Over the past quarter-century ecological criticism has moved from the margins to an increasingly prominent position in literary studies, yet it is still regarded with suspicion in many corners of the discipline. While it has become second nature for scholars to think critically about the way literary texts reflect (or obscure) how which race, gender, sexuality, and nationality are constructed and negotiated, the manner in which human beings navigate, alter, and adapt to changes in their environment has not received the same level of scrutiny from scholars in the humanities. Anxious to avoid endorsing any form of environmental determinism with its sordid history of politicized and racialized misuse, most literary scholars and historians have downplayed, ignored, or denied the extent to which human history and culture has been shaped through our interaction with our physical environment. At the same time, when humanists (and literary scholars in particular) have ventured into the field of “environmental studies,” our attempts have often been hindered by the fact that we are quite literally speaking a different language from the scientists and social scientists engaged in research and public policymaking surrounding environmental issues. As anthropogenic climate change and other looming ecological crises promise to shape our lived experience more dramatically and unpredictably than ever before, the field of literary studies risks becoming irrelevant to the most urgent challenges facing human civilization.
Nonetheless humanists do have an important role to play in diagnosing and addressing our current environmental crises. Since human culture has produced the crisis that we’re in, the study of human cultural production may hold keys to understanding how to find a way out. Theorists such as Bruno Latour have framed environmental problems as a paradigmatic example of a “hybrid” phenomenon, neither subjective nor objective, that resists our attempts to neatly demarcate scientific study from cultural inquiry. [1] Others will point out that behind the technical arguments underscoring current global warming discourse (e.g., “what is a safe level of carbon dioxide 350 or 400 parts per million?” or “should we settle for a 1.5 degree increase or 2 degree increase in temperature?”) lie questions of values. To what extent are we willing to sacrifice our own comforts and material well-being to ensure a better world for future generations as well as our nonhuman coresidents on this planet? To what extent are we residents of wealthy nations—who largely created the problem and yet are more insulated than poorer countries from its impacts—responsible for ameliorating it and compensating poorer countries for the impacts they will bear from climate change, and for the sacrifices to their economic development that may be necessary to avert the most catastrophic outcomes? These are questions of justice and values, and no computer model can answer them.
History can teach us valuable lessons, both positive and negative, about how we interact with our physical environment. While in the popular understanding climate change equates to late industrial global warming, in fact throughout all of our existence as a species we have adapted to a changing global climate. As William Ruddiman has recently argued, [2] human beings have been exerting a pronounced and even decisive influence on the climate system since as long as human civilization has existed; atmospheric carbon levels began to rise as early civilizations converted forestland to agricultural use. So the story of human civilization has, to a large extent, been the story of the ways in which we both react to and help to shape our changing climate.
Of course, the prospect of the climate change we are currently facing is different, both in terms of the severity of its consequences and the abruptness with which it is occurring. In our own lifetime perhaps the only comparable shared catastrophe is the threat of extinction through nuclear war, a threat that in popular imagination, if not reality, seems to have subsided. This sense of common catastrophe requires a new sense of historical imagination and will require a new array of critical and theoretical tools. And yet, despite the exciting possibilities we as humanists bring, and the urgent needs we can meet, we still remain relegated to the sidelines of the public policy conversation.
To be sure, intellectual trends within ecological criticism have contributed to this condition. As Lawrence Buell, the most prominent American environmental literary critic, has argued in The Future of Environmental Criticism, [3] the field’s development over the last two decades has in large part been prompted by the need to overcome its early shortcomings and oversights. Ecocriticism’s first wave, rooted in deep ecology, tended to see nature and human beings as opposed to one another, and held that the proper response of environmental criticism should be to help protect the natural environment from the depredations of human culture (21). This stance yielded in the late 1990s to a “second wave” which addressed itself to human concerns as well as nonhuman nature; to urban and suburban environments as well as to wilderness settings; and to all types of literary texts, not just “nature writing.” Prompted by dialogue with the environmental justice movement, second-wave literary critics no longer saw human beings and the environment as opposed to one another, but instead focused on the ways in which they were interdependent and mutually constitutive.
If Buell’s history is correct, what will the “third wave” of ecocriticism look like? This collection is, among other things, an attempt to answer that question. But at the outset I will offer some provisional goals for an ecocriticism of the future, one that promises to contribute significantly not only to our own disciplines but also to the larger public conversation about the environmental crisis we face.
The third wave of ecocriticism will continue to build on the developments in the second wave: surrendering the field’s Americanist bias in favor of a more global scope; deconstructing the inherited opposition of “nature” and the “human” in which the former is privileged and the latter denigrated; exploring the social, economic, and physical dimensions and impacts of environmental processes; examining “environmentality” as a key attribute of all texts rather than the province of a narrowly circumscribed genre of “nature writing”; and extending its purview beyond wild and rural landscapes to encompass cities, suburbs, and the rest of the built environment. But a new ecocriticism needs to depart from its forbearers as well.
First, literary ecocritics need to engage poststructuralist and new historicist lines of critique more fully and openly. The first wave of ecocriticism, rooted in Heidegger and deep ecological politics, viewed the dominant intellectual trends in the humanities with suspicion. One of the most important ecological critics, Jonathan Bate argued [4] that succeeding generations of New Critics, structuralists, deconstructionists, psychoanalytic critics, and new historicists, had all, despite their differences, misread Romantic literary production in the same way: by incorrectly decoupling it from its true status as “nature writing.” Bate and his followers have provided a welcome corrective to the new historicist tendency to see the celebration of nature as mere ideology mystifying social and economic processes, but the resulting dividing line between what ecocritics are doing and what the mainstream of the literary profession is doing has been unproductive for both camps. Recently, theorists such as Timothy Morton [5] have sought to engage mainstream critical theory in a way that problematizes concepts such as “nature” and the “environment” without giving way to neo-Marxist reductionism. The fruits of an emerging conversation between ecocriticism and postcolonial theory promise to yield new insights for both fields. This dialogue will need to continue, and the mainstream of literary studies will need to become more receptive to work on literature in the environment, in order for ecocriticism to shed its defensive posture and take up an appropriate space in the intellectual conversation.
Second, ecocriticism will need to be genuinely interdisciplinary, in a way beyond what that term ordinarily connotes. Ecocritics will have to work with a broader array of data and historical materials than ever before. We may not be scientists, but we should be expected to attain a basic level of literacy in the physical, environmental, and biomedical sciences appropriate to the research projects we are doing. Literary critics will need to move away from the sweeping relativism and the facile and imprecise metaphorization of scientific concepts that has sometimes characterized the field of “literature and science,” and learn to speak with climatologists, geologists, and physicists on their own terms. This is a daunting task but by no means an impossible one, and will be necessary if we are to expand upon our audience.
Relatedly, ecocritics will need to become more comfortable working with a broader and more eclectic array of primary source materials than ever before—a diversity reflected in the essays contained here. As a specialist in Romantic poetry, I never thought that my studies would encompass tree-ring research or that I would need to be able to describe the North Atlantic Oscillation index; yet, my research has required me to work with data and archives of whose existence I wasn’t aware of just a few years ago. Alongside the standard-issue materials of literary historiography—journals, letters, newspapers, etc.—the ecocritics of the future will be working with weather maps, medical reports, food price records, and ice-core data. While such materials stretch us to the limits of our disciplinary competency, they are essential in producing historically sound scholarship that is capable of understanding literary texts in their full material situations.
Finally, ecocriticism needs to retain a commitment to continuing self-critique. As our own environmental predicament and the state of scientific knowledge about it changes rapidly, we need to be equally willing to adapt our methods and strategies. Borrowing from Timothy Luke’s concept of ecocritique, we should think of the critique we are doing as an action, and one both directed inwards as well as outwards. One of the most promising recent pieces of work in this vein is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s rethinking of historiographical methodology in light of anthropogenic climate change. [6] Chakrabarty argues that the sheer dimensions of the environmental crisis, and the fact that human activity is now driving the biogeochemical processes controlling the earth’s climate system, have revealed the limits of our traditional anthropocentric accounts of human history, whether those accounts are Marxist, postcolonial, or Foucaultian. Charkrabarty’s call for a “negative universal history,” like Timothy Morton’s notion of “dark ecology,” carries a certain pessimistic valence that characterizes much humanistic work on literature and the environment right now; but the notion of a negative history born out of doubt is well suited to a field that lacks a rock-solid epistemological foundation. In fact, our best teacher here may be none other than John Keats, whose imperative to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” is good advice for us, not merely as scholars but also as human beings, as we scramble to prepare for changes to our environment on a scale that human civilization has not previously known, although we might not want to follow Keats in disclaiming “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” [7]
The essays contained here do stubbornly (though not irritably) reach after fact and reason, and they do so with an impressive sense of intellectual ambition. This collection developed out of a graduate seminar led by Gillen Wood in 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the topic of “New Directions in Ecocriticism.” Drawing on his call for an ecohistorical literary method, [8] the seminar sought to develop new methodologies for work on literature and the environment that would respect the historical complexity of human-environmental interaction. The collection was shaped by the students’ individual research interests, so that the literary texts under discussion extend from England to the United States, Jamaica, and Chile, and range chronologically from the early modern period to the twentieth century. Despite their differences, they follow a common methodological imperative to build rich, full, and diverse historical archives beyond the resources traditionally used by ecocritical scholarship. Together, they offer some possible directions for what ecological literary criticism can accomplish going forward.
Part I examines the complex and unstable relationship between the physical environment and the rapidly changing economy of the early seventeenth century. First, Matthew O’Brien examines the political and cultural effect of climatic instability at the outset of James I’s reign. A particularly cold decade in England (at the apex of what paleoclimatologists have deemed “the Little Ice Age”) resulted in failed harvests and popular discontent towards James I’s land use policies. O’Brien shows how literary texts of the period—Arthur Standish’s “The Common’s Complaint,” “The Great Frost” (an anonymous dialogue between a Londoner and a country gentleman), and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606)—demonstrate a growing gap between the ideologies of land use espoused by urban and rural constituencies, which came to a head in the Midlands Revolts of 1607 against the Crown’s enclosure policies. Each text examines how the economic instability of rural England, already aggravated by mismanagement of land, became positively disastrous when unstable and inclement weather comes into play.
Economic dislocation in the period was no less pronounced in Jacobean cities, as Elizabeth Tavares shows in her reading of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1610) and The Alchemist (1614). Drawing upon the history of food production and distribution and theories of local network sustainability, Tavares argues that the plays put pressure upon the roles of “producer” and “consumer” in the London economy, showing how both roles depend on specialized and precarious relationships in the urban economy. Tavares’s paper is an attempt to think about dramatic form in an ecocritical manner, by conceiving of plays as complex, integrated systems rather than only as linear narratives. She concludes that the plays theorize the new relationships of consumption and production in an emerging capitalist order by revealing the creative and destructive power of criminality and greed.
The essays in Part II study the ways in which disease is depicted as an environmental threat in literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Fadely uses contemporary epidemiological science to read Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic novel of the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, The Adventures of Arthur Mervyn (1799). Fadely argues that the central medical-political debate in the novel about the disease’s etiology become embedded in the novel’s formal structure itself. The novel rests uneasily between a Gothic portrait of a city in the grip of a dimly understood and even supernatural epidemic, and bildungsroman plot grounded in liberal, Enlightenment theories of agency. This generic instability results from simultaneous investment of the novel (and of biomedical discourses of the period) in two competing semiotic codes. Fadely concludes that the novel’s form allows Brown to explore the origins and causes of yellow fever in a way that the medical discourse of the time, polarized between contagionist and miasmatic theories of disease transmission, often missed.
Where much of the horror in Arthur Mervyn stems from the intense proximity of diseased and dying bodies in an urban nightmare, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) posits a distinctly different horror—an environment emptied of human inhabitants by disease. By reading it alongside contemporary historical accounts of cholera, typhus, and yellow fever, Jessica Mercado establishes that the novel is not only a fictional account of a postapocalyptic world, but a record of what the devastation that epidemic disease had already unleashed on human beings and their environment. Far from being escapist science fiction, Mercado concludes that The Last Man, she concludes, intervenes in hotly contested medical debates about the strategies for preventing, containing, and treating disease.
The essays in Part III are concerned with the human and environmental costs of 20th-century industrialization and development. Lisa Burner begins with a reading of the Chilean novelist Joaquín Edwards Bello’s naturalist novel El Roto (1920), which portrays a brothel in a slum neighborhood of Santiago targeted for urban renewal. Burner reads El Roto as an unintended parable of capitalist urbanization and the shifting social and natural ecosystems it encounters and creates. Drawing on the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith, Burner argues that the text’s ceaseless movement, instability, and destruction represent internal, structural characteristics of capitalism’s need for endless expansion. As it vacillates between a nostalgic idealization of the Chilean lower class and a disgust for them, the novel graphically highlights the centrality of real human suffering attending to capitalist transformations of the urban environment.
The environmental costs of urbanization create different challenges in for affluent, northern post-industrial societes, as Maggie Kainulainen demonstrates in her reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978). Kainulainen argues that the novel’s protagonist, Janey, is rendered human garbage, a waste product to be disposed of once the patriarchal and capitalist systems have extracted her value. The novel makes the hidden waste of those systems visible, and, more importantly, demonstrates how the continued maintenance of both patriarchy and consumer capitalism depends upon the disavowal of the human “waste” it produces. In the novel, the human waste the system produces becomes connected to physical waste produced by capitalism, spatially displaced and hidden from view. Kainulainen argues that, by valorizing the entropic, disruptive potential of those human beings cast off by society as refuse, Acker presents a social analogue to the advocates for sustainable systems of waste management.
A similar focus on the dynamics of complex systems as a model for literary production is at work in the final essay, Shawn Ballard’s ecoformalist reading of David Mitchell’s novel Ghostwritten (1999). The dynamics of the relationship between human beings and the environment in this novel constitutes a complex network that resists traditional cause-and-effect analysis as well as conventional literary narration, Ballard argues, which can best be understood by applying complex systems theory. In Ghostwritten, environmental disaster results not from single catastrophic events but from the accumulation of trivial human decisions, whose effects are too complex to trace and predict, creating a complex web, global in scope, binding together humans and the natural environment, as well as the past, present, and the future.
Together, these essays provide a glimpse of the rich methodological possibilities promised by the new literary eco-historicism, which will continue to be developed and refined. For too long the unique contributions of humanists as scholars of literature, rhetoric, history, and ideas, have been sidelined from public conversations about environmental policy. But as these essays show, the material environment is always shaped by, and helps to shape, human values, practices, and institutions. By exploring this rich cultural and environmental history, ecohistoricism promises to make vital contributions towards understanding both how we have reached the current point in our shared human-environmental history, and how we as a civilization can proceed in a responsible and ethical way in a time of severe ecological crisis.