University of Jordan
Dr. Samira ElKhawaldeh
P.hd. Readings in Literary Theories
Submitted by: Hind Alem
The Problems and Challenges of Ecocriticism
Abstract
During the last few decades, Environment has posed a great threat to human society as well as
to mother earth. As a reaction of man’s anthropocentric attitude towards nature, a new theory
came into existence that aims at reading nature and its relation with Man, called Ecocriticism.
The present paper seeks to explore the different concepts of this new theory and establish the
connection between environmental matters with literary texts. However, as a recent theory,
ecocriticism found itself in front of many obstacles when trying to balance between theory
and practice. This research attempts to answer the following questions: What are the
challenges and problems associated with Ecocriticism? On this light, the present paper will
provide a brief history of the emergence of the theory of Ecocriticism and most importantly it
will attempt to examine the different problems and challenges faced by Ecocriticism.
Keywords: Ecocriticism, challenges, Literary Theory, Nature, Man.
Today Ecocriticism refers to a complex set of ideas derived from cultural and literary studies,
science and animal studies, ecophilosophy, environmental ethics and history, environmental
justice movement, ecofeminism, animal studies, sociology and psychology, and globalism
studies, among other academic domains. Although it may seem that all these issues tackled by
ecocriticism would make its strength as a theory, many scholars are skeptical about its future
due to several challenges and problems within its scope. The present paper presents first of all
a brief overview of environmental studies’ history in order to show that the context of its
emergence, when issues of race, gender and political instability were dominant, made
ecocriticism difficult to emerge as a separate theory. Secondly, by delving into the question of
its definitions and labels as well as its methodological gaps, one can understand the difficulty
of balancing between theory and practice. Finally, the research attempts to unveil the causes
that led ecocriticism to remain under other cultural and literary disciplines.
The term “Ecocriticism” was coined in the late 1970 by William Rueckbert in his work
Literature and Ecology (24), but its history goes back much further. In fact, according to
Lawrence Buell in his work The Future of Ecocriticism, there are several views about its
origins. For US settler culture literature for example, one would need to go back at least as far
as the 1920s- the decade when it first established itself as a professional area- sometimes said
to have “inaugurated the new academic field” of American literature(13). Some other
American critics might argue that the origin should be set much earlier, at least as far as Ralph
Waldo Emerson Nature (1836), the first canonical work of US literature to unfold a theory of
nature with special reference to poetics (ibid).
Lawrence Buell, the most prominent American environmental literary critic, has argued
in The Future of Environmental Criticism, the field development over the last two decades has
in large part been prompted by the need to overcome its early shortcomings and oversights.
Ecocriticism 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 signature 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 important.
Lawrence focuses on the two precontemporary books of literary and cultural studies of
important influence for later Anglo-Saxon American environmental crisis: In American
studies Leo Marx’s the Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
American Culture (1964), and in the British studies, Raymond Williams well-known work
The Country and the City (1973). Marx and Williams both focused on the cultural and literary
instantiation of the intertwined history of attitudes toward nature versus urbanism and
industrial technology. Moreover, both stressed the appeal of nostalgia for rural landscapes:
how the landscapes have been transformed and spoiled by the economic and class interest
(Buell 14). The importance of these two books and the essays that succeed them for the
subsequent turn in environmental studies lay especially in their identification of the dynamics
of the history of what is called national imaginaries in terms of contrasting archetypal
landscapes, although they dealt with the subject quite differently. Williams concerned himself
much more with the actualities of environmental history and landscape transformation than
did Marx, who focused on “myth-symbol” in the school of American studies, according to
which the key symbolic.
Williams’ heroes were endangered country writers as peasant poet John Clare and regional
novelist Thomas Hard, whose works “rendered these most these most faithful, despite the
threat of cooptation by the stereotypical green language of romanticism and the false
consciousness implanted by difference to patrons or market place”(15). Marx’s heroes, on the
other hand, were a small group of high canonical literary writers, from Henry Thoreau to
William Faulkner, who practiced a “complex pastoral” against “simple pastoral” by using
green symbols to critique advancing machine culture. For Marx, such visions of lost or
possible future golden age had “nothing to do with the environment per se”. The play off was
entirely political and aesthetic.
This useful distinction between the first and second wave of Ecocriticism, formally
introduced by Lawrence Buell in his 2005 book on The Future of Environmental Criticism,
distinguishes between older (generally speaking, twentieth-century) environmental criticism
that was preoccupied with nature writing, wilderness, and texts such as Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden, and emerging twenty first century work that is often concerned with a
variety of landscapes (including places like cities) and more timely environmental issues.
Buell drew attention to how this distinction applies to primary texts by noting that “Thoreau is
content to sit, contemplate, and ponder the beauties before him . . . [while individuals like
Rachel Carson are] . . . apt to actually do something.” Consequently, writers such as Thoreau
and Wordsworth, who were the darlings of first-wave environmental criticism, are somewhat
less interesting to the second wave. Not surprisingly, second-wave environmental critics,
careful not to overly romanticize wilderness (as did many of their predecessors), are more
likely to direct themselves to sites of environmental devastation and texts that do the same,
such as Carson’s Silent Spring.
As it is aforementioned, ecocriticism emerged first of all as a simple interest in the
relationship between the individual and nature in the literary works of the romantic period.
Starting off with this principle, ecocriticism could not be taken seriously because there were
other humanist studies that focused on the struggle and sufferings of the individual in society
such as Feminism and Postcolonialism. In order to establish a valid theory, critics have to
agree on a consistent and coherent definition and label. A task that was problematic for
ecocritics because of the several branches they touched.
In The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty defines Ecocriticism as "the study of the
relationship between literature and the physical environment" (5) and compares it with other
cultural studies such as Marxist and feminist criticisms. The Ecocriticism Reader was the first
of its kind—a series of ecocritical essays devoted to organizing an area of study whose efforts
had, until the early 1990s, not been "recognized as belonging to a distinct critical school or
movement"(7). Rather, as Glotfelty points out in the introduction, many of the twenty-five
essays collected in the reader had appeared under headings as varied "as American Studies,
regionalism, pastoralism, the frontier, human ecology, science and literature, nature in
literature, landscape in literature"(ibid).
In his interview The Problems of Environmental Crisis, Lawrence Buell argues that for at
least two reasons, Ecocriticism is a somewhat confusing and inadequate term (8). For one
thing,
”eco” suggests a specifically biotic or natural world emphasis, too narrow to
encompass the broad range of environmental interests actually pursued by self identified
ecocritics, many of whom are at least as concerned with the built environment and its effects
on both human and non-human life forms. And secondly, many literary scholars who are
passionately concerned with environmental issues many scholars would object to the label as
excessively restrictive, because Ecocriticism in the first instance was used especially to
designate a particular kind of literary criticism that focused primarily on nature writing and
post-Wordsworthian nature poetry with a view to emphasizing its potential for reconnecting
people to nature (10). But Ecocriticism nonetheless the “omnibus term, or nickname, by
which environmentally-oriented literary studies is most likely to be known for the foreseeable
future; and so retain use of it here” (11).
Thus, Buell acknowledges that there is some uncertainty about what the term exactly
covers but argues that if one thinks of it as a multiform inquiry extending to a variety of
environmentally focused perspectives more expressive of concern to explore environmental
issues searchingly than of fixed dogmas about political solutions, then the term ecocriticism
becomes a large and growing scholarly field.
This point brings the research to another discussion about the problems and challenges
concerning this newborn theory, which is its interdisciplinary aspect. Indeed, many scholars
argue that besides having methodological issues, ecocriticism fails to stand a separate theory.
Simon C. Estok in his study A Report Card on Ecocriticism asserts that like any recently
born thing, Ecocriticism is experiencing tremendous growth and development in these early
years of its existence. In the short time since it first appeared as a movement, some of the
initial concerns that marked its initial moments have already been mentioned: its definition.
Glen Love, paraphrasing Glotfelty's point, argues in his contribution to The Ecocriticism
Reader that “race, class, and gender are words which we see and hear everywhere at our
professional meetings and in our current publications ... [but] the English profession has failed
to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment”(Estok 4).
Buell believes that Ecocriticism or environmental criticism lagged behind other cultural
disciplines because of a number of reasons. Race, gender, sexuality, and postcolonial studies,
one reason, surely, is that environmental imperilment did not become consistently “front-page
news” until about the 1980s. Another reason, perhaps equally important, is that environment
differs from the others in being a non-human, or, a transhuman entity, and on that account it
cannot be self-evident sense a part of personal or social identity (The Future of Ecocriticism
35). Thus it might be argued that environmental criticism would predictably be harder to
promote and display than the other cultural disciplines such as Feminism or Postcolonial
theories, especially insofar as it involves privileging the welfare of the non-human equally or
more than the human.
Although, as John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington correctly point out in Reading under
the Sign of Nature, theory has taken the front seat in early ecocritical writing (largely because
theory, it seems, can authorize and validate the approach), there are some misgivings about
and distrust of theory among ecocritics. Hence, Tallmadge and Harrington promise to
establish an adequate theory but "without spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy"
(12), and Lawrence Buell pledging to avoid what he terms "mesmerization by literary theory"
(The Future of Ecocriticism 111). Given that Ecocriticism is something that is supposed to
change things, a healthy skepticism toward theory of the sort seems perfectly valid.
Buell's approach, however, is to avoid the complexities of theory entirely, it seems, and to
bridge the gap between what he does, in fact, acknowledge as a theoretical problem: the
relationship between text on the one hand and world on the other. He calls this bridge an
"aesthetics of dual accountability" (98), which will satisfy "the mind and the ethological facts"
(93).
One of the more promising examples of such an attempt to deal directly with the problems
of representation comes from Gretchen Legler's essay in her work Ecofeminist literary
criticism, Legler raises a number of deconstructionist questions about the markings of
language in
Henri David Thoreau’s Walden. Legler deconstructs Walden briefly but
effectively by noting how Thoreau represents the natural environment:
Nature in Thoreau's work is constructed as a place that nurtures [the] white masculine
aesthetic and as a place that is not suitable for the nurturance of other bodies--the bodies of
Native Americans, immigrants and white women (Legler 75) Legler helps to connect issues
such as race, class, gender, and sexuality in theoretical terms with questions about the
environment (Estok 13).
Nonetheless, Tallmadge and Harrington are certainly accurate in observing defensiveness
toward theory that characterizes early ecocritical discourse (14). The presumption of "a
skeptical, if not hostile, reader" (ibid) largely remains with ecocritical discourses, partly
because ecocriticism has still not found its own voice and continues to speak through the
mouths of other theories, continues, as Tallmadge and Harrington argue, to be "less a method
than an attitude, an angle of vision, and a mode of critique" (ibid).
Glen Love, too, voices a concern in Ecocriticism and Science about the theoretical
standing of ecocriticism. He seems to feel some uncertainty about "what that place of
ecocriticism is to be, particularly in its theoretical and methodological base" (65). Stephanie
Sarver goes even further in expressing her worries about ecocriticism theoretical viability.
Sarver contends that ecocriticism is not a theory at all but is more than anything a focus:
Ecocriticism" is ... an unfortunate term because it suggests a new kind of critical
theory. The emerging body of work that might be labeled ecocritical is united not by a
theory, but by a focus: the environment. This ecocritical work draws on a variety of
theories, such as feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and historicist.
(15)
In a sense, Sarver has a point, but it is a point that may be applied to any kind of theory,
indeed, the very theories she mentions as being theories per se: feminism, Marxism, post
structuralism, psychoanalysis, and historicism. All of these theories draw heavily on other
theories that preceded them (Estok 8). Such borrowing, however, is exactly what goes on in
the articulation of a new critical practice. All theories are a synthesis, and Sarver fails to
recognize this fact. Still, the argument Sarver is making is valid in so far as it calls
ecocriticism to task for not being theorized enough and for being heavily thematic (Estok 14).
Why does ecocriticism find difficulties in getting its theoretical footing? In order to answer
this question, the research refers to Richard Kerridge, who perceptively suggests in Writing
the Environment that one reason is that unlike feminism, with which it otherwise has points in
common, environmentalism has difficulty in being a politics of personal liberation or social
mobility ... environmentalism has a political weakness in comparison with feminism: it is
much harder for environmentalists to make the connection between global threats and
individual lives (16).
Moreover, Kerridge believes that perhaps one of the reasons for this problematic is that the
terms of engagement are less defined with environmental issues than they are with social
ones. Well-established terms as misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism provide a
path of discussion in literary criticism: the terms themselves (by the very fact that they offer a
name) authorize discussion and description of recognized topic "misogyny" is hatred of
women; "racism," of racial difference; "homophobia," of non-procreative sexualities; and
"anti-Semitism," of Jewishness and Jews. But “what should we call a fear and contempt for
the environment?”(Kerridge17). Indeed Ecocriticism does not have terms describing the
mechanism for the fear that produces such environments. There are number of terms to
describe socially oppressive systems of thinking and the social objects of fear and hatred they
produce, but when the object is the natural world, there is no single term with which we can
begin an organized and informed discussion. A term such as "ecophobia"(18) would allow
people to label fear and loathing toward the environment in much the same way that the term
"homophobia" marks fear and loathing toward gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Admittedly,
there is too much jargon polluting the world of theory, but some kind of terminology and
theorization is necessary; otherwise, ecocriticism risks becoming just an empty buzzword
(24).
It is probably accurate to claim that no one has done more in helping Ecocriticism onto
solid theoretical ground than Patrick D. Murphy. As he complains, the problem with
Ecocriticism is that too much of it "remains theoretically unsophisticated. Too often, there
remains an anti-theoretical, naive, realist attitude expressed in" the work of ecocritics. [19]
Arguably, the criticism is as valid today as when it was first made in 1995. In place of
theoretically unsophisticated stances, Murphy offers a Bakhtinian "dialogical orientation,"
which, he maintains, "reinforces the ecofeminist recognition of interdependence and the
natural need for diversity" (22). Sarver would argue that this is simply not good enough. In
her own words, literary scholars who are environmentalists seem not to be creating a new
critical theory; rather, they are drawing on existing theories to illuminate the individual’s
understanding of how human interactions with nature are reflected in literature (50).
As a conclusion, ecocriticism as a recent theory still struggles to stand as an independent
discipline although it is committed on changing things. Due to its wide range of topics, the
term “ecocriticism” is considered by some critics as too narrow and confusing as it
encompasses only the natural aspect of the study. Another problem faced by ecocriticism is
that of its theoretical methodology which seems still undeveloped and inexperienced
compared to other cultural studies. Its interdisciplinary aspect also makes ecocriticism still
search for an independent voice, instead of being only a mode of vision or critique. Lastly, the
biggest challenge faced by ecocriticism is linked to its transhuman feature, that is, a theory
that attempts to put equal importance between human and non human beings. Theorists are
still trying to build up convincing arguments for the interconnection between human beings
and nature. However, regarding the actual circumstances of climate change, pollution, loss of
biodiversity, and the waste disposal that causes public health issues, ecocriticism may
overcome these challenges and gain an important place in the field of literary theories.
Works Cited
Glotfelty, Cheryll. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Univ. of
Georgia Press, 2009.
Estok, Simon C. “A Report Card on Ecocriticism.” The Journal of the Australasian
Universities Language and Literature Association, vol. 96, no. 220, ser. 38, Nov. 2001.
Fiedorczuk, Julia. "The Problems of Environmental Criticism: An Interview with Lawrence
Buell." (2011).
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Blackwell, 2008.
Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” 1978, pp. 1–24.
Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature.
Zed, 1998.
Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Univ. Press of
Virginia, 2000.
Tallmadge, John, and Henry Harrington. Reading under the Sign of Nature New Essays in
Ecocriticism. University of Utah Press, 2000.
Sarver, Stephanie. "Environmentalism and literary studies." Rocky Mountain Review of
Language and Literature 49.1 (1995): 106-112.
Love, Glen A. "Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience?." New Literary History 30.3
(1999): 561-576.
Legler, Gretchen T. "Ecofeminist literary criticism." (1997).