Abstract
During the last decades of the twentieth century, it became a matter of scientific consensus that human society, as it currently functions, poses a potentially lethal threat to what Henry David Thoreau once called “our common dwelling” (W 124). At first a nuclear winter seemed the clearest threat to the global environment, but this was gradually replaced by the prospect of climate change induced by greenhouse gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels. In 1977, the National Academy of Sciences issued an uncertain report called Energy and Climate, and two years later, the World Meteorological Organization held its first World Climate Conference, but the evidence was still unclear. By the end of the 1980s, there was no longer any uncertainty. In 1988, the United Nations Environmental Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which, two years later, released its first report, finding half a degree Celsius of net global warming during the twentieth century. These two decades also saw the development of a broad awareness of the need for a new collective relationship with the planet. The first Earth Day in the United States was held in April 1970; from then on, as the scope and seriousness of the problem became clearer, a truly impressive and diverse movement for change grew at the grassroots of society.1
The Romantic approach to nature was fundamentally ecological; that is, it was concerned with relation, interdependence, and holism. Nowhere is this … outlook more clearly revealed than in the writings of Henry David Thoreau. … Thoreau was both an active field ecologist and a philosopher of nature whose ideas anticipated much in the mood of our own time. In his life and work we find a … complex and sophisticated ecological philosophy. We find in Thoreau, too, a remarkable source of inspiration and guidance for the subversive activism of the recent ecology movement.
—Donald Worster
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Notes
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 68, 49. Three valuable histories of the American environmental movement are
Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993),
and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003).
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), xxi.
William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” Iowa Review, 9, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 72–73.
Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 72–73, 86. Although the term “ecocriticism” came into common use in the 1990s, there is a large body of older work, from a number of disciplines, that has been adopted as a kind of canon of scholarship. Perhaps the earliest attempt to demonstrate the redemptive potential of nature writing is the long introduction to Joseph Wood Krutch, Great American Nature Writing(New York: William Sloane, 1950).
Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribner, 1974) anticipates almost the whole of the ecocritical project, but because he focuses on what he sees as the ecologism of the tradition of dramatic comedy rather than on nonfiction nature writing, he has received very little attention. For a handy collection of major statements and precursor texts,
see David Mazel, ed., A Century of Early Ecocriticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 69. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 430n.
Lawrence Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” New Literary History, 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 699–700.
Michael Branch, “Ecocriticism: Surviving Institutionalization in the Academic Environment,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 2 no. 1 (Spring 1994): 98. Jonathon Bate quoted in Jennifer Wallace, “Swampy’s Smart Set,” Times Higher Education Supplement, July 4, 1997, 4.
Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in Ecocriticism Reader, xxi. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2–3.
Glen A. Love, “Revaluing Nature: Towards an Ecological Criticism,” Western American Literature, 25, no. 3 (November 1990): 213.
Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 169.
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2, 4. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1204–1205. Love, “Revaluing Nature,” 203. For another influential early version of the ecocritical argument about the power of ideas,
see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Brazillier, 1972). For ecocritical histories of the idea of nature in Euro-American culture,
see Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991),
and Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Jonathon Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 245–247.
James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 11, 228.
Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). A history that parallels Philippon’s, though with an earlier starting point, is
Daniel G. Payne, Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996).
Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985), 8.
Charles S. Brown, “Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: The Quest for a New World View,” Midwest Quarterly, 36, no. 2 (January 1995): 191–202.
Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 28.
John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 1.
Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 73.
Thomas J. Lyon, ed., This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 7.
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 77–82. Slovic, Seeking Awareness, 18. For systematic expositions of deep ecological ideas, see David Oates, Earth Rising: Ecological Belief in an Age of Science (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1989),
and Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
Perry Miller, Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreaus Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 181–182n.
See Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986) and
Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) for general accounts of the nationalistic impulses behind the formation of the canon of American Literature.
Wendell Glick, The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) and
Gary Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993) trace the history of Thoreaus political and literary reputation inside the academy.
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 84–95.
R.W.B. Lewis, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 1. Nash’s reading of Thoreau developed a thesis first proposed in Krutch, Great American Nature Writing, 3–4. Perhaps the most direct narrative of the development of nonfiction nature writing from Thoreau to
Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard is Don Scheese, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Michael P. Branch, Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004) documents the rich prehistory of environmental literature.
Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 82. Don Scheese, “Thoreau’s Journal: The Creation of a Sacred Space,” in Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, eds., Mapping American Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 140, 147. Slovic, Seeking Awareness, 15. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 23, 139. For an additional examples of the ecocritical argument about Thoreau’s ecocentricity, see
Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 36–38.
Robert Kuhn McGregor, Henry Thoreau’s Study of Nature: A Wider View of the Universe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) is dedicated in its entirety to the demonstration of this claim.
Jay Parini “Greening of the Humanities,” New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1995, 52. Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in Ecocriticism Reader, xix. Karl Kroeber, “Ecology and American Literature: Thoreau and Un-Thoreau,” American Literary History, 9, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 310. For a sharp critique of ecocriticism’s attempts to import ecological concepts into literary analysis,
see Dana Phillips, “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology,” New Literary History, 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 577–602. Also useful in this regard is
Alan Marshal, The Unity of Nature: Wholeness and Disintegration in Ecology and Science (London: Imperial College Press, 2002).
Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 73. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 29.
Glen A. Love, “Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience?” New Literary History, 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 561–576.
See also Ursula K. Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” American Book Review, 18, no. 5 (July–August 1997): 4 ff For a valuable survey of the major sources and axioms of ecocritical theory, see William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 69–91.
Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, “Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness,” Environmental History, 4, no. 6 (October 2001): 541–560.
Michael Bennett, “Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery,” in Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 195–210.
Vera Norwood, Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 284. For a more materialist history of women and ecology,
see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
Joni Adamson Clarke, “Toward and Ecology of Justice: Transformative Ecological Theory and Practice,” in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998), 9–18, issues a call for ecocriticism to engage the concerns of the environmental justice movement, which she answers in
Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).
Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999) focuses on environmental issues and experiences in the literature of the multicultural metropolis. Two of the most influential texts of feminist ecocritical theory are
Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) and
Patrick Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). For tremendously influential study of how gendered representations of the frontier underwrote imperial expansion, see
Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). See also
Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
Vera Norwood, Made from this Earth, 284. Donelle N. Dreese, Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 113–114. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 7. For a collection of essays that expand ecocriticism’s reach in similar ways,
see John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington, eds., Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000).
Jhan Hochman, “Green Cultural Studies: An Introductory Critique of an Emerging Discipline,” in Lawrence Coupe, ed., The Green Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). The Commitments of Ecocriticism. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_1
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