Literacy Studies and the Emerging Field of Ecoliteracy

Genre Study Literacy Studies and the Emerging Field of Ecoliteracy 1

University of Central Florida 12/07

Literacy Studies and the Emerging Field of Ecoliteracy

Summary: This paper distinguishes ecoliteracy as a specific type of literacy and applies

the theories of James Paul Gee and Gloria Anzaldua to an analysis of ecoliteracy, exploring its

historical background, pedagogy, and implications for further studies, especially in term of Gee’s

ideas about discourses and Anzaldua’s concept of borderlands.

INTRODUCTION: GEE, ANZALDÚA, AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR ECOLITERACY

In 1989 James Paul Gee advanced his ideas about the convergence of various social,

psychological/cognitive, and linguistic approaches to language studies in an emerging field that

he dubbed “literacy studies.” He emphasizes the importance of social practices to literacy

studies, defining discourses as “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations . . .

which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures,

glances, body positions, and clothes” (525, 526). He also defines them as “socially accepted

association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify

oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network.’” Discourses are

“identity kits” and may contain many subdiscourses (537). Gee’s theories about discourses can

be applied to many areas of literacy studies, including the emerging field of ecoliteracy, which

encompasses various discourses that constitute social networks united by their concern for issues

related to the environment, ecology, and sustainability—even though they may be divided by

other issues, for example the means to achieve sustainability.

In her 1987 experimental autobiography Borderlands: The New Mestiza, Gloria

Anzaldúa proposed the metaphor of borderlands as a way of defining the psychological, spiritual,

and physical borderlands that are “. . . physically present wherever two or more cultures edge



each other, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch . . .” (19). She is the most recent

and best example of a small group of Western women writers1 who center their writing on

interaction with others and with the environment (Blend 403). Anzaldúa is primarily known as a

voice for the gay community, for women, for people of mixed races and of color, and for all

those who are disempowered by society and its discourses of power, but there is a strong thread

of ecofeminist thought that runs throughout Borderlands which centers on ideas about the land

and human relationships with it, especially through agriculture. She uses the land and agriculture

as metaphors, but the concrete examples she uses show her primary concern with environmental

and agricultural issues and their connections to issues of human rights—including literacy—

especially for the disenfranchised. As the primary meeting ground where humans and the natural

world interact out of the necessity for sustenance (both physical and spiritual, as is evident in the

writings of both Anzaldúa and farmer-writer-educator Wendell Berry), agriculture is a particular

focus of environmentalist and ecoliterary thought.

The Historical Emergence of Ecoliteracy

Writing and literacy have been a part of humans’ interaction with nature at least from the

time of Aristotle’s works on natural history. In The Book of Nature: Natural History in the

United States 1825–1875, Margaret Welch establishes that a “highly distinctive natural history

rhetoric” forms a major genre within American literature, and explicitly connects this genre to

literacy studies, stating that “The transmission of natural history texts depends on literacy,”

which further implies that this constitutes a specific type of literacy based within a distinctive

discourse (Welch 8, 9). During the second half of the 19th century, natural history writing, which

1 For example, European-American writers Mary Austin (Land of Little Rain, 1903) and Gretel Ehrlich (Islands, the Universe, Home, 1991), and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko (“Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 1996).



was primarily concerned with recording information and observations about the natural world,

began to morph into environmental writing as a few visionaries began to examine the ways that

humans were relating to and exploiting the natural world. A recognizable environmental

movement in America began around this time, its emergence marked by the literary works of

John Burroughs and John Muir, both of whom traced their literary roots back to Henry David

Thoreau (Finch, Elder 23). As the 19th century moved into the 20th, writing about the

environment exploded in myriad directions, including landmark works by scientists such as Aldo

Leopold and Rachel Carson and genre-crossing novelist-poet-essayists such as Wendell Berry,

Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey. These writers explored the environment

from many different perspectives, and while they were united by their subject matter, their

approaches and viewpoints varied wildly, from Berry’s meditations on agriculture to Abbey’s

exhortations to ecoterrorism.

The worlds of literature and ecology/environmental studies were explicitly united when

William Rueckert coined the term “ecocriticism” in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An

Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Ecocriticism refers to the practice of literary criticism focused on

reading texts for their environmental content, whether that content is implicit or explicit. Other

related fields have also emerged, including ecopoetics—concerned with the aesthetics of nature

writing—and ecocomposition—concerned with pedagogies for teaching about writing in

connection with the natural world. In 1992 the concept of environmental literacy, or ecoliteracy,

was coined by educator/writer David Orr2 in his book Ecological Literacy. Orr currently serves

on the board of the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) in Berkeley, California, which was founded in

2 Among his other credentials, David Orr is also currently a professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin college and has written numerous books and articles including The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in the Age of Terror (2004).



1995 by an eclectic group of visionary writers and educators including physicist Fritjof Capra.3

Their stated mission is toward “education for sustainable living,” and a major component of that

mission is the elucidation and promotion of ecoliteracy, a complex concept that emerges from a

wide-ranging collection of essays published in 2005 by the CEL titled Ecological Literacy:

Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. The essays in this anthology argue persuasively

that ecological literacy is not only a specific type of literacy, but that educating for this type of

literacy requires a complete overhaul of our current educational model. They define an

“ecologically literate” person in terms of comprehension, concepts, and problem-solving

abilities, and so situate ecoliteracy as based in a specific discourse (which subsumes many

subdiscourses), and as culturally based, as well as residing in a specific set of shared values.

ANALYSIS OF ECOLOGICAL LITERACY: PERSPECTIVES FROM GEE AND ANZALDÚA

Given that ecoliteracy is an emerging type of literacy studies and is well-represented by

the collection of essays in Ecological Literacy, how can some of these representative essays be

analyzed in terms of Gee’s ideas about discourses? Do they represent ecoliteracy as an example

of primary or secondary discourse acquisition? In the light of these essays, how well does Gee’s

theory succeed in explaining the acquisition of ecological literacy? How might the metaphors in

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands promote the goals of ecoliteracy—being able to conceive of

environmental problems and solutions? What would an analysis of ecodiscourses look like in

terms of this metaphor, as psychological, spiritual, and physical borderlands—do the members of

the ecodiscourse communities fit the description of borderland residents, do they speak for

residents of the borderlands?

3 Fritjof Capra’s credentials include a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna (1966), teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, and five international bestselling books, including The Tao of Physics (1975).



Gee’s Discourses, Anzaldúa’s Agricultural Heritage, and Ecoliteracy

Gee argues that acquiring a discourse is a matter not of overt instruction, but of

enculturation into the social practices of the discourse by interaction with people who have

already mastered it, partly because discourses are more than bodies of knowledge. He

differentiates between primary discourses, which are acquired in the home and constitute

people’s original sense of identity, and secondary discourses, which are acquired in extra-

domestic social institutions, and constitute people’s identities as members of these groups.

Secondary discourses are further broken down into dominant and nondominant discourses, the

former being concerned with acquisition of social goods and the latter with solidarity within a

social network (527, 528). Gee’s definition of discourses leads to his definition of literacy:

“mastery of or fluent control over a secondary discourse.” He does not consider mastery of one’s

primary discourse as a literacy. Since there are many secondary discourses, there are many

applications of the term “literacy” (542).

Gee distinguishes between “acquisition,” which is subconscious—we “acquire” our

primary discourse—and “learning,” a conscious process that may or may not involve formal

teaching. These modes of knowledge-making may be mixed for any given task; we both

“acquire” and “learn” our secondary discourses. Acquisition results in better performance, but

learning results in better ability to explain, analyze, and criticize. In terms of literacy and

classroom practice, this means that helping students to acquire fluency in a discourse—become

literate in that discourse—requires attention to both the explicit teaching of methods and the

social practices that accompany the discourse; this emphasizes the fact that even the most basic

reading and writing instruction involves some ideology and values, and they are inculcated

subconsciously as primary discourse acquisition (539). “Powerful literacy” almost always



involves both learning and acquisition, and they must be understood as means to different goals

in order to achieve those goals. Much of what passes for learning in formal educational settings

is more accurately described as simply practicing literacies that are acquired elsewhere; “good”

pedagogy is that which provides meta-cognitive skills, for example skills in analysis and

criticism (543).

Do the essays in Ecological Literacy suggest that ecoliteracy represents a primary or

secondary discourse acquisition, and what might this suggest for pedagogy? Fritjof Capra

characterizes ecoliteracy as “education for sustainable living,” and as a pedagogy that teaches

through an experiential multidisciplinary approach. One of the main foci of the curriculum

described in this book is food, focused through creating a school garden. The garden is seen as

integrating most school activities across the curriculum, from learning about the biology of

complex systems to forming a more intangible emotional bond with nature and the school’s

culture. The garden facilitates learning in a very practical way about where food comes from,

how complex natural systems behave, and how to work with others in the community toward a

common goal (Stone xiv).

The CEL’s stated goal is to apply concepts of systems thinking to fostering sustainable

changes in education. Their focus is on broad-based educational reform, not on creating

packaged programs. They work with schools that function as communities, that are open to

systematic reform, that are committed to teaching ecological knowledge through place-based

projects (in urban, suburban, and rural settings), and that are willing to integrate their curricula,

for example through school gardens. The CEL identifies many social and educational problems

as problems of disconnection: rural from urban, food from its origins, health from the



environment, and in the largest sense, problems from the patterns that perpetuate them (Stone 3,

5). Given these criteria, the question of primary versus secondary discourse acquisition begins to

come into focus, as well as what that might mean for practical solutions and pedagogies. As

primary discourses are acquired in the home, not learned, ecoliteracy as the CEL views it is not

primary, but secondary, the result of a combination of acquisition and learning in the social

institution of school. This is a response to the fact that in the past, the primary discourse that

many people acquired included an awareness of how natural systems support individuals,

families, communities, and society, but that this is no longer the case because of many

interrelated factors, including the decline of family farming and small-scale agriculture, the

increase in urbanization, and the migration of the majority of the population away from rural

areas to suburbs and urban areas. Consider, for example, Anzaldúa’s recollections of her

childhood, the way that farming was integrated into her home life and the greater life of the

community, and how she witnessed its disappearance within her lifetime. She describes how the

Mexicans lost their traditional, sustainable farming culture when American agribusiness arrived

in terms of her borderlands metaphor:

In the 1930s, after Anglo agribusiness corporations cheated the small Chicano

landowners of their land, the corporations hired gangs of mexicanos to pull out the brush,

chaparral and cactus and to irrigate the desert. The land they toiled over had once

belonged to many of them, or had been used communally by them. Later the Anglos

brought in huge machines and root plows and had the Mexicans scrape the land clean of

natural vegetation. In my childhood I saw the end of dryland farming. I witnessed the

land cleared . . . (31, 34)



In this not-so-distant past that Anzaldúa describes, children acquired a primary discourse

at home, in their communities, that could be characterized as ecoliteracy,4 following Capra’s

definition—education for sustainable living. The Mexicans understood the land and what it could

support, they respected it, and the children of the community acquired this discourse as part of

their culturally-based education. Because it was inherent in their way of living, there was no

need for the concept of ecoliteracy, since it was part of their lives. This was true not only of the

Mexicans of Anzaldúa’s childhood, but of many others all across the nation and the world. This

agriculture was the foundation of all other culture, since growing food is a primary necessity for

living. The modern world has turned this situation upside down; almost no one, certainly not the

dispossessed Mexicans of the borderlands, is in a position any longer to acquire this primary

discourse at home; almost no one lives on the land anymore. This divorce from the land is one of

the main factors in the current environmental crises, as people are so divorced from the source of

all sustenance, the earth itself, the soil we walk on. It’s been replaced by fast food; lunch comes

from McDonald’s, not from the earth; McDonald’s makes all that goes into creating a Happy

Meal invisible to the consumer.

Since the primary discourse of ecoliteracy cannot be acquired at home by most people

nowadays, if it is to be acquired/learned at all, it must be as a secondary discourse, through the

social institution of schools; and in order to effectively foster this acquisition and learning, the

schools must be reformed along the lines outlined by the CEL. They must function as surrogate

communities to replace the once-were agricultural communities; they must educate through

projects based in specific places; and they must integrate their curricula. This leads back to Gee’s

ideas of how best to approach a pedagogy for teaching what should have been acquired as part of

4 Although not in Gee’s terms, since he does not consider the acquisition of primary discourse as a literacy.



one’s primary discourse, an understanding of, and respect for, the complex systems that sustain

life; this cannot be simply learned from a text or lectures, any more than writing can be taught

effectively as a simple mechanical set of skills.

What about dominant versus nondominant discourse? Does ecoliteracy represent a

discourse that is mostly concerned with the acquisition of social goods, or with solidarity as part

of a social network? It seems to represent both. If ecoliteracy is education for sustainable living,

it represents a shift in the whole way that we conceive of education; it doesn’t represent another

course or two in “environmental education” tacked on to an already overburdened curriculum, it

represents a complete reorganization of the curriculum, literally from the ground up. It represents

combining the discourses of social goods and social networking into one discourse, one that

educates students to see that social goods (for example, wholesome, healthy foods) and social

networking (for example, working together as a community in the garden) are integrated “saying

(writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations . . . which integrate words, acts, values,

beliefs, attitudes . . .” as Gee defines discourses. We say we want healthy foods and

communities, we write about them to exercise our critical thinking and agency, we value the

natural world that sustains us, and we believe that by working together in communities we can

make ourselves and our community healthier and happier; this begins to constitute the discourse

that we can call ecoliteracy. Ecoliteracy represents the end of dominant versus nondominant

discourses.

To summarize: ecoliteracy is a secondary discourse, and can be acquired best using a

pedagogy that is place-based and integrates the curriculum, for example by creating a school

garden and using it as an across-the-curriculum touchstone; ecoliteracy combines dominant and



nondominant discourses into one that unifies the pursuit of social goods with social networks.

Ecoliteracy must be based in place, community, and culture, and, in a feedback loop, increases

the health of all those aspects of human life.

GEE AND THE PEDAGOGY OF ECOLITERACY

Michael Ableman, who has spent most of his life as a farmer and educator, expresses our

current educational problems in terms of the farm:

Schools and farms have become a lot alike. They have both become factories with

assembly-line controls and engineered inputs, cranking out either grades and test scores

or ‘food’ . . . The industrialization of our food system and the industrialization of our

education system treat us all as if we are just consumers, passively waiting to be fed

disconnected information or prepackaged food. (Stone 178)

Just so, in terms of practical pedagogy, Gee points out that it is not possible to teach the

nuances of a discourse in a classroom, apart from “. . . socially situated practices . . .

incorporated into homes and daily lives.” This leads to the idea that social change cannot be

effected only through classroom practices, but must begin with changes in the structure of

society, although Gee also says, somewhat paradoxically, that language teachers are the logical

people to bring about this change in the social structure (531). The resolution to this apparent

paradox is to connect classroom practices with the greater community. He says that the way to

effect social change in the classroom is to address deficiencies in acquiring mainstream

discourses as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. He talks about how having to translate

mainstream discourse into the terms of your own primary discourse can lead to meta-knowledge

that improves your ability to work with both your primary discourse and the mainstream. This



includes instruction in composition, critical thinking, and other meta-level skills. He poses the

problem of how to ensure that meta-knowledge and discourse development occur in tandem,

which is problematic because of several related issues:

The impossibility of acquiring discourses except via social practices.

The difficulty in achieving mastery of a discourse at the high school or college level.

The value conflicts between various discourses.

He proposes a solution, which he admits is only partial, in two parts: the first is to

understand that fluency in a discourse after the traditional “apprentice period” has passed is

generally not attainable, although it can be most closely approached by classrooms modeling

social practices and connecting these practices with others outside the classroom. Second is that

partial fluency coupled with meta-knowledge and various additional coping strategies can allow

one to function in a discourse even if one is not born to it. This approach is inherently political

(533).

How does this translate into an ecoliteracy curriculum? Just as Gee points out that the

subtleties of a discourse cannot be taught as separate from everyday social practices, so the

teaching of ecoliteracy cannot be taught without situating the pedagogy in a specific place,

integrating the various aspects of learning across the curriculum, and connecting the curriculum

with practices outside the classroom, for example how people obtain the food they eat at home,

how they prepare it, and how they eat (i.e., together as a family, or behind the wheel of a car).

The broad social changes that must occur in order to even begin solving our current

environmental crises require changes in the structure of society, beginning at the roots, which are

our educational philosophies and classroom practices. Ecoliteracy conceives of these changes in



classroom practice as Gee does, as logically being the job of educators; their pedagogy needs to

reach across the curriculum and beyond the classroom, to integrate all areas of study with

projects like school gardens, and to connect these school-based activities with the community of

which the school is only a part. It seems true that learning ecoliteracy as a secondary discourse

places one at a certain disadvantage; perhaps a person who learns about nature, the environment,

and gardening in a school setting will never acquire the intimate understanding of a person who

is born in a community that practices traditional agriculture. But on the other hand, as Gee points

out, it is possible for teachers to help students turn this disadvantage into an advantage. For one,

having to translate the typical modern primary discourse, divorced from nature, into a discourse

of environmental awareness, and awareness of where food comes from, how to raise it, prepare

it, and enjoy it in the company of other community members, can lead to improved meta-

knowledge of both discourses. For example, as Ableman describes the situation of many, perhaps

most, young people today:

For many young folks, especially those living in the urban world, gardens may be their

only connection to the natural world. Those gardens are not just places to plant a few

vegetables or flowers; they are not just a break from the endless, mindless stretch of

pavement; they become gathering places, sanctuaries, cultural and social centers . . .

(Stone 181)

These same young people who would have no concept of nature, and maybe no healthy

place to socialize, can gain both a new understanding of environmental discourse and an

expanded understanding of their home discourse—an ability to critique their home discourse—

an ability to perhaps separate the wheat of their home discourse from the chaff. This is at least



one place where teaching critical thinking, reading, and listening, and composition come into

play. Capra points out that “Not everything we need to teach can be learned from ecosystems.

Ecosystems do not manifest the level of human consciousness and culture that emerged with

language among primates . . .” (Stone 22). The meta-level skills that Gee refers to as being the

primary tools that the composition teacher should nurture in their students complement and

expand on the practical lessons learned from the garden. This combination of teaching meta-level

skills and integrating them across the curriculum using a pedagogy based in a specific place

addresses the problems of acquiring ecoliteracy as a secondary discourse. The social practices of

teaching ecoliteracy can include not only school gardens, but also environmental restoration

projects, explorations of the local environment, farm-school partnerships, and urban

environmental justice projects, to name a few possibilities. While ecoliteracy is probably more

easily cultivated in secondary-school-age children, integrating the curriculum and connecting it

with social practices in the greater community seems the best bet for cultivating this discourse in

postsecondary and adult education as well. And a pedagogy that helps students critique their

primary discourses seems the best possibility for addressing the inevitable value conflicts. For

example, urban youth who value fast food will not likely value fresh produce without an

introduction to the discourse in which the production of that produce is embedded; they are more

likely to eat a carrot if they plant the seed, harvest it, and cook it as part of a community; this is

the community that can be fostered through sustainable education programs like the ones that the

CEL is cultivating. As Gee points out, this approach of engaging students in learning a new

discourse that will enable them to critique their home discourse is inherently value-laden and

political.

ECOLITERACY AND ANZALDÚA’S PSYCHOLOGICAL, SPIRITUAL, AND PHYSICAL BORDERLANDS



Anzaldúa uses the metaphor of a body, perhaps a woman’s body, in referring to Anglo

culture’s treatment of this land: “White America has only attended to the body of the earth in

order to exploit it, never to succor it or to be nurtured by it” (90). Where the Mexicans practiced

sustainable dryland farming, American agribusiness practices an agriculture that cannot be

sustained because of the way it abuses the land, the water, and the laborers. She speaks in terms

of the big, the corporate, and the exploitative triumphing over the small, the community, and the

sustainable—but only in the short term. When she says that “. . . we count the days the weeks the

years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the

deserts they’ve created, lie bleached,” (86) she means it literally; the agricultural practices

imposed on the southwest by American agribusiness are not sustainable, and will eventually turn

the area into true deserts, incapable of supporting agriculture or any life at all. And what America

has wrought on this continent is being replicated over the entire planet. The emerging world

powers of China and India appear to be poised to follow our American example, our agriculture,

our consumer culture, and our educational system, with all their flaws.

Anzaldúa’s borderlands are “. . . physically present wherever two or more cultures edge

each other, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch . . .” From the perspective of

ecoliteracy, every social class will be affected more and more by our current environmental

crises; the upper classes will no longer be able to insulate themselves from the now-global issues

of air, water, and soil degradation. Every culture, every person on earth will be involved in these

issues in the coming decades. Every class needs to be involved in the solutions to these

problems. We are all physically affected by the toxins that continue to be poured into the

environment—everyone breathes the same air. We are all psychologically affected by the

awareness—some more aware than others—that our current lifestyles are not sustainable. And



we are all spiritually affected by our divorce from the earth that gave us life in the first place, and

that is our only source of sustenance. The world of ecoliteracy does constitute a borderland,

where all classes meet whether they like it or not, and where we are all wrestling with physical,

psychological, and spiritual problems for which we must find solutions if we are to survive as

humankind. No one is immune from these concerns.

Anzaldúa uses the primal metaphors of nature in the form of agriculture and grain,

specifically corn, to describe the essential qualities of her new mestiza: “Indigenous like corn,

like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of

conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly

wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and

strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads” (103).

Anzaldúa’s concept of agriculture as the basis for culture, for traditional people surviving on the

land in a sustainable manner, as inherently related to literacy—ecologically literacy—a culture of

being able to read the land—is evident as she chooses to end her book with an anecdote-

abstraction-poem based on the land and metaphors of natural cycles, characterizing the earth as

female, and the Chicano/Chicana culture as being caretakers of the earth:

Yes, the Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land. . . .

Below our feet, under the earth lie the watermelon seeds . . . Growth, death, decay, birth.

The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant changing of

forms, renacimientos de la tierra madre.5

This land was Mexican once

5 Renascences (rebirth or renaissance) of mother earth.



was Indian always

and is.

And will be again. (113)

In the borderlands of the environmental, the ecological, and the agricultural, who counts

as an Indian, or a Mexican, or a mestiza? I say, we are all the new mestizas, we all live in the

borderlands, and we had better learn the discourse of the corn, how to survive, how to become

indigenous once again, and how to hold tight to the earth, to survive at this crossroads where we

find ourselves on this small planet.



WORKS CITED

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

Blend, Benay. “Voices from the Western Borderlands: A Cross-Cultural Study of Chicana,

Native American, and Women Writers of the American West.” Literature of Nature: An

International Sourcebook. Ed. Patrick D. Murphy. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998.

403–408.

Center for Ecoliteracy. 2007. Center for Ecoliteracy. 5 December 2007.

<http://www.ecoliteracy.org/index.html>.

Finch, Robert, and John Elder, ed. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: Norton,

1990.

Gee, James P. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” Literacy: A Critical

Sourcebook. Ed. Cushman, Ellen, et al. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 525–537.

---. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: What Is Literacy?” Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook.

Ed. Cushman, Ellen, et al. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 537–544.

Murphy, Patrick, ed. Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. Chicago: Fitzroy

Dearborn Publishers, 1998.

Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The Ecocriticism

Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. 105–123.

Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870–1990: A Curricular History.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Stone, Michael K. and Zenobia Barlow, eds. Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a

Sustainable World. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005.

Welch, Margaret. The Book of Nature: Natural History in the United States 1825–1875.

Northeastern UP: Boston, 1998.

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/index.html

Documents

Literacy Studies and the Emerging Field of Ecoliteracy