Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105Ecocriticism

Pippa Marland*Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts, University of Worcester, UK

AbstractIn the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorisedpreserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophisticated array of earth-centredapproaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines in-cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology. Ecocriticisms diversity also extends to engagingwith a variety of literary forms as well as, increasingly, lm, TV, digital environments and music, andto an interest in representations of the urban. At its heart is the conviction both that we are living in a timeof ecological crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency our modes of being in the world and thatour cultural perceptions of nature and the human, and the relationship between the two, have to alarge degree been responsible for these damaging modes of being. Its role is to interrogate and critiquethese perceptions, even within environmentalism itself, with some ecocritics also committed to exploringalternative ways of conceptualising our relationship with the non-human world. This paper briey tracesthe history of ecocriticism, discussing its initial development in the USA and Britain, outlining the twostrands of social ecology and deep ecology that underpin its ongoing formulation, and tracing the wavesof its development. It then focuses on contemporary and emergent theorisations, in particular the globalinection of current post-colonial ecocriticism and the environmental justice movement, whichintroduces the new paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics, and the recent formulation of ecocritical post-humanism. This emphasises the imbrication of the human in earths matrix, drawing on the insights ofecofeminism, phenomenology and biosemiotics, and has its most recent incarnation in the currentlyemerging eld of material ecocriticism, which, in its engagement with the complex entanglement ofthe human and the non-human, the social and the scientic, hints at a more dissonant paradigm.

Introduction

Ecocriticism is an umbrella term for a range of critical approaches that explore the representationin literature (and other cultural forms) of the relationship between the human and the non-human, largely from the perspective of anxieties around humanitys destructive impact on thebiosphere. Other terms for the eld include environmental criticism and green culturalstudies, the latter term reecting the increasing diversity of the elds remit its recent focuson lm, TV, virtual worlds and popular music, for example, as well as its growing interest inrepresentations of urban environments. How critics involved in this area choose to denethemselves depends largely on their own position in relation to environmental issues and to theirunderstanding of the implications of the individual terms. The prex eco is preferred bysome for its ecological connotations its emphasis on what Lawrence Buell calls human andnon-human webs of interrelation (The Future of Environmental Criticism, glossary, 138, emphasismine) but for others it implies an overly close identication with one particular strand ofscholarship that advocates a commitment to political activism (Bergthaller, EASLCE website).1

The multiplicity of perspectives and objects of study outlined above has perhaps contributedto an enduring perception in certain quarters of the academy that ecocriticism lacks legitimacyor coherence as an area of critical theory. Peter Barry, in his inuential primer Beginning Theory,sees it as a eld that is still distinctly on the academic margins [] and the movement still does

not have a widely-known set of assumptions, doctrines or procedures (239). In part this

2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

is because of the enormity of the subject. As Timothy Clark points out, The environment,

Ecocriticsm 847The Roots of Ecocriticism

Notwithstanding its broad remit, there is a shared perception within ecocriticism that we areliving in a time of environmental crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency ourmodes of being in the world. Moreover, there is a general agreement that these modes ofbeing have been, to a large degree, culturally determined. Buell, in an early formulation ofthe role of ecocriticism, identies the environmental crisis as a crisis of the imaginationthe amelioration of which depends on nding better ways of imaging nature and humanitysrelation to it (The Environmental Imagination, 2). He believes that the ways in which we haveconceived of ourselves and our relationship with the environment have contributed to ourdestructive impact on the planet. For Buell, then, the task of the ecocritic is both to unraveland critique the conceptualisations that have been so damaging and to identify traces of thosebetter ways of imaging where we nd them. This remains the case for some ecocritics evenin the most recent formulations of the movement.The 1960s are largely seen as the decade that marked the beginning of the kind of

environmental consciousness that provides the backdrop to ecocriticism, with the publicationof Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in 1962 hailed as the beginning of modern environmentalism(Garrard,Ecocriticism, 1).3 Although other works emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that were seen asembodying early forms of ecocritical practice, the movement was slow to establish itself.4 It wasnot until 1992 that the rst professional organisation of ecocritics, the Association for the Study ofLiterature and Environment, was formed in the USA, followed in 1993 by the founding of itsjournal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. A sister organisation was setup in the UK in 1998 (now encompassing the UK and Ireland), with its own publication, thejournal Green Letters, rst published in 2000.after all, is, ultimately, everything (203), an apparently unlimited area of enquiry that is alsoin the process of constant change. It follows that so complex and dynamic a concern as thehealth of the biosphere and our place within it requires a broad range of procedures and anability constantly to critique assumptions and doctrines. It implies, as Greg Garrard suggests, thatthe ecocritic must strive for a certain degree of ecological literacy (Ecocriticism, 5), whichinvolves producing a uid and contingent response in the face of both new forms of ecologicalunderstanding2 and the ongoing and widespread sense of deepening environmental crisis. Clark,again, points up the magnitude of this challenge: to try to conceptualise and engage themultiple factors behind the accelerating degradation of the planet is to reach for tools whichmust be remade even in the process of use (xiii).Lawrence Buell, whose measured views often provide a touchstone for ecocriticism,

acknowledges the diversity of perspectives: As literary ecodiscourse becomes more widelypractised, more globally networked, more interdisciplinary and thus even more pluriform,the participants must become more increasingly aware of speaking from some position withinor around the movement rather than for it (Future, viii). For the purposes of this essay, I usethe term ecocriticism throughout to facilitate the discussion of a variety of environmental orearth-centred critical approaches that have largely developed in the last 20 years and thatrepresent positions from within or around the movement. In the paragraphs that follow, I givea brief history of ecocriticism from its early incarnations in the USA and Britain, through thesuccessive waves of its theoretical development and their relation to the enduring major strandsof ecological thought deep and social ecology to its increasingly international platform andthe emergence of the signicant contemporary formulations of global eco-cosmopolitics andpost-humanist material ecocriticism, which are introducing new paradigms to the eld.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

In her introduction to the early collection of ecocritical essays The Ecocriticism Reader, published

848 Ecocriticsmin 1996, Cheryll Glotfelty points up the dearth of environmental criticism existing at that time:

If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you could infer from the major pub-lications of the literary profession, you would quickly discern that race, class, and gender were thehot topics of the late twentieth century, but you would never suspect that the earths life supportsystems were under stress. Indeed you would never know that there was an earth at all. (xvi)

One of the factors inuencing this slow progress was perhaps the uncertainty within thehumanities of involving themselves with what was generally perceived to be a scienticproblem, the domain of the environmental sciences.5 Another issue was the difculty ofspeaking for the earth itself. Other areas of theory that were gathering momentum in the1970s such as feminism and post-colonialism both of which critiqued the political andsocial effects of othering had more identiable means of locating and giving the spacefor articulation to those voices silenced by dominant ideologies.But, in particular, there was a feeling in these early ecocritics that critical theory itself was

thwarting their attempt to establish any kind of advocacy for the earth. John Parham rightlynotes a belligerent attitude to theory in rst-wave ecocriticism (The Poverty of EcocriticalTheory, 25). Rather than necessarily representing a rejection of theory per se,6 this was morethe result of a frustration with the particular linguistic turn present in the structuralism andpost-structuralism of the 1970s and 1980s that viewed language as a closed system, suggesting,at least in what Wendy Wheeler and Hugh Dunkerley call the less subtle Anglophoneinterpretations of continental theory (Introduction,New Formations, 7), that it is not possibleto discuss the realworld because reality is constructed in language and there is nothing outsidethe text.7 Similarly, in the context of the NewHistoricism, Alan Liu made the much-contestedassertion: there is no nature except as it is constituted by acts of political denition madepossible by particular forms of government (104). Terry Gifford, responding to this statement,argued that While Liu is right to identify the word nature as a mediation, he is wrong todeny the general physical presence that is one side of that mediation (Green Voices, 15).The role of early ecocriticism, then, while not necessarily denying the linguistic construction

of nature, was largely to create the theoretical space in which to discuss that general physicalpresence on the other side of the mediation, which the proliferation and habits of consumptionof the human race (albeit with an uneven global distribution of that consumption, as discussedbelow) were putting in jeopardy. Kate Rigby calls this endeavour the ecocritical reinstatementof the referent (154) and, in an oft-quoted rebuff to extreme applications of the linguistic turn,Kate Soper reminds us: it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thingcontinues to be polluted and degraded even as we rene our deconstructive insights at the levelof the signier (151).8

The First Wave Reinstating the Real

Accordingly, the rst wave of ecocriticism, especially in the USA, focused on the representationin literature of the world beyond the text, devoting much of its energy to the search for theforms of literary expression which could best convey an environmental message. In TheEnvironmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell formulated a checklist of four ingredients of anenvironmentally orientated work:

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins tosuggest that human history is implicated in natural history. []

2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. []Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the texts ethical orientation. []

Ecocriticsm 8494. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in thetext. [] (78, italics in original)

Buells questioning of the texts ethical orientation in particular points up an important,though contested, element of ecocriticism, which is what Buell calls a spirit of commitmentto environmentalist praxis (Environmental, 430). As a theoretical eld based around concernsspreading out from the cultural to the political, there is a desire in some ecocritics to have apractical, real-world impact to educate our broader interactions with the non-human worldand to form a counter-canon of texts which are seen tomodel a more ecologically sustainablemode of being and dwelling in the world than that which has predominated in the lived realityof the modern era (Rigby, 159). For others, the focus is more on interrogation than activism,though political intervention may be a (positive) outcome of that interrogation.9

Cheryll Glotfelty also provided a comprehensive checklist in her introduction to TheEcocriticism Reader this time of questions reecting the way in which an (American) ecocriticreads. As well as incorporating aspects of Buells ingredients, she also pregured many ofthe concerns of subsequent waves of ecocriticism. For this reason, I include her full list inAppendix 1 as a still useful orientation for anyone wishing to carry out practical ecocriticism.In the USA, despite the breadth of Glotfeltys questioning, the rst wave of ecocriticism was

predominantly associated with the championing of non-ction nature writing. Writers such asHenry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and AnnieDillard were lauded for the quality of their environmental imagination. The landscapes theyengaged with were often wilderness or semi-wilderness, and their writings reect the legacyof American Transcendentalism, with its emphasis on the educative value of wild nature andon intense individual connection with the landscape. This approach has been described ascelebratory (Head, Ecocriticism and the Novel, 236; Barry, 242), suggesting a relativelyuncritical understanding of nature.10

First-wave British ecocriticism also concerned itself with the recuperation of forms ofwriting that foregrounded the non-human world and that might foster environmentalsensibility, though here the emphasis was on poetry. It was spearheaded by Jonathan Bate,who in two inuential works, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition(1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000), undertook the rehabilitation of the Romantic Poets,especially William Wordsworth, as poets of nature. For Bate, Romantic poetry enables us tothink fragility (Song, 112) to apprehend our ecological embeddedness and sharedvulnerability with the non-human world.Bate diverges from Buell, however, when it comes to environmental praxis. Basing his

argument on Heideggers ideas of dwelling a manner of being in the world that is receptiveto the self-disclosure of nature and is revealed through poetry Bate characterises ecopoetry asa phenomenological and pre-political form, which draws us into communion with the earththrough its emphasis on presencing rather than representation, bodying forth that presencingin part through its rhythms and sounds. He suggests that, while it might be appropriate forMarxist or feminist critics to believe that they are contributing towards social change, greencritics should not approach poetry with a set of assumptions or proposals about particularenvironmental issues, but as a way of reecting upon what it might mean to dwell with theearth (Song, 266). For Bate, Ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness. When itcomes to practice, we have to speak in other discourses (266).Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the British landscape and its literary evocations are

inextricably intertwined with the social and the political. Bates own discussion of the peasantpoet John Clare identies the way in which he viewed the rights of man and the rights ofLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

nature as co-extensive and co-dependent (Song, 164), with his poetry foregrounding the

and identify ourselves within a broader circle of living things, then our societal problems may

850 Ecocriticsmalso nd resolution.12

Social ecologists believe that the very notion of the domination of nature by manstems from the very real domination of human by human (Bookchin, 65).13 Thus, in aparadigmatic reverse of deep ecology, they suggest that we must rst address the problemsof social inequality and oppression before we can remedy our dislocation from the environ-ment. Both of these movements have been strongly critiqued; deep ecology for its presumedlack of a social dimension,14 social ecology for its perhaps nave underestimation of thedurability of existing social systems. However, it is important not to make reductive readingsof either strand,15 as these are perspectives that continue to develop in complexity andreceive more nuanced workings as they inform ongoing theorisations of ecocriticism. Broadlyspeaking, rst-wave ecocriticism leaned more toward deep ecology in its emphasis on personalconnection, or re-connection, with nature (though, as we have seen, the minatory aspectrunning through British ecocriticism also hinted at a more social inection), whereas the secondwave owed more to social ecology. In discussion of the third and fourth waves of ecocriticism,the two areas of thought come into closer orbit.mutual suffering of the earth and the rural poor as a result of the enclosure of common landand the ensuing destruction of ancient habitats. For Peter Barry, British ecocriticism is alwaysminatory: that is, it seeks to warn us of environmental threats emanating from governmental,industrial, commercial, and neo-colonial forces (242). In the absence of vast stretches ofwilderness to evoke, in English literature wild nature invariably co-exists with agriculturalor industrial activity, or human settlement, migration or leisure patterns, each shaped, partially,by the dominant modes of production and social organisation (Parham, Two-Ply, 113).Dominic Head, discussing the difference between, for example, the work of Thomas Hardyand D. H. Lawrence and American wilderness writing, states, we are confronted with naturalimages in which questions of social history and sexual politics are inscribed on the scene or in thelandscape (Ecocriticism and the Novel, 236).These questions of social and economic history and sexual politics began to emerge with more

force on both sides of the Atlantic as ecocriticism progressed. The rst wave had carried out anecessary rehabilitation of the referent but fell short when ecocritics themselves began to challengethe theoretical limitations of the movement, thus signalling the second phase of ecocriticism.

Deep and Social Ecology

Before moving on to discussion of the second wave, however, it is important to differentiatebetween two strands of thought deep and social ecology which exist within ecocriticismand which feature throughout the trajectory of its development.Deep ecologists see the need for a radical reconceptualisation of humanitys place on the

planet. They adopt a biocentric/ecocentric perspective that proposes a biospherical egalitarianism(Naess, 95) in which the interest of the biosphere overrides the interests of individual species,including the human. They believe in raising ecological awareness through an individualadjustment of values, suggesting that a change in our relationship with the environment canonly come about through rst grounding ourselves in the dark of our deepest selves (Snyder,ix) in order to rediscover our profound connection with the more-than-human world.11

Deep ecology challenges the anthropocentrism at the heart of modern society and the kind ofshallow ecological standpoints that see the natural world as merely a resource for humanityand that presuppose that human needs and demands override other considerations. And, putsimply, it asserts that if we rst address our hierarchical attitudes towards the natural worldLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The Second Wave Debating Nature

of the developments in ecofeminism that demonstrate its signicance in the ecocritical trajectory.

Ecocriticsm 851As Buell suggests, though the second wave revised ecocriticism, it carried through elements ofthe rst wave, maintaining its awareness of the general physical presence of nature anddeveloping and rening its engagement with form and the search for the environmentalimagination. Where it diverged was in its re-engagement with the critical theory it had initiallypulled against. In the UK, the philosopher Kate Soper suggested in What is Nature? that thenature-endorsing approach typical of early ecocriticism should be balanced with a morenature-sceptical sensibility, able to reect on the way in which nature has been constructedand deployed to reinforce dominant ideologies, but that neither perspective should be allowedto dominate. In fact, they should be informed by reection on each other. Laurence Coupe gavethis dual awareness a specically ecocritical spin in a memorable phrase in his introduction to TheGreen Studies Reader (2000): green studies debates Nature in order to defend nature (5).In the US, Dana Phillips launched a more polemical challenge to ecocriticism to re-engage

with critical theory, stating that:

The rst generation of ecocritics has embraced a curatorial model of literary scholarship and hasspurned literary theory, apparently without having reaped the benets of its close acquaintance.This has made ecocriticism seem overly devotional, and hostile to the intellect at times. (ix)16

Phillips also suggested a rethinking of the search for an environmental literature, questioning whatthe function of a literary criticism that focused on largely mimetic or directly representational writing might be: Realistic depiction of the world, of the sort that we can credit as reasonableand uncontroversial, is one of literatures more pedestrian, least artful aspects (8).17 In the UK,Dominic Head also broached the question of form, specically calling for an engagement withthe novel: If ecocriticism is to realise its full potential, it will need to nd a way of appropriatingnovelistic form (Ecocriticism and the Novel, 236).Ecocriticisms second wave ushered in a more reexive approach that provided the scope

to address the complex intertwining of nature, Nature, and social and sexual politics, andthat, as well as critiquing and reframing the forms that had already come under its scrutinyto reect a more complex understanding of these interweavings (e.g. post-pastoral, newnature writing and ecopoetry),18 did indeed turn to the novel and to new novelisticAlthough he was the instigator of the notion of ecocritical waves, Lawrence Buell himselfqualies this imagery, suggesting that the waves are indistinct and offering palimpsest as abetter metaphor:

No denitive map of environmental criticism in literary studies can [] be drawn. Still, one canidentify several trend-lines marking an evolution from a rst wave of ecocriticism to a secondor newer revisionist wave or waves increasingly evident today. This rstsecond wave distinctionshould not, however, be taken as implying a tidy, distinct succession. Most currents set in motionby early ecocriticism continue to run strong, and most forms of second-wave revisionism involvebuilding on as well as quarreling with precursors. (Future, 17)

Perhaps because of this sense of indistinct succession and concurrence of perspectives, there is alack of consensus about what actually constitutes eachwave. Greta Gaard, for example, argues thatthe accounts of the secondwave underestimate the importance of feminist thinking: the retellingof ecocritical roots and perspectives marginalizes both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspec-tives (643). In the broad account of the second wave that follows, I include discussion of someLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

additions to the canon to explore the ways in which its more self-conscious textuality might

852 Ecocriticsmarticulate the complex entanglement of self and world, social and environmental history.19

Two important areas of cultural theory that were already established andwell placed to bring toecocriticism an understanding of the way in which nature had been constructed and deployed toreinforce dominant ideologies of gender, class and racewere ecofeminism and post-colonial ecocriticism.They also represented a necessary corrective to ecocriticisms previous apparently blanketapportioning of human environmental culpability, foregrounding notions of environmental justicethat recognised the inequitable distribution of environmental benets and risk among the globalpopulation, and challenging the predominantly (white, male) Anglo-American search for theenvironmental imagination. The ecofeminist Sylvia Mayer points up the common groundbetween these two social ecological perspectives when she states:

Together with environmental justice scholars, ecofeminists claim that it is not humankind as such that isresponsible for environmental damage. The responsibility lies predominantly with those human beingsand social milieus whose position in socioeconomic power relations has enabled them to take politicaldecisions and prot from their results in many societies largely, but not only, a male elite. (118)

Although some ecofeminists have registered their opposition to the patriarchal dominationof both women and the environment by embracing and celebrating the idea of woman ascloser to nature,20 others have resisted the implications of biological essentialism containedwithin this view, dubbing it as motherhood environmentalism (Sandilands, xiii). For thelatter group, the way to address the inequities of the male/female, culture/nature divide isnot by moving privilege from one side of the dichotomy to the other, in what ValPlumwood calls uncritical reversal (31), but by interrogating and challenging the veryexistence of that dichotomy. Plumwood powerfully summarises the way in which the con-struct of nature has been wielded to legitimate both dualistic ways of thinking and thepower relationships they enable.

The category of nature is a eld of multiple exclusion and control, not only of non-humans, but ofvarious groups of humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature. Thus racism, colonialismand sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference ascloser to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanitylacking the full measure of rationality or culture. (4)

Like Plumwood, Donna Haraway has also emphasised the necessity of identifying anddisrupting the hierarchies typical of western post-Enlightenment thought, which have all beensystemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers,animals (Haraway, 177). In fact, one of the key contributions of feminist and ecofeministthought to contemporary ecocriticism is its unsettling of binaries such as culture/nature,male/female, mind/body, civilised/primitive, self/other, reason/matter, human/nature and so on.Another important legacy of this process has been an apprehension of the complex

entanglement of the environment and the body as the site of shared damage. Carolyn Merchant,demonstrating again the links between ecofeminism and environmental justice issues, refers to thedisproportionate siting of environmental hazards such as landll, incinerators and toxic wastedumps in underprivileged minority areas. She states, Women experience the results of toxicdumping on their own bodies (sites of reproduction of the species), in their own homes(sites of the reproduction of daily life), and in their communities and schools (sites of socialreproduction) (161). While this view perhaps retains elements of the identity politics Sandilandscritiques the troubling assumption that the fact of being a woman is understood to lie at theLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

base of ones experience of ecological degradation (Sandilands, 5) it nevertheless foregrounds

(Nixon, 4). Even more disturbing is the idea that the further environmental degradation

Ecocriticsm 853of poor nations might be carried out in order to appease rich nation environmentalistswho campaign against the dumping of waste and industrial efuent in their own backyard. Rob Nixon prefaces his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor(2011) with a leaked World Bank memo expressing the political expediency of dumpingtoxic waste in the lowest wage country and suggesting that the World Bank should beencouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries(1). These arguments have challenged ecocritics to engage in more globally nuancedterms (DeLoughrey and Handley, 9).

Slow Violence Towards a Global Ecocriticism

Nixons book has been extremely inuential in drawing attention to the complex interplayof the local and the global in environmental terms. Describing environmental issues such asclimate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnication, deforestation, theradioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans (2), Nixon suggests that their effects are oftenhard to track and quantify. He describes this as slow violence a violence that occursgradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time andspace, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all (2) and he askshow this can be represented in a global culture that is accustomed to an ever more immediateow of information and sensation, and that conceptualises violence as event focused, timebound and body bound (3). Like Lawrence Buell, he is in search of forms of writing thatcan adequately convey an environmental message, not this time to foreground the real, materialpresence of nature as such but to render the invisible visible. For Nixon, the answer lies in thework of writer activists authors who are fuelled by rage and hunger for redress and whoseimaginative writing can help the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible byhumanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses thus offering us a differentkind of witnessing: of sights unseen (15). Some post-colonial ecocritics have identied thisability to make the unapparent apparent with the use of the novelistic device of magic realism.the notion of an interplay between environment and body, a theme to which I return indiscussion of Stacy Alaimos recent concept of trans-corporeality and the development of thefourth wave of ecocriticism (discussed below).Post-colonial criticism has also long understood the integral connection between

ideological constructions of nature and the oppression and exploitation of colonised peoplesand their environments: Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issuesnot only as central to the projects of European conquest and global domination, but alsoas inherent in the ideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects historically and persistently depend (Huggan and Tifn, 6). The persistently is signicant here,since the contemporary neo-liberal era has intensied assaults on resources (Nixon, 4)and perpetuated the environmental and social damage suffered by the worlds poor inever-developing forms of neocolonialism.This sense of the continuation of colonialist practices in new guises has had an important

impact on ecocriticism, demonstrating the need to reappraise environmentalism itself. InVarieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997), Ramachandra Guha and JuanMartinez Alier use the phrase environmentalism of the poor to distinguish between therich-nation environmentalism of the northern hemisphere and that of the global South.This reects the feeling that environmental discourses are all too often neo-colonial,Western impositions inimical to the resource priorities of the poor in the global SouthLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, for example, in Postcolonial Environments, nds in Indra Sinhas

realism discussed by Mukherjee, above, is a form) as an identiable homology across literatures

854 Ecocriticsmglobally, used for expressing aspects of the catastrophic upheavals in ecologies brought about bythe expansion of global capital that would otherwise defy representation.

Eco-Cosmopolitics and the Third Wave

In another response to this global imperative, Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson hailed thearrival of ecocriticisms third wave in 2009 a development which recognises ethnic andnational particuliarities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries, exploring allfacets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint (67). Broadly speaking, thisdescribes the paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: TheEnvironmental Imagination of the Global (2008), Ursula Heise describes the genesis of thisconstruct in the recuperation of the term cosmopolitanism in a range of elds in the late1990s, with theorists striving to model forms of cultural imagination and understanding thatreach beyond the nation and around the globe (6). She discusses this in terms ofdeterritorialisation, stating that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globeentails the emergence of new forms of culture that are no longer anchored in place (10).For her, the challenge that this deterritorialisation poses for the environmental imagination is:

to envision how ecologically-based advocacy on behalf of the non-human world as well as onbehalf of greater socioenvironmental justice might be formulated in terms that are premised nolonger as primarily on ties to local places but on ties to territories and systems that are understoodto encompass the planet as a whole. (10)

What she proposes is an ecologically inected world citizenship (10). It is in the spirit ofthis world citizenship that the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth wasnovel Animals People, which is based on the Bhopal disaster, a magic realism t to expressthe horrors of a reality that threatens to escape the ordinary boundaries of stylistics (153).The diffusive temporal and spatial nature of the results of slow violence and the fact that we are

now living in a geological epoch informally termed the anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer) todenote the magnitude of human impact on environmental change, suggest the need for anecocritical paradigm that is not only more globally nuanced but also more globally embracing in other words, one which, while sensitive to environmental justice issues at a local level, is alsoable to register the temporal and planetary implications of anthropogenic environmental destruc-tion in a world where no act or result of damage can be seen as purely local.A recent issue of Green Letters (Spring 2012) devoted to Global and Postcolonial Ecologies

employs broadly social ecological, Marxist constructs for discussing the global, in particular JasonMoores term world-ecology, which denotes the epochal reorganization of world ecology thatmarked the rise of the capitalist world-economy (Niblett, 16). For the editor Sharae Deckard,this has enabled a tentative worlding of post-colonial literary criticism which seeks:

not only to generate an understanding of the political, cultural, and aesthetic differences betweenliterary and critical approaches to the environment across multiple national traditions, but also todetect structural homologies and similarities of concern, particularly in those ways in which literaturesrespond to the uneven development projects of global capital and their impact on local environmentsand subjects. (Deckard, 1011, emphases in original)

Michael Niblett, for example, identies the literary device of irrealism (of which the magicLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

adopted at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in

effects of slow violence register indiscriminately on the bodies of the human and the

Ecocriticsm 855non-human, disrupting both the nature/culture binary and human social distinctions.Referencing the work of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman in Material Feminisms, Adamsonexplains:

An oil spill, for example, studied from a culturalnatural perspective that does not separate the tworealms, reveals how a toxin may affect the workers who produce it, the community in which it isproduced, and the humans and animals (domesticated and wild) that ingest it. (Adamson, 148)

This notion of movement of matter across bodies in a multiple entanglement leads me todiscussion of the fourth wave of ecocriticism.

The Fourth Wave Material Ecocriticism: Post-Human and Post-Nature

The fourth wave should be regarded as co-existent with rather than superseding the third(or indeed the other strands of ecocriticism) and has only very recently been identied. Itis the emergent eld of material ecocriticism. For Scott Slovic, it is Stacy Alaimos discussionof trans-corporeality in Material Feminisms that has helped to launch an entire newdirection in contemporary ecocriticism (443). This concept has developed out of earlyecofeminist apprehensions of the impacts of environmental justice on the human body andthe more recent material turn, which has found a powerful voice in the work of feministthinkers in a range of disciplines, including Karen Barad and Claire Colebrook, as well asAlaimo and Susan Hekman. Alaimo denes trans-corporeality as a construct that deals withthe material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider materialworld (States, 476) and that has engendered a new materialist and post-humanist sense ofthe human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the ows of substances andthe agencies of environments (States, 476).For Alaimo, this interconnection calls for rich, complex modes of analysis that travel

through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biologicaland textual (Trans-corporeal, 238). In this, she echoes Bruno Latours sense in We Have2010. The declaration stresses that we are all part of Mother Earth, an indivisible, livingcommunity of interrelated and interdependent beings with a common destiny (). It seeks to recognise the environmental damagewrought by global capitalism and promotes social and environmental justice but withinthe framework of a biospherical egalitarianism similar to that advocated by deep ecologistArne Naess.This advocacy for the non-human extends the notion of environmental justice (usually

applied to human concerns relating to the environment) to the environment itself, and bringstogether parties whose interests might previously have been deemed separate. Joni Adamsonrecounts a protest in Peru in 2006 attended by a coalition of indigenous peoples,environmentalists and academics (148) that opposed a mining concession sited at the footof the mountain Ausangate. The protesters argued that the mountain should have the rightto exist in a proper relationship with its surrounding mountains (148). For Adamson (citingde la Cadena), the notable aspect of this protest was the way in which those involved, someof whom would not personally subscribe to the notion of a sentient mountain, were able tojoin together in a commitment to a politics of nature that included disagreement on thedenition of nature itself (149).Another reason for these new alliances is a realisation of the ways in which the diffusiveLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Never Been Modern that false distinctions between the worlds of, for example, science and

The notion of shared materiality has initially been seized on in ecocriticism to take forward

856 Ecocriticsmand develop some ecocritical formulations of post-humanism in a broadly deep ecologicalspirit. Post-humanism de-centres and interrogates the human, challenging the construct ofthe Great Chain of Being, which places man at its head. Cary Wolfe states that the human,we now know, is not now and never was itself (Zoontologies, xiii). In a similar vein, JacquesDerrida has questioned the construct of the animal. His neologism animot (which plays onthe French homophones maux of animaux [animals] and mot [word]) is designed tobreak down the traditional semantic boundary between human and animal and encompassthe heterogeneous multiplicity of the living (399) in which man is just one of manyspecies. There is, in fact, a strand of post-humanist enquiry specically dedicated to animalstudies, and a degree of tension exists between this strands exploration of the sentience,subjectivity and rights of non-human animals and ecological perspectives that see valueresiding in an ecosystem as a whole rather than in individual species or, indeed, individualanimals. For Timothy Clark, there is a real, intractable dispute here (181), particularly inthe apprehension that even apparently biocentric approaches may mask an inherentanthropocentrism.21 Cary Wolfe contends that, in general, academic discourse remainslocked within an unexamined framework of speciesism (Animal Rites, 1, emphasis inoriginal), pointing up one of the fault lines of post-humanism: most of us remain humaniststo the core, even as we claim for our work an epistemological break with humanismitself (1).In an early discussion of the implications of post-humanist thought for ecocriticism, Louise

Westling borrows Derridas term, formulating the phrase animot post-humanism. Thisattempts to blend the notion of decentring the human with an exploration of animalpolitics, the natural and the social, have restricted our ability adequately to assess ourmanner of being in the world. Our material selves cannot be separated from networks thatare simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientic, and substantial (Alaimo,States, 476). Apprehending the extent of these entanglements challenges us epistemologicallyand ethically:

Emphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-humanworld, and at the same time acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capaciousepistemologies, allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend with numerouslate-twentieth-century/early-twenty-rst-century realities in which human and environmentcan by no means be considered as separate: environmental health, environmental justice, the trafcin toxins, and genetic engineering, to name a few. (Alaimo, Trans-corporeal, 238)

This paragraph foregrounds three key issues of material ecocriticism. First is the premisethat there is a shared materiality between the human and non-human world that rendersobsolete the distinctions between human and environment, moving beyond the constructof nature altogether; second is the idea that all of this shared matter has agency; and thirdis the ethical and political challenges the complexity and hybridity of these materialinterminglings suggest. In the paragraphs below, I discuss each of these issues in turn, detail-ing their ongoing impacts on current ecocritical theory. Returning to Timothy Clarksoutlining of one of the challenges to ecocriticism, cited in my introduction, this paradigmis very much an example of ecocritical tools being remade even in the process of use (xiii).

Shared Materiality and Post-HumanismLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

subjectivity and emphasises our imbrication in the matrix of earths life (Literature, 26).

Ecocriticsm 857Developing ideas drawn from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and David Abram, Westling suggeststhat this imbrication is revealed to us through a phenomenological immersion in the world.She makes a deliberate distinction between animot post-humanism and what she termstechno or cyborg post-humanism,22 believing that the latter is less relevant to ecocriticismsince it deals in the concept of the transhuman the perfectible, technological human that isable to surpass its environment and its own body a concept that perpetuates damagingdualistic modes of thinking.For Serenella Iovino, an understanding of the shared materiality between human and

non-human proposed by the new materialists makes the imbrication Westling describes allthe more tangible, dissolving the human/nature binary and enabling an ecologicalhorizontalism and an extended moral imagination (Iovino, Material, 52) in other words,reaching, in part, towards the biospherical egalitarianism of deep ecology.

The Agency of Matter

A second key theme of material ecocriticism is the notion that matter is an agentic force, againremoving one of the distinctions that has traditionally been drawn between human andnon-human and reinforcing the idea of horizontality rather than hierarchy. Matter is seen asmanifesting an inherent creative power, a vitality which is not that of a static being but of agenerative becoming (Iovino, Material, 53), establishing a multiply-tiered ontology in whichthere is no denitive break between sentient and nonsentient entities or between material andspiritual phenomena (Coole and Frost, 10).In biosemiotic and ecosemiotic perspectives, such as those advanced by the philosopher and

ecocritic Wendy Wheeler (The Whole Creature) and the ecophilosopher David Abram(Becoming Animal), one of the ways matter reveals its agency is through its production andembodiment of signs that invest the non-human world with its own systems of signicationand meaning. A biosemiotic perspective also helps to bridge the culture/nature divide. In thisparadigm, culture, like language, is an emanation of our material being.Wheeler describes cultureand nature as inextricably intertwined and co-dependent and co-evolving (Whole Creature, 41),and Iovino talks of nature and culture as a circulating system (Stories, 454) that should betterbe termed (following Donna Haraways lead) natureculture (Stories, 454).So far, this is a fairly harmonious picture of interrelationship and shared qualities a broadly

deep ecological notion of agential kinships (Iovino, Material, 66). However, as Iovino andothers ongoing theorisations recognise, the implications of shared materiality also involve amore disorientating hybridity, for example in the trafc in toxins and genetic engineeringAlaimo mentions, where the complex entanglements of human and non-human and theirdiffusive effects present ontological and ethical dilemmas. For Bruno Latour, the combinationof the human and its technology sets in motion a mutual expansion of agentic potential whereall of the component parts, both human and non-human the actants are in the process ofexchanging competencies, offering one another new goals, new possibilities, new functions(Pandoras Hope, 182). But these new functions are unpredictable, with matter at times evolvingdeviant agencies (Alaimo,Bodily, 139) as it manifests its creative power and crosses into bodiesand environments.

Thing Power: Ethical Challenges

Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, stresses that the onto-story (4) ofshared materiality she proposes is not one of unproblematic interrelationship: in contrast tosome versions of deep ecology, my monism posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor aLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

diversity unied by a common spirit (ix). In fact, the complex entanglement of human and

858 Ecocriticsmnon-human, biology and politics renders the terms deep and social ecology as redundant asnature. To demonstrate the more disturbing manifestations of what she calls thing power(2), she cites Robert Sullivans description of a New Jersey garbage hill outside Manhattan,which powerfully evokes the physical agency of the dump, as toxic elements mingle andcombine, warm and fresh, ready to seep into the groundwater.23 This is an ongoing agencywhich is non-human, and yet whose genesis is in the detritus of human consumerism.Similarly, the image below not only provides further evidence of the temporal and spatial

reach of slow violence but also graphically illustrates trans-corporeality in action, asman-made substances nd new agential roles. Chris Jordan, the photographer, explains:

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent,the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs ofthousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by theirparents, who mistake the oating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted PacicOcean. http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#about

Fig. 1. Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, used with permission.

For Iovino, trans-corporeality entails a hybridity that blurs boundaries and distinctionssuch that it becomes less and less possible to differentiate between human and non-humanagency. Referencing the work of feminist science critic Karen Barad, who devised the termpost-humanist performativity (Barad, 120), she describes it as a process where thepost-human replaces the human/nonhuman dualism and overcomes it in a more dialecticand complex dimension (Stories, 459). While this is undoubtedly the case, as theMidway image also graphically exposes, these ongoing expansions of agential possibility oftenbegin with the technicity of the human, perhaps suggesting a need to engage with theimplications of the cyborg post-humanism rejected by Westling and to explore further whatCary Wolfe describes as the embodiment and the embeddedness of the human being in notjust its biological but also its technological world (What is Posthumanism? xv).This is the point at which ecocriticism now stands theoretically investigating the complex

ontological, epistemological and ethical implications of this multiple embeddedness. For Bennett,the hope is that the [onto-]story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surroundsand infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonantconnections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology (4). OtherLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

thinkers with less interventionist perspectives are more sceptical of the notion that it is possible

as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Green Letters; and ecocriticism is the

Ecocriticsm 859focus of a host of international conferences. However, it continues to be a movement thatquestions its own function. In a recent exchange in successive issues of the Journal of Ecocriticism,two different perspectives were aired on the effectiveness and future of ecocriticism. WilliamMajor and Andrew McMurry speak of a desperate optimism (1) in the face of whatthey see as our species elaborate and protracted endgame (1). They doubt the valueof their work (and that of ecocriticism as a whole, by implication) and feel that themovement has become enmeshed in institutional frameworks. Somehow the originalmission to reinstate the referent has been diverted, the commitment to environmentalpraxis dissipated. Nevertheless, we go on, of course, even in the face of a difcultfuture. After all, what choice do we have? (7).In the subsequent issue, however, Roman Bartosch and Greg Garrard come back with a

more upbeat rejoinder. Resisting what they see as the apocalypticism (2) of Major andMcMurry, they speak of a risky, exciting and unprecedented future (5)26 and, at the sametime, express a refusal to be hurried by the urgency of environmental issues: we believe thatthe contribution of ecocriticism is inherently and valuably gradual: making us think anewabout the world, nature, and the place of the human animal (2). As their methodology theypropose close, slow reading, reecting the reticent, obdurate fragility of literature, to whichcritics ought to bear patient witness even to the crack of doom (5) and echoing (at least inpart) Mortons call to action in Ecology without Nature to decelerate our thinking and, throughfor a theory to offer solutions to ecological problems. John M.Meyer, in his 2001 work PoliticalNature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought, warned against what he saw asthe common and misplaced desire in environmentalist thinkers and writers to develop a newworldview that could form the basis of an alternative relationship between humanity andthe rest of nature (22). In a more recent essay, Hannes Bergthaller, drawing on NiklasLuhmanns work on social systems theory and second-order cybernetics, stresses that modernhuman society is divided into autopoietic functional units (such as law, politics, science, religionand the economy), each of which creates its own reality, and none of which is in a positionto control the operations of any of the others (Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory, 225).The implication for ecocriticism is that it cannot hope to change society as a whole but shouldrecognise its limitations in terms of praxis and focus instead on interrogating the nature andblind spots of environmentalism itself.24 Timothy Mortons ecological thought, which,conversely, denotes an apprehension of the complex interrelation of all things,25 neverthelessrepresents a similar challenge. While not necessarily eschewing the political radicalisms thatseek to create new forms of collectivity out of the crisis of climate disruption, Morton insiststhat we must at all times apply a rigorous and remorseless theoretical radicalism that opensour minds to where we are, about the fact that were here (The Ecological Thought, 104). Theseare provocative interventions and useful reminders that ecocriticism should continue to critiqueits own assumptions and doctrines in the course of its earth-centred explorations.

The Future of Ecocriticism Despair, Excitement and Slow Reading

In its short history, ecocriticism has progressed from its initial relatively uncritical endorsementof non-ction nature-writing to its current engagement with a wide range of cultural forms,theoretical sophistication and pluriform status. The Association for the Study of Literatureand Environment now has ten afliate organisations worldwide with more under discussion;there are a large number of ecocritical and environmental journals in existence includingEcozon@, The Journal of Ecocriticism, Indian Journal of Ecocriticism and Studies in Ecocriticism as wellLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

painstaking attentiveness, to identify anomalies and paradoxes in received opinion in order to

860 Ecocriticsmgo against the grain of dominant normative ideas about nature, but to do so in the name ofsentient beings suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions (12).In the last two decades, ecocriticism has shown itself more than able to respond to the

challenge of engaging with critical theory. It has established environmentality as apermanent concern in the humanities, fostered a broader understanding of ecologicalresponsibility and environmental justice on a global scale and emphasised our compleximbrication in a material world that has taken us post-human and post-nature but leftus with the exciting challenge of continuing to untangle the coordinates of those states.Counter-intuitive though it may seem in the face of accelerating environmental degradation,perhaps Bartosch and Garrard are right. Perhaps the time has now come for a reinvigorationof slow and close reading, which, whether in the hope of generating environmental praxis orin a more purely investigative mode, applies these new paradigms in full-length engagementswith cultural forms, interrogating from every possible angle the imagings that reect andinuence our ongoing modes of being in the world.

Glossary

Anthropocene: The unofcial name for the current geological epoch, suggested by Paul J.Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000. It signies the extent of human (or anthropogenic)impact on environmental change since the industrial revolution. The period since the1950s has seen a rapid intensication of those anthropogenic effects and has been calledthe Great Acceleration.

Anthropocentrism: A system of beliefs that places the interests of humans over those of non-humans.

Autopoietic: A term devised by Chilean biologists and philosophers Francisco Varela andHumberto Maturana to describe the workings of biological organisms, and applied tosocial systems by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann: Autopoietic systems close themselvesoff from their environment in order to maintain their own structure; they draw energy fromtheir surroundings only in order to maintain the boundary that separates them from theenvironment (Bergthaller, Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory, 222).

Biocentrism: A system of beliefs that holds that the interests of the biosphere as a whole takeprecedence over those of any individual species, including the human, and that all species haveinherent value.

Eco-cosmopolitics: An earth-centred global politics that recognises ethnic and nationalparticuliarities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries [], exploring all facetsof human experience from an environmental viewpoint (Adamson and Slovic, 67). It extendsthe concept of environmental justice to the environment itself, involving at times legaladvocacy for the non-human world.

Deep ecology: A perspective that regards the question of our proper place in the rest of na-ture as logically prior to the question of what are the most appropriate social and politicalarrangements for human communities. That is, social and political questions must proceedfrom, or at least be consistent with, an adequate determination of this more fundamentalquestion (Eckersley, 28).Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Dwelling: A complex concept, developed in the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger

Ecocriticsm 861to explore and dene our manner of being in the world hence its interest for ecocritics amanner of being that is receptive to the self-disclosure of nature, the apprehension of whichis revealed through poetry.

Ecocentrism: Similar to biocentrism, ecocentrism is a system of beliefs that recognises the valueof all elements of the biosphere, both animate and inanimate.

Ecocriticism: An umbrella term for a range of critical approaches that explore the representa-tion in literature (and other cultural forms) of the relationship between the human and thenon-human, largely from the perspective of anxieties around humanitys destructive impacton the biosphere.

Ecofeminism: Broadly speaking, a political, cultural and intellectual movement rooted in thebelief that the destruction of the environment and the historical oppression of women aredeeply linked (T. Clark, 111), particularly inuential in ecocriticism in terms of challengingdualistic, hierarchical conceptions, and making the links between toxicity and the body thatinform Stacy Alaimos notion of trans-corporeality.

Ecology: The relationship between organisms and their environment, and the scientic studyof that relationship.

Ecopoetry: Described by J. Scott Bryson as poetry that embodies ecocentrism, a humbleappreciation of wildness, and a scepticism towards hyperrationality and its resultant overrelianceon technology (7).

Environmental justice:Amovement that recognises and seeks to redress the unjust apportioning ofboth environmental risk and benet globally for example the siting of waste dumps andpolluting industries in areas occupied by disempowered social groups.

Material ecocriticism: An emerging paradigm based on the notion of shared materiality betweenhuman and non-human. In this paradigm, all matter is seen as agentic.

Neocolonialism: The ongoing socio-economic and political domination of post-colonial terri-tories by colonial powers, for example through terms of trade, the power of multinationalcorporations, and domination of international organisations such as the United Nations andthe World Bank (Garrard, Ecocriticism, 208).

NewNature writing:NewNature writers were dened by Jason Cowley in a special NewNaturewriting issue ofGranta in 2008: They share a sense that we are devouring our world, that thereis simply no longer any natural landscape or ecosystem that is untouched by humans. But theydont simply want to walk into the wild to rhapsodize or commune: they aspire to see with ascientic eye and to write with literary effect (9).

Phenomenology:Grounded in the work of Husserl, developed in the writings of Merleau-Pontyand, later, David Abram, and given a specically ecocritical focus by critics such as LouiseWestling (2006), phenomenology emphasises the centrality of the body in perception, withreection as secondary to perception, existing only as a result of our embodiment in andongoing reciprocity with the physical world.Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Post-colonial ecocriticism: Like ecofeminism, this is a broad and inuential area of ecocritical

depend (Huggan and Tifn, 6).

862 EcocriticsmPost-humanism: An emergent and multi-stranded interrogation of the construct of thehuman, in ecocriticism focused both on our immersion in the matrix of earths life(Westling, 26) and the embodiment and the embeddedness of the human being in not justits biological but also its technological world (Wolfe, xv).

Post-pastoral: A form of pastoral that is both socially and environmentally aware, the term wasdevised by the ecocritic Terry Gifford and explored in his inuential work Pastoral (see note 18).

Social ecology: A perspective based on the belief that our dislocation from and destructive impactupon the non-human world originates in hierarchical social systems that have projected thedomination of human by human into an ideology that man is destined to dominate Nature(Bookchin, 65).

Trans-corporeality: Dened as the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies,and the wider material world (Alaimo, States, 476), trans-corporeality is a concept that hasengendered a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially andperpetually interconnected with the ows of substances and the agencies of environments(Alaimo, States, 476).

World-ecology: A concept developed in the work of Jason W. Moore to explore the globalecological implications of the capitalist world-system: The interaction of multiple local andregional ecologies became far more than the total of their respective parts, as capitalism beganto create a new relational universe for ecosystems no less than social actors (323).

Short Biography

PippaMarland is writing an ecocritical thesis on constructions of islandness in the Anglophoneliterature of four islands/island groups around the British and Irish archipelago. The researchlooks at the place of the island in our cultural imagination, and in particular explores the ideaof the island as a heightened space for the negotiation of self and world. The thesis has an inter-disciplinary base that includes the emergent eld of island studies, formulations of place drawnfrom cultural geography, archipelagic perspectives in critical and creative writing, and, as anoverarching framework, contemporary ecocritical theorisations of post-humanism. She is basedat the University ofWorcester where she teaches on modules in English Literature and CulturalStudies. She is co-editing an issue of the journal Green Letters (forthcoming, 2014) and is areviewer for New Welsh Review.

Notes

* Correspondence: Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts, University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester,Worcestershire, United Kingdom, WR2 6AJ. Email: p.marland@worc.ac.uktheory which recognises a fundamental link between environmental issues and colonialism:Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as central tothe projects of European conquest and global domination, but also as inherent in theideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects historically and persistentlyLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

1 Richard Kerridge, though expressing a preference for ecocriticism himself, suggests that environmental criticism is

Ecocriticsm 863considered by some to imply a more appropriate academic distance from the broader environmental movement (cited inRamos-Prez).2 For example, some early articulations of ecocriticism were based on a view of ecological harmony and equilibriumthat has now been superseded by postequilibrium views. Daniel Botkins book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecologyfor the Twenty-First Century was particularly inuential in introducing a more discordant, dynamic and mutable modelto ecocriticism. In this postequilibrium ecology, The Earth is perhaps better seen as a process rather than an object(Garrard, Ecocriticism, 204).3 Although important work has been carried out in tracing the beginnings of ecological thought to earlier periods forexample, Richard Groves exploration of environmental awareness relating to colonial practices inGreen Imperialism: Co-lonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 16001860: As colonial expansion proceeded,the environmental experiences of Europeans and indigenous peoples living at the colonial periphery played a steadilymore dominant and dynamic part in the constructions of new European evaluations of nature and in the growingawareness of the destructive impact of European economic activity on the peoples and environments of the newlydiscovered and colonised lands (3); Jonathan Bates (and others) discussion of ecological thought in the work ofthe Romantic poets; and John Parhams detailed study of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Green Man Hopkins, whichdevelops a theory of the Victorian ecological imagination.4 These proto-ecocritical works include Leo Marxs The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal inAmerican Culture (1964), Raymond Williams The Country and the City (1973), Joseph Meekers The Comedy of Survival(1974) and William Ruekerts 1978 essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism (which is often citedas the rst use of the term ecocriticism).5 Richard Kerridge hails ecocriticism as environmentalisms overdue move beyond science, geography and socialscience into the humanities (Writing the Environment, 5).6 As Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby point out in their introduction to Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, therejection of critical theory by early ecocritics was its own theoretical moment (1).7 As Barry notes, this quotation from Derridas Grammatology is often taken out of context to justify an extremetextualism, whereby it is held that all reality is linguistic, so that there can be no meaningful talk of a real world, whichexists without question outside language (68).8 Though as Garrard observes, this phrase inadvertently points up the cultural construction of even the most apparentlyempirical information, the ozone hole in fact being a metaphor for the phenomenon of ozone depletion.9 Roman Bartosch and Greg Garrard, for example, contend that Ecocriticism must resist the instrumentalising ofliterature even in its own interests (2, emphasis in original).10 In fact, some rst-wave ecocritics chose to reject certain conventions of critical discourse altogether and to present theirwork instead in the form of narrative scholarship, which brings autobiographical accounts of interaction with the natural worldinto responses to literature. This has been characterised byMichael P. Cohen as the praise song school of ecocriticism (21).11 This phrase was devised by David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) to unsettle hierarchical conceptualisations thatplace man above nature, and to reinforce a deep ecological sense of the inherent value of the non-human.12 The ecocentrism espoused by deep ecologists:

regards the question of our proper place in the rest of nature as logically prior to the question of what are the mostappropriate social and political arrangements for human communities. That is social and political questions must proceedfrom, or at least be consistent with, an adequate determination of this more fundamental question. (Eckersley, 28)

13 In an introduction to the 1991 edition of his inuential work The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin made thefollowing summary of his views on the sources of our environmental dislocation:

I tried to point out that these problems originate in a hierarchical, class, and today, competitive capitalism system thatnourishes view of the natural world as a mere agglomeration of resources for human production and consumption.This social system is especially rapacious. It has projected the domination of human by human into an ideology thatman is destined to dominate Nature. (65)

14 It has also, on occasion, been accused of misanthropy. One of the eight points of Arne Naess and George SessionsPlatform for Deep Ecology (1984) is the necessity for a substantial decrease in human population (cited in Denton, 80).This point has sometimes been interpreted in anti-humanist ways, for example the apparent welcoming of epidemicdisease and famine as forms of population control by early Earth First activists (Denton, 87). However, other deepecologists have rmly rebuffed accusations of anti-humanism and stressed that humans are just as entitled to live andblossom as any other species, provided they do so in a way that is sensitive to the needs of other human individuals,communities and cultures and other life-forms generally (Eckersley, 56, emphasis in original), also emphasising theirrecognition of the fact that not all humans are equally implicated in environmental damage. For Greg Garrard, theproblem of human over-population is one which ecocriticism continues to fail adequately to address (Review of 2010).15 John Clark, in particular, gives a complex and nuanced reading of social ecology in his essay A Social Ecology.16 This seems a particularly reductive reading of rst-wave ecocritics ignoring, for example, Buells consciousness fromthe start of the power of cultural construction and the specic engagement of certain early ecocritics with contemporaryLiterature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846868, 10.1111/lic3.12105 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

theory for example Sue-Ellen Campbells essay The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-

creative and destructive forces coexist in nature; third, the realisation that inner human nature is illuminated by its relationshipto external nature; fourth, a simultaneous awareness of the cultural constructions of nature, and of nature as culture; fth, a

864 Ecocriticsmconviction that human consciousness should produce environmental conscience; and sixth, the realisation that environmen-tal exploitation is generated by the same mind-set that results in social exploitation. (Head,Modern British Fiction, 193).

New Nature writers aim to see with a scientic eye and to write with literary effect (Cowley, 9). Ecopoetry is broadlydescribed by Scott Bryson as poetry that embodies an ecocentric stance, a humility in its relation to the non-human and a distrustof hyperrationality.19 Even before these challenges were being laid down, work was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic that engagedwith these issues, setting the tone for the second wave. Louise Westling, in The Green Breast of the New World (1996)interrogates the presence of gender in the treatment of landscape and environment in 20th century ction; David Mazel,in American Literary Environmentalism (2000) delves into the ideological construction of wilderness and its implication incolonialist endeavour; and Richard Kerridge, in Ecological Hardy (2001) explores the ways in which Thomas Hardy isconcerned with the multiplicity of uses material, cultural and emotional that human beings have for the naturalenvironment (126).20 TimothyClark identies aspects of this perspective in L. ElizabethWallers ecofeminist reading of VirginiaWoolfsTheWavesin her essay Writing the Real: VirginiaWoolf and an Ecology of Language in which Woolfs compositional method is seen toopen a usually blocked path to a supposedly lost and unalienated human nature, located in the female body (Clark, 116).21 Timothy Clark, citing the work of Tom Regan, gives the example of an ecological restoration scheme in the Galpagosislands that involved the culling of feral goats, questioning what the biocentric commitment of ecologists might be in asimilar situation that required the culling of human animals (181).22 She associates Donna Haraway with this cyborg post-humanism, perhaps missing the point of Haraways self-confessedlyironic political myth (Haraway, 191). Haraway uses the gure of the cyborg to create a focus for post-human thought bypositing a radical being in which the boundaries of human and animal and machine have been erased. The cyborg, shebelieves, is a construct through which we can properly interrogate the human.23 Robert Sullivans description of a New Jersey garbage dump:

There had been rain the night before, so it wasnt long before I found a little leachate seep, a black ooze tricklingdown the slope of the hill, an expresso of refuse. In a few hours this stream would nd its way down into the groundwater of the Meadowlands; it would mingle with toxic streams But in this moment, here at its birth, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium,copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this uid my ngertip was a bluish caramel colour and itwas warm and fresh. (Sullivan, 1998, cited in Bennett, 6)

24 Bergthaller states:Only to the extent that ecocriticism is something other than the academic wing of the environmental movement can itrender that movement a service which is perhaps more valuable than general consciousness-raising or the recruitment ofnew personnel. (Cybernetics, 227)

25 This has much in common with the insights of new materialism Mortons idea of the mesh (Ecological, 8) echoingthe imbrication discussed above, and his hyperobjects (19) (such as plutonium and styrofoam) exemplifying thedisturbing agentic potential and slow violence of the products of human/non-human entanglement.26 ForMorton, it is a future which has, in a sense, already arrived. In a passage that provides a corrective to the elegiac tone ofmuch environmental writing, he states:

Environmentalism is often apocalyptic. It warns of, andwards off, the end of the world. The title of Rachel Carsons SilentSpring says it all. But things arent like that: the end of the world has already happened. We sprayed the DDT. We ex-ploded the nuclear bombs. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the end of the world. Today is notthe end of history.Were living at the beginning of history. The ecological thought thinks forward. It knows that we haveonly just begun, like someone waking up from a dream. (Ecological, 98)

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ASLE and afliate websites

http://asle.org.uk/https://sites.google.com/site/asletaiwan/http://www.alecc.ca/http://www.aslec-anz.asn.au/http://www.asleindia.webs.com/http://www.asle-japan.org/http://www.aslekorea.org/modules/doc/index.php?doc=introhttp://www.asle.org/http://www.easlce.eu/Waller, L. Elizabeth. Writing the Real: Virginia Woolf and an Ecology of Language. New Essays in Ecofeminist LiteraryCriticism. Ed. Glynis Carr. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000. 137156.

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