes about Lyell, Cuvier, Darwin, and more recent principals from whose work today’s orthodoxies about the planet (however short‐lived) have been pieced together. The second half is triggered by the rapid disappearance of amphibious animals around the world, enriched by her travels to the Amazon rainforest, the Andes, Scotland, and the Great Barrier Reef. From backwater hikings in the wild to deep‐sea diving beneath disappearing corals, she culls devastating evidence of what is about to be lost forever, barring eleventh‐hour remediation. Her insights extend beyond global warming, pollution, loss of diversity, shortages of water and arable land, culminating in a vision of the Anthropocene, a new virtual Pangaea reuniting all prior separated land masses as a result of international travel that takes invasive species everywhere with unforeseeable disastrous effects.
Now, after twenty‐five years of startling ascent in the literary academy as a mainstream niche known as “Ecocriticism,” what is left of its urgent genesis from science, archeological history, literature, and physical materialism? Struggling in the early 1990s to acquire recognition and credentials, a major route of ecocriticism since then has inched toward specialist “academicism” of the sort that often afflicts humanities disciplines as they reach their peaks and nervously eye the abyss below. My sense is that “material ecocriticism” will mark the end of ecocriticism’s evolutionary trajectory, reaching as it does the occult, the obscure, and the ineffable, whereas environmental studies owe their genesis to the five human senses. I foresee a problematical phase of quasi‐philosophical writings purporting to be “ecocriticism” that instead consist of academic papers by specialist scholars addressing each other’s theoretical writings rather than the physical and political environment that validates ecocriticism in the first place.
But an ecocriticism that refused to become narrowly “theorized,” that remained productively unfocused and creatively messy, could survive to freshly treat its original subjects by being absorbed into the languages of other disciplines. It is well into that phase even now. Every week literary periodicals such as the New York Review of Books, TLS, and the London Review of Books introduce books in fields that would once have been considered to be outside but are now thoroughly inside ecocriticism: Darwinian evolution, DNA analyses of fossil finds (we’re 2 to 4 percent Neanderthal, according to Pääbo Svante’s tireless searchings), neuroscience, deep history, paleoarchaeology, anthropology, politics. Even more can be found in the health sciences, those that study diseases derived from toxic chemicals and micro‐organisms in our foods, water, air, and transmission from other species to us. Still other fields include climate change, accompanied by the growing scarcity of water and arable land as global warming alters the face of the planet, creating the danger of warfare over diminishing resources that force more and more people and other life forms into less and less space. (The study of phenology draws graphic pictures of these changing habitats, as plants and animals creep higher and higher up on mountains.) Such studies as these are not only demonstrably ecocritical, but scientific and political as well. Why, then, will there be a need for a free‐standing academic field known as “Ecocriticism,” when everything begins, as it ultimately must, to be dealt with in such terms? The growing awareness of this fact has begun to be visible in the increasing adoption of the titular phrase “Environmental Humanities.” Many of the longer articles in Science and Nature are sufficiently well written to qualify as bona‐fide ecocriticism and the often brilliant National Geographic magazine has become visually and textually ecocritical in every way. An even more global term is already needed to embrace the sciences. “Ecocriticism” may very well take on the role of a clearing house and data base as it hands the torch to other incarnations, a mark of its true success.