{"id":7018,"date":"2015-01-12T22:52:40","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T06:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io\/?page_id=7018"},"modified":"2015-05-31T14:50:46","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T21:50:46","slug":"7018-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/?page_id=7018","title":{"rendered":"New English"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Literature and the Environment<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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UC Santa Barbara\u2019s English Department is a national leader in the study of Literature and the Environment (also known as ecocriticism and \u201cgreen\u201d criticism). What makes us unique is that, with a range of faculty members doing diverse though often interconnected research, we have seamless, strong coverage in ecocritical coursework from the early Renaissance through the 21st century. Moreover, we explore environmental issues from British, American, and Global perspectives, using a host of methodological approaches, with such emphases as non-human\/human relations, environmental and social justice within a global rather than national context, and the political impact of institutions, networks, and regimes on bodies and the biosphere. Such diversity has allowed students to take courses as varied as \u201cAmerican Romanticism and Environmental Imagination,\u201d \u201cPostcolonial and Global Ecological Imaginations,\u201d \u201cMilton and Ecology,\u201d \u201cNatural Representations: Wordsworth, Dickinson, Bishop,\u201d and \u201cAnimal Theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

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UNDERGRADUATE OVERVIEW<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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How does literature affect environmental values and practices? Can a novel or poem make a more sustainable world? Environment literary criticism focuses on the ways in which literature shapes and responds to a variety of environmental concerns, from animal welfare to pollution to global warming. UC Santa Barbara\u2019s English Department offers a variety of ways for undergraduates to explore the intersection of literature and the environment. Students casually interested in the subject can simply take one or more of the many courses offered. It is also possible to do an Undergraduate Specialization in Literature and the Environment by taking four or more of these courses. Students who are especially dedicated can complete the USLE with Honors. The English Department also sponsors a variety of events having to do with literature and the environment.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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UNDERGRADUATE SPECIALIZATION<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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Get a green B.A. in English!\u00a0OK, you can\u2019t actually get a green-colored diploma at UCSB, but if you are concerned about the environment and the future of our planet, or would just like to explore the literary history of the natural world, it is possible to declare an Undergraduate Specialization in Literature and the Environment (USLE). The requirements of the USLE are simple: just complete four environmentally oriented courses from a range of over two-dozen that are regularly offered. Certain other courses, such as English 199 and 196 with an environmental theme, may also satisfy the requirements of the USLE, as may courses from past years. Contact Professor\u00a0Ken Hiltner\u00a0for details. It is also possible to complete the USLE with\u00a0honors. In addition to receiving the regular UCSB diploma at graduation, students completing the USLE will also be awarded a special certificate at the English Department\u2019s Undergraduate Commencement Reception. (Sorry, but the certificate is not green either!)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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UNDERGRADUATE HONORS<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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Students interested in completing the Undergraduate Specialization in Literature and the Environment (USLE) with Honors have two options: 1. Majors who have completed at least two quarters of the junior year with a minimum GPA of 3.5 (overall and\/or in the major) may apply for admission to the English Department\u2019s Honors Program. Students who satisfy the requirements of the Honors Program by completing English 199 and 196 with an acceptable environmentally themed thesis will receive Honors in the USLE. 2. At the discretion of the Instructor, students may enter into an USLE Honors Contract for upper-division courses that meet the requirement of the Specialization. This involves regular meetings with the Instructor, as well as supplemental work, such as extra readings, an additional short paper or two, or a slightly longer term paper. \u00a0Students completing Honors Contracts for two or more USLE courses to the satisfaction of the Instructor will receive Honors in the USLE. (Please note that the USLE Honors Contract is not related to UCSB\u2019s College of Letters & Sciences Honors Contract.) USLE Honors Certificates will be awarded at the English Department\u2019s Undergraduate Commencement Reception.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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GRADUATE\u00a0<\/span>OVERVIEW<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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UC Santa Barbara\u2019s English Department provides graduate students with a range of resources to aid in the study of literature and the environment. This begins with our extraordinary faculty, who approach environmental issues from a variety of diverse and exciting perspectives. The regular meetings of the Colloquium in Literature and Environment bring together faculty and graduate students in order to discuss their own work, and to keep current with ecocritical studies. There are also teaching opportunities available for graduate students interested in literature and the environment. Students may take the \u201cTheories of Literature and the Environment\u201d list an option for the First Qualifying Exam.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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GRADUATE COLLOQUIUM<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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Coming soon!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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GRADUATE QUALIFYING EXAM<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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UCSB is one of the few\u00a0U.S. universities that offers\u00a0PhD students a comprehensive overview of the field of ecocriticism. All candidates for the PhD in English at UCSB must successfully pass two oral qualifying exams, both of which may be vectored toward literature and the environment.<\/p>\n

As the Department notes on its website, \u201c[t]he first qualifying exam is designed to test the student\u2019s familiarity with a range of literature at once various enough to encourage breadth of learning and focused enough to allow for the demonstration of intellectual grasp. Students are expected to complement their knowledge of individual works with a sense of broader historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts as well as with the ability to apply the kinds of critical tools used by professional scholars today.\u00a0For the purposes of the exam, the spectrum of literature written in English is broken up into thirteen fields.\u201d One of these\u00a0thirteen fields is \u201cLiterature and the Environment.\u201d In order to prepare the for exam, students are required to read and prepare all three parts of the below\u00a0list.<\/p>\n

The second qualifying exam involves students sitting down with \u201ctheir dissertation committee for a ninety-minute conference on the dissertation project based on a four-to-five-page prospectus and a bibliography of at least fifty works to be constructed by the candidate in consultation with her\/his committee\u2026The prospectus should define the dissertation topic, its initial critical questions, and its relationship to existing scholarship and may also describe likely chapter divisions. The readings lists will include works most immediately germane to the dissertation but will also represent the wider professional area within which the dissertation is likely to be received or in which it seeks to make an intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The First Qualifying Exam in\u00a0Literature and the Environment<\/p>\n

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Part 1. The Emergence of Environmental Thinking<\/p>\n

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1. \u00a0 \u00a0Bible,\u00a0Genesis\u00a0I-IV<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0 \u00a0Virgil,\u00a0Eclogues\u00a0I, IV, & V;\u00a0Georgics\u00a0I<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0 \u00a0Francis Bacon,\u00a0New Atlantis\u00a0(1624)<\/p>\n

4. \u00a0 \u00a0Alexander Pope,\u00a0Windsor Forest\u00a0(1713)<\/p>\n

5. \u00a0 \u00a0Jean Jacques Rousseau, from\u00a0A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind\u00a0(1755)<\/p>\n

6. \u00a0 \u00a0Oliver Goldsmith, \u201cThe Deserted Village\u201d (1770)<\/p>\n

7. \u00a0 \u00a0Immanuel Kant, 71-74, from\u00a0The Third Critique\u00a0(of judgment) (1790)<\/p>\n

8. \u00a0 \u00a0John Clare, from\u00a0The Village Minstrel and Other Poems\u00a0(1821)<\/p>\n

9. \u00a0 \u00a0William Wordsworth, selections from\u00a0The Prelude\u00a0(1850)<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0 Henry David Thoreau, \u201cEconomy,\u201d \u201cThe Pond in Winter,\u201d from\u00a0Walden\u00a0(1854)<\/p>\n

11.\u00a0 Charles Darwin, Chapter IV, \u201cNatural Selection,\u201d from\u00a0The Origin of Species\u00a0(1859)<\/p>\n

12.\u00a0 George P. Marsh, Chapter 1, \u201cIntroducing,\u201d from\u00a0The Earth as Modified by Human Action\u00a0(1874)<\/p>\n

13. \u00a0Martin Heidegger, \u201cThe Question Concerning Technology,\u201d from\u00a0The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays\u00a0(1949, trans. William Lovitt, 1977), and \u201cBuilding, Dwelling, Thinking,\u201d from\u00a0Poetry, Language, Thought\u00a0(trans. Albert Hofstadter, 1971)<\/p>\n

14.\u00a0 Hannah Arendt, \u201cLabor, Work, Action,\u201d (1964, from\u00a0The Portable Hannah Arendt\u00a02000)<\/p>\n

15.\u00a0 Leo Marx, \u201cSleepy Hollow, 1844,\u201d from\u00a0The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America\u00a0(1964)<\/p>\n

16.\u00a0 Raymond Williams, Chapters 1-5, from\u00a0The Country and the City\u00a0(1973); \u201cNature\u201d and \u201cCulture,\u201d from\u00a0Keywords\u00a0(1976)<\/p>\n

17.\u00a0 Jonathan Bate, Chapter 2, \u201cThe Economy of Nature,\u201d from\u00a0Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition\u00a0(1991)<\/p>\n

18.\u00a0 Terry Gifford, \u201cThree Kinds of Pastoral,\u201d from\u00a0Pastoral\u00a0(1999)<\/p>\n

19.\u00a0 Robert N. Watson, Introduction and Chapter 3, from\u00a0Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance\u00a0(2007)<\/p>\n

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Part 2. Ecocriticism and Modern Environmentalism<\/p>\n

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20.\u00a0 Aldo Leopold, \u201cThinking Like a Mountain,\u201d \u201cThe Conservation Aesthetic,\u201d \u201cThe Land Ethic,\u201d from\u00a0A Sand County Almanac\u00a0(1949)<\/p>\n

21.\u00a0 Rachel Carson,\u00a0Silent Spring\u00a0(1962)<\/p>\n

22.\u00a0 Lynn White, Jr., \u201cThe Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,\u201d from\u00a0Science\u00a0(1967)<\/p>\n

23.\u00a0 Ed Abbey, \u201cIndustrial Tourism and the National Parks,\u201d from\u00a0Desert Solitaire\u00a0(1968)<\/p>\n

24.\u00a0 Yi-Fu Tuan, Chapter 8, \u201cTopophilia and Environment,\u201d from\u00a0Topophilia\u00a0(1974)<\/p>\n

25.\u00a0 Carolyn Merchant, \u201cNature as Female,\u201d from\u00a0The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution\u00a0(1980)<\/p>\n

26.\u00a0 Bill McKibben, \u201cThe End of Nature,\u201d from\u00a0The End of Nature\u00a0(1989)<\/p>\n

27.\u00a0 Arne Naess, \u201cThe Deep Ecological Movement,\u201d from\u00a0Philosophical Inquiry\u00a0(1986) and \u201cThe Deep Ecology \u2018Eight Points\u2019 Revisited,\u201d from\u00a0Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century\u00a0(1995)<\/p>\n

28.\u00a0 Leslie Marmon Silko, \u201cLandscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,\u201d from\u00a0The Ecocriticism Reader\u00a0(1996)<\/p>\n

29.\u00a0 Cheryll Glotfelty, \u201cLiterary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,\u201d from\u00a0The Ecocriticism Reader\u00a0(1996)<\/p>\n

30.\u00a0 Richard Kerridge, \u201cEnvironmentalism and Ecocriticism,\u201d in\u00a0The Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism\u00a0(2006)<\/p>\n

31.\u00a0 Lawrence Buell, Introduction and Chapter 3, \u201cRepresenting the Environment,\u201d from\u00a0The Environmental Imagination\u00a0(1995); \u201cToxic Discourse,\u201d from\u00a0Critical Inquiry(1999)<\/p>\n

32.\u00a0 William Cronon, \u201cThe Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,\u201d from\u00a0Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature\u00a0(1995)<\/p>\n

33.\u00a0 Ursula K. LeGuin, \u201cThe Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction\u201d (1986), from\u00a0The Ecocriticism Reader\u00a0(1996)<\/p>\n

34.\u00a0 Michael Pollan, \u201cWeeds,\u201d from\u00a0Second Nature: A Gardener\u2019s Education\u00a0(1991);\u00a0\u201cThe Feedlot: Making Meat,\u201d from\u00a0Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma\u00a0(2006)<\/p>\n

35.\u00a0 E. O. Wilson, \u201cBernhardsdorp,\u201d from\u00a0Biophilia \u00a0(1984)<\/p>\n

36.\u00a0 Robert Bullard, Chapter 2, \u201cRace, Class, and the Politics of Place,\u201d from\u00a0Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality\u00a0(1990)<\/p>\n

37.\u00a0 Dana Philips, \u201cExpostulations and Replies,\u201d from\u00a0The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America\u00a0(2003)<\/p>\n

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Part 3. Futures: Posthumanism, Risk, and Global Environmental Justice<\/p>\n

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38.\u00a0 Donna Haraway,\u00a0 \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century,\u201d from\u00a0Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature\u00a0(1991); \u201cCyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,\u201d from\u00a0Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality\u00a0(2003)<\/p>\n

39.\u00a0 N. Katherine Hayles, Chapters 1 and 11, from\u00a0How We Became Posthuman:\u00a0Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics\u00a0(1999)<\/p>\n

40.\u00a0 Giorgio Agamben, Part III from\u00a0Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life\u00a0(1998)<\/p>\n

41.\u00a0 Temple Grandin, \u201cAnimal Feelings,\u201d from\u00a0Animals in Translation\u00a0(2004)<\/p>\n

42.\u00a0 Carey Wolfe, \u201cLearning from Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject,\u201d from\u00a0What is Posthumanism?\u00a0(2009)<\/p>\n

43.\u00a0 Vandana Shiva, Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2, from\u00a0Biopiracy\u00a0(1999)<\/p>\n

44.\u00a0 Dipesh Chakrabarty, \u201cThe Climate of History: Four Theses,\u201d from\u00a0Critical Inquiry\u00a0(2009)<\/p>\n

45.\u00a0 Greg Garrard, \u201cHow Queer Is Green?,\u201d from\u00a0Configurations\u00a0\u00a0(2010)<\/p>\n

46.\u00a0 David Harvey, \u201cNotes Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,\u201d from\u00a0Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development(2006)<\/p>\n

47.\u00a0 Ursula Heise, \u201cIntroduction\u201d and \u201cFrom the Blue Planet to Google Earth,\u201d from\u00a0Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global(2008)<\/p>\n

48.\u00a0 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, \u201cIntroduction: Towards an Aesthetics of the Earth,\u201d from\u00a0Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment(2011)<\/p>\n

49.\u00a0 Paul Outka, \u201cIntroduction: The Sublime and the Traumatic,\u201d from\u00a0Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance\u00a0(2008)<\/p>\n

50.\u00a0 Bruno Latour, Part I: \u201cCrisis\u201d and Part II: \u201cConstitution,\u201d from\u00a0We Have Never Been Modern<\/p>\n

51.\u00a0 Ramachandra Guha, \u201cRadical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,\u201d from\u00a0Environmental Ethics\u00a0(1989)<\/p>\n

52.\u00a0 Joan Martinez-Alier, \u201cCurrents of Environmentalism,\u201d from\u00a0The Environmentalism of the Poor\u00a0(2002)<\/p>\n

53.\u00a0 Timothy Morton, \u201cThinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,\u201d from\u00a0Collapse\u00a0(2010); \u201cQueer Ecology,\u201d from\u00a0PMLA\u00a0(2010)<\/p>\n

54.\u00a0 Rob Nixon, Introduction, from\u00a0Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor\u00a0(2011)<\/p>\n

55.\u00a0 Anna Tsing, \u201cUnruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,\u201d from\u00a0Party Writing for Donna Haraway!<\/p>\n

56.\u00a0 Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, \u201cClimate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,\u201d from\u00a0Discourse\u00a0(2007)<\/p>\n

57.\u00a0 Ulrich Beck, Chapters 1 and 2, from\u00a0Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity\u00a0(1986; trans. 1992)<\/p>\n

58.\u00a0 Rebecca Solnit, \u201cDiary\u201d on the BP Blowout, from\u00a0London Review of Books\u00a0(2010)<\/p>\n

59.\u00a0 Peter Van Wyck, \u201cWaste,\u201d from\u00a0Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and the Nuclear Threat\u00a0(2005)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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FAQS<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHAT IS ECOCRITICISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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Environmental criticism, also known as ecocriticism and \u201cgreen\u201d criticism (especially in England), is a rapidly emerging field of literary study that considers the relationship that human beings have to the environment. As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in the Introduction to\u00a0The Ecocriticism Reader, \u201cJust as feminist criticism examines language and literature form a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts\u201d (viii), environmental critics explore how nature and the natural world are imagined through literary texts. As with changing perceptions of gender, such literary representations are not only generated by particular cultures, they play a significant role in generating those cultures. Thus, if we wish to understand our contemporary attitude toward the environment, its literary history is an excellent place to start. While authors such as Thoreau and Wordsworth may first come to mind in this context, literary responses to environmental concerns are as old as the issues themselves. Deforestation, air pollution, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism have all been appearing as controversial issues in Western literature for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHAT IS 1ST- AND 2ND-WAVE ECOCRITICISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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This useful distinction, formally introduced by Lawrence Buell in his 2005 book on\u00a0The Future of Environmental Criticism<\/em>, distinguishes between older (generally speaking, 20th-century) environmental criticism that was preoccupied with nature writing, wilderness, and texts such as Henry David Thoreau\u2019s\u00a0Walden<\/em>, and emerging 21st century work that is often concerned with a variety of landscapes (including places like cities) and more timely environmental issues.\u00a0 A UCSB undergrad working on an honor\u2019s thesis succinctly drew attention to how this distinction applies to primary texts by noting that \u201cThoreau is content to sit, contemplate, and ponder the beauties before him . . . [while individuals like Rachel Carson are] . . . apt to actually\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0something.\u201d\u00a0 Consequently, writers such as Thoreau and Wordsworth, who were the darlings of first-wave environmental criticism, are somewhat less interesting to the second wave. Not surprisingly, second-wave environmental critics, careful not to overly romanticize wilderness (as did many of their predecessors), are more likely to direct themselves to sites of environmental devastation and texts that do the same, such as Carson\u2019s\u00a0Silent Spring<\/em>.\u00a0 While some first-wave environmental critics might cringe at the thought, a study of the celebration of flowers in Romantic poetry may be of far less interest to the second wave than an assessment of A.R. Ammons\u2019s book-length poem\u00a0Garbage<\/em>.\u00a0 One of the important advantages of this shift in focus is that, because environmental criticism is now directed to present environmental issues rather than an improbable pastoral past (i.e. some sort of imagined pristine \u201cwilderness\u201d), it is poised to have real cultural and political relevance in the 21st century.\u00a0 There are, however, two important points to keep in mind.<\/p>\n

1. Second-wave environmental critics can still take up some of the same interests as their predecessors, though they are generally very conscious of the implications of doing so.\u00a0 For example, the aforementioned undergrad argued that Carson intentionally (from the pastoral opening of\u00a0Silent Spring<\/em>\u00a0onward) romanticized nature as a rhetorical strategy designed to enlist readers to combat threats to the environment.\u00a0 This approach is very different than first-wave environmental criticism, as this student was not herself led by Carson into making a fetish of nature (as often happened in the first wave); rather, as she explored how such romanticizing takes place, she drew attention to the manner by which this rhetorical strategy influenced the first wave of environmental critics\u2013who were in many cases blind to the influence.<\/p>\n

2. As our environmental crisis has been brewing for thousands of years, second-wave environmental critics need not just work with modern texts.\u00a0 For example, because the first commission to study London\u2019s air-pollution problem (which was caused by burning highly sulfurous coal) was convened in 1286, environmental critics working with medieval and Renaissance texts are ideally positioned to explore the birth of our attitudes toward urban air pollution.\u00a0\u00a0 Consequently, the literature of nearly any period can be of interest to second-wave ecocritics as a way of helping us understand the emergence of our present environmental crisis.<\/p>\n

Because the distinction between first- and second-wave environmental criticism is not always clear, a useful question to ask of works of environmental criticism is whether they promise the sort cultural or political payout prized by the second wave.\u00a0 Expressed another way, following the above undergrad, does the criticism in question \u201cactually\u00a0do\u00a0something\u201d?\u00a0 For an example of environmental criticism that does something, it is helpful to consider the emerging field of environmental justice.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHAT IS THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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The environmental justice movement, as Richard Kerrigan notes in his very helpful essay on \u201cEnvironmentalism and Ecocriticism\u201d in Oxford\u2019s 2006\u00a0Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism<\/em>, is \u201ca collective term for the efforts of poor communities to defend themselves against the dumping of toxic waste, [as well as] the harmful contamination of their air, food, and water\u201d (page 531).\u00a0 Consequently, as Kerrigan makes clear, \u201cecocritics responsive to environmental justice will bring questions of class, race, gender, and colonialism into the ecocritical evaluation of texts and ideas, challenging versions of environmentalism [such as first-wave ecocriticism] that seem exclusively preoccupied with the preservation of wild nature.\u201d\u00a0 In this sense, the environmental justice movement, which has become very influential in the past few years, did for ecocriticism what second-wave feminist critics, such as Gayatri Spivak, did in their field in the 1980s.\u00a0 Just as Spivak warned that it was both naive and dangerous to consider issues relating to gender without also taking into account a range of additional factors, such as class, race, and colonialism, the environmental justice movement made clear that ecocritics also need to consider these and other factors, including gender. \u00a0As one might imagine, this enormously complicates\u2013and greatly enriches\u2013the practice of environmental criticism. \u00a0For example, in 1992 the chief economist for the World Bank, Larry Summers (who later went on to become Harvard University\u2019s President for a time), baldly stated in an internal memo that \u201cI think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country [i.e. Africa] is impeccable,\u201d as such an arrangement would presumably allow wealthy nations to dispose of their toxic waste, while impoverished countries would receive much needed capital for accepting it.\u00a0 Although Summers denied that the memo was intended seriously (and later denied its authorship altogether), because it in fact reflected the World Bank\u2019s policy, this document makes clear that environmental concerns are often entangled with factors like class, race, and colonialism.\u00a0 If we just read the statement made by Summers from an environmental perspective, we risk not taking these other issues into account\u2013as well as risk being oblivious to the horrific implications of the statement.<\/p>\n

Texts of nearly any genre and period can be read from the perspective of environmental justice.\u00a0 For example, in 1635, a century and a half before William Blake famously took up the subject, William Strode penned what is likely the first \u201cChimney-Sweeper\u2019s Song.\u201d\u00a0 Read with a concern for environmental justice, this song makes clear that the individuals of the working class performing this job suffered, as the poor generally still do today, far more from the dangers that come with burning fossil fuels than individuals of wealthier classes.\u00a0 (This profession actually emerged with urban air pollution, as prior to the 16th century most English homes did not have an actual fireplace with chimney, but rather a designated place on the floor for a wood fire under an opening in the roof.\u00a0 Because smoke from coal was too noxious for such an arrangement, residential chimneys, and chimneysweeps, became ubiquitous in England by the end of the 16th century.)\u00a0 Not all second-wave environmental critics are part of the environmental justice movement; however, few ecocritics today would be so naive as to not take issues of environmental justice into account.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHICH WORKS QUALIFY AS ECOCRITICISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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This is a difficult question.\u00a0 On the one hand, a work that we may at first glance take as a work of environmental criticism, such as a study of medieval bestiaries, might have little to do with actual animals and their relation to the environment, as such bestiaries are often highly allegorical works that use animals merely as stand-ins for human beings.\u00a0 This is not to say that such texts cannot be approached from an environmental perspective, but the fact is that this has rarely happened.\u00a0 Similarly, a literary critic interested in an urban landscape from a cultural, political, or economic perspective might give little thought to environmental concerns.\u00a0 Yet another example would be works that focus on the environment exclusively from the perspective of the history of science.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a work that may not deal with environmental issues directly may be an important ecocritical text.\u00a0 For example, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) named Robert Watson\u2019s\u00a0Back to Nature<\/em>\u00a0as the \u201cbest book of ecocriticism\u201d published in 2005-2006, in spite of the fact that this book is not primarily referencing the environmental resonances that emerged with its title phrase in the 1960s and \u201970s; rather, in this book, \u201cback to nature\u201d signals something like \u201cback to reality\u201d or, to be more precise in the phenomenological sense Watson intends, it means \u201cback to \u2018the things themselves.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 The thesis of\u00a0Back to Nature<\/em>\u00a0is that in the Renaissance there emerged an anxiety over whether poets and artists could succeed at representing between the boards of a book or on canvas \u201cthe things themselves\u201d we encounter in the environment.\u00a0 Consequently, this is a highly theoretical work that surprisingly does not significantly touch on important environmental issues emerging at the time, such as air pollution, deforestation, endangered species, wetland loss, and so forth.\u00a0 Nonetheless,\u00a0Back to Nature<\/em> is in fact an important ecocritical work as it fascinatingly explores how late Renaissance writers squarely dealt with the issue of how to represent the environment.<\/p>\n

As \u201cecocriticism\u201d is a bit of a freely floating signifier at this time, it is difficult to know what works of criticism fit under the rubric. It is certainly the case that some works touch on environmental issues without primarily being works of ecocriticism. Similarly, a study that is primarily cultural or economic (such s Raymond Williams\u2019s milestone\u00a0The Country and the City<\/em>, which is in many respects an early work of environmental justice) may importantly draw attention to the relationship between economics and the environment.\u00a0 Although it may sound simplistic, perhaps the most important question to ask of a possible ecocritical work is whether it is primarily concerned with environmental issues as they principally appear in texts.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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IS ECOCRITICISM NEW?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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Yes and no.\u00a0 For as long as human beings have been writing, and reflecting on what others have written, we have been considering the relationship that we have with the natural world.\u00a0 This began long before Plato and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.\u00a0 Indeed, because the concept of \u201cnature\u201d has been given so much thought, it is, as an early ecocritic (Raymond Williams) noted, perhaps the most difficult of all ideas to understand.\u00a0 In spite of the fact that nature is such an old and difficult concept, in the 1960s and \u201970s a number of literary critics,\u00a0including Lynn White Jr., Leo Marx, Carolyn Merchant, Keith Thomas, and Williams, began considering what literature can tell us about our relationship to the natural world, as well as our current environmental crisis.\u00a0 In many respects, these were the first modern environmental critics.\u00a0 Consequently, the term \u201cecocriticism\u201d was coined in the 1970s.\u00a0 In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, interest in environmental criticism increased exponentially; it promises to be one of the most important fields of literary study in upcoming decades.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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DO ECOCRITICS ONLY WORK WITH MODERN TEXTS?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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With the growth of technological modernity, which began to accelerate in\u00a0the 16th and 17th centuries, came increasing interest in the implications of technology, industrialization, urbanization, and other environmentally important topics.\u00a0 Because these issues began appearing regularly in early modern and modern literature, ecocritics have paid a good deal of attention to these relatively recent texts. However, literature of nearly any period can be read ecocritically.\u00a0 For example,\u00a0The Epic of Gilgamesh<\/em>, which is nearly five thousand years old, is a fascinating text to consider as it explores how a culture came to grips with the fact that it needed to deforest vast tracts of land in order to thrive.\u00a0 Similarly, in a fascinating (and controversial) essay from the 1960s, Lynn White Jr. argued that the opening chapters of the Bible can tell us much about our current attitudes toward the environment.\u00a0 Once you get in the habit of reading \u201cgreenly,\u201d it sometimes seems as if every book that you pick up has environmental implications!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHAT IS ANTHROPOCENTRICISM AND ECOCENTRISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
\n

In 1964, in what is in some sense the prehistory of environment criticism, Lynn White Jr. boldly suggested that \u201cChristianity is the most anthropocentric religion that the world has seen.\u201d\u00a0 In addition to containing an enormously influential ecocritical reevaluation \u2013 which has frequently been challenged as being overly simplistic \u2013 of Christianity, this statement also makes an important assumption:\u00a0 that anthropocentricism, which is an ethic that makes human interests central, is problematic.\u00a0 Following White and others, such as Aldo Leopold, many first-wave ecocritics found the notion of putting human concerns above those of other species worrisome.\u00a0 In response to anthropocentricism, they offered \u201cecocentrism\u201d (closely related to \u201cbiocentrism\u201d), which does not privilege the interests of any one species, such as human beings, over any other in the biosphere.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, many of these early ecocritics found \u201cwilderness\u201d particularly appealing (as did nature writers such as Thoreau), as these places were supposedly untouched by human concerns.\u00a0 This in part accounts for the preference that some early ecocritics had for wilderness over \u201cspoiled\u201d environments.\u00a0 However, the second wave has been more likely to accept the fact that human beings now inhabit much of the \u201cnatural\u201d environment of our planet.\u00a0 This acceptance came largely concurrently with the growth of \u201crestoration ecology,\u201d which is the belief that human beings need to take an active role in both restoring and preserving our natural habitat.\u00a0 Consequently, many ecocritics today see the anthropocentricism\/ecocentrism binary as overly simplistic, believing that the two are not always in conflict.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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IS ECOCRITICISM A FORM OF ACTIVISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
\n

It certainly can be.\u00a0 In fact, many, if not most, ecocritics may think of themselves as environmental activists.\u00a0 As environmental criticism can deepen our understanding of the relationship that we have with the environment, it can certainly be an aid to activism. For example, an environmental activist deeply devoted to the preservation of wilderness may benefit enormously (and perhaps even significantly reconsider their position on the subject, as have some individuals in the past decade) when they become aware of the literary history of the notion of \u201cwilderness,\u201d which is by no means a self-evident concept, but rather is a culturally constructed idea that has undergone dramatic change in the past few centuries.\u00a0Moreover, in recent years, ecocritics have begun looking at the writings of environmental activists, such as Rachel Carson\u2019s enormously important\u00a0Silent Spring<\/em>, in order to deepen our understanding of environmental activism itself.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ECOCRITICISM?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
\n

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois presciently suggested that \u201cthe problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.\u201d\u00a0 With a nod to Du Bois, Lawrence Buell opened his 2005 book on\u00a0The Future of Environmental Criticism<\/em>\u00a0by suggesting that, although issues of race are sadly still with us, our emerging global environmental crisis will be the greatest problem of the coming century.\u00a0 As Buell is, sadly, very likely correct, environmental criticism will be crucially important in the 21st century, and will no doubt experience many \u201cwaves\u201d of interest.\u00a0 Because concern over our environmental crisis is in large measure fueling this interest, it seems likely that future ecocriticism will move in the direction second-wave critics are now charting, rather than looking back in a sentimental way to overly romanticized accounts of the environment.\u00a0 Similarly, ecocritical approaches that do not take into account issues of environmental justice (or more accurately, injustice) will no doubt seem simplistic and perhaps even worrisome.\u00a0 In addition, critics such as\u00a0Robert Watson<\/a>\u00a0will likely continue to theoretically explore the nature of the art that deals with nature.\u00a0 Moreover, as Watson makes clear on the first page of his\u00a0Back to Nature<\/em>, \u201cecocriticism seems to be booming in its test markets (British Romanticism and the literature of the American West) and now seems ready to push its way back to the Renaissance,\u201d as well as into all other periods of literary study.<\/p>\n

It is also likely that ecocriticism will greatly enrich other critical approaches.\u00a0 For example, in his Introduction to Albert Memmi\u2019s\u00a0The Colonizer and the Colonized<\/em>, Jean-Paul Sartre made a famous speculation: \u201cWere the colonized to disappear so would colonization\u2013with the colonizer.\u201d\u00a0 By this Sartre meant that if colonized human beings were to disappear, \u201cthere would be no more subproletariat, no more over-exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 While this is certainly true, Sartre ignored the fact that not only human beings are colonized, but so are the places they inhabit.\u00a0 Indeed, the colonial enterprise usually understood the \u201ccolonized\u201d as both people and place.\u00a0 True, in some instances it would be the human colonized resources that would appeal most to the colonizer, with the prospect of labor so inexpensive that literally thousands of hours of human labor could be lavished in the making of a single wool rug or bolt of silk fabric.\u00a0 On the other hand, the colonized natural resources, which in this case supply the wool and silk, also had immense appeal to the colonizer.\u00a0 By drawing attention to the fact that places as well as people are colonized, an ecocritical approach reveals that Sartre is not only being simplistic, but like many twentieth-century thinkers, he is unfortunately largely oblivious to environmental issues.<\/p>\n

Because of the environmental justice movement, ecocriticism greatly benefited from the work of literary critics exploring issues like gender, class, race, and colonialism.\u00a0 Ecocritics are now returning (and will very likely in the future continue to return) the favor by showing how an environmental approach can enrich critical work in the fields, such a colonial studies, from which environmental justice borrowed.\u00a0 In this sense, ecocriticism will, like the methodological approaches that preceded it, both remain a discrete field of literary study, as well as inform other approaches.\u00a0 Consequently, many critical studies will have a \u201cgreen\u201d tint to them without being primarily works of ecocriticism.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/p><\/div>

<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/p>\n
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