Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Handbooks of
English and American Studies
Edited by
Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf
Advisory Board
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien,
Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner
Volume 2

Handbook of
Ecocriticism and
Cultural Ecology
Edited by
Hubert Zapf

ISBN 978-3-11-030837-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-031459-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039489-4
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Editors’ Preface
This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students and research-
ers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each
volume – involving a particular historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers
to current concepts and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combin-
ing theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between
abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and defining feature
of this series, bringing together literary history and interpretation, theory and text. At
a time when students of English and American literary studies have to deal with an
overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature, as well as cope with
the demands of new BA and MA programs, such a handbook series is indispensable.
Nevertheless, this series is not exclusively targeted to the needs of BA and MA stu-
dents, but also caters to the requirements of scholars who wish to keep up with the
current state of various fields within their discipline.
Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series typically provide:

– knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical developments;
– knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods;
– knowledge of cultural and historical contexts;
– knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other media;
– knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories;
– examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves fruitfully into
interpretations of literary texts.
Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and

take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume
editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the
selection of suitable authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowl-
edge in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers new
insights and recent research results on the most current topics, thus launching new
academic debates.
We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as well as
Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging support this series would
not have taken off.
VI Editors’ Preface
The first volumes include:

Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality
Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies
Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First
Centuries
Ralf Haekel (ed): Handbook of British Romanticism
Christoph Reinfandt (ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and
Twenty-First Centuries
Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter (eds.): Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the
First World War
Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.): Handbook of the English Novel,
1830–1900
Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.): Handbook of English Renaissance Literature
Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.): Handbook of
Comics and Graphic Narratives
Martin Middeke
Gabriele Rippl
Hubert Zapf
May 2016
Contents
Hubert Zapf
0 Introduction 1
Part I Ecocritical Theories of Culture and Literature
Wendy Wheeler
1 The Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic Abductions of Biosemiotics 19
Kate Rigby
2 Earth’s Poesy: Romantic Poetics, Natural Philosophy, and
Biosemiotics 45
Louise Westling
3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary 65
Hanjo Berressem
4 Ecology and Immanence 84
Hannes Bergthaller
5 Paradox as Bedrock: Social Systems Theory and the Ungrounding of
Literary Environmentalism in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire 105
Gernot Böhme
6 Aesthetics of Nature – A Philosophical Perspective 123
Hubert Zapf
7 Cultural Ecology of Literature – Literature as Cultural Ecology 135
Part II Issues and Directions of Contemporary Ecocriticism
Kate Soper
8 Neither the ‘Simple Backward Look’ nor the ‘Simple Progressive
Thrust’: Ecocriticism and the Politics of Prosperity 157
Catrin Gersdorf
9 Political Ecology: Nature, Democracy, and American Literary
Culture 174
VIII Contents
Mita Banerjee
10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies 194
Christa Grewe-Volpp
11 Ecofeminisms, the Toxic Body, and Linda Hogan’s Power 208
Nancy Easterlin
12 Ecocriticism, Place Studies, and Colm Tóibín’s “A Long Winter”: A
Biocultural Perspective 226
Axel Goodbody
13 Animal Studies: Kafka’s Animal Stories 249
Serpil Oppermann
14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism: Hybridity, Stories,
Natures 273
Greg Garrard
15 Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s
Flight Behaviour 295
Part III Between the Local and the Global: Cultural Diversity vs.
Eco-Cosmopolitanism
Scott Slovic
16 Narrative Scholarship as an American Contribution to Global
Ecocriticism 315
Alfred Hornung
17 Ecology and Life Writing in Transnational and Transcultural
Perspective 334
Serenella Iovino
18 From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera: Material Ecocriticism, Literary
Interpretation, and Death in Venice 349
Elena Past
19 Mediterranean Ecocriticism: The Sea in the Middle 368
Contents IX
Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus

20 Eco- and Geo- Approaches in French and Francophone Literary
Studies 385
Elmar Schmidt
21 Latin American Environmental Discourses, Indigenous Ecological
Consciousness and the Problem of ‘Authentic’ Native Identities 413
Swarnalatha Rangarajan
22 Women Writing Nature in the Global South: New Forest Texts from
Fractured Indian Forests 438
Ogaga Okuyade
23 Ecocultures and the African Literary Tradition 459
Cheng Xiangzhan
24 Ecosophy and Ecoaesthetics: A Chinese Perspective 481
Sylvia Mayer
25 World Risk Society and Ecoglobalism: Risk, Literature, and the
Anthropocene 494
Part IV Ecologies of Literary Communication
Sieglinde Grimm and Berbeli Wanning

26 Cultural Ecology and the Teaching of Literature 513
Alexa Weik von Mossner

27 Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion 534
Katharina Donn
28 Beyond the Wasteland: An Ecocritical Reading of Modernist Trauma
Literature 551
Christopher Schliephake
29 Literary Place and Cultural Memory 569
Timo Müller
30 The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes 590
X Contents
Erik Redling
31 Cultural Ecology and Literary Translation 605
Part V Genre and Media Ecologies
Scott MacDonald
32 PANORAMA: Three Ecocinematic Territories 621
Aaron S. Allen
33 Ecomusicology from Poetic to Practical 644
Suzaan Boettger
34 Within and Beyond the Art World: Environmentalist Criticism of Visual
Art 664
Index of Subjects 683
Index of Names 701
List of Contributors 713

Hubert Zapf
0 I ntroduction
1 Aims and Scope of the Handbook

Since its beginnings in the later twentieth century, ecocriticism has become one of
the most rapidly developing areas of research and teaching in literary and cultural
studies. In the more than two decades since its emergence as an academic field, it
has turned into one of the most promising new paradigms not only in literature and
culture departments but in the humanities in general. It has meanwhile branched
out from literary ecocriticism to other disciplines, media, art forms, and knowledge
cultures that are being assembled under the new epistemic umbrella of the environ-
mental humanities. Compared to its regional beginnings in the context of the Western
Literature Association of America and its initial focus on nature writing, wilderness
narratives, and romantic nature poetry, ecocriticism has undergone significant trans-
formations in the twenty-first century that have led to a substantial extension and
diversification of the epistemic scope, scale, and interdisciplinary range of the eco-
critical project.
As a consequence, the influence and overall visibility of ecocriticism and of eco-
logical thought in the academic world and beyond have grown significantly in recent
years. This development testifies to the immense potential of the paradigm, which
not only offers exciting new perspectives of scholarly work, but may also help return
a much-needed sense of the indispensable role and importance of the humanities
at a time when a neoliberal agenda of economic utilitarianism, along with empiri-
cal-quantitative models of science, threatens to dominate universities. It promises to
regain at least some of the cultural relevance of the disciplines commonly subsumed
under the humanities by exploring sustainable cultural alternatives to a merely eco-
nomic or technoscientific vision of globalization and of the future of humanity on the
planet. At the same time, the rapid spread, differentiation, and transnational dynam-
ics of ecocriticism have led to a situation in which it has become difficult to gain any
representative, let alone comprehensive overview of the field.
It is because of this newly gained visibility and undisputed scholarly significance
that such surveys as offered by the present handbook are currently in high demand.
In spite of their necessarily selective character, they offer much-needed general ori-
entation in an increasingly vast and diversified academic field, enabling scholars
and students alike to assess those developments and approaches they find especially
useful and promising, and to contextualize them in the larger epistemological frame-
works of the field. Such overviews widen the scale and range of scholarly attention
in a kind of complementary epistemic move that counteracts the tendency to focus,
2 Hubert Zapf
sometimes all too narrowly, on the internal codes of particular schools, approaches,
and areas of specialization.
In this sense the present handbook, while aware of its inevitable limitations of
scope and coverage, nonetheless aims to represent some of the most influential direc-
tions, approaches, issues, and agendas that define the field of ecocriticism in interna-
tional scholarship. Both the handbook as a whole and the individual chapters aim to
provide state-of-the-art knowledge of the field, its historical genealogy and complex-
ity, and its internal diversity and cross-cultural range. What results from this is obvi-
ously not a complete and unified picture but an assemblage of manifold discrete but
mutually interacting and overlapping positions, whose ‘representativeness’ results
not from any monosystemic hierarchization but from their own creative-conceptual
potency, as well as from their exemplary role at nodal points of the overall discursive
field of ecocriticism. This fractal epistemology of always distinctively coded relation-
ships between micro- and macrodiscursive narratives may be one way to convey a
sense of the inner logic of the field as well as of its characteristic contradictions and
conflict lines, helping to reflect larger topographies in the exemplary space of specific
approaches and textual applications.
The authors of this volume have been invited to collaborate not primarily on the
basis of any doctrinal or proportional criteria but on account of their distinct contri-
bution to and expertise in their respective areas. They are leading figures of interna-
tional ecocriticism, who have produced some of the most interesting and influential
work in the field. While a considerable number of contributors are from Germany
and continental Europe, the volume is a collaborative venture in which some of the
leading voices of Anglo-American and international ecocriticism are participating in
a potentially global dialogue. Indeed, editors of comparable volumes are also contrib-
uting to this handbook, notably Louise Westling, editor of the Cambridge Companion
to Literature and Environment (2014) and the Cambridge Global History of Literature
and Environment (with John Parham, forthcoming), and Greg Garrard, editor of the
Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014). While the present handbook therefore inevi-
tably intersects and overlaps with issues addressed in these other volumes, it never-
theless offers a different, complementary venue into the field of ecocriticism due to its
specific framing and conception.
Greg Garrard’s substantive Oxford Handbook presents the history and contem-
porary state of ecocritical scholarship in a broad, transnational, and interdiscipli-
nary spectrum. Louise Westling’s Cambridge Companion gives a more exemplary and
condensed overview of current issues and directions from various angles. Whereas
Garrard organizes his volume along the lines of the Foucauldian paradigm of histor-
ical discourse theory, which critically interrogates the constructedness of ecological
concepts with the aim of “historicizing ecology and ecologizing history” (Garrard
2014, 3), Westling follows a more phenomenological direction which endorses the
immersion of culture in nature and the shaping of cultural concepts by precultural
forms of ecosemiosis as an epistemic basis for political, ethical, and environmental
0 Introduction 3
justice forms of ecocriticism. This difference is a question of emphasis rather than

of principle, however: critical-constructivist and empathetic-phenomenological ori-
entations are represented in both volumes, as is the case in the present handbook,
whose focus on cultural ecology explicitly aims at blending these contrastive epis-
temologies in ways that resonate with the ‘discursive realism’ advocated by the new
material ecocriticism (see Iovino and Oppermann 2014). Both Garrard’s and West-
ling’s volumes reach out towards a transnational scale from an Anglo-American eco-
critical background, while the Cambridge Global History, which of course follows a
different format and scholarly purpose, extends its scope onto a global scale. Another
survey of the field that is relevant but also substantially different in its conception is
Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William P. Gleason, and
David Naguib Pellow (2016). It shares the aim of presenting “the central terms and
debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental
studies” (Adamson, Gleason, Pellow). But in its structure based on sixty keywords,
it differs from the present handbook in that it deliberately takes the unavoidable
contingency of selection as its organizing principle, zooming in more thoroughly on
single environmental issues from various disciplinary angles, while at the same time
expanding its scope beyond ecocriticism into the “environmental social sciences, sus-
tainability sciences, and the sciences of nature” (Adamson, Gleason, Pellow). Each of
these survey collections, then, has its distinct profile and it makes sense to assume
a mutually complementary rather than a simply competitive relationship between
these volumes.
2 Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Against this background, a volume such as the present handbook needs to be as
wide-ranging and inclusive as possible but also to make a distinctive contribution to
the existing and growing corpus of surveys and handbooks. The inevitable limitations
of any overview of the field can be turned to advantage if the specific frames and
scholarly contexts on which the respective collection is based are explicitly acknowl-
edged. The most visible marker of distinction in comparison with other survey
volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology in the handbook’s
title. Cultural ecology is an approach to literary and cultural studies that has emerged
from German and European ecocritical theory (see Goodbody and Rigby 2011) but has
its roots and ramifications in transnational contexts as well. In this sense of a specific
paradigm of literary studies (see Zapf 2008, 2016), cultural ecology is represented by
a separate chapter and is a frame of reference for a number of other contributions as
well. Yet the linking of ecocriticism with cultural ecology in the title is also meant in
a broader sense to convey the shared assumption underlying all contributions in one
way or another that the cultural dimension is an indispensable part of contemporary
4 Hubert Zapf
ecological knowledge landscapes, and that the critical, explorative, and transforma-
tive contribution of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity is essential
to the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. The reference to cultural
ecology suggests that it is not enough for ecocriticism to deal with the interrelation
between texts and external natural ecosystems, but that ecocriticism also needs to
explore the cultural ecosystems of language, literature, and other art forms in three
basic respects: in their co-evolutionary interrelation with natural ecosystems; in their
mutual interactivity and cross-influences with other cultural ecosystems; and in their
autopoetic self-organization (see Luhmann 1989) which, in the case of literature and
art, is inseparable from questions of form, aesthetics, and textuality. In the view of
cultural ecology, even while natural evolution always remains a subliminal presence
in cultural evolution, the latter has gained its own dynamics, which qualitatively –
though not ontologically – differentiates it from the natural evolution from which it
has emerged (see Bateson 1991, 2002; Finke 2006).
For ecocritical literary studies this means thinking natural and cultural ecologies
together without reducing them to each other, to take both their difference and their
interrelatedness into account as necessary conditions of their theoretical and textual
explorations. This has consequences for the disciplines and epistemologies of eco-
logical knowledge as well: While inter- and transdisciplinary work is required in any
ecological context, an awareness of the differences between distinct histories and cul-
tures of knowledge is equally necessary. This is true for the differences between the
methodologies of the empirical-material ecological sciences and of the humanities,
but also between historical cultures, scholarly disciplines, and other forms of ecocul-
tural knowledge. The two basic axioms of an ecological epistemology, connectivity
and diversity, need to be taken seriously both in the ways in which ecocritical issues
and subjects are explored and in the ways in which ecocriticism positions itself within
the wider spectrum of contemporary academic disciplines.
This linking of ecocriticism and cultural ecology as a co-defining frame of the
present collection entails an extension of the once predominantly Anglo-American
definition of the field to philosophical, theoretical, and eco-aesthetic perspectives
from continental Europe, and to transcultural conversations with non-Western eco-
logical knowledge cultures worldwide. The addition of ‘culture’ in the name of the
European branch of ASLE, the European Association for the Study of Literature,
Culture and Environment (EASLCE), indicates a more general transatlantic differ-
ence of emphasis on the cultural, textual, and semiotic mediation rather than the
immediate accessibility of ecological issues as a shared feature of European ecocrit-
icism compared to its American counterpart. While this programmatic difference
in names may have involved a “conscious declaration of independence” and an
attempt at “overturning Anglo-American dominance” (Garrard 2014, 4) at the time
when EASLCE was founded in 2004, it is also evident that European ecocriticism
since then has become part of an interrelated field of transatlantic and indeed global
0 Introduction 5
ecocritical activities, and this transnational and global dimension, alongside regional
and national varieties, is likewise reflected in the conception of the present volume.
A further feature that results from the conjunction of ecocriticism with cultural
ecology is a special attention to the contribution of literary texts and other aesthetic
cultural artifacts to ecological knowledge. In accordance with the series program of
the De Gruyter Handbooks in English and American Studies: Text and Theory, the rela-
tionship of theory to text is a particular focus of the contributions, which aim at the
mutual illumination of texts by theoretical models and of theories by textual analysis.
In this way, both the ecocritical potential of theory and the ecocultural potential of
texts can be more succinctly validated than by either merely theoretical or merely
literary-textual approaches.
3 M
etaphors Conceptualizing the Field: The Wave,
the Palimpsest, the Rhizome
Within these specific premises of its intention, scope, conception, and positioning in
the scholarly ecocritical community, the handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey
of some of the most significant trends and directions in contemporary ecocriticism for
scholars and students as well as for a general public. It is at this point that a few words
are in order concerning the epistemic conceptualization of the field that governs the
structure of the handbook. In surveys of ecocriticism, three metaphors have been
characteristically employed to conceptualize the field.
One such major ‘conceptual metaphor’ (Lakoff and Johnson) has been the wave
metaphor, with which different phases of ecocritical emergence and evolution have
been described in something like the following sequence (Buell 2005; Adamson and
Slovic 2009):
(1) A first wave dominating the early 1990s, in which ecocriticism positioned itself
against the presumed worldlessness of the then prevalent paradigm of post-
structuralism; postulated a realist epistemology; focused on place as a central
eco-ethical category of texts and scholarship; endorsed a concept of nature as
wilderness; based scholarship on personal experience and environmental activ-
ism; relied on a content-oriented concept of environmental writing as a truthful
mimetic representation of the extratextual world; preferred nonfictional nature
writing over fictional, imaginative texts; confided in the authority of ecological
science; and was more or less confined to an Anglo-American canon of texts;
(2) A second wave emerging at around the turn of the twenty-first century, in which
various directions of cultural studies, along with constructivist versions of crit-
ical discourse analysis, were adapted to ecocriticism; the valorization of wilder-
ness was complemented by a broader concept of nature and environment that
included urban ecologies; the corpus of environmentally relevant texts was
6 Hubert Zapf
extended from nature writing to potentially all other genres and artistic media; a
more skeptical attitude was developing to the truth claims of the natural sciences;
and the culturally monolithic canon was revised and expanded from a variety of
perspectives such as ecofeminism, multiethnicity, ecopsychology, and environ-
mental justice;
(3) A third wave beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in which
boundaries of national literatures were transcended towards an “internationally
relative and comparative framework” (Murphy 2000, 58); the initial resistance to
critical theory was replaced by active engagement with and broad-scale integra-
tion of theory into ecocritical work; the activist strand of ecocritical work became
stronger, as did attention to the ecological implications of personal and commu-
nal lifestyles (see Slovic 2012); environmental justice and other forms of political
ecocriticism became an ever more visible part of the ecocritical project, as in the
alliance of ecocriticism with postcolonialism, material feminism, queer studies,
and science studies; new emphasis was placed on materiality and post-anthro-
pocentric thought as manifested in material ecocriticism (see Iovino and Opper-
mann 2014); the range of environmental analysis widened from local, regional,
and national scales to a planetary scale (see Heise 2008), as epitomized by global
challenges such as climate change and the Anthropocene.
In fact, the increasing critical-creative alliance with the natural sciences and with
overarching theories of evolution, culture, and transdisciplinary assemblages of
knowledge in these most recent developments has already led to talk of a ‘fourth
wave’ of ecocriticism (see Marland 2013) – showing that this is an ongoing process
of continual emergence and innovation that cannot be captured or closed off in any
isolating category or linear-causal logic.
Obviously, such lists can never be fully accurate or complete. Many of these ten-
dencies overlap, and each has its own history that often predates the official advent
of ecocriticism. There have been objections to such summarizing accounts from early
on, on the grounds that important contributions such as ecofeminism were missing
(see Gaard 2011) and that the neat sequential arrangement evoked the false impres-
sion of a coherent and teleological evolution of the field. A linear narrative of eco-
critical thought from supposedly naïve and unsophisticated origins to ever more
elaborate stages of continually advancing ecological knowledge would indeed be a
reductionist version of a much more multifaceted story. There has been ecocritical
thought before ecocriticism, which would not have been possible without the rich
heritage of environmental writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in
fact reaches back even further not only to the proto-ecological thought of romanti-
cism but to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and to classical antiquity, as well as
to the rich ecological heritage of non-Western cultural traditions (see Westling 2014;
Garrard 2014). To retain the imagery of the wave, there are not just three (or four), but
a great number of overlapping, crisscrossing, and mutually traversing waves, which
0 Introduction 7
are difficult to isolate from each other, suggesting a multilinear genealogy of diverse
currents and directions rather than any unilinear narrative of origin. What is more,
these currents and directions are not simply moving onward but react to and mingle
with the other waves in a mutually transforming manner. As Scott Slovic (2010, 5)
observes, “the waves do not simply end when a new wave begins.”
Having said that, a shorthand summary of recent ecocriticism in terms of major
‘waves’ does serve for a first orientation, revealing that significant changes have been
taking place in the past three decades. It shows, even at a cursory glance, that ecocrit-
icism has developed from a marginal phenomenon in literature and culture depart-
ments into an institutionalized academic field; that the sheer quantity of research
activities, study programs, and publications has been growing exponentially; that
ecocriticism has transformed from a regional and national into a transnational and
global phenomenon; and that increasing diversification and interdisciplinary open-
ness have led to an unprecedented multiplication of approaches, methods, subjects,
and epistemic frames. In Louise Westling’s summarizing account, “increasingly
complex and theoretically sophisticated analyses of environmental literature have
come to dominate the field by its third decade” (Westling 2014, 6).
The image of the wave, however, is only one of three such ‘conceptual metaphors’
in which the structure and dynamics of the field have been described. While the wave
metaphor, which is taken from the domain of nature, indicates the sequential dynam-
ics and continually evolving innovational potential of the field, another guiding
metaphor that has been used to describe the various directions of ecocriticism is that
of the palimpsest, which is taken from the domain of culture and writing. Through
this metaphor, the simultaneous, though not always equally visible presence of dif-
ferent, multi-layered versions of ecocritical thought in their historical-cultural depth
is more adequately expressed: “Most currents set in motion by early ecocriticism
continue to run strong, and most forms of second-wave revisionism involve build-
ing on as well as quarreling with precursors” (Buell 2005, 17). The palimpsest image
connotes the agency and cultural mediation of language, text, and interpretation,
rather than merely a quasi-natural force, as the driving principle of historical and
epistemic change. A more appropriate account of ecocritical history might therefore
be achieved by blending the sequential, innovational dynamics of the wave image
with the historical reflexivity of the palimpsest image, and the manifest ‘pheno-texts’
of contemporary ecocriticism with the latent ‘geno-texts’ on which they are inscribed
(“Palimpsest”).
Still another metaphor through which the domain of ecocritical thought has
been conceptualized is the rhizome. To speak of a ‘rhizomic’ trajectory or genea
logy of ecocriticism, as DeLoughrey and Oppermann have suggested in the contexts
of postcolonial and postmodern ecocriticism respectively (see DeLoughrey 2005;
Oppermann 2010), goes beyond the conceptual range of the other two metaphors,
taking into account many different, decentralized cultural-historical sources of eco-
critical thought. The rhizome is a concept with which Deleuze and Guattari describe
8 Hubert Zapf
a non-hierarchical web of multiple, distinct, but interrelated agencies: “As a network

of multiple threads, the rhizome has interconnected living fibres without any central
unit” (Oppermann 2010, 19). It is “composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). This appears as a particularly
apt image in the domain of ecocriticism, as it indicates both, the diversity of local,
regional, and national manifestations, and the transnational and transdisciplinary
connectivities of ecological thought.
It seems to me that each of these metaphorical conceptualizations of the field
has its own explanatory value for a survey of ecocriticism – the wave metaphor for
its attention to shifting paradigms and successive phases of innovation; the palimp-
sest metaphor for its attention to historical reflexivity and deep-time complexity; and
the rhizome metaphor for its attention to de-centered ramifications and transnational
cross-currents of ecological thought. Within their different frames, they help describe
ecocriticism as a vibrant field of diverse competing ideas and directions and yet also
as a shared, large-scale scholarly project with its own history, paradigms, and discur-
sive codes. All three of these conceptual metaphors have influenced the conception
and organization of the present volume.
4 Structure of the Handbook

On its most general level, the handbook is organized along features associated with
characteristic innovations of third wave ecocriticism as described above. It reflects
recent transformations of the field generated by the sharply increased importance of
theory, of interdisciplinary work, of transnational and ecoglobal perspectives, of litera-
ture and the aesthetic, and of diverse genres and media. Part I, “Ecocritical Theories of
Culture and Literature,” takes account of the turn to theory which has characterized
ecocriticism especially in the twenty-first century. The initial ecocritical resistance to
theory has been superseded by an explicit dialogue and, indeed, a highly productive
alliance of ecocriticism with cultural and literary theory, as demonstrated in chap-
ters on biosemiotics, phenomenology, Deleuzean eco-logics, social systems theory,
philosophical aesthetics, and cultural ecology respectively. Building and expanding
on this theoretical turn in ecocritical thought, Part II, “Issues and Directions of Con-
temporary Ecocriticism,” indicates the range and growing importance of transdisci-
plinary issues and approaches, offering an array of political, postcolonial, ecofemi-
nist, biocultural, animal studies, posthuman, and climate change approaches. Part
III, “Between the Local and the Global: Cultural Diversity vs. Eco-Cosmopolitanism,”
explores the turn to transnational and ecoglobal frames that has come to complement
the emphasis on the local and national in early ecocriticism, bringing together con-
tributions on American, German, Italian, Mediterranean, Francophone, Latin Ameri-
can, South East Asian, African, and Chinese ecocriticism, as well as on ecoglobalism
0 Introduction 9
and the Anthropocene. Part IV, “Ecologies of Literary Communication,” reflects the
increased attention to the contribution of literary aesthetics and communication to
ecological knowledge that has become another characteristic feature of the recent
ecocultural discourse. It provides chapters on teaching, emotions, trauma, chrono-
topes, cultural memory, and translation as important dimensions of literary ecology.
Part V, “Genre and Media Ecologies,” accounts, albeit only in exemplary selection,
for the diversification and productivity of creative forms of ecological engagement in
different genres and media by supplying chapters on ecocinema, ecomusicology, and
visual art.
On a less visible level, the handbook and its contributions are also shaped by the
palimpsest metaphor. Not only are second and first wave positions implicitly present
in currently dominating trends, but proto-ecological thought before the recent aca-
demic institutionalization of ecocriticism is continually referred to and incorporated
in the various contributions. In Part I, the historical genealogy and intertextual deep
structure of contemporary theories is foregrounded especially in the contributions on
romanticism, eco-phenomenology, and eco-aesthetics, but is also an intrinsic part of
the argument in the chapters focusing on biosemiotics and cultural ecology. In Part
II, the multilayered historical emergence of different cultures of ecological knowledge
is acknowledged in sociopolitical, postcolonial, ecofeminist, biocultural, and ecocrit-
ical animal studies contexts. In Part III, the contributions from a variety of ecocritical
approaches on a worldwide scale likewise involve a reflexive awareness of their his-
torical genealogies and culturally sedimented intertextualities in the sense of Julia
Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, in which “the pheno-text is the surface phenome-
non of a text present before us, whereas the geno-text is the operation which engen-
ders the pheno-text, [which] is the cause of its genesis” (“Palimpsest”). This applies
particularly to the chapters on the ‘palimpsestuous multiplicity’ (“Palimpsest”) of
Venice as a material-cultural text and on ancient traditions forming deep-time ‘geno-
texts’ to the ‘pheno-texts’ of modern Indian, African, and Chinese ecocriticism. In
Part IV, the analysis of ecocritical aspects of literary communication reaches back
to reception aesthetics, modernist trauma literature, and even the ancient rhetorical
figure of the ‘loci memoriae’ as references of ecocultural memory studies. In Part V,
the palimpsest metaphor similarly indicates longer-term genealogies that have made
the emergence of contemporary intermedial eco-aesthetic practices possible.
Finally, the handbook’s conceptualization of the ecocritical field is also influ-
enced by the rhizome metaphor. This is manifested, first and foremost, in the mani-
fold cross-references between the various chapters beyond the confines of the sepa-
rate sections, which constitute a field of multiple interrelated “directions in motion”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21) that, while each of them offers a singular viewpoint,
cannot be contained within one single unit or frame of discourse. In no way, there-
fore, are the individual contributions meant to be completely subsumed under the
headings of the sections in which they have been assembled. Rather, each of them
represents its own nodal point in the ecocritical discourse, which always exceeds any
10 Hubert Zapf
fixed place in the ecocritical topography, spiraling out into the topics and theories
covered in other chapters, and connecting ‘transversally’ (see Murphy 2013) across
the boundaries of the various sections. Different genealogies of ecocritical thought
in various scholarly disciplines are presented, which open towards but do not simply
dissolve into larger networks of transdisciplinary dialogue. Different ‘rhizomic’ roots
and trajectories of ecocritical thought are laid bare across diverse national, regional,
epistemic, medial, and aesthetic ecological cultures that are explored in their shared
potential, without presuming any monocultural or monoystemic unity of the field.
Biosemiotics is different from but resonates with phenomenology, ecological aesthet-
ics, cultural ecology, and material ecocriticism; postcolonial ecocriticism overlaps
with but has its own agendas in relation to environmental justice, ecofeminist, or
climate change ecocriticism; European notions of eco-aesthetics show astonishing
affinities to but are nevertheless profoundly different from aesthetic conceptions of
non-Western cultures such as Chinese eco-aesthetics; critical animal studies share
some concerns with but also diverge from posthuman approaches of ecocriticism.
All of these directions are distinct yet interconnected in multiple ways, and it is in
these vibrant cross-currents and mutual resonances between individual contributions
that the internal dynamics and scholarly productivity of the ecocritical field consists.
Many of these cross-references are mentioned in the chapters, and some especially
relevant ones are explicitly marked in the text to make this transversal connectivity
visible. Others remain necessarily implicit, and it will be up to the readers of this
volume to fill the gaps and provide such links, and thereby participate in the ongoing
process of dialogue, reflection, and interpretation in which the field of ecocriticism
is currently evolving, and which the present volume tries to make accessible in both
informative and inspiring ways.
5 B
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12 Hubert Zapf
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0 Introduction 13
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14 Hubert Zapf
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0 Introduction 15
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Part I Ecocritical Theories of Culture and Literature
Wendy Wheeler
1 T
he Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic
Abductions of Biosemiotics
Abstract: This chapter argues that a biosemiotic understanding of life helps us to
understand that all organisms, not only humans, are communicative and engaged in
semiotic interpretation, and have teleological, self-organised purposes in co-evolu-
tionary dialogue with their environments. The chapter further argues that this co-evo-
lutionary biosemiotic account of all living organisms – bacteria, plants, fungi, human
and nonhuman animals – helps us to avoid the twin pitfalls of the mind-body dualism
and nominalist idealism that has gripped modernity from its seventeenth-century
start. In doing so, this contribution describes how semiotic scaffolding is used in bio-
logical development and evolution in ways that are essentially poetic and abductive.
In this way the chapter advances a nonreductionist, nondualistic, processual, co-evo-
lutionary, ecological and realist, naturo-cultural theory of organismic meanings, pur-
poses and knowledge.
Key Terms: Biosemiotics, meaning, teleology, poetry, abduction, semiotic scaffold-

ing, Reformation, umwelt, realism, nominalism, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jesper Hoff-
meyer, John Deely, Seamus Heaney
[…] poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture
to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds,
where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried
city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. (Heaney 2002, 14)
1 B
iosemiotics as the Bridge between Nature and
Culture
One important purpose of religion is to address both fears of death and also transcend-
ent longings such as the desire for cosmic meaning and understanding. But another
of its important and related functions is to address the moral life, and to provide
answers to questions such as “How should the good life be lived?,” “What should
the relationship be between human beings?” and “What should the relationship be
between human beings and nonhuman nature?” In other words, religion is a way of
grounding social, cultural and natural relations. It offers to fix one of self-conscious
mankind’s more pressing existential questions, one that is as pressing for science as
it is for metaphysics, and that concerns the possibility and nature of the bridge (if
one exists at all) between subjective experience and objective being. Even the child
20 Wendy Wheeler
will soon encounter the question “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” As is well known,
that dividing chasm has run through Western conceptions of reality since Descartes
and, before him and informing him, Plato. Monotheistic religions build that bridge by
placing the unshakeable strength of its foundations and its carrying capacity between
the two shores of self and not-self in a transcendent god in whom, and according to
doctrine, distinctions and meanings are all held firm.
In the philosophy of modernity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative seeks an answer
to the moral aspects of this problem which does not rely on a transcendent god. He
does this by grounding what it is right to do in the human capacity to reason about
the good. The categorical imperative means to will only what you can will to be uni-
versally the case. This is how morality can be grounded in a godless world. This view
has informed the development of the ideas and laws of Human Rights and of Equality
of all before the law in Western cultures, although clearly the Christian influence is
visible. Accordingly, many people argue that such rights are not accepted as ration-
ally true by all human beings. Many across the world evidently also believe that it is
safer to place (or to keep) the sources of morality and right action outside of fragile
human definitions and in the realm of the unassailable divine. In a post-Enlighten-
ment age, conscious reasoning is no longer accepted as the sole motivation guiding
human thought and behaviour; warriors in opposing camps, both secular and reli-
gious, become ever more fractious and intransigent.
The Categorical Imperative was based on the nominalistic assumption that no
direct access to reality as it really is (noumena) can be accomplished by human sub-
jects. The latter have access to phenomenal experience alone, and nothing guaran-
tees correspondence between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. The effects of
nominalism (one side of the nominalist versus realist ‘battle’ between the ancients
and moderns which took place in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
A. D.) were to lead to both the Protestant Reformation and also to the development of
modern science. This latter was largely effected during the seventeenth century on
the basis of contemporary beliefs that Adam’s fall had made human beings subject
to potentially illimitable error. This meant that nominalist doctrine assured all who
accepted it that subjective experience itself was not a source of knowledge because
every perception and thought might well be simply a human-made fiction. This led to
the scientific emphasis on empirical research, although even this had to be rescued
from nominalist doubt by Francis Bacon (himself a nominalist). Bacon found himself
forced to counter such catastrophic Protestant pessimism by arguing that the Fall
“affected only man’s moral rectitude: it did not alter his sensory acuity or the things
his senses observed” (Poole 2005, 2; Wheeler 2014b).
Another way, though, has been proposed through this apparent impasse, both
before and after these typically modern nominalist conceptions: this other way is that
of the bridge of living semiosis which joins all organisms’ experiences to the world
they inhabit – even if only partially. This way of thinking began to be explored by
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A. D.), and was developed during the Middle Ages in
Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century recognition that “concepts (both perceptual and

intellectual) are signs formally” (Deely 2015; Deely 2009). It was finally more com-
prehensively understood, by John Poinsot in the seventeenth century, in terms of a
triadic semiotic relation necessary to meaning, although this came too late to stop
the Cartesian move and the dualism inherent in the tradition of Western metaphys-
ics (Deely 2001; Deely 2009). More or less lost for the next two centuries, a semiotic
understanding was rearticulated and developed in the philosophy of American scien-
tist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in the nineteenth century. Finally,
in our own time the understanding of the centrality of semiosis and meaning-making
entered contemporary biology, in the form of a semiotic biology known as biosemiot-
ics; this offered a mode of understanding that could answer the problems posed, and
the questions unanswered, by the dominant mechanistic approach (Favareau 2010;
see also ↗2 Earth’s Poesy).1
Semiotics offers an account of the world of living organisms in which what is
external and internal (whether things or ideas), both subjective and (supposedly)
objective, are treated by ‘readers’ (whether fungi, plants, nonhuman animals or
human animals, cells and organelles, organs and body systems generally) equally
as semiotic objects. In its most straightforward form, it is in the nature of the sign, as
described by Peirce and by John Poinsot before him, that it makes a bridge of meaning
between object and subject (Deely 2001). As Thomas A. Sebeok (2001, vii), one of the
earliest re-discoverers of both Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, put it, “[i]t is a crude
mistake to oppose nature and culture, organism to environment. ‘Culture,’ so called,
is implanted in nature; the environment or Umwelt, is a model generated by the
organism. Semiosis links them.” Because the world is never experienced directly, but
is always mediated by a modelling of experience (even cells and bacteria have expe-
rience, however minimal (Hoffmeyer 2008a) which excludes the perception of what
is unnecessary to the organism (for example, visually: ultraviolet light in the case of
humans, but not in the case of birds and some insects), it follows that mediation takes
the form of representations (the model stands in for what causes it) which can func-
tion as signs (i.e., can have significance). Were these multitudes of suprasubjective
signs not sufficiently successful in their bridging function (and this is what we must
mean by realism), there would be no life, and certainly no evolution.
In the Peircean semiotic account, the sign is, more accurately, constituted in an
irreducibly triadic sign relation. This sign relation is constituted between 1. the object
(the foundation of the sign), 2. the representamen (the sign vehicle: that aspect of a
sign which any living thing is able to grasp or potentially make sense of) and 3. the
interpretant (the meaning of the sign whether expressed as a human interpretation
or an act or acts or, in all forms of life, some change or other, whether in the chemi-
1 For a non-semiotic account of the problem of the machine metaphor (including the computer/pro-
gramme version) in the life sciences, see Nicholson 2014.
22 Wendy Wheeler
cal or nervous system or in behaviour, which makes a difference2). This latter is why
Peirce’s philosophy is called pragmatism (or pragmaticism as he later came to call it
because he thought it had been misunderstood by William James, John Dewey and
others). Each part of the triad is capable of generating different semiotic pathways
dependent, generally, on umwelt and context; but it is relatively easy to see that the
human use of signs will tend to produce signs and interpretants as part of a dynamic
process of growing more insight and more knowledge. This is obviously the case in
science, and usually part of the aim in the arts and the humanities – although less
directly. This process has both nonconscious and self-conscious elements, as I come
on to discuss. Animals use signs, but do not know that they do so. Timo Maran (2011)
has emphasised the use of animal mimicry in this regard (the carrying over of one
sign use to another via imitation), and Maran and Karel Kleisner (2010) have together
suggested the use of the terms “semiotic selection” and “semiotic co-option” in order
to emphasise the agency of organisms in the processes of evolution.
Meaning is always a kind of doing.3 The meaning of a sign is to be found in the
changes (actions or as above) which it brings about. Clearly, the semiotic object can
be said to have an original form inasmuch as it really exists in time and space as
intentional, even where (very often via the developmental movements of metaphors
[Lakoff and Johnson 2003]) it has become an ‘internal’ semiotic object in the form
of an idea. The representamen takes account of the fact that the object is subject
to change inasmuch as it can grow in our understanding of it. This will potentially
2 See Gregory Bateson’s (2000, 459) definition of information as “a difference which makes a differ-
ence.” To think through an example, imagine, for instance, a molehill. What is this object, as rep-
resentamen in the triad of relations which make up a sign, in the different worlds (Umwelten) of a
human gardener, a blackbird or robin, an ant, an airline pilot flying high above the earth? For the pilot
it isn’t a semiotic object at all (unless he or she is thinking about moles in their garden while flying);
for the blackbird and robin, it’s a meal site; for the ant it’s either nothing or, possibly, a disruption or
a potential nest site. For the gardener, it is a disruption which, depending on his or her inclinations,
will either be tolerated or, potentially, lead to the invention of mole traps. The invention of mole traps
may, in turn, lead to other inventions or to the modification of different kinds of traps. For all the an-
imals (human and nonhuman, and with the probably exception of the airline pilot while flying), the
molehill as semiotic object will mean different things; it will call up different representamens and dif-
ferent interpretants and thus may well establish new potential habits of doing or thinking in different
umwelten. Meaning, for all living things, is governed by habit (“nature’s tendency to take habits,” as
Peirce put it). Creativity lies in the extent to which habits can be shifted, whether intentionally or not,
by environmental changes (howsoever caused: physically, chemically, ideationally; by climate, other
living things, paintings, books, music, politics, wars and so on), and adapted to. Societies (human
or nonhuman) have evolved as ways of managing and sharing semiotic and adaptive life in all its
interpretive realist richness.
3 Of course, humans and other organisms can deceive. Humans say one thing (“I love you”) and do
another (cheat, for example), and many creatures use camouflage and mimicry to say “I am a leaf” or
“I am a poisonous and foul-tasting creature” when, in fact, they are not. The real meaning lies in what
is actually done rather than in what is ‘claimed.’
change the interpretant accordingly. Indeed, Peirce noted that both the object and the
interpretant have a dynamic aspect (De Waal 2013, see esp. chapter 5, “Semeiotics, or
the Doctrine of Signs”). Signs can and do grow. As Peirce himself said,
every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of
the symbol changes slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and
throws off old ones […]. Every symbol is, in its origin, either an image of the idea signified, or a
reminiscence of some individual occurrence, person or thing, connected with its meaning, or is
a metaphor. (1998a, 264)
A metaphor is, of course, a real thing, itself a bridge in the growth of meanings, and
very far from ‘merely’ a figure of speech.
It is easy to see that the Peircean semiotic is a processual and evolutionary semi-
otic of life: the growth of semiosis in nature is what makes creative responsiveness
and adaptation by the organism possible; semiosic growth in human culture pro-
duces more knowing.4 From this, it is also easy to see that the relationship between
object and subject is bridged by the action of signs. As the American philosopher John
Deely has argued, it is in the nature of the sign to be relational and intersubjective. It
is worth quoting Deely in full here in his account of the seventeenth-century Portu-
guese monk Poinsot’s breakthrough in semiotic understanding:
4 Some readers may notice a passing similarity between Peirce’s idea of potentially endless semiosis
and Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of the endless movement of the signifier. Derrida, who spent a year
on a grant at Harvard during the 1950s reading Peirce (Pettigrew 1996), commented on this similarity
in Of Grammatology (Derrida 1974, 48–49) where he noted that “Peirce goes very far in the direction
that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified” (49). One difference between
them, though, is that Peirce was a (qualified) realist who believed that semiosis was a process of in-
creasing complexity in which more knowledge about reality was generated (although not always and
not in all periods of time). Derrida, on the other hand, was a nominalist who believed that all this se-
miotic activity was a fiction produced by human minds about a reality that was unknowable. Another
difference, of considerable significance from a biosemiotic perspective, was that Peirce considered
semiosis to perfuse the entire universe, and thus to be an important way of understanding cosmic,
biological and cultural evolution. For Derrida, such biological and then cultural continuism between
humans and other organisms was something concerning which, despite all the scientific evidence,
Derrida remained inexplicably sceptical. In “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, Derrida expressed
suspicion about the special interests involved in erasing the “abyssal” difference between humans
and other organisms, and about the related “sinister connotations” of “geneticism” which he clearly
associated with Social Darwinism and sociobiology (Derrida 2002, 398). Needless to say, a biosemiot-
ically informed view of natural and cultural processes has nothing at all to do either with eugenics or
with the Neo-Darwinian or sociobiological reductive emphasis on genes as deterministic ‘blueprints’
for organisms. (See, for example, the contributors to The Third Way of Evolution: http://www.thethird-
wayofevolution.com/). For further discussion on these points, see Westling 2014, esp. ch. 2.
24 Wendy Wheeler
In effecting his answer to the profound question of how the being of sign is able to bridge
nature and culture, thought and being, Poinsot begins his Treatise with exactly the point that
Augustine’s famous and first attempt at a general definition of sign had presupposed. Instead
of simply stating what a sign is, Poinsot asks rather what a sign must be in order to function
in the way we all experience it to function, namely as indifferent to the distinction between
real and imaginary being, truth and falsehood, or as conveying indifferently cultural and
natural objects. To answer this question Poinsot distinguishes sharply between representation
and signification. This distinction becomes his basis for his differentiating between signs and
objects: an object may represent itself, but a sign must represent other than itself. Thus rep-
resentation is involved in the being proper to a sign as the foundation for the relation of signifi-
cation, but the signification itself always and necessarily consists in the relation as such, which
is over and above that characteristic of a material being or a psychological state of an organism
upon which the relation itself is founded.
Signification is opposed from the outset to whatever exists as an individual material entity or
aspect thereof, that is to subjective being in its entire extent. Signification is always something
over and above its foundation in some individual being or material object, something super-
ordinate thereto, something of its very nature intersubjective, either actually or prospectively.
Signs act through their foundation, but the actual sign as such is not the foundation but the rela-
tionship which exists over and above that foundation linking it as a sign-vehicle to some object
signified. (Deely 2001, 430–431)
There is a knowable world, but our knowledge of it is imperfect and incomplete, and
is born out of a dialogic engagement with it; this grows mind and knowledge. Bodies
and environments make minds, which in turn make more world. As Søren Brier (2015)
notes, “evolution is neither completely random nor completely mechanical, but is a
development of the reasoning powers of the universe.” Here, too, we can hear echoes
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s sense of an intersubjectivity of all nature, human and
more-than-human, which we have dangerously ignored. As Louise Westling writes
in the present volume concerning the core of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ontology of
world and flesh, “Unless we recover this sense of a wider intersubjective and inter-
dependent reality, our world will perish” (see ↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Liter-
ary Imaginary). You do not imagine the environment which supports you, nor the
microbes which live in and on you, and which keep you alive because 90 % of the DNA
that keeps you going is not your own DNA but theirs. You do not need to imagine these
things because you do not even know about them consciously. Nonetheless, these
symbiotic, communicative and mutualistic bacteria not only keep you alive, but they
also, as Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel (2009, 98) point out, “play an important role in
the development of the host’s intestine, capillary networks, and immune system, as
well as having important consequences for human health.” These unimagined things
are not human-made fictions, and the fact that they have been (and mostly remain)
unthought-of does not in itself seem to affect our deep feelings about the conditions
(which are in fact the conditions of their involvement with us, with and from other
forms of animal and plant life) which feel as though they constitute the rightness
of certain objects and practices and the wrongness of others. A feeling for gardens
and earth, woods and fields, and wild and domesticated animals, an anxiety about
too much technological interference in living processes, an anxiety about the use of
chemicals in agriculture, all these may well derive from a deep sense of the necessary
rightness of our embeddedness in, and dependence upon, Earth’s ecologies.
The thought here is not of cultural evolution as bad and in need of wholesale
repudiation; it is just as natural as any other evolutionary process. Rather it is of the
constraints and opportunities we carry within and without us, as evolutionary levels
which make up our stories and those of life’s nonhuman citizens. There is nothing
inherently progressive about evolution itself. We powerful humans require a touch-
stone by which we can judge what we should and should not do. As Jacques Ellul
(1980) argued many years ago, “can do” is not a good enough reason for doing. We
need a sharper sense of co-evolutionary co-dependence, and of the living thread
of developmental levels that joins the past to the future through every living entity.
Most of all, perhaps, we need to distinguish the ceaseless disturbance of information
from the sign-growing potential of semiosis. To come anywhere near accomplishing
this, we need to address what Anthony Wilden (1980, 240) has called the constraints
embedded in the deep structural codes of damaging societies, not simply “the mes-
sages which constitute the surface structure of the system.” Addressing constraints
of this sort shouldn’t be mistaken for getting rid of them – which, on the basis of
the scaffolded levels of semiotic evolution, is not possible. Addressing, here, means
something much closer to deep understanding (Wheeler 2014c).
The logic of evolution, both natural and cultural, is informational, or, more pre-
cisely, semiotic; it produces a tendency towards what molecular biologist and biose-
miotician Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008a) has called greater and greater extents of ‘semiotic
freedom.’ We know the world imperfectly and incompletely; our knowing is always
framed by our ways of world-modelling, and, like all organisms, these modellings
are constrained by the kinds of organisms-in-environments that we are. This is the
point made by Jakob von Uexküll (1957) when he writes about an umwelt as a spe-
cies-specific signifying environment. Both organism and environment are co-evolv-
ing. Nonetheless, our specifically human kind of striving always lies in the direction
of finding out more. The worlds we model may contain fictions, the models them-
selves may be partly fictional, but still that dialogue, however filtered, remains caught
up with a reality because it has grown, and continues to grow, out of the one made
biosemiotically from the felt being of bacterial cells 3.7 billion years ago in the long
evolutionary line which leads from the first living readers right the way up to the
complex and abstract semiotic being of Homo sapiens. We have a felt life of the body,
and that, in turn, grows what Marilynne Robinson (2010, 35) calls ‘the felt life of the
mind’ (emphasis added). That felt life of body and mind gets through, from sign-bear-
ing and sign-making us to the sign-bearing and sign-making rest of the world because
that is the intersubjective semiotic world we are made from. The bridge it crosses is
the bridge of signs. Were sufficient reality not a part of this biosemiotic conversation,
that biosemiotic evolutionary history could not have taken place. There would be no
life on this planet.
26 Wendy Wheeler
It goes without saying that this does not preclude the possibility of going wrong.
That said, it is in fact very difficult to tell when going wrong can be a possible if circu-
itous route to going right, as the art historian and artist Steve Baker (2013) has argued
about the practice of art. As well as pointing us towards the fruitfulness of art, and
also towards the ways in which we might wish to say that evolution is, itself, a sort
of art equally based on resistance and difficulty (what Peirce called the “Universe
of Secondness”), this also opens up another aspect of Peirce’s evolutionary philos-
ophy. This aspect concerns the role of chance, interpretation and abductive infer-
ence both in human creativity and also, importantly, in the creativity that belongs to
nature itself. The creativity which we find in humans is, of course, semiotic through
and through. It depends in very large part on the semiotics of abduction manifested
in metaphor, metonym and story. But these, too, (and unsurprisingly since nothing
comes from nothing) live in nature before they live in the latter’s evolved form as
human culture (Wheeler 2014a).
2 A
bduction and the Carrying and Growing of
Meaning
Abduction, the carrying of something or someone from one place to another, is
another way of talking about the movement which humans call metaphor but which
is common to all life. What this movement introduces is the possibility of new func-
tions, or meanings, biologically, and new meanings and new insights and functions
culturally. Language evolution clearly proceeds in this way (Wheeler 2012), but almost
all the metaphors through which language grows become gradually “dead”, or unno-
ticed, over time. Poetic uses of language, of course, are precisely organised so as to be
(at best) alive, and to resist this entropic tendency.
The underlying foundation of abduction is the play between similarity and dif-
ference; the similarity allows for the movement, the carrying across, from one ‘place’,
function, image or sign relation to another sufficiently similar to bear the trans-
posed function or meaning; but the difference in location or context introduces new
meaning or function. The similarity allows for the carrying or bearing of one meaning
to another. In that carrying-across, the meaning is changed or made new by the dif-
ference it marks; this may be of place or of association, but a new light is thereby
cast on an old meaning. The same thing happens in biological systems, and there we
call it evolution. To use a simple example of cultural and linguistic metaphor, we are
able to say (what was once a new thing) that a woman ‘sailed’ into a room because,
in the days when women wore long and full skirts, the skirts of a woman entering a
room with vigour and style billowed out like the sails of ship moving powerfully, and
with wind-filled sails, through the ocean. The figurehead at the ship’s bow, possibly
originating in this metaphor itself, strengthened the association. We can see here that
what is at work in the possibility of metaphor is an iconic sign, i.e. a sign based on
similarity (sails/skirts). At some point in time (very, very long ago), the idea that a
woman might have the qualities of a powerful sailing vessel must have changed the
cultural idea of what a woman might be capable of. Equally, of course, the possibility
of a ship “breasting the waves” must have arisen from a reflection backwards from the
new metaphor/insight to the old one. This is a simple example of the ways in which
present perceptions can change antecedent ones. This, too, is an aspect of develop-
mental biology where it is called downward causation (Andersen et al. 2000).
Abduction (or metaphor) takes the form of seeing the same phenomenon (or
semiotic object) from a new perspective. In its form as metaphor, the carrying trans-
gresses the deductive logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle, for it is both one thing
(a woman) and another (a sailing ship) at the same time. As Paul Ricoeur writes:
Can one not say that the strategy of language at work in metaphor consists in obliterating the
logical and established frontiers of language, in order to bring to light new resemblances the
previous classification kept us from seeing? In other words, the power of metaphor would be
to break an old categorization, in order to establish new logical frontiers on the ruins of their
forerunners. (2003, 233)
That scientific, aesthetic and cultural creativity involve an initially nonconscious and
meaningful combination of ideas is equally attested by Jacques Hadamard’s (1954, 29)
conclusion that “[i]ndeed, it is obvious that invention or discovery, be it in mathemat-
ics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas.” But, as Hadamard continues,
it also lies in the power of discrimination, of choosing the most fruitful combinations;
this means recognizing significant patterns of similarity and identifying significant
differences in the patterns that connect mind and nature (Bateson 2002). In other
words, the power of growth lies in the “reader”; that may be a human or a nonhuman
organism, or it may also be the organism’s own body (Kull 1998).
Biologically, and rather more mysteriously since we have no idea how it hap-
pened, the migration of the fish’s jawbone in the evolution of the mammalian middle
ear derives from a recognisably similar process to that described by Ricoeur above in
relation to language. The two bones which had been functional for being part of the
fish jaw were replaced by two different bones and left free to migrate to a different
position where they were eventually able to serve the wholly different function of
becoming the “hammer and anvil” bones of the mammalian inner ear. Those bones
once meant ‘jaw’ (and ‘eating’), and later they came to mean ‘ear’ (and ‘hearing’ or
‘listening’). Thus we see that Shakespeare’s metaphor of music as food in Twelfth
Night (Act 1, scene 1) has, in the felt life of his writing mind, prehistoric roots. The
iconic sign ‘function’ or meaning of the jaw bones was similar enough to the needed
‘function’ or meaning of ear bones so that one could be carried across to serve the
other. In the process, and over time, the meaning (from thing for eating to thing for
hearing) was changed. The two bones went, in the process of abductive movement,
through “a difference which makes a difference” (Bateson 2000, 459). But note that
28 Wendy Wheeler
what was being moved, over and above the bones in this instance, was a relationship
(in the form of a function or purpose) both to other parts of the organism and also to
something beyond it and potentially absent (food, sound). We can only make sense
of this radical incompleteness in nature if we understand the semiotic and cybernetic
being of the whole system. It is the system as cybernetic, responsive, semiotic whole –
organisms + umwelten – which calls forth creative and adaptive moves able to acquire
what Peirce called “habit” and what Terrence Deacon (2012, 417) has more recently
called “interpretive reliability.” It is natural selection that, retrospectively so to speak,
provides the normative criterion of the success or failure of organismic tinkering and
chance (2012). It is in this sense also, of the whole system biotic and abiotic, that we
can speak of the agency which animate being comes to grant to inanimate being.
Not only must we thus re-engage with Aristotle’s category of teleological causes
(Rosenblueth et al. 1943), but it is necessary also to bear in mind that a relationship
(to food, to sound) is not in itself a material thing – although it requires material
bearers. Semiosis (including biosemiosis of course) is always relational: both material
and immaterial. This both exposes the weakness of a materialist only account and
also makes the “hard problem” of conscious less of a problem (Chalmers 1995; Nagel
2012). Consciousness is relational and teleological in the cybernetic sense of a rela-
tion within a feedback system which thus alters subsequent responsive and adjustive
movements within the system – as, indeed, occurs in all biosemiotic systems.
Do these metaphors seem to have such a life of their own because, as Hans Blu-
menberg (2010) thought, they carry forward the weight of cultures? In fact, Peirce
(1998b, 394) himself thought that signs do have a life of their own. He also noted
that “it seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should
leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning.” It seems that the universe has
evolved its own necessary openness. Not only does the sign’s incompleteness drive
interpretance forward, but the truth of an idea, its buoyancy, will eventually (and
“eventually” might be several centuries) carry it to the surface:
Many logicians [say] that ideas arise from the consideration of facts in which there are no such
ideas, nor any ideas. That opinion is a superficial one […]. So, those logicians imagine that an
idea has to be connected with a brain, or has to inhere in a “soul”. This is preposterous: the idea
does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea. The soul does for the idea just
what the cellulose does for the beauty of the rose; that is to say, it affords it opportunity. (Peirce
qtd. in Nöth 2014, 185).
All this might possibly suggest that organisms are able, over time, to play a rather
more active part in their own changes than is allowable in the Neo-Darwinian ‘genes
only blueprint’ model which has, until recently, dominated accounts of biological
evolution. “Active” here should not imply self-conscious intent, of course. Reptiles
still have bones in their jaws which are not obviously useful. They remain potential
and untried signs. Before the migration of two of these bones in the lineage which led
to the mammals, what became the hammer and anvil mammalian ear bones may have
been used for a kind of hearing via vibration in the ground. If that was the case then
we would say, in retrospect, that these bones somehow or other found a better place
to be effective in a new and different way. Similar bones which remain in reptile jaws
were simply a potential which was never realised, or developed, as anything else.
For some groups of fish and reptiles at some point in evolutionary history, chance
afforded the possibility of growth, of one habit being broken and of something new
coming into being. The breaking of a jaw-habit allowed the possibility of a new ear-
habit to come into existence. The same potential still applies in human responses to
umwelt change and chance in nature-culture. Organisms are plastic creatures capable
of rejigging themselves and their environments over time. What is needful, perhaps,
for humans is some care about what, precisely, we want ourselves to become. Making
judgements such as this depends in turn upon a proper thoughtfulness also about
what we have been, and about the necessary constraints of form, and of intersub-
jective life, upon which life forms both draw and depend. The power of abduction is
an important element here, for it can change where we stand and, thus, how we see
things. One important matter, however, is that abductions (human and nonhuman)
cannot be willed. They are found things.
It seems likely that nearly all discoveries (which therefore move practice forward,
whether in art and science or in evolutionary growth of every kind natural and cul-
tural) are based on this metaphoric, or abductive, play. Nature, as Denis Noble (2006,
103–104) puts it, invents new metaphors. Mostly, however, these movements of cre-
ation are not conscious, as a very large number of remarks from creative scientists
and artists confirms (Wheeler 2014a). It also seems likely that nonhuman animals
exist almost entirely in a state which moves between abduction and habit, with only
relatively small and limited endeavours possible from them in terms of inductive
testing and deductive thought (of the birds, the corvids seem to demonstrate some of
these capacities). Doubtless there are several species which are more capable of these
more developed forms of cognition than we once thought. Ethologists discover more
and more semiotic cognition (i.e. not simply the automatically habitual behaviour
which most modern science has wrongly ascribed to nonhuman life) almost every
week among nonhuman animals. Humans need, thus, to become much more aware
than we have generally been in the modern period of our confraternity with, as well
as existential dependence upon, the lives of nonhumans on this planet. Hoffmeyer’s
biosemiotic perspective, for instance, has led him to say that all lives in living systems
deserve to be treated as moral subjects. The need for discriminations, he suggests,
might be based on the extents of intrinsic semiotic freedom involved (Hoffmeyer 1996,
139).5
The human uses of abduction, although having animal-like qualities (Peirce
1998c, 217–218), seem much more mysterious. We, it appears, have been able to
5 See also Kull, 2001; Tønnessen, 2003; Tønnessen and Beever, 2015 forthcoming.
30 Wendy Wheeler
turn natural metaphor into something very productive in culture – visual, acoustic
and linguistic metaphor – due to our highly developed use of symbolic abstraction.
Abductive inference is not an act of volition (indeed, volition may impede it [Wheeler
2014b]). It draws upon antecedent ‘animal’ modes of knowing, and belongs to bodily
processes and to the umwelt; that is to say that it is relational and iconic (in the
Peircean sense of iconic signs and “Firstness”), but the human capacity of greater
semiotic freedom means that cultural metaphor is both very fertile and also much
speedier than its precursor forms. Abductions can also take us beyond what we think
and expect. This suggests something quite mysterious. At the very least, it suggests
that there is a logic of discovery at work in the human world which is certainly inter-
subjective and perhaps suprasubjective, as Blumenberg suggested, albeit lodged in
and manifested by individual human beings (Nöth 2014). The phenomenon of simul-
taneous discovery supports this observation such that one can surmise a larger form
to cultural knowledges which, so to speak, carves out their collective developmental
tendencies on the basis of semiotic relations (meanings and purposes) set down in
the past and transformed in the present. This is the strange agency of signs referred
to earlier. Perhaps needless to say, this can only be an effect of formal limits and their
potentials for growth (as with any established morphology) expressed in an autopoi-
etic semiotic teleology, and not determinism.
Marilynne Robinson’s (2010, 34–35) account of ‘the modern malaise,” interest-
ingly, is not that it is the case that “an ebbing away of faith before the advance of
science has impoverished modern experience,” but rather that it might stem from
the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly
authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with
intellectual progress, and the exclusion of felt life from the varieties of thought and art that
reflect the influence of these accounts. (Robinson 2010, 35)
By “the felt life of the mind” Robinson means, she says, its beauty and mystery – some
of those central aspects of subjective being which remain unaccounted for (or very
crudely accounted for) in modern science. Of course, the felt life of the mind-body is,
itself, an oddly motile thing. Also not subject to being willed, it, too, is a found thing.
Presumably, this is Robinson’s version of the ‘hard question’ of consciousness: the
objection, made again quite recently by Nagel (2012) in Mind and Cosmos, that science
will remain radically incomplete until it can include a sufficiently nuanced and sci-
entifically and philosophically adequate account of self-consciousness and human
subjectivity within the ambit of scientific explanation. Nagel, a highly respected
philosopher, received some reviews which seemed to assume that an intelligent
mind couldn’t entertain such a problem without committing itself to some version
of “spiritual” belief. Yet it is hard to see that the scientific commitment to exclusive
materialism enunciated very clearly by Richard Lewontin as follows, isn’t, itself, a
belief commitment:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an under-
standing of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science
in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its
extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for
unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to mate-
rialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a
material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a
priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying
to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in
the door. (Lewontin 1997)
Biosemiotic science can do better here. The insight that mind is semiotic and rela-
tional, so that consciousness is not a material thing but the experience of relation
between objects both material and ideational, is the start of a more nuanced account
of subjective being. This includes, as central, Peirce’s understanding of abductive
inference as the ground of all subsequent logics of discovery. Abduction is the expe-
rience of evolutionary creativity. It is not conscious calculation very explicitly at all,
but is much more the canny opportunism of the purposeful animal. Its achievements,
its solutions, will subsequently be reached far more swiftly in an intensification of
purpose likely to be lodged more firmly in some form of memory. Here we have what
Peirce called the establishment of habit. It was, he believed, a centrally important
fact about nature’s (i.e., including culture’s) tendencies in general (Peirce 1992). Cre-
ative abductions are often born of adaptive pressures, but they also very often have
an element of explorative pleasure and play also. Their possibility certainly benefits
from curiosity and an openness to chance and the world’s turnings. This semiotic
openness to the world and to happenstance, which involves a certain resistance to too
much habit or convention, has certainly been recognised as an important aspect of
living a creative and inventive life (Wheeler 2014b). Both habit and creative openness
to happenstance are necessary.
Abduction (or abductive inference – often in the form of well-informed guesses)
is clearly semiotic and shared to some extent by all living organisms and their evo-
lutionary (and thus developmental) processes. But in humans it has another aspect.
This, something noted by researchers into creative processes in all fields (Wheeler
2014b), largely concerns the very self-conscious effort which goes into preparing the
ground through study and practice which contribute to the well-known period of
gestation, and the organisation of the inspirational experience into desirable forms
(whether in the arts, humanities or sciences) following it. That said, there is clearly
something “blind” or distracted, from the point of view of human experience, about
abduction. One recent study of medical decision making, for example, found that
doctors’ diagnostic capabilities are actually improved when they are distracted (de
Vries et al. 2010). Similarly, we know that vagueness can be a positive virtue (van
Deemter 2010). Quite often abductions happen in dreams or in hypnogogic states.
32 Wendy Wheeler
Sometimes, abductive inferences may be achieved simply in the uninhibited reaching

for a book, the feeling of a strong desire to speak to some individual, or in a million
other uncalculated impulses. Partly this may well be a response driven by noncon-
scious connections (nonconsciously remembered aspects of a poem or other piece of
writing, or of something said by a particular individual) which, provided the impulse
they generate remains uninhibited, drive the individual towards this or that semiotic
object, thus sparking a process of ongoing sign relations. But note what these effects
(and accompanying affects) tell us: that mind is embodied, enworlded and relational;
abductive ideas are tied to the innenwelten and umwelten of creatures.
3 N
ature the Tinkerer
Evolutionary nature, as the biologist François Jacob wrote, is a tinkerer and a brico-
leur (1982, 34). Nature as a ‘bodger’ is echoed in Denis Noble’s thoughts noted above.
If you want to feel evolutionary bodging life going on in your conscious self, imagine
yourself in the position of someone for whom a pressing task has arisen, but for the
solution of which no specific tool or artefact has yet been invented. You will have an
idea of the basic functions this ‘tool-to-be’ must possess, but, because you are not
an engineer and do not have access to the raw materials required to craft this tool ab
initio, all you can do is to look around for ready to hand components from which you
can cobble together something like the thing you have in mind as needful. Fortunately,
because you are a tinkerer and a bodger, you do, however, have at your disposal a
wide array of bits and pieces you have either collected, or have noted in the environ-
ment around you (on the ‘might come in useful later’ basis), which may be capable
of adaptation for use in the task to hand. In particular, you find that piece X could be
moved a bit and jigged alongside piece Y, and that, together combined, they might
well stand the strain of the needed function.
Do you feel the pleasure of this tinkering accomplishment? It is, of course, a
version of the same pleasure experienced by the child who has built a camp in the
garden or woods. It is the pleasure of play. Something like this pleasure (or striving
as Darwin called it) must be fundamental to every part of every living organism. It
tells us how important play is (Brown 2008). It’s a part of all inventiveness, natural
and cultural. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) called its manifestation in humans
‘the play of musement’ – that which goes on primarily in body-minds when they are
guessing, tinkering and bodging imaginatively. That said, it’s also clearly true that
learning to play with material things, as well as with ideas, is an important part of
the learning that makes learning with ideas possible, and sets the stage or makes the
semiotic scaffold (Hoffmeyer 2014, 2015) for learning how to be creative in general.
It is also, let us note again, a process which is on the way to metaphor: a need for
expression arises, and, in order for us to give it form, we must find something that is
like it. If it is a very productive, i.e. creative, likeness, it will not only perform the task
to hand, it will also expand our thoughts about that task, how we think about it, and
even force some principle upon us about this and related tasks. In other words, the
needful similarity will also produce differences, and these two moves of similarity
and difference will launch us on the path of knowledge, first about this particular
part of the universe and then about other ones. The path of inquiry is a wandering
one, but its Ariadne’s thread is traceable; it shows us a pathway from past, through
present to future. It is because of this that Peirce (1998d, 48) declared that the path
of inquiry must never be blocked: “Do not block the path of enquiry.” The wandering
thread guides inquiry at the latter’s most fundamental level where it lives in what
Seamus Heaney calls the pool of the self; it is the motor of metaphor in doing and
thinking, and lies beneath the logic of both artist and scientist. Peirce called it the
logic of abduction; Jacob called it night science:
Day science employs reasoning that meshes like gears […] One admires its majestic arrange-
ments as that of a da Vinci painting or a Bach fugue. One walks about it as in a French formal
garden […] Night science, on the other hand, wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back,
wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it feels its way, questions itself, constantly pulls itself
together. It is a sort of workshop of the possible, where are elaborated what will become the
building materials of science. Where hypotheses take the forms of vague presentiments, of hazy
sensations. Where phenomena are still mere solitary events with no link between them. Where
the plans for experiments have barely taken form. Where thought proceeds along sinuous paths,
tortuous streets, most often blind alleys. At the mercy of chance, the mind frets in a labyrinth,
deluded with messages, in quest of a sign, of a wink, of an unforeseen connection […] What
guides the mind, then, is not logic. It is instinct, intuition. (Jacob 1988, 296)
Along the way, and as time goes by, it might even turn out that this bodging combi-
nation, or a part of the larger contraption it has come to occupy, can actually handle
a couple of other tasks too. Stand back, you old tinkerer, and experience the great
pleasure of your own creative nature in response to the exigencies of fate as they fall
upon you. Welcome to the innovative capacities of natural and cultural evolution.
Sometime later a similar challenge presents itself to you. What do you do? Why of
course, you look for a solution which will repeat the success of your earlier triumph
by making use of similar structures.
But before we move on to further conclusions, let us look more closely at the
experience just engaged with. I shall address two things here. The first is the question
of whether or not the success of ‘Nature the Bricoleur’ can really be accounted for by a
theory of random change and natural selection alone, and in the absence of a theory
of self-generated purposiveness – what Darwin called an organism’s “striving” – and
what is, in fact, life’s teleological imperative (what biologists call evolutionary “func-
tion” or usefulness, by which they mean to disguise the apparently inconvenient fact
that living things are not machines but very clearly demonstrate purposes (Hoffmeyer
2011). At stake here are our views both of the organism (as essentially passive) and
the means and time required for natural selection to work. The second question, not
34 Wendy Wheeler
entirely unrelated, is the kind of thing that is going on when someone (or something
living) tinkers. Importantly, underpinning both discussions will be the well-grounded
biological assumption that the accepted continuities in evolution concern evolution-
ary layers of repetition and difference. Evolution is a process of building upon (i.e.
using developmentally) what has gone before – that is, a repetition of structures and
patterns (all as a tinkerer does it), plus the introduction of some new difference: the
new function, or meaning, which results from the repurposing. The latter may be a
modification of an existing part (the jaw bone of the fish eventually becoming part
of the mammalian inner ear, in the earlier example) or the recombination of ante-
cedently separate parts into a new functional whole (microbes and animals into gut
microbiome co-dependent evolution, for example). But where both questions are
concerned, the biosemiotic dimension to evolutionary and developmental thinking
emphasises the semiosic bridge and continuity right across the (thus false) nature
culture divide. This is the universal life quality of semiosis. All that is present in con-
temporary humans was there, albeit in less developed form, in the life that came
before them.
Living things are not machines. Machines have been evolved by human cultures
as a way of extending animal sensual and (with the development of art and writing
and now the World Wide Web) ideational capacities, and this has led many scientists
to conclude that it is right to call these natural capacities of the organism, which they
have more or less crudely reproduced, machines also. Organisms may have mecha-
nism-like parts and behaviours, but no human-invented machine has the capacity
to reproduce, maintain, grow and change itself via exchange with the environment
in the way that living things do. In particular, no human-produced machine has con-
sciousness and thus adaptability to its environment. To put it more pointedly, no
human produced machine has any choice about its inputs (Kak 2005); it has no body
responding to its environment (although a human can input a facsimile, or model,
of such a thing into a programme). No human yet (or very possibly ever) can detail
(or even be conscious of) all the inputs and outputs of a living body-mind, let alone
all the inputs and outputs of 3.7 billion years of evolution, which is still generating
inputs into and outputs from every living being (albeit constrained within each layer
[Polanyi 1968]). And since a mind is a biocybernetic relationship (a dialogue which
sculpts all concerned) between the innenwelt (meaning generating, signifying inner
world – physical and mental) and umwelt (meaning generating, signifying environ-
ment) of an organism, some proper distinction should be made between the still rel-
atively crude machines made by men and the living “machines” made by evolution.
In distinction, organisms, even the simplest, do make choices about their inputs and
outputs, do have feelingful bodies, do reproduce themselves and grow themselves
and their species and environments. What this all implies is not only that we should
be suspicious of the deathly machine metaphor as applied to evolved organisms, but
also that we might find ourselves needing to use certain words – mind, consciousness,
knowledge, meaning, intentionality, purpose – in new ways. In fact this is already

becoming a part of ordinary biology as it is taught to undergraduates.6
This is especially true when we view things from a biosemiotic perspective. For
not only is semiosis, the use of sign relations, universal to all forms of life, but so, in
whatever degree, is something like all the experiences of tinkering happenstance just
mentioned. As Hoffmeyer (2008a) writes, something seems to get left out of purely
functionalistic Neo-Darwinian accounts of organismic behaviour. Brains evolved very
early in biological evolution (about 600 million years ago, in flatworm-like creatures),
yet why should nature evolve such costly things as brains if brains, consciousness and
choice (however primitive at some levels) play no part in successful life and survival?
In the exemplary case of brown hares habitually standing bolt upright in the pres-
ence of foxes instead of running away, Hoffmeyer notes that the ethological expla-
nation is that the hare can outrun the fox, and that the fox knows this, so the hare is
saying “don’t bother, I have seen you”, thus saving them both a useless expenditure
of energy. In regard to the Neo-Darwinist explanation of genetic fitness and natural
selection merely, Hoffmeyer writes:
I cannot help feeling that something is missing in this kind of explanation. For how can we be
so sure that these animals themselves – as environmentally situated organisms of blood, flesh
and brain – take no creative part in their own behavior? The Neo-Darwinist explanation would
require us to delegate to their genetic apparatus the whole burden of anticipating the outcome
of all and every future communicative situation these animals may encounter. But why would
evolution equip mammals with brains containing billions of extremely energy-costly nerve cells
if such brains were then not allowed to make any decisions not already anticipated by the genes?
(2008a, xiii)
First, then, the experience of tinkering. Notice the frame of mind, for instance, in
which such common or garden inventiveness happens. Whether the child playing at
camp-making, or the gardener looking for a canny solution to supporting her rasp-
berry canes, the experience is not, surely, initially that of a focused logic but more one
of a vague casting about the local environment with a general purpose in view. The
mind, that is to say, is sensually alert to forms and materials which might serve the
task – to feel and to weight, to rigidity and flexibility, to endurance and resistance, to
effects upon other organisms (or theirs on it) – but pleasantly open, beyond that, to a
potential variety of solutions.
6 See for example Roth and Dicke 2013.

36 Wendy Wheeler
4 S
emiotic Scaffolding
An important aspect of understanding the role of semiosis for living things is to grasp
the idea of the scaffolding which I introduced a moment ago. It may well be that we
can think of certain aspects of living bodies as behaving something like machines,
but, as with our own machines, they are nothing without the communication (in
whatever coded form) and meanings provided by the living humans around them.
This is where Hoffmeyer’s introduction of the concept of semiotic scaffolding is
important (Hoffmeyer 2008b; Wheeler 2014c). Hoffmeyer borrowed the idea of a scaf-
folding process, which itself furthers other processes of growth, from Jerome Bruner.
Bruner used the idea of a cognitive scaffolding primarily in the context of education,
where it signifies various forms of cognitive support provided by the attentive teacher
attempting to lead the learner forward – as implied in the etymology. In this, it is
possible to see some similarity with Michael Polanyi’s (1958, 53) idea that the primary
task of the student is to get into a relationship with the teacher’s way of approaching
a topic in which he or she tries to imitate the teacher’s way of approaching learning
as a kind of doing. In this way of thinking, the teacher’s way of approaching a subject
provides the cognitive scaffolding for the learner. This produces the process which
Polanyi (1966) described as the “from-to,” or proximal to distal, structure in which
understanding becomes internalised, digested, or tacit. This is the basis (a growing
process of course) upon which subsequent structures of understanding can be built.
Indeed, this from-to structure describes the developmental “layers” of “life’s irreduc-
ible structure,” and this is how Polanyi (1968) understands evolutionary growth itself.
With Hoffmeyer’s use of the term “semiotic scaffolding” we are to understand
that it is the mediating role of semiosis (or the action of sign relations) which sets up
the conditions (the scaffolds) whereby biological systems are able to perform specific
tasks in specific contexts. Mechanical structures alone cannot specify this because,
as noted before, machines, even classical computers, have no ability to be selective
about their inputs. Yet, as Subhash Kak (2005) points out in an article on the differ-
ence between artificial and biological intelligence, “[t]his is precisely what biolog-
ical systems can do with ease.” Needless to say, while tasks may take the forms of
mechanisms, the semiotic scaffold by which they are afforded cannot be mechanical
because choice involves some degree of interpretation in different contexts. Here the
nature of the semiotic scaffolding (which mediates between code and flesh) pushes
the system (whether student or soma) in one direction rather than another.
When we move to the psychical and cultural level, where semiosis can often be
highly dispersed and is nearly always richly interactive, the semiotic scaffolding, just
like the evolutionary body and environments from which it springs, is likely to be
made of several active layers. Again, and as with the biosemiotic levels, these “layers”
can probably be thought of as nested systems in which family and peer group are the
first proximal influence, and thus will tend to inscribe the scaffolding directions of
later proximal-distal developments. Since, however, all these influences are, from the
start, bathed in the often barely articulated, and sometimes hardly, if at all, conscious
assumptions of a culture and its time, the cultural semiotic scaffolding has a specific
tone almost from the start. I would hesitate to call such assumptions ideologies since
it is hard to see how a person could get to an “outside” position in which an ideology
is supposed to become visible in an act of revolutionary consciousness raising. Very
fleeting moments of vision are possible for those who think very hard, but in general
what is seen as a raised consciousness is simply a different, and maybe less conven-
tional, point of view from that to which one has become accustomed from family and
peer group. Such consciousness raising thus has more of the nature of a religious
conversion experience about it than a true escape from an ideology.
5 Intelligent Nature: Biosemiosis as Natural Poetry

In other words, and because it mediates meaning, the semiotic architecture which
scaffolds the future, in culture and in nature, must draw upon an essentially poetic
and non-conscious metaphysic of ‘intelligent nature’ – no matter how minimal. To put
things another way, nature itself is ‘poetic’. Poetic meaning does not obey a linear
logic, but emerges from a recursive growth of pattern and metaphor. Where the latter
is in play, things are both what they are and also something else at the same time.
As said, metaphor does not obey classical logic and the law of the excluded middle.
Meaning resides in the patterned whole, not singly in any isolated part. Poetry is
nature in us humans; or perhaps we should say that nature in us is poetic thinking.
When we are being creative, we recognise this aesthetic aspect. Jacques Hadamard
(1954, 10), quoting Pierre Daunou, writes: “In Sciences, even the most rigid ones, no
truth is born of the genius of an Archimedes or a Newton without a poetical emotion
and some quivering of intelligent nature.” Hadamard (26–27) also writes of Hippolyte
Taine’s, and even Augustine of Hippo’s, sense of the “layers” of non-conscious activ-
ity upon which creative thought draws. This seems very close, also, to Louise West-
ling’s account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of sedimentation:
Biosemiotics and recent genomic and evolutionary biology confirm Merleau-Ponty’s insights
from more than fifty years ago about the sedimentation of memory in the earth itself, in organ-
isms, and outside their bodies through culture. (↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imagi-
nary)
As chapter 2 of this handbook points out as well, this thought about the autopoie-
tically self-structured character of life has a history. An important part of it is to be
found in Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (“Conversation on Poesie”).
Kate Rigby writes:
38 Wendy Wheeler
All human “poesy” or artistic making, Schlegel declares here, is dependent upon, and indeed
grows out of, the prior “unformed and unconscious poesy” of the living earth, of which we
are ourselves a “bloom” […] The human capacity to “hear the music of the unceasing action”
(unendlichen Spielwerks…) of earthly becoming, and “to understand the beauty of this poem,”
arises because we are ourselves “a part of the poet, a part of his creative spirit lives in us and
never ceases to glow with secret force under the ashes of self-induced unreason” […] Schlegel’s
re-configuration of human creativity and literary language as an outgrowth of Earth’s “poesy” is
informed by the new understandings of natural history, living systems, and human subjectivity
that emerged during the Romantic period. (↗2 Earth’s Poesy)
The idea of Romanticism came, at least in part, from Schlegel’s idea that the thought
of the present, the coming thought of modernity as he saw it being formed, was
indeed captured in its aesthetic life. In this case, this was in the coming into being
and growth of the novel, or roman. Romanticism thus meant, against the controlled
formalism of the neo-classical period, a feeling for individual experience within a
complex and dialogic whole, both a play with the quality of that many layered experi-
ence and also a questioning of its reality. The reliability or not of narration, its veracity
and its supposed realism, are all markers of the novel form from its beginnings in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The impossibility of a full grasping
and representation of the world, and the need, thus, for a selective modelling and ret-
rospective recuperation of it, is of course there right from very early on in the novel’s
history in the mid-eighteenth-century novels of Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy,
famously, reflects on the processes of representation themselves.
As a form, the novel itself is closely concerned with realism, time and the com-
plexity of interpretation, and these concerns reflect a rapidly complexifying social
world in which, famously, between the 1820s and 1840s in Britain, the anchors of
self in compassable communities and religious belief were increasingly cut adrift
(Houghton 1968). Romanticism’s similar concerns, it seems, should have fitted well.
However, while Romantic understandings and interpretive approaches were able to
explore the poetic form, in Britain it was only with George Eliot that such explorations
of complex narrative social wholes really began their aesthetic expression. The main
social and scientific developments remained objectivist, positivistic and empirically
realist. Oddly enough, and as is well known, Eliot’s own quasi-sociological interests
were fairly staunchly Comtean.
If we wonder why Romanticism has often attracted negative connotations – a
‘Romantic’ view of the world being one widely thought of as tender – rather than
tough-hearted – part of the answer must lie in the coming to dominance of an empiri-
cal, reductionist, positivistic and deterministic science which thought it had dispensed
both with a world which might, from time to time, be experienced as enchanted,
and also with metaphysical questions in general. In physics this complacency was
struck down in the early decades of the twentieth century by the extraordinary
counter-logic revealed by discoveries in quantum mechanics. In biology, however, it
remained (with some notable exceptions; see Wheeler 2015) more or less intact from
the Modern Neo-Darwinian Synthesis of the early 1940s up to the completion of the
Human Genome Project in 2003 (Sapp 2003). This latter showed that genes (them-
selves something of a fiction [Keller 2000]) were not simply deterministic; nor was
there (as many had confidently predicted) a gene for every function. The completed
Human Genome Project indicated not only far fewer gene sequences than mechanical
reductionists had predicted, but also the puzzling and widely noted fact that identical
gene sequences can code for different outcomes depending upon context (Hoffmeyer
2008a, 129, n.31; Shapiro 2011). As Hoffmeyer writes:
Genes do not – as previously supposed – correspond to distinct functions within the organism.
Rather – and both embryological and neurobiological research bears this out overwhelmingly –
genes function as signposts in a dynamic interplay with each other and with the network of
proteins and membranes in the growing embryo. It is not the genes per se, but their interplay and
interpretation in the cell that counts. (2008a, 131)
Similarly, in a newspaper article entitled “DNA as Poetry: Multiple Messages in a

Single Sequence,” James A. Shapiro points out that what he calls “coincident mes-
sages,” that is, multiple messages written within the same DNA coding sequence,
cause tremendous problems for a mechanistic account of biological functions. In fact,
we understand perfectly well that the same words in human languages can have dif-
ferent meanings according to the contextual interpretation; it appears that DNA code
is, like human language, indeed, not a mechanical but a semiotic, and thus interpre-
tive, phenomenon in which cells (and bodies and organisms) have learned to make
many meanings. Altogether this painted a much more complex picture of biological
life and development, and aided the advance of evolutionary developmental (Evo-
Devo) and complex development systems biology (Gilbert and Epel 2009; Sapp 2003;
Pigliucci and Müller 2010). With this, the gradual decline of Neo-Darwinism began,
and a far more nuanced account of evolution and development was started. Biosemi-
otics itself was a part of that movement.
With these developments it is unsurprising that biologists should find them-
selves rediscovering the intimations of much earlier biological suppositions made
before the metaphysical rigidities noted above had fully settled themselves in nine-
teenth-century scientists’ minds. Biological entities are subject to the laws of physics
and to chemistry, but they are not, in themselves as organisms, subjects of invariable
entailing laws. Organisms are historical entities subject to formal constraints, but not
laws (Kauffman 2013). For them, change is neither mechanical nor law-like; it is meta-
phor-driven and subject to chance and the making of meanings. In this sense, organic
life bears the structure of art rather than the machine.
40 Wendy Wheeler
6 T
he Lightest Burden: Abducting the Pool of
Yourself
Having said that nature is made of the stuff – the patterns, repetitions, figures and
movements – that make song and poetry in humans, it is perhaps not surprising that
the nearest things I have found to comprehensive descriptions of the semiotic logic of
abduction have come from poets. Abduction, the discovery of new knowledge wher-
ever it is found and of whatever sort, is a burden in the same way that the word is
used, as in the burden of a sermon or a message, to indicate the main business, the
central theme, the life and the meaning. It is what is carried from human to human,
sometimes between species and, always, over time.
Making a distinction between craft and technique, Seamus Heaney says that craft
is what you can learn by immersing yourself in example, but it is never, on its own,
in touch with feeling (or what Daunou called “intelligent nature”). Craft is a sort of
competent going through the motions, a “learning to turn the windlass at the well of
poetry” and the lifting of a bucket full of air (Heaney 2002, 19):
You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have
dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool
of yourself. (2002, 19)
This is the point, Heaney says, where craft turns into technique. It can stand as a good
description of the process of creative discovery in any sphere:
Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of
metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a defini-
tion of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds
and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in
memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique
involves the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the
touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources
to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in
Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea,
something intended, complete.’
[…]
And if I were asked for a figure who represents pure technique, I would say a water diviner. You
can’t learn the craft of dousing or divining – it is a gift for being in touch with what is there,
hidden and real, a gift for mediating between the latent resource and the community that wants
it current and released. As Sir Philip Sidney notes in his Defence of Poesy: ‘Among the Romans a
Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a Diviner…’
[…]
Technique is what allows that first stirring of the mind round a word or an image or a memory to
grow towards articulation: articulation not necessarily in terms of argument or explication but in
terms of its own potential for harmonious self-reproduction. (Heaney 2002, 19–21)
The abductive experience, a guess made of feelings, intuitions and inclinations, is

like divination: it must allow the knowing that belongs in bodies and earth (the bogs
of Ireland are Heaney’s favoured image for this latter) to get going while the sharp
human mind is held off until the right moment arrives. The burden is light because
the abductor must not know precisely what it is that he or she carries, must not feel
around to gauge its contours and weight. It is no coincidence that we say we are preg-
nant with thought. The “seminal excitement,” as Heaney (2002, 21) puts it, “has to be
granted conditions in which, in Hopkins’s words, it ‘selves, goes itself… crying / What
I do is me, for that I came.’” Technique, very clearly, is the slow work of time and the
unhurried plumbing of the pool of the biosemiotic self.
7 B
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Kate Rigby
2 E
arth’s Poesy: Romantic Poetics, Natural
Philosophy, and Biosemiotics
Abstract: This chapter undertakes an exploration of the pre-history of contemporary
biosemiotics in Romantic ecopoetics, beginning with the ways in which Romantic
natural philosophies, such as those of Schelling and Goethe, opened the way for a
renewed appreciation of the subjective ‘worlds’ or Umwelten, as Jakob von Uexküll
later termed them, along with the agency, communicative capacity, and, in some
cases, ethical considerability of more-than-human beings. Secondly, I will examine
the implications of this philosophical re-animation of materiality for the reconcep-
tualization of human language, especially as deployed to poetic ends. Here, I turn to
Friedrich Schlegel’s (1967 [1800]) “Conversation on Poetry,” in which human poiesis,
the crafting of ideational worlds by means of words, is repositioned as an emergent
property of the prior autopoiesis of natural becoming. Finally, I will indicate how this
German proto-biosemiotics finds a literary counterpart in the ecosemiotics of English
Romantic literature, focusing on John Clare’s birds’ nest poetry.
Key Terms: Biosemiotics, Romanticism, Goethe, Schelling, Clare
In 1800, the avant-garde journal of German Romantic literature and theory, Athenäum
(“Athenaeum”) serialized a work entitled Gespräch über die Poesie (“Conversation on
Poesie”) (Schlegel 1967, 184–190). Penned by one of the journal’s founding editors,
Friedrich Schlegel, this early document of modern literary theory was inspired by the
lively discussions that Schlegel had been engaged in over the past few years with
a group of friends who became known as the “Jena Romantics.” Among them were
his brother, the literary translator and cultural historian, August Wilhelm, and his
wife Caroline (who hosted most of their gatherings), the writers Friedrich von Hard-
enberg (better known by his nom de plume Novalis) and Johann Ludwig Tieck, the
philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Friedrich’s lover, Dorothea Veit, and
(while Schlegel had been staying with him in Berlin in 1799) the theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher. The Gespräch stages an open-ended debate about literature, within
which four of the participants present a series of longer disquisitions on various ques-
tions: Andrea’s account of the “Epochs of Literature,” Ludovico’s “Talk on Mythol-
ogy,” Antonio’s “Letter on the Novel” and Marcus’s analysis of the style of Goethe’s
earlier and later works. From a contemporary ecocritical perspective, what is particu-
larly striking about this debate is the way in which it is framed in the “Prologue.”
All human “poesy” or artistic making, Schlegel declares here, is dependent upon,
and indeed grows out of, the prior “unformed and unconscious poesy” of the living
earth, of which we are ourselves a “bloom.” This primal poesy, which “stirs in the
46 Kate Rigby
plant and shines in the light, smiles in a child, gleams in the flower of youth, and
glows in the loving bosom of women,” has always been humanity’s privileged “object
and source of activity and joy” (Schlegel 1968, 54). The human capacity to “hear the
music of the unceasing action” (unendlichen Spielwerks, my translation, Schlegel
1967, 285) of earthly becoming, and “to understand the beauty of [this] poem,” arises
because we are ourselves “a part of the poet, a part of his creative spirit lives in us
and never ceases to glow with secret force under the ashes of our self-induced unrea-
son” (Schlegel 1968, 54). Schlegel’s re-configuration of human creativity and literary
language as an outgrowth of ‘Earth’s poesy’ is informed by the new understandings
of natural history, living systems, and human subjectivity that emerged during the
Romantic period. In this chapter, I want to revisit German Romantic notions of the
‘language of nature’ and ‘natural language’ (Natursprache), along with the depiction
of other-than-human viewpoints and voices by the English Romantic poet John Clare,
from the perspective of contemporary research and reflection in the field of ‘biosem-
iotics.’
1 B
iosemiotic Basics
Biosemiotics proceeds from the premise that “living nature,” as Jesper Hoffmeyer
(2008, 4) puts it, is “essentially driven by, or actually consist[s] of, semiosis.” Among
the diverse vehicles of communication that are perpetually composing, recomposing,
decomposing and interconnecting the multifarious life-forms that constitute Earth’s
biosphere are sound, scent, movement, pressure, texture, taste, and shape, as well as
more elusive, but nonetheless powerfully efficacious phenomena, such as electrical
fields and chemical effusions. From a biosemiotic perspective, the whole world – or
rather all worlds, since each organism inhabits its own – is, as Peirce put it, “perfused
with signs” (qtd. in Wheeler 2011, 271): from the level of the individual cell, which
perforce interprets the genome that it contains in order to help build a body within
a particular bio-physical environment, to that of the literary critic who, perchance,
interprets a poem to help build understanding within a particular socio-cultural envi-
ronment. This is a fast-growing field with diverse disciplinary manifestations, ram-
ifications, and cross-fertilizations. Claus Emmeche’s succinct definition from 1992
nonetheless still holds good:
Biosemiotics proper deals with sign processes in nature in all dimensions, including 1) the emer-
gence of semiosis in nature, which may coincide with or anticipate the emergence of living cells;
2) the natural history of signs; 3) the ‘horizontal’ aspect of semiosis in the ontogeny of organisms,
in plant and animal communication, and in inner sign functions in the immune and nervous
systems; and 4) the semiotics of cognition and language. (Hoffmeyer 2008, 4)
2 Earth’s Poesy: Romantic Poetics, Natural Philosophy, and Biosemiotics 47
Biosemiotics proper, as Hoffmeyer observes, was invented independently several

times over in the latter part of the twentieth century. Hoffmeyer himself is a biochem-
ist and he recounts how he and his then doctoral student Claus Emmeche arrived at
their own version of the ‘semiotics of nature’ at the University of Copenhagen in the
late 1980s. Meanwhile, in Estonia, a series of scholarly exchanges between Russian
and Estonian biologists and linguists that began with a conference in Tartu in 1978,
led Kalevi Kull to develop an expanded understanding of the ‘semiosphere,’ a term
first framed by Russian Formalist Yuri Lotman by analogy with geologist and bioge-
ographer V. I. Vernadsky’s ‘biosphere’ concept from 1926: Kull’s breakthrough was to
realize that the biosphere was in itself a richly polylogic semiosphere. Hoffmeyer also
acknowledges that Gregory Bateson, who was a major inspiration for his own work,
developed a similarly semiotic understanding of living systems. As Louise Westling
shows in The Logos of the Living World, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was heading that way
too in his late lectures on Nature. It is widely accepted, however, that the preeminent
figure who “had the broadminded intellect and indefatigable energy to assemble all
the threads that would serve as the foundation for the modern biosemiotic project”
(Hoffmeyer 2008, 364) was the Hungarian-born American linguist, Thomas Sebeok
(1920–2001), to whom Hoffmeyer’s authoritative introduction to the field is dedicated.
The two main threads out of which Sebeok wove his synthesis were the ‘semeiotic’ phi-
losophy of American Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and the ‘Umwelt’
theory of German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), which he came
to explore with Jakob’s grandson, the medical researcher Thure von Uexküll. Sebeok
was fascinated by non-human animal and human-animal communication, and in
Peirce he found a theory of sign relations, which was not restricted to human verbal
communication (unlike the semiology of Ferdinand Saussure that was taken up so
enthusiastically in francophone structuralism and post-structuralism from the 1970s).
In order to advance the theory of ‘zoosemiotics’ that he had already begun to postu-
late in the early 1960s, Sebeok needed to be able to account for the process whereby
animals come to translate corporeal sensations into meaningful perceptions. And it
was in the revised second edition of Jakob von Uexküll’s Theoretische Biologie (The-
oretical Biology, 1928), which he read in the original German in 1978 (having perused
and dismissed a poor English translation of the first edition thirty years earlier) that
he found the key: namely, in his refashioning of the existing German term Umwelt
(environment) to designate a species-specific and more-or-less individually nuanced
phenomenal world, a world, that is, composed of signs. As Hoffmeyer (2008, 32)
observes, von Uexküll “was working very much within a nineteenth century Roman-
tic intellectual culture that was still vibrant in Estonia, while the science of Charles
Darwin’s England was increasingly utilitarian, mechanistic and Malthusian.” Among
his most important influences, moreover, were F. W. J. von Schelling’s Naturphiloso-
phie and the developmental or ‘epigenetic’ biology of Goethe and Karl Ernst von Baer,
among others (Kull 2001, 4).
48 Kate Rigby
Von Uexküll’s research into the perceptual worlds of other-than-human animals

revealed how every creature’s Umwelt is borne out of the functionality of its particular
bodily constitution and conditioned by its developmental stage and life experience:
it is correlated with a mental model of reality, or Innenwelt, that determines whether
and how any entity that enters an animal’s physical environment might become a
bearer of meaning within a species-specific world of signs (Merkwelt); one that it
will be called upon to interpret wisely in order to interact with it appropriately (for
example, as predator, prey, play-fellow, mate, or the source of some other kind of
potential trouble, pleasure, or interest). The relationship between an organism and its
environment is dynamic, being continuously renegotiated through what von Uexküll
termed the “functional cycle” (Funktionskreis) of perception and action that “effec-
tively ‘couples’ the ever-changing system that is the organism to the ever-changing
system that is the world” (Favareau 2008, 32). While Sebeok and others have since
extended this zoosemiotic line of inquiry, others have gone on to explore such weird
and wonderful semiotic processes as those occurring within organisms (‘endosemio-
sis’), among plants (‘phytosemiosis’), and even in inanimate nature (‘physiosemio-
sis’). Of particular relevance to this chapter is the nascent field of ‘ecosemiotics’ (Kull
1998), encompassing research into human communication with, and about, nature,
as mediated through the sign systems of human culture, which might be considered
part of the wider field of environmental (or ‘ecocritical’) literary and cultural studies.
Most biosemiotic research hitherto has been conducted by natural scientists.
However, it has also begun to attract the attention of a growing number of researchers
in the environmental humanities, as can be seen from Wendy Wheeler’s contribution
to this volume. In addition to restoring communicative agency to non-humans, biose-
miotics significantly expands our understanding of human sign relations. As “whole
creatures,” as Wheeler has it, humans, in common with other animals, also partici-
pate in a host of corporeal communications that generally transpire below the level
of consciousness. It is for this reason, as Peirce stressed, that we always know more
than we think we know. Caught up, as we tend to be, in the world composed by the
words that are forever running through our heads, passing out our mouths, into our
ears, or being traced by our eyes or finger-tips, much of what we know viscerally, so to
speak, does not make it into our field of awareness. Occasionally, though, some of the
signs that our mindful bodies are perpetually decoding might be felt in the flesh, as
in the approach of a threat, the source of which we have not yet identified; or intuited
as a hunch, which could give rise to one of those creative insights that Peirce termed
“abductions” (Wheeler 2011).
This is not to say that we would be better off without that world of words, though.
On the contrary: biosemioticians view articulate human language as the most complex
mode of communication that has evolved thus far on Earth. With growing complexity
comes what Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008, 309; 2010) terms increasing “semiotic freedom,”
entailing heightened self-awareness, including the ability to recognize, as Immanuel
Kant influentially enjoined us to do in his Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der Urteils
kraft, 1781), that the world disclosed to us through our ideas, words, and the embod-
ied experiences that they co-construct, does not necessarily correspond to the way
things are “in themselves.” The geo-historically unprecedented degree of semiotic
freedom that humans have acquired along their evolutionary journey has enabled
the inter-generational creation, perpetuation and transformation of symbol-based
communal cultures, which has in turn facilitated the emergence of greater social
complexity and the augmentation and acceleration of communication across time
and space through the development of new media (from writing to the internet), thus
enabling the creation of new kinds of knowledge, along with enhanced technological
capacities.
This growth in semiotic freedom is nonetheless a risky business. For one thing,
it goes hand-in-hand with an ever-expanding margin of potential misunderstand-
ing: while some organisms certainly deploy signs to deceive others (for example, by
puffing up their fur or feathers to appear larger than they actually are) my dogs are
rather less likely to misread the chemical signal left by a fellow canine, let alone the
sight of its raised hackles, than I am the nuances of any conversation that might tran-
spire with a neighbor while we’re all out for a walk. In everyday life, the muddles
that can arise from the slipperiness of verbal communication, especially in written
form, and hence in the absence of invaluable non-verbal signals, can be a real drag.
In verbal works of art, however, this very multivalence, or semiotic openness, is of
the essence of the aesthetic experience. More troublesome, potentially, is a further
concomitant of the increased semiotic freedom facilitated by articulate language:
namely, the development of a certain alienation from our own corporeal being and
sensory perceptions, and, potentially, from other beings (especially other-than-hu-
man ones) and from the natural world more generally. Once inducted into the world
of words, and hence into a particular cultural formation, the recognition of our cor-
poreal, or psycho-physical, interconnectedness with other creatures and our earthly
environs no longer comes naturally. Paradoxically, the cultivation of our own bodily
being, along with our connectivities with non-human others, is necessarily a cultural
achievement, and, as Gernot Böhme (2003) puts it, an “ethical undertaking” (see also
↗6 Aesthetics of Nature on the role of aesthetics in this process). Societies vary signif-
icantly in this respect, and one of the distinguishing features of euro-western culture,
in the view of ecophilosophers such as Val Plumwood (2002), has been the predom-
inance of dualistic discourses of human exceptionalism, often grounded in claims
about language and reason as opposed to, and elevated above, the merely material
realm of nature, which systematically occlude the recognition of our own natural-
ity, whilst sanctioning the ruthless human exploitation of otherkind and our earthly
environs, and contributing thereby to the growing degradation of both human and
non-human habitats.
It is important to recall, however, that the West by no means has a monopoly
on animal exploitation and environmental degradation: consider, for example, the
slaughter and cruelty entailed in the use of animal products in traditional Chinese
50 Kate Rigby
medicine, or the utter denudation and consequent socio-ecological collapse of Easter

Island in Polynesia. Nor has the hyper-separation of human reason and language from
other-than-human forms of cognition and communication, which became accentu-
ated in Western culture with the ascendency of Renaissance humanism and Cartesian
mind-matter dualism, ever gone unchallenged. Long before Jacques Derrida (2008)
was prompted to reflect self-critically upon the “phallogocentrism” of Western phi-
losophy on finding himself beheld in his human-animal nakedness by a feline com-
panion, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) pondered, “[w]hen I play with my cat, who
knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?” Desiderating the
“vanity” of Man, who imagines “that he equals himself to God, attributes to himself
divine qualities, withdraws and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures,
cuts out the shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to
them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit,” Montaigne (1842, 206)
insists that animals “have a full and absolute communication amongst themselves,
and that they perfectly understand one another, not only those of the same, but
of divers kinds,” while cautioning that while we too are able to engage in various
kinds of interspecific interchanges, our insight into the “secret and internal motions
of animals” is inevitably limited; for we are, after all, only human. In the following
century, Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) also acknowledged the ‘natural language’ (Natur-
Sprache) of other-than-human beings, albeit in a more mystical key than Montaigne.
Reworking the alchemical ‘doctrine of signatures’ previously postulated by Para-
celsus (1493–1624), and drawing also on Christian Neoplatonism and Jewish Kabba-
lism, this heterodox Lutheran theologian and free-thinking philosopher (Weeks 1991)
proposed that all creatures disclose themselves, not only to humans but also to one
another, through the distinctive resonance or ‘voice’ (Hall) that emanates from their
corporeal form, drives and appetites. According to Böhme, human verbal language
also retains traces of a putative pre-lapsarian mode of speaking, which participated
in the primal “sensual language” still “spoken” by other creatures; and although the
original names that Adam bestowed upon creation in this natural language had been
lost as a consequence of the Fall, he maintained that it was yet possible to have mys-
tical access to them through the agency of the Holy Spirit (as he claimed to be able to
do himself) (Goodbody 1984, 28).
2 P
roto-biosemiotics in German philosophy around
1800
While, as we shall see, Montaigne’s observations resonate more strongly with the
depiction of other-than-human sign relations in Clare’s animal poetry, it was Böhme’s
novel notion of ‘Natur-Sprache’ that nourished the proto-biosemiotic line of thinking
that began to emerge in the German region in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
As Axel Goodbody (1984) explains in what remains, to my knowledge, the only book-
length study of this key Romantic topos, discussions of ‘natural language’ or the ‘lan-
guage of nature’ made their way into German Romanticism via J. G. Hamann’s and
J. G. Herder’s reception of Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme in the mid to late eighteenth
century. This lineage is apparent, for example, in Novalis’s (1968, 267) notes towards
his counter-encyclopèdie (Das allgemeine Brouillon, 1798/1799), when he asserts that
it is not only humans who speak, but “the universe speaks also – everything speaks –
infinite languages,” adding, in a clear allusion to Paracelsus: “Doctrine of signatures.”
Paracelsus’ ‘doctrine of signatures,’ according to which the allegedly divinely-
endowed characteristics of all natural entities were legible in their outward appear-
ance, itself constituted a significant new departure within the older theological topos
of Nature as the ‘Book of God’: that is to say, as a second source of divine revelation
alongside the Bible. As Hans Blumenberg (1981) has shown, this trope can be traced
back to Augustine, whose De Dialectica (398) also contains what Favareau considers
to be the first recorded definition of sign relations within Western thought, which
embraces both the indexical signs that are rife in the natural world and human lin-
guistic signs: “had the contingencies of history been otherwise,” Favareau (2008, 7)
laments,
and had sign study proceeded from Augustine’s definitions, rather than from a radically disem-
boweled version of Aristotle […] we may not have found ourselves here today still trying to estab-
lish as a general understanding the idea that the world of sign relations per se did not start with
the advent of homo sapiens – and that a sign relation is not something that was created ex nihilo
by the minds of human beings – but rather, that the minds of human beings are themselves the
product of a de novo use of absolutely natural and biological sign relations.
As words in the Book of God, however, earthly phenomena were construed by Augus-
tine and later theologians up until at least the late seventeenth century, not as com-
municating in their own right, but as a medium for the voice of heaven. For Paracelsus
too, Nature as a whole was divinely authored. But the doctrine of signatures accords
to individual phenomena the capacity to communicate of themselves, albeit in the
limited sense of signaling their “virtues” with respect to human interests (notably, in
the case of plants, their medicinal uses) and thus pre-eminently, for human eyes. As
already noted, Böhme’s elaboration and radicalization of Paracelsus’s ‘signatures’
transgresses this anthropocentric limit to allow for the physical self-disclosure of
living things to one another, thereby decentring humans as the only creatures capable
of interpreting these corporeal signals.
Now, when Hamann (1730–1788) and Herder (1744–1803) revived this train of
thought, it was in clear contradistinction to the way in which the older trope of the
Book of Nature had begun to be deployed in the meantime, following the rise of the
mechanistic, dualistic and empiricist ontologies and epistemologies of the Enlight-
enment. Whereas the new rationalist theological orthodoxy had relegated the divine
author to a non-interventionist role outside of Creation, whilst rendering His work
52 Kate Rigby
newly legible according to the physical laws of nature and in the language of mathe
matics, Hamann and Herder sought to regain a sense of the material world as com-
posed of an inherently meaningful ‘hieroglyphics,’ which demanded a different kind
of hermeneutics. For Hamann, this was a mystical hermeneutics, the purpose of which
was a deeper experience of deity as disclosed through contemplative, as distinct from
objectifying and instrumentalising, ways of knowing (Blumenberg 1981, 30). This
was also true to some degree for Herder, who was an ordained Lutheran minister,
as well as a leading thinker of what Jonathan Israel (2001) has termed the ‘radical
enlightenment.’ This philosophical lineage descends largely from the underground
reception of the controversial Dutch Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677),
and, through the intermediary of Herder, subsequently contributed significantly to
the development of early German Romanticism. I will return to Herder’s reworking
of Spinoza, and its centrality to Romantic understandings of Earth’s “poesy” in due
course. Firstly though, I want to consider a fascinating earlier essay that Herder wrote
for the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences’ 1770 competition to determine whether
humans were capable of inventing language, solely on the basis of their natural abil-
ities.
In his “Treatise on the Origin of Language” [Abhandlung über den Ursprung der
Sprache], Herder (1985) rejects the theological premise that language was gifted to
humans by God, while simultaneously complicating the opposing rationalist view
that it is an arbitrary human invention. He begins by stressing the creaturely dimen-
sions of human communication, asserting that “[a]lready as an animal, the human
being has language” (Herder 2002, 65; emphasis in the original). This is the language
of affect – of cries, sighs, and yells of joy, for instance – that we share with other
animals. While generally subordinated to the conventional signs of articulate speech,
this creaturely ‘natural language’ continues to flow as an underground current in
much of our communication, as well as granting us an intuitive understanding of the
affective responses of other animals, especially those with whom we have a greater
affinity, such as terrestrial herd animals, as distinct from those who are more dis-
similar from us in “nerve structure” and way of life, such as sea creatures (2002, 67).
Yet, while Herder allows that remnants of those natural sounds that are specific to
our species being constitute the “juices which enliven the roots of language” (68), he
insists that articulate speech – the conventional language that has to be learnt anew
by every child of every generation in every human culture – is a distinct development.
Rather than construing this as a willful “invention,” however, he stresses that it was
a natural and necessary outcome of our relatively undelimited “circle” or “sphere”
of activity and corresponding paucity of innate technical skills and instincts: “the
more numerous the functions and the destiny of animals are, the more dispersed their
attention is over several objects, the less constant their manner of life is, in short, the
larger and more diverse their sphere is, then the more we see its sensuousness distribute
itself and weaken” (78; emphasis in the original) and, so Herder reasons, the greater
its need of a more complex mode of communication.
In the absence of the kinds of ethological research that are only now beginning
that to disclose the extensive role of learning, and hence culture, in the communica-
tive practices of several other species (such as cetaceans, some birds, dogs, and other
primates), Herder probably overstates the uniqueness of human speech. Importantly,
however, he stresses that the language of words emerges only in and through our
embodied experience of a more-than-human world that resounds with the voices of
other creatures. Herder traces the development of human language to our innate dis-
position for ‘reflective discernment’ (Besonnenheit), the cognitive desire to identify
what is distinctive about each physical entity that comes to our attention, which com-
pensates for our paucity of other instincts. Herder exemplifies this process of reflec-
tive apperception in a distinctly Arcadian primal scene of human language-formation
involving a fellow creature, which initially appears to the senses of sight and touch
as “white, soft, woolly”: unlike the hungry wolf, who is liable to cognize the lamb
exclusively with reference to its own appetites as food, or the randy ram, who sizes it
up as a potential mate, Herder’s first human, propelled by a different kind of appetite,
namely, the desire to know (the appetitus noscendi, as Augustine put it [Trabant 2009,
125]), apprehends the lamb’s vocalization as its ‘distinguishing mark’ (Merkmal), and
is thereby imagined to have cried out inwardly to himself, “Aha, you are the bleating
one!” (Herder 2002, 88). Whereas G. W. F. Hegel would later construe human naming
practices as a form of mastery that “annihilates” the singularity of all things by sub-
stituting for the particularity of their physical reality something ideational that could
henceforth exist in the absence of the thing thus named (Rigby 2004, 123), Herder
traces the origins of language to an act of non-appropriative attentive listening to the
animal other, who is perceived, moreover, as an alter ego, a “thou” (Trabant 2009,
130). (It must be admitted, however, although Herder does not do so, that this would
not necessarily have prevented the subsequent classification of the lamb, by said
human no less than the wolf, as food, or even, by said human no less than the randy
ram, as an object of genital gratification!) In my view, Hegel also has a point: but
Herder’s fundamentally dialogical account of the origins of language implies a mode
of ethical comportment as proper to human being, or rather, becoming human, which
bears profound ecological and biosemiotic significance: this is, as Trabant (2009, 130)
observes, “an appeal to let the world breathe and resound, and to dialogue with it.”
For Herder, language and thought are inseparable: indeed, in arguing that the
recognition of the lamb qua lamb by her bleating occurs first as a responsive bleating
in the soul of the cognizing human, he implies that the use of words to communicate
with others is secondary to the function of language as a way of thinking. This sec-
ondary function is nonetheless no less crucial to the process of becoming human,
which Herder understands to be an historically unfolding process, entailing ever-
widening circles of sociality, from families, through tribes and nations with their
gloriously diverse languages and hence (potentially conflictual) ways of thinking, to
the transnational and ultimately global: for humans, Herder (2002, 159–161) insists in
conclusion, are not “national animals,” but one “species” with the capacity to grow
54 Kate Rigby
in understanding and accomplishments by respectfully learning from one another

across the permeable boundaries of cultural and linguistic difference. Moreover,
while Herder might be mistaken in his assertion of the uniqueness of the cognitive
desire that, he claims, all humans (but only humans) share, the spoken language
to which it gives rise is activated by our embodied participation in an even wider,
namely trans-species, Earth community. If, as ancient tradition has it, human speech
first took the form of song, then, Herder (2002, 104) speculates, this must have com-
prised a “concerto,” composed out of the diverse vocalizations of other creatures,
“to the extent that his understanding needed them, his sensation grasped them, his
organs were able to express them […] within the natural scale of the human voice”:
here then, the human poesy of words is thought to have enjoyed its first flowering as
a mode of participation in the polyphonic song of the Earth.
At the time that Herder penned his entry for the Berlin Academy’s essay compe-
tition on one of the hottest topics of the age, he had already begun to take an interest
in Spinoza, having perused his Ethics (Ethica, 1677) and Theological-Political Trea-
tise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1677) in the late 1760s. Influentially, Herder also
commended Spinoza (along with German folksong) to the younger writer, J. W. Goethe
(1749–1832), whom he met in 1771, and together they embarked on a close study of
the Ethics during 1773–1774. Spinozan references and ideas become increasingly fre-
quent and significant in Herder’s writing from this time, but it was only in the wake
of the virulent critique of Spinozan ‘nihilism’ launched by the theologian J. H. Jacobi
(1743–1819) that Herder truly “came out” as a Spinozist in his famous credo, God:
Some Conversations (1787) (Bell 1986; Forster 2012). In addition to embracing Spi-
noza’s historically contextualizing and de-mythologizing approach to biblical her-
meneutics, along with his democratic and egalitarian political orientation, Herder
adopted a version of his metaphysical monism: that it, the understanding of mind
and matter (or ‘extension’), God and Nature, as indivisible, albeit distinct, manifes-
tations of the one universal substance. There is perhaps already a trace of Spinozan
monism evident in Herder’s insistence that human language and hence thought is
wholly dependent upon our bodily participation in the communicative matrix of the
more-than-human world. But it was only in his essay “Shakespeare” (Herder 1993),
which sparked a craze for Shakespearean drama in Germany and defined the terms in
which it also became revalued in Britain during the Romantic period (and beyond),
that he openly asserts that “the whole can be called that giant God of Spinoza, ‘Pan!
Universe’” (1993, 515).
Herder’s was nonetheless a renovated monism, which departed from Spinoza’s
in key respects. In place of Spinoza’s static universal “substance,” Herder reconceives
the divine as an active and mind-like “primal force” that is manifest in all creation,
which is in turn understood in terms of becoming, rather than being. Whereas Spino-
za’s view of nature remained within the mechanistic paradigm that predominated in
the seventeenth century, Herder embraced the new perspective of dynamically inter-
acting forces and organic growth that was emerging from the development of the life
sciences, along with the study of chemical, electrical and magnetic phenomena. In
God: Some Conversations, Herder construes nature accordingly as “a system of living
forces based in the primal force, God,” while characterizing this system as “a progres-
sive self-development toward ever higher forms of articulation” (Forster 2012, 80).
In this way, Herder implicitly reconceives of the Book of Nature as self-scripting and
evolving, rather than as externally authored and immutable. And it is in this sense
that Friedrich Schlegel would later reframe the human capacity to create verbal works
of art as an outgrowth of Earth’s “poesy”: for what is nature itself, from this neo-
Spinozist perspective, but “an eternally self-creating work of art,” as Schlegel put it in
one of his youthful jottings (qtd. in Zimmermann 1978, 242)?
Another of Schlegel’s conversation partners in Jena whose thought was pro-
foundly informed by Herder’s renovated monism was the philosopher Schelling (also
a keen reader of Jakob Böhme and Renaissance Neoplatonism, and an inheritor of
Kant’s crucial epistemological distinction between noumena, or things-in-them-
selves, which we can never know directly, and phenomena, things as they appear to
the human mind). In his System of Transcendental Idealism (System des transzenden-
talen Idealismus, 1800), Schelling (1978, 232) too refers to “what we call nature” as
“a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wondrous script.” More importantly, though,
Schelling’s mature philosophy of nature articulates an early version of the theory of
evolutionary emergence. Inspired in large part by new biological research, including
Goethe’s work on plant morphology and “metamorphosis,” Schelling reinterpreted
Spinoza’s natura naturans (‘nature naturing’) as an immanent principle of purposive
self-organization and dynamic self-transformation within the temporal becoming of
the natural world as a whole (natura naturata, or ‘nature natured’), which he came
to think of as a meta-organism (allgemeiner Organismus), of which human conscious-
ness too was integrally a part. According to the post-Kantian, neo-Spinozist theory
of dynamic evolution advanced in On the World Soul (Zur Weltseele, 1798), life is not
infused into matter from outside, but rather matter itself had acquired life with the
emergence of organic forms: “Organic matter has formed within itself the principle of
life” (Schelling 2000, 255; emphasis in the original), implying that the potential for
the emergence of living organisms is inherent in nature. Similarly, human conscious-
ness was not infused into organic matter from outside, but could now be understood
as having emerged through an evolutionary process, which, in his First Outline of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature and the separately published Introduction thereto
(both considerably indebted to his conversations with Goethe during this period),
Schelling attributed to the dynamic interplay of generative and inhibiting forces
within the infinite “productivity” of natural becoming (Nassar 2014, 193–202). There
was, therefore, a real (as opposed to an ideal or transcendental) continuity between
inorganic and organic matter, and between organic life and human consciousness: all
things, moreover, remained interconnected within that “common medium” (Schelling
2000, 257) that Schelling had previously troped under the ancient name (with more
recent Neoplatonic resonances) of the “world soul.”
56 Kate Rigby
The exemplar that Schelling provides as evidence for the ‘common medium’
interconnecting all natural phenomena at the end of the World Soul is the observed
behavior of those animals who become visibly distressed immediately prior to the
occurrence of large earthquakes: it is, he writes, “as if the same cause, which shat-
ters mountains and raises islands out of the sea, also moves the breathing breast of
animals” (Schelling 2000, 257). There is now considerable empirical support for this
phenomenon, which provides an intriguing instance of those zoosemiotic processes
that are just beginning to be rigorously investigated (Maran et al. 2011). With respect to
the living world, moreover, it is tempting to argue that Schelling’s ‘common medium’
is nothing more, nor less, mysterious than the communicative matrix of biospherical
semiosis. This is not a possibility that he pursues here though, preferring to look for
a universal connection, which he refers to as a “formative ether” (Schelling 2000,
257), instead of considering the existence of particular communicative media, such
as those that evidently enable certain other species to pick up atmospheric, haptic
or auditory signs of an imminent earth movement that human senses are too dull,
or too dulled, to discern and decode. In his earlier discussion of animal ‘irritability’
and ‘sensibility’ (Erregbarkeit and Sensibilität), Schelling does nonetheless move in a
distinctly biosemiotic direction.
In the biology of his day, these were two of the three primary modes of ‘excitability’
that were seen to be characteristic of all life, the third being ‘reproduction’ (including
growth, maintenance, self-repair, and drives, in addition to the generation of individ-
uals of like kind). ‘Irritability’ referred to physiological responses to external stimuli,
such as the contraction of muscles, changes in the movement and constituents of
bodily fluids, and alterations to the action of inner organs (i.e. similar to what would
now be referred to as autonomic nervous system reactions). ‘Sensibility’ was con-
nected with ‘irritability’ but referred to the ability to make and retain impressions of
external stimuli, to interpret them, as it were, if not necessarily consciously. The kinds
of sensible impressions thus formed, moreover, were in turn related to an organism’s
particular corporeal organization, its physical form, and, hence, its psycho-physical
capacities, impulses, and orientations. What Schelling (2000, 248) refers to here as an
animal’s “sphere of characteristic impressions” (Sphäre eigenthümlicher Eindrücke) is,
I would suggest, an important precursor to Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the animal’s
Merkwelt, the semiotic bubble, through which it construes and negotiates its Umwelt.
The signs that an animal registers as significant, for instance through its faculties
of sight and hearing, Schelling (249) goes on to argue, are conditioned by its innate
inclinations – its “instinct.” Recalling Herder’s insistence on the embodied nature of
human thought and language, Schelling acknowledges that the human subject too
only sees and hears that which s/he is “motivated” or “impelled” to recognize (wozu
er zu erkennen Trieb hat) (250; emphasis in the original). This, however, he designates
as a “higher instinct,” which, when directed towards that which is great and beauti-
ful, is called “genius” (250). In other words – those which he would later use in the
System of Transcendental Idealism – what we call ‘genius,’ those brilliant insights and
leaps of imagination that underpin both artistic creativity and some kinds of scientific
discovery, involves the agency of ‘the unconscious’ (das Unbewuβte, a term that he
coined and Sigmund Freud made famous), or what Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred
to as “silent [i.e., pre-verbal] knowing” (see ↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary
Imaginary).
It is important to stress that Schelling’s commitment to reconnecting human con-
sciousness and creativity with the more-than-human realm did not imply the nega-
tion of human freedom. This is now reconceived, however, as a potential that has
arisen out of a temporal process of development that had given rise to increasingly
complex levels of organization in the living world: what biologist and proto-evolu-
tionary thinker Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer, one of Schelling’s major sources (and, sub-
sequently, his son’s professor) termed the “organizational sequence” (Richards 2001,
247). With the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness in what was taken
to be the (as yet) most complex organism in this sequence, Schelling believed that
Nature had acquired the capacity to reflect upon itself. There is, no doubt, a moment
of humanist hubris here, but it is qualified by the recognition not only of human
dependence upon the prior and ongoing processes of natural becoming, but also of
the untranscendable limits of human knowledge. If we are ourselves a part of nature,
we can never step outside it to know it as a whole; and since, according to Schell-
ing’s holistic thinking, the individual parts acquire their full meaning and signifi-
cance only in relation to this elusive whole, any understanding that we form of them
will necessarily be partial. Not only does this imply that nature can never be fully
transparent to human reason: Schelling also came to accept that reason could not be
self-grounding (Bowie 1993, 159–168). Moreover, Schelling’s recognition of the role
of ‘instinct’ in shaping every creature’s ‘sphere of characteristic impressions’ implies
that humans are no less enclosed within what von Uexküll would later characterize as
a species-specific semiotic bubble than are other living beings. Schelling’s proto-bio-
semiotic elaboration of Kielmeyer’s ‘organizational sequence’ does nonetheless point
towards the growth in ‘semiotic freedom’ associated with the development of more
complex organisms along a continuum that, in Jesper Hoffmeyer’s analysis also cul-
minates, at least for the present, and insofar as we can tell, with articulate human lan-
guage. Schelling put it this way: in the human sphere, the creative freedom of natura
naturans, which Schlegel tropes as Earth’s poesy, is raised to a new ‘potency.’
Under the electrifying influence of his conversations with Schlegel’s group,
Schelling came to identify the work of art, that is to say, the process of artistic cre-
ation, as the privileged locus for the re-unification, on a higher level, of mind and
matter, thought and feeling, conscious and ‘unconscious.’ In his System of Transcen-
dental Idealism, Schelling resolves the opposition between the ‘unconscious’ poesy
of (non-human) nature and the intentionality of human artistic creation that was
implicit in the opening effusion of Schlegel’s Dialogue, by proposing that the work of
art is not, after all, a purely intentional product, but rather emerges from the interplay
58 Kate Rigby
of unconscious urgings (the subject’s ‘inner nature’) and conscious crafting. In Robert
Richards’ gloss, Schelling’s argument runs like this:
Insistent forces thus well up from the unconscious nature of the artist and rush in turbulent
cascades through the narrows of consciousness. This creates […] violent eddies of contradiction
that “set in motion the artistic urge.” Such contradictions can only be calmed in the execution of
the work of art. As the artist comes to rest in the finished, objective product, he or she will sense
the union of nature and self, of necessity and freedom, of – finally – the unconscious and the
conscious self. (Richards 2001, 162)
In this work, Schelling also discusses a mental phenomenon that he terms ‘aesthetic
intuition’ (ästhetische Anschauung), which he believed to play an important role
in scientific discovery no less than in artistic creativity. Such intuitions are in play,
Schelling (2001, 227–228) argues, when an idea impresses itself upon the mind before
one has grasped what it means or how it has been arrived at, or when a sense of the
whole has been glimpsed prior to the analysis of the parts that constitute the phenom-
enon in question. It is the ‘poetic capacity’ (Dichtungsvermögen) that enables these
kinds of intuitions to find their initial articulation in figurative language: metaphor,
in this sense, constitutes a bridge whereby that which is as yet unknown enters into
the sphere of the known. As Wendy Wheeler (2011) has observed, Schelling’s theory
of the creative agency of metaphor (and, I would add, aesthetic intuition more gen-
erally) can be seen as a significant precursor to Peirce’s notion of ‘abduction’: that is,
the process whereby signs that have been registered and associations that have been
made below the level of consciousness by the Umwelt-aware embodied mind give rise
to insightful new “hunches.”
3 Ecosemiotics in English Romantic Verse

Just as the process of artistic creation requires the capacity to tune in to one’s own
inner nature, so too, it was widely believed during the Romantic period, to appre-
hend the “voice” of other-than-human nature necessitated the relinquishment of an
objectifying and instrumentalist agenda (Zimmermann 1978, 244). This perspective,
which can be found on both sides of the English Channel, is formulated programmat-
ically in William Wordsworth’s paired poems, “Expostulation and Reply” and “The
Tables Turned,” in the avant-garde collection that he published with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads ([1798] 1992, 107–109). Chided by his friend, “Matthew,” for
sitting around idly daydreaming by the shore of a lake when he should be improv-
ing his mind by imbibing “the spirit/breathed/From dead men to their kind” in the
medium of the written word, the speaker of “Expostulation and Reply,” who shares
the author’s name of “William,” counters with a philosophical defense of contempla-
tion, arguing that the cultivation of a “wise passiveness” affords a different kind of
mental nourishment, namely by means of those other-than-human utterances that

arrive unbidden from “the mighty sum/Of things forever speaking.” In the following
poem, William “turns the tables” on his bookish friend by chiding him for sitting
around reading when he should be out for a meditative evening stroll, exposing
himself thereby to what is mysteriously referred to as “the light of things.” Elsewhere
(Rigby 2014b, 118–120) I have argued that this involves stilling oneself sufficiently to
allow things to disclose themselves in their own way and their own time: this is to
“come forth,” as we read in the last lines, “and bring with you a heart/That watches
and receives.” In order to allow yourself to be illuminated by the “light of things,”
then, you are going to need to surrender for the moment your perhaps perfectly legit-
imate desire to objectively know and instrumentally use them, and position yourself
instead as the recipient of whatever it is that they might have to reveal to you, perhaps
surprisingly, even amazingly, that is to say, in ways that exceed your expectations,
comprehension, and capacity adequately to respond to their address.
In another poem from Lyrical Ballads, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” the speaker,
who is reclining in a grove in just such a contemplative state of mind, apprehends not
only “a thousand blended notes,” the diverse sounds of the more-than-human world
in which he is immersed, but also the pleasure that the particular beings who sur-
round him appear to be taking in their own inter-active existence:
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreathe;
And ‘tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:–
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there (Wordsworth 1992, 76)
As Marjorie Levinson (2007) has observed, Wordsworth’s verbal constructions imply

an active reaching out to aspects of the environment. Together with the speaker’s
profession of “faith” that in doing so these birds and plants were taking pleasure in
their own existence, there is an echo here of Baruch Spinoza’s concept of conatus i.e.
the impulse to preserve their being and augment their capacities, to compose and
recompose themselves with and through their dynamic relations with others, which
he accorded to all physical entities, animate and inanimate, individual and collec-
tive. Levinson rightly attributes the reception of Spinoza within English Romanti-
cism to the Spinoza-controversy of the mid-1780s, but without noting the specifically
60 Kate Rigby
Herderian cast of Wordsworth’s neo-Spinozism. This is perhaps most evident in his

famous “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks
of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” when the speaker recalls being arrested by:
[…] the sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things (Wordsworth 1992, 118)
This divine “something” is no longer a static substance, but an indwelling propul-

sive force, “a motion and a spirit,” which is materialized in the “least motion” of all
“Nature’s works,” including the “human soul,” as we read in “Lines Written in Early
Spring,” in their endeavour to “preserve a kinetic poise within a dynamic ensemble of
relations, an ensemble that also composes them as individuals” (Levinson 2007, 377).
What Wordsworth also hints at here is that this process of interactive co-becoming
is inherently semiotic, with plants as well as birds seen to have a sense of their own
existence within what Schelling termed their distinctive ‘spheres of characteristic
impressions.’
Among Romantic poets none attend more closely and caringly to the sign rela-
tions of fellow creatures than the English poet John Clare (1793–1864). I would there-
fore like to conclude with a brief discussion of one of his many ecosemiotic animal
poems, “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” (Clare 2003, 185). Here, as in his other bird’s nest
poems, Clare deploys the uniquely human code of writing, along with the culturally
specific conventions of Romantic counter-pastoral, to invite the reader to participate
imaginatively in a rural ramble, with a view to gaining a better appreciation of the
life-world of another being. In so doing, he also draws attention to the corporeality
of human semiosis in his depiction of the physical actions and sensory perceptions
that enable the discovery of the hidden nests. In “The Yellowhammer’s Nest,” for
example, this involves altering a habituated mode of bodily comportment, as the
interlocutor is invited to “stoop/And seek” the nest of this vulnerably ground-nesting
bird. In the multivalent semiotic frame of the poem, this surrender of upright posture
in turn becomes legible as a metaphor for the surrender of human sovereignty, if not,
as becomes apparent in all of Clare’s verse, of the ethical responsibility of respecting,
and where appropriate, protecting the lives of otherkind. This begins with becoming
attentive to other-than-human practices of poietic environing, or place-making, such
as the building of nests. Here, this is shown to involve the recoding of material objects
appropriated from the human Umwelt, which acquire a new meaning when incorpo-
rated into that of the birds, such as the “bleachéd stubbles and the withered fare of
last year’s harvest”, which, together with “the horse’s sable hair,” provide building
materials for the Yellowhammer. In addition, Clare highlights the affective dimension
of the bird’s interpretation of phenomena in their Umwelt, as the speaker observes
the outward signs, in the ‘natural language’ of affect (to recall Herder), of the Yellow-
hammer’s apprehension of the cowboy harvesting dewberries as a potential source of
threat; similarly, he detects a mournful tone in the parent birds’ warbling in the wake
of the loss of their young to a watchful snake, for whom the fledglings had been inter-
preted (appropriately enough for them, but tragically for the bereaved birds) as food.
While Clare’s poems invite empathy on the basis of a shared creatureliness, “The Yel-
lowhammer’s Nest” nonetheless also draws attention to the potentially colonizing
tendency of human claims to be able to decode “nature’s poesy”:
Five eggs, pen-scribbled o’er with ink their shells

Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads
As nature’s poesy and pastoral spells— (Clare 2003, 185)
By attributing the recognition of resemblances between egg-shell markings and

“writing scrawls” to “fancy,” Clare implicitly urges respect for the alterity of otherkind
and their unfamiliar Umwelten.
As I have argued elsewhere (Rigby 2014a) with regard to Goethe’s poem “The
Metamorphosis of Plants” (1798), it is with respect to the ethical implications of
observing both continuities and differences between human and non-human semiotic
processes and environings, that a reconsideration of Romantic ecopoetics might con-
tribute to advancing biosemiotic research in the present: Romantic philosophy and
literature, in other words, is not merely of historical interest for its pre-figuration of
later biosemiotic insights; it might also help to provide an enhanced understanding of
the complex interrelationship between natural becoming, or the ‘language of nature,’
cultural codes, and poetic communication. There is much more research to be done
in this area by biosemiotically-inclined Romanticists. While I have begun to suggest
some of the ways in which particular works of Romantic thought and literature engage
with more-than-human sign relations, such engagements are awaiting exploration
with respect to other times and places too, as indicated by Louise Westling (2014 and
↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary) in her biosemiotically-informed
discussion of the ‘ecological imaginary’ from the ancient Sumerian Epic of Giglamesh
through to contemporary poetry and fiction, in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology and especially his remarkable late lectures on Nature. In addition,
and crucially, literature (and other creative arts) can provide great insight into the
dynamic interactivity of verbal and non-verbal semiosis within and between human
percepts, affects, and relations. This lies at the center of much of Wendy Wheeler’s
biosemiotic research, and is explored further in the previous chapter (↗1 The Lightest
Burden).
62 Kate Rigby
4 B
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Louise Westling
3 M
erleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary
Imaginary
Abstract: Assuming that literary works are sedimentations of an ancient ecological
imaginary nourishing all human cultures, this chapter demonstrates the way that
human culture extends the invisible sedimentations of organic bodies. Annabelle
Dufourcq’s description of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s radical concept of the imaginary
as a fundamental dimension of the real will be connected to insights from biosemi-
otics and recent genomic and evolutionary biology which confirm many of his ideas
about cultural sedimentation and its preservation of past experience which is always
embodied and dynamically, synergistically involved in the Lifeworld through the
umwelten or subjective environments of individual creatures. Literary works from the
Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Seamus
Heaney’s poems about the boggy ecosystem of Ireland sediment layers of an eco-
literary imaginary preserving the inescapable enmeshment of our species in the full
life of the biosphere.
Key Terms: Ecological imaginary, sedimentation, biosemiotics, semiotic scaffolding,

ancient literature, folk customs, brute being, deep history
Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension

of the real, indeed the very foundation or institution of Being (Merleau-Ponty 1968,
262; also Dufourcq 2012, 187–189 and 342–398). Works of art and literature, as well as
dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and idealizations, bring this invisible realm into visi-
bility. From the time of our most ancient homo sapiens ancestors, painted and carved
images and words have recorded ecological understandings and experiences in forms
that speak to us mysteriously, even nightmarishly, as cultural memories. Cave paint-
ings preserve enormous panoramic visions of animals overlapping and morphing into
each other – mammoths, lions, oryx, bulls, reindeer, horses. Occasionally tiny human
forms dance among them wearing lion or oryx heads, wound them with darts, or lie
dead at their feet. Bone carvings show flowering plants, seeding grasses interspersed
with spawning salmon, gravid horses, and symbols of human reproduction. All these
works are sedimentations of an ancient ecological imaginary nourishing all human
cultures. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature restores that understanding
of the dynamic intertwining flesh of the world which literary works have witnessed
and preserved and to which they now increasingly turn with new urgency.
This chapter will describe Merleau-Ponty’s ecological sense of the intertwining
and synergies of all beings and things in the world and the wild or Brute Being that is
their underlying reality. It will extend into environmental consciousness the radical
66 Louise Westling
concept of the imaginary which Annabelle Dufourcq has defined in Merleau-Ponty’s

writings and demonstrate how literary works explore this imaginary to reconnect us
to memories of the deep past and the wild Being, allowing us to glimpse the unknown
‘forces’ and ‘laws’ of the natural world. According to Dufourcq (2014, 709), Mer-
leau-Ponty described the crisis of modernity in which “modern art reveals a changing
and unfinished world” where “everything is completely enigmatic again” and man
seems to be again undergoing “the Dionysian ordeals of Greek mystery plays: a ter-
rifying but perhaps fertile exaltation of irrational forces of life, madness, loss of the
self, ecstasy.” Merleau-Ponty conducted an ontological revolution by re-opening a
full sense of that imaginary, with all its pregnancy, promiscuity, terror, and promise
which is sedimented in language and art and carries our cultural history into the
present.
Similarly our bodies carry invisible sedimentations of species memories and
indeed the history of all life. Danish biologist and biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer
(1996, 13) explains that “every single life-form in existence today has, lodged inside its
genetic matierial, the sinuous trail of its evolutionary past harking all the way back to
the dawn of life – while it is itself busy incorporating the experiences of today into the
future.” Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the imaginary and invisible dimensions of the
real allow us to see how cultural sedimentations in literature as in the other arts, in
history, and in philosophy, serve parallel functions for those who share that culture or
can gain some access to it. Biosemiotics and recent genomic and evolutionary biology
confirm Merleau-Ponty’s insights from more than fifty years ago about the sedimen-
tation of memory in the earth itself, in organisms, and outside their bodies through
culture. These are intertwined, chiasmic dimensions of the flesh of the world which
is the profound ecology that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology describes (cf. ↗4 Ecology and
Immanence). It is instituted upon/within a wild Being of visible and invisible mean-
ings that are dynamic and emergent, just as they have been since the beginnings of
our planet and the dawn of life. “The only Logos that preexists is the world itself,” he
wrote in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxxiv), and he continued
to stress this idea until the end of his life. Unless we recover this sense of a wider inter-
subjective and interdependent reality, our world will perish. Ancient and modern lit-
erary works witness this truth, and modern fiction, poetry, and visual media turn
our attention to its reawakening as climate change, widespread ecological collapse
and extinctions accelerate all over the globe. With a glance at some of the earliest
literary texts from Mesopotamia and Greece attending to human enmeshment within
the biotic community that constitutes even our individual bodies, we will move on to
examine representative literary sedimentations of archaic memory in Shakespeare,
Virginia Woolf, and Seamus Heaney to reveal the eco-literary imaginary at work.
1 Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasmic Ontology

Central to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking as expressed in his final unfinished manu-
script, posthumously published as The Visible and the Invisible, was the understand-
ing that humans are intertwined within what he called the Flesh of the world – “a
spatial and temporal pulp where the individuals are formed by differentiation” and
in which particular things, with all their historical and geological dimensions, com-
municate through us as sentient beings. Our body is a being of the family of things
(Merleau-Ponty 1973, 137), “a sensible sentient, a very remarkable variant, but whose
constitutive paradox already lies in every visible [thing]” (136). There is “a recipro-
cal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (138). The present visible world
“counts so much for me and has an absolute prestige for me only by reason of this
immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which it announces
and which it conceals.” This understanding of the world is Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic
ontology in which all things are intertwined and united within a deep sedimentation
of time and space that reaches into the future. Here is a whole architecture of phe-
nomena, “a whole series of ‘levels of being,’ which are differentiated by the coiling
up of the invisible and the universal over a certain visible wherein it is redoubled and
inscribed” (114). Each body thus contains a sedimented history dynamically express-
ing itself as the organism reaches out and interacts with the world around it.
The unity within each individual body opens it to other bodies, as we both touch
them and are touched by them in a chiasmic intertwining that is also manifested in the
interior synergy of our own bodies. “Why would not the synergy exist among different
organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions
and their passions fit together exactly […]” (142). This description of the world is con-
gruent with what we have learned in recent decades about the complex microbiome
and its semiotic behavior within each individual human body and even within cells,
as Hoffmeyer (2008) explains in Biosemiotics: The Signs of Life and the Life of Signs.
It also seems to anticipate what evolutionary biology has revealed about how much
we share genetically with our co-evolved animal kindred, though morphological
similarities had been noticed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier in many
cultures and made central in Darwin’s writings about human/animal relationships
in The Descent of Man. The lecture courses on Nature that Merleau-Ponty gave in the
last years of his life (1957–1961) at the Collège de France were centrally concerned with
the emergence of humans in evolution and the shared embryological developments
among many species that retain physical vestiges of their evolution.
68 Louise Westling
2 The Imaginary and the Invisible

Merleau-Ponty (1973, 262) asserted that the imaginary sphere of dream and fantasy
is the very foundation or institution (Stiftung) of Being. What can that mean? He
adopted Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt or Lifeworld of ordinary bodily experi-
ence as our basic realm which has been obscured by dualistic Western cultural pre-
sumptions that mistakenly reify abstractions such as mathematics and place humans
outside of the natural world. Husserl (1970, 353–378) asserted that this attitude is a
relatively recent development of European modernity since Galileo and Descartes
and has led to a dead end in classical empirical science; he said we must recover our
experience of the Lifeworld to find our bearings again. For Merleau-Ponty (1973, 167,
178, 215) the Logos of the Lifeworld is the invisible meaning that is the “other side” of
the visible world, a vertical, wild, Brute Being that bears within itself all space and
time, and that is not separate from the visible world. At the level of the human body
there is “a pre-knowing, a pre-meaning, a silent knowing” of which we may not be
consciously aware (178). In fact some aspects of the invisible for us are perceptible to
other creatures – for example bats using echo-location, whales and elephants per-
ceiving sounds and other signals inaccessible to humans, animals sensing the begin-
nings of earthquakes or smelling the presence of cancer. The complex Flesh of the
world far exceeds the understanding of any organism, however, and our human sense
of solid reality is in fact only our particular species’ mode of shaping its fragmen-
tary and limited perceptions into some kind of coherence. This is the subjective realm
which Jakob von Uexküll (19571) called the human Umwelt, the lived reality of inter-
action with the environment for our species, distinct though overlapping with those
of other organisms. Our imaginations apprehend and shape the visible world and our
understandings of the invisible meanings that animate it. That is what Merleau-Ponty
means when he says the imaginary and the dream are the foundation or institution
(Stiftung) of reality. The visible remains always gaping open with incompleteness and
ambiguity, since we only perceive it partially from where we are situated and with
inadequate sensory abilities, on the basis of the particular culture which has shaped
us. We never see wholes but only partial glimpses or profiles, as those of a tree or cube
from a particular angle of vision. But, like other creatures, we are perceptually open
to the world, our imaginations vibrating to the open imaginary realms it suggests to
us. “There is a dilatation [dilation or expansion] of perception, a carrying over of the
Aha Erlebnis [Aha! experience] of ‘natural’ perception to instrumental relations for
example (chimpanzees) which obliges us to put in continuity the perceptual open-
1 I have used this translation rather than the more recent Jakob von Uexküll, Marina von Uexküll,
Joseph D. O’Neil. A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, because the latter fails to use Uexküll’s key term, Umwelt,
and thus loses that centrally important concept.
ness to the world (λογος ενδιαθετος) and the openness to a cultural world (acquisition
of the use of instruments)” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 212). Thus our natural perceptions
carry over into our cultural understandings; openness to the world means also open-
ness to cultural understandings like the ability to use tools. Primate studies show
such dynamics among chimpanzees as well as humans and thus imply a continuity
between our ways of understanding and functioning within the world and those of
other animals.
Annabelle Dufourcq sees Merleau-Ponty as positing an enlarged reality that is
not based on traditional oppositions such as real/ideal, real/imaginary, real/possible.
Instead, the imaginary, the realm of dream, is a vivid, fluctuating, intense, shimmer-
ing, ambiguous part of the real that is full of possibilities but also haunted and night-
marish. With such a suggestion, she argues, Merleau-Ponty rediscovers the pathway
traced by Husserl: “Since the imaginary is insinuated throughout, everywhere, since
it invades perception, existence, and the entire real, Merleau-Ponty wants to show
that dream is not nothing, but indeed is a mode of presence, of a grand richness,
remaining in continuous relation with perceptive reality, which pursues equally
and in the same fashion, its existence in the artistic imagination” (Dufourcq 2012,
188–189, my translation). The imaginary field is the dynamic open dimension of
the perceptible world, always sensible, but needing to be given form. It builds on
what we perceive but is open to new manipulations and dimensions and is the very
principle of emerging life, meaning, and novel structures, as in evolution, or art, or
music (Dufourcq, conversation from 25 June 2014). In his lectures on “The Concept
of Nature” in 1959–1960, Merleau-Ponty (2003, 227) said that his planned studies of
“language, with other systems of expression (painting, cinema), with history and its
architectonic […] [will] make the passage to invisible being.”
In fact he had already begun to describe this passage in a discussion of Marcel
Proust’s Search for Lost Time near the end of his uncompleted manuscript of The
Visible and the Invisible. “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations
between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of
the sensible, that is its lining and its depth” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 149). Thus his imagi-
nation allows his fiction to capture “the bond between the flesh and the idea, between
the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals” (149)
He gives form to part of the imaginary. Similarly painting, music, philosophy, history,
and even science are explorations of the invisible (and the imaginary) that disclose
a universe of ideas through disguises or shadows of unknown “forces” and “laws.”
Science detatches these from sensible appearances and by reduction erects “a second
positivity” or manageable derivative, rather than allowing these meanings to be expe-
rienced in their primary mystery (149). In contrast, painting, music, poetry, drama,
and cinema offer new experiences that “open a dimension that can never again be
closed” (151). One of his favorite examples is Cézanne’s paintings of the Mt. Ste. Vic-
toire, each distinctive and different in orientation, revealing a new dimension of the
mountain and its surrounding countryside and sky.
70 Louise Westling
3 S
edimentation
Aesthetic experiences are cultural crystalizations of experience and memory, sedi-
menting the past and reconnecting us with the “polymorphism of the wild Being”
upon which culture rests (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 253). For Merleau-Ponty, “there is no
essence, no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography, […]
because, like that of nature, the space or time of culture is not surveyable from above,
and because the communication from one constituted culture to another occurs
through the wild region wherein they all have originated […].” All are nodes and
antinodes of the same ontological vibration, or “one sole explosion of Being which
is forever” (265). The Earth is Ur-Arche, revealing in its geographical layers a carnal
Urhistorie (259) of which organic bodies, their behaviors, and their cultures are exten-
sions.
Merleau-Ponty adapted and extended the concept of the sedimentation of
meaning from Edmund Husserl, who introduced it in The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology. For Husserl, sedimentation became a problem
in the sciences from the time Galileo focused on mathematics as the essential truth
rather than the complex dynamism of lived experience from which concepts and for-
mulae had been abstracted. This reductive method is mistaken for essential reality
and thus closes off implications of meaning “through the sedimentation or tradi-
tionalization” of concepts and theories. Such a way of thinking assumes that nature
is mathematical and can only be interpreted in terms of mathematical formulae
(Husserl 1970, 51–52), and it reached its extreme form in the dualism of Descartes and
Newton. Husserl acknowledged, however, that linguistic and artistic sedimentations,
even those of science, could be awakened and brought back into touch with the flow
of the lifeworld by active engagement and questioning. In “The Origin of Geometry,”
he said that language sediments ideas and subjectivity that must be awakened and
reactivated by listener or reader (1970, 361). In “The Vienna Lecture” he described
spiritual and cultural history going back to the Stone Age as revealing “a plenitude of
human and cultural types which nevertheless flowingly interpenetrate one another. It
is like a sea in which men and peoples are the fleetingly formed, changing, and then
disappearing waves […]” (274). Merleau-Ponty chose to explore this more positive
view of sedimentation, focusing especially on language and cultural works including
poetry, history, and philosophy, though he also considered the darker dimensions in
his writings on political crisis and violence (see, for example, Merleau Ponty 2007,
41–54; 1964, 293–308).
Merleau-Ponty described the origin of language as mythic, asserting that “there
is always a language before language, which is perception.” The “mythic” or archaic
realm of perception before spoken languages is the silent realm of a “brute mind like
savage nature,” the wild Being that is “the common tissue of which we are made.”
In our present situation of self-conscious linguistic and artistic culture, we must
“awaken this spirit on this side of sedimented positivities” or cultural objects and
behaviors that grew out of it (Merleau_Ponty 2003, 219; 1973, 203). Merleau-Ponty
sought to make a philosophy of the Lebenswelt, one which could rediscover the world
of silence (mute Being and meaning) and give it visible form through language. The
statements of this philosophy, like all linguistic thematizations, “will in their turn be
sedimented, ‘taken back’ by the Lebenswelt, will be comprehended in it rather than
they comprehend it.” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 170) Thus linguistic forms in philosophy,
literature, and history, like the forms of painting and music, become sedimented parts
of the phenomenal world which is full of intersubjectivity. Combinations of words are
charged with sedimented significations that are capable of entering into fresh rela-
tions beyond those which formed them in the past, thus bearing the past with them
as they create new meanings in the present (170–171). Culture contains a vertical sed-
imentation of intersubjectivity which is extended deep into the past and into a kind
of savage mind and Being beyond the human. This invisible Being requires human
creation, cultural forms, in order for us to be able to experience it (175, 197). But these
sedimentations only have meaning for members of the culture that produced them,
or for those who enter it through translation or learning the language in which they
have been formulated. Just as a town, “for whomever shares the history of it, is full of
meaning – or a figure – but for whomever does not participate in it, it is meaningless,”
so all cultural productions including language are meaningless for those who do not
share its meanings and memories, its way of reaching down into the wild Being and
the invisible (203, 227).
Merleau-Ponty died before he could fully develop these ideas about cultural
sedimentation and its preservation of past experience which is always embodied
and dynamically, synergistically, involved in the Lifeworld through the umwelten or
subjective environment of individual creatures (114 and 142). But scientific studies in
genomics and epigenesis are beginning to discover similar processes in the evolu-
tion and development of physical organisms, just as Merleau-Ponty (2003, 144–153,
167–178, 186–199) suggested in his Nature lectures on Coghill and Gesell’s embryo-
logical studies, Uexküll’s theory of the umwelt, and the work of Portmann, Lorenz,
and Tinbergen on mimicry and instinct, where embryonic and young animals antici-
pate environments and futures they cannot yet know, in proto-linguistic and cultural
behaviors.
4 B
iosemiotics
The recently developed field of biosemiotics, itself influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy (see Westling 2013, 113, 141–142), has brought together new research from
molecular biology, genomics, organic chemistry, and many other scientific fields to
show pervasive intercommunication (intersubjectivity), sedimented memory and
emergent processes that support his chiasmic view of the dynamically evolving forms
72 Louise Westling
and beings on the planet. Biosemiotics was developed in Estonia and Denmark by
scientists and linguists dissatisfied with mechanistic Cartesian perspectives on living
organisms and drawing inspiration from Uexküll’s descriptions of animal agency in
subjective umwelten, from Thomas Sebeok’s Zoosemiotics, and from Charles Sanders
Peirce’s triadic semiotic theory (see ↗2 Earth’s Poesy for a fuller account of the origins
of biosemiotics). Jesper Hoffmeyer explains that a semiotic approach to the under-
standing of the biological world turns Cartesian/Newtonian mechanism upside-down
by asserting that living entities evolved as intentional systems engaged in manipu-
lating signs. “It also claims that from the moment semiosis first began to manifest
itself in the first living units, or cells, a new dynamic principle was now superimposed
upon the already established dynamics of emergence as exhibited by complex chem-
ical systems” (Hoffmeyer 2010, 30). Even primitive unicellular organisms are semiotic
agents (Hoffmeyer 2008, xvi), and all living things use the genetically sedimented
codes of their pasts to adapt to the ecosystems in which they find themselves. These
“codes” turn out to be far more complex and indeterminate than popularly supposed.
They are a kind of “semiotic scaffolding” central to sign processes that organize activ-
ities and require interpretive agency but not necessarily what we think of as “mind”
(Hoffmeyer 2014, 14).
The mechanistic definition of genes popularized by such Neo-Darwinists as
Richard Dawkins as the structural units of inheritance that determine an organism’s
development and behavior, has begun to collapse under the weight of increasingly
precise evidence and criticism, as Steven Rose (1997), Richard Lewontin (2000), and
Thomas Nagel (2012), among others, have pointed out. Wendy Wheeler’s “The Light-
est Burden” in this volume provides another look at this change, as she discusses
the breakdown of mechanistic biology and cites Jesper Hoffmeyer’s explanation of
why it has failed. Thus the semiotic scaffolding that genes represent looks more and
more similar to linguistic structures that can only function dynamically within the
developing life of individual organisms. James A. Shapiro (2011, 146) noted more than
a decade ago that “parallels have long been noted between linguistics and genome
expression,” and suggested that a paradigm shift in genomics is underway. Eugenia
Ramirez-Goicoechea describes recent discoveries that show how the effects of genes
turn out to be multiple and indirect within the complex hierarchy of biochemical sys-
temic relations within the cell. More surprisingly, “DNA does not encrypt anything
because there is no message. The only reading of the DNA is in the growth process
of the organism itself” (Ramirez-Goicoechea 2013, 60–61). Since the 1980s this more
dynamic perspective has been emerging to suggest that genes are less bounded and
more mutable than was earlier believed. “DNA segments splice, shuffle and reshuf-
fle, swap and shift places” recombining and interacting “with other genomic, cel-
lular, histological, hormonal, physiological and anatomical network systems” (62).
Thus, genomic materials cannot be fixed independently but must be seen as dynamic
and changing elements within a hierarchically organized network of regulatory
systems that interact in various ways at particular times. Given these radical changes
in understanding genetic behavior, Ramirez-Goicoechea believes that semiotic and

linguistic metaphors are needed for a new conceptual description of the gene, one
that can encompass many kinds of agency and emergence from historical elements
within a global dynamic that includes myriad signals and networks of intercommu-
nication (2013, 63–64; see also Lewontin 2000, 129). Developmental processes within
organisms turn out to be sensitive to personal embodied experiences in response
to diverse environments, and resulting biocultural adaptations to rapidly changing
environments can be passed on reproductively (Ramirez-Goicoechea 2013, 67 and
76; Calloway 2013; see also Hoffmeyer 2014, 23–30). Merleau-Ponty’s theories about
the interrelationships between the body’s life and cultural behaviors begin to find
support in this new emphasis on semiotic activities and emergent forms. Parallels
between the activity of sedimentation in genomic development and in language and
literature may turn out to be not just convenient analogies but necessary unities;
cultural objects have the potential to be living parts of the phenomenal world when
performed by speakers, readers, and audiences, and to become part of unfolding con-
versations which are long cultural gesticulations within our species’ entanglement in
the dynamic life of the biosystems that have evolved with us. This cultural eco-imag-
inary, the deeply-layered sedimentation of experience within the dynamically evolv-
ing ecosystem, can be reawakened by careful attention to particular literary texts, as
we shall see.
5 L iterary Sedimentation
Estonian biologist and biosemiotician Timo Maran suggests in his recent article, “Are
Ecological Codes Archetypal Structures?” that Carl Jung’s archetypes might be con-
sidered ecological codes functioning as a sedimented cultural imaginary through bio-
semiotic processes. Ecological codes are distributed and open, belonging partially
to many species and open to new ones, having both cognitive and non-cognitive (or
conscious and unconscious) aspects fixed partially in physical forms, partially in
genetic memory, and partially in cultural memory depending on the abilities of each
species (Maran 2012, 150–151). Maran realizes that connecting Jungian psychology
with biosemiotics is walking on thin ice, but he carefully adapts Jung’s concepts to
accord with biosemiotic understandings of the biological functions and behaviors
of living creatures. He quotes Jung’s description of the archetype as “essentially an
unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived”
taking “its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.”
Furthermore, “so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are
dealing with archaic or […] primordial types, that is, with universal images that have
existed since the remotest times” (151). Maran explains that “if we replace […] ‘col-
lective’ with ‘interspecific’ and ‘individual’ with ‘species-specific’; if we take ‘uncon-
74 Louise Westling
scious’ in [a] Sebeokian sense, that is, as a reference to many nonlinguistic layers in
the semiotic self; if we interpret ‘altering’ and ‘taking color’ in [an] Uexküllian way as
references to the umwelten of specific animal species, then the connection between
Jung and biosemiotics may just appear to be reasonable” (151–152). I want to propose
that human linguistic and literary behaviors are an extension of this dynamic and
that they result from the individual person’s engagement with her own culture and
environment, absorbing and adapting behavior as she shapes her individual imag-
ination within cultural tradition. Literary works, like language in general and other
cultural creations such as painting and music, are ecologically and intersubjectively
involved with the lifeworld their creators experienced, though we may have forgotten
how fully they encode ecological memory and allow for adaptations to newer realities
in their audiences.
The earliest known literary works from Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago
contain sedimentations of far more archaic materials passed down from thousands of
years of oral tradition. The Epic of Gilgamesh had an almost 1500-year-old life among
Sumerian, Babylonian, and other cultures until it was lost beneath the sands of what
is now Iraq, then rediscovered a century ago by archaeologists in cuneiform fragments
that have been gradually put back into somewhat coherent form. But Assyriologist
Stephanie Dalley tells us that the epic never ceased influencing works from Homer’s
Odyssey to stories of Sinbad the Sailor for three or four thousand years. She explains
that the epic provides “a unique opportunity for tracing earlier, independent folk-
tales which were combined in the creation of the whole work, and we can see how
the whole work in written form never became fossilized, but was constantly altered
through contact with a continuing oral narrative tradition” (Dalley 1989, 39). This is
a similar kind of evolution and adaptation to that of species, as Dalley’s language
implies. I have suggested elsewhere that the story of Gilgamesh can be read as an
ecological tragedy in which the uncertain boundaries and kinships between humans
and other animals are denied by arrogant and violent efforts to control the natural
world (Westling 2013, 50–56). What is pertinent for our purposes here is the dreamlike
atmosphere of the imaginative world in which a hairy doppelganger is created to block
the “wild” energies of the young king who is oppressing the people he should protect
and serve. Enkidu can be seen to embody Merleau-Ponty’s “brute or Wild Being” that
is at one with the wild animals of the grasslands until he is domesticated by a priest-
ess of Ishtar and brought to meet his fated master. But Gilgamesh himself expresses
this wild Being in outrageous rampages that make him like a raging bull and lead
his subjects to beg the gods for relief. When Enkidu and Gilgamesh challenge each
other, fight, and then become inseparable comrades, those energies seem to come
into a kind of balance, but Gilgamesh cannot rest until he has fulfilled his ambition to
make his name by attacking a cedar forest sacred to the gods and destroy its protector,
the huge monster Humbaba. The whole sequence of events in the epic sediments a
dreamlike, ecological imaginary that unmistakably links arrogant human manipula-
tion of the natural world with disaster portended by Gilgamesh’s terrible dreams and
fulfilled when the gods take revenge on Enkidu and Gilgamesh for their sacrilege. At
such a huge distance of culture and time from the world of the Sumerians, Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Hittites who told and retold and recorded the various forms of this
narrative, we cannot understand it very well. But reading the translation of the most
complete restored text from Babylon opens a strange, haunting dimension of human
experience in the world that seems to be recurring in horribly destructive ways in our
own time in the very same geographical space. Ecological disasters in the Sumerian,
Babylonian, and Assyrian versions of the ancient flood story, Atrahasis, stand for reg-
ularly occurring droughts and floods that continue in the region (Dalley 1989, 1–8).
A later but still ancient text, Euripides’ Bacchae (405 BC), also expresses pro-
found anxiety about the relations of humans and other animals, suggesting a similar
disaster when the young king Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the power and sacred-
ness of the god who represents the powers of wild nature. Dionysos is ‘Ενδενδρος’
(Endendros), the power in the tree, “he is Φλενς (Phleus) or Φλεως (Phleos), the abun-
dance of life,” and the very principle of animal life (see Dodds 1989, xi–xii, xx; Euripi-
des 1978, 2–3; Westling 2013, 56–61). His worship leads people to go out of their cities
into the countryside to directly participate in the world of wild animals and the fertile
earth. As the messenger describes the celebrating women of Thebes to his disapprov-
ing young king, he says that their hair was garlanded with leaves and flowers, live
snakes around their waists like belts twisted up to lick their cheeks, lactating mothers
suckled gazelles and wolf cubs, some women struck rocks to make spring water flow
and others caused milk to ooze from the pasture as they pressed to feel for Dionysos
(Euripides 1978, 43).
The Chorus of Maenads cries out the sacred truth that humans must accept:
“whatever divinity is,/it is power,” and the laws of “Nature herself/coming to flower”
(Euripides 1978, 49). E. R. Dodds (1989, xxvii–xxxvi) thinks the story of Dionysos is
likely to be “the oldest of all dramatic subjects” and characterizes this play as lin-
guistically archaic in Euripides’ opus, adapting and revising extremely ancient ritual
materials.
A contrasting early modern case is William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s
Dream, completely embracing the very powers of mutability, fertility, and human
folly that Pentheus so disastrously refused to acknowledge. This is a comedy fusing
cultural materials from ancient Celtic and even earlier folklore, similar traditions
encoded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and popular pastoral and courtly love literary pat-
terns of his age. Much scholarly attention has been showered on the folk traditions of
Shakespeare’s boyhood Warwickshire, deriving from these very old practices (Barber
2012, 3–21,135–141; Palmer 1976, 73–93; Briggs 1959, 44–55; Ackroyd 2006, 6, 40–41).
The magic woodland realm of moonlight and dream is the haunt of fairies with origins
among the supernatural beings of the Celtic Otherworld that could open and inter-
mingle with ordinary human environments with both benign and sinister conse-
quences (Siewers 2013, 31–44). These were originally large and dangerous human-like
beings, but Shakespeare is credited with domesticating them for the purposes of his
76 Louise Westling
comedy, thus profoundly changing their reputation in popular culture (Henning 1969,
484–486; Green 1962, 89–103; Briggs 1959, 8–70). Still, danger lurks around the edges
of the play’s action. Titania and Oberon are, like the Celtic fairies, creatures the size
of humans but with great powers associated with the mysterious forces of nature who
frequently interact with people in the ordinary human realm, as they do in the play.
They are served by charming smaller creatures with names of ordinary natural things
(Cobweb, Moth, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed), and also Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, a
rough sprite well-known in English folklore for causing mischief among rural people.
Troubles in Fairyland cause dangerous disruptions in the world of nature (Briggs 1959,
15, 43–44) which, as the fairy queen Titania tells her estranged royal partner, Oberon,
are the results of the dissension between them:
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud,
that they have overborne their continents. (Shakespeare 1998, 2.1.88–92)
Fields are flooded, crops are rotting, sheep are drowned, and crows feed on their
bodies, country games have been abandoned, and “rheumatic diseases do abound”
(1998, 2.1.105). These natural disasters would have been very real to Shakespeare’s
audience, because regular infestations of the Plague caused widespread death and
shut down public activities in cities like London for months at a time, and the 16th
and 17th centuries were blighted by the Little Ice Age which brought unusually cold
weather to Northern Europe, causing widespread crop failures, poverty, starvation,
and disease (Kay 1995, 13–14; Ackroyd 2006, 4–5, 112–113, 174, 188–190, 205, 317, 398–
399; Van Es 2013, 259–260).
When the play’s young lovers flee the city of Thebes in Act I to escape the forced
marriages determined by their elders, they experience a re-integration into the giddy,
dangerous Dionysian realm of metamorphosis, loss of bearings and identity in the
moonlit woods, and participation in the mysterious Otherworld of natural forces and
dreamlike fairy powers. This chaotic realm is full of surprise and laughter, eventually
restoring balance that brings all the play’s characters into a harmonious ending of
multiple marriages.
Shakespeare’s masterful combination of these materials with others from the
classical world of his Latin schooling, especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, brought
Northern European sedimentations into fusion with Mediterranean ones of Greece
and Rome which themselves have ancient provenance and disturbing associations
with worship of chthonic deities, violent rituals, even human sacrifice such as we
see in the Bacchae. C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye, and many other commentators have
established that the fairies, Puck’s origins, and the seasonal Maying rituals of retreat
into Dionysian woodland frolics at night are traditional realities of Shakespeare’s own
world, familiar from his childhood and very much alive in the countryside for hun-
dreds of years afterward. Shakespeare deploys an ecological imaginary that revives

and synthesizes previously sedimented materials with still-living rural practices. Per-
formance in Shakespeare’s time was a ritual reenactment of archaic Maying and Mid-
summer practices celebrating harmony of humans with seasonal changes, wildness
of the woodlands, and powers of the landscape represented by the fairies. Ronald
Miller (1975, 255) says, “the mystery of the fairies – the very aura of evanescence and
ambiguity surrounding their life on stage […] points to a mysteriousness in our own
existence […].” This is the imaginary described by Annabelle Dufourcq as central to
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, which expands the real to open up again the
understandings of traditional peoples all over the world.
Virginia Woolf understood the depth and range of Shakespeare’s syncretic cul-
tural sedimentations and their continued life in the imaginations of her own con-
temporaries. As I have suggested elsewhere (Westling 1999, 865–875), her final novel,
Between the Acts, dramatizes their persistence as parallels to the inscriptions of deep
history in the English landscape and the sedimented human history in living pop-
ulations. The novel’s characters are enmeshed in a complex ecological community
that includes farm animals and migrating birds, trees, moving clouds, and marks of
history still inscribed in the land as “scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by
the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to
grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars” (Woolf 1969, 4). The human population includes
ancient remnants of prominent families whose hands are covered with veins like the
gnarled roots in the local graveyard, common villagers whose families are far older
and marked in the earth by “green mounds in the churchyard [that] had been cast
up by their molings, which for centuries had made the earth friable” (75). The lan-
guage of the novel, the minds of the characters, and the village pageant which comi-
cally rehearses English history, are all full of floating “scraps, orts, and fragments” of
English literature from Shakespeare through the Victorians, interwoven with nursery
rhymes, popular songs, snippets of the latest newspaper reports, and desultory con-
versation. In tidal ebb and flow of unity and dispersity, characters work sometimes
alone and sometimes cooperatively to make meaning out of what often seems chaos.
The novel’s form implies that the cultural imaginary includes all of these shifting
sedimented materials, enmeshed in the dynamic material environment of the whole
community of life and inorganic physical forces, continuous in the vast sweep of
geological time represented by the central character Lucy Swithin’s fascination with
prehistory emphasized at the beginning and end of the novel, where she is reading
in her Outline of History about England as a swamp, with thick forests covering the
land. Under the contemporary surface, as under the land itself and within the genetic
memories of its inhabitants, the primal reality of their Brute Being remains. The novel
ends as “the house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses
[…]. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among
rocks” (Woolf 1969, 218–219). Similarly in The Waves, published a decade earlier, sedi-
mented within the character Bernard, who sums up the qualities of all the other char-
78 Louise Westling
acters in himself and functions as the figure of the writer, is that of a far older human
being.
There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails;
and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral – well, he is here. He squats in me
[…]. He now holds a glass of fine old brandy in his paw. […] It is true, he washes his hands before
dinner, but they are still hairy. (Woolf 1959, 289)
Seamus Heaney takes such an understanding much further, insisting on the embod-
iment of personal and cultural experience within the boggy rural landscape of his
native Ireland and its entire dynamic ecosystem in his 1975 collection, North. Although
he may not have known Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, he seems unconsciously to
apply the understanding that Merleau-Ponty (2012, 213) set forth in Phenomenology of
Perception that we are bodies, and we can only learn to know their expressive unities
by taking them up and seeing how “this structure will spread to the sensible world”
and thus restore the full consequences of our material being as creatures of earth.
Heaney’s poetry in North focuses here, using sedimented layers of English, French,
Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin to enact the cultural depths of experience and center
its location in the mucky earth of the boglands where his family made their livelihood
for generations, and where even older histories are literally embedded in the ground.
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers

of Provence
and the ivied latins
of churchmen
to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line (Heaney 1980, 183)
The poems in this collection reveal how the local reaches into geological time,
including Neolithic Ireland, the Iron Age past, the early modern history of English
oppression under Elizabeth Tudor and her courtiers like Walter Raleigh and Edmund
Spenser, up to the more recent “Troubles” of civil conflict in Northern Ireland
between politically dominant Unionist Protestants and Republican Catholics. To do
this, Heaney creates a poetic archaeology that examines fragmented human remains
in bogs dating from the cultures of Iron Age Celts across Northern Europe, who rit-
ually sacrificed women and men by garroting, cutting their throats, or beheading,
and depositing their bodies in bogs where tannic acid preserved them for hundreds,
even thousands of years until they were uncovered by peat-cutters. These “bog-bod-
ies” have been found in increasing numbers in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands,
England, Scotland, and Ireland in the past fifty years; Heaney’s imagination was fired
in particular by the 1969 appearance in English of Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob’s
The Bog People (Lloyd 1995, 127). Archaeological evaluation of their condition and
likely cause of death supports the description of Celtic practice by Roman historian
Tacitus. Through the poems in North, Heaney reaches into the sedimented body of the
Irish land out of which he grew and reads its story, recovering a knowledge of what
Merleau-Ponty (1973, 116–117) would call the Wild or Brute Being that he sees as our
only environment. This ecological imaginary probes his intimate connection with the
dynamism of earth and the deep past buried within it. In Heaney’s poem “Kinship”
earth is “nesting ground,” the wild “outback of my mind.”
Kinned by hieroglyphic
peat on a spreadfield
to the strangled victim,
the love-nest in the bracken,
I step through origins

like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,

water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather (Heaney 1980, 195)
His language is intertwined with this mucky earth as he reads its hieroglyphics, deci-
phering the ecosystem of rot and regeneration, a center that both holds and spreads,
“sump and seedbed/a bag of waters/and a melting grave.” Autumnal leaves and
mosses sink into it and ferment, as
Mosses come to a head,

heather unseeds
brackens deposit
their bronze
This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow,
80 Louise Westling
mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
I grew out of all this

like a weeping willow,
inclined to
the appetites of gravity (Heaney 1980, 198)
Alan Shapiro (1995, 21) has called attention to Heaney’s “implied equation between
landscape and mind,” suggesting that “landscape and language interanimate each
other, so much so that to explore one is inevitably to discover something about the
other.” Here we find an attitude similar to that described in German Romantic philos-
ophy in ↗2 Earth’s Poesy.
Heaney associates the empire of Tacitus’s Rome with Ireland’s sufferings under
imperial British rule for almost five hundred years, but Andrew Murphy (1996, 39–47)
describes how North broadens northern European connections Heaney had suggested
in earlier books of poetry, reaching out to Ireland’s Viking history and connections
with the Icelandic sagas and the megalithic world of the Boyne Valley passage graves.
Heaney extends the meaning of these losses to those of tribal peoples all over the
globe in “Hercules and Antaeus” which ends the long first section of the collection.
Three legendary representatives of indigenous peoples stand for the dispossessed of
every continent, as Murphy (1996, 47) explains. Balor, the Irish mythological King of
the Formorian deities, was vanquished by the supernatural Tuatha Dé Danann; Anglo-
Saxon Brythnoth fell to Viking invaders at the Battle of Malden; and Lakota Chief
Sitting Bull died at the hands of U.S. soldiers. These heroic icons of ancient Ireland,
Britain, and North America are represented by the mythological Greek/Berber figure
of Antaeus, lifted from the ground that is the source of his strength by imperial Her-
cules, who tears him “out of his element/into a dream of loss/and origins” (Heaney
1980, 207). Heaney’s poem, like most of the poems in North, can be understood even
more broadly, however, in a context he was not likely to have considered. This is the
profound environmental loss and displacement of such peoples and whole ecosys-
tems by the technologically rapacious forces that are now ravaging the planet and
raising the question of whether its living communities can survive. Heaney’s Antaeus
remains “a sleeping giant/ pap for the dispossessed.” Can he awaken, regain his ter-
ritory, and embrace again “the cradling dark / the river-veins, the secret gullies/of his
strength?” (207–208). Is such an ecological imaginary sedimented in the earth and
the deep cultural past merely elegaic or nostalgic? Or do Heaney’s poems return us to
the necessary entanglement with the rest of the biosphere that is the simple ground
of our being as a species?
6 B
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6.1 W
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Hanjo Berressem
4 Ecology and Immanence
Abstract: Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the ecosophy of Félix
Guattari, this chapter develops from the ‘logic of immanence’ – of being different
from but simultaneously being a part of that from which one is different – the notion
of an ‘ecology of immanence.’ This “unilateral distinction” (Deleuze 1994, 28) is the
perhaps most general conceptual basis of ecological thought. The chapter relates this
logic to the notion of ‘holism,’ which is often used in science-oriented discussions
to imply that ecology is based on a naïve, unscientific belief in the world as a friend.
Going back to J. C. Smuts’ definition of the term, the chapter shows this to be a misrep-
resentation that is detrimental both to ‘the ecology of the discourses on ecology’ and
to the notion of an ecology of immanence.
Key Terms: Holism, immanence, multiplicity, Gaia, ecosophy, Deleuze, Henry James,
Jan Smuts
1 Introduction: ‘All Things Considered’

How to be ‘adequate’ to the world? If ecology aims at such an adequation, how to be
ecological? In my contribution, I will argue that the conceptual premise of such an
ecological adequation might be found in the notion of immanence, in the sense of
being ‘inherent to.’ If taken seriously, a logic of immanence leads almost inevitably to
an ecological attitude towards the world. Even fields that are not explicitly concerned
with ecology, such as mathematics, physics or chemistry, become ecological if they
‘assume’ a logic of immanence. Such a logic, however, needs to take immanence as
comprehensive and as given. Ecology can become the practice of immanence only
when, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2001, 27) notes in his essay “Imma-
nence, a Life,” “immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself.”
Such a comprehensive logic of immanence defines, equally, the thought of ecologists
such as Ernst Haeckel, J. C. Smuts, Gregory Bateson and Félix Guattari, of scientists
and historians of science such as Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour,
of many ecological practices of life such as those of John Muir and Arne Naess, as well
as many varieties of artistic practice.
It would, of course, be utopian to argue that to embrace a logic of immanence
could solve the many problems addressed by ecology. If these problems could be
easily solved, chances are that they already would have been solved, which is a lesson
that also pertains generally to what one might call ‘the problem of the world.’ As
they are deeply entangled in that overall problem, ecological questions are in fact so
vast, diverse and intricate, that, as Bruno Latour has recently argued, one of the main
problems is that of scaling: How to get from the level of global warming to the level
of personally no longer using plastic bags and vice versa? Consider the difficulty of
actually knowing whether, ‘all things considered,’ it might not be more ecological to
use plastic bags than to use bags made from paper or hemp.
While Latour sets his hope in the growing availability of scientific knowledge
and in the density of networks of scientific data, my proposition is that such a belief
in science is not enough. To overcome ecology’s immensely scaled and complicated
problems, one also needs to develop, within the multiplicity of actors and agendas
that define ‘the ecological,’ an overall ecological attitude. According to such an
attitude, the choice between plastic and hemp is easy, one might say, although, ‘all
things considered,’ it might in actual fact be the ‘wrong’ choice. This should not deter
one from choosing hemp, however, because nobody will ever be able to look at the
problem in consideration of all things. In the light of the fact that it is impossible to
‘consider all things,’ my proposition is inherently a gamble. It opens up the ques-
tion of how an ecological attitude might be grounded. If one maintains that the most
viable choice is the one that is most adequate to the system of the world, what does
‘adequate,’ in this context, mean?
2 Exposition of Theoretical Premises

In his book Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes a figure of thought that con-
tours the conceptual complexity of the logic of immanence. “Instead of something
distinguished from something else,” Deleuze (1994, 28) notes, “imagine something
which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not
distinguish itself from it.” He illustrates this “unilateral distinction” by way of the
phenomenon of a lightning bolt that “distinguishes itself from the black sky but must
also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not
distinguish itself from it” (28).
The notion of being different from but simultaneously being a part of that from
which one is different is the perhaps most general conceptual basis of ecological
thought and an ecological attitude. All ecological practices and ethics develop from
this unilateral distinction: As singular beings, we distinguish ourselves from the
world around us, but we inevitably trail this world, which does not distinguish itself
from us, behind. As Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
note, living, autopoietic systems are separated from the world in terms of informa-
tion and operation, but are immanent, or, as they call it, ‘structurally coupled’ to the
world in terms of energy and energy exchanges.
In what follows, I will conceptually distinguish these two states by differentiating
between the environment and the milieu. In terms of structural couplings and ener-
86 Hanjo Berressem
getics, humans are immanent to the given milieu. Informationally and structurally,
however, the given milieu is experienced as the environment; as that which stands
around and thus outside of humans; the circumstances in which they find themselves.
If by milieu we mean ‘the given’ and by environment the ‘given as given’ – a concep-
tual pair Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition – in terms of set theory, the
milieu is more comprehensive than the environment, in the same way that the analog
is more comprehensive than the digital (Wilden 1972).
The ultimate challenge of a logic of immanence is to think of these two realms
as being formally distinct but ontologically one, in the same way that the photon is
formally distinguished into particle and wave, although it is, ontologically, both of
these at the same time. In other words, the registers of formal distinction are embed-
ded in a logic of complementarity, as it is expressed, for instance, in quantum physics
(Schrödinger 1967).
Before I deal with how this logic works in terms of ecological thought, let me
delineate the position of ecology within the ‘ecology of discourses on ecology’ in
contemporary culture. In this context, when I talk about science, I am not talking
about the multitude of already existing, dense symbiotic relations and the immensely
complex networks ‘between’ real science and ecology. In fact, even to talk of such
relations might be wrong because to thus differentiate disregards that in many of its
aspects ecology is itself a science and vice versa. Rather, I am talking about what
Latour would call the specifically ‘modern’ images of science that circulate in our
culture. Although these images have a very powerful cultural grip, most of them are,
somewhat ironically, themselves not scientific: As Latour argues in We Have Never
Been Modern, it were the scientists who invariably knew they were the ones who were
not modern.
For the moment, therefore, I am not talking so much about what science and
ecology do, as about their respective public image. According to that image, science
is objective and uninterested, which means that politics and ethics happen only after
the moment of science. As Henry James (1970, 13) defines science in his novel The
Golden Bowl, it is “the absence of prejudice.” Science thus defined stresses the cog-
nitive aspect of an immanent logic, according to which one is ‘apart’ from the world.
Ecology, in contrast, is seen as first of all and inherently political, which means
that politics and ethics come before the moment of the science. It stresses the ener-
getic aspect of an immanent logic according to which one is ‘a part’ of the world.
Metaphorically, one might say, in reference to the question about the speed with
which a feather and a stone fall to the ground, ecological science is more concerned
with the case of their falling through the actual world, while classical science is more
concerned with the case of their falling through a vacuum. In both of these cases,
however, the discursive distribution of these characteristics is equally one-sided.
Rather than to keep these two ‘modes of science’ separated, one needs to trace the
complex network of alliances between ‘real’ and ecological science, and the ways in
which the two modes of science have always been aligned.
I am not, however, at this point yet. Let me first trace how the two images are
related to two of science’s implied modes of operation. Real science, whose image is
indebted to the notions of rationalism and abstraction, is seen to look at the world
from without; or, both more metaphorically and more directly, from within laborato-
ries that have been carefully sealed off from environmental disturbances. Although
this is of course a generalization, and as such not true, when one sees the real space
of the laboratory as a conceptual space, it marks a certain tendency in real science to
separate the experiment from the world in which the processes that the experiment
reconstructs are taking place, and from the practical effects the knowledge retrieved
by way of the experiment will have in the real world. The ‘inherent vice’ of this mode
does not lie in its pragmatics – for some experiments, such a closure is absolutely nec-
essary, if only to ensure ‘repeatability’ – but in the tendency to conceptualize science
from within the possibility of a basic disjunction of that science and the world (see
Schmidgen 2008). This disjunction concerns science ‘as such,’ but also the repression
of its function as an actor in complex worldly situations, with ‘alliances’ that involve
politics and ethics as much as they involve science. Symptomatically, James’ (1970, 13)
sentence goes on “backed by the presence of money.”
“Unhappy Readymade,” Marcel Duchamp’s wedding gift to his sister Suzanne in
1907, might be read as an ironic critique of such an artificial separation of science
from its milieu. The present consisted of a copy of Euclid’s book Elements, to which
Duchamp had added instructions for Jean Crotti, Suzanne’s future husband:
It was a geometry book, which he had to hang by strings on the balcony of his apartment in the
rue Condamine; the wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out
the pages. […] It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then
the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea […]. (Cabanne 1971, 61)
The humor, of course, rests on a pun: the work literally suspends Euclid’s mathemat-
ical Elements into the meteorological elements that function as the material media of
the world: mathematics suspended into physics.
From Duchamp’s visual essay one might construct the notion of a ‘real ecological
science’ that is aware of its distance to the world, but also, and at the same time, its
fundamental and given immanence to that world. A real ecological science is sepa-
rated from, but also suspended into the constantly changing weather of the world.
Both in terms of its practice and its ethics, it realizes that its germ-free laboratories are
immanent to the dirty, fuzzy intensities of the natural elements; that it is simultane-
ously about and of the world and thus follows the logic of immanence as a ‘unilateral
distinction.’
In the conceptual ecology that defines large parts of the discursive landscape
around ecology, the two versions of science – real science before ethics; ethics before
real science – are often at war. From the first point-of-view, the main weakness of
ecological thought is that it is ‘holistic;’ which is read as implying that it gives up
88 Hanjo Berressem
scientific objectivity for a naïve, unscientific belief in the possibility of an unprob-

lematic and unreflected identity with an anthropomorphized world that is taken
to be a living friend. Although holism has been embraced by modern science, as
in Stuart Kauffman’s notion of life, in the discursive ecology, the term does not so
much evoke images of serious scientists, but rather of white-haired sages who speak
words of sacred wisdom, of hippie communes and of civilizations such as the Na’vi
in the movie Avatar; a people who worship a mother goddess called Eywa and who
are literally plugged into the natural universe of their home planet Pandora through
a biological neural network that is centered on trees with faux-poetic names such as
‘Hometree’ or the ‘Tree of Souls.’
Symptomatically, even the Pandoran wildlife helps the Na’vi win the final battle
against the humans who, coming from an Earth that has turned into an over-industri-
alized, dystopian wasteland, have come to harvest a natural resource, ‘unobtanium,’
that lies under Hometree. Popular culture is pervaded by such images of natural
people who stand for a way of life that throws into stark relief the uber-technologi-
zation and -industrialization of our contemporary world. There is a straight line from
Silent Running and Star War’s pseudo-hippie Jar Jar Bings, the Gungan from the ‘holis-
tic’ race Otollo on planet Naboo to Avatar’s Na’vi, which in turn evoke the Arda and
the Elves of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth trilogy The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
The conceptual danger of such alternative worlds, which are, symptomatically, often
created in the genres of science-fiction and fantasy, is that they are, precisely, fanta-
sies.
Even in the more down-to-earth context of publications such as Small is Beautiful
or the Whole Earth Cataloge, holism evokes the nostalgic return to cultural practices
that seem to be more immediately in touch with nature, such as the 1960s ideology
of going back to nature. In its evocation of the world of archaic rituals, rain-men and
natural healing, holism is tainted with being regressive both in terms of technology
and culture. As it has always been difficult to turn back time, this notion of holism
drags ecology into the field of the irrational and the hopelessly utopian.
By default, then, holism is taken to be the naïve belief in a friendly, deeply Arca-
dian nature with which one can live in peace and harmony. ‘Mother nature knows
best what is good for you.’ However, both of these suppositions – that there is a deep
unity between humans and nature, and that nature is a friend – are misreadings of
what holism ‘in actual fact’ means. When Jan Smuts (1926) coined the term in his
book Holism and Evolution, it denoted merely the tendency in evolution towards the
creation of complex assemblages that Guattari (2013 [1989], 129) calls “coherencies.”
In this context, it might be helpful to revisit Smuts’ text to see how much holism
is in fact opposed to what holism is often taken to mean; despite the fact that Smuts’
text does in parts evoke a ‘transcendentalism,’ as when it maintains that “[i]n the
kingdom of life is visibly arising its capital, the City of God” (Smuts 1926, 231) or when
it talks of a “universal Mind” (255). This transcendental lyricism, however, is coun-
tered by the lyricism of immanence that also defines the text. In fact, holism denotes
a very immanent process of consolidation or assemblage that is at work in and an

inherent part of nature from the moment of genesis onwards:
Appearing at first as the chemical affinities, attractions and repulsions, and selective groupings
which lie at the base of all material aggregations, it has accounted for the constitution of the
atom, and for the structural organising of atoms and molecules in the constitution of matter.
Next, after some gaps which are being energetically explored by biology and bio-chemistry, and
still operating as a fundamental synthetic selective activity, it has emerged on a much higher
level of organisation in the cell of life, and has again been responsible for the ordered grouping
of cells in the life-structures of organisms, both of the plant and the animal type, and in the pro-
gressive complexifying of these structures (Smuts 1926, 328–329).
This evolutionary assemblage, which Smuts (1926, 239) calls “indeed something mar-
vellous, almost something miraculous” extends from the most basic building blocks
of nature to its most complex architectures: “[T]he earlier simpler structure of the
atom becomes the unit for the molecule; the molecule for the crystal” (160) and ad
infinitum. Holism is, and this is quite astonishing for a book written in 1926, “quite lit-
erally, the process of self-organization and emergence” (110). Like Gilbert Simondon
(1980 [1958]) will do thirty years later in his book On the Mode of Existence of Techni-
cal Objects, Smuts (1926, 110) highlights that “[t]he functioning of the parts is influ-
enced by their place in the milieu of the other parts” and that these processes rely on
far-from-equilibrium conditions that pertain in the milieu outside of the whole. In
fact, ‘consistencies’ can only develop because the process of their assemblage draws
energy from that milieu. They rely on the fact that “[t]he fundamental structures of
Nature are […] in somewhat unstable equilibrium” (181).
In this context, the notion of the whole is “not a general principle or tendency”
(Smuts 1926, 129) which would imply an agent positioned outside of the system.
Rather, “it is a structure or schema,” which means that the whole is simply the name
for the working assemblage of heterogeneous, assembled parts that are recursively
stacked. As Smuts (130) notes, “a whole is not some tertium quid over and above the
parts which compose it; it is these parts in their intimate union and the new reactions
and functions which result from that union.”
Although nature forms a whole, this whole is merely the name we give to a
dynamic process that is grounded in a fundamental multiplicity. Nature is “pro-
foundly complex and replete with unsearchable diversity and variety. It is the expres-
sion of a creative process which is for ever revealing new riches and supplying new
unpredictable surprises” (Smuts 1926, 346). It would be equally wrong, however, to
remain with this chaotic multiplicity, because it merely forms the reservoir of potenti-
ality for nature’s assemblages: “the creative process is not, on that account, issuing in
chaos and hopeless irreconcilable conflict” (346). In modern scientific terms, it forms
a ‘deterministic chaos’ in which “the whole process of Evolution is largely a con-
tinuous growth towards organic independence and self-regulation; in other words,
towards wholeness” (145). Smuts notes explicitly that the notion of holism rests on a
90 Hanjo Berressem
logic of immanence; on a “unitary or monistic conception of the universe which is the

immanent ideal of all scientific and philosophic explanation” (111).
Although holism runs through and combines all plateaus of nature, it is neither
anthropomorphic (Smuts 1926, 344), animistic (345–346) or vitalistic. A living organ-
ism is “not an organism plus life, as if life were something different and additional
to it; it is just the organism in its unique character as a whole” (112). In fact, as “the
‘whole’ will be found a much more useful term in science than ‘life’” (89), holism will
makes “the application of the ideas and methods of mechanism or vitalism […] super-
fluous” (132, see also 111, 166–167, 183). In place of an opposition, in which “body
and mind wrongly come to be considered as two separate interacting substances”
(153), it installs a notion of complementarity, opening up spaces in-between, such as
“the realism and the idealism at the heart of things,” which makes it “a more accu-
rate description of reality than any of these more or less partial and one-sided world-
views” (327). Ultimately, it shows the danger of both idealisms and materialisms: “to
assume a Pre-established Harmony […] would be as great a mistake in one direction
as the contrary and more usual mechanistic assumption” (229).
Like Simondon, Smuts embeds all processes of “individuation” (242) into the
constructivist logic of holism. In these processes, nature consists of energetic fields
from whose far-from equilibrium milieus germinal, larval individuals draw the energy
needed for self-organization. From the beginning, an individual does not only inter-
act with its milieu; it quite literally is that very interaction: “All functioning takes
place in a field, that is to say, in a milieu of other functionings” (118, see also 119),
so that the external field “forms the extension of the internal field, and together they
form the total milieu for all happening and change in connection with organisms”
(119, see also 199). Even more, “[t]he organism and its field is one continuous struc-
ture which, beginning with an articulated sensible central area, gradually shades off
into indefiniteness” (117, see also, 117). The system is the result of what Deleuze (1989,
69) would call “dark precursors”; subtle energetic assemblages such as those in a
“supersaturated solution […] where the solidification or crystallisation lags behind
the conditions which bring it about” (Smuts 1926, 181).
According to Smuts’ (1926, 233) holistic theory of individuation “[m]ind is, after
the atom and the cell, the third great fundamental structure.” This mind, however, is
once more not only the human mind, but a subtle mind that “has its earliest begin-
nings in the inorganic structures of Nature already. Disturbance of the equilibrium of
physical structures leads […] to a state of tension, and a tendency to compensation”
(244). According to Smuts (245), mind emerges when “[t]he passive tension became
an active ad-tension or attention.” As he notes, “[i]n this transformation we reach the
most primitive, most characteristic function of Mind” (245).
The ‘tension’ of a body in disequilibrium gradually became covered with a vague ‘feeling’ of
discomfort, which had survival value; instead of remaining a passive state it became active as
ad-tension or attention, and ultimately consciousness. Interest became appreciable. Simulta-
neously the individual side of Mind developed as conation, seeking, experiment; and from this
double basis Mind grew with phenomenal rapidity. (234)
Mind, then, has to do with life not as a force added to a consistency, but as that con-
sistency’s inherent activity, “[f]reedom, plasticity, [and] creativeness” (234).
When Smuts refers to an unconscious mind, therefore, this implies less a retro-
spective injection of psychoanalysis into holism, than a reference to a notion of recur-
sively stacked plateaus of the unconscious. Each mind “has its conscious illuminated
area and its subconscious ‘field’” (Smuts 1926, 235). “For most minds, perhaps for
all minds, the conscious area is small compared to the subconscious area”; beyond
which lies the probably still larger “organic or physiological area of the nervous,
digestive, endocrine and reproductive systems, which all concern the Personality
most vitally and closely” (289). Much of the organic operations take place on these lit-
erally unconscious levels. The “organism has nothing to learn from highly developed
Mind in the way of regulation, co-ordination or inner control of structures and func-
tions. The self-balance of processes and activities in organism surpasses anything our
ingenuity can understand or encompass” (240; see also 248).
With the mind considered as operating in the smallest and most unconscious
levels of the system, the formal difference between mind and matter is given up for
the notion of an embodied mind where the synapsis is one of the smaller, although by
no means the smallest element where the material, electrical fields and the immate-
rial, psychic fields meet. From within a holistic framework,
the question of primacy as between the Mind and the brain is deprived of all real importance.
It is not a question of origins but of values, to which there can be but one answer. By whatever
standard of value it is measured, Mind has risen above its physiological source as high as, or
even higher than, life has risen above its inorganic beginnings (Smuts 1926, 262; see also 270).
It is no wonder that in Smuts’ (349) definition of nature as “holistic without being a

real whole,” he refers to “[t]he new science of Ecology,” which is “simply a recogni-
tion of the fact that all organisms feel the force and moulding effect of their environ-
ment as a whole. […] Sensitivity to appropriate fields is not confined to humans, but is
shared by animals and plants throughout organic Nature” (349).
The young science of Ecology has been built up since Darwin’s time and is based on the recog-
nition of this fact, that, in addition to the operation of Natural Selection, the environment has
a silent, assimilative, transformative influence of a very profound and enduring character on
all organic life. In the subtle ways of Nature, sun and earth, night and day, and all the things of
earth and air and sea mingle silently with life, sink into it and become part of its structure. And
in response to this profound stimulus life grows and evolves, the lesser whole in harmony with
the greater whole of Nature. (227)
92 Hanjo Berressem
To set Smuts’ evocations of a nurturing universe against the scientific details of the
theory of holism is counter-productive:
the creative intensified Field of Nature […] is the source of the grand Ecology of the universe. It is
the environment, the Society vital, friendly, educative, creative of all wholes and all souls. […] It
is the oikos, the Home of all the family of the universe, with something profoundly intimate and
friendly in its atmosphere. (352)
Despite the fact that these are once more ‘enchanting’ passages, they do not imply
that living systems are defined by an unproblematic, universal identity with nature,
or that nature is inherently friendly to ‘its’ creatures. The world is not a unified organ-
ism with a coherent will and a single consciousness. Rather, it is an in itself heteroge-
neous assemblage that is, on all of its levels, as destructive as it is constructive. In fact,
for Smuts, nature has no teleology other than to produce the new. Its ‘telos’ is nothing
but the production of newness and variety: “Everywhere we meet the new, which is
irreducible to the old elements from which it seems to have sprung; the qualities and
characters on which new stable varieties or species are founded cannot be explained
on the basis of known pre-existing qualities or characters” (Smuts 1926, 137).
Smuts, then, situates holism between on the one hand an affirmative, affective
enchantment that is, today, evoked in the work of Jane Bennett, and, on the other
hand, the dark ecology of Timothy Morton (2007, 102), who notes in Ecology Without
Nature: Thinking Environmental Aesthetics that his “ecology without nature rules out
holism.” While both of these approaches have numerous merits and have sparked
important debates, in terms of their rhetorics both go, perhaps, a bit too far. While
Jane Bennett, especially in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings,
and Ethics (2001), is perhaps slightly too celebratory, Morton’s (184) “‘goth’ assertion
[…] that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology,” as well as his call for a
“perverse, melancholic ethics” (195), are perhaps a bit too dark, especially after his
descent into ‘object-oriented ontology,’ with its stress on a dark ontology rather than
on questions of epistemology. If one were to chart the rhetorics of the ecology in con-
temporary academia, I think one would find that although they often meet concep-
tually, epistemologists tend to be much ‘lighter’ in tone than the current ontologists,
who paint the world and its objects in mostly dark colors, as can be seen in such titles
as Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013) or
Eugene Thacker’s recent Cosmic Pessimism (2015). Perhaps Karen Barad’s Meeting the
Universe Halfway (2007) – a rhetorically quite level-headed study that deals, sympto-
matically, with the ‘meeting’ of ontology and epistemology in the world of quantum
physics – comes closest to Smuts’ sentiment.
If nature is alive, then, it is both violently and beautifully so; a differentiation
that invariably depends on one’s point of view. The only way in which we are con-
nected directly to the world, in fact, is that we are ‘of’ it. The natural world is not an
operational nor a mental whole to which we might, like the Na’vi, attach ourselves.
Although we are ‘of’ it, in terms of human cognition, the natural elements form
merely a set of quantities to which humans and their sciences need to be adequate.
The challenge is not to translate elemental qualities – such as love and care – into
human qualities, but to translate elemental quantities that impinge on the human
being and human culture in general into adequate qualities – as Heinz von Foerster
notes, “No cell codes the quality of the source of stimulus, it only codes its quantity.”
(1994, 56; my translation) – and to develop, from these qualities, viable ways of living.
The misapprehension that holism implies an ideology of a deep friendship
with a living, loving and wise nature is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the
fate of James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia hypothesis. What has remained in
the public view is not so much the book’s argument about climate change and its
immensely complicated, highly scientific notion of self-organization, but that of a
nurturing, caring universe figurized by Gaia, the earth-goddess and ‘great mother’ of
Greek mythology; a figure that was suggested, perhaps unfortunately, to Lovelock by
his friend William Golding.
One needs to differentiate, then, between the definition of holism and what is
seen as its ‘adherent ideology’ (see ↗5 Paradox as Bedrock). A first difficulty with
such a de-sentimentalization is that many ecologists do show, in both theory and
practice, a very personal engagement with and love for nature, the overarching sen-
timent being that ‘the planet’ is in danger and needs to be protected. Long before
the geologists proved that in terms of terraforming human agency has reached the
level of natural forces, a fact that has rung in the era of the ‘anthropocene,’ James
Lovelock (2000, 84, 29) considered the human being to be “a sort of shop steward for
the nonhuman segment of the biosphere.” In fact, Smuts’ often highly objectionable
political beliefs – which Peder Anker has traced in Imperial Ecology (2002) – might
be a good reminder that ecology can also be done by someone who does not so easily
fall into the ecological cliché. Originally trained as a botanist, Smuts became a highly
complex and controversial figure; a general who read Spinoza, a statesman who
helped instigate apartheid and who put Ghandi into prison, but who was also fasci-
nated by Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. Smuts’ example shows that to
lead a fully ecological life is impossible. Smuts’ life is a reminder that ‘the ecological’
is an attitude, not an ideal.
Ironically, we can fulfill our task of shop stewards – or of course fail at it! – only
because we are, as humans, separated from the planet not only in terms of being
singular bodies, but, more pertinently, because we have – as opposed to the faculty
of sentience, which we share with many other non-human beings – the faculty of con-
sciousness. Unlike in Avatar, the animals will never help us in a concerted effort to
save the world from exploitation, to save the human race from extinction and, in less
urgent rhetoric, to make life more livable for the greatest possible number of living
beings. Also, although we might make the killing of animals more ‘humane’ or stop
eating animals altogether, we will never convince the lion to sleep with the lamb.
Once again, the challenge is to think of humans as being part and parcel of the world,
94 Hanjo Berressem
but, at the same time, as being, in very specific, what we call ‘human’ ways, separated
from it. Again, however, the first characteristic needs to be taken as more comprehen-
sive than the latter: “transcendence is always a product of immanence” (Deleuze 2001
[1977], 31).
It is hard to argue that ecology, as the attempt to keep the system of the world
up and running, is in itself a bad project. It is somewhat tragic, therefore, to see the
default choice being set up to lie between conceptual regression and technological
progression. The more pertinent question is how technology can be used from within
an ecological attitude that goes beyond paying lip-service to ‘the ecological’ in order
to sell one’s products in an ecologically mildly aware market in which the more afflu-
ent members of a society tend to buy products that are labelled ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘bio-
logical.’ In other words, how can the logic of unilateral distinction help to negotiate
the disconnect between the regressively sentimental and the progressively scientific?
Is it possible to adhere to the letter of holism without taking over its implied spirit? Is
it possible to evade, from within ecology, the often politically motivated sentimentali-
zation of ecology and the various anthropomorphizations and transcendentalizations
of nature? Can the notion of immanence help conceive of a ‘rational’ ecology that is
neither melodramatic nor utopian?
If one of the most important aspects of an ecology of immanence is that the planet
is not our friend, then how to ground our stewardship for and love of nature? How
to develop an ecological ethics? Guattari’s “ecosophy” provides conceptualizations
that allow for such a notion of a future-oriented, political ecology and ethics (see ↗24
Ecosophy and Ecoaesthetics: A Chinese Perspective). How can we make life on this
planet better? More liveable? More in tune with or adequate to the planet? How can we
do this without false romanticism or nostalgia?
3 Relevant Contexts of Research

It is ‘at the beginning’ that the conceptual parameters of an ecology of immanence are
set up. Already Greek and Roman nature philosophy [Naturphilosophie] considered
the world to have been created as an inherent multiplicity. Lucretius, in his epic poem
De Rerum Naturae imagined the world’s genesis as the result of a minute deviation of
one atom from an end- and timeless ‘vertical rain’ of atoms. This symmetry-breaking,
infinitesimally small deviation, which Lucretius called the clinamen, causes an atomic
chaos out of which orders emerge that ‘trail this chaos behind’ and thus remain, even
within the orders that emerge, inherently multiplicitous. While Michel Serres has
read Lucretius’ figure as a non-linear dynamics avant la lettre in The Birth of Physics
(2000), Gilles Deleuze has distilled from Lucretius the notion of a fundamental pos-
itivity of nature. Nature creates both order and disorder. Endlessly and surprisingly,
with a useless exuberance that Annie Dillard (1974) has, quite wonderfully, described
in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The ecological attitude, therefore, must find its grounding
beyond order and disorder. It must be grounded in a constant and ceaseless state of
change and creativity. As Smuts noted (1926, 89), wholes are not static but “dynamic,
evolutionary, creative.”
Although Guattari subscribes to the generative force of nature, the figure of
nature is no longer the benevolent mother evoked by Gaia or Eyra but, as Serres notes,
of Venus, as a figure of beauty born from and rising from the turbulence and noise of
the sea. In Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari (2013, 119) has described this initial
chaos as “a place in which nothing referred to anything so as to refer to everything, at
such a speed that nothing remains of these references. One might say that the memory
[…] of the arrangements of the soup of chaos equals zero.” In informational terms, the
state of chaos is a state without redundancy. A state of noise and semiotic turbulence
that equals infinite information and thus infinite complexity.
To describe this chaos further, Guattari (2013, 59) draws on the science of non-lin-
ear dynamics. It is a “deterministic chaos animated by infinite velocities.” This chaos
is the cause of both an “ontological heterogeneity” (61) and an “ontological intensity”
(29). From this point-of-view, Venus is the figure of an inherently dispersed and mul-
tiplicitous Gaia. All “complex compositions” (59) are born from within the ‘foam’ of
this chaos.
The “powdery diversity” (Guattari 2013, 111) of this multiplicitous state is the
‘given’ within which everything occurs and that which anything that occurs trails
behind. It forms the ‘aerosol of immanence.’ From the beginning, however, this
chaos, which is not a friend, is formed and defined by the interactions of in them-
selves disparate and heterogeneous elements, which form the ‘plane of immanence’
provided by the initial chaos into planes of consistency and of composition. As the
initial chaos traverses all forms, however, the planes of consistency and composition
remain immanent to the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence assures that
every plane of consistency and composition will trail the chaos of the plane of imma-
nence behind. As Guattari maintains, “beneath the diversity of beings, no unicoval
ontological plinth is given” (58). Or, as Simondon (1980 [1958], 53) notes, “[l]iving
matter is far from being pure indetermination or pure passivity. Neither is it a blind
tendency; it is, rather, the vehicle of informed energy.”
This notion of an infinite multiplicity provides the potentiality of any ecology of
immanence. It is the multiplicity and positivity that drives everything; the multiplicity
that is within everything and that allows things to change. It provides the free-floating
energy that makes up the milieu within which consistencies self-organize. In that it
takes its energy from the environment that it changes in the process, every form of
assemblage is deeply environmental.
The notion of multiplicity leads directly to the notion of the infinite connectivity
that underlies ecological thought. Everything is connected to everything else. Nature,
as Leibniz realized with wonder when he looked through Leeuwenhook’s microscope
and saw the infinite recursivity of living matter, is infinitely complex and living:
96 Hanjo Berressem
“[e]ach portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like
a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal,
each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond” (Leibniz 1985 [1898],
§ 67, 256). Bateson (1991, 7.2) realized the same when he observed the relationship
between a polluted Lake Eerie and the people living around it: “You decide that you
want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good
place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part
of your wider eco-mental system – and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insan-
ity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” John Muir
(1911, 110) felt it when he wrote that “[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Borrowing a figure of thought
from biology, Deleuze and Guattari note that the elements of nature form an infinitely
complex rhizome.
Let me take as given, then, the infinite multiplicity and connectivity of the world;
something that implies its fundamental specificity in terms of time and space. Given
the singularity of every situation, one must see every “given situation” as a set of
complex relations that need to be negotiated and “administer[ed]” (Guattari 2013, 19)
by the agents immanent to that situation. As Guattari notes, it is not enough to look
at and analyze a given situation from the outside. Rather, the “primary purpose of
ecosophic cartography is not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages
of enunciation capable of capturing the points of singularity of a situation” (128).
Any ‘given’ situation, therefore, is at the same time scientific, political, philosoph-
ical, artistic, biological, and chemical. In fact, although we set up, pragmatically,
borders around it, it is related to everything, which means that it can no longer be
treated in isolation. Ecology is the name we give to an approach to the world that is
aware of this inherent complexity of a given situation. To look at a situation ecologi-
cally is to trace the relations between the various actors and fields of reference with
the practical aim of creating a viable, self-sustaining milieu. The only ethics of such
a milieu are that it should be adequate to the world described by Serres (1995, 110) as
“a chaotic multiplicity of orderly or unitary multiplicities and chaotic multiplicities,”
a description behind which it is easy to recognize the notion of ‘order in a sea of disor-
der’ that has been popularized by the science of non-linear dynamics. Such a milieu
needs itself to be as multiplicitous, open and elastic as possible. To see the world as
such a system is the attitude needed to administer situations and why ultimately, a
“generalised ecology – or ecosophy – [is] as a science of ecosystems, as a bid for polit-
ical regeneration, and as an ethical, aesthetic and analytic engagement. It will tend to
create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new gentleness between the
sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races” (91–92).
Although Guattari’s rhetorics might once more seem utopian, the gentleness he
talks of is systemic rather than sentimental. In fact, the strength and the conceptual
power of Guattari’s ecosophy lies precisely in that it does not rest on a sentimental
notion of ecology. New assemblages are in themselves neither good nor bad. They
can “work for the better or for the worse” (Guattari 1995, 5). For Guattari, the aim of
ecosophy is ‘simply’ to keep the possibility of choice and the coefficient of change as
high as possible. To ensure this, the bonds between the single elements of an assem-
blage must remain as elastic as possible. Ecologically, too much order and too much
disorder are equally detrimental. While complete order leads to fascist ecologies, the
break-up of all bonds leads to anarchic and schizophrenic ecologies. The aim of eco
sophy, therefore, must be the controlled dismantling of molar, stratified structures
and the redefinition of the individual as an emergent machine; a re-complexifica-
tion of a culture that has become too hard and too periodic; a “controlled chaosmotic
deterritorialization – under the sign of social, aesthetic and analytic practices” (56).
As Guattari notes,
[a]mong the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of subjectivity
is now returning as a leitmotiv. It is not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we
produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it […]? How do we work for its liber-
ation, that is, for its resingularization? Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature,
poetry, innovative pedagogies, town planning and architecture – all the disciplines will have to
combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic
spasms looming on the horizon, and transform them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the
promises of which, for all that, are all too tangible. (1995, 135)
The project is to free and open up potentialities of mutation and modulation; to

create a “deterritorialising complexification” (19) that brings about emergent individ-
uals with a stress on “processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation” (29) and on
“unlimited combinatories and creativity” (45). Once more, Simondon (1980, 52) pro-
vides a useful conceptual backdrop. The reason for alienation is “a rupture between
background and forms in psychic life. It occurs when the associated milieu no longer
effectively regulates the dynamism of forms.” Such a rupture destroys the strong
kinship between life and thought. In a living organism all living matter cooperates
with life (52).
At the end of his ecological “cartography,” Guattari (1995, 11) formulates a general
ecology that allows not complete freedom, but elastic and thus graceful subjects.
How, like Duchamp, to suspend the globalized, oedipalized, ordered, decelerated,
binarized and rationalized subject from the cultural balcony? How can one once
again make the wind blow through the individual and through science? How can the
individual be singularized, processualized and suspended into a continuous move-
ment of becoming?
98 Hanjo Berressem
4 A
pplication to Selected Texts and Other Cultural
Phenomena
In large areas of contemporary discourse, the notion of animism or vitalism has, like
that of holism, become a marker of conceptual naiveté. It is, perhaps, a legacy of
rationalism and of the enlightenment that the notion of a ‘living world’ has become
to be regarded as unscientific. Or, today, a result of movies such as Avatar. How sad,
in fact, that the notion of a world that is ‘alive’ seems too naively evident to be sci-
entifically evident. As Smuts’ rejection of an animism that uncouples life from its
embodiment has shown, the question is not whether the world is alive or not, but
what exactly that ‘life’ consists of, and how the term is defined. Of how thoroughly it
permeates the world, and what our attitude to a living world should be to be adequate
to its living.
An ecological attitude towards ‘life’ can take many forms. It can be political,
social, philosophical, scientific or artistic. The work of John Cage, for instance,
shows, very directly, a ‘formal ecology.’ Art, he notes, in reference to the work of
Ananda Coomaraswamy, should be an “imitation of nature” (Cage 1961, 100). While
this seems to reach back to a simple notion of mimesis, the sentence continues “in
her manner of operation” (100); an addition that makes his poetics truly ecological.
In fact, from such a notion of adequation, the focus of what ecology is shifts, because
it goes beyond immediately ecological genres such as nature writing, or texts that
are directly concerned with ecological matters. An ecosophical poetics, for example,
might be said to define the work of Henry James, who is not an immediate candidate
for ‘ecological writer.’ Nevertheless, James’ notion of the artist as a medium – the
artistic consciousness as a spiderweb that catches and expresses the world’s vibra-
tions – is eminently ecological. As James notes (1957, 38), “[i]n proportion as in what
she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the
truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put
off with a substitute, a compromise and convention.”
‘Like James,’ nature writers see nature as an intricate, infinitely complex assem-
blage of human and non-human cultures that has very site-specific habits which we
tend to abstract into laws. These habits can be recognized by an intense and prolonged
observation that implies an immersion in the landscape in which the living realizes
itself. As it emerges from the given, human thought is one of many ways to create a
resonance between the human and the world. It is quite obvious for nature writers
that human and nonhuman languages are the result of co-evolution, and that human
evolution is tied to the evolution of non-human agents. Meaning is constructed within
the single living being, and knowledge, therefore, never objective. Nature is indeed
the largest ‘plane of immanence’
At one point in his book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez (1986) describes the space of
and in an airplane as if it were that of a closed-off laboratory. Cut off from the land-
scape and the milieu, it does not allow for true – or better: viable – knowledge to
emerge. This knowledge condenses on its windows, being unable to permeate the
interior. “[Y]ou must walk away from the planes” (285), therefore, is Lopez’s advice
for the scientists who are truly interested in gaining knowledge. “The airplane, like
the map, creates a false sense of space. […] The interior of a plane is artificially lit,
protected from weather, full of rarified air […] and far noisier than the ground below”
(284–285).
To show the absurdity of science in a closed-off laboratory, Lopez (1986, 87)
recounts an experiment to test overheating in polar bears. These experiments, which
were “conducted at a laboratory,” showed that polar bears have “adequate protection
in temperatures as low as –40°F with a 15-mile-per-hour wind.” While this is an inter-
esting observation, this never happens in the ‘given’ field: “Laboratory results are
always somewhat problematic because they oversimplify. In the field bears tend to lie
down in the leeward protection of drifts and pressure ridges or to dig temporary dens
in –15°F to –20°F weather with 15-mile-per-hour winds” (87). Although the laboratory
observation is not ‘false,’ it is curiously irrelevant, because the situation it describes
is purely hypothetical. It happens only in the laboratory in which there are no drifts
and pressure ridges for the bears to use as protection. According to Lopez’s fine irony,
to us the experimental findings “have a certain attractiveness because they simplify
and provide numbers” (88).
The irrelevance of the experiment results from the fact that it disregards that the
bears, who are the subjects of the experiment, have an immensely complicated feed-
back relation to the landscape through which they travel. There is a complex inter-
action between the living beings and “the media they move through” (Lopez 1986,
158). Both are complicated machines that are attuned to each other. Again and again,
Lopez is amazed at “how intricate these seemingly simple natural events are” (160).
Often, humans can only marvel at nature’s complex habits. As Smuts noted,
the results, matured and consolidated through immemorial periods, cannot be repeated or
rehearsed by short-dated laboratory experiments, conducted too under conditions very different
from those of Nature. These experiments, however valuable and instructive in affording subsid-
iary clues and hints of the natural process, do not by any means exhaust or even seriously affect
the real problem of creative Evolution. (1926, 225–226)
In fact, “[n]o cunningly devised machine of human contrivance can rival or even
approach in delicacy of co-ordination or fineness as well as complexity of adjustment
the organic wholes we see in Nature” (Smuts 1926, 148).
Language is part of that adjustment. “The very order of the language, the ecology
of its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind’s intercourse with the landscape,”
Lopez (1986, 278) notes. It is in “concordance” (278) with the field and it has “a con-
gruent relationship with the land” (297). Lopez, however, takes pains to point out that
there are two series that stand, as Deleuze (1989, 69) notes, in a relation of “reciprocal
presupposition.” Language emerges from the field and remains immanent to it: “The
100 Hanjo Berressem
land, in a certain, very real way, compels the mind of the people” (Lopez 1986, 202). At
the same time that “a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape” (273),
these two realms are separated: “there is another realm of reality corresponding to the
physical one but different” (274). This is “a country of the mind” (295).
As in Smuts, for Lopez (1986, 313) this mind is not only the human mind, but
also that of non-human agents: “we need tolerance in our lives for the worth of dif-
ferent sorts of perception,” therefore. For all the members of the ‘commonwealth of
the living.’ To be adequate to the world, we need to develop a keen sense of other
lives and other forms of perception – such as “the ability to detect an electromagnetic
field” (158) – as well as of other languages; of the “infinitely varied” (165), both singu-
lar and communal “patchwork of life” (123).
An ecological thought, then, happens ‘by circumstance’ and by way of the
infinitely many chance encounters in each life. It is embodied and spread out within
the milieu; within the atmospheres in which we think: a thought that is in resonance
with both our meteorological and our conceptual weather, which form an infinitely
complex field of resonances. It emerges from living and reading, from minute deci-
sions, from an overheard sentence, from cultural to biological and chemical influ-
ences; from the dynamics of the milieu to which we are immanent. This is why an
ecological attitude will find that individual thought also traces the world behind.
Thought is as multiplicitous and as assembled as everything else. Although it is not so
easy to ‘visualize’ thought as being assembled as it is to see material things as assem-
bled, this is precisely the challenge of ecological thinking. “‘A’ thought is in actual fact
an ensemble of pure thoughts in conjunction,” Guattari (2011, 126) notes. Alliances of
such pure thoughts form a mental plane of consistency and composition: “a thought
with ‘n’ dimensions where everything starts to think at the same time, individuals as
well as groups, the ‘chemical’ as well as the ‘chromosomal’ or the biosphere” (126). To
be adequate to such a ‘distributed, multiplicitous thought’ is the ultimate challenge
of an ecological attitude.
5 Conclusion: ‘All is Light’

When, in order to prove the diffusion of cultures across the globe, Thor Heyerdahl
undertook, in 1969, two journeys from Marocco to America on two boats made entirely
from papyrus – which we know more as a writing surface than as a building material
of a boat – he named these boats ‘Ra I’ and ‘Ra II,’ after the Egyptian sun-god. During
these scientific trips, he also chronicled the pollution of the ocean with oil, which
led to a United Nations intervention. Heyerdahl had become famous in 1947 when
he crossed the Pacific with the ‘Kon-Tiki,’ which was built entirely from balsa wood.
In 1978, Heyerdahl planned to sail another boat made from papyrus, the ‘Tigris,’
from Basra to Pakistan. When his ship was stopped in Dschibuti because of war, he
burned it in protest of that war. As a testimony against war and the senseless loss of
life, the burning of the ship is a gesture that aligns science, politics, documentary
filmmaking and ecological intervention. It is a gesture that acknowledges how deeply
science is involved in the world; so much so that it can give itself up in order to make
a political and ecological difference in that world.
For Lucretius, the goddess who presided over the multiplicity of the world was
Venus Anadyomene. Today, the figure that presides over multiplicity is not Venus or
even Gaia, but rather Helios or Ra. The sun as the luminous ground of energy (Margu-
lis). The origin of multiplicity is a ‘luminous’ energy that traverses all things, and that
‘carries’ life. It is a truly cosmic luminosity, in the sense that if the earth were a closed
system, chances are that it would already have consumed all of its inherent energy.
How fitting that in naming his boat ‘Ra,’ Heyerdahl linked the diffusion of cultures
and the diffusion of light.
On this background, Guattari’s ecosophy is, like Heyerdahl’s ecological science,
inherently luminous. It is no wonder, therefore, that many ecologists celebrate this
source of illumination, often by way of celebrating the shades and intensities of the
play of light; a light that bathes the planet in waves but also, sometimes, in storms of
energy. The notion of the electromagnetic field as the true plane of immanence pro-
vides what might be called a luminous ecology with its ultimate point-of-perspective.
Although this electromagnetic field is the source of life, it surely is not a friend. At the
same time, in the shift from ‘electromagnetic radiation’ to ‘light,’ the energetic field is
charged with an immense affective intensity. It is, quite literally, enchanted.
Whereas electromagnetic radiation is a neutral, scientific term, light is an ‘exis-
tential’ term. From the plant that bends towards the light, the project of the enlight-
enment, to ‘magic hour’ at a beach or in a city, light, in all of its spectralities, is expe-
rienced as a carrier of life, whereas darkness is experienced as its polar opposite. The
darkness of the cosmic void. Of course, light and darkness are just forms of the dis-
tribution of radiation, and as such both are ‘radiological.’ For individuals with eyes,
however, “sight,” as von Foerster (2008, 28) notes, “comes before the light.” Much of
its affective attributions, therefore, do not have to do with the fact that darkness is
inherently negative, but with the fact that it implies the ‘death of the eyes’; organs that
are fundamental to the human. Less so, of course, for the squid or the plant. Which,
of course, is to say that ‘light is also not the answer.’ The sun is a gift, in the sense of
pharmakon, not a friend. There can always be too much light. ‘Don’t look directly into
the sun,’ we tell our kids, ‘or you’ll go blind.’ Whiteness can be horribly co-opted by
ideologies of purity and clarity, and darkness has its very own poetics, ecologies and
erotics. Light chaos, dark order. Light judgement, dark touch. It is always a question
of economy. Of the fundamental chiaroscuro of the world.
It is in the overlap of ‘electromagnetic radiation’ and ‘light’ that science meets
ecology, and ecology meets science. Not to think in a dualism, but to think in mul-
tiplicity. The challenge of ecology, one might say, lies in ‘writing from behind the
multiplicity’ of physical reality. In all of its aspects, ecocritical theory is a future-ori-
102 Hanjo Berressem
ented, experimental, pragmatic and deeply dangerous, risky undertaking. Because

the future remains, as Guattari (2013, 15) has noted, with subtle irons, “largely open.”
It honors multiplicity not as a ‘value in itself’ but as the ‘inherent value’ of the system
of the world; both as a physical and a psychic value. To be adequate to this world,
its ethics develop from and honor this multiplicity. Perhaps such an ethics has never
been stated more laconically than by Heinz von Foerster (1994, 234): “Act in such a
way that the number of possibilities of choice increases” (my translation). What is a
friend is not the world, but rather, its form of operation: change and choice.
6 E
pilogue
In his Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer (1960, 296) notes that “the remedy for the
kind of abstractness which befalls minds under the impact of science is experience –
the experience of things in their concreteness.” In Alfred North Whitehead, Kracauer
finds a thinker of the concrete. As he quotes Whitehead,
[w]hen you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation
of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct
perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with the
high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness. (qtd. in Kracauer 1960, 296)
From this “esthetic appreciation,” Kracauer develops a relation to the world that may
well serve as an explanation for ecology’s inherent holism: “Out of this urge for con-
cretion technicians often fall into playful animism, lending some motor with which
they commune the traits of a whimsical person,” Kracauer (296) observes. Ecology’s
inherent holism should perhaps be read as such a ‘playful animism.’ Ecologists, as
technicians of a world to which they are immanent, ‘playfully animate’ that world.
No wonder that the subtitle to Theory of Film is a perfect program of a future ecology:
“The Redemption of Physical Reality.”
7 B
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Hannes Bergthaller
5 P
aradox as Bedrock: Social Systems
Theory and the Ungrounding of Literary
Environmentalism in Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire
Abstract: Environmentalism is caught up in a paradox: it wishes to speak on behalf
of the whole constituted by society and its biophysical environment, but it can only
do so in the terms provided by society itself; it argues that humans need to recognize
themselves as a part of nature, but the very possibility of this argument is predicated
on society standing apart from nature. This chapter argues that Niklas Luhmann’s
theory of social systems provides a theoretical angle from which the paradox of
holism can be understood not as a defect of environmentalist discourse, but rather
as its necessary and enabling condition. The development of ecocriticism as a disci-
pline is described in terms of successive attempts to elaborate on, but also to evade
and obscure this paradox; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire is presented as a literary
text which has posed difficulties to ecocritical readings precisely because it seeks to
confront it directly.
Key Terms: Edward Abbey, communication, functional differentiation, Niklas

Luhmann, modernity, paradox
1 D
eep Ecology, Ecocriticism, and the Paradox of
Holism
The environmental movement “seeks to affect society from within society as if it
occurred from outside. This paradox creates the instability of the observer position
and the dynamics of the social movement makes allowances for this without realizing
it” (Luhmann 1989, 126). When Niklas Luhmann wrote these sentences in Ecologi-
cal Communication (originally published in 1986), he had the German environmen-
tal movement in mind, whose popular appeal was cresting at the time, and which
had only recently embarked on its ‘long march through the institutions.’ But they
could have applied equally well to another, roughly contemporaneous development,
namely the emergence of ecocriticism in British and US academia. Perhaps the most
important source of inspiration for early ecocriticism was Deep Ecology, a radical
strand of environmentalist thought which gained prominence during the Reagan
and Thatcher years. Frustrated with the massive roll-back of environmental policies,
106 Hannes Bergthaller
many in the movement abandoned the notion that an ecological transformation of

society could be brought about by way of compromise and piece-meal reform. The
only remedy for society’s ecological problems, Deep Ecologists argued, was a funda-
mental shift of values and attitudes, one that would acknowledge the intrinsic value
of the natural world which lies beyond the boundaries of society. Ecocriticism was to
be the voice of that great outside – it would speak for “the entire buzzing, howling,
gurgling biosphere” which had been “compressed […] into the narrow vocabulary of
epistemology, to the point that someone like George Lukács could say, ‘nature is a
societal category’ – and actually be understood” (Manes 1996, 15). With this indict-
ment of Lukács, Christopher Manes took aim at the entire tradition of humanistic
studies, a tradition whose deeply ingrained anthropocentrism had, in his view, made
it an accessory to the silencing of nature at the hands of Western modernity. Accord-
ingly, many ecocritics bore their outsider status vis-à-vis the academic establishment
as a badge of honor.
It did not take very long for the paradoxes inherent in this view to catch up with
the movement. After all, if ecocritics wanted their message to find a hearing, they had
to adopt the language of the very institutions which they also denounced. In order to
plead on behalf of the outside, one needed to get a firm foothold on the inside. Within
a relatively short period of time, ecocriticism established itself as yet another branch
of literary studies, merely the latest in the series of revisionary movements that had
swept through the humanities since the 1970s. This also meant that its successes and
failures were now to be gauged by the same metrics as those of any other scholarly
discipline: what counted were the quantity of publications, conferences, and aca-
demic positions, of students and external funding. Many ecocritics remain deeply
ambivalent about, if not hostile to, this process of professionalization. Yet the notion
that ecocriticism could somehow stand apart from the general academic modus oper-
andi, and the repertoire of symbolic gestures employed to demonstrate this distance,
have come to look increasingly like a form of special pleading – they may continue to
play an important role in establishing the reputation of individual scholars within the
field (e.g. in the form of debates over what sort of consumer behavior is appropriate
for a bona fide ecocritic), but for better or worse, it is the larger context of the univer-
sity which sets the criteria by which the future of the field as a whole is determined.
But the contradictions were not limited to the way in which ecocriticism posi-
tioned itself in relation to its institutional context; they also had a more strictly con-
ceptual dimension. If ecocritics believed in the necessity to sidestep ‘societal cate-
gories’ and to articulate the value of the biosphere as it was in and of itself, they
were soon forced to realize that in order to “actually be understood” (Manes 1996,
15), they had to rely on the semantic affordances which society provided. The inter-
ests of the more-than-social whole could only be advanced from a particular posi-
tion within society. As critics pointed out, the language of wilderness, of nature as
the absolute other of society, had quite an illustrious pedigree and was politically far
from innocent (e.g. Cronon 1995). ‘Arrogance’ was hardly a prerogative of ‘humanism’
5 Social Systems Theory and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire 107
(Ehrenfeld 1978) – in fact, from the perspective of socially marginalized groups, some
forms of ‘holism’ and ‘biocentrism’ espoused by Deep Ecologists looked suspiciously
like an inside game whereby able-bodied, straight white males accorded themselves
privileged access to nature and the transcendent values associated with it. Assign-
ing absolute priority to the defense of wilderness also meant tacitly downgrading the
rights of ethnic or other minorities to a secure livelihood and healthy environment; it
meant framing environmental issues in a way that erased histories of dispossession
and disenfranchisement, and effectively pitched wilderness against the interests of
the poor and powerless. In most of the familiar accounts of the discipline’s history, the
task of deconstructing the wilderness myth and of unfolding its sometimes unsavory
political implications fell to ‘second-wave ecocriticism,’ which, from the late 1990s
onwards, shifted the field’s focus towards questions of environmental justice, urban
environments, and the intersection of environmental issues with questions of race,
gender, or class (Buell 2005, 1–28). Having begun as an attempt to ground its ecolog-
ical critique on the absolute value of that which lay “beyond” society, ecocriticism
thus ended up turning towards eminently social questions and assimilating itself to
well-established discourses of emancipation.
The trajectory which the discipline has followed since its inception can thus be
taken to illustrate Luhmann’s contention about the inherent ‘instability’ of environ-
mentalist critique resulting from the unrecognized paradox built into the movement’s
self-description. The claim to speak for the larger ecological whole of which society is
merely a part inevitably entangles itself in performative contradictions: “The whole
cannot be a part of the whole at the same time. Any attempt [to establish the totality
of the system within the system] would merely create a difference in the system: the
difference of that part which represents the totality of the system within the system
vis-a-vis all the other parts” (Luhmann 1989, 121). In traditional societies, this paradox
could remain latent as long as social hierarchies were unchallenged (the strangely
dual nature of the king’s body, for example, was a problem that concerned medie-
val philosophers, but which lead neither peasants nor noblemen to question their
obligations within the feudal order; see Kantorowicz 1957). Under the conditions of
modernity, however, any pretension to represent (politically or aesthetically) the
“whole” is open to critique, because “[in] the new order there are no natural prima-
cies, no privileged positions within the whole system and therefore no position in the
system which could establish the unity of the system in relation to its environment”
(Luhmann 1989, 122).
2 Communication, Contingency, Co-evolution

If ecocritics have found effective ways of side-stepping this paradox, it is surely not
because they paid much heed to Luhmann’s diagnosis; and while they have worked
rather hard to remedy the lack of ‘theory’ which Luhmann (1989, 125) had also identi-
fied as a principal weakness of the environmental movement, their efforts have gener-
ally not gone in the direction of a theory of modern society, such as Luhmann himself
provided with his own theory of social systems. Attempts to adopt his substantial
body of work to the purposes of ecocriticism, or the more broadly conceived environ-
mental humanities, have been few and far between (e.g. Blühdorn 2000; McMurry
2003; Cudworth 2005; Hofer 2007; Clarke 2008; Wolfe 2010; Castle 2013). The reasons
for this very limited reception are numerous and not necessarily specific to ecocriti-
cism. To begin with, Luhmann never attained the kind of prominence in the Anglo-
phone world which some of his great intellectual rivals in the German academy, most
notably Jürgen Habermas and the late Ulrich Beck, were able to achieve. Although
several of his most important books have been translated into English, these still
constitute only a small fraction of his entire oeuvre, which covers every discipline in
the social sciences and humanities (among many other things, he wrote on theology,
administrative law, the mass media, pedagogy, psychotherapy, business consulting,
and political science). Luhmann’s writing can be both dauntingly opaque and mad-
deningly redundant, and a substantial investment of reading time is required to gain
even a provisional understanding of his idiosyncratic conceptual vocabulary, which
he borrowed (and often repurposed) from a wide range of theoretical sources. While
there is significant overlap between Luhmann’s insights and those of the poststruc-
turalists, his texts lack almost entirely the latter’s seductive elegance (Moeller 2012,
10–18).
But presumably the most important reason why Luhmann did not find much
favor in the Anglophone academy is one that, at least on the face of it, ought to make
him attractive to ecocritics who take seriously their field’s ambition to develop a
‘non-anthropocentric’ theoretical perspective: his theory of social systems represents
a radical break with the humanist assumptions which inform the Western intellec-
tual tradition, and which continue to exert a particularly strong hold on public and
academic discourse in the United States. According to this latter tradition, society is
conceived as something created by and for the benefit of individual human beings.
The attributes and characteristics of these individuals – free will, rationality, human
rights, and so on – are assumed to determine what society is and should be. They
are called upon to explain how society functions and to criticize social developments
which are considered undesirable. Against such commonsense views, Luhmann
argues that society constitutes a distinct plane of reality that is irreducible to the
reality of individual human organisms. Society does not consist of human beings, but
of communication. Communication, moreover, is not something that people ‘do’ –
as Luhmann (1988, 371) provocatively puts it: “Humans cannot communicate; not
even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communi-
cate. Only communication can communicate.” Luhmann does not mean to deny that
humans, brains, and minds need to exist in order for communication to occur, but
he insists that communication has a dynamic and a structure of its own that cannot
be derived from the properties of the latter. They are a necessary, but not a sufficient
condition – just as water is necessary in order for fish to exist, but not sufficient in
order for us to explain what they are.
I use this metaphor advisedly: in fact, Luhmann conceptualizes communication
as an emergent, self-organizing system, in analogy to biological organisms. Such
organisms live and evolve by maintaining and recursively processing the difference
between themselves and their respective environments. Here, Luhmann draws on
the theory of autopoiesis as developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
(1986), according to whom the living being is constituted as a network of processes
that produce the components of which this network itself consists. A system organ-
ized in this fashion is able to distinguish itself from (and thus cognize or observe) its
environment and thereby acquires a certain level of freedom from external determi-
nation (Varela 1986). The behavior of the system is not dictated by what occurs in its
environment, but becomes a function of the systems’ previous states, an effect of the
system reacting to itself or, more precisely, of the system reacting to its own (previous)
reactions to its environment. The system can therefore be described as operationally
closed. Again, this does not mean that it no longer depends on the presence of par-
ticular environmental conditions, but only that it is the system itself (as long as it per-
sists as a system) which selects the aspects of the environment relevant for its self-re-
production. Operational closure is therefore, paradoxically, the very condition for a
system’s ability to open itself (selectively) to its environment: “[In] the self-referential
mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts;
closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the
complexity of the environment that is possible for the system” (Luhmann 1995b, 37).
Luhmann employed a variety of concepts in order to describe the sort of circular cau-
sality that obtains between such a system and its environment, speaking at different
times of interpenetration, structural coupling, irritability, or resonance.
The application of this model to communication (and to the ‘psychic systems’ or
consciousnesses which constitute its immediate environment) has far-reaching rami-
fications. For one thing, it suggests that communication rides on an essential paradox:
it can only refer to its outside by referring, at the same time, to itself, and it can only
refer to itself by distinguishing itself (and therefore referring to) its outside. Commu-
nication always must be “about” something, but it can never occur as anything but
communication. It must distinguish between itself and that which it refers to, but
this distinction can only be made within subsequent communication, which likewise
reproduces the distinction between the communicative event and its referent. It is
this recursive processing of the difference between system and environment by which
the system constructs both itself and its environment. Whereas the notion of a system
traditionally implied unity, Luhmann’s concept of social systems is founded on the
primacy of difference (or on the paradoxical unity of the difference between system
and environment). In this regard, his account of the autopoiesis of communication
is close to Derrida’s notion of différance, which similarly casts language as a play of
signifiers wherein meaning is continually deferred and can never find completion in a
signified. But whereas Derrida is more concerned with staging the paradox of linguis-
tic self-reference in his own texts, Luhmann is interested in the way in which actual
communication manages to “unfold” the paradox in historically specific ways. In
purely logical terms, a paradox is an aporia – it “does not lead anywhere” (Luhmann
1987, 164; my translation). In practice, however, communication avoids this impasse
by continually substituting distinctions, in a manner that, for the time being, makes
the problem invisible. These substitutions are fundamentally contingent – there is no
principle or law, no transcendent reality, which would authorize and ‘ground’ them,
and they are in this sense arbitrary and therefore susceptible to deconstruction; yet
once they have been made, they both provoke and constrain further development.
For social systems theory, “the paradoxes produced by self-reference are not a termi-
nus, but the starting point for evolutionary developments” (Koschorke 1999, 56; my
translation).
Among other things, this implies that the increased sensitivity of modern society
to paradoxes must itself be considered as the result of social evolution: both social
systems theory and deconstructionism, as theories which foreground the paradox-
ical quality of society’s self-descriptions, are made possible by historically specific
socio-structural conditions. This brings us back to Luhmann’s critical account of the
environmental movement, as I have summarized it above. According to Luhmann,
the most distinctive feature of modern society is that it is organized along principles
of functional differentiation. In medieval society, people’s ability to participate in
communication and their access to social functions was determined by their social
station – by their membership in a particular household, which in turn occupied a
particular position within the feudal order. Just as each household was structured
hierarchically, with the pater familias at the top, so society as a whole could be
imagined as an all-encompassing hierarchy. This arrangement left little room for con-
flicting descriptions of the world, since social privileges were neatly lined up with
cognitive privileges. It therefore also underpinned traditional ontology, which viewed
the world as a collection of reliably self-identical bodies, a “congregatio corporum or
universitas rerum” (Luhmann 1980, 33). In such a world, paradox appeared merely as
an “outlying opinion,” as the term’s Greek etymology indicates, on the assumption
that true knowledge of the world was readily available to anyone who sought for it in
good faith (Luhmann 1995a, 170).
All of this begins to change with the onset of modernity. The primary functions
by which society sustains itself are now no longer distributed along the lines of social
stratification; instead, they are gradually assumed by a host of specialized function
systems (such as law, politics, economy, or science – to name only the most obvious
examples). These subsystems internally reiterate the difference between system and
environment, and they achieve operational closure through the implementation of
semantic codes which elaborate on the function system’s primary distinction, thereby
unfolding its constitutive paradox. (It is impossible, for example, to decide whether
the distinction between legal and illegal is itself legal or not – yet the legal system
manages to avoid paralysis by creating hierarchies of norms and time-consuming
procedures which continually postpone a reckoning with this paradox). Each func-
tion system relates to society at large as its environment; each of them constructs the
world in its own distinctive fashion, but none of them can impose their version on
the others or on society as a whole. This undermines the socio-structural conditions
which had lent plausibility to traditional ontology, and it makes impossible the fab-
rication of generally binding accounts of what society is or should be. The new het-
erarchy of function systems thus leads to the “loss of natural representation” – and,
concurrently, to the reconstruction of representation as a specifically political term
(Luhmann 1987, 162; my translation).
The shift to functional differentiation also has momentous consequences for how
the individual is imagined. In the older, stratified society, individual human beings
were seen as occupying a fixed position within the social order. A person could not
be a member of two households; it was in this sense fully included within one and
only one particular social system, which comprehensively determined its identity. In
modernity, by contrast, the function systems generate their own rules for inclusion
which are designed to be universally applicable (in principle, every person is sup-
posed to have access and be accessible to political, legal, or economic decisions, for
example), but can no longer aim at full inclusion. Individuals can participate in all
of the function systems, but none of them addresses the human being “as a whole”;
as Luhmann (1980, 30) writes, it is impossible to imagine a person that would lead a
“purely legal existence” or that was “only being educated” (my translation). As a con-
sequence, the individual is in effect “expelled” from society. In order to retain a sense
of self-identity, it is now forced to abstract from the multiple roles it assumes in the
various function systems (e.g. as voter, consumer, or student) and posit a principle of
unity that underlies and precedes the latter. The philosophical figure of the ‘subject’
steps into this breach: it conceives of the individual as a “singular, unique relation-
ship to the world which attains consciousness in an ego and realizes itself as human
being”; as such, it is seen to have “its proper location within itself and outside of
society” (Luhmann 1993, 212; my translation). The Romantic myth of subjectivity – of
the individual consciousness which suffers from the inauthenticity and diremption of
social existence, and which turns to nature in its search for an “original relation to the
universe” (Emerson 1957, 21) – is an early and highly consequential response to this
new situation. The question of how the individual and society can be adjusted to each
other, and indeed how social order is even possible on such a tenuous basis, becomes
a central question for social and political thought from the 18th century onwards, and
it stands at the heart of the new discipline of sociology as it emerges in the second
half of the 19th century. Society begins to experiment with new self-descriptions – all
of which find themselves courting paradox, and, in the face of accelerating social
change, wear thin rather quickly. The advent of postmodernism, both as a cultural
phenomenon and as a theoretical style, represents not so much a break with modern
conditions as a belated acknowledgement of their consequences (1995a, 175; 1995c,

178). The increased awareness for the arbitrariness, improbability, and fragility of
modern world society is itself a contingent product of social evolution.
This emphasis on contingency sets social systems theory apart from earlier
attempts to conceptualize society as a ‘superorganism’ and to describe its develop-
ment in the terms of evolutionary theory. For Herbert Spencer and those who followed
in his footsteps, evolution meant progress. They viewed functional differentiation as
a mark of the superiority of modern societies over their more “primitive” predeces-
sors. By contrast, Luhmann insists that social evolution “does not guarantee either
the selection of the best of all possible worlds nor ‘progress’ in any sense. At first evo-
lutionary selection produces a very improbable, highly complex order. It transforms
an improbable order into a probable (functional) one. […] But it does not mean that
the improbability disappears or is inactualized as prehistory. It is co-transformed and
‘aufgehoben’ in Hegel’s famous sense. It remains a structurally precipitated risk that
cannot be negated.” Evolution does not lead to better adaptation or increased fitness,
but only to greater complexity, which is inseparable from a proportional increase in
the capacity for “self-endangerment” (Luhmann 1989, 108–109). This view of evolu-
tion closely parallels the one advanced by Stephen Jay Gould (e.g. 1989, 282–291). In
applying it to society, Luhmann does by no means seek to ‘naturalize’ social order in
the sense of showing that all is as it should be, or that it couldn’t be otherwise. His
point is, rather, that when we are trying to understand society, the conceptual vocab-
ulary we have inherited from the humanist tradition is as much of a hindrance as it is
with regard to natural processes. Before Darwin, it was next to impossible to under-
stand how the kinds of complex order observable in the natural world could have
come about without some sort of transcendent design. The remarkable fit between
the physiological structure of individual organisms and their respective environ-
ments, the way in which the trophic relations between the different species appeared
to maintain a stable balance between their respective populations, the sheer beauty
of many animals and plants – these could only be explained as the result of divine
agency, an agency which was, however, conceived along markedly humanist terms:
God was imagined as an ‘artificer’ who created the world with a particular purpose
in mind. This purpose marked his handiwork in the same way that a watchmaker’s
goals are incarnated in a watch. Evolutionary theory made such assumptions super-
fluous by showing how, given sufficient time, the structured complexity of the natural
order could arise on the basis of a purely immanent process of variation and selection
which operates “blindly,” without any kind of transcendent compass.
While theories of teleological design have fallen out of favor in biology, we still
accept them as a matter of course in the domain of social theory. We continue to think
of society as a kind of artifact, created by human individuals with particular goals
in mind and to be judged by its success or failure to attain these goals. In a useful
analogy, Hans-Georg Moeller designates such views as a form of ‘social creationism’
and contrasts them with Luhmann’s (2012, 68) conception of society as the contingent
and provisional outcome of system/environment coevolution. In ecological processes,

each life-form evolves in response to changes in its environment, thereby changing
it – and then has to respond to these changes; this environment contains other evolv-
ing life-forms, who likewise coevolve with and thereby change their respective envi-
ronments. No life-form can ‘see’ the entire ecological environment (or what Jacob von
Uexküll designated as ‘Welt,’ in contradistinction to the organism-specific ‘Umwelt’;
Sagan 2010). Biological organisms are thus entangled in a dense network of cascad-
ing feed-back loops that is far too complex to allow any particular species to control
its own environment, not to mention the ecological process as a whole. Social systems
theory challenges us to accept that the same is true for the processes of communica-
tion of which society consists.
What makes this conception so profoundly discomforting is that it disables most
established forms of political critique. According to social systems theory, there is no
Archimedean point, no theoretical or practical fulcrum from which modernity could
be unhinged and a better social order instituted. Each of the function systems evolves
in response to shifts in the larger social environment – politics reacts to economic
processes and vice versa, both affect and are in turn affected by scientific communi-
cation. None of them takes precedency, and therefore none of them is able to master
or effectively steer the others. From this perspective, expectations that, say, rational
planning by the state, a forced infusion of ethics into the economy, or an increase of
‘environmental consciousness’ in individuals would be able to bring about a stable
alignment of society with its ecological environment are not only naïve, but poten-
tially dangerous, insofar as their epistemic arrogance blinds them to the unintended
side-effects or their respective projects for world-improvement (one could also say that
they tend to ignore Hardin’s First Law of Ecology, which stipulates that “you can never
do only one thing”; Hardin 1985, 55–69). In Ecological Communication, Luhmann
(1989, 16) proposes that the problem can be understood as one of resonance: just as
a physical object “can be made to resonate only on the basis of its own frequencies,”
so an autopoietic system can respond to its environment only on the basis of the code
by which it differentiates itself from the latter. With respect to society’s ecological
problems, the danger is that there can be either ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ resonance: in
the first instance, society fails to react altogether; in the second, it overreacts, poten-
tially exploding the boundaries by which its function systems constitute themselves.
The communication of fear and moral outrage, in particular, can slip into positive
feedback-loops that can be as destructive as mere inaction (not least in that they may
desensitize a system such that its ability to respond to its environment is degraded).
In Ecological Communication, Luhmann devotes most of his attention to this latter
problem. This is surely due to the fact that the text was written at a historical moment
when environmental doom-mongering was reaching an early peak in Germany, but
it does not mean that he didn’t take ecological issues seriously. In the books that fol-
lowed, Luhmann invariably placed them at the top of the list of problems confronting
society; at the same time, he always insisted that they were real problems precisely
insofar as they were in principle insoluble:
A rational approach to these problems can only be pursued within society and under the condi-
tion of the continuation of its autopoiesis, and that always implies: maintenance of difference.
[…] The irritability of systems must be increased, which is only possible within the context of
their self-referentially closed operations. That is precisely the goal of systems theory when it
treats the distinction between system and environment as the form of the system. More than any
other theory of society, it thus places ecological problems and, in exactly the same sense, human
problems at the center of its theoretical conception. This emphasis on difference sharpens our
view of these problems in a manner which removes all hope that they could be solved and thus
made to disappear. (Luhmann 1997, 185; my translation)
3 Social Systems Theory and (Text-) Art

As I have presented it in the foregoing, Luhmann’s social systems theory offers eco-
critics not so much a literary hermeneutic, not a toolkit for the analysis of individual
texts, but rather a highly abstract meta-critical frame, i.e., a perspective from which
the foundational assumptions of the field can be assessed. To be sure, this is not for a
lack of attempts to adapt social systems theory for the purposes of literary studies. In
fact, after the publication of Luhmann’s first comprehensive account of social systems
theory in Social Systems (Soziale Systeme, 1984), many literary scholars in Germany
celebrated it as a home-grown alternative to Derridean deconstruction (cf. Benjamin
and Jahraus 1997). In Luhmann’s own writings during this period, the topic of art
assumed an increasingly prominent position, culminating in the publication of Art
as a Social System (Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, 1995). As the English title already indi-
cates, Luhmann’s central concern in all of these efforts was to demonstrate that art
constitutes a social function system in its own right. Literature was to be understood
as “text-art” (Luhmann 2000, 25), i.e., as a particular type of communication within
the art system.
Given Luhmann’s own premises, three interlocking questions needed to be
answered in order to make this contention plausible: What is the primary code of
art communication? What is the medium of its autopoiesis? What is its social func-
tion? Luhmann provided a variety of answers to these questions. Early on, he sug-
gested that the code beautiful/ugly served as the primary distinction through which
the art system differentiated itself from other forms of communication (Luhmann
2008, 14–44). In Art as a Social System, he replaced this with the distinction “fit/
lack of fit” (118) and proposed that the medium of art was “perceptions” (22). The
social function of art was to “integrate what is in principle incommunicable – namely,
perception – into the communication network of society” (141). In a unique fashion,
Luhmann argued, works of art dramatize the foundational paradox of communication
as outlined above. Perception (as an activity of consciousness) and communication
are operationally closed off from each other, yet they are able to build up structured
complexity only through their mutual irritation. Once again, they are constituted by
the difference that both separates and unites them. In most forms of verbal commu-
nication, the paradox that arises if one seeks to articulate the unity of the distinc-
tion between cognition and communication remains submerged. The experience that
a thought or an emotion resists being “put into words” may be a common one, but
attempts to articulate it are usually intermittent and without consequence. Works of
art, however, specialize in this problem and push it into the foreground: They “retard
perception and render it reflexive – lingering on the object in visual art (in strik-
ing contrast to everyday perception) and slowing down reading in literature” (14).
Whereas everyday interactions focus on the ‘what’ of communication, art emphasizes
the ‘how.’ A literary text draws attention to aspects of its structure that are ignored in
most other forms of written communication: “connotations, not denotations mediate
its meaning”; it “does not seek automatically to repeat familiar meanings; although
it must draw on such meanings, it instead aims at disrupting automatization and
delaying understanding” (25). By using perception as its medium, art communication
circumvents ordinary language (provocatively, Luhmann insists that this holds true
even and especially for literature); it therefore resists direct paraphrase and can be
continued only through the production of further works of art.
As many commentators have pointed out, such a characterization of art has some
obvious similarities to formalist aesthetics, for example to Roman Jakobson’s (1960)
concept of ‘poeticity,’ the self-referential use of language so as to draw attention to an
utterance’s status as a linguistic artefact, and to related notions of the work of art as
an ‘autotelic’ structure as they were championed by the New Criticism. And it would
appear to be vulnerable to the same critique which has been levelled at the latter:
that it is biased toward a particular modernist and experimental strand of art, and
therefore unable to account for vernacular or popular forms of arts; that it is blind to
the ideological effects of art, to the ways in which art is entangled in political or social
struggles (even and especially when it purports to eschew them), and to how aesthetic
preferences encode class privileges. Insofar as it defines art as concerned above all
with its own forms, it seems to stand in almost diametrical opposition to what has
been a central concern of ecocriticism from the outset, namely the recovery of what
Lawence Buell (1995, 86) has termed the “referential dimension” of literature. In Luh-
mann’s telling, art emerged as an autonomous function system by elaborating its own
criteria of judgment and warding off external determinations; especially from the
Romantic period onwards, writers insisted that the value of a literary artwork was to
be assessed not by whether it was profitable, moral, pious, legal, or mimetically accu-
rate, but first of all by whether it was original, i.e. whether it presented new and com-
pelling literary forms. The story is broadly familiar; but again, one may ask, doesn’t
such an account give undue prominence to an aestheticist impulse which, although
it may have played an important role in the last two-hundred years, represents only a
narrow band in the larger spectrum of modes of engagement with the world that have
driven the development of art?
Yet one must not conflate Luhmann’s description of art as an autopoietic system
with earlier notions of ‘art for art’s sake.’ One has to remember that for Luhmann,
autopoietic closure does not mean that a system somehow floats free of its environ-
ment; on the contrary, it enables the system to react to its environment in a more com-
plexly-ordered fashion. Pure self-reference is as impossible as pure hetero-reference:
a system can only relate to itself by differentiating itself from its environment, which
is therefore dragged along, as it were, in its every operation. Art cannot shake off the
world, any more than it can erase the boundary separating it from the latter. Art can
“change the world” precisely because and only to the extent that it is not identical
with it. In arguing for the autonomy of art, Luhmann does not suggest that art is a
realm of pure forms unconcerned with their relationship to sordid reality; on the con-
trary, his point is that with the emergence of art as a social function system, the rela-
tionship between the work of art and the environing world becomes an unavoidable
problem – one that, however, art must now address on its own terms. In doing so, art
lays open the paradoxical conditions which inform all system/environment relation-
ships; it “make[s] the world appear within the world – with an eye toward the ambiva-
lent situation that every time something is made available for observation something
else withdraws, that, in other words, the activity of distinguishing and indicating that
goes on in the world conceals the world” (Luhmann 2000, 149). Art discloses reality
not by representing it, but by distinguishing itself from it: “The imaginary world of art
offers a position from which something else can be determined as reality […]. Without
such markings, the world would simply be the way it is” (142). The proper question is
therefore not “how does art represent reality,” but rather, “[h]ow does reality appear
when there is art? In creating a double of reality from which reality can be observed,
the artwork can leave it to the observer to overcome this split – whether in an ide-
alizing, critical, or affirmative manner, or by discovering experiences of his own”
(143–144). Far from excluding, for example, the critical engagement of art with social
problems, the autopoietic closure of the art system, which releases it from its earlier,
ancillary functions of shoring up religious or monarchic authority, makes such an
engagement possible, in the first place – but only by way of a self-limitation, i.e. as
a contingent selection from the space of possibilities opened up by the autonomy of
art. The seemingly boundless capacity of literary communication to switch between
or hybridize codes, to ransack all social domains for semantic raw material, it’s very
capriciousness and volatility – according to Luhmann, these features of modern “text-
art” do not establish it as an “interdiscourse” which would somehow soften the sharp
contours of functionally differentiated modernity, as cultural ecology would suggest.
Instead, they have to be seen as the outcome of the art system’s self-adjustment to
modern conditions; they make art into a “paradigm of modern society” (310): “More
than any other functional system, art appears to succeed […] in representing modern
society within society […]” (308).
4 P
aradox as Bedrock: Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire
Admittedly, these considerations lie at such a steep level of abstraction as to make
them appear almost vacuous – which is, of course, the price Luhmann pays for
seeking to provide an account that is to be applicable to all art in modern society.
For the literary critic, the challenge is to generate original insights about an individ-
ual text by placing it within this larger framework. In the concluding section of this
chapter, I therefore want to turn to a text which has always posed particular interpre-
tive difficulties for ecocritics, namely Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (first published
in 1968). A fictionalized account of Abbey’s time as a park ranger in Utah’s Arches
and Canyonlands National Parks, Desert Solitaire won Abbey instant recognition as
an original new voice in the literature of the American West, and established him as
a leading spokesperson of the burgeoning environmental movement. His later novel
The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975), about a group of wilderness enthusiasts who resort
to sabotage in order to resist the encroachment of industrial development, is credited
with having inspired the formation of Earth First!, an organization which during the
1980s and 1990s became the best-known and most influential exponent of radical
environmentalist activism in the US. More than perhaps any other writer, Abbey came
to be identified with the Deep Ecology movement. Among his many devoted fans,
“Cactus Ed” stood for an uncompromising commitment to the defense of wild nature
and a sweeping, no-holds-barred critique of industrial modernity. Both in his life and
in his writings, he was seen as presenting a full-bodied example of what it meant to
cleave to a truly biocentric egalitarianism, a world-view which saw human beings as
equal members of a “planetary biotic community” (Loeffler 1993, 47–48).
But from early on, less sympathetic observers drew attention to the elements of
social conservatism that were baked into Abbey’s environmentalist views. Most obvi-
ously, women figured only marginally in most of his texts, and the persona he culti-
vated in his writings frequently voiced opinions that were downright misogynous.
His literary treatment of ethnic minorities was often less than respectful, and when,
later in his life, he advocated stricter controls on immigration so as to prevent over-
population in the US, those who saw him as a racist saw themselves confirmed. From
the perspective of second-wave ecocriticism, the “carnevalistic insolence” (Gersdorf
2009, 183) of Abbey’s work is merely an aesthetic cover for the nativist, androcentric,
and heteronormative prejudices that have always featured prominently in the Ameri-
can cult of wilderness. Attempts to defend him against such charges usually resort to
biographical anecdote and can, for the most part, be summed up as saying: “well, he
wasn’t really like that” (for an example, see Bryant 1998). When Abbey offended the
sensibilities of his readers, it is argued, he did so deliberately in order to jolt them out
of their cognitive ruts – and not because he actually means the outrageous things he
sometimes says.
Both of these approaches – the celebration of Abbey as an authentic champion of

wild nature and the critique of him as a not-so-secret bigot – wrest with, but ultimately
sideline what is arguably the most distinctive feature of Abbey’s literary style, namely
his penchant for paradox and performative contradiction. Nowhere in his work is this
more pronounced than in Desert Solitaire. In the first chapter of this book, the narra-
tor announces the project he intends to pursue during his sojourn in the desert:
I am here not only to evade the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also
to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental
and the fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a
juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly
ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or
Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and
brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow
survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock. (Abbey 1971, 6)
With this pronouncement, Abbey very explicitly places his text in a literary tradition
which, in the U.S., can be said to begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau. His sentences echo Emerson’s call, in the essay Nature, for Americans to
recover an “original relation to the universe” and, like earlier generations, behold
God “face to face” (Emerson 1957, 21); and they all but paraphrase Thoreau’s famous
declaration of intent in the second chapter of Walden (“I went to the woods because
I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”; 1992, 61). The
derivative, hopelessly overdetermined language which Abbey deploys here is itself
already an aspect of the paradox which he names at the end of the passage: the nar-
rator’s desire for an unconditioned, immediate contact with the natural world is con-
ditioned and mediated by a theological, philosophical and literary heritage which
asserts its force in his very attempt to cast it off. The passage also makes it abundantly
clear that what is at stake in this effort to confront the natural world directly is not
only the essence of nature but just as much the essence of the self. The question is not
only whether the narrator can push his way past literary cliché so as to touch bedrock,
but also whether this bedrock can sustain his vision of empowered individuality.
Peter Fritzell (1991) has described nature writing as a hybrid of spiritual auto-
biography and natural history. The genre is joined at the hip to the Romantic myth
of subjectivity, which, as I have pointed out above, was itself a response to the new,
eccentric position into which the individual is pushed in functionally differentiated
modernity. In the terms of this myth, nature figures as a realm where the individual
consciousness can attain an authentic relationship to itself and to the world, uncon-
ditioned by the arbitrary impositions of society. The idea of the desert wilderness as
a space for “pure” individuality, unconstrained by social conventions and obliga-
tions, and the corollary idea that the experience of absolute freedom which this space
affords is the only basis on which non-coercive forms of collective existence are pos-
sible, are the dominant theme of Desert Solitaire. As Abbey (1971, 29) puts it in one of
the early chapters: “The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme
individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.” This
also leads Abbey, in several instances, to restage the primal scene of classical liberal
theories of society, where the individual enters into the social contract of his own
free will. In a central chapter that recounts a rafting trip down the Colorado River,
Abbey describes the experience as a “rebirth backward […] into primeval liberty, into
freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word […]. The freedom,
for example, to commit murder and get away with it scot-free […]. I look at my old
comrade Newcomb in a new light and feel a wave of love for him; I am not going to
kill him […]” (1971, 177). The point, however luridly overstated, is clear: social bonds
are genuine only when they can be experienced as voluntarily assumed, rather than
imposed by convention. Yet Abbey’s narrator is perfectly aware that he and Newcomb
are acting out a script that is itself nothing if not conventional – one that, even though
he casts it in the language of sexual archetype, he acknowledges as having been cod-
ified by writers such as Mark Twain and John Wesley Powell (Abbey 1971, 176). Once
more, the forms in which authentic individuality seeks to express itself are recognized
as hand-me-downs from literary tradition – which, however, does not stop the narra-
tor from appropriating them with a monomaniacal earnestness that is perhaps best
described as quixotic.
Desert Solitaire does not dissimulate this paradox, but systematically pushes it
into the foreground. The text is riddled with self-cancelling gestures which highlight
its own status as a literary artifact even while they disparage literature as ineffectual
or derivative and warn against the danger of confusing it with reality. Later in the
same chapter where Abbey and Newcomb play at being Huck and Jim, the narrator
stumbles on a deserted miner’s camp and browses through “an astonishing heap of
tattered magazines of the All-Man He-Male type – True (false), Male (a little queer),
[…] Saga (fairy tales), Real (quite phoney) and others of the genre […]. These fellows
must have spent a lot of time reading; no wonder they failed to find whatever they’d
been looking for – gold? God? uranium? – and had to leave” (Abbey 1971, 194). It is
difficult not to read this as a bit of sly self-commentary – poking fun at the narrator’s
own pretensions to hyper-masculinity, suggesting that he, too, has been taken in by
the hackneyed conventions of his chosen literary genre and his own bookishness, and
anticipating that his quest, no less than that of the miners, will issue in defeat.
What these passages suggest is that when Abbey’s text refers the reader to the
“bedrock” of reality, it does so by pointing her not somewhere beyond or outside of the
literary domain, but rather to the cracks that open up within the literary itself. Nature
appears not as some distant other, but as a fissure within the same. If, as Luhmann
(2000, 313) writes, the reality of art can still be understood in terms of resistance, it
is not “the resistance of the external world to attempts to grasp it by knowing and
acting, but a resistance, within one and the same system, of internal operations to
the operations of the system” – an effect, in other words, of communication pushing
up against communication. The strength of Desert Solitaire, both as a literary text
and as a piece of environmental thought, is therefore not that it somehow shakes us

loose of anthropocentric prejudices, articulates the intrinsic value of nature, or shows
how ecological realities can provide a secure foundation for an ethical stance towards
the non-human world, as Deep Ecologists would have it. Instead, it lies in Abbey’s
insistence that all such efforts begin with and end up in paradox, and that from such
paradox springs whatever freedom and responsibility we may have; to quote Heinz
von Foerster’s (2003, 291) apothegm: “Only those questions that are in principle
undecidable, we can decide.”
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Gernot Böhme
6 A
esthetics of Nature – A Philosophical
Perspective*
Abstract: Classical aesthetics of nature was essentially a theory of the representation
of nature in art. Today, its range is much wider. As ecological aesthetics of nature,
it is a complement to scientific ecology, which as human ecology investigates the
metabolism between man and nature. In contrast, an ecological aesthetics of nature
is concerned more generally with the condition of human beings in environments.
Thereby, the notion of ‘atmosphere’ plays a decisive role: atmospheres are pheno
mena that mediate between objective environmental qualities and the subjective con-
dition of human beings.
An ecological aesthetics of nature has both a critical and a productive task. On
the one hand, it serves as a critique of inhuman environmental qualities, and on the
other hand provides criteria for the re-cultivation of devastated natural spaces.
Key Terms: Ecological aesthetics, atmosphere, body, sensuousness, natural beauty,

landscape garden, Hegel, Adorno
Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity […]
What is reconciled would resemble it. (Adorno 1997, 73–74)
1 Rehabilitating an Aesthetics of Nature

There are good reasons to perceive in these lines of Theodor W. Adorno, or more gen-
erally in his aesthetic theory, a rehabilitation of the aesthetics of nature. In a situation
where suffering from modern society increases to an unprecedented extreme, which
is the situation of Adorno’s philosophizing, nature regains its systematic significance
in aesthetics: as reality, it is seen as the sole extra-societal domain. Nature in Adorno’s
view holds a subversive potential, representing that which suffers from a categorizing
and functionalizing social appropriation: the body, the individual, the concrete and
therefore singular phenomenon of nature. In its aesthetic representations of nature,
the work of art keeps alive access to this ‘other’ of society, allowing the ‘non-identical’
of matter to appear.
Since today a rehabilitation or, rather, a new beginning of an aesthetics of nature
is pending, it might be worthwhile to look closely at these “good reasons.” First of all
we need to ask in what way a rehabilitation of an aesthetics of nature and of natural
* Translated by Monika Hottelet.

124 Gernot Böhme
beauty (des Naturschönen) as proposed by Adorno was necessary. In effect, there has
not been any period in the recent development of art which has not produced land-
scape paintings and in which no nature poetry was written. Add to this the persistent
presence of the so-called low art (Trivialkunst) of sea and alpine pieces, of scenes
with vagrants and gypsies, as well as the long-standing tradition of nature-loving
folk songs, and it appears evident that Adorno’s new emphasis on nature in aesthetic
theory represented a special challenge to avant-garde art, i.e., an art that consid-
ered itself explicitly ‘modern.’ Waves of romantic and neo-romantic appreciation of
nature have again and again impacted cultural life since the eighteenth century, and
occasionally, as in the Barbizon school and in Impressionism, reached the pinnacle
of artistic achievement. The dominant line of modernity, however, developing from
nineteenth-century French avant-gardists to Dada, futurist, and surrealist manifestos
on to concept art is characterized instead by an alienation from or a suppression of
nature. It is curious to realize that today the avant-garde with its air of revolution often
merely confines itself to presenting the narrow-mindedness of the respective zeitgeist
carried to extremes. Regarding this kind of self-conception, Adorno, who was himself
an aesthetic esoteric, probably pointed in a new direction.
Adorno’s rehabilitation of natural beauty, however, is first of all a rehabilitation
within aesthetics as a theory. Here, for more than a century, Hegel has been Adorno’s
closest associate – for better or worse. Hegel indeed concluded a great era of theory in
which natural beauty served as the model for artistic beauty; where artistic creation
was seen as imitation of nature, as an extension and completion of its work, or even
as the work of nature itself. Hegel, whose viewpoint in philosophizing is that of the
absolute spirit, does not, as did Kant, encounter the beautiful in nature in amazement
or moral edification, but measures it in terms of his established notion of the beauti-
ful, according to which the beautiful is the appearance of the idea. It is true that Hegel
is able to locate the idea as union of concept and reality in nature: it is present in the
organization of parts into a whole. In this way, Hegel can conceive of the different
stages of the organic as manifestations of the idea – and today we certainly give him
great credit for being able to thus integrate a part of the scientific knowledge of nature
into aesthetics. However – and here Adorno (1997, 118–119) has a point against Hegel–
natural beauty in this view is treated only as an imperfect stage of artistic beauty and
is not even aufgehoben (“sublated”) in it. For beauty, according to Hegel, remains
locked within nature, as it were; it does not emerge out of itself, it lacks ‘appear-
ance.’ I quote Hegel (1970, 167): “The living beauty of nature [is] neither for itself
nor out of itself produced as beautiful, nor for the sake of an aesthetic appearance.”
Nature is, as Hegel posits, precisely spirit in its alienation, and natural beauty can
only be beautiful in its being ‘for us’, i.e., only in its artistic representation. “Idealist
pride” here exacts vengeance, says Adorno, “on that part of nature, which is not itself
spirit.” Against this, Adorno (1997, 118) contends: “That which Hegel judges as defect
of natural beauty, that which eludes the fixed concept, is actually the substance of the
beautiful itself.” With this, Adorno initiates a shift from nature appropriated by art to
the beautiful in nature itself.
Hence we may say more precisely what Adorno’s rehabilitation of natural beauty
consists of: the liberation of aesthetics from its limitation to a theory of art, which had
begun with Hegel and has had a persistent influence ever since. It thus becomes possi-
ble to again conceive of aesthetics as a fundamental mode of experiencing reality. We
have to add, however, that Adorno nevertheless remains under the spell of traditional
aesthetics, insofar as he continues to conceive of aesthetics as a theory of beauty. He
does not even see the possibility of extending the thematic scope of aesthetics – as
was the case in classical aesthetics, which dealt with the beautiful and the sublime –
but views the sublime as a variant of the beautiful (Adorno 1997, 101). It was probably
his insistence on the autonomy of art which barred his view. Yet non-autonomous
activity has long been (and continues to be) concerned with producing atmospheres
that are quite different from that of the beautiful: for example the atmospheres of
power and terror, or the atmospheres of the sacred or the offensive (cf. Böhme 2010).
Therefore, Adorno was not able to incorporate into his theory the abstract negation of
traditional aesthetics, which began to be recognized after Hegel, in concepts like an
‘aesthetics of the ugly’ (Ästhetik des Hässlichen, cf. Rosenkranz 2007 [1835]) or of ‘no
longer fine arts’ (die nicht mehr schönen Künste).
Adorno’s rehabilitation of natural beauty is expressed in the hypothetical form:
what is reconciled would resemble natural beauty. The attitude of resignation implied
therein signifies that for Adorno, the conditions of social reconciliation, whose hope
is still remembered with a view to natural beauty, do not exist. At the same time
Adorno suggests that he felt to have arrived at an end, not a beginning, and that he
was not able to advance on the paths which he had signposted with his aesthetics.
Indeed, Adorno’s aesthetics appears as a late version of a bourgeois aesthetics in
which nature was considered as a ‘counterworld’ (Gegenwelt), as that which is situ-
ated ‘out there,’ outside town, beyond civilization and, particularly, beyond technol-
ogy (cf. Großklaus and Oldemeyer 1983).
Contrary to Hegel, Adorno does not have anything to say about nature itself.
Nature for him is only the entirely unattainable topos of that which lies outside of
society (Topos des Außergesellschaftlichen). Just as the discovery of nature in bour-
geois aesthetics takes place against the backdrop of an alienation of society from
nature which it mirrors, the same holds true for Adorno: It is indeed a truly desperate
act to orient the vanishing hope for social reconciliation by the fading light of a recon-
ciled nature.
Undeniably, Adorno’s aesthetic theory must be regarded as the most important
work of theoretical aesthetics of the recent past. He has rehabilitated nature on the
level of theory as subject-matter for the artistic avant-garde. He has pushed open the
door to extending aesthetics beyond a theory of art. And he has rendered visible again
the utopian core which the idea of natural beauty has included all along. However,
when we today set about developing a new aesthetics of nature, we must not overlook
126 Gernot Böhme
that Adorno’s theory is a critique of taste, an elite theory, aloof from that which came
after him: the populist maxim of “everyone is an artist,” the rapprochement with
trivial art, and the increasing rehabilitation of kitsch. His aesthetics remains a theory
of beauty without opening itself to a general theory of atmospheres, their production
and experience. And precisely through the hope which is tied up with it, Adorno’s
aesthetics is the final and ultimate expression of an alienation from nature.
2 Aesthetics and the Environmental Problem

The present topicality of an aesthetics of nature is not the result of ‘suffering from
society’ (an der Gesellschaft leiden) as in Adorno’s or in the classical aesthetics of
nature before him, but of ‘suffering from nature’, inasmuch as humans begin to expe-
rience firsthand and in their own body the consequences of what they did to nature;
this is the core of the so-called environmental problem. A present-day aesthetics of
nature can therefore only draw on Adorno’s aesthetic theory to a limited extent – by
learning from its failure.
Nature is a topic everywhere, including art. Contemporary art points at nature –
depicting, remembering, lamenting and accusing, warning. Depicting: be it the
minutely detailed presentation of a rock formation (Nikolaus Lang has presented
an artwork of stripped ground called Peeling at the Documenta 6) or the assiduous
display of materiality as such in the works of Stefan Huber (Arbeiten im Reichtum
14), Magdalena Jetelová (Der Setzung andere Seite), or Gloria Friedman (Existentia)
at Documenta 8. Remembering: as in the landscape with the four vegetal gestures1 of
Guiseppe Penone in which the plant spirits of Findhorn (cf. The Findhorn Commu-
nity 2008) were given manifest expression. Accusing: as in Klaus Staeck’s reprise of
Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf. Warning: as in Nikolaus Lang’s disintegrating installation
Gegen sich und andere gerichtet (“Directed Against Itself and Others”), which demon-
strates the eventual retraction of human work by nature, or in Robert Morris’ oeuvre
which, in an anticipatory perspective, presents humankind as nothing but sediment.
Without difficulty, we can find the same in recent literature. Thus, a large part
of current nature poetry is written in the past tense: nature as the memories of one’s
youth. The depiction of nature has thus grown into a self-assuring act of signification.
See the example of Bernd Jentzsch:
1 Paisaggio del Quaddro.

Nature truly is a piece of nature.

This group of mallows here, in Gablenz
the maples, windy, they stand firmly,
their roots there, where I travel, in the valley
the river, one can hear it, asking one’s way. (1980, 262)
Here as well we have lament, accusation, caution. As an example corresponding to

Robert Morris’ land art works, I quote a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
here lay the apple

here stood the table
that was the house
that was the town
here rests the land.
that apple there
is the earth
a lovely orb
on which apples existed
and eaters of apples. (1980, 268)
These examples show that the way in which nature is aesthetically addressed has
indeed changed. Nature is no longer a social ‘counterworld’ of hopes and illusions but
the living space of the human species, threatened by irreparable loss and, therefore, in
vital need of preservation; or else it is the maw of a post-human world finally devour-
ing everything. Even though as a consequence something quite new has emerged in
the field of art, we may nevertheless ask if it already expresses that new aesthetics of
nature demanded by the environmental problem. Is it not rather the continuation of
the ecological discourse by other means (cf. Mayer-Tasch 1981)? Is it more than what
art has always been capable of doing: to reproduce reality, more or less fantastically,
to express fears and hopes, to record visions? Is it more than the civic engagement
of the artist as critical citizen, who deals with emerging problems by his own proper
means? In other words: Is this all that art can possibly contribute toward transforming
the human-nature relationship? Do these works of art already articulate the aesthetic
relation of human beings to the world as the foundational dimension of the ecological
problem?
In another way, landscape management also updates the aesthetics of nature.
Since we have come to recognize the beauty of nature as a factor for enhancing the
quality of life, we have turned it into a variable in planning. With nature becoming an
increasingly scarce resource, beauty has moved into the focus of conflicting interests.
To balance and weigh these interests an aesthetic, notabene: a scaled evaluation of
so-called usable surface areas (Realnutzungsflächen) is needed. These areas can be.
128 Gernot Böhme
a lake or pond, a farm, grove, corn field, a pasture with a ski lift, or a gravel quarry.2
Undoubtedly, something new is happening here as well. Employing methods of
empirical social research, the aesthetic judgment of everybody thus comes into effect
for landscape design. I refer here as an example to studies in ecological psychology
concerning the aesthetics of landscape by Werner Nohl and Klaus-Dieter Neumann
(1986). Are we thereby heading toward a new aesthetics of nature? This question by
authors of such works seems by all means valid. Indeed, some of the tendencies that
I mentioned above in my critical discussion of Adorno can be found here as well:
the extension of aesthetics beyond the field of art, recourse to the beauty in nature,
and overcoming elitist tendencies in aesthetics. Here likewise the motive for reviving
the aesthetics of nature is evident: the work just cited is promoted by the UNESCO
program “Man and the Biosphere.” Yet however useful such research may be in terms
of a defensive struggle over nature, it raises the deeply unsettling question whether
this is in fact already the new aesthetics of nature that so many people today pin such
high hopes on? These hopes are of course fueled by what the aesthetics of nature
once was, and considering the example just mentioned, one wonders if it is justified
to throw the achievements of classical aesthetics of nature over board so easily; in
search of a new aesthetics of nature based on charting the landscape according to
scaled landscape image data. Contrary to such a positivist approach, an idea of land-
scape design will certainly have to be claimed once more.
3 A
esthetic Transformations of the Human-Nature
Relationship: Mimesis, Nature as Subject, Nature
Alliance
Considering such experiences, it seems advisable to pause for a moment, to slow
down somewhat the rapid forward-moving drive toward the new aesthetics of nature.
The hope which is tied to this new aesthetics of nature is not merely the hope that,
with the environmental sector forming, aesthetic competence would increase in value
on the job market, and even that the autonomous but marginalized domain of art
might possibly be reintegrated into society. This hope is rather fueled by the notion
that aesthetics could contribute eminently to the indispensable transformation of
the human-nature relationship. It is tied to the potential of a different relationship to
2 This aesthetic approach to such units of natural space might be compared to Christian C. L.
Hirschfeld’s (2001 [1780]) theory of garden art. Here as well we have ‘aesthetic evaluation,’ but not in
terms of homogenizing scales of preferences. His was a concern with the quality of the emotional im-
pact a landscape or garden elicited. What is more beautiful, a pond or an alpine pasture with a ski lift?
nature, as it was implied in classical aesthetics – different, that is, from the strategy
for a mastery of nature, which is targeted at its exploitation.
I would like to bring this potential to mind by using three terms employed by
Adorno, Marcuse, and Bloch, namely ‘mimesis’, ‘nature as subject’, and ‘nature alli-
ance’.
‘Mimesis’ is obviously one of Adorno’s key terms. It carries that minimum of
hope which Adorno, despite his resignative critique of society, is able to formulate.
‘Mimesis’ is the antonym of ‘appropriation’, especially conceptual appropriation.
‘Mimesis’ is a behavior which accepts the other as a value in itself: the object, nature,
the other human being. In ‘mimesis’ the concrete, the singular, the individual are to
be respected. With this, Adorno builds on an aspect of classical aesthetics of nature,
which indeed stands in marked contrast to an intellectually categorizing and techni-
cally manipulating attitude towards nature. The maxim of imitating nature implied
an orientation on nature as ‘beautiful order’, and it implies accepting and respecting
the given natural world. In the imitation of nature, any artistic activity only becomes
possible through being deeply affected by nature. At the same time, it is not certain if
the term ‘mimesis’ is adequate to transport this potential into our time – since Plato’s
Sophist, it has been a basic term in art theory in general. Already then, it comprised as
one part eikastiké, i.e., art emulating the model as much as possible, and phantastiké,
i.e., art representing its model in a modified way, on account of the peculiarity of the
material and with regard to the eventual viewer. In his study on art and myth, Georg
Picht, likewise referring to Plato, emphasized that the most vital point of ‘mimesis’ in
art can consist in representing the non-real.3 By way of contrast, we have to say today
that the decisive factor of the mimetic capacity, that which comprises a non-manip-
ulative relationship with nature, is the capacity to participate with one’s own body
(Mitvollzug am eigenen Leibe). When we bring this sympathetic aspect of the concept
of ‘mimesis’ into prominence, stressing co-experience or commiseration, then it can
indeed be a key term for a different relationship with nature. For in knowing through
participation and co-experience, humanity respects nature’s independent existence
and at the same time realizes its kinship to her, its own naturality.
The concept of ‘nature as subject,’ as employed by Herbert Marcuse and Ernst
Bloch, is likewise explicitly directed against the modern era’s dominant way of relat-
ing to nature, which implies treating nature as mere object in theory and as mere
material in practice. Speaking of nature as a subject corresponds to aesthetic expe-
rience as expressed in classical nature aesthetics: nature is experienced as some-
thing which appeals to us either by affecting us and eliciting a specific mood, or by
‘speaking to us.’ The former can be found in the doctrine of the so-called ‘characters,’
objective qualities of feeling that Christian C. L. Hirschfeld (2001 [1780]) ascribes to
3 It is important, however, to keep in mind that what is non-real for us – the idea – is ultimately real
in Platonic thought.
130 Gernot Böhme
particular localities or nature scenes in his theory of garden art. The latter is proposed
in the theory of the language or semiotic code of nature (cf. von Bormann 1968). If in
this field of aesthetics a different way of experiencing the natural world has been pre-
served, which today shall be utilized as a potential for changing our relationship with
nature, we obviously cannot revert to a time before the Enlightenment, i.e., return to
the animism which forms the ancient background of these approaches. But it is nev-
ertheless necessary to take those experiences seriously and to newly recognize their
significance. This may be systematically achieved by developing an ecological aes-
thetics, as well as an urban and architectural aesthetics, which explores the relations
between environmental qualities and the affective states (Befindlichkeiten) of people
who live in such environments, or just by acknowledging the need of human beings
for nature as the ‘other’ of themselves in the wider public debates (cf. Böhme 1985).
The term ‘nature alliance’ has been coined by Ernst Bloch (1977, 814) as an
antonym of a technology which acts in nature like an “army of occupation in enemy
territory.” By contrast, Bloch calls for a technology which enters into a of partnership
with nature, into a relation of co-productivity. With this idea of a different relation to
nature, he could as well have drawn on a subfield of classical aesthetics, the theory
and practice of the English garden (cf. Böhme 1989). The horticulture of the second
half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century occupies a special
position in the history of aesthetics. Even where art was still understood as an imita-
tion of nature, art and nature were always strictly separated, both categorically and as
objects. Art was made by man, nature existed by itself. Art strove toward the ideal and
the lasting form, nature in contrast is ever changing. In the art of the landscape garden
we have the remarkable example of a union of art and nature. It was an art which was
operant in and with nature and whose status could not be taken for granted. Occa-
sional examples from contemporary art may be ascribed to this idea such as when
materials like wind, light, and meteorological conditions were incorporated into the
realization (not just the presentation) of plastic works of art – even Christo’s Running
Fence could be mentioned here. The example of the English garden, however, merits
closer study if we address not just the question of how nature aids in producing art,
but how the artist conversely aids in bringing forth the nature of the future.
4 Aesthetics of the Body and the Atmosphere

After these preliminary considerations we can now finally ask why and upon what
grounds such high hopes are invested in the aesthetics of nature today. We can
compare the situation of today’s aesthetics with that of Romanticism, which expected
from aesthetics the reconciliation of subject and object and finally, in Schelling, even
elevated art above philosophy (see also ↗2 Earth’s Poesy). The situation is compara-
ble to the position art held for Adorno, who time and again saw shining forth in art an
image of social reconciliation, while despairing of this possibility in his philosophical

analysis. The hopes which today are associated with an aesthetics of nature are in no
way less urgent: they are directed towards a reconciliation of man with nature. We have
seen that they find fertile soil in classical aesthetics, and also in certain approaches
in artistic production as well as in aesthetic theory after Adorno, even though these
remain limited in scope. Yet neither the rudiments of a different relationship to nature
(as in classical aesthetics), nor the approaches of contemporary art justify any such
far-reaching hopes. The reason for this is that modern aesthetics has arisen from the
same kind of alienation from nature as modern science. The widening gap between
fact and fiction, science and art, as well as technology and art hides the fact that their
developments are actually only current and countercurrent within one vortex, namely
the growing alienation of man from nature. That there are reasons for this process in
the development of productive forces and the conditions of production – industriali-
zation, urbanization, traffic – is granted. What provided such a strong link between
modern aesthetics and modern science, however, was the self-conception of man
manifest in both. Man in the Age of Enlightenment saw himself as a rational being –
and thus by definition disassociated himself from the body. The physical body was
not the nature that he himself was, but rather the nature he was tied to, something
external: a different substance in Descartes; the animality that had to be overcome
on our way to civilization, cultivation, and moralization in Kant; the bestiality requir-
ing constant control and silencing in the pedagogy of Enlightenment (Aufklärung-
spädagogik). From a distanced, disinterested attitude and on the basis of an already
acquired extensive instrumental mastery over nature, modern man explores the
natural world. And out of the same distance, the civilized citizen discovers the aes-
thetic value of nature. Just like modern natural science step by step eliminated the
human body from the process of gaining experience and finally reduced the contri-
bution of the senses to the mere recording of signals (cf. Kutschmann 1986), modern
aesthetics as a critique of taste disciplined human sensual experience to the point
that today, thinned out into abstract semiotics, it is only concerned with signs and
their meanings. Aesthetics is the critique of judgment, today probably an extended art
of reading: hermeneutics. But it is certainly far from what its name signifies, namely
a theory of sensory experience. Being emotionally touched by pieces of art or nature
is of no concern here, let alone bodily states (leibliche Befindlichkeit). It is especially
these domains, however, which would distinguish aesthetics from those other disci-
plines which treat the human senses merely as information-processing systems. Of
course, reducing aesthetics to semiotics corresponds only too well to the practical
restriction of human sensuousness to signal recognition, as required today by work,
traffic, and consumerism (cf. Hoffmann-Axthelm 1984). What follows from all this is
that the hopes which are built on an aesthetics of nature would first of all demand a
transformation of aesthetics in general. This transformation would have to be accom-
plished by and through overcoming the modern self-conception of humanity itself.
132 Gernot Böhme
If today, at the end of the modern era, a shift of the human self-conception seems
necessary, this shift involves integrating the nature the human being itself is: the
human body. The body here must not be understood as the object of medical and
natural scientific research. It would be an illusion if we simply strove to reconcile the
existing split of human beings into subject and object through holistic approaches,
whatever they may be. Body [Leib] rather signifies the primary way of being-in-the-
world and the sensory experience of oneself on which self-consciousness is based. It
is that which traditionally was called human sensuousness, and which was treated by
Alexander Baumgarten, and in a reduced form by Kant, under the heading of aesthet-
ics. Today, however, we have to develop what is to be comprehended as sensuousness
explicitly against the modern disciplining of the self (the so-called ‘process of civiliza-
tion’) and the modern estrangement from nature as a result of the all-pervading devel-
opment of structures of rationality. This task today falls to aesthetics, which is thereby
moving into the center of anthropology – hence, Rudolf zur Lippe is quite justified in
positioning his aesthetics as anthropological (cf. zur Lippe 1987). Art would be rein-
stated in its formative function for humanity. It would have to develop the sensuous
self-consciousness of man.
According to Enlightenment anthropology, which still remains prevalent today,
sensuousness is conceived of as receptivity: sense perception is mainly sensation,
the receiving of sensory stimuli and signals that lead to the forming of judgments
which eventually may happen to have emotional significance, as well. This anthro-
pology arose from a pedagogical impulse and in effect followed the maxim of divide
et impera. Its aim has always been self-mastery. If, however, we comprehend sensu-
ousness as bodily presence, it is a priori two-sided: the environment is sensed in our
bodily state and we emit an atmosphere into our surroundings. Sensing the environ-
ment entails the traditional aspect of perceiving and noticing, but also that we react
emotionally, as they say, to our environs; something which lies beneath and before
the threshold of distanced judgment. We have to take care, however, not to conceive
of emotion as something like psychic states (seelische Zustände). What we feel to be
our physical and affective state (Befinden) rather has to do with bodily dispositions
relative to our surroundings. It is from here that an ecological aesthetics of the future
would have to be developed. This aesthetic would have to actively participate in the
conscious transformation of nature, which is indispensable in the long run – not only
within the confines of Europe, but for the whole planet. This is not about a comeback
of the ‘conservation warden’ of National Socialism, who was supposed to defend the
traditional landscape against the intervention and intrusion of technological ration-
ality. Nor is it analogous to the program called ‘art in architecture’ in modern-day
Germany, which aims to mask the otherwise unchecked technical-economic exploita-
tion of nature by adding a token of natural beauty. It would rather involve resum-
ing the program of humanizing nature that Karl Marx had put forth long ago, and in
which external nature is understood as extracorporeal dimension of the human body,
constantly co-determining and directly affecting its state of being. Sensuousness as
bodily presence also means, however, that human beings continually enter into their
surroundings: they emit an atmosphere. This anthropological fact demands a new
understanding of the human body in aesthetics and, in a sense, a rehabilitation of
physical beauty – together with other features (Charaktere), of course – in the face
of the bourgeois-democratic denigration of ascriptive characteristics. For aesthetics,
this would involve the task of theoretically investigating and practically developing
what would traditionally be termed ‘forms of human expression’. We are not con-
cerned here with the internal/external dichotomy, however, but with characteristic
features and the articulation of human presences in diverse localities. From this
vantage point, we will be able to comprehend artistic activity, at least partially, as
differentiation of human bodily existence and of its generating of atmospheres, into
a distinctive capability.
The human body, as I pointed out, is at the core of the so-called environmental
problem. In this impact on the body, external nature has become an issue in quite
another manner than in past centuries. What is more, our relationship to the body
as our nearest nature, the nature that we ourselves are, determines our relationship
to external nature. An aesthetics as theory and praxis of man’s bodily existence in its
respective environments would indeed be central to our developing a new self-con-
ception of man. The hopes, therefore, which are now invested in an aesthetics of
nature by far exceed the expectation that it contributes its share to the wider contem-
porary discourse. It is from within aesthetics itself that the necessary change in the
relationship between mankind and nature has to be accomplished. An aesthetics of
nature which would meet this challenge would first and foremost have to articulate
a new understanding of the human body, and would make nature its topic or subject
from the perspective of a humanity that is itself nature.
5 B
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experimentellen Naturwissenschaft der frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986
Neumann, Klaus-Dieter and Werner Nohl. Lanschaftsbilderbewertung im Alpenpark
Berchtesgaden: Umweltpsychologische Untersuchung zur Landschaftsästhetik. Ed. Deutsches
Nationalkomitee für das UNESCO-Programm Man and Biosphere. MAB-Mitteilungen 23. Bonn:
Bundesministerium für Umwelt, 1986.
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eine ökologische Naturästhetik. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. 121–138.
Mayer-Tasch, Peter C. Im Gewitter der Geraden: Deutsche Ökolyrik 1950–1980. München: Beck, 1981.
Hubert Zapf
7 C
ultural Ecology of Literature – Literature as
Cultural Ecology
Abstract: The chapter provides an overview of cultural ecology as a recent direction in
current ecocriticism that has its own distinctive features but also resonates in mani‑
fold ways with other approaches represented in this handbook. Some of the general
aspects of cultural ecology and its implications for the conception of the present
volume have been indicated in the introduction. This chapter specifically deals with
the relevance of cultural ecology for literary studies. Building on work by Gregory
Bateson, Peter Finke, and Wolfgang Iser among others, the approach proposes a
theory of imaginative literature that considers literature itself as a particularly potent
form of cultural ecology. Its central assumption is that literature acts like an ecolog-
ical force in the larger cultural system. This theory is exemplified in two poems by
Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. At the end, a triadic model is presented for
a functional description of the transformative ecological potential of narrative texts
within cultural systems and discourses.
Key Terms: Cultural ecology, aesthetics, metaphor, literary creativity, Gregory

Bateson, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, ecological unconscious, culture-critical
metadiscourse, imaginative counter-discourse, reintegrative interdiscourse
1 The Place of Cultural Ecology in Ecocriticism

As the present handbook amply demonstrates, contemporary ecocriticism encom-
passes various different dimensions, among them a sociopolitical dimension in which
texts are examined in terms of their explicit or implicit environmental agendas, with
the aim of raising ecological awareness and of changing social and political practices,
including gender issues in different versions of ecofeminism, or class and environ-
mental justice issues in postcolonial versions of ecological thought; an anthropolog-
ical or ecopsychological dimension in terms of addressing psychological disruptions
and civilizational traumas resulting from the ecological crisis; an ethical dimension
of ecocriticism, in which prevailing egocentric and anthropocentric value systems are
put to the test from an awareness of alterity or ‘answerability’ to human and nonhu-
man ‘anotherness’ (Murphy 2006); an epistemological dimension, in which linear–
monocausal concepts of thought, agency, and time are questioned and superseded
by nonlinear concepts of complexity and recursivity; and an aesthetic dimension,
which examines the ways in which fictional, imaginative texts can be of relevance
to an ecologically redefined model of humanity and of human culture. It is this latter
136 Hubert Zapf
dimension which is a main focus of a cultural ecology of literature, yet the aesthetic
dimension is not opposed here to the other four aspects of ecocriticism but rather
seen as encompassing them on a different plane of ecocultural self-representation
and self-exploration.
Along with this specific attention to the aesthetic, cultural ecology also links up
with the increased importance of literary and cultural theory in recent ecocriticism.
After its initial resistance to theory, ecocriticism has meanwhile become one of the
most productive sites of new theoretical developments in the humanities. At the same
time, critical theory is discovering its own hitherto neglected affinities to ecological
thought. This is one of the more surprising turns of recent literary and cultural studies
after a phase in which ecocriticism and critical theory had mutually ignored each
other. In their radical constructivist epistemology, critical theory and cultural studies
had relegated ‘nature’ from the domain of scholarly attention as a mere ideological
fabrication which only served to hide interests of political power and dominance. Eco-
criticism on the other hand (over-)reacted to this extreme form of cultural construc-
tivism with wholesale rejection rather than with a differentiated assessment of rele-
vant insights of critical theory. Meanwhile, one of the major activities of literary and
cultural critics has become to identify intersections and common agendas between
ecology and critical theory, which, as it turns out, have not just recently emerged but
have been there all along.
One example of such an ecological reappraisal is the philosophy of German Ide-
alism and especially of Naturphilosophie (see Goodbody 2007; Wilke 2015). This philo
sophy of nature was developed by figures like Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schell-
ing in the context of post-Enlightenment thought, relating reason to imagination,
mind to world, cultural to natural history in holistic-organic rather than instrumen-
tal-mechanical ways. Aesthetics came to play an important part in this new episteme
of living interrelationships and connecting patterns, which were seen to be active
throughout different scales of reality and the self, linking the productivity of nature
and of human culture in recursive systems of analogies, whose most complex expres-
sion was art. Such ideas not only shaped the thematic and aesthetic conceptions of
romantic literature in Germany, but also strongly influenced English and American
romanticism as well, which are often taken to represent the starting-point of modern
ecological thought in the Anglo-American world. Coleridge’s ideas on the literary
imagination as a both deconstructive and reintegrative aesthetic activity are to a con-
siderable extent inspired by Schelling (Coleridge 1970; Schelling 1988), and Emer-
son’s description of the sources of intellectual and artistic power in the productivity
of nature itself, or more precisely, in the dynamic interplay between ‘self,’ ‘nature,’
and ‘oversoul,’ in turn owes much to Goethe and to Coleridge’s translation of Kant
and Schelling into the Anglophone literary cultures. In any case, this history of inter-
cultural and transatlantic reception helped to contribute to a new awareness of the
role of nonhuman nature as an active agent and co-evolutionary force that cannot be
objectified as mere external material context of human civilization, but is intrinsically

part and energetic source of its highest cultural developments.1
Other examples of theorists that are cited for ecological thought include Friedrich
Nietzsche, a core reference for poststructuralist theories as a philosopher of free play
and epistemic perspectivism, who has been re-interpreted from an ecocritical per-
spective in terms of the valorization of matter, the body, and the interrelatedness with
nonhuman life in his conception of art as not merely ergon but energeia, not as static,
self-enclosed word but as dynamic energy-field between human existence and Diony-
sian art; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose ecophenomenology illuminates the relational
complexities of human-nature co-existence in such a way that human self and non-
human nature are always interacting, but also always evade full mutual transparency
(see ↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary); Raymond Williams, who
had long been read solely in terms of a sociopolitical agenda of cultural materialism,
while the strong presence of an environmental and ecocultural dimension of his writ-
ings was only recognized when ecocritics began to look anew at works such as The
Long Revolution in terms of Williams’ contextualization of social evolution in biolog-
ical evolution, of the human mind in its changing environments (Wheeler 2006); the
Frankfurt school of Critical Theory and their circle, notably Adorno and Horkheimer’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which art represents a resistance of nature against the
totalizing claims of instrumental reason, as well as Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which
is being explored in its ecoaesthetic potential, for example, in Kate Soper’s critical
rehabilitation of romantic nature poetics (see Soper 2011; see also ↗8 Politics of Pro
sperity). In this view, romantic poetry and, by extension, imaginative literature, is
not just a rhetorical vehicle of contemporary structures of power and discourse, but
has a potential of transgressing and breaking out of their totalizing pressures, both
socially in their resistance to modern consumer society, whose origins coincide with
the rise of romantic literature, and ecologically in their resistance to the ideological
dominance and discursive appropriation of other-than-human nature.
Foremost protagonists of postmodernism and poststructuralism as well are
being recuperated for this new genealogy of ecological thought. Lyotard’s critique of
grand narratives implies such references, when he links up this critique with a form
of ‘ecology’ which aims at discursively empowering the concrete, manifold forms of
human life that are overshadowed or even silenced by those dominant grand nar-
ratives (Lyotard 2000). Even more visibly, Derrida has been claimed for ecocritical
1 By conceiving a fundamental culture-nature symbiosis to be a shaping factor of cultural semiosis

and artistic signification, German Naturphilosophie and literary Romanticism already point forward,
as Kate Rigby argues (see Rigby 2014), to the approach of biosemiotics as an important branch of
contemporary ecocriticism, in which critics like Wheeler and others posit the unceasing communica-
tional process of living signs between various forms of living beings as the basis of both natural and
cultural processes of survival and creativity (see Wheeler 2006, 2011).
138 Hubert Zapf
theory with his later writings especially such as “The Animal That Therefore I Am,”
where the deconstruction of all binary oppositions entails an opening of poststruc-
turalism towards an ecological and, notably, a literary-aesthetic dimension (Derrida
2002).
In a related context, the project of a ‘material ecocriticism’ (Iovino and Opper-
mann 2014) has emerged from the attempt to bridge the gap between ecology and
postmodernism, as well as between the material sciences and ecological processes
in culture – as in the works of Katherine Hayles, Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, Jane
Bennett, Catriona Sandilands, Serenella Iovino, or Serpil Oppermann (↗18 Material
Ecocriticism; ↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism). Material ecocriticism
responds to the problem of poststructuralism and discourse analysis which “have
exorcized nature and materiality out of representation and have thus closed in rep-
resentation on itself” (Herzogenrath 2009, 2). It reinterprets postmodernism not as
pure cultural constructivism but as a hybrid form of ‘discursive realism,’ which adapts
insights of the postclassical sciences about nonlinear complexities, epistemic plural-
ism, the agency of matter, and permeable boundaries of self and world to textuality
and writing (see Oppermann 2006). Aiming to displace the dichotomy between mind
and matter, culture and nature in an ecocritical dialogue with science studies, this
project clearly intersects with and has substantial affinities to the paradigm of cul-
tural ecology.
Like all ecological thought, cultural ecology emphasizes relationality and inter-
connectedness on all levels and in all areas of study. At the same time, however, it
resists the tendency in recent versions of ecotheory to abolish all boundaries, and
to highlight universal interconnectedness while neglecting the very real differences
and boundaries that continue to exist both on the material-semiotic level between
cells, organisms, and ecosystems, and on the cultural-semiotic level between cul-
tures, social systems and subsystems, identities, forms of knowledge, and genres
of texts. Cultural ecology is distinct from such universalizing ecocentric theories in
that it thinks together the two axiomatic premises of an ecological epistemology,
connectivity and diversity, relationality and difference. This especially concerns the
fundamental relation between culture and nature, which are seen to be inextricably
interconnected but are also irreducible to each other. It does not seem helpful from
this perspective simply to do away with the concept of ‘nature’ altogether, as Timothy
Morton, like social theorist Bruno Latour before him (see Latour 2004), proposes
in his Ecology Without Nature, more or less absorbing nature into an ecocritically
enriched discourse of deconstruction within the framework of a material object phi-
losophy (Morton 2007, 2010). Nor does it seem helpful, in an opposite move of estab-
lishing a body-centered ‘earthly cosmology,’ to do away with the concept of culture
and absorb it into the radical egalitarianism of an ecocentric phenomenology, as in
Abram’s (2010) Becoming Animal. In both cases, the difference between nature and
culture is dissolved into a space of undifferentiated (con-)fusion, in one case into the
domain of critical discourse, in the other into the domain of affective relations and
elemental empathy.
This basic premise of a vital interrelatedness yet evolutionary difference between
culture and nature has significant consequences for ecocriticism. While it helps to
overcome the deeply entrenched culture-nature dualism and its anthropocentric ide-
ology of supremacy and exploitative dominance over nonhuman nature, it also resists
opposite attempts to simply dissolve culture into nature and to replace an anthro-
pocentric ideology by a physiocentric or ecocentric naturalism. What is needed is
neither a naturalist reduction of culture nor a culturalist reduction of nature (see ↗8
Ecocriticism and the Politics of Prosperity). The paradoxical, double perspective that
cultural ecology adopts in this contested discursive field between anthropocentrism
and ecocentrism has perhaps best been summed up by the Italian ecocritic Serenella
Iovino’s (2010) notion of a ‘non-anthropocentric humanism.’
2 C
ultural Ecology of Literature – Literature as
Cultural Ecology
The developments just described indicate a complementary tendency in ecocriti-
cism and in critical theory towards an increasing cross-fertilization and convergence
between the formerly separated domains of ecology and culture. The approach of a
cultural ecology concurs with this general tendency, places it at its theoretical and
methodological center, and specifically differentiates it in view of its relevance for
the fields of literature and literary studies (see Müller 2010; Müller and Sauter 2011).
It is the assumption of a cultural-ecological approach that imaginative litera-
ture deals with the basic relation between culture and nature in particularly multi-
faceted, self-reflexive, and transformative ways, and that it produces an ‘ecological’
dimension of discourse precisely on account of its semantic openness, imaginative
intensity, and aesthetic complexity. A primary reference for the approach, then, are
actually the literary texts themselves, which are considered a form of cultural know
ledge in their own right. But there is also a wider theoretical context, which includes
insights of critical positions of theory and aesthetics just indicated, as well as more
specific sources. This is, above all, the transdisciplinary approach of a ‘cultural
ecology,’ which was founded by Julian Steward, investigating the importance of the
natural physical environment for the evolution of human cultures (Steward 1955), and
was then extended beyond its bio-anthropological origins by Gregory Bateson as a
key figure. Bateson’s (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind bridges the epistemological
divide between the natural and the human sciences by exploring connecting patterns
of mind and life beyond disciplinary boundaries. Culture is seen as an evolutionary
transformation and metamorphosis rather than a binary opposite of nature. The mind
is placed “in the very heart of natural history, in the self-generating grammar of living
140 Hubert Zapf
processes and of their incessant, remarkable metamorphoses” (Manghi 2002, xi). But
the mind is also placed in the heart of cultural history, as a fluid, open, dynamic field
of complex feedback loops within and between individual minds, forming interper-
sonal circuits of communication which are continually driving, transmitting, and bal-
ancing processes of cultural evolution and survival. While causal deterministic laws
are therefore not applicable in the sphere of culture, there are nevertheless productive
analogies which can be drawn between ecological and cultural processes.
Also crucial is Peter Finke’s notion of cultural ecosystems that he develops from
Bateson’s ecology of mind and from Jakob von Uexküll’s (2014) distinction between
Umwelten and Innenwelten, between external environments and internal worlds,
which Uexküll ascribes to nonhuman as well as to human life. In a dialogue between
evolutionary biology, social systems theory, and linguistics, Finke points out that the
characteristic environments of human beings are not just external but internal envi-
ronments, the inner worlds and landscapes of the mind, the psyche, and the cultural
imagination which make up the habitats of humans as much as their external natural
and material environments. Language as a cultural ecosystem is especially important
here as a shaping factor in the process of cultural evolution. Language represents a
‘missing link’ between cultural and natural evolution (Finke 2006) because it relates
back to concrete biophysical forms of information and communication in the pre-cul-
tural world of nature, but also transforms them into more abstract, symbolic systems
of human interpretation and self-interpretation. Language thus decisively contributes
to the emergence of internal worlds of consciousness and culture that are character-
istic of the cultural evolution. Language and other cultural sign systems, in turn, are
the material and the medium of art and literature, whose task is the constant critical
examination, imaginative exploration, and creative self-renewal of these cultural sign
systems.
In this sense, literature can itself be described as the symbolic medium of a par-
ticularly powerful form of ‘cultural ecology,’ as I have tried to argue in some of my
recent work (see Zapf 2002). Literary texts have staged and explored the manifold and
complex interactivity between culture and nature in ever new scenarios, and have
derived their specific potential of innovation and cultural self-renewal from the crea-
tive exploration of this boundary. What this means is that literature is not only a pre-
ferred discursive site for representing and negotiating the culture-nature-relationship
but that in its aesthetic transformation of experience, it acts like an ecological force
within the larger system of culture and of cultural discourses. From its archaic begin-
nings in mythical story-telling and oral narratives, in legends and fairy-tales, in the
genres of pastoral and nature poetry, but also in modes of the comic, gothic, and gro-
tesque, literature has symbolically expressed the fundamental interconnectedness
between culture and nature in tales of human genesis, of metamorphosis, of symbi-
otic co-evolution and co-existence between different life forms. This attention to the
life-sustaining significance of the mind/body and culture/nature interaction became
especially prominent in the era of romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of
literary stagings of human experience up to the present. As an ecological force within

culture, literature has presented human experience as part of a shared world of bodily
natures and embodied minds, exemplified in the motif of what Louise Westling calls
the ‘human-animal dance,’ a fascinating closeness between human and nonhuman
life that, as Westling has pointed out, has pervaded literary narratives from archaic to
modern times, from the Gilgamesh epic to Virginia Woolf (Westling 2006).
The aesthetic mode of textuality involves an overcoming of the mind-body-dual-
ism by bringing together conceptual and perceptual dimensions, ideas and sensory
experiences, reflective consciousness and the performative staging of complex
dynamical life processes (see Ette 2004). From the beginnings of modern aesthetic
theory in Baumgarten’s (1750–1758) Aesthetica, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Hegel’s
Aesthetics and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory up to Gernot Böhme’s (1989) contemporary
ecophilosophical Aesthetics of Nature theory has struggled with the double status of
the aesthetic as both an experience and a form of knowledge, a paradoxical, non-
systemic form of sinnliche Erkenntnis, of sensuous knowledge (Baumgarten 1750–
1758), in which the tension and ambiguous co-agency between mind and body,
thought and life was part of the ways in which the productivity of aesthetic and imag-
inative processes was conceived. Literature as a medium of cultural ecology thus
specifically focuses on this interactivity of mind and life which is staged in literary
texts as a liminal phenomenon on the boundary between culture and nature, self and
other, anthropocentric and biocentric dimensions of existence.
The perspective of cultural ecology on literature considers the evolution of
aesthetic and imaginative forms of textuality as doubly coded – as a deep-rooted,
transhistorical feature of human cultural evolution that has manifested itself across
different cultures and periods from archaic to modern civilizations; and as a histori-
cal-specific phenomenon as the result of the functional differentiation and speciali-
zation of different kinds of writing, discourse, and cultural practice especially since
the eighteenth century. Wolfgang Iser usefully describes this functional history of lit-
erature not in terms of a binary opposition between fiction and reality, but as a binary
relation between the Real, the Fictive, and the Imaginary, in which the Fictive is a cul-
tural form mediating the institutionalized pressures of the Real with the anarchic and
amorphous impulses of the Imaginary. This model is translated into the context of cul-
tural ecology by extending Iser’s self-referential anthropological imaginary towards
an ecological imaginary, which in literary texts represents a source of counterdiscur-
sive scenarios to the predominant systems of civilizational order. I have described this
functional dynamics of narrative texts as a triadic relation between culture-critical
metadiscourse, imaginative counter-discourse, and reintegrative interdiscourse (see
below). Literature has thereby evolved into a kind of discursive heterotopia that oper-
ates both inside and outside the discourses of the larger culture, opening up an imag-
inative space in which dominant developments, beliefs, truth-claims, and models
of human life are being critically reflected and symbolically transgressed in coun-
ter-discourses to the prevailing economic-technological forms of modernization and
142 Hubert Zapf
globalization. Literary texts provide a transformative site of cultural self-reflection

and cultural self-exploration, in which the historically marginalized and excluded
is semiotically empowered and activated as a source of their artistic creativity, and is
thus reconnected to the civilizational reality system in both deconstructive and recon-
structive ways. As a medium of radical civilizational critique, literature simultane-
ously provides a sustainable generative matrix for the continuous self-renewal of the
civilizational system.
For this evolutionary function of literature, the formal and artistic qualities of
texts are not merely illustrations of already existing environmental knowledge but are
themselves actively participating in the production of ever new ecologies of knowl-
edge and communication. Literary form is therefore an indispensable part of the ways
in which a cultural ecology of literature looks at texts. This relates not only to the
aspect of metaphor as a central mode of textual ecopoiesis as pointed out by Bateson
and Wheeler among others (see ↗1 The Lightest Burden); it also refers to differen-
tiations of narrative structure, complexities of character relations, the interaction
between external environments and interior worlds, chronotopes of time and space,
compositional arrangements of motifs, language, symbolism and rhythm, as well as
to the intertextual dynamics from which any new individual text is composed. A cul-
tural ecology of literature also, and particularly so, looks at the indeterminacies, the
gaps and polysemic processes of signification, which are characteristic of aesthetic
texts and which resist clear-cut ideological messages, but help to create the imagina-
tive space for otherness – both in terms of the representation of the unrepresented,
and in terms of the reader’s participation in the textual process. Literature is an eco-
logical cultural force not only in a thematic sense as in explicitly environmental forms
of writing, but in a more fundamental sense in the forms and functions of aesthetic
communication as they have evolved in literary and cultural history and are inscribed
into the generative signature of texts.
3 Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity

In all cultural ecosystems, creativity is an important element, even though the modes
and degrees of creativity are quite different in different fields. What seems clear
however is that art and literature constitute a cultural ecosystem in which creativity
is given a central place. They are an “experimental field of cultural possibilities” and
a “storehouse and innovational space for all sorts of creative processes, which are
needed everywhere in cultural systems for the renewal of their dynamics and con-
tinued evolutionary force, but which can be relatively freely performed only in art”
(Finke 2003, 272, my translation).
In some of the most inspiring recent contributions to creativity research, the cre-
ative processes which are staged in imaginative texts are related to fundamental pro-
cesses of life itself, and this is another relevant frame of reference for a cultural ecology
of literature. Combining Charles Sanders Peirce’s cultural semiotics of language with
bio-evolutionary insights, Wendy Wheeler proposes a biosemiotic approach to illu-
minate the connection between natural and cultural forms of creativity. According
to Wheeler, the two are linked by the basic insight of biosemiotics that “all life –
from the cell all the way up to us – is characterized by communication, or semio-
sis” (Wheeler 2006, 270; emphasis in the original). This semiotic dimension of life
is evidenced in the functional cycles of semiotic loops “flowing ceaselessly between
the Umwelten (semiotic environments) and Innenwelten (semiotic ‘inner worlds’) of
creatures” (272) – concepts which Wheeler borrows from Jakob von Uexküll. Crea-
tive processes in nature and culture share an element of agency and improvisational
flexibility, with which they respond to changing demands of their environments by
rearranging and recombining existing patterns of life, communication, and interpre-
tation. Signs are constantly read in bodily natures within a survival-oriented process,
which transforms itself into the various semiotic communication levels of organisms
and ecosystems.
This transference of similarities across different scales of living systems in their
survival-oriented forms of self-organization resembles, as Wheeler points out, the
operation of metaphors on the level of language, discourse, and art. This corresponds
with Gregory Bateson’s (2002) concept of ‘patterns which connect’ and his related view
of metaphor as a constitutive form of both ecological discourse and poetic speech. In
this view, the ‘meta-phorical’ reading of one form or pattern and its transference to
another is at the core of creative activity both in processes of life and in processes
of literature and art, and “creation via metaphor” (Wheeler 2006, 275) constitutes a
common ground between them. In this sense, the (auto-) poiesis of life becomes an
analogue for the (auto-) poiesis of the aesthetic, since in fact the “human grasp of the
world is essentially aesthetic” (276). Art is thus also always implicitly self-reflexive,
constituting a cultural medium which thematizes the “mysteries of human mean-
ing-making itself” (276). This means that “art, and especially art in language, remains
the best place of our hopes of self-understanding” (276). Literature becomes a par-
adigmatic cultural form representing the play of similarities and differences which
make up the biosemiotic processes of life itself.
And it is precisely this transformative interplay between different yet similar pat-
terns and life forms that is a preferred source of literary creativity. To mention just a
few random examples from American literature here – the grass as an analogue of
poetic polyphony in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; the flight of the white heron as a
figuration of the self’s awakening in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron”; the con-
tractility of the snail as a poetological principle in Marianne Moore’s “The Snail”; the
biomorphic forms of new beginnings from physical and sociocultural wastelands in
W. C. Williams’s “Spring & All”; the irregular windings of mountain paths as a model
for Gary Snyder’s “Riprap”; the spider web as a metaphor of mythopoetic storytelling
in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony; or the spiral movement of the eagle’s flight as a
144 Hubert Zapf
compositional principle in the Native American poet Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem.” This
‘aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari 1989) of ecology is holistic but also attentive to sin-
gularity, connective but polymorphous, an ongoing discontinuous reinvention of the
world and the self in an ecological logic of intensity that replaces discursive totalities
(see Guattari 1989). In these examples, the reflexive interactivity between nature and
culture, matter and mind becomes visible as a creative matrix of literary texts.
4 L iterature as Cultural Ecology in Poems by Emily

Dickinson and Wallace Stevens
In the following, I would like to illustrate this in two poems from American litera-
ture, one from the nineteenth, one from the twentieth century. These poems help to
exemplify one important aspect of a cultural ecology of literature, namely that in its
methodology, it doesn’t follow a deductive ‘application’ of theoretical principles to
texts but rather an ‘abductive procedure’ in the sense of Charles Sanders Peirce, in
which new hypotheses emerge from the explorative dialogic interplay between dif-
ferent domains, in this case between theory and text, rather than from the assumed
priority of one over the other (see Douven 2011). Literary texts in this view are consid-
ered not just as derivative material for demonstrating the truth-claims of theories but
as a source of cultural-ecological knowledge in their own right. What moreover makes
these poems especially interesting to a cultural ecology of literature is that both of
them are not immediately obvious examples of environmentally relevant literature.
Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” has been seen by critics mainly
in connection with her thanatopoetics in the context of Victorian deathbed literature,
while Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” has primarily been read as an example
of his poetological ideas about the relationship between imagination and reality. Both
texts are cases of a decidedly non-realist, highly imaginative, and self-referential kind
of poetry, and are therefore rather far removed from any kind of mimetic-natural-
ist model of ecological writing. But it is precisely in their poetics of indeterminacy,
radical defamiliarization, and exploration of linguistic and semiotic liminalities that
they become particularly instructive cases of a cultural ecology of literature.
First then, Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz”:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –

The stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air–
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –

And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my keepsakes – Signed away

What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –

Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
The poem consists of four stanzas of four lines each in an alternating four- and three-
stressed iambic form, which draws on the protestant church hymn. This establishes
an external sense of formal order and control, which however is counteracted by
the internal experience related in the text, which develops as a drama of existential
chaos and loss of control. From the perspective of the dying first person narrator, the
poem imagines an ultimate boundary situation between life and death, external and
internal world, the intense desire for and the insuperable limits of knowledge. At the
very point when the dying person, surrounded by the bereaved mourners, is focusing
with all concentration on the encounter with and insight into a higher transcenden-
tal world, the scene is disrupted by the noisy buzz of a fly, which apparently is itself
in the last, tired phase of its existence. In this extreme situation of experiencing the
limits of human life and knowledge, the speaker is confronted with her own crea-
tureliness, which signifies a shared bodily reality in which humans and other living
beings equally participate and which marks the inevitable condition and limitations
of all cultural constructs of meaning and knowledge. In the anticlimactic movement
of the poem, the religious expectation of transcendental revelation turns into the
encounter with an immanent world of corporeality, in which insight is coupled with
blindness, clarity with confusion, and isolation with the unsettling realization of
creaturely co-existence with another living being, an inconspicuous fly, which in the
disintegration of its movements – “with blue – uncertain stumbling buzz,” parallels
the existential disorientation of the human observer. It is precisely in this defamil-
iarizing, (syn-)aesthetic perspective of imaginative kinship, in which the fundamen-
tal ecological relation of humans with other life forms is being communicated in the
poem. The process of the text undermines the dichotomous worldview from which it
develops, and stages the experience of shared creaturely existence as an ethical and
epistemological challenge to the cultural conditions to which it responds.
My second example is the poem “Anecdote of the Jar” by the modernist writer
Wallace Stevens:
146 Hubert Zapf
I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The poem is again clearly structured in its sequence of three four line stanzas. The
flow of its four-stressed iambic rhythm is however fractured in several places, such
as at the close of the first and second stanzas, before it regains dominance in the end
with the triumph of the ‘jar’ over nonhuman nature. The poem deals with the relation-
ship between culture and nature, with the autonomization of a civilizational order
that defines the natural ecosystem not in terms of living interconnectedness but as a
mere external environment (“It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill.”)
The first person speaker is the symbolic agent of this anthropocentric civilization,
which realizes its goal of superior order through the total control of nature. At the
time of the New Criticism and beyond, the ‘jar’ was seen as a symbol of the artwork,
which achieves an imaginative control of an otherwise chaotic reality. On closer look,
however, the aesthetic process of the text consists in undermining this claim of dom-
inance and authorial omnipotence (“It took dominion everywhere”) by conveying the
apparently harmless domestication of the wilderness as an all-pervading paralysis of
life, in which the uniformity and monotonous circularity of the civilizational system
goes hand in hand with the paralysis of the poetic imagination, as the second and
third stanzas indicate: “The jar was round upon the ground, […] The jar was gray and
bare.” The death of the wilderness is the death of the imagination, and the living inter-
relationship with nonhuman nature appears not only as a condition of human life but
of poetic creativity that has been deprived of its vital context: “It did not give of bird or
bush.” This absent presence of nonhuman nature signifies a counterdiscursive move-
ment in the text whose subliminal force is marked in the fractures of the rhythm but
also in the grotesque phantastic mode of representation. In its polysemic meanings,
the word ‘jar’ (connoting a ‘container made of glass or pottery, especially one used for
storing food’ but also something that is ‘incongruous in a striking or shocking way.’
OED) introduces a cognitive dissonance in the text implying tension, conflict, and
incongruity in the relation between cultural object and natural environment. As a
signifier of the silent noise contained in expanding circles of exclusion, the jar, which
grows into an eerily magnified relation of size to its surroundings, furthermore con-
tains a socioeconomic meaning connected with its commercial use, which has been
linked to a real brand of marmalade at the time named Dominion Wide Mouth Jar
(see Pearce 1977, 65), thus pointing to an industrial use of nature in a mass consumer
society. In its mixture between sublime artifact (it was “tall and of a port in air”) and
pop-art ready-made, monstrous design and oversized caricature, the jar simultane-
ously satirizes and pathologizes the pressures of cultural normality and normativity.
Stevens’ poem anticipates the ‘hyperobjects’ of civilization, as Timothy Morton (2013)
calls them, signatures of an Anthropocene, whose surreal scale reshapes and deforms
the precivilizational world of nature.
As these examples show, tropes of interaction and mutual transformation
between nature and culture, matter and mind pervade the imaginative fabric of liter-
ature. They constitute intertextual fields of metaphors, in which an ecological deep
consciousness manifests itself in the texts as a culture-critical sensorium for civiliza-
tional pathologies, but also as a potentially regenerative form of ‘cognitive biophilia,’
as Elizabeth Lawrence (1993) calls it. If according to Fredric Jameson (1981) the his-
torical-political world is potentially present in even the most formalist products of
literary art in what he calls their ‘political unconscious,’ then a similar point could be
made about an ecological unconscious, which is likewise potentially present in exper-
imental and apparently self-referential works of literature and art. In the course of
cultural evolution, literature seems to have developed into a cultural form in which
the reconnection between the changing historical world and the awareness of bio-
centric origins became one of its hallmarks as a specifically complex, holistic, and
self-reflexive form of discourse even and especially under the conditions of advanced
modernization.
5 T
riadic Functional Model of Literature as Cultural
Ecology
Literature as an ecological force within culture is both deconstructive and reconstruc-
tive. It breaks up ossified forms of language, communication, and ideology, sym-
bolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally separated.
With a view to narrative texts, this transformative function of literature as cultural
ecology can be described as a historically shifting combination of three discursive
modes, which operate both within and outside of established discourses (see Zapf
2002, 2016):
(1) A culture-critical metadiscourse, which deconstructs hegemonic ideologies
and exposes petrifications, coercive structures, and pathogenic implications of domi-
nant systems of civilizational power. Examples from core texts of American literature
are the system of puritanism in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the financial system of
Wall Street capitalism in Melville’s “Bartleby,” the system of global economic expan-
148 Hubert Zapf
sionism in Moby-Dick, the Victorian gender system in Chopin’s The Awakening, the
system of slavery and institutionalized racism in Morrison’s Beloved, or the post-apoc-
alyptic wasteland of civilizational self-destruction in McCarthy’s The Road.
(2) An imaginative counter-discourse, which foregrounds and symbolically
empowers the culturally excluded and marginalized – as in the scarlet letter A in Haw-
thorne’s novel, which turns from a monosemic signifier of cultural exclusion (‘Adul-
teress’) into a polysemic signifier of transformative creative energy (‘Art’); in Bartle-
by’s subversive formula of resistance to the functional appropriation of human life, “I
would prefer not to”; in the white whale as nonhuman agent and ecosemiotic counter-
force to anthropocentric dominance in Moby-Dick; in the voice of the sea in Chopin’s
The Awakening as soundscape of elemental life and siren song of myth connoting a
counterforce of vital connectivity to social repression and division; in the return of
the ghost of the dead daughter as the incarnation of all forgotten victims of slavery in
Morrison’s Beloved, a spectral hybrid being on the culture-nature boundary (“A fully
dressed woman walked out of the water” Morrison 1987, 62), who becomes the central
narrative energy of the novel’s posttraumatic story-telling; or in the figure of the child
in McCarthy’s The Road, whose instinctual altruism and ethical sensibility represent
an almost utopian counterpoint to an infernal death-in-life world of biophobia and
omnipresent destruction. All of these counterdiscursive processes are associated,
in different ways, with an ecosemiotic force that emerges from but also transgresses
traumatizing realities and releases transformative story-telling processes.
(3) A reintegrative interdiscourse, which brings together the civilizational system
and its exclusions in new, both conflictive and transformative ways, and thereby con-
tributes to the constant renewal of the cultural center from its margins. This reintegra-
tive interdiscourse involves epistemic, aesthetic, and regenerative aspects – epistemic
in that it brings together discourses and forms of knowledge that are otherwise kept
apart (see ↗15 Conciliation and Consilience); aesthetic in that it employs the ecolog-
ical the ‘patterns which connect’ heterogeneous domains (Bateson) as a principle of
its creative processes; regenerative in that the reconnection of the culturally sepa-
rated constitutes a tentative ground for systemic self-corrections and/or for potential
new beginnings. All of these aspects are at work in some degree or other in the above
mentioned texts (see for a more detailed analysis Zapf 2002, 2016).
Obviously, this reintegration does not mean any superficial harmonization of
conflicts, but rather, by the very act of reconnecting the culturally separated, sets
off conflicting processes and borderline states of crisis and turbulence. As the above-
mentioned examples show, culturally powerful texts are often post-traumatic forms
of story-telling, in which the traces of the unspeakable, unavailable, and unrepre-
sentable remain present in all attempts to reconstruct the past and to re-envision the
future. “This is not a story to pass on” (Morrison 1987, 337) is the comment at the
end of Beloved’s narrative journey through the traumatic nightmares of slavery, which
self-reflexively expresses the ultimate impossibility and yet the cultural necessity of
such story-telling.
But what is historically and realistically unavailable can be symbolically inte-

grated into language and discourse in imaginative texts. This is where literature
gains its vital ecological function within culture. Literature in this sense is, on the
one hand, a sensorium for what goes wrong in a society, for the biophobic implica-
tions and pathogenic structures of consciousness and civilizational order, and it is,
on the other hand, a medium of continual cultural self-renewal, in which neglected
biophilic energies can find a symbolic space of expression and of (re-) integration into
the larger ecology of cultural discourses. Literary texts are a mode of sustainable tex-
tuality, since they are sources of ever-renewable creative energy (see Rueckert 1996;
Zapf 2016). They are self-reflexive models of cultural creativity, which constantly
renew ossified forms of language, thought, and cultural practice by reconnecting an
anthropocentric civilization to the deep-rooted memory of the biocentric coevolution
between culture and nature, between human and nonhuman life. In such a perspec-
tive, literature and art represent an ecological force within cultural discourses, which
is translated into ever new aesthetic practices, and which is systematically articulated
in the theory and interpretative procedures of cultural ecology.
6 B
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Part II I ssues and Directions of Contemporary
Ecocriticism
Kate Soper
8 N
either the ‘Simple Backward Look’ nor the
‘Simple Progressive Thrust’: Ecocriticism
and the Politics of Prosperity
Abstract: Rather than focus on ‘nature writing’ and the redemptive qualities of an
unmediated encounter with nature, ecocriticism, it is argued here, should attend
more to the role of ‘consumerism’ and prevalent conceptions of human prosperity in
the destruction of nature.
Elaborating on this position, the chapter offers some criticism of both construc-
tivist and naturalist approaches to conceptualizing ‘nature.’ It emphasizes instead the
critical differences between humans and other animals in creating, and (potentially)
in resolving ecological crisis, distancing itself in doing so both from the self-subvert-
ing rhetoric of recent ‘post-humanist’ denials of human ‘exceptionalism’ and from
the political abstraction from a specifically human consumption encouraged by a
Spinozan-Deleuzian ontological monism. It concludes by offering some examples of
what a more consumption oriented ecocritical approach might consist in, drawing
on Shakespeare’s King Lear; some aspects of English Romanticism; and readings of
contemporary fiction by Michel Houellebecq and Ali Smith.
Key Terms: constructivism, naturalism, posthumanism, consumption, ‘avant-garde

nostalgia,’ human need, Shakespeare, King Lear, romanticism, hedonist dialectic
1 P
reliminaries: Nature, the Human, the Role of
Humanities
Ecocriticism has been viewed as an engagement with literary texts that themselves
constitute ‘nature-writing,’ in other words, that explicitly seek to invoke the quali-
ties of the natural world, animate or inanimate, and reflect upon those qualities. It
has also been viewed as an engagement with texts for what they reveal about human
relations with the natural environment and/or with other animals. And it has been
viewed as a reading of texts with a view to drawing out the enlightenment they shed,
or the lessons we can draw from them, about eco-politics and the directions it should
take today. These are differing orientations rather than mutually exclusive interpreta-
tions, and their concerns are to some extent overlapping. But I myself am certainly in
general agreement with Greg Garrard’s (2004) call for a move away from the “poetics
of authenticity,” with its focus on the redemptive qualities of a (supposedly) unme-
diated encounter with nature, to a “poetics of responsibility” much more centred
158 Kate Soper
on culture and human action (cf. Armbruster 2009, 23). Therefore, I shall offer some
reasons here for favouring the third interpretation of ecocriticism’s task, and provide
some illustration of how I see it most fruitfully contributing to a greener cultural sen-
sibility. But as a way of setting the context for that part of my engagement, I shall
begin with some fairly general remarks on the current context of environmental phi-
losophy.
The discrimination around the concept of ‘nature’ that has been prompted in
recent decades by the growth in environmental concern is now reflected in a complex
and ramifying set of discourses. But in a broad brush way we can distinguish between
two main tendencies: on the one hand, in the calls to re-value nature as a site of
intrinsic value, to recognise our kinship and continuity with other living creatures,
and to abandon anthropocentric conceptions of humanity’s privileged place within
the eco-system, we have been witness to what can be termed a ‘nature-endorsing’
tendency. Nature endorsers lament the loss or erosion of nature, emphasise human
dependency on the planetary eco-system, and demand that we acknowledge environ-
mental limits and the confines they impose on human activity.
As a counter to this, on the other hand, although sharing some of its naturalistic
arguments on human–animal affinities, the constructivist tendency has emphasized
the formation or mediation of human culture in whatever comes to count as ‘nature’
or ‘natural.’ Strongly influenced by recent developments in the fields of genetics and
information technology, and by post-structuralist theories, this approach is scepti-
cal of any redemptionist appeal to nature’s powers, while also often celebrating the
breakdown of clear-cut distinctions between artifice and nature (organic and inor-
ganic) as an emancipatory advance: as freeing us from the confines of supposedly
natural sexualities and modes of being.1
Both sides to this debate have important things to say and need to be heard. But
both, too, as I have argued in my writings on nature, often fail to distinguish ade-
quately between differing invocations of the idea of nature or to explore the coher-
ence of their normative implications. The endorsers, for example, in one aspect of
their argument, invite us to believe that humanity is part of nature and call upon us
1 Instead of seeking social and ecological salvation by overcoming human alienation, this type of po-
sition claims that progress can only come about via the estrangements of a post-humanist ontological
transcendence of the nature – culture polarity. In their recent and influential work on the condition of
global “empire” and the latter-day “proletarian” agents of its eventual transformation, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri enthuse, for example, about the new and alien forms of subjectivity centered on
gender and sexual transgression, mutant modes and cyborgism that will be the future agents of resist-
ance to global capitalism. They call on us to recognize that human nature is in no way separate from
nature as whole, and that there are therefore “no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human
and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth […] nature itself is
an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures and hybridizations” (Hardt and Negri 2000,
215–216; also see Haraway 1991; 1997; 2008; Gray 1995; Peperell 1995; Wolfe 2010).
8 Ecocriticism and the Politics of Prosperity 159
to ‘get back’ to it, or to re-cement our links with it. Yet this nature is also at the same
time presented by them as that domain which is definitionally independent of us,
but now ruined or largely lost through human intrusion upon it and ‘contamination’
of it. And to add further to the confusion, the natural environment is often identified
in these arguments with parts of the landscape that are the outcome of centuries of
human agricultural activity, and in that sense at least as ‘culturally contaminated’
as the most built-up environments. In its political implications, too, the ‘hands off’
nature approach to conservation encouraged by the endorsing perspective has often
proved too ready to give preference to wilderness preservation for the eco-tourists
over the welfare of indigenous peoples; or too quick to make humanity in general
responsible for the environmental destruction associated with the pursuit of Western
style affluence. At its most extreme, it can licence the totalitarian control of human
population advocated by some adherents of deep ecology.
The constructivist position, on the other hand, is at risk of denying or abstracting
from environmental pressures altogether. The treatment of nature as a continuously
revisable signifier does little to address material damage to the environment; nor does
the unqualified stress on socialisation give due recognition to the nature that grounds
bioscience and environmental change and always constrains the forms of their inter-
vention. After all, even the most sophisticated experiments in genetic modification
are dependent for success on pre-given biological laws and processes. The same point
holds for the larger-scale forms of human interaction with the environment, where
there is always a distinction to be drawn between the powers and processes which
are the essential precondition of all agricultural practice, on the one hand, and the
humanly modified landscape and its plant and animal life, on the other. In this sense
there is always a nature that is not the construct of human culture and technology but
is the primary condition and context of any cultural intervention and manipulation
in the first place.
In an attempt to correct for the respective shortcomings of both endorsing and
constructivist arguments, I myself have defended a position on nature that I describe
as both ‘realist’ and ‘humanist.’ It is realist in the sense that it recognises the contrast
between an independent nature conceived as the permanent ground of all human
bio activity and environmental change, and the ‘lay’ or ‘surface’ concept of nature:
that use of the term ‘nature’ with which we refer to the empirically observable, and
always historically changing and culturally conditioned life forms and environmental
effects.2 It is humanist, on the other hand, in the sense that, although it recognises
2 Nature in the “realist” sense refers us to the ever present and indestructible forces and causal
powers that are the condition of, and constraint upon, any human practice, however ambitious it is;
“nature” in the surface sense is the consequence of the workings and human harnessing of “realist”
nature, the conditioned and mutating environment of immediate perception and its life forms. And
recognition of the distinction between “realist” and “surface” natures is indispensable, I claim, to the
160 Kate Soper
human kinship with other species, it runs counter to the monist naturalism of those
who would assimilate human patterns of need and consumption to those of other
animals, rather than highlighting critical differences – and the role of those differ-
ences both in creating, and (potentially) in resolving ecological crisis (cf. Soper 1995,
149–176). It is human ways of living, after all, that – much in contrast to the cyclical
and reproductive mode of existence of other animals – are responsible for most envi-
ronmental damage, and they alone who can do something about it.
In this connection, I have emphasized what I term human biological under-deter-
mination relative to other creatures, and the range of choice of action that is therefore
in principle available to us (cf. Soper 1995, 32–33). The current ecological situation, I
argue, is better illuminated not by reference to the intrinsic qualities of non-animate
nature nor by recalling us to our fundamental kinship with other living creatures, but
by confronting the distinctively human appetite for innovative forms of cultural tran-
scendence and individualising self-expression. Viewed in this light, the key ecological
problem is whether we can find ways of living rich, complex, creative, non-repetitive
lives without social injustice and without environmental collapse. This is not about
how better to ‘respect’ or ‘get back to nature’ (in the sense of reverting to tradition and
a simpler way of life), but how to advance to a form of future that is both assertively
human and ecologically benign. The focus, in short, should fall less on the adoption
of the ‘right’ attitudes to, or ways of valuing nature, and more on the conditions of
human fulfillment and how these can be secured in an ecologically sustainable mode.
I take issue, in short, with those (and they are well represented among eco-critics)
who think environmental politics has more to do with appreciating nature than with
revising ideas about progress, prosperity and human flourishing.
In the same spirit, I question the adequacy of a Spinozan or Deleuzian ecocritical
approach that refers us to a play of forces through which all living beings are united
in a rhizomic universe. This is not so much because it is ontologically mistaken but
because it invites a positivism and fatalism of approach. Recognition of the relation-
ality of being is, after all, consistent with any and every ethics or politics. Such theory,
moreover, tends to operate at such a level of abstraction that little guidance is given
on the economic and political institutions that could meet its professed objectives;
and in the absence of that guidance it too readily reverts to an essentially descriptive
account of actuality: a comprehensive but somewhat scholastic mapping of practices
and subjectivities attached to a messianic, and hence ultimately evasive politics.3 It is
coherence both of ecological discourses about the “changing face of nature” conceived as percepti-
ble environment, and to any discourse about the genetically engineered or cultural construction of
human beings or their bodies.
3 Rosi Braidotti, for example, has recently written that “[s]ustainability expresses the desire to en-
dure, in both space and time. In Spinozist-Deleuzian political terms, this sustainable idea of endur-
ance is linked to the construction of possible futures” which in turn “entails the collective endeavour
to construct social horizons of endurance, which is to say, of hope and sustainability. […] [Hope] gives
fine to point out that we are all inter-connected in nature and share much more with
other animals than we previously thought. But what matters politically is recognition
both of the role of humanity in bringing about ecological collapse, and of the distinc-
tive capacities humans alone have to monitor, and in principle, adjust their behaviour
and environmental impact.
Such arguments, of course, presuppose specifically human demands for self-real-
isation and self-expression, and the capacities of reason, language use, imagination
and so forth, needed to act on those demands. They are committed, in short, to human
‘exceptionalism’ of a kind that has been challenged by some forms of posthumanist
argument (↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism). I say some because I accept
a great deal of the Nietzschean-Marxian-Freudian and, more recently, post-structur-
alist critique of the humanist subject conceived as an autonomous and epistemo-
logically self-transparent agent of history. Human persons, like other creatures, are
subject to trans-individual systemic processes and pressures (notably today market
forces, which are now always spoken of as independent agents of human destiny).
But there is also, of course, the more usually cited example of language and other
semiotic systems: systems that are presupposed to forms of consciousness and com-
munication rather than purely expressive tools of them; and these structures, though
humanly created, are in many ways beyond their ken or control. Posthumanists are
right in that sense to point to the ways in which modes – and the very means of –
communication are involved in what it means to be human at any given point in time.
I would also, on the issue of human-animal relations, endorse a good part of the
argument of those who want to problematise the discourse of rights in its application
to non-human animals on the grounds that it rests on an inadequate conception of
justice: one that fails to see that what generates our moral response to animals and
their treatment is not some distanced and impartial calculation of what considera-
tion is rightfully due to them, but rather our sense of the mortality and vulnerabil-
ity we share with them, and the compassion that goes with that. But it is precisely
with a view to sustaining the philosophical coherence of this kind of position, with
its appeal to the distinctive role of human imagination and sympathy in generat-
ing moral response, that we need to defend human exceptionalism.4 Derek Mahon
us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines”
(Braidotti 2013, 37–38). Or again, in his recent Deleuze-influenced book Common Ground, Jeremy Gil-
bert tells us that what “distinguishes a democratic politics from any other is the fact that it does not
try to regulate the inherent complexity of human relations […] by making social relations simpler,
but rather strives to give expression to their full complexity and the creative possibilities which this
entails” (Gilbert 2014, 129–130). It all sounds good – but it says very little about by whom or where or
when or how any of this creative potential or hope will be mobilised.
4 Cf. Cora Diamond’s (1991, 334) point that “the mistake is to think that the callousness [to animals]
cannot be condemned without reasons which are reasons for anyone, no matter how devoid of all
human imagination or sympathy.”
162 Kate Soper
(1990, 64), wryly asks in his poem, “The Mute Phenomena”, what we know “Of the
revolutionary theories advanced/ By turnips, or the sex-life of cutlery,” and suggests
that “Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived /The ideal society which will replace
our own.” But if we more seriously question whether we should continue to privi-
lege human intellectual and emotional capacities in our dealings with other forms of
being, then we shall surely also subvert the range of normative distinctions without
which there would seem little point in moving the critique in the first place. In The
Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton (2010, 71–73; cf. 2007) argues that we should not
“set up consciousness as yet another defining trait of superiority over non-humans.”
Humans, he suggests, are “fairly uniquely good at throwing and sweating,” and that’s
about all. But to belittle what is distinctive to us in this way, is also to undermine the
idea of the human person as enjoying any special claim to self-realisation. If Morton
is right, why is he writing books? Or why should we find the idea of the clone morally
problematic or think of cloning as destaining on our human species-being? And the
issue becomes even more acute in relation to machines. Even those who would have
us blur the mind-machine conceptual division have argued for it on the basis of the
quasi-mind-possession and ‘ensouled’ qualities of advanced computerization. But if
these capacities or attributes are themselves regarded as problematic because they
are rooted in some regrettably ‘humanist’ endorsement of human powers of cognition
and reflexivity, in some preferring of minds and souls, then why should the approx-
imations of artificial intelligence to human capacities be accorded any special atten-
tion in this context? One might note in this context the petitio a principio of certain
Deleuzian influenced arguments that theorise the self as wholly relational while
accounting for its individuation by invoking some kind of inner force or agency of
organization that negotiates or singularizes the pattern of interactional processes (for
a useful discussion, see Gilbert 2014, 105–130). For in what sense exactly does this
provide a more insightful explanation than speaking in terms of minds and subjects?
Granted that individuals are a complex product of ‘brains,’ ‘bodies’ and ‘environ-
ment,’ we still have to allow for that singular element which allows the individual to
‘totalize’ or transcend the relations composing the individual.
This relates to a more general paradox at the heart of the ethico-political project
of the posthumanist deconstruction of the Enlightenment framework of thinking
about human development. For the more plural and flexible forms of personal fulfil-
ment that it seeks to open up in regard to animal connectedness, gender, sexuality,
disability, and so forth, have, in truth, much more in common with the Enlighten-
ment project for self-realisation than any prior framework of thinking about human
freedom, subjectivity and self-expression. And the political norms (of empowerment,
democracy, emancipation, creative potential, and the like), that are so often invoked
in such theory, laudable though they may be, cannot, it seems, be grounded in rela-
tional ontology and thus remain arbitrary and voluntaristic.
Posthumanism, then, subverts itself if it attempts to go beyond human exception-
alism, and the most persuasive of the posthumanist discourses are those which are
prepared to recognize and talk about the lurking humanism of the forms of question-
ing of the nature and limits of the human that are opened up through the posthuman-
ist project. For in the last analysis, the rhetorical address of the posthuman only makes
sense as an appeal to the imagination or moral sensibility of those already within the
human community, even if it invites a reappraisal of the confines or self-imaging of
that community. As Stanley Cavell (1979, 412) has suggested, “what is so human is
that we share the fact with other animals, that animals are also our others. That we
are animals. Being struck with this is something one might call ‘seeing us as human.’
It is a feeling of wonder.”
2 A
Revised Politics of Prosperity: The Role of
‘Avant-Garde Nostalgia’
It follows from my emphasis on the importance of re-thinking human prosperity rather
than the nature of nature, that global environmental problems have to be re-cast as
problems of consumption – and in a two-fold and interconnected way. Firstly there is
the problem of the huge disparity between rich and poor in their access to resources,
and hence to the minimum of material conditions essential to any further flourishing.
Redressing this imbalance, I would argue, is both a moral and pragmatic impera-
tive, a demand not only of social justice, but a prerequisite of any long-term global
ecological survival. The other problem is that of consumerism, the problem, namely,
that human flourishing is currently so widely perceived, both by those with access
to it (hitherto mainly affluent people in the West), and by those without access, as
dependent on an ever enhanced consumption of material goods and luxury services.
The two problems connect in the sense that pressures for a more egalitarian distribu-
tion of global resources are unlikely to be applied unless and until the ‘good life’ is
reconceived along less consumerist lines. In the absence, that is to say, of a seductive
and compelling alternative to existing patterns of affluent consumption and commod-
ity dependent forms of self-expression and self-realisation, it will prove extremely
difficult to provide a better deal either for the environment and its non-human life
forms or for the less privileged within the human community.
What is needed, then, is a new ‘political imaginary’ that would draw on the social
complexity and reflexivity of the globalised era in order to break with the assumption
that enlightened polices on race, gender and human rights can only be carried on
the back of conventional economic growth and its shopping-mall culture. It would
also offer a profoundly different – secular but less materialist – conception of human
flourishing as dependent on the shortening of the working-week, the expansion of
free-time, slower and less stressful modes of transport, and more evolved and univer-
164 Kate Soper
sally available educational and aesthetic pleasures, rather than on enhanced produc-
tivity, stressed out work routines, and ever expanding material acquisition.5
Breaking with the growth-driven consumerist dynamic of production and satis-
faction is, admittedly, a daunting prospect given the integrated structure of modern
existence and the dependencies of national economies on the globalized system. It
is an index of the depth of our collective alienation, that we scarcely know how we
might begin to achieve it. But a cultural preliminary, I suggest, will be some re-think-
ing of our current notions of progress and development.
Against the grain of those who denounce green policies for taking us ‘back to the
stone age’ – a more prescient cultural outlook would recast certain forms of retro
spection as an important asset of future progress. It would not dismiss regrets over
vanished or vanishing times and spaces as wistful or passé but acknowledge their
role in reconnecting us with a tradition of acknowledged and lamented, if also always
cognitively transcended, forms of loss. In this connection I have coined the idea of
an ‘avant-garde nostalgia,’ which is obviously a provocatively contradictory notion
(Soper 2011). But I invoke it in order to capture a movement of thought that remem-
bers, and mourns, that which is irretrievable, but also attains to a more complex polit-
ical wisdom and energy in the memorialising process itself. Avant-garde nostalgia
would claim a politically progressive role for keeping faith with past ways of doing
and making, provided it comes in the form of a retrospection or lament that retains a
memory of the social and sexual exploitations of the labour processes of earlier com-
munities as well as of their more congenial aspects.
Raymond Williams’ (1993 [1973], 36–37) injunction (issued in the course of his
discussion of “retrospective radicalism” in The Country and the City) that we should
avoid both the “simple backward look” of an elegiac pastoralism and the “simple
progressive thrust” endorsed by the celebrants of capitalist modernity, is obviously
of relevance here (cf.1985; Ryle 2009a, 43–49; 2011, 52–53; cf. 2008). But so, too, is
the response of some of the Frankfurt school thinkers, who have also insisted on the
importance of remembrance to revolutionary progress. As Adorno has said, in expla-
nation, if not justification, of ‘avant-garde nostalgia’:
So long as progress, deformed by utilitarianism, does violence to the surface of the earth, it will
be impossible –in spite of all proof to the contrary – completely to counter the perception that
what antedates the trend is in its backwardness better and more humane […]. Rationalization is
not yet rational; the universality of mediation has yet to be transformed into living life; and this
endows the traces of immediacy, however dubious and antiquated, with the element of correc-
tive justice […]. If today the aesthetic relation to the past is poisoned by a reactionary tendency
with which this relation is in league, an ahistorical aesthetic consciousness that sweeps aside
5 Cf. Soper 2007a; 2007b; 2008; 2009; Soper, Ryle and Thomas, 2009. For details of the research pro-
ject on “Alternative Hedonism and the Theory and Politics of a new Anti-Consumerism,” in the ESRC/
AHRC “Cultures of Consumption Programme,” see www.consume.bbk.ac.uk.
the dimension of the past as rubbish is no better. Without historical remembrance there would
be no beauty. (Adorno 1997 [1970], 64–65)
This emphasises the importance of the ‘backward’ look even as it acknowledges its
fantastical dimension and the impossibility – and undesirability – of an unmediated
return to past experience. Herbert Marcuse (1986, 73), likewise, acknowledged that
the “romantic pre-technical world was permeated with misery, toil, and filth, and
these in turn were the background of all pleasure and joy.” But he also at the same
time lamented, as he put it, “a ‘landscape,’ a medium of libidinal experience which
no longer exists” (73). And all these theorists would have us see what is truly progres-
sive as lying beyond these antitheses. And implicit today, I would argue, in the diverse
range of contemporary laments over lost spaces and communities, the commercial-
isation of children, the vocational shifts in education, the ravages of development,
the ‘cloning’ of our cities, and so forth, is a hankering for a society that can reclaim
the libidinal experience of the past without sacrificing the very real political gains
of modernity. Diffuse and unfocussed though these laments may be, they speak to a
now quite widely felt sense of the opportunities that have been squandered in recent
decades for acceding to a fairer, less harassed, less environmentally destructive and
more enjoyable existence. To defend the progressive dimension of this kind of nos-
talgia against subsumption to consumerist ‘progress’ and its pressures is not to rec-
ommend a more ascetic or less sensually enriching existence. On the contrary, it is
to highlight the more exploitative, puritanical, disquieting, and irrational aspects of
contemporary consumer culture. It is to represent the forms of sensual enhancement
and complex fulfilments that people might be able to enjoy were they to opt for an
alternative economic order.
An ecocritical perspective of this kind would endorse a form of modernisation
and its representation that sought to break the link between progress and economic
expansion while opposing the cultural regression and social conservatism that have
hitherto tended to go together with economic backwardness. In place of a stadial and
evolutionist conception of history, it would offer a more complex narrative on the
old-new divide, a transcendence of the current binary opposition between progress
and nostalgia. Nations that had once figured as relatively backwards might recon-
stitute themselves in a period of historical transition informed by such conceptual
reconstruction as in the vanguard by comparison with the ‘over-development’ char-
acteristic of the imperial powers or metropolitan centres that had once rendered them
marginal and pre-modern by comparison.
It is in developing this dialectical optic on ‘progress’ that the humanities, to my
mind, have most to offer. Not only can they help to promote a cultural revolution in
our thinking about human pleasure, and personal fulfilment; they can also provide
the pedagogic resources to allow people in a future greener society better to enjoy a
materially re-productive, and therefore slower paced and less time scarce mode of
existence. And it is against the background of this general sketch of the potential
166 Kate Soper
contribution of the humanities to the reconceptualisation of the ‘politics of Prosper-

ity,’ that I want now to turn in the remainder to some exemplification of how it might
shift the focus of literary eco-criticism. My illustrations will be very programmatic,
since I shall offer no more than pointers to some possible readings, but will not be
in a position to explore any of them in detail here (although in one or two cases I
have elaborated on them elsewhere). The two main considerations determining my
selection of texts is, firstly that they offer insights on human consumption and the
politics of the good life; and, secondly, that they are sensitive to the humanity-nature
dialectic, and, in particular, to the need to recognise both the rationale for the critique
of capitalist modernity and the limitations of a naive nostalgia for earlier and greener
ways of living.
hakespeare, King Lear

3 S
My first example is King Lear, a play which (along with The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest
and Macbeth) has of course figured centrally in commentary on Shakespeare’s ideas of
nature (most seminally in John Danby’s (1941) study. But mine would be an approach
that does not go to it for its green imagery or for its cosmological and human parallels,
nor even, as Gabriel Egan has done recently for its foreshadowing of chaos and fractal
theory and the new genetics (cf. Egan 2006, 132–171), but rather for its insights into
the tensions between tradition and progress, and, above all, on the politics of need.
As many have pointed out, the play turns on contrasting normative conceptions
of nature (a two-way allegory in which different ways of being human are figuring dif-
ferent ways of responding to nature, and vice-versa). This applies both environmen-
tally in the actual – and metaphoric – contrast between wild and cultivated nature:
the nature of weeds and rank growth versus the husbanded nature of agriculture; but
also to human affairs, in the contrast between the ‘orthodoxy’ of a benign and bid-
dable Nature as represented by Lear, Gloucester, Albany and Kent, and the rebellious
Nature that is indifferent to social order and customs (and registered primarily in the
figures of Edmund, Goneril and Regan). On the one hand, then, we have respect for
tradition, hierarchy, conventional sexual mores and family values, on the other, the
individualizing, self-seeking, modernising values of the Edmund camp. And whether
or not one follows Danby in seeing Cordelia as registering the possibility of redemp-
tion from this conflictual nature, the tension itself, and the suggestion of the play that
we need to find a way to surpass it, is surely of some relevance to thinking through
our responses to the contemporary ecological situation – where we need to avoid both
complacent endorsement of tradition with its supposedly naturally ordered hierar-
chical community, and the unqualified pursuit of progress, modernity, and relentless
individualism. Or, to refer again to Raymond Williams’ terms, where we need to avoid
both the ‘simple backward look’ with its patrician (and patriarchal) forms of nostalgia
and the ‘simple progressive thrust’ with its unthinking adulation of entrepreneurial
progress.
Turning to the commentary on needs, the play complies with this demand both
in the counsel it seems to offer for some Aristotelian mean between overly luxurious
provision and the mere survivalism of the unaccommodated “bare-forked animal”;
and in its dialectical insight on the question of “true” need, where it recognizes the
importance in human affairs of always questioning what is really needed for humans
to prosper, while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of ever pronounc-
ing upon that truth in some final essentialist manner. As Lear famously puts it in
response to Regan’s asking why he needs so extensive a retinue:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest things superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need –
You heavens give that patience, patience I need. (Shakespeare 1997, 2.2.453–460)
“True” need, Lear implies here, cannot be finally agreed upon, because all attempts
to define it are either misleadingly restrictive or vacuously uninformative. To reduce
human needs to a brutish minimum is no more helpful than to justify the necessity
of every luxury. If we restrict our needs today to barest essentials, it will lead to the
absurdity of claiming that bread and water are alone ‘truly’ needed while bread fac-
tories and anti-biotics are luxuries. When employed vacuously, on the other hand, it
will result in the claim that everything we currently consume, and the entire system
of their production and delivery, are all equally needed. Our ‘true’ needs are more
than a matter of basic biology and both more – and less – than what we actually
consume. Deciding, then, on the ‘truth’ of human needing will always involve some
choosing-positing of value, of a certain way of life as better than another; it is not
something that can be read off from some set of facts about human nature, or imputed
to you as in your ‘true’ interest by some supposedly objective set of experts claiming
to know better than you do what you ‘truly’ need.
The essential point here concerns the complexity of a distinctively human con-
sumption, its irreducible symbolic dimensions, and the difficulties of specifying some
supposedly naturally determined set of true needs of the kind implicit in simplistic
denunciations of the falsity of consumerist provision. At the same time, however,
there is no chance of a greener future unless we put to ourselves this question of
‘true’ need, and place the politics of a ‘true’ prosperity much more at the centre of our
environmental concerns.
168 Kate Soper
4 Romanticism and the Hedonist Dialectic

My second example is one that has figured very prominently in ecocriticism, namely,
the English Romantic poets, who have rightly been valued for the power and insights
of their nature-writing (↗2 Earth’s Poesy). And they have been read as revelatory of
an authentic way of being in harmony with nature – perhaps most influentially by
Jonathan Bate (2001) in his The Song of the Earth, (where he follows Heidegger in pre-
senting what he terms ‘eco-poetics’ as phenomenologically indicative of an originary
and ecologically redemptive ‘dwelling’). My own reading would emphasise instead
the dialectical aspects of Romanticism’s approach to the nature-culture divide and its
on-going critique or subversion of its own yearnings for immersion in nature. It would
also note the role that Romanticism in a broad sense can play in the revisions of think-
ing about pleasure and the good life that I have argued are crucial to the furtherance
of a green political agenda (cf. Kerridge 2009, 130–156; Soper 2011).
In defence of the first point, I would suggest that Romantic poetry is almost always
pointing us beyond a simplistic endorsement of nature or simple message about our
alienation from it. It is true that it summons the otherness of nature and celebrates
its independence. But even as it does so, it also recalls us to the culturally mediating
role of the summons, and to the extent of the dependence of the aesthetic response
to nature on its human representation. It is a characteristic of much of Wordworth’s
poetry, for example, notably such works as “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” “Reso-
lution and Independence,” “Michael” and “Old Man Travelling,” that it reflects the
yearning for a return to nature, an immersion within the natural world, or closeness
to it, even as it registers that impossibility by giving the final word to poetic expres-
sion itself. In “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” the old laborer is so unintrusive in
his progress that “The little hedgerow birds, / That peck along the road, regard him
not;” his peace is so perfect that “the young behold / With envy, what the Old Man
hardly feels” (Wordsworth 1958, 42–43). In “Resolution and Independence,” the leech
gatherer is compared, on first encounter, to a huge stone “endued with sense” and to
a “sea-beast” that has crawled out to sun itself. His silence or inarticulacy “was like
a stream / Scarce heard: nor word from word could I divide,” and it is presented in
idealized contrast to the voluble angst of the poet: “I could have laughed myself to
scorn to find / In that decrepit Man so firm a mind” (87; 89–90). Yet the essential point
is that poetry is being written, the alienated writer “envies” the supposed immersion,
but cannot but give voice to the envy and thereby acknowledges that he is a fully real-
ized human being only by doing so (cf. Soper 1995, 236–243; 2011, 19–20).
A comparable idea is to be found in Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” in which, as Jerome
McGann has put it (1985, 58–60), Keats asks us to believe in a universal “season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness” because he knows that it is not true, and that so
perfect an autumn is purely an “autumn of the mind.” According to Keats, it is only
the poetic imagination that can create the image of beauty that we, who are caught
up in temporality and historical contradictions, project on nature as a mirror of our
desire for unity and reconciliation. There cannot, in the end, be any immersion in
nature because that itself is in contradiction to its own desire. In all this, the dialec-
tical position on nature that is intimated by the Romantic poets is more complex and
politically perceptive than that of the many nature lovers and environmentalists who
have more recently emphasised the dumb-striking and ineffable qualities of natural
beauty (especially wilderness) but who fail to acknowledge its dependency on sub-
jective representation and articulation and the always aesthetically mediated quality
of what we value or find beautiful in landscape (cf. Nicholsen 2002, 7–23; cf. Snyder
1990, 21).
5 A
gainst the Uncritical Ratification of Modernity:
Some Irish Resources and Potentials
I indicated earlier that the ecocritical approach defended here would re-conceptual-
ise modernity and its gains in a way that sought to sever the link between progress
and economic expansion while opposing the cultural regression and social con-
servatism that have traditionally gone together with economic under-development;
and I suggested that this might allow us to review the more ‘backward’ nations as
in a certain advance relative to the ‘over-development’ of the metropolitan powers.
It would allow us, in short, to offer an eco-critique of hegemonic representations of
‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and human well-being. I have argued elsewhere that Ire-
land’s relationship to the British imperial political and cultural powers that for a very
long period represented Irish society as ‘backward’ and ‘pre-modern,’ might offer an
interesting case study for such an approach, and that Ireland’s exceptional literary
offering could well now figure as an ecocritical resource in the construction of a more
mediated and greener conception of modernisation. Such a conception would retain
the commitment to social and sexual emancipation associated with metropolitan
modernity while at the same time reconstituting – and re-working in a distinctively
secular yet post-consumerist mode – something of the earlier romantic spirit of sober
consumption and prioritisation of spiritual over material gratification that has been
associated with pre-modernity and the value system of more traditional societies such
as Ireland (cf. Soper 2013). At the very least, there is considerable potential for recent
Irish literature to contribute to a revised frame of thinking about relations between
old and new, indigenous to imported culture. The critic Emer Nolan has claimed that
Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates a mode in which “the archaic and the avant-garde may
enter into explosively creative conjunction” and presents it as a book in which “the
notion of the emancipatory power of the modern is interrogated, indeed put under
considerable pressure, rather than one in which the modern is uncritically ratified”
(Nolan 2005, 165). Declan Kiberd (2009, 24) has argued comparably in his reclamation
of Ulysses as a guide on how to live. John McGahern is another writer to mention in
170 Kate Soper
this context. Comparably to that of Hardy, though in its own, quite distinctive and
more contemporary mode, McGahern’s fiction is richly dialectical in its treatment of
the rural-urban and past-present divides (cf. Ryle 2009b). We might note, too, in this
context the resistance of Beckett’s characters to the capitalist norms of consumption
and the imperative to consume (cf. Barry 2006). An engagement with ecological crisis
is perhaps sounded most explicitly in the more recent work of the Belfast born poet,
Derek Mahon (2008, 2009), influenced as it has been by Gaian thinking. But his earlier
work is also very arresting in its defamiliarisation of everyday consumption, its reflec-
tions on the legacies of material culture, and its elegiac commentary on progress and
development. I might note here, in particular, such poems as “A Garage in Co. Cork,”
“Ford Manor,” “Courtyards in Delft,” “Consolations of Philosophy” (Mahon 1990, 42,
74, 120, 152) but will here cite only a simpler and shorter example from his poem,
“Rock Music” – which counterpoints the clamorous demands of the discoteque and
its ‘farting’ Hondas (and their proof of the poet’s own cultural redundancy) with the
redemptive sounds of a more naturally orchestrated rock music:
The ocean glittered quietly in the moonlight

While heavy metal rocked the discoteques;
Space-age Hondas farted half the night,
Fired by the prospect of fortuitous sex.
I sat late at the window, blind with rage,
And listened to the tumult down below,
Trying to concentrate on the printed page,
As if such obsolete bumph could save us now.
Next morning, wandering on the strand, I heard

Left-over echoes of the night before
Dwindle to echoes, and a single bird
Drown with whistle that residual roar.
Rock music started up on every side –
Whisper of algae, click of stone on stone,
A thousand limpets left by the ebb-tide
Unanimous in their silent inquisition. (Mahon 1990, 100)
And finally in this connection, let me say a word on the potential contribution of
some recent fiction from elsewhere that has exposed the more nightmarish aspects
of modern consumer culture and even, in some cases, signalled the more reward-
ing libidinal experience that could be enjoyed in a post-consumerist society. Michel
Houellebecq’s Atomised and Platform, for example, are novels about techno-cultural
sex and metropolitan sex-tourism that are all the more unsettling because their narra-
tives are so co-optively one-dimensional – as uncritical of the quasi-pornographic and
narcissistic pleasures they relate as consumer culture is more generally of its shop-
ping-mall enticements. The critical knife is surely inserted here, but only by making
the reader all too uncomfortably aware of the power of dominant culture to subvert
critique. Martin Ryle’s recent reading of Houellebecq’s fiction and Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake as contemporary engagements with a Brave New World dystopia are
very instructive in this respect (cf. Ryle 2010). Even more relevant to an ‘alternative
hedonist’ ecocriticism is his commentary on Ali Smith’s The Accidental, a novel which
charts the ecologically sensitive intervention and erotic impact of the mythico-mag-
ical Amber on a stylish middle-class family (cf. Ryle 2010; 2008). Describing it as a
neo-pastoral intervention in current culture and politics, Ryle (2010, x) argues that
it represents how we both “know and deny that we are facing an ecological crisis of
perhaps disastrous proportions.” It is a novel that indicts the complacent retrospec-
tions – ‘the simple backwards look’ – in other contemporary fictions that focus on
earlier moments of history, notably the current obsession with World War II, but avoid
any engagement with the role of the oil economy and consumerism in creating our
current crises and our new wars. But in contrast to the dystopian fictions of Atwood
and Houellebecq, this is a novel that also gestures towards salvation by summoning
the more erotic and sensual pleasures that a greener life could provide. Even as it dis-
penses with any straightforward pastoral lament for the past, it distances itself from
any postmodernist celebration of cyborgism and our mobile and internet dominated
ways of relating to the world.
To conclude: a cultural revolution in our thinking about consumption and the
‘good life’ is now widely accepted as a condition of warding off the worst conse-
quences of global warming regardless of any other attractions it may have. But it
takes a different kind of imagination, and shift of moral and aesthetic focus, to see
that even were it ecologically possible to sustain consumerism forever, and to extend
the shopping-mall culture to all parts of the planet (and maybe beyond), that would
be not a relief but a curse, a blight rather than a blessing. Literary texts (and critical
readings of them) that can offer this form of dialectical insight into the displeasures
of the consumer lifestyle and its possible transcendence can help to keep alive that
needed imagination.
6 B
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Catrin Gersdorf
9 P
olitical Ecology: Nature, Democracy, and
American Literary Culture
Abstract: In the Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour (2004, 2) provides a general defini-
tion of “political ecology” as the effort “to make place for nature within public life.”
Inspired by Latour, this chapter will ask: How and to what effect did American writers
make place for nature in their literary work? It will focus on three writers – Henry
David Thoreau, Nathanael West, and Toni Morrison – who represent three decisive
moments in the history of the United States: the antebellum era of the so-called
American Renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century; the Depression era of the
1930s; and the postmodern 1980s, a decade marked by an increased interest among
American writers and intellectuals in deconstructing the master narrative of their
nation’s history. All three authors, to one degree or another, investigate questions of
democracy, its promise of universal liberty and equality as well as its cultural, social,
and institutional practices. And they all imagine the political state of US culture and
society through images of the natural, thus underlining the strong conceptual links
between nature and democracy at the heart of America’s political ecology.
Key Terms: Political ecology, democracy, walking, swamp, pastoralism, urban grid,
Bruno Latour, Henry David Thoreau, Toni Morrison, Nathanael West
Indeed, no culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its political life.
(Latour 2004, 232)
In the introductory chapter to Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour (2004, 2) provides a

general definition of “political ecology” as the effort “to make place for nature within
public life.” As such, political ecology is both a political movement inspired by the
environmental crises of the twentieth century and a political ideology, or system of
ideas and concepts, that represents the dynamic relationship between nature and
modern culture. Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century – the French original of
Politics of Nature was published in 1999, its English translation in 2004 – Latour is no
longer willing to tolerate accusations against political ecology as being “an outmoded
question, dead and buried, incapable of producing thought, unable to provide a new
foundation for morality, epistemology, and democracy” (3). But rather than chastis-
ing the critics of political ecology for their refusal to recognize the rights of nature, he
takes them seriously and launches a philosophical tour de force in which he revisits
political ecology’s conceptual propositions, analyzes the implications of their semi-
otic history, and eventually calls for “the abandonment of nature” (2004, 6) as the
organizational center of modern political life. Nature, “that blend of Greek politics,
French Cartesianism, and American parks” (5), needs to be replaced with a concept
9 Political Ecology: Nature, Democracy, and American Literary Culture 175
that takes into account the plurality of actors – human and non-human, modern and
non-modern, Western and non-Western – involved in “the progressive composition of
a common world” (47). While he refuses to give a singular name to such a concept,
offering ‘pluriverse,’ ‘common world,’ and ‘collective’ as context-dependent alterna-
tives to ‘nature,’ Latour is willing to take his time and ask: “What do nature, science,
and politics have to do with one another?” (6). In other words, how does a complex
sign that references the democratic discourse of natural rights (“Greek politics”), the
epistemological discourse of disembodied rationalism (“French Cartesianism”), and
the cultural discourse of wilderness preservation (“American parks”), influence the
way we know and organize the material reality that sustains human existence?
Inspired by Latour’s project of conceptual revision, this chapter will raise a
similar question: What do nature, American literature, and democracy have to do
with one another? More specifically, I will discuss three American writers – Henry
David Thoreau, Nathanael West, and Toni Morrison – who represent three decisive
moments in the history of the United States, a nation that likes to imagine itself as the
political and cultural property of nature (↗17 Ecology and Life Writing). The three his-
torical moments are: 1) the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century, an
era that was equally marked by a cultural call for an independent American literature
and the political call for the abolition of slavery; 2) the two decades at the beginning
of the twentieth century that followed the end of World War I in 1918 and the stock
market crash in 1929, a period that was torn between the cultural frenzy of post-war
consumerism and technological innovation during the 1920s and the experience of
economic depression and social desolation in the 1930s; 3) the postmodern 1980s
and 1990s, the decades that witnessed the resurgence of political conservatism after
a period of cultural and social libertarianism during the counter-cultural 1960s and
1970s, but also extensive revisions of the propositions and assumptions of American
exceptionalism, of the master narrative of American history as the realization of the
utopian promise of social and political equality, and of the American literary canon.
During these periods of cultural, social, and political transition the three Amer-
ican writers under investigation in this chapter produced texts that respond to and
interpret the state of America’s democratic promise of granting equality and liberty to
all its citizens. In a recent essay that “defends the politicality of American literature”
(Shulman 2014, 551), literary scholar George Shulman claims: “there is no politics,
and surely no radical politics, without ‘imagined community,’ collective identifica-
tions, visions of possibility” (550). Fantasy, in other words, is not a marker of politi-
cal disinterest. Therefore, if “some works of American literature, since Hawthorne’s
‘Young Goodman Brown’ or Melville’s Moby Dick, abjure a realistic aesthetic,” it is
“precisely to show, we may say enact, the central genres and fantasies constituting
(American) political life, and to dramatize their staggering human cost” (550). This
idea, that literature dramatizes the history and future of American democracy, and its
promise of universal liberty and equality, provides an excellent frame for my readings
of Thoreau, West, and Morrison.
176 Catrin Gersdorf
1 H
enry David Thoreau, or, The Political Ecology of
Representative Speech
“I wish to speak a word for Nature” – these are the famous first words of Thoreau’s
(2002 [1862]) essay on “Walking.” They constitute a declaration of the narrator’s
self-identification as a political subject. For it is the “I” speaking for an Other that
constitutes the core of a representative democracy; and it is the rhetoric of self-inau-
guration as a democratic spokesperson which, aside from giving this clause a Whit-
manesque ring, enacts the “I” as a self-determined individual. While the desire of
“speaking for Nature” reveals the democratic individual’s political aspirations, his
fantasy of being a politician, the wish of “speaking for Nature” exposes the epistemo-
logical confidence of the scientist who, according to Latour (see 2004, 64), does not
discuss but demonstrates indisputable facts.1 Or rather, the scientist acts as nature’s
ventriloquist, simply voicing the facts that otherwise remain silent. But, as Latour
advises his readers, learn “to Be Circumspect with Spokesperson” (62):
Never, since the Greeks’ earliest discussions on the excellence of public life, have people spoken
about politics without speaking of nature, or rather, never has anyone appealed to nature except
to teach a political lesson. Not a single line has been written – at least in the Western tradition –
in which the terms “nature,” “natural order,” “natural law,” “natural right,” “inflexible causal-
ity,” or “imprescriptible laws,” have not been followed, a few lines, paragraphs, or pages later,
by an affirmation concerning the way to reform public life. (Latour 2004, 28)
Whether Latour’s hyperbolic tone is pure rhetoric or not, at the vanishing point of his
thought, Thoreau appears as a political ecologist par excellence. In the lines and par-
agraphs beyond the inaugural clause, “Walking,” indeed, becomes a call for political
and cultural reform.
For Thoreau, Nature is both metaphor and physical reality. “I wish to speak a
word for Nature,” he writes,
for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, – to
regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I make an emphatic one, for there are enough champi-
ons of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of
that. (Thoreau 2002, 149)
With this paragraph Thoreau delineates the literary and philosophical parameters
of his essay. The rhetorical foundation for his argument is hyperbole. Readers will
be confronted with an “extreme statement,” i.e., they will enter a communicative
1 For a comprehensive discussion of Thoreau’s involvement with science, see Laura Dassow Walls’
(1995) Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science.
space in which meaning is produced by contrast and exaggeration.2 And they will
have to accept, at least for the duration of the essay, that when Thoreau uses Nature
in the upper case, the word’s referents are the ideas of “absolute freedom and wild-
ness.” In the course of Thoreau’s essay, and perhaps even more so in the context of
his other writings, many of which are reports of hikes in the forests and mountains
and along the rivers and coasts of New England, it becomes clear, however, that the
metaphoric productivity of uppercase Nature, its poetic and philosophical persua-
siveness as a sign of democratic constitutionality, depends on its homological rela-
tionship with lowercase nature. Employing Nature in metaphoric rather than mimetic
terms, Thoreau also prepares the ground for deploying Walking in the upper case,
as the dynamic “art” (Thoreau 2002, 149) of cultural and political criticism, and the
Walker as the practitioner of that art. Again, the practical feasibility of walking, its
commonsense meaning as a form of individual self-movement that is not dependent
on machines or animals, is an important rhetorical hinge between the text and the
reader; but it only constitutes part of the semiology of walking in Thoreau’s thought.
In analogy to Nature, Thoreau’s metaphor for the state of “absolute freedom and wild-
ness,” Walking (which is not capitalized as consequently in the essay as Nature) is
deployed as the metaphor for the dynamic process of remembering, or of temporarily
returning to that state in order to measure the progress of translating the natural rights
of freedom and equality into the political and social practice of civil government.
In the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke (2003, 102) argued that those
rights ought to be the foundation of exercising political power and that the responsible
exercise of that power involves the prevention of “harm” to the “life, health, liberty, or
possessions” of men. The gauge of good government is the extent to which the “state
of nature” – which Locke (101) defined as the “state of perfect freedom” and “[a] state
also of equality” – functions as a model for formulating the political principles which
its institutions are built to serve. Locke’s “state of perfect freedom” is very similar to
what Thoreau called “absolute freedom” – an ideal state of social independence and
economic self-determination. In “Walking,” Thoreau registers the growing distance
between that ideal state and the actual state of social, economic, and political affairs
in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. His essay addresses two
specific areas of American life in that era. Thoreau’s (2002, 151) major concern is “the
moral insensibility” of his New England neighbors “who confine themselves to shops
2 In his essay on “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” Thoreau (1906 [1847], 353) described exaggeration
as a habitual mode of life and its most poetic expression: “We live by exaggeration. What else is it to
anticipate more than we enjoy? The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is
poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration. He who
cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth. No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this
sort of emphasis, so that for the time there seemed to be no other”. As I will show later, Thoreau’s
reception of Carlyle is key to understanding his conceptualization of walking as a form of cultural
critique. See also Bennett (1994, 73) on hyperbole in Thoreau.
178 Catrin Gersdorf
and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years.” Of seemingly less
concern for the author of “Walking,” yet emerging as one of the essay’s most salient
subtexts, is the decade’s most controversial topic – slavery.
While Thoreau is candid about his disapproval of his neighbors’ self-confinement
to sedentary lives of practical and bureaucratic labor, he is vague about what exactly
he means by their “moral insensibility”: Are all lives devoted to generating profit
prone to be morally insensible? Does “moral insensibility” refer to his neighbors’ lack
of curiosity about things outside their “shops and offices”? Or is it something else
entirely? Inarguably though, the “mechanics and shopkeepers,” who “stay in their
shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs,
so many of them – as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk
upon” (Thoreau 2002, 151), are the pathetic protagonists on the stage of mid-nine-
teenth-century American social and economic life to which Thoreau’s Walker is intro-
duced as the dynamic antagonist. The poetic and philosophical power of this figure
is invested in its hyperbolic conception as the embodiment of the Lockean idea of
perfect freedom. “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister,
and wife and children and friends, and never see them again,” Thoreau (150) writes at
the essay’s beginning, “if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled
all you affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” Although Thoreau
insists on the Walker’s self-liberation from all personal obligations and responsibili-
ties and on his position as social outsider, he still imagines him as a figure who fulfills
an important public function. He “take[s] pleasure in fancying” genuine Walkers as
“knights of a new, or rather an old order, […] not the Knight, but Walker, Errant” (150).
The “chivalric and heroic spirit” of the Knight Errant “seems now to reside in, or per-
chance to have subsided into, the Walker” (150) who, Thoreau declares, “is a sort of
fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People” (150).
The choice of the term “fourth estate” is not insignificant because it marks the
Walker as an unofficial yet indispensable force in a democracy. Thoreau knew the
term by dint of his familiarity with the work of the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle,
whom he admired and considered a literary genius.3 In a collection of lectures, On
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, published in 1840, Carlyle (1840, 152)
called the writers sitting in “the Reporters’ Gallery” of the British parliament “a Fourth
Estate” and identified that group as far more important than the three traditional
estates of the Clergy, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons which, in Thoreau’s text,
appear as Church, State, and People. Carlyle (152) argued that after the invention of
printing and bookmaking, participation in political discourses and debates about the
“affairs of the nation” had ceased to be the privilege of a few men representing the
three estates of society. And neither was it confined to the public space of parlia-
ment. Anyone capable of mastering the arts of rhetoric and writing could become
3 See Thoreau 1906.

an agent in the project of building a democracy. “Literature is our Parliament too,”

Carlyle observed (152), adding that ownership of “a tongue which others will listen
to,” not “rank” nor “revenues” or “garnitures,” is the prerequisite for active partici-
pation in a nation’s democratic government. Speaking one’s mind and having those
thoughts printed creates “bits of paper with traces of black ink” known as books and
newspapers. For Carlyle (153), they are the most democratic “vesture of Thought,”
and, as such, significant cultural and political forces. Carlyle conceived of the fourth
estate as a discursive force located in the intermediate space between the inside and
the outside of the parliamentary arena, one which, in fact, mediates between the two
publics of representational and popular democracy. While the fourth estate operates
outside the spaces occupied by the other three estates, it is not totally detached from
them. Representing diverse and diverging economic, social, and ethical interests,
the three estates interact in a political system that was created to check and balance
those interests. The fourth estate is best understood as the force that observes the
system itself, critically responding to any signs that indicate the pending erosion of
the political, ethical, or philosophical ideals and principles on which the nation was
built. By calling him “a sort of fourth estate” Thoreau confers on the Walker the same
symbolic power and political responsibilities bestowed on the writer-reporter, or Man
of Letters.
The ideal, or principle, under examination in “Walking” is freedom. From Tho-
reau’s perspective, its validity as the nation’s ethical foundation was increasingly
undermined by the tendency of his fellow citizens to “confine themselves to shops
and offices” in an increasingly industrialized North, as well as by their unwillingness
to resist the perpetuation of chattel slavery in the plantation South. In the opening
paragraph he drafted for the original 1851 lecture, Thoreau apologized “for speaking
to them tonight on any other subject than the Fugitive Slave Law” (qtd. in Thoreau
2002, 148), thereby indicating that he expected his audience to at least inquire about
the topic. The printed version ignores that possibility entirely, not mentioning the law
at all– at least not at the very beginning of the essay and not in any obvious ways. But
Thoreau only appears to shun the issue of slavery, alluding to it later in his text in a
section that addresses the issue of property rights.
In “Life Without Principle,” an essay published during the period he also worked
on “Walking”, Thoreau criticizes his fellow Americans for replacing freedom with
property rights and economic profitability as the principles that define their own and
their nation’s political conduct. Walking becomes the master trope for articulating the
need to resist this development:
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a
loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth
bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no
interest in its forests but to cut them down! (Thoreau 2002 [1854], 198)
180 Catrin Gersdorf
The nondestructive, noncommercial interest he alludes to in this passage is identi-

fied in “Walking” as an interest in forests and other natural landscapes as spaces for
“intellectual and moral growth” (2002, 152). Following Emerson’s (2000, 15) philoso-
phy of “radical correspondence,” Thoreau trusts
that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal,
as our sky, – our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains – our intellect
generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightening, our rivers and mountains and
forests, – and our hearts shall correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas.
(Thoreau 2002, 161)
The description of these wide and open spaces – “the land [that] is not private prop-
erty” (157) – contrasts sharply with allusions to the limited spaces of shops, offices,
and other “improvements, so called,” which “simply deform the landscape, and
make it more and more tame and cheap” (153). Images of domestication abound in
“Walking.” They refer to a state of affairs that often elicits the author’s “disposition
to be satirical” (163). “Our winged thoughts,” he writes, “are turned to poultry. They
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur” (175).
Contemporary audiences readily understood the allusion to the mid nineteenth-cen-
tury craze about a breed of chicken known for profuse plumage that exaggerated by
far the actual size of the animal’s body.
It would be wrong, however, to assume that the polarity between the ridiculous
grandeur of the domestic and the sublime grandeur of wildness is an absolute in Tho-
reau’s thinking. As Jane Bennett (1994, 18) convincingly argued, “Domesticity, dwell-
ing with the They [by which she means all persons, institutions, and organizations
that form the social environment of an I, CG], is necessary, and Thoreau aims not
to eradicate it but to avoid an existence wholly dominated by it.” He offers walking,
the economically disinterested activity of the “loafer” sauntering through landscapes
unrestricted by someone else’s property rights, as an antidote to excessive domesti-
cation. Alternatively, reading about the walker’s encounters with the wild may have a
similar effect, at least on the thoughts and ideas of readers if not on their social and
cultural habits. But “where,” Thoreau (2002, 167) asks, “is the literature which gives
expression to Nature?” Where, in other words, is the literature that gives expression
to the values of “absolute freedom and wildness”? In lieu of “any poetry to quote
which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild” (167), Thoreau offers his own.
But the wildness he champions is not the kind born in the impenetrable, dangerous,
unknown wilderness ‘out there.’ Thoreau’s wilderness, and the wildness it gener-
ates, bears no similarity to the reality environmental historian William Cronon (1996,
71) described as “the antithesis of all that was orderly and good.” Rather, Thoreau
(2002, 168) envisions wildness itself as an embodiment of goodness. For him, “all
good things are wild and free.” Ontologically, goodness appears in the kind of resid-
ual rebelliousness Thoreau observed in his “neighbor’s cow” who “breaks out of her
pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five
or thirty rods wide, swollen with melted snow” (168). Thoreau sees in such an act
“the buffalo crossing the Mississippi” (168) and poetic evidence for his conviction
that total submissiveness to the realm of the domestic is an illusion.
If the Walker, who breaks out of shops and offices and strides across the pasture
into the woods and mountains, resembles the neighbor’s rebellious cow, the cock
crowing in the barn-yard early in the morning becomes Thoreau’s (2002, 176) poetic
image for the sound that “commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and
antique in our employments and habits of thought.” It not only contradicts Thoreau’s
earlier use of poultry as a symbol of pretentiousness but completely revises its sym-
bolic function. Toward the end of “Walking,” the cock’s crow is represented as “an
expression of the health and soundness of Nature” (176). Perhaps playing with the
emblematic character of the cock as a symbol of (French) republicanism,4 Thoreau
maintains: “Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed” (176). While Thoreau
may have thwarted their thematic expectations at the beginning of the essay, at its
end he seems eager to make sure his readers understand that the natural, or unalien-
able right to freedom is endangered by the nation’s fixation on property rights, and
that the defense of freedom involves both, a critique of commercialism and of slavery.
Thoreau began his essay by announcing it to be “an extreme statement;” he ends it
by facetiously re-presenting it as a version of the cock’s crow, a wake-up call for his
readers, reminding them of the ethical and political principles on which their nation
was built.
However, Thoreau’s advocacy for freedom needs to be read cum grano salis.
While the Walker emerges from the text as the advocate of freedom, his advocacy also
includes the freedom of territorial conquest and imperial expansion. More specifi-
cally, it involves the naturalization of westward expansion. “I must walk to Oregon,”
Thoreau (2002, 158) writes, “and not toward Europe,” adding that “mankind” in
general “progress[es] from east to west.” Identifying progress as a mode of migration,
he then casts it in biologically deterministic terms. Thoreau is convinced that “some-
thing like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring […] affects both
nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time” (158–159). While
the analogy deconstructs the established conceptual hierarchy between animals and
humans, and reminds his readers that they are “part and parcel of Nature,” it also
obfuscates, in the name of Nature, the political power of empire as a major driving
force in American history. Offering “the West” as “but another name for the Wild”
(162), the Wild as the force that secures political and cultural power, and walking as
4 The cock became a heraldic element in the Great Seal of the French Republic in 1848, where Liberty
is supported by a ship’s tiller decorated with a cock. After post-modernism, and under the influence of
psychoanalytic, feminist, and gender criticism, it is very hard to suppress one’s disposition to offer a
satirical remark on Thoreau’s choice of the cock as the heraldic animal of absolute freedom. May this
footnote serve as the record of that impulse rather than the site of its realization.
182 Catrin Gersdorf
the most effective form of self-edification and self-empowerment, Thoreau removes

the figure of the Walker from the rhetorical context of resistance against any form
of enslavement and recasts it as an affirmative agent in the historical narrative of
American exceptionalism. What begins as a critique of excessive domestication and
slavery develops into an advocacy of imperial expansion, thus burdening the eco-
critical potential of “Walking” and its call for political reform with heavy ideological
baggage.
In “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature,”
the essay that introduced the moniker “Nature’s nation” to students of American liter-
ature and culture, Perry Miller (1967, 199) characterized the nineteenth-century habit
of identifying “the unique personality of this republic with the virtues of pristine and
untarnished […] Nature” as the result of massive cultural anxieties. The utilitarian
reality of imperial expansion generated apprehensions about the nation being per-
ceived as, or even losing itself in “crass, materialistic” (201) pursuits, a danger that
Thoreau addressed in his work and that needed to be thwarted by artistic and literary
celebrations of “the mountains, the lakes, the forests” (201) as sources of spiritual
salvation. As Miller observed: “The most utilitarian conquest known to history had
somehow to be viewed not as inspired by the calculus of rising land values and invest-
ments but (despite the orgies of speculation) as an immense exertion of the spirit”
(201). The critical impetus of “Walking” as a discourse against materialism notwith-
standing, Thoreau did not escape this “Romantic dilemma” either, imagining the
West not as a cultural landscape created by a multiplicity of indigenous and colonial
histories but as the last abode of wildness, a condition that warrants the continued
regeneration of the democratic subject.
2 N
athanael West, or, Rearticulating the Political
Ecology of the Thoreauvian Swamp
Born in 1903, West died tragically in a car accident at the age of 37, leaving behind a
small literary œuvre of four novels, a few short stories and two plays. Yet two of his
novels, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), exemplify a decisive
shift in the political ecology of American literature. Miss Lonelyhearts, West’s second
novel, recounts the moral struggle and ultimate failure of its eponymous anti-hero, an
advice-columnist, who gives solace to his brokenhearted and ill-fated readers. Written
in the form of a comic strip, with individual chapters organized like pictorial frames
and a narrative style reminiscent of the linguistic staccato of the speech bubble rather
than the poetic exuberance of the Romantic age, Miss Lonelyhearts can also be read
as a critical comment on the tradition of American Romanticism. In two consecutive
chapters – “Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp” and “Miss Lonelyhearts in the
Country”– West explores the cultural and literary validity of transcendentalism’s
therapeutic program of individual self-empowerment and resistance to the confining

laws of civilization and history through spiritual and physical retreat into wild nature.
The two concepts West examines in these chapters – the dismal swamp and pastoral-
ism – are rather prominent tropes in Thoreau’s political ecology.
“Hope and the future for me are not in the lawns and cultivated fields, not in
towns and cities,” Thoreau (2002, 164) wrote in “Walking,” “but in the impervious
and quaking swamps.” And a little further down he adds: “I derive more of my sub-
sistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated
gardens in the village” (164). While the idea of deriving subsistence (presumably
spiritual) from a watery, uncultivated landscape is hardly surprising, the syntactical
pairing of “swamp” and “town” in opposition to “the cultivated gardens” and “the
village” may be somewhat unexpected. Dismissing the pastoral scene of cultivated
village gardens, Thoreau’s narrative alter ego, native to an urban settlement that is
the distant organizational relative to the Greek polis, rejects the political ecology of
Jeffersonianism, preferring instead the polarity between town and swamp, civiliza-
tion and wilderness as the ground sustaining the modern American citizen. Thoreau
underscores this line of thought by repeatedly juxtaposing in the next few paragraphs
the hybrid space of “the cultivated gardens in the village” to “the darkest wood, the
thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp” (165), a
place that becomes the “sanctum sanctorum” (165) for the individual man in need of
regeneration. The passage in “Walking” in which the author explores the re-creative
potential of “the dismal swamp” through a rhetorical performance of entering this
counter-cultural territory culminates in the pronouncement that “[a] town is saved,
not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”
It is, he concludes, “fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philoso-
phers for the coming ages” (165).5
The political fantasy of spatial bifurcation, or, as Latour would have it, spatial
bicameralism6, not only guarantees the spiritual and psychological sustenance of the
self-determined individual. In an echo of Emerson’s (2000, 3) advocacy for develop-
ing “an original relation” between the American poet and “the universe,” Thoreau’s
swamp becomes the ecological prerequisite for what Whitman, in Democratic Vistas,
5 Interestingly, in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary, the Dismal Swamp was not only a par-
ticular landscape at the state border between Virginia and North Carolina. It also played an important
role in the history of American slavery, providing a refuge for fugitive slaves and the communities they
created. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (2006 [1856]) novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp narrates
an important part of that history. Read through the lens of the history of slavery, the “dismal swamp”
becomes code for the space of liberty.
6 Latour adopts “bicameralism” from political science, which describes it as a system of representa-
tion with two houses, e.g. the House of Representatives and Senate. However, he recasts its mean-
ing “to describe the distribution of powers between nature (conceived, therefore, as a representative
power) and politics” (2004, 238).
184 Catrin Gersdorf
would describe as the “vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures” that are capable of
expressing “democracy and the modern” (Whitman 1982, 931). In the middle decades
of the nineteenth century, the conceptual and rhetorical anchoring of culture in
nature was a radical act, rivaling the concept of culture as being defined by history,
books, and “this tape-worm of Europe” that Emerson (2000, 649) wanted to “extract
[…] from the brain of our countrymen.”
By the 1930s, the time Nathanael West entered the scene of American literary
history, such pronouncements sounded rather nostalgic. Yet West calls up this tra-
dition, albeit with a parodic difference. That is, he recontextualizes the Thoreauvian
tropes of dismal swamp, pastoralism, and wild nature in order to examine their valid-
ity as elements in a literary critique of modernity. The dismal swamp of West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts is comparable to Thoreau’s celebrated wetland only insofar as they are
both spaces marked by ‘wild’ disorder and chaos. Yet while Thoreau’s autobiograph-
ical narrator rejoices in the symbolic power of the swamp, West’s (1962 [1933], 31)
third-person narrator registers the anti-hero’s increasing unease and discomfort with
“[t]he physical world” and its “tropism for disorder, entropy.” No longer able to view
his job as an advice columnist as a joke (32), Miss Lonelyhearts becomes physically
sick. His lover Betty’s suggestion that “all his troubles were city troubles” that can be
cured in the country, where “everything” is “fresh and clean” (32), appeals to Miss
Lonelyhearts, and when they first arrive at the Connecticut farm owned by Betty’s
aunt, he “had to admit, even to himself, that the pale new leaves, shaped and colored
like candle flames, were beautiful and that the air smelt clean and alive” (36). Yet
life on a farm by a pond soon loses its paradisiacal charm (when they first arrive,
they swim naked and eat apples), and the summer heat starts causing “nothing but
death – rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funereal hush”
(38). Returning to the city, “Miss Lonelyhearts knew that Betty had failed to cure him”
(38).
In the narrative space of these two chapters, West not only narrates Miss Lone-
lyhearts’ lack of success in regenerating his tattered self out in the country; he also
comments on the transcendentalist program’s demise. By the early twentieth century
it has become clear that nature no longer holds the same cultural and symbolic power
it did for Emerson, Thoreau, and their kindred Romantic spirits. West’s 1933 novel
still alludes to nature as a form of Romantic escape from the social constraints and
psychological demands of civilization (the South Seas, hedonism, art, and drugs are
the other forms mockingly enumerated by Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts’ boss and adver-
sary), but only to question its restorative value. For like the city park that Miss Lone-
lyhearts crosses regularly, the Connecticut farm and the pond are merely symbols of
the disciplinary power of human culture over nature.
Six years later, in The Day of the Locust, his last novel, West further elaborates on
this theme. Though not the major focus, the narrative refers to wild nature, or rather
its absence from the place that is quintessentially associated with the production of
dreams and imaginary identities – Hollywood. The Day of the Locust is told from the
perspective of Tod Hackett, a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts who works in
Hollywood as a set and costume designer and who is a close observer of this particular
environment. In this space, natura naturata exists, though barely, in “the remains of a
cactus garden in which a few ragged, tortured plants still survived” (West 1962 [1939],
89). More often, it is a simulation or imitation of the ‘real thing’ and appears as “a
lawn of fiber,” “a cellophane waterfall,” and “cardboard food” (131), or as the sculp-
ture of a dead horse placed at the bottom of the swimming pool of Claude Estee, a
movie industry mogul. And even ‘real’ topography, embodied by the hills just outside
the city limits, whose contours are traced by the light of the falling night, appear to
be lit by the “violet” hues of “a Neon tube” (61). From Tod Hackett’s perspective – the
perspective of a world completely devoted to the creation of dreams and illusions –
even the wild space beyond the city can no longer be perceived (or experienced) as
culturally innocent, untouched. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, Hackett realizes
that he is no longer able to paint in the style of such English and American Romantic
artists as Thomas Ryder (1746–1810) and Winslow Homer (1836–1910); that a collective
portrait of “the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, [of] the wave, air-
plane, funeral and preview watchers” (184) flocking into California to spice up their
bored lives before they die would be far more representative of modern life than “a fat
red barn, old stone wall or Nantucket fisherman” (60). The pastoral image is still con-
jured up in West’s narrative, but only to announce its representational futility. Holly-
wood, in other words, symbolizes the end of a tradition in which the quintessence of
the American experience was historically and culturally rooted in New England and
aesthetically molded by the Romantic age.
Tod Hackett’s transposition from Yale and New England to Hollywood and Cali-
fornia, from the pastoral scenes of Nantucket to the plastic nature of Hollywood rep-
resents Nathanael West’s final commentary on the aesthetic utility of the Romantic
past. Through Miss Lonelyhearts and Tod Hackett (characters who are, in one way
or another, concerned with artistic responses to the world around them) West artic-
ulates two related problems: 1) In a society that relies on such popular discourses as
that of the movies for articulations of social and ethical meanings, and that controls,
regulates and marginalizes nature to a degree never before experienced, the natural
can no longer successfully function as the anarchic location of cultural regeneration
and political renewal. 2) The Emersonian tradition (or ideology) of “aesthetic dissent”
(Rowe 1997, 1)7, rooted in the language and rhetoric of nature and functioning as cul-
tural therapy, becomes ineffective in light of the phenomenal lack of ‘wild nature’
in modern life. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, West cannot turn to (metaphorical)
swamps and other wild spaces as psycho-culturally productive alternatives to history.
7 Rowe (1997, 1) defines “aesthetic dissent” as “the romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflec-
tion on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and
effects a transformation of the naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention.”
186 Catrin Gersdorf
Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the tragicomic representation of this impossibil-

ity in Miss Lonelyhearts, as well as the pervasive presence of exhausted and artificial
nature in The Day of the Locust can each be read as an ecocritical comment on modern
life. For neither the popular press nor Hollywood produce narratives or images that
are comparable in their imaginative power and re-creative force to the configurations
of nature in transcendentalist writing.8 Miss Lonelyhearts ends with the death of its
anti-hero, the result of an unfortunate incident of miscommunication; and at the end
of The Day of the Locust, Tod Hackett epigrammatically envisions the fall of modern
American civilization as “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a painting whose apocalyptic
imagery ends the narrative, though not Tod Hackett’s life.
West’s novels can be read as literary comments on modern culture’s precarious
detachment from its non-human environment. For the modern subject, the retreat
into swamps and pastoral landscapes, whether real or imagined, is but a nostalgic
project, one that no longer holds the promise of renewal and regeneration.
3 T
oni Morrison, or, The New Political Ecology of the
Urban Grid
Although the gridiron design is by no means a modern American invention, it is the
most conspicuous form of spatial organization in the United States. Representing
the principles of efficiency, rationality, and calculability, the grid also articulates the
desire to gain power over nature.9 Thomas Jefferson, who favored a gridiron pattern
for organizing the lands of the Western Territory and as an instrument for preserving
8 It is interesting to note that in a different context West exhibits a more favorable approach to pas-
toralism. If we believe his biographer Jay Martin, one of his film scripts contrasts rural with urban
life – to the disadvantage of the latter. Return to the Soil is a fantasy of a nutritionally as well as eco-
nomically independent farm life that produces culinary delights by far surpassing that “slimy stuff
from cans” (qtd. in Martin 1970, 207). With this script, West caters to a dream that he deconstructs in
his novel. What seems to be a personal paradox is, indeed, a manifestation of a functional divide: as
a screenwriter, West saw himself working in a genre whose major function was to entertain and to
provide its audience with a temporary escape from the treadmill of their daily lives; as a novelist, he
worked in a genre that he understood as a medium of cultural criticism.
9 In his essay on “The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning,” Jack H. Williamson (1986) links the modern
conception of the grid to Descartes, who defined it in purely geometrical terms as a composite of axes
and coordinates on a plane in space. Williamson (1986, 20) observes that “with Descartes’s stress on
abstraction, the grid’s association with the world of outer appearance loosens. As the rules elaborated
in the Discourse made clear, appearances are suspect, and a problem (or, in visual terms, a field) is
to be divided into its smallest component parts. This geometric, reductive operation is, of course, a
mental process. The grid thus comes to represent not only the structural laws and principles behind
physical appearance, but the process of rational thinking itself.” The grid’s inherent value as a code
the democratic vigor of the Republic, had very clear ideas for the spatial organiza-
tion of the nation’s seat of government. His “Opinion on Capital” (Jefferson 1904/1905
[1790]), a text that details his notions for the production of the Republic’s most rep-
resentative urban space, documents Jefferson’s resolve to apply rational principles
to the building of American cities: “For the President’s house, offices and gardens,
I should think two squares should be consolidated. For the Capitol and offices, one
square. For the market, one square. For the public walks, nine squares consolidated”
(Jefferson 1904–1905). In Measuring America Andro Linklater (2002, 111) observed
that, for Jefferson, “the simplicity of the square […] made it democratic.” And in Place
and Belonging in America, David Jacobson (2002, 95) describes the application of the
rectangular grid in the production of American space as motivated by the assump-
tion that the “rationalization of the landscape created reasoned and rational citizens,
in contrast to the wild and untamed woods and its wild and untamed progeny.” As
we have seen above, the Romantic response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment
involved a reversal in the attribution of democratic potential – from the organized
space of the polis to the unruly space of swamps and dark forests.
In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) the town is a place of social control, con-
trasted with the forest as the location of the (female) body’s liberation from the moral
and religious constraints of the Puritan community. The poetic power of his language
and the lyrical energy radiating from his fiction find their main source in the symbol-
ism of natural environments. When representing urban space, Hawthorne’s language
does not lose its poetic intensity, but it underwrites the author’s quintessential aver-
sion against the city, which, in “The Gray Champion” (1837), he described as a “paved
solitude” and the home of “despotic rulers […], all magnificently clad, flushed with
wine, proud of unjust authority, and scoffing at the universal groan” (Hawthorne 1965
[1837], 864). Melville’s position toward the city is equally critical. The protagonist in
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) is a man who is first trapped in the nineteenth-cen-
tury version of an office cubicle, then disappears in the great unknown of a city that
erases nature as well as human beings. Searching for Bartleby in the streets of New
York, the narrator eventually finds him in a prison yard resembling the “heart of the
eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts,
grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung” (Melville 1986 [1853], 45). The structural
form of this sentence, in which the cycle of botanical life is squeezed into the syn-
tactical space between two commas, mimics the theme of human existence in the
geometrical space of the city’s grid. The allusion to pyramids, those monuments of
death, further amplifies the trope of contrasting the organic with the architectural,
wild nature with urban civilization – to the disadvantage of the latter. Melville’s New
York emblematizes prevailing nineteenth-century fears about the city as a space that
for rationality made it an attractive tool when it came to the territorial organization of the North Amer-
ican continent.
188 Catrin Gersdorf
jeopardizes both the American ideology of self-reliant individualism and nature, the
space from which the self-reliant democratic subject emerges.
Nathanael West’s apocalyptic urban visions notwithstanding, the novelists of the
early twentieth century, such as Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, replace nature
with the city as the center of the American dream. As “object and agent of desire” (Ick-
stadt 1991, 166), Chicago and New York “appear as a truly new world” (166), one that
offers “an inexhaustible promise of fulfillment” (167) to the citizen-turned-consumer.
As in Melville’s New York, images of nature are not absent from Dos Passos’ city, but
they now signify what is far away, unreachable, residual, or merely a memory of the
past when Broadway “was all meadows” (Dos Passos 1987 [1925], 227). Nevertheless,
when Dos Passos mobilizes the simile of a “birchlike cluster of downtown buildings”
(229), he calls upon trees to bestow poetic qualities on architectural objects. Through
the use of metaphor, he seeks to preserve the presence of nature, as well as the ecopo-
litical authority it enjoys in the American cultural imaginary, in the textual space of
the city. Toni Morrison’s (1993 [1992]) Jazz uses a similar method, albeit with a racial
difference.
Jazz is the second in a series of three novels in which Morrison investigates the
cultural spaces, psychological legacies, and mythical dimensions of African Ameri-
can history since the nineteenth century. The first novel, Beloved (1987), examines the
traumatic experience of slavery and is set in the Kentucky/Ohio borderland. Paradise
(1999), the third novel, probes the effects of the civil rights era in an all-black, small-
town community on the edge of the American heartland in Oklahoma. Jazz, the center
piece of the trilogy, focuses on New York City, one of the major destinations for those
African Americans who left the rural South during the era of the Great Migration.
First and foremost, the novel is a jazzed-up literary blues about a love triangle,
its tragic ending, and the melancholy of its memory. On the first three and a half
pages Morrison (1993, 4) presents us with the entire story: Violet, a woman of “fifty,
but still good looking,” “used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue” (3). Vio-
let’s husband, Joe Trace, “fell for an eighteen-year-old girl [Dorcas] with one of those
deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep
the feeling going” (3). Joe was never held legally responsible by the law “because
nobody actually saw him” (4) shoot the girl.10 But Violet punishes him, releases the
birds from their cage, embarrasses herself at Dorcas’ funeral by desecrating the dead
girl’s face, starts visiting Dorcas’s aunt, curious to find out more about the girl who
lured her husband away, and finally goes out to find herself a boyfriend. Joe endures
all this and pays no attention to his wife’s love affair. At the end of this account, the
nameless narrator reveals that she expected the Traces’ home “to be a mighty bleak
10 Toward the end of the novel the reader finds out that Joe did not kill but only wounded Dorcas,
who ends up bleeding to death because no ambulance would respond to “colored people calling”
(Morrison 1993, 210).
household, what with the birds gone and the two of them wiping their cheeks all day”
(6). But with the arrival of spring the Traces’ lives and home are revitalized – by a
young girl who enters “the building with an Okeh record under her arm and carrying
some stewmeat wrapped in butcher paper” (6). Violet invites her into the apartment,
and that, the narrator concludes, was “how that scandalizing threesome on Lenox
Avenue began. What turned out different was who shot whom” (7). Strangely enough,
this presumably second shooting is an obscure comment on an event that will remain
absent from the rest of the narrative. Yet it functions as the rhetorical equivalent of
the blue note, that flattened third in jazz that produces the musical pathos of impend-
ing tragedy and lingering melancholy. It is this story, developed along a bass line of
passion that sustains a multivocal11 conversation about trust and betrayal, exaltation
and moodiness, love and jealousy, that best explains Morrison’s choice of “jazz” for
her novel’s title. But like its musical namesake, Jazz can also be read as an allegory
of urbanization. Borrowing a phrase from African American poet Cecil S. Giscombe
(1994, 10), the novel can be described as an improvisation on the theme of “the melo-
dious southern wild coming into the city.”
In Jazz, this process is accounted for on several narrative levels. Joe and Violet
Trace come to New York from rural Virginia as part of the so-called Great Migration,
which began in the late 1890s and peaked in the 1920s when Harlem became the
“Negro capital of the world” (Claude McKay). Long sections of the book recount Joe
and Violet’s past life in the South. The landscape of Virginia is not only presented as
their ‘original’ home but becomes the device through which Morrison explicates her
protagonists’ character and present behavior. As one of Morrison’s mythical figures,
Joe Trace’s mother is “not a real woman but a ‘vision’” shaped like “a naked ber-
ry-black woman” who is “covered with mud and leaves are in her hair” (Morrison
1993, 144). She is pregnant when Golden Gray, another of the novel’s Southern char-
acters, spots her “in the trees” (144). And because of her appearance, he calls her
Wild, the only name by which she will be known through the entire novel. Wild gives
birth to a baby boy, but she leaves him to be raised by another family, who call him
Joe. Asking his adoptive mother about his biological parents, Joe learns that “they dis-
appeared without a trace” (124). “The way I heard it,” he explains, “I understood her
to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me” (124). This dialogue reworks
Joe’s function in the novel in Lacanian terms. By relocating her protagonist’s origin
point from the realm of myth and nature into the symbolic realm of language, Morri-
son expands Joe Trace’s protagonistic function as fictional representative of specific
social and historical experiences, now also rendering ‘Joe Trace’ a floating signifier,
leaving it to the reader to determine what it signifies.
11 Although Jazz has a principal narrator who appears at the beginning and initiates the story-tell-
ing, the novel’s structure is such that significant narrative space is provided to the voices and perspec-
tives of various other characters.
190 Catrin Gersdorf
Or perhaps not leaving it completely to the reader’s interpretive caprices. For as

Jonathan Culler observed, “the most radical play of the signifier still requires and
works through the positing of signifieds” (qtd. in Chandler 2002, 74). And Morrison
directs that “positing” in several ways, most effectively through the puns on “wild”
and “trace” in telling the story of Joe and Violet. In the semiotic order of Jazz, Joe
literally is the Trace of Southern Wild that survives in the urban grid of the Northern
city, an image further reinforced by Violet’s floral name. The bathos attached to a
flower that commonly symbolizes modesty and virtue is counterbalanced when, by
the simple act of adding one letter, Violet becomes Violent – which is what neigh-
bors begin to call her after the incident at Dorcas’s funeral. Growing up in the South,
an apprentice-hunter learning “how to fool snakes, bend twigs and string to catch
rabbits, groundhog; make a sound waterfowl couldn’t resist” (Morrison 1993, 125),
Joe, in an almost Thoreauvian turn of phrase, is “more comfortable in the woods than
in a town” (126). Reflecting on this time in his life and sounding somewhat surprised
about the leap he has taken from the narrated past in the woods to the narrative
present in the city, Joe says: “Folks thought I was the one to be counted on never
to be able to stomach a city. Piled-up buildings? Cement paths? Me? Not me” (126).
When the Traces first arrive, they find “a railroad flat in the tenderloin,” then move
further south to “the stink of Mulberry Street and Little Africa,” and later back north
again to “the flesh-eating rats on West Fifty-third” (127). Eventually, hard work and
the changing housing market in early twentieth-century New York make it possible
for this African American couple to progress “uptown” where “row houses and single
ones” have “big yards and vegetable gardens” (127), and where they can create their
private Eden, an urban pastoral of “birds and plants everywhere” (127). On a mimetic
level, Joe and Violet’s movement from downtown slum to uptown garden represents
the trajectory of African American social and economic progress in the early twentieth
century. On the semiotic level, where floating signifiers produce meaning by latching
themselves to each other rather than to their nontextual referents, Joe and Violet’s
spatial movement signifies the resilient presence of wild nature in the grid of the
city’s “laid-out roads” (120).
In the ‘mental’ space of Morrison’s fictional New York City, nature is an ineradica-
ble presence. It exists in that space either unexpectedly and in spite of itself (Joe), or as
a mixture of beauty and irrational cruelty (Violet/Violent). The story of Joe and Violet
Trace links the urban-industrial North with the rural-agricultural South. Because they
share the same narrative space (the text of Morrison’s novel), the existing conceptual
boundaries that separate the city from the country, rural from urban America, begin
to crumble, and readers begin to realize that nature cannot be abstracted from the
social and cultural space that is the city. Nor are the differences between nature and
culture always visible. In a brilliant passage at the beginning of Jazz, Morrison pre-
sents the imaginative dissolution of the nature-culture antagonism as the enthusias-
tic narrator’s identification with “the City”:
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the building in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s
not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any
blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city
like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above
the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church
steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but
top-notch and indestructible – like the City in 1926 when all wars are over and there will never
be another one. (Morrison 1993, 7)
To the extent that the narrator is unable to perceive the difference between “people”
and “the work of stonemasons,” between anatomy and architecture, the organic and
the inorganic, landscape and cityscape, Morrison’s novel refuses to recognize tradi-
tional conceptual boundaries between nature and urban civilization. The syntactical
conjunction of river, church, and apartment buildings (or homes) produces a unified
urban vista in which ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ elements coexist. Moreover, given that
river, church, and home are three of the most conspicuous coordinates in the cul-
tural landscape of the South, the passage also functions like a palimpsest, where the
actual, visible reality is scraped and its residual surface layered with the memory of
a distant landscape. Located at the very beginning of the novel, this vista introduces
the theme of Southern presence in the North which, as we have seen, will be devel-
oped in more detail by an ensemble of voices engaged in telling the story of Joe and
Violet. The end result is Jazz, a fictional account of a significant period in the cultural
history of African Americans that also promotes what urban design theorist Sanford
Kwinter (1995, 31), in a different context, called “a pastoral urbanism of inflection.”
Inspired by the image of a shepherd closely observing and then responding to “the
unfolding life of the flock, its movements, its collective affects, the flow of the contin-
ually reshaping mass and the flow of the landscape in continuous interaction” (31),
Kwinter sees this new, dynamic concept of urbanism as the mental prerequisite for
revitalizing the space of the city. He urges urban designers and architects to adapt
their work to the spatial forces that are already operative in the city rather than vice
versa, adapting the city to the definitive forms of their designs. Kwinter’s pastoral
urbanism is suggestive of the dynamics that underlie the way in which Jazz ‘thinks’
urban space.12 Morrison inflects existing notions of urban spatiality—traditionally
perceived as “piled-up buildings” and “cement paths,” as the regular grid that dis-
placed irregular nature—by carnivalizing its gridded structure with traces of the wild,
thus presenting urban space as an ecological, historical, and cultural hybrid, and her
novel as a text suggestive of a political ecology that provides “a new foundation for
12 I am adopting the terminology Nancy Armstrong introduced in How Novels Think (2005). She sug-
gests that the British novel was “thinking up” (2005, 3), or producing, the modern individual in a
narrative process of “invalidat[ing] competing notions of the subject” (2005, 3) that had emerged in
philosophy, science, and fiction during the period covered by her study.
192 Catrin Gersdorf
morality, epistemology, and democracy” (Latour 2004, 3). As in the Bakhtinian carni-
val, which signifies the temporary suspension rather than the complete destruction
of existing social orders and hierarchies, the spatial order of the city (crystallized in
the grid) is not fundamentally challenged in Morrison’s Jazz. Yet it is infused with a
collective equally created by the forces of history and nature, not free of violence but
willing to negotiate new, livable forms of communal existence.
4 B
ibliography
4.1 W
orks Cited
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1994.
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1840.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon
Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York. W. W. Norton,
1996. 69–90.
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. 1925. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New
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Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Linklater, Andro. Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale
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Ian Shapiro. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
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Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
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Morrison, Toni. Jazz. 1992. New York: Plume, 1993.
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Mita Banerjee
10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies
Abstract: This chapter charts the different trajectories of postcolonial studies and eco-
criticism, and explores current convergences between these fields. As an emerging
new field, ‘postcolonial ecocriticism’ combines postcolonialism’s critique of colonial
regimes and the workings transnational capitalism with ecocriticism’s attention to
the land which has been the gist of such exploitation. Stressing the rootedness of
postcolonial subjectivities in the spaces they inhabit, this contribution focuses on
two authors in particular in whose work postcolonialism and ecocriticism can be said
to converge: Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria) and Arundhati Roy (India). For both writers,
postcolonial ecocriticism is inextricably connected to notions of indigeneity, and the
necessity of seeing the land not only as an object of exploitation, but also as a pro-
tagonist in its own right. Finally, the chapter addresses the nexus between political
activism and aesthetics. What genres may postcolonial ecocritical narratives inhabit,
and what may be the pitfalls of such activist aesthetics?
Key Terms: Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Ecocriticism, Indigenous Rights,

India, Nigeria, Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro Wiwa
1 D
ifferent Developments: The Genealogies of
Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies
As fields which have similarly been concerned with the ways in which social reality
may be changed, in part, through literary and cultural criticism, postcolonialism and
ecocriticism have much in common. Both fields emerged at the intersection between
humanities concerns and political activism and have hence centrally been concerned
with the mooring of the humanities in material and social realities. As a movement of
both literature and cultural criticism, postcolonial studies emerged in the wake of the
independence movements of former European colonies, especially of British colonies
such as India, Africa and the Caribbean. If political independence had been achieved,
what was at stake was a translation of this political reality into cultural and literary
practice. What followed was an entire movement of the former empire ‘writing back’
to the center: In Salman Rushdie’s (1982, 8) memorable formulation, the newly inde-
pendent nations set out to re-write their own histories, turning the tables on the erst-
while colonizer who had once set out to dominate them not only economically, but
culturally as well. Postcolonial literature and the literary criticism which spelled out
its cultural politics can hence be seen as an intervention by cultural production into
political and social realities.
Such an intervention, in turn, was also characteristic of the emergence of eco-

criticism. If postcolonial studies emerged as a corrective of what it saw as a flawed
view of social reality – the idea that European culture was somehow superior to the
non-Western world –, ecocriticism emerged as a similar corrective. It set out system-
atically to investigate the relationship of human beings to their environment, both
in its animate and its inanimate form. Like that of postcolonial studies, its agenda
was hence twofold. First, ecocriticism had to investigate the relationship between
man and nature as it played out in a variety of cultural narratives, from literature to
film and popular culture. As Greg Garrard (2004, frontmatter) writes in his Routledge
introduction to ecocriticism, “Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and
portray the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural
production, from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Disney and BBC nature documentaries.”
Second, it exposed the anthropocentrism, the human-centeredness of many of these
depictions; and third, it went on to point out alternative ways of being in the world.
In such corrective fashion, ecocriticism from the very beginning had global concerns:
If indeed the impending doom of planet earth was to be averted, political as well as
cultural activism had to be global in scope. One of the signal images of both environ-
mental activism and ecocriticism as a field of research was that of the ‘blue planet’
seen from outer space (Garrard 2004): What the image symbolized was the smallness,
the vulnerability of the planet, which at once urged the ecocritic – as a representative
of humankind concerned with its own future – to take immediate action in order to
prevent further environmental destruction (Garrard 2004; Heise 2012).
Both ecocriticism and postcolonial studies have hence pointed to the ways in
which culture is always embedded in material reality, and in which culture and pol-
itics are deeply enmeshed with each other. In order to have an impact on world pol-
itics, both argue, our ways of thinking have to change. It is in this sense that both
ecocriticism and postcolonial studies have an element of didacticism: Both seek to
urge humankind to change its ways. At the same time, however, postcolonialism
and ecocriticism may differ in the temporality embedded in their respective projects.
Postcolonialism has sometimes been accused of being stuck in the past, constantly
wanting to ‘write back’ to a colonizer who, even in the era of decolonization, contin-
ues to wield his powerful influence on his former colonies. Ecocriticism, on the other
hand, is especially concerned with the future of both humankind and the planet. It
is hence no coincidence that the final chapter of Garrard’s introduction to ecocriti-
cism should be titled “Future: The Earth.” (Garrard 2004, 160) Despite these different
temporalities, however, postcolonial studies and ecocriticism share a signal concern:
the idea that the task of literature and of cultural criticism is to expose and to correct
‘flawed’ ways of being in the world.
Given the many commonalities between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, it
may be all the more surprising that each of these fields seems to be a latecomer to the
insights of the other. Postcolonialism has often been faulted for being concerned with
processes of economic and cultural domination while failing to consider the anthro-
196 Mita Banerjee
pocentrism of such concerns (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 3). Conversely, ecocriticism as
a discipline has often failed to take into account non-Western concerns (DeLoughrey
and Handley 2011, 9).
It is only recently that critics have begun to address the synergy which may result
from bringing together postcolonialism and ecocriticism by systematically spelling
out points of overlap between these two fields. Especially in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s
and George Handley’s (2011) edited collection Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of
the Environment and in Graham Huggan’s and Helen Tiffin’s (2010) co-authored study
Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, what emerges is the idea
that each of these fields may point towards a blind spot in the other. Thus, in the area
of postcolonial criticism, metaphors of the land and of the rootedness of the post-
colonial subject in his or her geography have abounded. Yet, these references have
largely been read by postcolonial critics only in their figurative sense; the material
and the ecocritical dimension of these metaphors on the other hand, has often gone
unnoticed (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 27; cf. also Heise 2002). As DeLoughrey
and Handley write of the work of Caribbean poet Eduard Glissant,
the land is “saturated by traumas of conquest […]” Glissant argues that this is why a postcolonial
ecology cannot be interpellated as a pastoral but rather an untranslatable historical record of a
“fight without witnesses […] .“ Since it is the nature, so to speak, of colonial powers to suppress
the history of their own violence, the land and even the ocean become all the more crucial as
recuperative sites of postcolonial historiography. (2011, 8)
What emerges here is the concept of witnessing, which has been central to the post-
colonial project as such. In order to address and to redress the wrongs of the colonial
past, the colonial subject has to bear witness to cultural, economic and environmen-
tal destruction; yet, to the extent that colonialism also ‘killed off’ the witnesses to
its violence, the land remains as the sole spectator of the past. How, however, could
the land bear witness? It is here that ecocritical readings may add to postcolonial
critiques yet another layer of meaning: If from within the human-centered framework
of postcolonial studies, the land remained necessarily mute, ecocriticism restores
to the land a form of both agency and eloquence. The task of ecocriticism, in this
context, would be to move from the metaphorical to the material, and from anthropo-
centrism as “human-centeredness” (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 3) to an account which
balances human and non-human environments. Such an inclusion or emphasizing of
ecocritical concerns into postcolonialism has been called a ‘greening’ of postcolonial-
ism (Huggan and Tiffin 2007). Moreover, the project of postcolonial ecocriticism may
hence consist in part of a re-reading of some of the canonical texts common to both
fields, and to expose those strands of argument – ecocritical concerns in postcolonial
literature, and postcolonial aspects of environmental writing – which have previously
been submerged. (See also ↗22 Women Writing Nature in the Global South)
If postcolonialism has often failed to consider the ecocritical dimension of its
seminal texts, ecocriticism, in turn, has often neglected the ways in which the gist or
at least the articulation of some of its key concerns have in fact been eurocentric (De
Loughrey and Handley 2011, 10; Vital 2008, 88). At worst, non-Western countries were
blamed for being negligent of ecocritical concerns, a charge which, as DeLoughrey
and Handley (2011, 26) point out, is a distortion of matters. Seen from this perspec-
tive, a “normative ecological subject” (14) emerges which conceals its Western loca-
tion; in faulting non-Western societies for disregarding the ecological dimension, this
“normative […] subject” of ecocriticism articulates what Larry Lohmann (1993, 202)
terms “Green Orientalism.” If in Edward Said’s (1978) seminal formulation, Oriental-
ism ascribed to the non-Western subject a form of cultural and historical primitivism,
this allegation of primitivism now takes an ecocritical turn. The non-Western subject
is accused of being “ecoprimitivist” in the sense that it slows down, even obstructs,
the march towards a global balancing of the ecosystem led by the Western ecocritic
(DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 19). Such “environmental orientalism” (2011, 20,
drawing on Sawyer and Agrowal) has also been ascribed to deep ecologists, who have
been said to privilege “wilderness preservation” and biodiversity over the concerns of
the human communities inhabiting this wilderness (21).
At the same time, ‘ecoprimitivism’ has taken yet another turn. In their search for
alternative ways of being in the world, ecocritics have often turned towards indige-
nous cultures, to whom they ascribed an innate knowledge of the land and an almost
genetic ecological intuition. However, such perspectives on the “Ecological Indians”
(Krech 1999; cited in Garrard 2004, 120) freeze Native Americans in the primitivist
stereotype of the hunter-gatherer. As Garrard writes,
Since the sixteenth century at least, “primitive” people have been represented as dwelling in
harmony with nature, sustaining one of the most widespread and seductive myths of the non-Eu-
ropean “other.” The assumption of indigenous environmental virtue is a foundational belief for
deep ecologists and many ecocritics. (2004, 120)
As Chadwick Allen (2007) has suggested, such stereotypes of the inherently ecolog-
ical Indian fail to take into account the extent to which Native communities several
centuries B. C., constructed complex architectural structures which attest to the fact
that these tribes engaged in complex trade relations.
[Central] Ohio is home to several series of large-scale earthworks, the most ancient of which are
believed to be about two thousand years old. These remarkable achievements of mathematics,
engineering, architecture, and construction typically are referred to as “mounds,” but that word
cannot express either the scale or precision of these works, nor the awe they still inspire among
those who know where and how to look at them […]. Researchers have discovered that football
field-sized Octagon Earthworks, in particular, is a type of lunar calendar that marks the 18.6-year
cycle of the moon’s northernmost and southernmost rise and set points along the horizon. (Allen
2007, 200–201)
Despite their economic, cultural and architectural complexity, then, these earthworks
were also attentive to the land of which they were a part. In Allen’s work, an attention
198 Mita Banerjee
paid to the complexity of native cultures in both economic and cultural terms is by
no means incompatible with ecological and ecocritical aspects. What is at issue in
Allen’s writing, then, is the necessity to link an awareness of the complexity of Native
American cultures with environmental concerns (see also ↗11 Ecofeminisms).
Some strands of ecocriticism have long been attuned to postcolonial dimensions,
especially work on biopiracy and studies in ecofeminism. Investigating biopiracy as a
neo-colonial practice, Indian ecocritic Vandana Shiva has explored the ‘patenting’ of
non-Western knowledge of the medical power of spices such as turmeric by US-based
corporations such as Monsanto (Shiva 1997; DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 11). What
is crucial to note in interventions such as Shiva’s is that there is a direct continuity
between the building of ‘green’ knowledge systems in the eighteenth century and the
turning of such knowledge into capital for transnational corporations in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. As Mary Louise Pratt (qtd. in DeLoughrey and Handley
2011, 10) has outlined, plant collection and the creation of plant taxonomies such as
that of Carolus Linnaeus was anything but innocent of imperial concerns: “‘Linnaeus’
system alone launched a European knowledge-building enterprise of unprecedented
scale and appeal.’” As Shiva argues for the twentieth century, the charting and the
patenting of such knowledge gained in non-Western territories went hand in hand:
“Having created a taxonomy for that which is visible, science in the service of trans-
national capitalism now charts and patents a microscopic form of life” (2011, 11).
Biopiracy, in Shiva’s words, is hence yet another form of colonization. Here
too, the concerns of postcolonialism and of ecocriticism are closely intertwined: In
unison with postcolonial critics, Shiva highlights the fact that colonialism is by no
means a phenomenon of the past; it is alive and kicking in neo-colonial practices
in the non-Western world. By the same token, these neo-colonial practices set out
to ‘contain’ not only human subjects, but their biosphere as well. As Shiva (qtd. in
DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 11) writes, “‘capital now has to look for new colo-
nies to invade and exploit for its further accumulation. These new colonies are, in
my view, the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals.’” Shiva’s
indictment of biopiracy highlights a number of strands within ecocriticism, as well as
various points of overlap between postcolonialism and ecocritical thought. First, she
draws on ecofeminism as a precursor to her own postcolonial critique of biopiracy in
India and other parts of the non-Western world. Thus, ecofeminist work as early as in
Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land has pointed out that the ‘subjugation’ of the
environment has always had a gendered dimension. Second, Shiva implies that the
struggle to overcome anthropocentrism has to take into account the perspectives not
only of nature and the environment, but also of animals. At the same time, it could be
argued that Shiva’s critique is problematic here in that it associates women’s bodies
with the spheres of plants and animals, thus dismissing the idea that all bodies are
vulnerable and hence susceptible to ecological destruction.
As Shiva’s critique of biopiracy indicates, then, ecocritical awareness is hardly a
monopoly of the privileged Western critic (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 16). More-
over, as DeLoughrey and Handley highlight in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecol-

ogies, ‘postcolonial’ development schemes developed by Western institutions for the
‘developing world’ often came at a huge ecological cost:
Critiques of capitalism, technology, neoliberalism, modernization, biopiracy and empire demon-

strate that environmental concerns are not the exclusive prerogative of the privileged north […].
Modernization schemes enforced by the IMF and World Bank such as the construction of hydro-
electric dams, the use of agrichemical fertilizers and patented seeds, as well as other resource
extraction initiatives like deforestation, mining, and the liberalization of internal markets have
all radically altered postcolonial environments. (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 16)
As Huggan and Tiffin (2010, 28) similarly point out, the discourse of ‘developmental-
ism’ is a nodal point at which postcolonalism and ecocriticism are directly opposed:
From the perspective of Western development aid, postcolonial nations have to be
assisted in their ‘catching up’ with modernity; the cost of such progress for the envi-
ronment is of subordinate concern (44–45).
2 C
onvergences and Common Ground:
Ken Saro-Wiwa
The work of Ken Saro-Wiwa perhaps best illustrates the ways in which there has
often been an ecological dimension to colonial violence and exploitation. As both
a writer and an activist, Saro-Wiwa opposed the environmental destruction of the
land inhabited by his community, the Ogoni, by the “Nigerian-based multinational
oil companies” Shell and Chevron (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 35). In keeping with the
concerns of postcolonial criticism which has been quick to note the neo-colonial ten-
dencies which have often undergirded the formation of postcolonial nation-states,
Saro-Wiwa chronicled in both fiction and non-fiction the ways in which the ruling
Nigerian elite exploited the indigenous Ogoni community (2010, 38). In this critique,
Saro-Wiwa addressed one of the key impasses of postcolonial studies. In its project of
‘writing back’ to the former colonizer, the telos of the postcolonial writer was often
the moment of decolonization. What, however, was to come after decolonization?
What were to politics of the postcolonial nation-state? As Saro-Wiwa pointed out in
his trenchant critique of the Nigerian nation state, decolonization often came with its
own set of problems: new postcolonial elites emerged which, often in tandem with
Western powers, set out newly to subjugate parts of the postcolonial nation. This, as
Saro Wiwa pointed out, was especially true of the domination of the Ogoni by Nige-
rian elites.
At the same time, Saro-Wiwa fused postcolonial with ecocritical concerns by
drawing attention to the devastating consequences and health risks which oil drill-
ing had for communities like his own. The workings of multi-national oil companies
200 Mita Banerjee
such as Shell, Saro-Wiwa (qtd. in DeLoughrey 2011, 10) emphasized, was nothing less
than “‘ecological genocide.’” In Saro-Wiwa’s work, environmental justice concerns
(Adamson 2001) and postcolonial criticism converge. It stands as a blueprint for and
precursor to contemporary studies in the field of environmental justice which draw
attention to the destruction of the land inhabited by indigenous communities whose
territories are being destroyed through mining. It is in this context that Rob Nixon’s
(2006) idea of ‘slow violence’ is especially pertinent in describing the gradual but
inevitable destruction of lands inhabited by marginalized communities.
Yet, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s work and his life also stands for the aporia of postcolonial
ecocriticsm as a form of intervention. Despite the protests of human rights organ-
izations such as Amnesty International and the outrage of the global community,
Saro-Wiwa was executed for treason by the Nigerian government in 1995. Postcolonial
critique was ultimately powerless to resist the economic concerns of the global oil
industry working in tandem with postcolonial elites; and the planetary reach of the
global community of political activism was powerless to stop the workings of mul-
ti-national corporations. In the end, many critics argued, economic capital overrode
cultural intervention. Humanities research, and literary writing, were seen as point-
less in a narrative in which they were mere footnotes.
Ken Saro-Wiwa points to yet another lacuna in the stalled or belated emergence
of postcolonial ecocriticism. In his critique of the Eurocentrism of some strands of
ecocriticsm, Rob Nixon has pointed to what he sees as an implicit connection between
the Anglo-American canon of ecocriticism as a field and the failure of Western ecocrit-
icism to intervene in the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa.
[Scholars] have lamented that the dominant discourse of the field [of ecocriticism] continues to
be marked by an Anglo-American and a national framework rather than engaging broader con-
texts. In fact, commenting on [a] celebratory New York Times article, Rob Nixon points out that all
of the two dozen or so “green” authors cited are American. He finds this to be a peculiar emphasis
since it was written precisely at the moment when the international community was mobilizing
to prevent Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Nigerian colleagues from being sentenced to death for their
resistance to what the Ogoni leader called “ecological genocide” perpetuated by oil companies
in the Niger Delta. (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 9–10)
On the eve of Saro-Wiwa’s execution, an entire community of postcolonial studies

practitioners was holding its breath, hoping that what seemed to be inevitable given
the course of events could still be prevented. As Nixon points out, however, postcolo-
nial activism in favor of Saro-Wiwa largely went unnoticed by ecocritical communities
in the US. Nixon’s intervention is hence crucial in recovering a simultaneity of events:
the emergence of an ecocritical movement celebrated in the New York Times, and the
fate of Ogoni writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, which was only seemingly unrelated to
such celebration. In Nixon’s understanding of postcolonial ecocriticism, then, there is
the need for a critical revision of the genealogy of Western ecocriticism, and the urge
to take seriously the global dimension of ecocritical concerns.
In keeping with Nixon’s argument, Huggan and Tiffin emphasize that Ken Saro-
Wiwa’s work was key to the project of postcolonial ecocriticism avant la lettre. To
Nixon (qtd in Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 35), Saro-Wiwa is “Africa’s first environmental
martyr.” In its present moment of emergence, postcolonial ecocriticism is thus also
occupied with an enlargement and a revision of its own canonical texts, Saro-Wiwa’s
work being central among them. As a field of cultural criticism, postcolonial ecocrit-
icism is hence a new field of research that has only recently come into its own (Kelly
2013, 175). Yet, given the many commonalities and convergences outlined above, it
is hardly surprising that the field has been launched by critics whose work has been
at the forefront of postcolonial studies. If Huggan’s (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic:
Marketing the Margins and Tiffin’s (1989) co-written account of postcolonial theory,
The Empire Writes Back, have proved seminal contributions to the field of postcolo-
nial studies, their recent Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment
may prove as critical for the inception of postcolonial ecocriticism as a new field of
research.
3 Arundhati Roy and the Problem of Genre

If it is no coincidence that Huggan and Tiffin’s work turned from postcolonial to eco-
critical concerns, the same may be said of one of the most prominent postcolonial
writers, Arundhati Roy whose debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker
prize. In her award-winning book Roy chronicled not only the communalist violence
in postcolonial India, but she also drew attention to the social injustice which the
narrative attributed to the caste system. In the novel, the dalit figure of Velutha, who
is marked by the caste system as an ‘untouchable,’ remains voiceless even as he is
spoken for by the narrative; he remains a cipher for the failure of postcolonial India
to live up to its democratic ideals. It has been one of the surprises of postcolonial lit-
erature as a field that after winning the Booker prize for The God of Small Things, Roy
refused to write another book of fiction and turned to non-fiction instead. Whereas
ecocritics such as Karl Kroeber (1994) and Hubert Zapf (2008) in his concept of ’liter-
ary ecology’ have specifically addressed the role of literature to shape cultural imagi-
naries (see ↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature), it is this power of the literary imagina-
tion that Roy has come to distrust. In the aesthetic move from fiction to non-fiction,
moreover, Roy moved from postcolonial to ecocritical concerns, highlighting the ways
in which each may be embedded in the other. Opposing the building of the Narmada
Valley Dam which deprived many Indian tribal communities of their land, Roy has
controversially supported the Naxalites, a Marxist organization fighting the Indian
government as guerillas. In her indictment of the Indian government for building the
Narmada Valley Dam, Roy illustrates how the strife for development and progress
by postcolonial India has disastrous consequences for the ecosystem of tribal lands.
202 Mita Banerjee
In her opposition of the Narmada Dam project, Roy clearly criticizes the ‘develop-
mentalist’ narrative outlined above (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 50). For her, the Indian
government, in subscribing to such a model of postcolonial progress has sold out its
own democratic ideals. The ecological destruction resulting from the Narmada Valley
dam, for Roy, amounts to nothing less than the bankruptcy of Indian democracy as
such. In her essay, “The End of Imagination,” Roy (2002) addresses the “twin evils”
of India’s going nuclear and its building of hydroelectric dams, both in the name of
development and progress. Roy (2002, 16–17) writes, “I returned to India. To what I
think/thought of as home. Something had died but it wasn’t me. It was infinitely more
precious. It was a world that had been ailing for a while, and had finally breathed its
last”. In official justifications of the need for both the dam and the bomb, Roy implies,
environmental concerns and the master-narrative of ‘progress’ seem incompatible;
the former is sacrificed in favor of the latter, and the safeguarding of the environment
is dismissed for the “greater common good” (Roy 2002, 39). Yet at what cost, Roy
(2009) asks, can we afford not to “[listen] to the grasshoppers,” as the title of one of
her essays has it?
Like Ken Saro-Wiwa speaking for the Ogoni community, Roy illustrates how the
destruction of the lands inhabited by indigenous communities has both a colonial
and an ecological dimension: For both Roy and Saro-Wiwa, genocide and ecologi-
cal destruction converge. Yet, what is the genre that such eco-postcolonial critique is
articulated in? In their reading of Roy as a writer who has crossed over from postco-
lonialism to ecocriticism, Huggan and Tiffin highlight the problem of style. Ecocrit-
icism as a field has been concerned with strategies of reading and of writing, even
as it is firmly embedded in environmental justice movements and hence in political
activism. Ecocriticism remains to be located largely in the humanities. As Huggan and
Tiffin emphasize, then, it would be short-sighted to disregard the aesthetic dimension
of ecocritical interventions. Without such an attention to style, ecocriticism may be
mere ideology; the novel degenerates into a mere pamphlet. It is here that Arundhati
Roy’s non-fiction writing may prove particularly troubling. In writing back to envi-
ronmental destruction, Roy’s prose, as Huggan and Tiffin suggest, oscillates between
hyperbole and sarcasm. In fact, Roy’s political agenda may undermine both her artis-
tic credibility and her literary force. As an ecocritic, she has opted out of fiction. If
the project of ecocriticism, like that of postcolonialism, is implicitly didactic, there is
a sense in which the didactic may override the aesthetic dimensions of a given text.
According to Huggan and Tiffin (2010, 48), “If Roy’s message is crystal clear, una-
shamedly partisan in its intentions, her text remains a curiously unresolved mixture:
part hard-headed investigative report, part sentimental political fable; part histori-
cally situated postcolonial allegory, part universal Green manifesto and call to arms.”
It is as an ecocritic, then, that Roy seems to have forgotten the nuances she so cher-
ished when she was still a postcolonialist. Even if in The God of Small Things, too,
the narrator could be said to speak for the low-caste outsider, Velutha, it nonetheless
emphasized that the multiplicity of voices and perspectives could not be resolved. To
Roy’s novel, the Bakhtinian model of heteroglossia, of a competing multiplicity of

voices, clearly applied. What she had once demonstrated in her postcolonial fiction,
however, seems to be absent from her ecocritical non-fiction. It is in moving from
fiction to pamphlet, then, that Roy refuses to address the question of voice: For whom
is she speaking when she is protesting the Narmada Dam Project? As Huggan and
Tiffin go on to note,
Complex social, political and ecological systems […] are repeatedly reduced to the black-and-
white dramatics of the children’s morality tale […]. Indeed, [this] raises the crucial question of for
whom Roy believes herself to be speaking – Adivasi “oustees”? The Narmada Bachao Andolan?
The Indian people? Environmental activists and “eco-warriors” from all over the world? – an
open question that blurs the boundary between underclass victims of ecological disaster and
their privileged supporters, and that makes Roy vulnerable to the criticism that she is silencing
those on whose behalf she is determined to speak. (2010, 48–49)
As a postcolonial writer turned ecocritic, then, there is a sense in which Roy’s prose
fails to fuse the ecocritical with the postcolonial. As a postcolonial writer, Roy high-
lighted in her novel The God of Small Things the heterogeneity of the Indian nation:
its caste system, its uneasiness with its own colonial past. Yet, it is this heteroge-
neity which she romantically homogenizes once she has assumed a more ecocriti-
cal agenda. In “speaking for” Indian tribal communities (Alcoff 1991–1992, 5) and
assuming an Adivasi voice, Roy gravitates towards the ‘ecoprimitivism’ outlined
above: In her account, the Adivasi are inherently and instinctively connected to their
lands; their own expression of such alternative indigenous epistemologies, however,
remains unaddressed in Roy’s non-fiction prose. Moreover, in order to emphasize the
urgency of her mission, Roy runs the risk of relegating indigenous communities to
the past: The image which she conjures up before the reader’s eyes is the picture of
Adivasi communities already having disappeared from the Indian national imaginary.
If one of the problems with Roy’s ecocritical advocacy of indigenous concerns is
the issue of voice, the other may be that of aesthetics. It is here that the fact that eco-
criticism remains an endeavor which has largely been rooted in the humanities, spe-
cifically in the field of literary and cultural criticism, may once more be considered.
In the urgency which she feels is needed to prevent further environmental destruc-
tion, and the destruction of indigenous communities, Roy feels compelled to under-
estimate the power of fiction. Fiction, she implies, is no longer powerful enough to
compete with the truth claims of politicians and capitalists alike. In order to contest
these truths, she feels forced to turn to non-fiction prose and to underestimate the
constructedness of her own narrative. In Huggan’s and Tiffin’s memorable image,
Roy’s prose becomes a ‘self-cannibalizing tiger’: In her desperate attempt to devour
her enemies (the Indian government, the World Bank, the developmentalists), Roy’s
narrative succeeds only in devouring itself. As Huggan and Tiffin write of one of Roy’s
essays, “The Greater Common Good,”
204 Mita Banerjee
Still, “The Greater Common Good,” for all its pieties, remains a highly intriguing text, not least
because, like the auto-cannibalising tiger that provides its first and most arresting image, it effec-
tively deconstructs many of its best arguments by drawing attention to itself as a playful piece of
investigative writing: a highly literary text. (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 49; emphasis in the original)
In Roy’s essay, the ‘self-cannibalising tiger’ is the Indian nation-state which has trans-
gressed against its own democratic values; the same practice of self-cannibalisation,
however, may be true of Roy’s narrative itself. Roy’s essay hence oscillates between
veiling and drawing attention to its own status as a (literary) text. Yet, the urgency of
her ecocritical concerns remains, as does the relevance of these concerns. The chal-
lenge for postcolonial ecocriticism may therefore be to fuse the aesthetic with the
political, without unduly gravitating only to one of these poles. Postcolonial ecocriti-
cismmay be at its best when it couches its political agenda in an aesthetic indictment
which is too powerful to be resisted even by a reader skeptical of such concerns.
It is the question of genre, then, that the newly incipient field of postcolonial eco-
criticism may have to grapple with. In what genre might ecological destruction best
be described, and in what genres should readers be exhorted to turn towards ecolog-
ical awareness and environmental justice? Thus, writers such as Robert Barclay have
drawn attention to the devastating effects of nuclear testing in the Pacific by writing
dystopias; texts in which the children born with deformations triggered by nuclear
fall-out seem more animal than human (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 58). Set in the Mar-
shall islands with their haunted past of nuclear testing, Barclay’s novel Melal. A Novel
of the Pacific (2002) is part of the genre of what Lawrence Buell has called the “toxic
gothic” (quoted in Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 59). Here, the tradition of the Gothic narra-
tive is appropriated by Maori and Pacific Islander writers in order to highlight the hor-
rific and grotesque consequences of nuclear testing. Such gothic writing, in turn, is
fused with the idea of ‘toxicity’ which has also loomed large in ecocritical writing (cf.
Mukherjee 2011). Melal can be seen as a literary staging of some of the tensions within
ecocriticism as a political and an aesthetic project: In Barclay’s novel, American envi-
ronmentalists meet Maori victims of nuclear testing; yet, the Americans’ concern is
only to save the dolphins (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 59). Nevertheless, the novel ulti-
mately transcends the dichotomy between indigenous knowledge systems and a
Western strand of ecocriticism which fails to take into account the human victims of
environmental damage. In its strident critique of what can be seen as “nuclear colo-
nialism” in the Marshall Islands (59), the novel ends up fusing the concerns of Pacific
Islander communities and American environmental activists:
Barclay’s novel illustrates the moral intensity of toxic discourse, its propensity for staging
“us-versus-them dichotomies” […], but complicates this scenario by suggesting that the lives of
the indigenous Marshall Islanders (Marshallese) and their American occupiers are inextricably
enmeshed. (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 59)
Texts such as Barclay’s Melal implicitly transcend the limits which critics such as Rob
Nixon have attested to ecocritism in its Western-centered form: they transcend the
boundaries of the nation-space by highlighting the liminality of human and animal
experience which cannot be contained by the artificial borders of the nation-state;
and they resist the ‘freezing’ of the indigenous community into anachronism or prim-
itivism.
At the same time, novels such as Robert Barclay’s Melal share with postcolonial
ecocritics such as Arundhati Roy the awareness of the urgency of environmental
justice concerns. However, they differ from Roy in their choice of weapon: Melal is
as unforgiving as is Roy in its environmentalist critique, even asthe form it chooses
to voice such critique is decidedly different. For Barclay as for Maori writers such as
Patricia Grace in Potiki (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 70), the form of the dystopic novel is
ideal in exposing an environmental and human devastation that is no longer science
fiction but has already occurred. In fusing its aesthetic properties with its political
concerns, such dystopic texts strike a balance between literature and activism; they
are didactic only implicitly, without failing to compromise their innate qualities as
literary texts. In keeping with its dystopic quality, such texts spell out an “ecology
of doomsday” (55) by having non-human monsters appear among their cast of char-
acters. Yet, as the reader quickly comes to realize, these monsters come in human
form, and the monstrosity itself is man-made. As Australian activist Zohl de Ishtar has
documented the interviews on the effects of nuclear testing in Oceania collected in
Daughters of the Pacific (1994), children were born with severe deformities as a direct
result of nuclear radiation. As one of the interviewees states, “[t]his ugly thing [called
the ‘jellyfish baby’] only lives for a few hours. When they die they are buried right
away. They do not allow the mother to see this kind of baby because she will go crazy.
It is too inhumane” (Ishtar qtd. in Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 58). It is these ‘monstrous’
victims of nuclear testing and environmental destruction who appear in the narrative
of ‘toxic Gothicism.’ Such toxic Gothicism is also at the core of other texts which have
become canonical for the newly emergent field of postcolonial ecocriticism. Thus,
Pablo Mukherjee (2011) has read Indra Sinha’s (2007) novel Animal’s People as an
indictment of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India. In these dystopic novels,
the boundary between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ blur, and an anthropocentric perspective
gives way to a less speciesist one. Both Animal’s People and Melal are thus fictional
works which point to the ways in which an ecological dimension is inextricably inter-
twined with postcolonial concerns and neo-colonial developments. To address such
intersections will be one of the key challenges for postcolonial ecocriticism as a field.
206 Mita Banerjee
4 B
ibliography
4.1 W
orks Cited
Adamson, Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (1991–1992): 5–32.
Allen, Chadwick. “Earthworks: Native Intellectuals on the Ground.” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007):
199–209.
Barclay, Robert. Melal. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2004.
De Loughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the
Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Heise, Ursula. “Introduction: The Invention of Eco-Futures.” Ecozon@ 3.2 (2012): 1–10.
Heise, Ursula. “Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of Environment in Media Theory.” Configurations
10.1 (2002): 149–168.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Green Postcolonialism. Special issue of Interventions 9.1:
(2007).
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New
York: Routledge, 2010.
Ishtar, Zohl de, ed. Daughters of the Pacific. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1994.
Kelly, Ríona. “Exploring Narratives of Global Justice and Sustainability: The Rise of Postcolonial
Ecocriticism.” Modern Fiction Studies 59.1 (2013): 175–181.
Krech, Shepart, III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton, 1999.
Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of the Mind. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Lohmann, Larry. “Green Orientalism.” The Ecologist 23.6 (1993): 202–204.
Mukherjee, Pablo. “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’: Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal People.”
Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George
Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 216–31.
Nixon, Rob. “Slow Violence, Gender and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Journal of
Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2 (2006): 3–12.
Roy, Arundhati. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002.
Roy, Arundhati. Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. London: Haymarket, 2009.
Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes back with a Vengeance.” Times 3 July 1982: 8.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. New York: South End Press, 1997.
Vital, Anthony. “Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology, and ‘Life & Times of
Michael K.’” Research in African Literatures 39.1 (2008): 87–106.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Postcolonial Literatures. 1989. London: Taylor and Francis, 2002.
Gerhardt, Christine. “The Greening of African-American Landscapes: Where Ecocriticism Meets

Post-Colonial Theory.” Mississippi Quarterly 55.4 (2002). 515–533.
Grace, Patricia. Potiki. Aukland: Penguin, 1986.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphors as Experience and History in American Life and
Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Krishen, Pradip. Trees of Delhi. Delhi: Penguin India, 2006.
Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania
Loomba et al. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 233–51.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Penguin, 1997.
Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. London: Pocket Books, 2007.
Christa Grewe-Volpp
11 E
cofeminisms, the Toxic Body, and Linda
Hogan’s Power
Abstract: The following chapter outlines the origins of ecofeminism, delineates some
of its most prominent branches until the 1990s and traces its further development
into feminist articulations of new materialism with its emphasis on corporeality and
the body. It shows how some early forms of ecofeminist thought paved the way for
a sophisticated, highly theoretical and ethical discourse which continues to work
against dichotomous separations of nature and culture and their gendered manifes-
tations by exploring the inter- or intra-activity of discourse and matter and by under-
standing the human body as an active agent as well as a product of social, cultural,
historical and other forces. These (eco)feminist insights are used to interpret Native
American writer Linda Hogan’s novel Power, in which the story about the ritual hunt
of a panther reveals the complex relationship between material phenomena and dis-
cursive representations.
Key Terms: Ecofeminism, new materialism, corporeality, toxicity, inter-/intra-activity.
Ecofeminism has suffered from a bad reputation since the mid-1990s. Because it was
linked with essentialism, mysticism or apolitical nature worship, feminist scholars
interested in environmental issues have shunned the term for “fear of contamina-
tion-by-association” and have used labels such as “ecological feminism,” “feminist
environmentalism,” “social ecofeminism” instead (Gaard 2011, 27). It seems a pity
that the sometimes scathing accusations, even by mainstream feminists, have had
such a negative and effective influence on ecofeminism as they are based on only
one branch called cultural or radical ecofeminism. Critics have ignored the rigor-
ous theoretical approaches of other ecofeminist branches that have contributed to
the ecocritical debate with precise intellectual analyses. In fact, some contemporary
theoretical ideas within posthumanism and new materialism can be traced back
to ecofeminist assumptions developed in the 1990s, especially by Donna Haraway,
Katherine N. Hayles and Val Plumwood, who tried to bridge the gap between radical
poststructuralism and essentialism by pointing towards the imbrications of cultural
constructions and material phenomena. Theoretical ecofeminists in the 1990s were
explicitly against essentialized, naturalized notions of gender and their concomitant
reductionist views of women as well as other minorities. However, as Stacy Alaimo
(2008, 237) argues, their fear of being accused of biological determinism has unfortu-
nately led to an “accelerated ‘flight from nature,’” and, as Greta Gaard deplores, from
a close affiliation with ecofeminism itself. In her 2011 article “Ecofeminism Revisited:
Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmental-
ism,” Gaard outlines the development of ecofeminism and especially the backlash it
has undergone since the mid-1990s in great detail. In her overview, she exposes the
critique leveled against ecofeminists for being essentialist, apolitical, and elitist as
highly one-sided and biased. She argues that they have always struggled “for local,
community-wide, and global ecojustice,” and that “ecofeminist theory, spirituality,
and practice have consistently been rooted in activism that challenges any notions of
essentialism” (Gaard 2011, 38).
In the following, I will outline the origins of ecofeminism, delineate some of its
most prominent branches until the 1990s and portray its further development into
feminist articulations of a new materialism with its emphasis on corporeality and the
body. It is the aim of this chapter to show how some early forms of ecofeminist thought
have paved the way for a sophisticated, highly theoretical and ethical discourse which
continues to work against dichotomous separations of nature and culture and their
gendered manifestations. I will then explicate how ecofeminist insights can be used
as a tool for literary analyses of fictional texts by interpreting Linda Hogan’s novel
Power. In this book, Hogan explores the embeddedness of humans in the natural
environment showing how the world is shaped by material and discursive forces, and
how this can lead to ethical questions about the status of the human in a more-than-
human world.
1 The Diversity of Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism can roughly be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when women began
to connect feminist issues with environmental problems. Political activist and scholar
Noël Sturgeon (1997, 25) sees first manifestations of ecofeminism “within the anti-nu-
clear movement, social ecology, bioregionalism, Earth First!, the U.S. Greens, animal
liberation, sustainable development, and to a lesser extent, the environmental justice
movement.”1 One of the key triggers for the initiation of ecofeminism was the nuclear
accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, after which women organized a conference in
Amherst titled “Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the 1980s.” The goal of the
conference was to show the connections between militarism, sexism, racism, clas-
sism, and environmental destruction. It resulted, among others, in the organization
for the Women’s Pentagon Actions (WPA) in 1980 and 1981, which deeply influenced
feminist peace politics (Sturgeon 1997, 26–27). Other conferences followed, and soon
the first anthologies and academic publications appeared and multiplied, with a wide
variety of topics and political orientations. Other incidents that triggered and fueled
1 For a detailed study of the early history of ecofeminism see Sturgeon’s (1997) monograph Ecofem
inist Natures, especially the first chapter “Movements of Ecofeminism.”
210 Christa Grewe-Volpp
the movement were, for example, the exposal of toxic waste sites in urban neighbor-
hoods, especially the Love Canal disaster in the 1970s, the unequal distribution of
toxic waste in poor and black neighborhoods, and issues of reproductive rights and
technologies.
As can easily be surmised from the broad scope of concerns of environmentally
engaged feminists, ecofeminism has never been a movement united by one political
platform. On the contrary, it is pluralistic and sometimes even highly controversial,
although diversity is (mostly) welcomed. As Linda Vance (1993, 125–126) declared in
1993, “Ask a half dozen self-proclaimed ecofeminists what ecofeminism is, and you’ll
get a half dozen answers, each rooted in a particular intersection of race, class, geog-
raphy, and conceptual orientation.” Nevertheless, ecofeminists share some basic
assumptions and goals. They are convinced that the exploitation of nature follows
the same logic as the exploitation of women and other minorities. Greta Gaard speaks
for many women when she calls for an analysis of all forms of oppression in emanci-
patory struggles:
Drawing on the insights of ecology, feminism, and socialism, ecofeminism’s basic premise is that
the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality,
physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature.
Ecofeminism calls for an end to all oppressions, arguing that no attempt to liberate women
(or any other oppressed group) will be successful without an equal attempt to liberate nature.
(Gaard 1993, 1)
Ecofeminists have differed in their approach to end these forms of oppression. Some
are affiliated with liberalism, others with socialism, Marxism, anarchism or essential-
ist positions about nature and gender. Two highly influential historical studies, both
rooted in feminist materialism, have provided a foundation for further research on the
association of women with nature and its disastrous effects on women as well as on
the natural environment, the first being Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1975),
the second Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980). Whereas Kolodny explores
the often dire consequences of the feminization of the North American landscape,
Merchant blames the exploitation and destruction of nature in the Western world on
the development of capitalism and rationality since the Enlightenment.
Most studies on the relationship between women and nature have been
human-centered, placing social concerns first, others (like Greta Gaard or Carol
Adams) have included the rights and welfare of animals on their agenda. Academ-
ically, some ecofeminists have linked their analyses with poststructuralism (Karla
Armbruster), others with Bakhtin’s dialogism (Patrick D. Murphy), feminist stand-
point theory (Deborah Slicer), postmodernism and radical democracy (Catriona
Sandilands), queer theory (Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Greta
Gaard), postcolonialism (Vandana Shiva), a critique of racist ideologies (Dorceta E.
Taylor), and, last but not least, the oppression of indigenous women (Winona LaDuke,
Paula Gunn Allen). The list is by no means complete, but should give an idea about
the diversity and multi-directionality of ecofeminism since the 1980s. All of these
scholars – the exception being cultural ecofeminists – assume that categories such
as nature, women and animals as well as the relationship between them are socially
constructed, no one takes them as ‘naturally’ given.
Ecofeminism until the mid-1990s, even the end of the millennium, has often
been subsumed under distinct feminist labels: liberal (or radical rationalist), radical
cultural and spiritual, and social (or socialist). Ecofeminists grounded in these the-
oretical directions differ from each other in their understanding of the relationship
between women and nature. In the following I will briefly define these labels, because
it proves to be one possibility to distinguish between the plethora of the many, some-
times confusing terms. I will also point out the shortcomings of such labeling.2
Liberal (or radical rationalist) feminists have their roots in political liberalism.
They view both men and women as rational agents who regard capitalism as the
optimal economic structure to maximize their own self-interests. For them, environ-
mental problems can best be solved by better science, better laws and regulations (Mer-
chant 1990, 100–101). Liberal feminists reject the association of women with nature.
They argue, like Simone de Beauvoir, that women must overcome their ‘natural’
femininity and enter the realm of traditionally male culture, because being defined
as more natural than men has led to their subordination in patriarchal culture. As
Ynestra King (1990, 110) writes, “[t]hey deplore the appropriation of ecology as a fem-
inist issue, seeing it as a regression that is bound to reinforce sex-role stereotyping”
or, as de Beauvoir said in an interview with Alice Schwarzer in 1984, “[o]nce again,
women are being defined in terms of ‘the other,’ once again they are being made into
the ‘second sex’ […]. Equating ecology with feminism is something that irritates me.
They are not automatically one and the same thing at all” (qtd. in King 1990, 110). As
radical rational feminists favor culture over nature, they perpetuate the strict separa-
tion between the two spheres and cannot be considered ecofeminists.
Radical cultural feminists, or simply cultural (eco)feminists, on the other hand,
value the association of women with nature. Feminists like Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich
or Susan Griffin even believe in the moral superiority of the female realm – against
the destructive male realm – and celebrate a distinct female culture. The female body
is seen as a source of power, nurture and care. In their view, environmental problems
cannot be traced back to the ‘naturalization’ of women and others, but to the alien-
ation of men from the female realm of love and growth. Charlene Spretnak (1989,
129) deplores men’s lack of female reproductive experiences: “Not feeling intrin-
sically involved in the processes of birthing and nurture, nor strongly predisposed
toward empathetic communion, men may have turned their attention, for many eras,
2 For an overview of ecofeminism until the end of the twentieth century see Grewe-Volpp (2004),
“Natural Spaces Mapped by Human Minds,” especially chapter 2.3. Most of the following summary of
the ecofeminist labels is based on this chapter.
towards the other aspect of the cycle, death.” These ideas about women and nature
have caused severe criticism, because they fall back on essentialized notions of an
original, universal femininity that ignores historical, cultural, social, racial and other
aspects of difference. Furthermore, not all kinds of oppression can be explained by
sexism. Women of color, for example, share their struggle against racism or genocide
with men, and not all women are naturally nurturing, nor are they morally superior.
Ynestra King (1990, 111) explicitly deplores the romanticization of women as good and
as apart from the “dastardly deeds of men and culture,” because the world is more
complicated than that.
Closely connected to cultural ecofeminists, sometimes even a part of cultural
ecofeminism is an ecofeminist spirituality. It consists of an eclectic mixture of various
groups of women who believe in an immanent Goddess as opposed to a patriarchal,
transcendent God. This Goddess is not “Yahweh with a skirt” (Spretnak 1989, 128), but
she “is embodied in the living world, in the human, animal, plant, and mineral com-
munities and their interrelationships” (Starhawk 1989, 177). Ynestra King observes a
greater racial diversity in this movement than among the predominantly white cul-
tural (eco)feminists, because women of color and indigenous women contribute to it
with sophisticated cultural traditions. Nevertheless, it is precisely these women who
have articulated their critique against white appropriations of another culture which
they see as yet another form of exploitation, even cultural imperialism. Indigenous
traditions are anchored in a very long history which cannot simply be transferred to
a white feminist movement. The same is true for pre-Christian gynocratic cultures,
about whose rituals and religious practices little is known. Greta Gaard (1993, 307–
308) is certainly not the only one who considers offering devotions to a Corn Goddess
or a Queen Bee highly awkward today. In this same vein, other scholars criticize such
an appropriation as ahistorical. Nevertheless, feminist spirituality was never fully
condemned by feminists, because it provided strength for many women and because
there is, again, a diversity of beliefs which must be looked at closely before they are
too easily judged. Female spirituality is not, however, a useful tool for political or
social analyses of the connection between the association of women with nature and
its consequences.
Social and socialist feminists both criticize capitalist patriarchy as the source of
the oppression of women. They both refer to neo-Marxist philosophies in their analy-
ses of the (re)productive labor of women without ignoring their biological and social
conditions. Social ecofeminism goes back to the ecologist Murray Bookchin whose
goal was a radically egalitarian, decentralized society which would lead to the end
of environmental destruction. He believed in a ‘natural,’ harmonious relationship
between humans and nature as well as among humans. However, he had nothing to
say about the category of gender, so that later ecofeminists, including his colleague
Ynestra King, finally turned away from his theories. Socialist feminists are material-
ists who regard nature, including the human body, as socially and historically con-
structed. They focus strongly on human, especially female labor, and on economic
and political power relations. According to Ynestra King, the centrality of economics
in their theory and practice is their strength as well as their weakness. They have
developed a strong class analysis, but have not sufficiently addressed the issue of
nature: “they do not treat the domination of nature as a significant category for femi-
nism” (King 1990, 114, 115). Ecofeminists rooted in socialist theory, among them King,
Carolyn Merchant, Karen Warren, and Val Plumwood, have made the analysis of the
links between the domination of nature and of women and other minorities their
major research goal, adding an important new theoretical perspective to the study of
the relationship between nature and culture.
The feminist and ecofeminist labels help to clarify theoretical positions, but
they sometimes too easily pigeonhole complex and multifaceted debates. Although
there is a clear divide between essentialist and constructionist ideas, many ecofemi-
nist scholars have views that overlap neat categorizations. As Cate Sandilands, who
has done extensive research on queer ecofeminism and democracy, wrote in 2009:
“I have never liked the subdivision of the term [ecofeminism] into social-, cultural-,
anarcha-, etc. for several reasons. First, […] I think we all have more in common than
the hyphenations suggest. Second, and relatedly, it’s far more important, intellectu-
ally and politically, for ecofeminists to include than to specialize” (qtd in Gaard 2011,
45). It makes no sense to reduce all cultural ecofeminists to a biological determin-
ism (because some are well aware of the social construction of gender), or to regard
socialist ecofeminists as the only politically correct group within the ecofeminist
movement. It is important to look closely and in detail at their arguments to arrive at
a critical assessment. It is just as important to consider how much ecofeminists have
in common. The major goal of all is the abolition of power relations. They criticize the
dominance and exploitation of women as well as of nature in a patriarchal society and
extend their critique to all forms of oppression. They recognize the fact that people do
not only live in a cultural human world, but also in a natural environment, and that
a solution to social problems, especially with regard to gender relations, cannot be
achieved without a solution to environmental problems, or vice versa.
2 Ecofeminism and the Material Turn

Despite a reluctance by feminists to use the prefix ‘eco’ for their own identification in
the last two decades, they have continued and expanded scholarly work in ecofem-
inism since the 1990s. In general, one can observe an intensified theoretical discus-
sion rooted in poststructuralism and lately also in posthumanism, and a weakening
of radical cultural or essentialist views into a practically insignificant marginality.
Serpil Oppermann speaks of a movement from material to posthuman ecocriticism
in this volume, which “forges a post-naturalist environmental imagination in the
making.” (↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism).
Indeed, the most prominent and sophisticated ecofeminist research today can
be found within a theoretical field labeled ‘the material turn,’ which has become a
hot topic in ecocriticism at large. The material turn is a critical reaction against the
linguistic turn, the dominance of social constructionism and its exclusive emphasis
on discourse, because as Karen Barad (2008, 120) aptly pointed out, “[l]anguage has
been granted too much power.” This suspicion of the power of language was already
expressed by early ecocritics in the 1990s who playfully insisted on practicing “com-
poststructuralism.” However, the new focus on matter is not a return to earlier forms
of materialism as articulated in Marxist philosophy, nor is it a revival of the early
ecocritical aversion to theory or to radical cultural forms of ecofeminism, because
in these theories, the material world existed ‘out there,’ separate from culture. New
materialists value many ideas of the linguistic turn und the important cultural work
it has done, most of all its critique of power structures inherent in the naturalization
of social categories. Yet, they deplore the total retreat from materiality, the neglect of
the properties of matter which when taken seriously, lead to a new concept of what it
means to be a human being in a social and natural environment. In short, new mate-
rialism leads to the insight that humans are inextricably a part of the material world
which acts upon them as they act upon it.
This insight makes new materialism an attractive thought model for ecofeminists,
because it argues persuasively against the separation of nature and culture, of human
bodies and the natural environment, of sex and gender, of matter and discourse, and
because it thus renders ideas of hierarchical dualism, ecofeminists’s major target of
critique, obsolete. Ecofeminists of the 1990s started developing theories which tried
to heal the gap between radical forms of poststructuralism (nature exists merely as
a text) and essentialistism (nature exists as an original entity in itself). Donna Har-
away’s concept of nature, for example, worked against a strict dichotomy between
nature and culture. To her, nature was not a passive object awaiting cultural defi-
nition, but an actor participating in the production of its meaning. “In its scientific
embodiments as well as in other forms, nature is made, but not entirely by humans;
it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans” (Haraway 1992, 297). Three
years later, N. Katherine Hayles also acknowledged a dynamic nature which humans
can relate to only in so far as their particular embodiment allows. The meaning of the
world is thus the result of an interplay between embodied humans and an agentic
world (Hayles 1995b, 413). Val Plumwood (1993, 159) speaks of nature not as dead
matter, but as “the earth other as a centre of agency or intentionality” that actively
participates in the relationship between humans and non-humans. Although I find
the term “intentionality” problematic, this new conception of an agentic world is
useful because it opposes a dualistic juxtaposition of an active human subject and
a passive material object. As Plumwood (1993, 5) neatly summarizes: “Once nature
is reconceived as capable of agency and intentionality, and human identity is recon-
ceived in less polarized and disembodied ways, the great gulf which Cartesian thought
established between the conscious, mindful human sphere and the mindless, clock-
work natural one disappears.”
Haraway, Hayles and Plumwood are part of a larger group of theorists who put
great emphasis on the agentic power of the material world which interacts with
humans and which is thus not merely the projection foil of discourse.3 Bruno Latour’s
actor-network theory, also from the 1990s, has been highly influential for new mate-
rialist thought as well. Latour attributes the capacity of agency to humans as well as
non-humans. An ‘actant,’ a term he substitutes for ‘actor,’ is a source of action, “some-
thing that acts or to which activity is granted by others” (Latour 1996, 373); it can be
human or non-human or even an event. The result is, as Bennett (2010, 9) maintains,
that “[a]gentic capacity is now seen as differentially distributed across a wider range
of ontological types.” One convincing and often cited example of the agentic capacity
of matter comes from Ladelle McWhorter who has observed how dirt acts without
being a conscious agent, how it aggregates and perpetuates itself, which, according
to Stacy Alaimo (2008, 247), “demands a reconceptualization of agency itself.”4 Other
influential examples of new materialist thought come from modern physics, foremost
chaos and complexity theory, from molecular biology, biotechnology and genetics,
to name just some of the most important fields.5 New physics focuses on “forces,
energies, and intensities (rather than substances),” and research in genetics shows
how an organism’s properties are dependent on complex interactions between genes
and many other forces including not only hormones, but even environmental factors
(Coole and Frost 2010, 13, 17).
Actants, agency, activity, interaction, intra-action – these are some of the key
terms that new materialists explore in great detail. They are the core of their onto-
logical speculations about the intricate and complex relations between material phe-
nomena and discursive representations. New materialists go a step further than the
ecocritics and ecofeminists of the 1990s in that they do not take the agency of matter
simply for granted, but analyze the capacity and effectiveness of matter and material-
ity; they also point towards the ethical and political dimensions of their new approach
in times of global warming, resource depletion, and other pressing ecological con-
cerns. New materialists regard matter – organic and inorganic – as vital and alive.
In her aptly titled study Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett (2010, viii) explains that “[b]y
‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – […]
to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their
own.” These agents or forces are neither subjects who make conscious decisions, nor
are they in any way linked to human intentionality; their vitality is rather an imma-
3 For a more detailed discussion of Haraway’s and Hayles’ early position, see Grewe-Volpp 2006.
4 See also Heather Sullivan (2012) on “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.”
5 See Coole and Frost’s (2010) introduction to New Materialisms for a detailed overview of influential
ideas for new materialisms in philosophy, the natural, social and political sciences.
nent property of matter. There is also no outside force which initiates the activity of
matter, matter rather possesses “its own modes of self-transformation, self-organiza-
tion, and directedness” (2010, 10).
Another important characteristic of the vitality of matter is that elements never act
alone or in isolation (just as human beings never exist in their own separate spheres),
but in cooperation with other elements. Hence, “[matter’s] efficacy or agency always
depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies
and forces” (Bennett 2010, 21). Actants, to use Latour’s term for non-subjective,
impersonal sources of action, ‘do’ things in their encounters with other actants and
thus bring about change. They form ‘assemblages,’ a term Bennett (2010, 23) takes
from Deleuze and Guattari and which she describes as “ad hoc groupings of diverse
elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts,” as “living, thriving confederations.” They
are highly dynamic, continually creating new modes of existence that in turn interact
with other assemblages or groupings, thus constituting the emergent qualities of life.
Karen Barad (2008, 138, 139) prefers to speak of “intra-activity,” which means that
things become what they are in their encounter with other assemblages or groupings,
i.e. that there is nothing that precedes their relations, whereas “inter-action” pre-
sumes the existence of things prior to their assemblage (see also Alaimo 2012, 396).
Matter for her is thus “not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (Barad 2008,
139, 146). Donna Haraway, in her more recent work, supports Barad’s notion of beings
constituting each other and themselves in their relationships. She also insists that
“[b]eings do not preexist their relatings” (Haraway 2003, 6) and speaks of a co-evolu-
tion of humans and dogs, for example, which has shaped both creatures: “We make
each other up, in the flesh” (2–3).
However, it is not only humans and non-human beings such as animals that
are part of the co-evolving, perpetually becoming world. Involved in the processes
of becoming are also material phenomena such as flesh and genes, minerals and
trees, to name just a few, and importantly, techno-culture, historical, political and
economic forces, and many other factors. Discourse shapes the world just as the mate-
rial world influences discourse, or as Karen Barad (2008, 140) argues, “[d]iscursive
practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to
one another; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the
dynamics of intra-activity.” This statement can be considered the key to new mate-
rialism; it bridges the gap between a conception of matter outside of culture and of
a material world defined exclusively by text. For new materialists, the separation of
nature and culture does not make sense. Instead, questions of ontology and knowing,
social construction and the agency of matter are inextricably intertwined in Hara-
way’s concepts of ‘natureculture’ (2003, 2) and ‘co-construction,’ in Barad’s ‘intra-ac-
tivity,’ Latour’s ‘actants’ or Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality.’ They all imply the intercon-
nectedness of various phenomena, material and discursive. Timothy Morton (2010,
15) includes thinking itself in the ‘mesh,’ which is his term for all the interconnected
entities taken together. This mesh can be approached by ecological thought, “a prac-
tice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with
other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral” (7). The entanglement of material and
discursive forces is also emphasized by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann in
their useful critical delineation of the material turn (↗18 Material Ecocriticism and
↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism). They quote Coole and Foster, Alaimo
and Hekman, Bennett, Latour and Barad (to which I would add Haraway), who all
argue that “we need to theorize [the natural and the cultural] together, and analyze
their complex relationships in terms of their indivisibility and thus their mutual effect
on one another” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 462, 463).
What makes new materialism so compelling for ecofeminism are the notions of
interconnection, entanglement or more precisely, intra-activity, because these catego-
ries are based on a non-hierarchical relationship among phenomena which dissolves
the concept of hyper-separation, a concern which lies at the heart of ecofeminist
theory. New materialism also reconceptualizes and expands feminist understand-
ings of the body as divided into categories of sex and gender. As Stacy Alaimo (2008,
239) claims, “feminist theory’s most revolutionary concept – the concept of gender
as distinct from biological sex – is predicated on a sharp opposition between nature
and culture.” However, by directly engaging with matter, ecofeminists come to under-
stand the ‘natural’ body no longer as “the ground of essentialism,” which renders bio-
logical determinism moot (241). The female body is not a passive object awaiting cul-
tural inscriptions, but an active agent participating in cultural constructions. Female
embodiment then is not destiny, rather, it is part of natural and cultural processes.
Again, the notion of bodies as agents is not a new 21st-century insight. Donna Har-
away’s image of nature as a trickster as well as her hybrid cyborgs abandoned the idea
of purely natural bodies shaped by culture already in the early 1990s; she insisted
instead that bodies can act in unexpected and surprising ways. Deborah Slicer (1998,
61) was only one of several ecofeminists who picked up this idea by defining the phys-
ical as a player with its own agency which if forgotten or ignored, can have disastrous
consequences: “To engage in a hubris that forgets the material as player, whether
we are talking about a human body or a watershed, is self-destructive, as environ-
mentalists have been saying all along.” She agrees with N. Katherine Hayles (1995b,
61) who claims that our embodiment as human beings shapes our understanding
of the world. The body itself is thus an important participant in the construction of
meaning. It is, as Stacy Alaimo (1998, 126, 137) argued in the late 1990s, “a place of
vibrant connection, historical memory, and knowledge” – “a threshold where nature
and culture dissolve.” New materialists of the 21st century explore how the body in its
materiality intersects with history or memory, with social and political forces, with
discourse. It is important to them that the material properties of our body are alive
and ‘doing’ things on their own, that, according to Bennett (2010, 10), they are “lively
and self-organizing.” In her more recent research, Donna Haraway equally focuses on
the body as a material becoming. To her, bodies are figures, which she interprets as
“material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one
another” (Haraway 2008, 4). Although she analyzes the co-evolution of humans and
dogs, her results can be extended to other human and non-human relationships as
well. In her view, there has never been a pure origin, nor does any entity exist that is
separate from its environment. Instead, all phenomena have developed in exchange
with other phenomena, so that we as humans have incorporated past assemblages,
past naturecultures, past natural and cultural imbrications. Human agency is thus
what Bennett (2010, 31) calls an “interfolding network of humanity and nonhuman-
ity,” and this interfolding has, according to Haraway, a very long history.
Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-corporeality’6 superbly theorizes the body’s
inseparability from material and discursive processes. As bodies, she says, we are very
literally a part of our environment which “is always the very substance of ourselves”
(Alaimo 2010, 4). These substances can be healing or nurturing, but they can also be
toxic and dangerous. Importantly, we cannot control them as they act independently
from our own intentions, or as Alaimo points out, “a recognition of trans-corpore-
ality entails a rather disconcerting sense of being immersed within incalculable,
interconnected material agencies that erode even our most sophisticated modes of
understanding” (17). If we take the concept of ‘co-construction’ or ‘interconnection’
or ‘mesh’ into consideration, we will realize that we are not the lords of our own cre-
ation, but that many tiny elements, some of them nasty, are also actively involved in
our becoming. We can no longer see ourselves as disentangled from all the stuff that
is supposedly floating around ‘out there.’ We will equally understand that our bodies
are not only the product of the agency of matter, but also of a mingling of historical
and political forces, cultural practices, environmental conditions and many other
factors. Human corporeality is “something that always bears the trace of history,
social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk” (261).
The new materialist concept of trans-corporeality is also an attractive model for
ecofeminists because it has ethical and political consequences. It erases notions of
subjectivity that rely on human exceptionality; it fosters instead a more humble rec-
ognition of humans being part of an ever evolving world. In the 1970s, deep ecologist
Arne Naess had propagated a “biocentric equality” (Devall and Sessions 1985, 70)
and the conviction that humans were a genuine part of all life. Whereas deep ecolo-
gists believed to reach the experience of oneness intuitively and were skeptical about
natural sciences, new materialists emphasize the importance of scientific knowledge
which can give us valuable insight into our bodies’ intricate involvement with the
environment. If we perceive with Karen Barad (2008, 146) that we are not in the world,
but of the world, we should pay better attention to the materiality we inter- or intra-
act with. If we know about our place as embodied humans in an agentic world, we will
ideally ask questions about responsibility. Our inquiry will be, as Haraway (2003, 7)
6 Alaimo (2010, 3) defines trans-corporeality “as a theoretical site […] where corporeal theories, envi-
ronmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways.”
presumes, “about understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might
be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each
other less violently.” We will ask political questions about the causes and effects of
environmental problems which can no longer be seen as existing somewhere out
there, but as part of ourselves.7 Toxic bodies reveal our being of the world quite dras-
tically. Not only have they incorporated dangerous elements that are harmful to our
health, they are also the product of economic, cultural and other forces. Toxic bodies
are always situated in a specific material environment and a specific power struc-
ture. They “insist that environmentalism, human health, and social justice cannot
be severed, since they are all continually emergent from zones of intra-activity (in
Barad’s terms) that are as biological as they are political, as material as they are
social” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 14).8
3 An Ecofeminist Reading of Linda Hogan’s Power

Literary texts have the potential to imaginatively elucidate and to negotiate ideas
expressed in theory. They can serve as a kind of test laboratory in which social con-
flicts and tensions interact, allowing the reader a vicarious access to a world he or
she has not experienced before. This is especially true for Native American literature,
which presents us with a mediating position between Native and Western cultures,
or between traditional and modern value systems, thus instigating a thought provok-
ing reading process which cannot prioritize one system over the other (see also ↗10
Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies). In her novel Power, Linda Hogan not only jux-
taposes traditional concepts of nature and modern ideas about environmental protec-
tion, she also employs several ecofeminist assumptions and new materialist concepts
of matter, turning them into a part of lived reality. She agrees, for example, with the
7 In The Good-Natured Feminist Catriona Sandilands (1999) has developed an expanded concept of
democracy that takes the various players, human and non-human, into consideration. Timothy Mor-
ton (2010, 7) has also raised the issue of democracy in his study The Ecological Thought: “It’s [the
ecological thought] a practice and a process of becoming aware of how human beings are connected
with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral.”
8 Hannes Bergthaller (2014) criticizes new materialists for remaining rather vague in their articula-
tion of ethical guidance (just like deep ecologists), making it difficult to privilege particular assem-
blages within the general flux. He argues for an analysis of the limits of agency and of the function
of boundaries, which he undertakes with the concept of autopoiesis (39, 40). According to him, it is
necessary to develop a set of tools that help to draw distinctions between different types of assem-
blages, “and to specify the conditions under which they can persist through time” (42). I agree that
new materialism must be further developed to become an adequate analytical tool, but it has so far
definitely done invaluable, sophisticated work in analyzing the imbrications of nature and culture
and our own material involvement in the world’s processes.
basic ecofeminist conviction that there is a link between the domination and exploita-
tion of the natural environment, women and indigenous people, and she connects
this link with Western notions of hyperseparation and its inherent power relations.
Hogan has created a world in which strict boundaries – between land and water,
between spirit and matter, between nature and culture – are challenged and juxta-
posed with notions of interdependence and inter- or intra-activity. Although nature
in her novel is imbued with an indigenous spirituality, which would support a radical
ecofeminist position, she cannot be easily categorized. Her concept of nature is also
very radically material, its properties corresponding with the insights of new materi-
alists: matter is agentic and vital, even sentient and volitional, but it is also shaped
by the forces of history, politics and ideology. The toxic bodies of the text reveal their
embeddedness in a very real natural and social environment, and they are proof of
the material and spiritual consequences of the abuse of power, which points towards
the need for a more ethical way of living in this world.
Take, for example, the land, a fictional place in Florida, which has been shaped
by water and is again, at the present time of the novel’s action, flooded by a storm of
mythical proportions. It represents a perpetually evolving, changing world without
clear boundaries, made not only by geological and meteorological forces, but also by
mythological stories of life-creating spirits and the disruptive intrusions of modernity.
The world before colonization is remembered as a life in balance between the natural
environment and the indigenous people, when a bond of mutual respect and care
ensured the continuance of life. The stories, deeply embedded in and intra-acting
with the materiality of the land, can be understood as guidelines for physical and
spiritual survival, providing meaning and identity. With the advent of white people,
this world fell apart. Not feeling intrinsically connected to the land, the invaders pro-
moted their ideas of progress, built highways through sacred territories, polluted the
water and the land and deprived the indigenous tribes of their living conditions. The
colonial ideology and its practices have had and still have material consequences for
the land and its inhabitants: “The people are more sick than in the past and the other
doctors can’t help them. Mostly it is the chemicals, Ama says, the same ones that have
poisoned all the fish” (Hogan 1998, 140). As environmental justice activists and schol-
ars have pointed out, poor people and people of color are disproportionately exposed
to toxic elements and hazardous wastes. They usually don’t have a lobby to defend
their rights, which helps explain the desperate situation of the few remaining tribes
in Florida and elsewhere. For Omishto, the young main protagonist of the novel, it
becomes clear that history is “a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves
nothing behind” (Hogan 1998, 170). The land in its present-day material condition as
well as human corporeality are thus, as Alaimo claimed (2010, 261), “something that
always bears the trace of history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution
of risk.” They have been shaped by discursive forces, but at the same time, by the
diverse material phenomena that constitute their being. Despite its exploitation, this
land is still very powerful; it is alive and watching. The swamp is a dangerous place
“where a girl can get lost and the swamps and trees would eat her alive” (Hogan 1998,
19), but it is also a place one can be friends with if one learns how to relate to it. Later
in the novel, Omishto experiences the swamp as “full of intelligent souls of cat, deer,
and wind. […] There is something alive here and generous” (1998, 231). The vitality of
the land is inherent in its materiality which cannot be separated from its spirituality.
The complex relationship between material phenomena and discursive rep-
resentations becomes especially obvious in the novel’s depiction of the Florida
panther, a real animal belonging to an endangered species and a mythical cat called
Sisa in the old language, which has existed before humans and “taught us the word,
Oni, which is the word for life itself, for wind and breath” (Hogan 1998, 73). It is the
body of the panther, which being literally a part of its natural environment, reveals
the material effects of colonialism, but is also treated as a mythical being outside
of history. This particular cat is maybe the last remaining animal of its species, the
others have been run over by cars or are sick, their territory crisscrossed by highways.
Ama, a woman who believes in ancient traditions, takes it upon herself to sacrifice
the cat in a ritual hunt to ensure its survival. She believes in an old story according to
which a dying panther called a woman to kill it during a time of sickness introduced
by foreigners. If she did it correctly, all the animals would come back and there would
be wholeness again (111). Ama thus connects the ancient story with the condition of
the modern world. She tries to stop the destruction and heal the land, the animals and
the tribe. Omishto draws the parallel between the panther’s sick body and Ama’s, the
tribe’s and the land’s fallen state: “[…] it is just like her, […], like the cut-up land, too,
and I see that this is what has become of us, of all three of us here. We are diminished
and endangered” (69). The materiality of the panther, its toxic body, just as the toxic
body of the land, the water and the people, are the result of history, modernity, and
the workings of poisonous elements which intra-acted to produce this world out of
balance.
Janie Soto, a traditional woman from the Panther Clan, also believes that there is
a reciprocal relationship between all material and spiritual phenomena which have
evolved over time in a mutual process of becoming. She is convinced of the intricate
links between the agency of a material world and the consequences all human actions
have on it. She “believes and knows that sometimes what we do goes up into the sky,
and that sometimes it seeps down into earth and hides until all things go back to their
beginning. She believes that our every act, word, and thought is of great significance
in the round shape of this world and there are consequences for each” (Hogan 1998,
183). Because we are made from clay and mud, we are of the same substance as the
rest of creation; we are very literally of the world, as Barad claims. Each single act is
therefore of ethical importance, it has effects on the whole web of life. Disrespecting
these ancient “rules” (183) leaves traces in the bodies of land, animals and people,
many of them toxic.
The repeated references in the text to a world in balance before the intrusion of
white invaders seems to suggest an idealization of an ancient indigenous culture, a
form of ethnocentrism which falls back on dualistic thinking, against the principles
of ecofeminism. Of course the insistence on the destructive power of colonialism is
justified in the face of the genocide that took place on the North American continent.
However, what speaks against an idealization of traditional ways of life is Hogan’s
depiction of the old Taiga people who live isolated from the modern world and insist
on a rigorous adherence to ancient rituals. They accuse Ama of not having killed
the panther properly and sentence her to four years of aimless wandering, which
comes close to a death sentence. They do not realize that in the modern world, the
old stories do not work anymore. New forces have become active so that the rituals
must be changed. What they cannot know is that Ama did not bring them the fur of
the panther as required because she knows that the sorry condition of their totem
animal’s body would have driven them to despair. Ama willingly sacrifices herself
with the panther believing in the restorative power of her deed. And she changed the
ritual because, as she told Omishto, “the old ways are not enough to get us through
this time and she was called to something else. To living halfway between the modern
world and the ancient one” (Hogan 1998, 22, 23).
What further complicates an easy dualism between ‘positive’ Native and ‘nega-
tive’ white ideas of a healthy relationship to the natural environment is the legitimate
prohibition, enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, to hunt an endangered
species. From a modern point of view, this animal should not be killed. Neverthe-
less, Ama’s acquittal by the white court is not a victory because the lawyers find her
story and her behavior more crazy than guilty. To them, she is the exotic ‘other’ who
cannot be held responsible for her misdeed. They cannot understand that she killed
out of compassion for the animal and for the tribe, reenacting an old myth, albeit
with important variations. Was Ama’s hunt then a failure, condemned by both the
white and the tribal court? Was it an irresponsible individual act without the power to
change the future of the land, the animals, or the people?
To answer this question it is important to consider Omishto’s role in the novel, the
young woman who is drawn to Ama’s world, but does not believe in magic, who feels
that she is of two worlds, the world of modernity and the world of ancient people,
although she is a foreigner among them, although she does not speak their language.
She knows that “our survival depends on who I am and who I will become” (Hogan
1998, 161), and that in the course of the novel she must decide where she belongs.
She has witnessed the killing of the panther and she knows that Ama was both right
and wrong. Being a highly sensitive person, she listens to the world around her – not
only to words spoken, but also to the wind, the fog, the mysteries of the natural envi-
ronment. At the end of the novel, after Ama has been sentenced by the tribal court,
she joins the elders, dreams of the panther and becomes the new panther woman.
However, this does not imply a return to an original world of purity. Omishto has a
mediating function. Being of two worlds, she has the potential to renew the tribe, to
help it adapt to the modern world and to keep the belief in the vitality and agency
of nature. Most importantly, Omishto believes in the creative power of stories. In
Dwellings, Hogan (1998, 94) wrote that we need new stories against the destructive
“stories of endings,” of “extinction,” that we need “new terms and conditions that are
relevant to the love of land, a new narrative that would imagine another way.” Her
statement implies that stories have material effects, shaping our actions and thus the
development of ourselves, as well as the environment. Stories of endings and extinc-
tion will provide no alternative to exploitative ways of being in the world. Stories of
beginnings, of respect for ‘vibrant matter’ and our own intricate embeddedness in
and intra-action with this material world will or at least might.
By putting two epistemological systems into dialogue – Western reliance on sci-
entific facts and indigenous belief in mythological reality – Hogan mediates between
two arguably incompatible concepts, imaginatively overcoming strict boundaries and
dualistic divisions, a major concern of ecofeminist theory. The reader is confronted
with two completely different value systems which he or she must reflect upon in
a hermeneutical process of interpretation. Either / or solutions are not useful here.
The spiritual and the material, myth and science, nature and culture, seemingly at
odds with each other, must be reconciled in the understanding that they are intri-
cately interwoven and mutually emergent. The Taiga, a fictional tribe in late twen-
tieth century Florida, experience a tension between the forces of modernity and a
traditional way of life. Their future depends on the sensitivity of a young woman who
will connect the old and the new, the rational and the intuitive, the material and the
spiritual, prioritizing neither, but keeping them in a productive dialogue, aware of
the powers in a continually evolving world. Her retreat to the place of the traditional
Taiga is not a form of escapism, but in the final analysis, a necessary precondition
for a reconnection of the tribal with the modern world, for an end to binary thinking.
4 B
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Nancy Easterlin
12 E
cocriticism, Place Studies, and Colm
Tóibín’s “A Long Winter”: A Biocultural
Perspective
Abstract: This chapter argues for the expansion of the notion of place employed in
ecocriticism and explains the benefits of the enlarged concept for environmental
understanding and literary interpretation. Drawing on place studies, a growing inter-
disciplinary research area, Easterlin articulates the field’s prevailing dynamic notion
of place, understood as a set of complex relations between processes, persons, and
places. Referred to as place-in-process, this notion of the human interaction with and
conceptualization of spaces is compatible with the evolution of humans as a way-
finding species. Adopting the model of place-in-process in a subsequent analysis of
Colm Tóibín’s novella “A Long Winter,” Easterlin demonstrates how imbalances in
family and social relationships, combined problems of self-identity, activate potential
dangers in the nonhuman natural world that would not otherwise be lethal.
Key Terms: Environmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, human geography,

phenomenological geography, place, place attachment, place studies, wayfinding
The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless – to us – if we know little enough about
it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by
an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from
western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.
(Leopold 1989, 48)
Over the twenty-five year course of its development, ecocriticism – also known as
studies in literature and the environment – has undergone significant refinement
and expansion. Beginning with a focus on the nonhuman natural world and, as Law-
rence Buell (1999, 1091) puts it, in a generally antitheoretical,“up-country-and-out-
back” orientation, the field has gained theoretical sophistication and branched out to
include study of urban environments, feminist concerns, environmental justice, and
animal studies. Understandably, though, the physical environment remains a persis-
tent preoccupation of ecocriticism, which was initially motivated by calls for ecolog-
ical awareness in light of human depredations of the natural world. Struggling with
how to include human perspectives alongside ethical consciousness, some scholars
have increasingly recognized that the notion of ‘place’ is of central importance in the
conceptualization of the material world. At the same time, however, prominent eco-
critics such as Buell and Ursula Heise (2008, 21) remain suspicious of place, which
in their perspective harbors a counterproductive essentialism. For example, Heise
(10) insists that environmental efforts to restore the sense of place are a dead end as
12 Ecocriticism, Place Studies, and Colm Tóibín’s “A Long Winter” 227
a founding ideological principle, and she calls for deterritorialization constituted in

forms of culture not anchored to specific locales.
That the idea in question, ‘place,’ is always fundamentally ideological is most
certainly a matter of debate, notwithstanding the decades-old constructivist turn in
literary theory that eschews consideration of predispositions in human cognition,
attitudes, and behaviors. Somewhat ironically, the notion of place to which Buell and
Heise object is more an artifact of their own theoretical leanings and literary historical
interests than a reflection of the actual social and natural functionality of place. As
Heise (2008, 49) points out, the American environmental tradition and American-
ist literary studies are imbued with nostalgia for local attachment and an attendant
ambivalence about the increase in geographical mobility over the course of the past
two centuries. For Buell and Heise, the figuration of ‘place attachment’ as usually
anchored to the individual’s developmental ground and essentially connected to
primitivist ideology is leant further support by a somewhat exclusive recourse to Hei-
deggerian phenomenology, which leads Buell (2005, 66) to conclude that such feel-
ings “can easily fall into a sentimental environmental determinism.” Commenting on
this ideologically inflected permutation of place, Janet Fisko (2012) traces the Ameri-
can conjunction of ecological sensibility, local community, and participatory democ-
racy back to Thomas Jefferson and points to the disconnection between this notion
of place and contemporary egalitarian values and initiatives, such as the food justice
movement. Buell, Heise, and Fisko thus helpfully elucidate the ideology underpin-
ning and the contradictions within American conceptions of place attachment. But
as I have suggested elsewhere, place attachment is a much more diverse and dynamic
phenomenon than the static and romanticized version attendant upon nation-build-
ing and the social changes resulting from industrialization indicates (Easterlin 2012,
111–125). Those who engage in this particular metonymic error – taking one concep-
tualization for all potential instantiations and meanings – cannot explain the persis-
tence and ubiquity of attachments to diverse locales, much less their possible utility
in human existence and environmental affairs.
I support Heise’s calls for an expanded ecocritical investigation of globally and
generically diverse literatures; moreover, I argue that our ability to travel and enjoy
diverse locales, like our ability to read and write creatively and critically about them,
stems from both our evolved interest in and attraction to new natural phenomena
but, first and foremost, to our grounding in familiar domains. Ecocriticism has much
to gain by expanding its horizons to include research in cognitive and evolutionary
psychology as well as the intersection of these fields with ‘place studies,’ an interdis-
ciplinary area that has been growing and diversifying for over forty years. The purpose
of the current chapter is to explain the history, range of research, and methodological
and theoretical developments of this field; to illustrate that place studies coheres with
an evolutionary perspective on humans as a knowledge-seeking, wayfinding species,
who have evolved to explore new domains but whose felt attachment to given locales
228 Nancy Easterlin
is nevertheless adaptive; and to illustrate the complexity of ’place-in-process,’ the

dynamic relationship between persons, processes, and places, in a literary work.
In A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, I drew on devel-
opmental and environmental psychology, neuroscience, and other fields to argue that
human feelings for places are profoundly informed by the quality of human relation-
ships associated with physical locations. I have since learned that place studies is
a thriving, coherent, and broadly interdisciplinary scholarly area physical locations
(Easterlin 2012). Moreover, my recent research in place studies confirms my earlier
claims that, because of the evolved sociality of the human species, the quality of
relationships among people in a given locale strongly colors attitudes toward the
physical environment. Literature has a special role to play in reviving awareness of
those things to which we have become habituated, for, as Buell correctly notes, in life
people are only vaguely aware of their relationship to the physical environment. Since
literature is a critical part of the evolution of culture and an extension of mind, it has
special power to illuminate the dynamics of place-in-process. The novella I explore
here, Colm Tóibín’s A Long Winter, illuminates how a weakened fundamental place –
defined by impoverished family, community, and home attachments – turns the non-
human natural world into an inimical force.
1 Place Studies: An Overview

Studies in the dynamics of place attachment “represent all branches of social sciences,
including environmental psychology, sociology, community psychology, human
geography, cultural anthropology, gerontology, demography, urban studies, leisure
sciences and tourism, ecology, forestry, architecture and planning, and economics”
(Lewicka 2011b, 207). For many contemporary geographers, “place [is] the unique
focus distinguishing geography from other disciplines” (Seamon and Sowers 2008,
43, emphasis in the original). As Maria Lewicka (2011b) reports in “Place Attachment:
How Far Have We Come in the Last 40 Years?,” her overview of developments in the
field, the area continues to grow at an accelerating pace. Lewicka’s electronic search
identified 400 articles published in 120 journals in 40 years; 60 % of that total was
published between 2001 and 2011.
“Place” is succinctly defined as “space that has been given meaning through
personal, group, or cultural processes” (Altman and Low 1992, 5, emphasis in the
original). It is an integrated concept that includes both subjective and objective com-
ponents (Buttimer and Seamon 1980), such as affective, cognitive, and practical
attachments; varied actors and a range of social relationships (individuals, groups,
and cultures); and linear as well as cyclical temporal dimensions (Altman and Low
1992, 8). As Irwin Altman and Setha Low explain (1992), although the early decades
of the field focused on individual cognitive functioning, by the 1990s phenomenolog-
ical approaches had gained increasing importance. Phenomenological geography, a

dimension of human geography, studies the essential nature of man’s dwelling on
earth (Seamon 1980).
Present-day ecocritics echo a longstanding concern of scholars in place studies
when they caution against potential essentialism. Some of the earliest scholarly forays
into the area, in fact, illustrate both strong biases toward particular types of environ-
ments as well as static conceptions of emotional attachments to discrete locales. For
instance, in 1938, Louis Wirth predicted that urban density was deleterious to attach-
ment (see Hummon 1992). This hypothesis, however, has not been supported by later
research. As David Hummon reported in 1992, citing many social surveys from the
late 70s and early 80s, “community attachment, unlike community satisfaction, is
not strongly related to community size, density, or type. Such findings suggest that
community attachment must be understood in terms of processes other than those
involved in the broad ecological structuring of settlement patterns in modern, urban
society” (Hummon 1992, 257).
Notably, Hummon’s summary of these findings provides a centrally important
context for the evaluation of Aldo Leopold’s supposition that the grounding of indi-
viduals in distinct, naturally beautiful locales is crucial to healthy attachment and
living. Indeed, Lewicka’s (2011b, 209) survey of the literature in the field indicates
that “not only have places not lost their meaning but their importance in the con-
temporary world actually may have grown.” Whereas both the reality of disaster and
the prospect of annihilation lead to dislocation and alienation, and whereas the uni-
formity of many modern buildings and planned communities dulls perception, desire
for “the particularity of place – for what is truly ‘local’ or ‘regional,’” is increased
rather than deadened by these phenomena. Authentic, versus nostalgic, longing for
“identity, character, [and] nuance” increases with the banality of modern planning.
In sum, with modernization and mobility, the scale of place apparently grows, often
to the region and the nation, versus the local community, but its importance does not
evaporate (Lewicka 2011a, 679). This finding suggests that the deterritorialization that
Heise advocates on ethical grounds may, in fact, be part of a natural process contin-
gent upon the greater mobility resulting from modernization.
If processes distinct from settlement patterns appear to hold the key to place
attachment, what would these distinct processes be? In their separate studies, Altman
and Low as well as Hummon suggest that the central factor in strong place attach-
ment is the degree of the individual’s social connections within the specified areas,
and this assessment has not been contradicted by several more decades of research.
As Hummon (1992, 257) reported, “local social involvements – particularly those with
friends, but also those involving kin, organizational memberships, and local shop-
ping – prove to be the most consistent and significant source of sentimental ties to
local places.” One of Hummon’s interviewees in his study of Worcester, Massachu-
setts, Ann, who grew up and has spent her whole life there, replies negatively to the
230 Nancy Easterlin
question of what particular objects or places make the city home: “No, I don’t relate
Worcester to a thing. It’s more the people. Family and friends” (268).
That social relationships prove especially instrumental in place attachment
makes fundamental evolutionary sense since, for reasons of survival, humans are
a highly social species, as I have argued elsewhere (Easterlin, 2012, 118–120). I will
elaborate more on why social connections are such a powerful influence on feelings
for physical environments in the next section. Now, however, it is important to note
that of the three dimensions of place studies – persons, processes, and physical envi-
ronment – the last of these has been the least studied (Lewicka 2011b). Given oper-
ative definitions of ‘place’ as a function of human meaning attribution, and given
the strong influence of phenomenological geography on the field, this bias seems
understandable, if not inevitable. Simply put, place studies is human-centered. Fur-
thermore, the applied focus of this interdisciplinary area, whose findings have impli-
cations for planning and design, strengthens the field’s orientation toward persons
and processes. In my view, because literature often concretely represents the physi-
cal environment, literary analysis guided by place studies can help correct this defi-
ciency, even while it assumes that a species-centered perspective dominates all our
dealings – not only with space but, indeed, with all other entities outside our organ-
ismic boundaries (Easterlin 2004, 2010, 2012).
In their efforts to characterize differently experienced connections to places,
human geographers have developed typologies of attachment. Probably the most
influential of these is Hummon’s, in part because he was the first to give significant
attention to negative as well as positive relationship to locales. Hummon breaks down
community sentiment into five types: 1. everyday rootedness (characterized by Ann of
Worcester, above); 2. ideological rootedness, largely founded on the type of environ-
ment and in commitment to it; 3. displacement, evident in the person who still feels
attached to a native locale and unconnected to the current environment; 4. uncom-
mitted placelessness, evident in the person who feels unconnected to the locale; and
5. place relativity, displayed by the person who sees the locale as home, but has lived
elsewhere and is highly mobile. In a cross-study of the Polish population, Lewicka
proposes a modification of Hummon’s typology: 1. traditional attachment (a refine-
ment of Hummon’s everyday rootedness); 2. active (versus ideological) attachment;
3. place alienation (actual dislike); 4. place relativity (ambivalence); and 5. placeless-
ness. I find Lewicka’s refinements helpfully clarifying, but I caution against getting
caught up in memorizing terminology. What is significant is that positive and negative
perceptions of place are greatly affected by feedback between social relationships,
physical location, and self-identity. This dynamic, in short, constitutes place-in-pro-
cess.
The conception of place as an ongoing human construction, the result of over
forty years of research in place studies, stands in strong contrast to Heideggerian and
Leopoldian notions of attachment that limit the concept to a static and necessarily
positive relationship with a specified type of environment. As Antonio Cristoforetti,
Francesca Gennai, and Giulia Rodeschini (2011, 225) put it, place is a continuous and
dynamic redefinition of space, the “result of subjective re-involvement processes,” so
that place is perhaps best understood as “‘place-in-process.’” Hopefully, the present
brief overview conveys a sense of how fully dynamic this process is and how difficult,
therefore, it is to isolate the various aspects.
One final feature of place-in-process requires discussion, and that is self-iden-
tity. According to Cristoforetti et al, ‘home’, recognized as the quintessential place,
“includes and completes a person’s self-image and sense of identity” (Cristoforetti
et al 2011, 226). In place studies, home stands as “‘major fixed reference point for
the structuring of reality’” (Porteous, in Leweicka 2011b, 211). Associated with iden-
tity, order, rootedness, attachment, privacy, and security, home provides not only an
anchor but an evolving site in the process of self-definition. This view is shared by
neuroscience, developmental psychology, and evolutionary studies (Easterlin 2012,
117–125). From the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999), who identifies the self as
a fundamental point of reference, to attachment theorists and human geographers,
who insist on the developmental continuity between infant-caregiver attachment and
feeling for the total environment (i.e., including other persons and the nonhuman
natural world), contemporary science and social science overwhelmingly recognizes
that identity and functional efficacy are physically and spatially grounded. Concep-
tions of self, home, and place are developmentally and dynamically interrelated,
transforming with experience (Tuan 1977; Stern 1985).
Thus, in the field’s scholarly literature, placelessness or place alienation, corre-
lated with a feeling of uprootedness (rather than rootedness in home as a fixed ref-
erence point), often goes hand-in-hand with problems of identity and self-worth. As
Hummon explains, identity is strongly related to several factors, including the local
landscape as a symbolic extension of the self, as well as the sense of ‘insideness’ in
community wherein neighborhoods and communities become imbued with symbolic
meanings. These symbolic meanings, in turn, play a part in an individual’s self-defi-
nition – as, for instance, a friendly, small town inhabitant or, alternatively, a cosmo-
politan city-dweller. In “Identity and Place: Clinical Applications Based on Rooted-
ness and Uprootedness,” Michael A. Godkin points out that the relationship between
self-perception and place attachment has been noted since the 1960s. His interviews
with recovering alcoholics reveal that negative self-image is correlated with a feeling
of uprootedness. Of the three interviewees Godkin reports on, Doris, who spent many
years in an orphanage, feels uprooted in many indoor locations, which remind her of
the impersonal institutional habitation of her childhood; but she remembers fondly
picnics and the sense of freedom they would allow. Ellen especially loved the base-
ment workshop of her foster father, who treated her with affection and worked on
projects with her at the end of the day. Ben remembered warmly the place his family
had lived before his mother’s death.
Godkin wishes to emphasize the importance of place in therapy, insisting that,
for the patient, re-envisioning it helps establish a sense of self-coherence. In my
232 Nancy Easterlin
understanding of Godkin’s research, the individual with a weak or negative sense of

self re-establishes rootedness by remembering a place of value, and that feeling of
rootedness becomes necessarily an orientational point in the narrative of the self. The
earliest human geographers, including Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph, refer to degrees
of ‘insideness’ and ‘outsideness’ in feelings for place, a terminology generally synon-
ymous with ‘rootedness’ and ‘uprootedness.’ In effect, a perception of being/becom-
ing/belonging in a specific locale provides an orientational point for both physical
movement and ongoing construction of the self. Paul Morgan (2010), who turns his
attention to the developmental dynamic of child and environment, hypothesizes that
physical place, like caregivers, acts as an external regulator for the growing child. It
is true that, over time, the child learns to internalize the regulatory functions from
adults and external environment; however, in my view, human others and the nonhu-
man natural world retain a strong regulatory function over the lifetime. Essentially,
attachment to persons and locations encourages the positive self-image and feeling of
security that enable extended interpersonal and spatial relationships.
The perception of place, then, can – or, more correctly, will inevitably – be
affected or in fact transformed by changes in both social or family relationships
and the physical environment as well as development and aging. In fact, properly
understood, place cannot be static, since, being a complex human construction, it
is realized continuously through the attribution of meaning to concrete locales by
people transforming over the course of the lifespan. Identifying four core aspects of
the home, understood as the place that “includes and completes a person’s self-im-
age and sense of identity,” gerontologists Cristoforetti, Gennai, and Rodeschini (2011,
226) describe how its meaningful features – what they denominate as its heart, its
objects, its refuge, and its interjected internal spaces – alter under the condition of
widowhood. Similar to Godkin’s alcoholics, these widows must reconstruct the mean-
ingfulness of home spaces, in their case to fit their solitary lives and aging bodies.
Because place studies consistently emphasizes the importance of human feelings
and social attachments to environmental perception, ecocritics may well wonder how
such a field might contribute to an enlightened view of the nonhuman natural world.
Our manner of relation to the nonhuman is not only part of place-in-process but is
frequently foregrounded in literature, providing an opportunity to bring to conscious-
ness that to which we have become habituated.
2 Evolutionary Features of Place Attachment

With the exception of the environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan,
few contributors to place studies have located the field in the context of evolved
human psychology (Kaplan and Kaplan 1982; Kaplan 1992). Nonetheless, the find-
ings of place studies are not only highly compatible with current thinking about the
evolution and essential nature of our species but make fundamental sense within
that explanatory system. Why humans are able to adapt to every known terrestrial
environment, and why their relationships are so crucial to feelings about places, are
well explained by current evolutionary thought.
First things first: no organism exists outside of an environment, but most species
are far more tied to physical locations than humans, a highly unusual species. ‘The
environment’ consists of everything outside the organism and is a dynamic concept
whose complexity, extent, and rate of change will depend largely on the species adap-
tions of the organism in question (Easterlin 2004; 2012, 105–110). Most species inhabit
an ecological niche, which is constituted by a habitat and a suite of behavioral adap-
tations that enable resource extraction, coping with predators, and reproduction to
a degree that sustains the species. In this respect, humans are astonishingly unlike
other species in their capacity to adapt to diverse geographical locales and to occupy,
in the metaphor offered by John Tooby and Irven DeVore (1987), ‘the cognitive niche’;
indeed, in their comprehensive adaptability, they constitute an explanatory challenge
for evolutionary theory.
In Stephen Kaplan’s (1992) terminology, humans have evolved as a home-based,
wayfinding, knowledge-seeking, knowledge-using species, capable of employing
intelligence instrumentally as they travel into new domains. Arguing against research
traditions in social science that separate emotion from information processing,
Kaplan (1992, 583) points out that affective motivations are critically important to
intellectual function, because “an information-oriented organism that did not find
confusion disturbing might be content to spend considerable time confused. Such
an organism would, in the words of a colleague, be ‘easy to eat.’” Rather than surviv-
ing within a known habitat, early hominids had the ability to “carry out such infor-
mation-based processes as recognition, prediction, evaluation, and action.” Kaplan
posits a fundamental ambivalence in human nature, one counterbalancing interest
in the new and unknown with caution about potentially dangerous or lethal envi-
ronmental features (competing groups of conspecifics, as well as unfamiliar plants,
animals, weather patterns, and terrain, for example). Thus, feelings such as appre-
hension and excitement in new environments help humans calibrate response in a
manner conducive to survival. While certain features of natural environments, like
trees and water, have general appeal because they signal, respectively, protective
cover and a needed resource, what seems most important to people as they assess a
new environment is a determination of how they might function within it (Appleton
1975 and 1990; Orians and Heerwagen 1992; Kaplan 1992, 58). For this reason, the dis-
position of elements such as trees, water, pathways, open areas, and shrouded views,
whether in a real or represented space, is often more important to a human perceiver
than the actual elements themselves.
Why have humans evolved for high intelligence, one of whose keys features is
the ability to extract information from physical locations and, combining new with
old information and previous experience, to construct abstract simulation models of
234 Nancy Easterlin
environments and events as a tool for planning and action? In evolutionary jargon,
the human brain is a tremendously ‘expensive’ adaptation, and thus no accident, but
a long-developing, functionally necessary feature of the species. Since evolution is
a complex process involving feedback relationships between species and environ-
ment extended over long periods of time, sorting out causes is always something
of a chicken-and-egg affair. The evolution of bipedalism – for improved mobility in
an exposed habitat, for the reduction of heat stress and attendant efficiencies, or
for enhanced social interaction – requires increased cognitive capacity for the coor-
dination of muscle groups. Expansion of social groups, which provided evolving
humans with safety in numbers as they transitioned to a savanna habitat, necessi-
tates increased brain size for maintenance of social relationships. A prolonged period
of development facilitates the feedback relationship between expanded cognitive
capacity, social learning, and ecological challenges. Strong affectional attachments,
also facilitated by an extensive developmental period, motivate members of the group
to stay close to one another, providing strength in numbers by constituting and defin-
ing the group as a coherent unit.
In sum, the distinctive ecological dynamics of human evolution resulted in
a far-ranging, bipedal, intelligent, and highly social species, adapted to living in
kinship groups of significant size and capable of adjusting to change in habitat. Given
the relative freedom humans have from delimited spaces, skeptics might reasonably
ask if place attachment is a cultural artifact rather than an aspect of what I earlier
called “the essential nature of man’s dwelling on earth.” In our evolved psychology,
much more than in our modern lives, perhaps, we are vulnerable to the threats and
insufficiencies of a new locale, so that too much environmental change will elicit
ambivalence or even fear. That ambivalence and fear – in the past and, indeed, now –
is adaptive, making it hard for people to move when the material and affectional
resources of an established place appear adequate.
The evolutionary philosopher Kim Sterelny (2012) offers a valuable analysis of
Neanderthal extinction that illustrates the deleterious impact of rapid environmental
transformation. Contesting the recent scientific consensus that the Neanderthals were
driven to extinction by the cognitively superior homo sapiens, Sterelny posits that the
main cause of extinction was a negative feedback relationship between demography
and environment during a period of dramatic climate change. Drawing on the anal-
ysis of Clive Finlayson, Sterelny suggests that the Neanderthal had varied subsist-
ence strategies and therefore the cognitive capacity “to adapt to a colder world,” but
they did not, retreating instead to shrinking forest refuges that became traps. Why?
Neanderthals were ambush hunters, and transition to the steppe-tundra would have
entailed a switch to pursuit-endurance hunting. Steppe-tundra grazers are distinct
from the game of temperate forests; their habitats, the methods of tracking them, and
a new style of weapon would be required, for which the squat, short-armed Neander-
thal physique was not well adapted. Additionally, if the change in habitat was abrupt
(as opposed to a gradual transition from forest to scrubland to savanna in Africa), the
opportunity for learning was not great. In all, “To adapt to a new world, the Nean-
derthals needed to embrace a technological, behavioral, and social revolution. The
costs and risks of such a revolution would be extremely high. At any given moment,
it would often have seemed a better bet to track the retreating habitat, relying on the
skills and tools already mastered” (Sterelny 2012, 69).
Because of rapid human cultural evolution, people today are far less depend-
ent on changes in the nonhuman natural world than were the Neanderthals. Never-
theless, Sterelny’s hypothesis provides a strong cautionary reminder for those of us
inclined to forget our dependence on the material world. So, too, the ability to tran-
sition to a new habitat and to construe it as a new place is not endlessly malleable.
Literature reminds us that place-in-process may be either a positive or negative feed-
back relationship, depending on environmental contingencies and personal factors.
3 Place-Dynamics in “A Long Winter”

Much of the fiction by the contemporary Irish writer Colm Tóibín highlights the
dynamics of place-in-process, focusing often on the interaction between self-identity,
family and social relationships, and built and nonhuman natural environments. As
Liam Harte (2010, 337) observes, “Tóibín has a subtle geographical imagination in
which space, place, and landscape are active determinants of identity and experience
rather than passive, static entities.” Harte notes that Tóibín’s typical choice of setting,
the eroding coastline near his hometown of Enniscorthy, symbolically counters the
characteristic “assumption of much Irish literature that place, standing metonymi-
cally for nation, is the embodiment and guarantor of cultural stability and continu-
ity” (347). If for historical reasons the Irish are, on one hand, particularly susceptible
to sentimentalizing the land, it is perhaps unsurprising that, on the other, many Irish
writers (including Tóibín, John McGahern, and John Banville) balance awareness of
the appeal of physical place with a critical realism toward the environment and its
function in human life.
Thus, in keeping with contemporary American ecocritics, Tóibín disparages a
strongly sentimental and ideological notion of place. In a 2009 interview, he makes
his objections to this vision explicit:
[Some people] think that the Irish historical experience, or whatever is going on in Ireland, is
extremely interesting. I just sigh! You just long to go home to your Bergman films, Rembrandt
paintings, your Schubert piano sonatas […] You know, this godforsaken, wet little place on the
edge of things and its level of obsession about itself! […] [P]lace needs to be opened up, opened
out. […] [T]here’s no such thing as pure race in Ireland. We live in Ireland, we’re born in Ireland,
like Leopold Bloom was. But we come in terms of blood from all over the bloody place, but espe-
cially from England. (Tóibín 2009, 18–19)
236 Nancy Easterlin
In this manner, Tóibín rejects the race-and-place myth that so often underwrites
romanticized notions of nationhood. He also punctures this myth through the depic-
tion of the intimate relationship between potentially corrosive or destructive natural
elements and human life. In the novels The Heather Blazing (1992) and The Blackwa-
ter Lightship (2001), for instance, some houses have crumbled into the sea and other
dwellings face such an imminent fate. In these novels, the decay of physical terrain,
the unpredictability of the elements, the vulnerability of homes, and the human
response to all of these centrally serves the reintegration processes of dysfunctional
families and inhibited individuals.
Tóibín’s depictions of the integrated entities of places and persons – in fictional
terms, of setting and character – is a particular strength in his writing because it
brings to the fore the phenomenological truth that no person exists outside of place –
because humans, like all other organisms, cannot exist outside environments. Tóibín
reveals this profound interdependence through a focused representation of the inter-
action between the described physical environment and the emotional states and
interpersonal relationships of his characters. Whereas literary scholars are trained to
see attention to nonhuman nature and physical objects as symbolic, Tóibín’s writing
frequently displays the limitations of a perspective that treats the nonhuman natural
environment as an illuminating backdrop to the human condition. In Tóibín’s work,
physical locale is, at times, as Harte notes, formative of identity and experience.
But Tóibín extends this insight beyond the idea of the physical environment acting
on people: encultured human beings, who have many protections from nonhuman
nature, sometimes actually empower its threats through poverty of relationships and
weak self-identity. In the novella discussed here, “A Long Winter,” Tóibín’s spare style
and structural mastery illuminate how weakness in human factors – family and com-
munity relationships and self-identity – unleashes the potential destructiveness of
harsh winter weather, turning it into a lethal force.
“A Long Winter,” is not, in fact, set in Ireland, but on a farm in Spain. The story
is narrated in eight sections and is focalized through Miquel, the older of two sons,
who has recently returned from two years of compulsory military service. His younger
brother, Jordi, is in turn preparing to leave for his military service. Noticing his moth-
er’s odd behavior on a trip to the market town of La Seu, Miquel soon learns she is an
alcoholic. His father, aware that the mother has ordered cheap wine for delivery while
pretending to order oil, finds the wine after it has been delivered and empties all the
bottles. When his father refuses to replace the wine, the mother, unknown to Miquel
and his father, sets out in the beginning of a harsh snowstorm, perhaps heading
toward her brother’s village. Father and son, with increasing help from neighbors,
make repeated forays along the road to find her. They do not contact Jordi, who has
left for his military service, to tell him that his mother is missing and, eventually,
presumed dead. A young man named Manolo, an orphan, is hired after several weeks
to help with cooking and other responsibilities usually left to women. Much of the
seventy-page story is taken up with the relentless search, an attendant grudging rec-
onciliation with neighbors, whom the father has alienated, and with the beginning
adjustment of the family to Manolo’s presence.
If “place” is “space given meaning through personal, group, and cultural pro-
cesses,” (cf. Altman and Low 1992, 5) then identification of these processes should
help illuminate the perception of the story’s built and natural environment. An expe-
rienced journalist, Tóibín typically adopts a concise, observational style. His charac-
ters are often uncommunicative and emotionally, socially, and sometimes (as here)
sexually repressed which, given Tóibín’s alignment with a Hemingwayesque realism,
requires that the reader infer “personal, group, and cultural processes” to which the
characters deny themselves access. Far from being an exception, “A Long Winter” is
perhaps one of the most extreme examples of these features of Tóibín’s writing. As a
gay man who reached adulthood long before homosexuality was decriminalized in
Ireland, and as an Irishman who sees keenly the repressiveness of family relations
in that country, Tóibín explores with special sensitivity the human failure to address
personal problems and griefs, the impact of that failure on social relationships, and
the differential force conferred upon the environment by such human dynamics.
Since the story is focalized through the main character Miquel, his attitudes
toward self and environment dominate the narrative. Within the framework offered
by place studies, Miquel exhibits the ambivalence toward family, home, and the farm
that are characteristic of place relativity and sometimes even placelessness. In other
words, he has lived away from home and is somewhat disconnected from it, even if
his partial detachment is not entirely conscious, initially. If home is “a fixed reference
point for the structuring of reality” (Lewicka 2011b, 211), Miquel’s contradictory atti-
tudes, behaviors, and inaction reveal an unstable reference point, defined at once
by idealized fantasies and voids and inversions of the meanings typically associated
with domestic spaces and objects. On the second page of the story, Tóibín recounts
Miquel’s positive but ultimately rather illusory feelings about home:
More than with fear or hunger or constant discomfort, he associated his years of military service
with dreams of home. In the early months, as he received useless training under the punishing
sun, he wondered why he had never viewed his life with his family in the village as precious
and fragile. He dreamed of cold dawns, being woken by his father to go with him in the jeep to
the uplands where the flocks of sheep were summering. He dreamed about Jordi, who loved his
sleep, deciding whether or not he would come with them. He dreamed about his own bed, the
familiar room, the sounds of night and morning, the scops owls near the window in summer, the
creaking of the floorboards as his mother moved in the night, the bringing of flocks down to the
barn in the winter, the narrow street of the village full of their cries. (Tóibín 2007, 198)
Superficially, this passage evokes a secure, even ideal, perception of home. The
tending of the flocks appears seamlessly integrated with the human life of the village
and the family over the course of the seasons, the sound of the wild owls merged
with the domestic life of animals and humans. Yet the rhetoric of the passage puts
this image of home within a context of displacement and longing that is somewhat
238 Nancy Easterlin
suspect, suggesting an unwillingness to bring memory to account. The construction

of place is, notably, twice displaced, since it is a memory of a memory, ironically rein-
corporated into the actual space of house and farm. Tóibín’s repeated use of the word
“dream” or “dreams,” three times as a verb and once as a noun, signals to the reader
that Miquel’s reconstruction from a distance of life on the farm was at best equal parts
wish-fulfillment and memory. Though Miquel is in general a sympathetic character,
Tóibín hints here at his characteristic unwillingness to confront the realities of farm
and village life, family, and identity. “The creaking of the floorboards as his mother
moved in the night” rounds off and completes Miquel’s comforting illusion because it
is a reminder of her presence; retrospectively, though, readers may well wonder why
he sees this as a source of comfort rather than a matter of concern, since it signals
restlessness and may betoken nighttime drinking. So, too, the opening of the passage
echoes the young man’s sublimation of unpleasantness – what he remembers about
military service is not “fear or hunger or discomfort” – into an idealized image of
home.
Tóibín has already, in fact, begun to develop a familial and natural context for
Miquel’s illusory and therefore unstable image of home in the story’s opening para-
graphs. The short piece of text correlates the unusually mild weather at the approach
of winter with the multiple human deceptions and malfunctions in the family:
Even as the days grew darker, the wind was mild. Miquel watched from the bedroom window
as his father and Jordi walked along the lane which ran from the lower fields up to the barn. They
were both in shirtsleeves as though it were a summer day.
“We’ll have no winter this year,” [Miquel’s] father had said over dinner the previous evening.
“The priests have announced it as our reward for constant prayer and kindness to our neigh-
bors.”
Miquel had managed a laugh to please his father, a role normally played by Jordi. But Jordi
and their mother had remained silent. Jordi seldom spoke now and responded with hardly even
a gesture if anyone said a word to him. On Saturday he would be taken to La Seu for a special
haircut and be gone by Tuesday to do his military service. He would be away for two years.
(Tóibín 2007, 197)
If home provides a point of reference for the structuring of reality, many features
of this opening paragraph hint at the instability of Miquel’s foundational relations.
Instructively, Tóibín positions him as an outsider, observing his father and brother
from within the house, then remembering from this vantage point the conversation of
the evening before. This, along with Miquel’s conciliatory laughter, indicates that he
is somewhat removed from the family, but also ambivalently aligned with his father.
Since Miquel is ironically positioned not only in the house but in the bedroom, his
remoteness embodies the failure of communication and intimacy that defines the life
of his family. The unwillingness of Jordi and the mother to laugh at the father’s joke
about “constant prayer and kindness to [the] neighbors” suggests an as-yet-uniden-
tified context that undermines humor; in section three, readers learn that the father,
who has always kept his family somewhat aloof and isolated, testified against three
village families for diverting water a few years before, even though the families from
whom the water was stolen spoke in defense of the guilty parties. But Miquel’s “father
took pleasure, if he could make one of his sons listen, in calling his neighbors liars
and thieves” (Tóibín 2007, 216). Thus, Tóibín progressively reveals that the head of the
household is a sarcastic, mean-spirited, and domineering man, infatuated only with
his sense of superiority. That Miquel defers to him by laughing at his sarcastic joke
indicates his ongoing willingness to subordinate himself and, with that subordina-
tion, a tacit acceptance of values and attitudes he does not share. His assumption that
Jordi’s silence reflects brooding over his imminent military service may be only partly
correct. Jordi, who is aware of his mother’s decline and who will eventually have to
leave the farm because Miquel will inherit it, perhaps has a more critical perspective
on their father.
Miquel’s weak self-identity is dynamically related to his deficient reference point
for structuring reality – in other words, by a sense of home that is by turns fantasti-
cal and negative. The story depicts a brutal coming-of-age in which Tóibín implies
that this sensitive and sympathetic young man could become the mirror-image of his
father. Paralleling the opening scene, in which Miquel watches his father and brother
from the window, the father recounts his observation of the wine delivery:
“I watched the whole adventure from the top floor of the low barn with those binoculars you
brought back from the mili. They were delivering the oil, but it was just an excuse.”
“Spying on me,” his mother said.
“And what did you do?” Miquel asked his father.
“I went down,” his father said, “when they had gone and I emptied it, all of it. And I put the
containers back where they were, but they were empty now of their poison.”
“You know all about poison,” she said.
Miquel was surprised by the suddenness of her anger, her sharpness.
“I’m the one has to sleep with you,” his father said. “And the smell of that stuff rotting you as
you sleep.” (Tóibín 2007, 210)
In this and the opening scene, Tóibín constructs the interior spaces of the farm –
the home – as observational posts that stand in lieu of human communication and
shared feeling. Spying and voyeurism, behaviors motivated by the need for power and
control, replace love and support provided by productive conversational exchange,
intimacy, and shared action. Although Miquel is not overtly engaging in these behav-
iors as he looks out the window in the opening scene, his refusal to answer Jordi’s
question about the military experience (“It was not worth remembering or comment-
ing on” [2007, 198]) marks his potential development into the image of his father, who
withholds information and observes others as a means of control. In this scene where
the father recounts emptying the wine, Miquel does not speak up, even as his mother
“[continues] to rock back and forth, as though they were not there,” and Miquel reads
his father’s expression as “sorry and nervous” (210). Even in the devastating remain-
der of this conversation, Miquel remains uncertain about how to respond, though he
240 Nancy Easterlin
caresses and holds his mother’s hand. He suggests to his father twice that they replace
the wine and asks how long his mother has been drinking, but each time, he nonethe-
less defers to his father’s judgment. And, lying in bed, he feels resentful: “They did
not tell him that his mother, while he was away, had become a hopeless drinker. In
keeping the secret, they had treated him like a stranger” (213). Again, he mirrors this
estrangement when he accedes to his father’s wishes and does not contact Jordi about
his mother’s disappearance, ambivalent about sharing crucial news, because keeping
his own secret is, perhaps, a form of revenge. (Similarly, in The Blackwater Lightship,
Declan keeps his AIDS infection secret from his sister Helen for several years, perhaps
as revenge for how she abandoned him when they were children, immediately after
their father died.)
Miquel’s weak identity, evident in his incapacity for independent action, and the
breakdown in communication in the family as a result of secrecy and habitual oppo-
sition, constitute a breakdown in human systems that unintentionally empowers
potential dangers in the physical environment. Neither Miquel nor his father under-
stands the depth of the mother’s distress. When the father answers that he will not
replace “what [he] threw out,” she replies, “Well, that’s the end then,” and begins to
cry (211). Miquel comforts her and moves her closer to the fire, but even though he has
some sense of her addiction, he will not act contrary to his father’s wishes. The next
morning, as Miquel and his father work to repair the brick facing on the barn, “he
noticed how intensely cold it had become; the water in the fenced-off piece of ground
in front of the henhouse was completely frozen. The sky was blue, but it was not the
still, calm blue of earlier days, it was more that the clouds had been blown back by
the wind, making the blue of the sky seem exposed and raw” (214). On one level – the
relevant but limited level of traditional literary analysis – the exposed sky symbolizes
the exposed relations between the family members, but on another, as a representa-
tion of place-in-process, it constitutes a redefinition of space according to which the
deficiencies of persons and processes render place forcefully inimical, subjecting this
family to natural dangers against which they are materially well protected. Returning
to the house and searching for his mother at noon, Miquel realizes she is gone. Were
she not driven to desperation by family dysfunction, she would have stayed in the
constructed shelters identified with home, and winter would never have acquired the
terrific power it exerts in the story.
Moreover, the negation of community attachment in the animosity between
Miquel’s father and the villagers further exacerbates the force of the nonhuman envi-
ronment. Most of the young people have “fled to the cities or bigger towns,” but a few
younger men and women, like Miquel and Jordi, run their farms, and the “old people
[sit] by the window watching” (215). When Miquel and his father go house to house
to ask if anyone has seen the mother leave, one neighbor, Mateu, answers, “I saw her
go all right […] but there was no sign of her coming back” (217). He also unhelpfully
replies that she has been gone several hours, “three or four, or somewhere in between.”
Like the father, Mateu gains knowledge through private observation – watching from
the window – and, like him, uses it for passive destruction – in this case, to gain
revenge for the fine he had to pay for diverting water from his neighbors. Thus, just as
the implications of the mother’s addiction and subsequent distress go unrecognized
within the family, causing her to head out as a storm threatens, the probable reasons
for and consequences of her departure are treated by the villagers, at least initially, as
no reason for concern. Yet if Mateu’s relation with Miquel’s family were not so acrimo-
nious, it is hard to imagine that he would not have spoken to Miquel or his father – or,
indeed, the mother herself – before she was hopelessly out of sight. Miquel imagines
that she has perhaps headed along the country roads to Coll del So, but has then
taken “old tracks and pathways” towards her brothers home in Pallosa, “which no
jeep could follow and no outsider could find” (217). Probably, Miquel and his father
are here tacitly included as perplexed outsiders, unfamiliar with these paths that lead
back to her original home. But whatever the case, the breakdown in social and inter-
personal relationships actuates an imbalance in the human navigation of the physical
world. Notably, the dangers of this imbalance, highlighted in Tóibín’s story, signify a
truth of the human species, whose sociality undergirds its survival.
Throughout the story, then, the erosion of emotional attachments in the family
and community goes hand-in-hand with the collapse of communal support and posi-
tive knowledge sharing and use. In terms of the three aspects governing the definition
of place – persons, processes, and places – this signals the disintegration of norma-
tive social systems. Human culture is founded on shared knowledge, on information
gathering and its storage and strategic deployment, but in this novella, the results
of private observation are privately harbored until they are too late to act on (Donald
1991; Donald 2001; Mithen 1996, 2003; Sterelny 2012). As Miquel and his father drive
out of the village on the first of many searches for the mother,
the windscreen wipers were on full, but still the snow impaired their vision and the jeep’s head-
lights caught sheets of whiteness. Had she been on the road coming toward them, even her arms
outstretched, they would not have seen her. It must have been clear to his father, Miquel knew,
that there was little purpose in their journey. (Tóibín 2007, 218)
Ironically, Miquel’s hasty return to the house to get his binoculars before heading out
on the road highlights a new desire to return to constructing action plans based on
shared knowledge, but his father chastises him for running in to fetch the binoculars:
“We don’t have time for thinking.” Given the situation, a heavy snowstorm that has
made the road impassable and covered all the tracks the mother may have taken, the
father is probably right. But observation and movement have only been rendered fruit-
less by the dysfunction in persons and processes, which expose the family members
to harsh weather, rendering it a dangerous and, finally, lethal force. Furthermore, the
moment is poignant, because Miquel has thought to use this military tool for positive
and shared informational gain, albeit perhaps too late.
242 Nancy Easterlin
When the weather permits it, Miquel and his father, with increasing help for the
other villagers and Manolo, the new servant, search repeatedly for the mother, and
then for her body, at the mercy of new storms and the snow that now blankets the
countryside. Thus, the voids which are home and community in this story ramify
throughout, redefining place as material environments that are disproportionately
and violently powerful. The novella’s final grotesque scene vividly depicts the end
result of this place-in-process, although it simultaneously points to a rebalancing of
human-environment relations. After repeated searches, Miquel and his father race
toward an area where they and Josef Bernat, the villager who has been most forward
in striking a reconciliation under the catastrophic conditions, have sighted vultures
circling: “They were large flapping birds, filthy-looking, hitting against one another
as though they were blind. Then they fastened on a spot and began to peck at their
prey, pulling up piles of viscera, pushing one another out of the way” (268). As the
three men approach the scene, they see that the vultures are eating a dead dog, not
the body of the mother, and Miquel’s father takes aim at a bird who “flew insolently
over them”:
The injured bird, lying almost upside down, began to screech, tried to rise and fell back. Sud-
denly, it managed to lift its head, which was raw and unbowed, utterly alive, the eyes indignant
and sharp, the nostrils almost breathing fire within the vicious beak. The vulture saw them, and
all its sullen hatred for them, its savage gaze, its fierce panic, caught Miquel, as though it were
directed at him and him only, as though his secret spirit waiting all its life for such recognition.
The dying bird was beyond human in its grief and its injury, screeching still in pain. Miquel did
not know why he began to edge toward it, but he quickly found that Manolo was holding him
from behind, preventing his moving farther as his father lifted the gun again. Miquel leaned back
toward Manolo, seeking the warmth of him, looking for grim comfort as the next shot rang out.
Manolo held him hard to make sure he did not move any closer to the dying bird and the carcass,
half-torn asunder now, no use to anyone. (270)
As Hummon puts it, landscape acts as a symbolic extension of the self. Tóibín’s story
is so powerful because the frozen, unyielding countryside and the pain of the dying
bird animate the emptiness, grief, and rage that Miquel cannot express, seeming,
despite their destructive and corrupted essence, to embody aspects of the inarticulate
self.
On one hand, this ending of the story represents an ultimate dehumanization in
Miquel’s identification with the wounded and dying bird, but on the other, it points to
a rebalancing of place-in-process through recognition of both the need to rehabilitate
the self and the resurrection of human attachments. Alongside the grim searches for
the mother in a harsh and unyielding environment, as the story progresses, Tóibín
depicts Miquel’s subjective reinvolvement with home through his recognition of
his mother’s suffering, his developing intimacy with Manolo, and his discovery of
his own sexuality. Importantly, these aspects all seem interrelated, because better
self-definition and an independent sense of responsibility provide a reference point
for relationships to persons and places. First, Miquel’s regret about his treatment of
his mother attests to personal failure, and thus constitutes subjective reinvolvement
in home through a reimaging of his mother’s experience that is inextricable from his
own nascent self-transformation:
In these days when he thought about his mother, the feelings were sharpened by guilt, a gnawing
presence in his chest which he could obliterate only by deliberately thinking about something
else but which would easily and stealthily return. He regretted now that he had never, in recent
years, come in like this to her kitchen on an ordinary day and watched her cooking or lighting
the fire and offered to help her, or keep her company while she worked. He also knew that he
should have been braver the day before she disappeared, he should have gone to her and told
her he himself would replace what his father had thrown out. He should, he thought, have forced
his father not to leave her alone in a room craving alcohol. He knew that if he had been brave, he
could have prevented her from leaving. (247)
This passage marks not only a transition in Miquel’s feeling about his mother but in his
attitude to all human relationships, since it clearly stands in contrast to the beginning
of the story, where Miquel silently observes his father and brother, remains reticent in
the face of Jordi’s fear of military service, and fails to act when aware of his mother’s
clear distress. Although the passage is in one respect tragically regretful, since he will
almost certainly never see his mother alive again, it is symptomatic of his movement
toward a rebalanced relationship to place, of place-in-process that reconstitutes the
proximate physical environment in the face of human relationships. In this passage,
he understands that the internal spaces of the house have come to embody isolation
and loneliness rather than comfort, security, and shared experience.
Significantly, Miquel’s relation to the character Manolo illustrates the progressive
changes in his character. As an orphan whose parents died during the war, Manolo is
treated as little better than a slave by the families that take him in. Since it is winter
and there is little farm work, the families in Palloso are happy to lend out Manolo as
cook and housekeeper. Miquel, who finds “his father’s account of finding Manolo […]
like a story of buying an animal or a sack of rice,” tries first to deflect discomfort by
making a joke, calling his father “a monster,” and thus displaying aggressive humor
similar to his father’s own (249). At the same time, he objects to sharing his room
with Manolo, and when Manolo prepares for bed, Miquel asks him to leave his socks
and shoes outside the room. Thus, when Manolo is first introduced into the house-
hold, Miquel reacts with a sense of superiority and cruelty that once again resembles
his father’s behavior, even while he knows that his father’s insensitivity has hurt the
young man. In all, this initial reception of Manolo mirrors the scene in which the
father reports spying on his wife as the wine is delivered. On both occasions, Miquel
fails to challenge his father and in so doing refuses to support a member of the house-
hold who needs the defense of a stronger person.
However, in the next section of the story (section 5), Miquel’s attitude toward
Manolo begins to change and, as it does, he exhibits an independent identity that
is shaped by commitment to others and associated with a renewal of home. After his
244 Nancy Easterlin
uncle visits from Pallosa and greets Manolo warmly, then tells Miquel privately of
Manolo’s background, Miquel tries to befriend Manolo, staying in the kitchen and
talking to him when the weather prevents outdoor work. Although Manolo retains
his emotional and social distance, these overtures on Miquel’s part demonstrate
that he has learned the larger lesson from his mother’s isolation and suffering: do
not participate in such treatment of anyone. Tóibín has developed a clear parallel
between Manolo and the mother, because Manolo does household chores, working
in the kitchen and tending to the chickens, in effect taking the woman’s place. At the
same time, it would be easy for Miquel to rationalize remaining aloof, since Manolo
is not a blood relative and is culturally defined as socially inferior. Instead, acting
on his temperamental but previously repressed sympathy for others, Miquel exhibits
compassion and loyalty.
Miquel fully displays these new characteristics when he defends Manolo against
his father, who taunts Manolo: “‘Oh, we’ll have to get a skirt for you’ […]. ‘You’re the
best housewife in the whole country […] Maybe you’re only pretending to be a boy’”
(254). When Manolo threatens to leave and the father continues to goad him, Miquel
orders his father to stop taunting Manolo and sit down. After this, Manolo no longer
willfully subordinates himself within the household, and he and Miquel discuss the
mother’s disappearance as well as Jordi’s ignorance of it before going to sleep at
night. And because Miquel has taken responsibility for his convictions, assuming an
adult identity in the household and, in the process, defending the dignity of another,
Manolo is able, in turn, to do the same. He states his view that the father has been
wrong not to inform Jordi of his mother’s disappearance, even perhaps implying that
Miquel should act independently to communicate the news to his brother, although
Manolo is too respectful of Miquel’s feelings to say this directly.
Miquel’s defense of Manolo not only affects all the relationships within the
household but redefines the spaces of the house as a different kind of home. If home
“includes and completes a person’s self-image and identity” (Cristoforetti et al. 2011,
226), then the central rooms here, the kitchen and the bedroom, associated respec-
tively with the mother and the brother, have simultaneously characterized Miquel’s
reluctance to embrace an independent identity and the isolation among family
members who cannot or will not communicate. They are, originally in the story,
reflective of his ‘outsideness’ or ‘uprootedness.’ Through the dramatization of place-
in-process as the maturing of the self and the concomitant revival of affection and
support for others, Tóibín highlights the power of human relationships’ definition of
physical space as positive place, as Miquel replaces place relativity or placelessness
with the renewal of meaningful attachment.
In Tóibín’s fiction, the reconstitution of home as a quintessential place connected
with productive identity has nothing to do with conventional relationships, as is
evident in the incorporation of Manolo, a temporary servant, into the family. Even
more pointedly, Tóibín’s depictions of same-sex relationships and gay friendship con-
sistently illustrate two things: that acknowledging sexual identity is integral to taking
responsibility for adult selfhood, and that healthy family feeling is not founded on
conventional sexuality. In The Blackwater Lightship, for instance, it is Declan’s gay
friends who reintroduce open conversation to his dysfunctional family. Several of the
stories in Mothers and Sons, the collection in which “A Long Winter” is included, align
the repression of sex with the abuses in the Catholic church, while the story “Three
Friends” suggests that unconventional behavior, including gay sex, can be a means of
communion and healing from grief. “A Long Winter” differs from these in that, while
Miquel clearly exhibits same-sex attraction, the full range of his sexual orientation
is ultimately ambiguous, and by the end of the story he has yet to act on his sexual
desires. During the early trip to La Seu, the market town, the butcher’s wife jokes with
Miquel’s mother that such a handsome young man will be married soon, but Miquel
says he will be too busy with the farm for such things. Later, when the police first come
to the house, Miquel looks over a young policeman with distinctly sexual regard, and
the policeman returns his gaze, but no words are exchanged. In the sixth section of
the story, the three men set up a tin bath in the kitchen and take turns bathing –
first the father, then Miquel, then Manolo. After Miquel bathes, Manolo dries him,
and as Manolo adds some clean water to the bath, then undresses and moves toward
it, Miquel watches him. Manolo “[moves] slowly, almost gracefully, toward the bath,
seeming to be utterly alert to Miquel’s eyes watching him” (Tóibín 2007, 260).
In thus delicately depicting Miquel’s movement toward adult sexuality, Tóibín
affirms that acknowledging one’s sexuality is central to adult selfhood without lim-
iting the relationship between the two young men to one of sexual attraction alone.
This scene in effect cleanses the kitchen, redefining it as a place no longer associated
with the mother’s isolation and imprisonment but with emotional and physical inti-
macy. Furthermore, it anticipates a rebalancing of relations between the human and
natural world in the wrenching final scene where Manolo holds Miquel back from the
dying vulture. Without strong relationships and community, human life is like the
dog’s “carcass, half torn asunder […] no use to anyone,” and Miquel’s vitality is trans-
ferred to the vulture, who, unlike the young man, can express rage and injustice (270).
The terrible fate of humans who fail to use and share knowledge to support and love
one another is to reduce themselves to physical matter. Whereas the useless animal
carcass figures the mother’s demise, perhaps even her victimization to eroded family
relations, Manolo’s strong embrace and the transformation in Miquel that have made
this loyalty possible suggest that he will not be eaten alive by unforgettable sorrow or
reduced to the status of an object in a world where agency is transferred to nonhuman
nature.
The human interaction with the environment is a funny thing – relentless, yet
so often invisible to our minds. As the cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald (2001,
57, 114–117) insists, automaticity (or habituation) in human response ultimately frees
up consciousness. The human capacity to hierarchize and, in the process, automa-
tize certain cognitive functions depends on and serves flexible intelligence, facilitat-
ing attention, awareness, and symbolic skill, but this presents a paradox in terms of
246 Nancy Easterlin
environmental understanding. For awareness to operate as our long-term governing

system, it must be focused, and familiar aspects of human environments are cognized
automatically. On a daily basis, we do not direct consciousness toward those things
to which we have become habituated, and our in-process negotiation of self-and-en-
vironment, our ongoing reconstitution of place-in-process, goes mostly unnoticed.
If we wish to think about all those things to which we have become familiarized,
including built and natural environments and our conceptualization of place, literary
reading and explication in light of place studies and cognitive psychology are a good
place to start, for these allied activities compel us to bring back into consciousness
aspects of reality that, to our detriment, we take for granted. Among researchers in
place studies, few have turned to literature for insight, but literary reflection on place
may in fact benefit this interdisciplinary area as well as ecocriticism (Riley 1992). At
a time when the humanities are treated as peripheral to central human enterprises, I
can think of no better argument for how they serve the longevity of this world.
4 B
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Axel Goodbody
13 Animal Studies: Kafka’s Animal Stories
Abstract: Kafka has not tended to feature in accounts of the ecocritical canon.
However, there are two important grounds for examining his animal stories in this
volume. On the one hand, they introduced radical innovations in the use of animals
as literary symbols. And on the other, they have inspired thinkers and writers since
the 1970s with their destabilisation of accepted notions of human distinctiveness from
non-human animals. Kafka challenged the common understanding of human identity
by foregrounding our animality and drawing attention to the agency of animals. The
chapter first traces the emergence of Animal Studies as a dynamic trend in contempo-
rary cultural studies, before examining the stories “Metamorphosis” and “A Report to
an Academy” as examples of Kafka’s zoopoetics and zoontology respectively. It con-
cludes by reflecting on the contribution of literary animal writing to cultural ecology.
Key Terms: Animal Studies, Kafka, zoopoetics, zoontology, anthropomorphism
Franz Kafka, who lived in the city of Prague as a member of the German-speaking
Jewish minority, is usually thought of as a quintessentially urban author. The role
played by nature and the countryside in his work is insignificant. He was also no
descriptive realist: his domain is commonly referred to as the ‘inner life’, and he is
chiefly remembered for his depiction of outsider situations accompanied by feelings
of inadequacy and guilt, in nightmarish scenarios reflecting the alienation of the
modern subject. Kafka was only known to a small circle when he died of tubercu-
losis, aged 40, in 1924. However, his enigmatic tales, bafflingly grotesque but mem-
orably disturbing because they resonate with readers’ own experiences, anxieties
and dreams, their sense of marginality in family and society, and their yearning for
self-identity, rapidly acquired the status of world literature after the Holocaust and
the Second World War.
Kafka was a modernist: his work reflected and responded to the disorientation
and anxiety of his generation in the face of the loss of the seeming certainties of
the late nineteenth century. Traditional moral frameworks had been undermined
by the decline in established religion and the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, faith
in human rationality was eroded by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious,
and trust in enlightened, emancipatory politics and the onward march of civilisation
was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Already before these unsettling
developments, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (formulated in On the Origin of
Species, 1859 and The Descent of Man, 1871) had cast doubt on traditional notions
of the uniqueness of human beings as a species and their right to use other animals
as they wished. Nietzsche’s blend of Rousseauist cultural criticism with Darwinian
evolutionary theory was an important influence on the thinking of Kafka’s genera-
250 Axel Goodbody
tion. For Nietzsche, the evolution of human consciousness did not signify progress or
improvement of the species, it was rather a symptom of the decadence of the organ-
ism that accompanied its transition from unadulterated, feral existence to domestic
society. Consciousness functioned as an epistemological substitute for the repressed
and atrophied animal instincts. His conception of animals as instances of the origi-
nary state of humanity, lost in a modern life dependent on the mediation of experi-
ence through language and dominated by an excess of rationality, found its way into
the fiction and poetry of the period.
The image of animals living in the ‘open’ in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Eighth Duino
Elegy, for instance, is grounded in the notions that human consciousness is an obsta-
cle in the way of a larger, less rational way of knowing, and that it may be possible to
imagine if not to retrieve such fullness of vision, by seeing the world through the eyes
of non-human animals, and by depicting it in a poetic form of writing using sugges-
tive images rather than abstract concepts. Some of Nietzsche’s followers (Robinson
Jeffers and Ernest Hemingway in the United States, D. H. Lawrence in Britain) ideal-
ised ‘healthy’ animality and expressed a fascination with wildness. In Germany, the
expressionist Gottfried Benn longed to be freed from individuation by regression to a
primitive pre-conscious state. Traces of this attraction to animal vitality are present in
Kafka’s letters, diaries and stories. However, his understanding of animals and what
it is to be human, and his use of animal figures as vehicles for the expression of ideas
and mental states are more complex and of greater relevance for us today than what
Philip Armstrong (2008, 143) has called Lawrence’s and Hemingway’s “redemptive
therio-primitivism,” with its fatalistic assent to the supposed Dionysian innocence of
animal violence and human cruelty.
Although animals do not feature prominently in Kafka’s novels (The Man Who
Disappeared, The Trial, The Castle), there are few literary authors in whose overall
work they play such a central role. As Donna Yarri (2010, 269) notes in her “Index
to Kafka’s Use of Creatures in His Writings,” nonhuman and cross-human creatures
appear in all his longer stories and about half his shorter ones. “Metamorphosis,” in
which the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has
been transformed into a giant beetle or cockroach, and “A Report to an Academy,” a
lecture by an ape telling how, after his capture in West Africa, he managed to evade
spending the rest of his life as a circus animal by learning to act and speak like a
human, will be familiar to many readers. But Kafka wrote other equally thought-pro-
voking animal stories (“The Burrow,” “Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People,”
“Investigations of a Dog,” “Jackals and Arabs,” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor”
are among the more important.) Apes, moles, mice, dogs, birds, horses, jackals, a
panther and other animals are encountered in the pages of the twelve-volume criti-
cal edition of Kafka’s stories, novels, letters, diaries and notebooks. As well as these
‘ordinary’ animals, he also depicts transformations (from human to animal and from
animal to human), imaginary hybrids, and some bafflingly indeterminate creatures,
such as the strange bouncing balls in “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” and Odradek
in “The Worries of a Head of Household.”
Kafka was a vegetarian. He believed killing animals and eating meat was immoral,
once writing in a letter: “My paternal grandfather was a butcher in a village near
Stakonitz; I have to not eat as much meat as he butchered” (Kafka 1953, 59). He had to
put up with the disapproval of his family, for whom meat eating was a sign of wealth
and status, and a matter of religious and cultural importance, because of the ritual
slaughter setting kosher meat apart from normal European practice. We know from
his diaries and letters that he abominated hunting, and was an opponent of conven-
tional zoos (identifying with the caged animals). But he was not a hobby naturalist or
a writer of realist animals stories based on sustained observation of their behaviour,
exploring the animal mind with the imaginative empathy of Ernest Thompson Seton,
Jack London, or Henry Williamson.
In much of his work, animals rather serve as vehicles for the expression of human
subjectivity, exemplifying the very appropriation of animals as images for human
attributes against which nature writers have tended to work, with their experiments
in articulating animal modes of seeing and being in the world. Kafka’s approach is
by contrast a largely allegorical one, drawing on different forms of animal symbol-
ism, and using animal figures to depict human experiences and feelings. Transposing
the action from the human beings in his novels to animals in his stories generalises
individual actions, facilitates critical detachment from them, and signals through the
obvious fictionality of the text the need for readers to interpret it. Kafka’s animal nar-
ratives are mechanisms of estrangement, allowing reflection on his personal situa-
tion, that of Jews, modern man, and humanity in general. However, they differ from
traditional animal fables and animal writing for children in important respects. First,
the animals depicted tend to be ugly and threatening, rather than the cuddly crea-
tures and companion species of children’s literature, the familiar ones of fables and
folk tales, or the charismatic megafauna of environmental writing. And no less strik-
ingly, they resist reduction to any single coherent interpretation. Multivalent, her-
meneutically open-ended symbolic structures, Kafka’s stories hold out the promise
of a hidden logic, but must always in the end be understood in a context of unre-
solved contradictions and simultaneous partial validity, for they condense meaning
in obscure, discontinuous and morally ambivalent narratives.
Kafka has not tended to feature previously in accounts of the ecocritical canon.
However, there are two important grounds for examining his animal stories in this
volume. On the one hand, they introduced radical innovations in the use of animals
as literary symbols. And on the other, they have reverberated over the last three-quar-
ters of a century, nourishing voices destabilising common conceptions of human
distinctiveness from non-human animals and hegemonic understandings of our
relationship with non-human animals and nature. For although most of his animals
invite reading as figures onto which human concerns are displaced, Kafka neverthe-
less anticipated central contentions of the new thinking about animals which has
252 Axel Goodbody
emerged over the past generation. He challenged accepted notions of human identity
by foregrounding our animality, and drew attention to the agency of animals. Rec-
ognition of Kafka’s importance as a precursor of contemporary critics of speciesism
and an influential innovator in matters of animal representation has come from both
philosophers (Deleuze and Guattari’s choice of Kafka as a model for their project of
unsettling the human-animal divide, in “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature;” Derrida’s
references to “Kafka’s vast zoopoetics, something that […] solicits attention, endlessly
and from a novel perspective” in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 374) and writers
(J. M. Coetzee’s tribute to him in the story “The Lives of Animals”).
In the following I first trace the emergence of animal studies as one of the most
dynamic trends in contemporary cultural studies. I then consider in turn Kafka’s zoo-
poetics (his deployment of animals as literary figures) and zoontology (his reflection
on the nature and status of animals), examining the stories “Metamorphosis,” “Inves-
tigations of a Dog,” and “A Report to an Academy” and touching on other examples
of his symbolic use of animals, and his probing of assumptions of human exception-
alism. Given the vast extent of the secondary literature on Kafka, my use of it has nec-
essarily been selective. Although cultural animal studies has only emerged as a field
with its own concepts, theories and questions in the last twenty years, Karl-Heinz
Fingerhut’s book on Kafka’s animal figures, which was published as long ago as 1969,
and Margot Norris’s (1985) ground-breaking study, Beasts of the Modern Imagination
remain important sources. I conclude by reflecting on Kafka’s zoomorphic legacy, the
role of animal writers in negotiating change in our perception of the place of humans
in the world, and their contribution to cultural ecology.
1 The Emergence of Cultural Animal Studies

In the introduction to an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection of essays, Aaron
Gross (2012, 4) describes animal studies as a “discourse” that “cuts across fields
in the human and life sciences – a discourse that has been paralleled by increas-
ingly sophisticated discussions of and more robust concern for animals in popular
culture.” Academic enquiry has then emerged, in disciplines ranging from biology
to history and cultural studies, in the context of a new critical awareness among
Western publics of the threat of extinction for many species, and the suffering, mental
as well as physical, of many domesticated animals. Both phenomena are, as Gross
comments, consequences of the reduction of contact with animals in everyday life in
the Western world, the hidden industrialisation of their slaughter for food, and their
vestigial remaining presence as family pets or objects of spectacle. Animal studies is
a radically multidisciplinary project. In the humanities alone, it unites field-specific
enquiries in anthropology, art history, children’s literature, continental philosophy,
gender studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, sociology and
other disciplines. Philosophical, historical and cultural animal studies focus respec-
tively on consideration of animal rights and ethics, accounts of our shifting under-
standing of animals and relationship with them, and analysis of the literary and
visual representation of animals. These fields of enquiry have, however, overlapped
in practice, with animal historians such as Keith Thomas and Harriet Ritvo drawing
on literary sources, and studies of the literary, filmic and artistic representation of
animals integrating elements of history, philosophy, cultural anthropology and soci-
ology alongside semiotics and literary/generic textual analysis.
The current phase of research into textual and visual depictions of animals, their
meaning in different cultures, and the cultural history of anthropomorphism began
in the 1990s, and experienced an explosion of interest in the twenty-first century. Cul-
tural animal studies today has a number of different roots.1 The first is the animal
rights movement. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation
drew the attention of an international public to the brutality and immorality of factory
production of meat, and kick-started animal rights in much the same way Rachel Car-
son’s (1962) Silent Spring had drawn activists to environmentalism in the previous
decade. Singer rejected René Descartes’ conception of animals as mere machines,
from which human beings are set apart by reason, language and sense of self. Citing
the early nineteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who had sug-
gested that cruelty to animals was analogous to slavery, he argued that animals suffer
pain, and that this entitles them to moral consideration. Singer popularised the term
‘speciesism’ (discrimination against animals, coined by analogy with racism) for the
thinking in which our treatment of animals differently from humans and our system-
atic, institutionalised killing of them are grounded.
Singer’s work triggered new scientific research into the mental and linguistic abil-
ities of apes in the Great Ape Project, which has worked to prove that many species
possess the basic capabilities necessary for subjectivity, self-consciousness, rational
agency, and the capacity to learn and transmit a language. New findings in research
into animal intelligence have undermined the notion of a simple distinction between
primates and human beings. This research, which underpinned the argument that
primates should be considered kinds of humans and enjoy corresponding rights (and
led a New York judge to grant a landmark writ of Habeas Corpus for two chimpanzees
in April 2015, in a case brought by the Nonhuman Rights project), has been a second
root of cultural animal studies.
A third, separate stream feeding into cultural animal studies has been the post-
modern/deconstructionist project of decentring the human agent. This philosophi-
cal undertaking began in the 1980s, with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987)
1 I am indebted in the following to the overviews by Marc Lucht, “Introduction,” in Lucht and Yarri
2010, Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” in Weil 2012, and Greg Garrard “Animals,” in Garrard
2012.
254 Axel Goodbody
conception of ‘becoming animal’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-

nia as a fluid, instinctual and non-conceptual form of subjectivity, which paralleled
feminist and postcolonial theorising of the body and the subaltern. What Deleuze
and Guattari envisaged was less a transformation of humans into animals than an
erasure of the boundaries of human identity through recognition of species’ irreduc-
ible interdependence, an emancipatory movement from being to becoming, in which
the subject no longer occupies a realm of rigid stability but is deterritorialised, liber-
ated and released into a ‘nomadic’ mode of existence.
Whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal’ had little to do with real
animals, their behaviour or lifeworlds, Jacques Derrida’s (2002) landmark essay, The
Animal That Therefore I Am (French original 1997) stressed both the autonomy of the
animal and human animality (his title revised Descartes’ definition of the human
as a thinking being, “Cogito ergo sum”), and challenged readers to reconsider their
treatment of animals. Derrida was prompted by the gaze of his cat as he emerged
naked from the shower to recast the Genesis myth, making it an animal (rather than
a woman) that brings man to consciousness of his nakedness (and of good and evil).
Animals are for Derrida the creatures through which we define our humanity. On the
one hand, he castigates their subjection to a subordinate position, and the simplis-
tic othering present in the homogenising generalisation, ‘the animal’: this engenders
violence by positing a category of creatures which we can legitimately dominate, and
against which there can be no crime. On the other, he rejects Aristotle’s and Des-
cartes’ distinction of man from other animals by the ability to think, and claims that
our self-recognition and thinking originate in the recognition that we are animals,
and share the world with them. Meeting the look of animals, their gaze on us and the
world, reveals our human limitations. By becoming attuned to animals we can over-
come some of the limitations of our so-called ‘rational’ condition.
Giorgio Agamben’s (2004) The Open (Italian original 2002) has continued this
line of argument. Agamben critiques the othering of animals in the ‘anthropologi-
cal machine’ (i.e. the definition of humanity through its distinction from animals) of
mainstream western philosophy since Augustine. He locates traces of a counter-con-
ception of reconciliation between the estranged parties of humans and non-human
animals in the writings of Martin Heidegger, and to a lesser extent other thinkers,
ranging from Ernst Haeckel, Jakob von Uexküll and Rainer Maria Rilke to Georges
Bataille, Alexandre Kojève and Gilles Deleuze.
Meanwhile posthumanist thinkers in the United States have pursued a parallel
goal of decentring the human, with similar consequences for animal studies. Donna
Haraway and Cary Wolfe have drawn attention to the absence of clear boundaries
between human beings and machines on the one hand, and humans and animals
on the other. Reviewing Derrida, Deleuze and other theorists in his book, Animal
Rites, Wolfe (2003) argues that a genuinely posthumanist approach to the question of
the animal must go beyond merely extending utilitarianism and moral rights theory
to (some) animals, and challenge the exclusionary logic which remains present in
the work of Singer and others. In When Species Meet, Haraway (2008) writes of the
‘entanglement’ of the human and non-human worlds, and the ‘naturecultures’ which
have evolved from them. She highlights the ‘co-construction’ of the categories human
and animal, arguing that human beings are part of a community of animals, with the
human and the animal constituted through interaction in subject- and object-shaping
encounters. The relationships of mutual attraction, manipulation and dependence
between humans and domestic species are better understood, Haraway argues, as
instances of symbiosis than of simple domination. Posthumanism demands that we
recognise that there are other modes of perception of the world as well as the human,
and that these can be sophisticated forms of consciousness (↗14 From Material to
Posthuman Ecocriticism).
A key point in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am is that whereas main-
stream philosophers have tended to define humanity through its difference from the
animal other and to emphasise the difference between humans and animals, “poets
or prophets” (Derrida 2002, 283) have more often challenged this binary, inferred its
responsibility for abuse of animals and environmentally damaging mindsets and
behaviours in general, and sought to overcome it. In the same year that Derrida wrote,
the South African Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee gave two lectures in
Princeton University’s Tanner Lecture series on Human Values, which were published
as a short story entitled “The Lives of Animals” (Coetzee 1999; they were subsequently
incorporated into his novel, Elizabeth Costello). His protagonist, a novelist called Eliz-
abeth Costello who possesses autobiographical traits, gives an impassioned speech
to an American university audience, articulating animal suffering in zoos, scientific
research, and above all the production of food. Coetzee, who has read Kafka (in the
original German) since he was an adolescent, published an academic study of one of
Kafka’s animal stories in 1981, and since written a second novel reflecting on our rela-
tionship with animals (Disgrace, 1999), has his fictional alter ego structure her public
lecture around a sustained comparison of her situation with that of the ape, Red Peter
in Kafka’s story, “A Report to an Academy.” Coetzee refers to Kafka as a pioneer in the
literary depiction of and philosophical reflection on the human-animal continuum.
In the last ten years a series of scholars have directed attention to the existence of
other literary representations of animals and our human relationship with them pre-
dating Coetzee’s highly charged novella. Works examined include Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Virginia
Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee, and poems by Rilke, Mar-
ianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Gary Snyder,
and Seamus Heaney (see Armstrong 2008; Rohman 2009; Weil 2012; also Gross and
Vallely 2012.) Philip Armstrong for instance examines four classical animal narratives
(Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick) and discusses their
reworking by later novelists including Upton Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hem-
ingway, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Yann Martel, in ways reflecting shifting
social and environmental forces.
256 Axel Goodbody
Like other branches of cultural studies, cultural animal studies is concerned with
the ways in which culture shapes individual experiences, everyday life, and social and
power relations. Animals in literature are historically determined and culturally moti-
vated constructions, by means of which conceptions of the human and the animal are
negotiated. Cultural animal studies works both synchronically and diachronically. On
the one hand, the image and status of animals is examined in different cultures, and
how their distinguishing features reflect wider value sets. On the other, the origins
and consequences of historical shifts in the representation of animals are identified.
Attention is devoted to critically highlighting elements of prejudice and systematic
misrepresentation of animal life in mainstream cultural texts and artifacts, and (as in
this chapter) to revealing challenges to our treatment of animals and the hegemonic
conceptions of animal and human identity which they are rooted in, and traces of the
autonomy and agency of which animals have been deprived.
Aesthetics and questions of form are a second field of enquiry for cultural animal
studies. Examination of the animal question as an aesthetic issue is sometimes said
to have begun with John Berger’s (2003) essay, “Why Look at Animals?” (written in
1977). Focusing on the cultural rather than the physical marginalisation of animals in
contemporary society, Berger argued that animals are universally used to chart our
experience of the world. The first metaphor was probably an animal one, using the
diversity of animal species to express social and psychological differentiation among
human beings. However, he argued, there has been a decisive historical shift in the
cultural meaning of animals, paralleling the change in our physical relationship with
them since the eighteenth century. At the same time as they were reduced to a com-
modity as a foodstuff, a nostalgic view of animal innocence arose. A subset of animals
has since served as pets, effectively as human puppets, whose function it is to confirm
neglected (emotional, altruistic) parts of ourselves.
Berger drew two important consequences for the aesthetics of animal representa-
tion. Anthropomorphism, which used to be an expression of our proximity with
animals, must now make us uneasy, he held, because we live in a world from which
animals have largely been banished. It performs a compensatory function, which stabi-
lises and only reinforces our estrangement from them. The marginalisation of animals
has also been intensified by the fact that they have been depicted almost exclusively
as passive objects of our human gaze. Berger castigated zoos as institutions originally
intended to endorse colonial power, which cemented the one-way gaze of humans at
animals. Despite his general condemnation of this aesthetic complicity in marginal-
ising animals, Berger conceded that individual artists and writers have recorded and
critically commented on the concealing of our proximity with animals which has been
prevalent in capitalist culture. Artists today must, he inferred, take on the challenge
of exposing the modern practices disguising the dualism of exploiting and revering
which has been present in our relationship with animals since time immemorial.
Subsequent studies of animal representation and aesthetics such as Cary Wolfe’s
(2003) Animal Rites have developed and refined Berger’s arguments. Wolfe (2003,
133–134) criticises mainstream books and films for relegating non-human others “to
the realm of senseless matter, inert organicity, brute instinct, or at best mindless rep-
etition and mimicry,” and using animals as tropes in accounts of human aggression
and sexuality. He notes, like Berger, that literary animals appear as subjects with
their own agency in a subset of texts, which blend natural history with observation
of animal behaviour, elements of travelogue, interviews and cultural history. Unlike
Berger, however, he defends anthropomorphism, arguing that it can be handled as a
technique acknowledging non-human agency. Timothy Clark (2011, 194–195) writes
similarly in his Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, describing
anthropomorphism as a space in which issues of “the nature of other animals, of lan-
guage, of the human […] intersect in fascinating, provocative and perhaps ultimately
irresolvable ways.” Kafka’s animal stories are more accurately described as zoomor-
phic, in that they present humans in animal form, than as anthropomorphic (endow-
ing non-human animals or inanimate objects with human attributes). However, the
distinction is problematic, not least because his writing reveals a fascination with the
twilight zone between human and animal.
A fundamental issue which writers and critics have grappled with is whether
and how we can represent animal lives in human language and culture without illu-
sion or distortion, since language and culture inevitably project a world understood
according to our scale, interests and desires. Irony has been acknowledged as playing
a key role in addressing this problem, as a means of making readers critically aware
of our discriminatory othering of animals. By foregrounding the social construction
of animals in a text, aggressively appropriating the non-human world and ensuring
readers notice this, authors can remind us obliquely that there is a more-than-human
world out there which has been silenced and suppressed. As Clark (2011, 191) puts
it, in their representation of animals they can “stage” their own artificiality. Kafka
makes skilful use of irony and satire in “Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to
an Academy.” However, before examining these stories, a more general account of
Kafka’s use of animals as symbols and identification figures is given in the following
pages.
2 Z
oopoetics: Kafka’s Animal Symbolism and
Narratives
Karl-Heinz Fingerhut’s starting point in his study of animals and the functions they
serve in Kafka’s writing is the universal tendency in human culture to use animals as
concrete figures for abstract qualities. The association of a species with a particular
form of human behaviour (the fox with cunning, for instance) is originally forged on
the basis of the animal’s appearance or characteristic behaviour. Over time, however,
these symbolic animals become cultural templates which can overshadow our phys-
258 Axel Goodbody
ical experience of living with the actual creatures. While animal behaviour is recog-
nised as analogous to that of human beings, animals are also traditionally viewed as
other. This combination of similarity and difference makes the animal a vehicle for
reflection of the human subject in fables, allegories and animal tales.
Using animals as characters was common in the Yiddish folk tales and Hassidic
parables which Kafka read, and in this respect his literary practice was in keeping
with his cultural heritage. In fact, he absorbed and adapted elements of animal rep-
resentation from a wide variety of sources, including fables, fairy tales, and canoni-
cal literary works. Perhaps the closest of Kafka’s stories to the Aesopian fable, which
is conceived from the conceptually formulated moral at the end and clothes it in
realistic exemplification, and in which animal figures exemplify individual human
frailties, is “Little Fable,” a tale of a mouse and a cat. Mice are normally associated
with timidity and vulnerability, their species depicts and generalises a human type.
Kafka’s short narrative appears to depict the relationship between ordinary citizens
and the power elite in modern society. His mouse has, however, been read as standing
for Jews in Europe, and the cat as a personification of the state, a divine force, and the
vitality of the life force. Although Kafka’s stories are frequently referred to as fables,
or animal parables (that is, stories in which the protagonists model forms of human
behaviour and present them for ethical evaluation), they lack these forms’ concluding
interpretation, hinting instead at multiple meanings, while withholding an unequiv-
ocal understanding. If his fables are thinking models, it is not in the sense of clothing
a pre-existing truth. Rather he starts with a suggestive image, which often has dream-
like features. His animals are also not those normally encountered in either fables
or children’s literature, and the meanings they are invested with are more complex
and ambivalent in nature. A further complicating feature of Kafka’s animal stories is
that they tend to use genre characteristics of the fable in parodistic intent, making
the speaking animal’s limited perception of the world evident through ironic stylistic
effects.
Kafka did not then simply invent his narrative elements and animal figures: they
are assembled from cultural tradition. However, he transformed them by suffusing
them with personal meaning. His animals and their relationships with human and
non-human others are never mere cyphers for humans in their social or political con-
stellations, as in Kenneth Grahame’s contemporaneous classic of children’s litera-
ture, The Wind in the Willows (1908), let alone didactic vehicles for the internalisation
of social norms, as in Waldemar Bonsels’ Biene Maja (1904). Kafka was interested in
totemism and the animal beliefs which lie at the origins of many religions. His stories
retain traces of the pre-rational sense of the identity of an individual or group with a
particular species of animal which is found in animal myths and folk tales.
Kafka’s animals also contain elements of the animal’s creaturely reality, which
gives them a memorable vividness, and sometimes introduces a note of grotesque
humour. However, he was not concerned with scientific accuracy: at one point in “A
Report to an Academy” he mentions the ape’s tail (“the crack wasn’t enough to push
a tail through” [Kafka 2007, 228]), appearing to confuse monkeys (which have tails)
with apes and chimpanzees (which don’t). (The German word Affe that he mainly uses
means both ‘ape’ and ‘monkey’.) At another, he refers to Red Peter’s Achilles’ heel –
although apes do not have one. This imprecision was a matter of conscious writing
strategy, rather than accident: when writing “The Burrow,” Kafka incorporated infor-
mation on both the badger and the mole from entries in the popular illustrated work of
natural history, Brehms Tierleben (see Wegmann 2011, 361). In “Metamorphosis,” the
creature which the semi-autobiographical figure Gregor Samsa turns into is referred
to in similarly inexact terms: while it is normally thought of as a beetle or cockroach,
the German word used is the generic term Ungeziefer, or ‘vermin.’
All this suggests that Kafka’s animals are primarily figures for the articulation of
human affairs – his own subjective experience and its symbolic extension to related
collectives. In his diaries and letters, he often relates the plight of an animal to his
own feelings, for instance observing a beetle lying helplessly on its back and infer-
ring it mirrors his psychological state, or describing himself as a mole, burrowing in
search of self-knowledge (see Fingerhut 1969, 37–39). It is only a small step from the
experienced, dreamed, and imagined identification with an animal which we find
in Kafka’s diaries and letters to his literary depiction of the despised but also pitied
self in the form of an animal. Some of the animals in his stories appear to originate in
his dreams: a recurring dream involved his pursuit by dogs or other animals. On the
one hand Kafka felt pity for suffering creatures, but on the other he feared animals
and was disgusted by them. Horses, panthers and other powerful creatures are asso-
ciated with vitality, naturalness, freedom and harmonious being in his writing, but
the association is often accompanied by ironic detachment, and switches easily into
fear – large animals recalling his overbearing father, and small ones prompting fears
of his private space being invaded. Chris Danta (2013, 124–125) has shown how Kafka’s
stories reveal a pattern of animals invading, displacing and decontextualizing the
human. In a letter written in 1917 from Zürau, where he was convalescing from tuber-
culosis at his sister’s home, Kafka (2008, 113) provided a graphic image of the animal
invading human space, describing mice which had scuttled around his bedroom the
night before as “the most horrifying thing in the world.”
In some stories, Kafka draws consciously on dream symbolism. He read Freud
and was familiar with psychoanalytic dream interpretation as a way of explaining
how unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind. His stories are
filled with incidents which can be viewed as psychoanalytic phenomena, such as
father/son conflicts, unconscious desires, ego-conflicts, projections, sublimations,
and uncanny reoccurrences of suppressed wishes in disguise. As in dreams, the self
is split into different components and given form in figures, both human and animal.
Kafka’s animals sometimes correspond to familiar psychoanalytic symbols: the horses
in “A Country Doctor” have for instance been convincingly interpreted as expressions
of repressed sexual energy.
260 Axel Goodbody
Fingerhut identifies four key complexes of animal symbolism which Kafka uses
in referring to himself in his diaries and letters, and which reappear in his stories
and fragments: the insect, the dog, the rodent or burrowing animal, and the bird.
The giant beetle in “Metamorphosis” is Kafka’s most famous creature: it is commonly
read as an outward form corresponding to Gregor Samsa’s situation regarding his
family and society, as an objective correlative for his mixed feelings of wretchedness
and resistance, and as an oblique reflection of the author’s isolation as a Jew and
an artist. Kafka similarly uses the dog as an unflattering identification figure: dogs
are not seen as loyal companions in Jewish tradition, but as servile, cringing, pet-
ulant beings, stubborn, impertinent and lewdly sensual. His protagonist in the late
story “The Burrow” combines, as already noted, aspects of badger and mole, uniting
various images of burrowing and forest animals which appear in his diaries, letters
and earlier stories. This portrait of a lonely, anxious inhabitant of an elaborate burrow
has been read as a depiction of his relationship with his writing, and its (in)ability to
meet his psychological needs.
Kafka’s final complex of animal imagery includes the jackdaw, raven, black-
bird and crow. He saw himself associated with the jackdaw through the meaning of
his family name (spelled kávka) in Czech: his father’s haberdashery shop used the
jackdaw as a symbol. Kafka’s Hebrew first name, Amschel, was also understood
by many eastern European Jews as a Hebraicised version of Amsel, the German for
‘blackbird.’ In the early story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” the autobio-
graphically coloured protagonist bears the name ‘Raban,’ echoing the German word
for ‘raven’. And we may presume that the 1500-year-old hunter from the Black Forest
who died in a hunting accident but is condemned to an existence as living dead in
“The Hunter Gracchus” serves as alter ego: gracchio is the Italian name of the Alpine
chough.
Kafka seems to take a perverse pleasure in his own abasement and humiliation
by depicting himself as an animal. The ape, burrowing animals including rats and
worms, the cockroach, and even the jackdaw are lost, trapped, feared, abominated
and hunted figures, which approximate to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life.’ In
German and Austrian anti-Semitical political publications of the time, Jews were fre-
quently referred to as rats, mice, insects and vermin. Hadea Nell Kriesberg (2010, 34)
concludes that Kafka took the reality of the ever-present possibility of being referred
to as an animal, and pondered what it would mean to truly be one. However, the
insect is also more generally an image for Kafka’s protest against a world in which the
isolated individual (for instance the artist) becomes a form of vermin which would
be best disposed of. The animalistic representation of his personal inner life invites
reading as a coded account of the life experience of groups of others, and ultimately
of the human condition. A closer look at “Metamorphosis” may help show how Kafka
pushed the boundaries of animal representation with the fragmented, encrypted and
multivalent transfer of his inner life onto an animal figure.
3 “ Metamorphosis”
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself
changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed” (Kafka 2007, 87). Thus begins “Met-
amorphosis,” which Kafka wrote in November 1912, in the burst of creativity which
followed his literary breakthrough with “The Judgement.” It is a tale of shape-shifting
from human to animal, concerned with the protagonist’s psychological adaptation
to the change, and its consequences for his family. The blend of wildest imagination
(Gregor’s turning into a cockroach) with realistic detail (the extended description of
how, lying on his back with his many tiny legs waving uncontrollably in the air, he
manages to get out of bed, and the contortions he goes through to turn the key in his
bedroom door) makes the story simultaneously strange and familiar, uncanny and
funny.
In traditional forms of therianthropy (the transformation of a human being into
an animal) in myths, folk tales, children’s literature and fantasy, the animal form can
symbolise internal savagery (as in werewolf tales), or it can be a deceptive outward
appearance concealing the individual’s inner goodness (as in “Beauty and the Beast”).
In “Metamorphosis” it is both. Ungeziefer, or ‘vermin,’ suggests a creature threatening
to human health and wellbeing (because it is disease-carrying), and repulsively ugly.
But Kafka may also have had the etymology of the term in mind: its original meaning
‘unclean animals/animals not suitable for sacrifice’ hints at Gregor’s impending
failure to achieve recognition for redeeming his family through his self-sacrifice.
On the one hand, Gregor’s transformation is a catastrophe, cementing his already
existing social isolation and leading to his death. He describes his predicament (he
cannot speak, and although he understands what others are saying, they do not realise
it) as “incarceration” (Kafka 2007, 112) – it externalises and intensifies the alienation
he has already been experiencing in the family, at work and in society generally.
However, on the other hand Gregor can no longer be expected to go to work. His new
body form releases him from the intolerable burden of having to support the family
single-handed and pay off the debt incurred when his father’s business failed. Gre-
gor’s transformation, however gruesome, appears as a form of dream reality, possibly
even a fantasy wish-fulfilment. In dreams, insects such as cockroaches are commonly
associated with uncleanness, and aspects of the self that need to be confronted. Guilt
and debt are leitmotifs in the story, and although Gregor presents himself as a dutiful
son, there are hints that he may have committed some sexual or financial misdemean-
ours. He half-accepts his transformation as punishment for a vaguely sensed delin-
quency, as well as a keenly felt personal inadequacy.
However, dream cockroaches can also be markers of tenacity and resistance. In
Kafka’s earlier, unfinished story, “Wedding Preparations in the Country” the protag-
onist, Raban, longs for his clothed body to go into the country to fulfil his obligation
to meet his fiancée, while he lies in bed, in “the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle
or a cockchafer, I think” (Kafka 1995, 78). This becomes partial reality for Gregor: his
262 Axel Goodbody
inner self can lie in bed in the form of a beetle, but in this case his body, representing
his social self, does not go out into the world for him. His transformation into ‘vermin’
reflects his guilty conscience over letting the family down and becoming a lazy malin-
gerer. A concretisation of his latent wish to withdraw from society, it corresponds to
the mix of helplessness and aggression arising out of his inner turmoil of dissatisfac-
tion with his career and place in the family.
At the end of “Metamorphosis,” Kafka alludes obliquely to Christ’s fasting and
temptation through his depiction of Gregor’s progressive rejection of the food pro-
vided him, which mirrored the author’s own vegetarianism and asceticism. Kafka’s
leanings to ascetic self-denial bordered on anorexia, and one of his great frustrations
was that his parents blamed his suffering on his vegetarianism and his writing, rather
than his being unable to eat and write as he wished (see Norris 1985, 115–116). This
may be reflected in the story, for as with the protagonists in other stories, there are
hidden links between Gregor and his author. ‘Samsa’ resembles the pattern of vowels
and consonants in ‘Kafka’, there is a proximity with the (albeit unspoken) word Käfer
(beetle), and both approximate to the German word for cage, Käfig, hinting at Gre-
gor’s entrapment in his tedious job. However, if we read Gregor’s transformation as
something giving outward symbolic form to his self-sacrifice in the family’s interests,
his attempt to redeem the family through self-immolation (he dies as a result of refus-
ing food) is strangely ambivalent. It succeeds in the sense that as he wastes away
they go from strength to strength. But they do not recognise his part in this process.
The story has been interpreted by psychoanalytic critics as one reflecting the author’s
self-hatred because of his unacceptable Oedipal wish to replace his father, and
depicting a search for redemption through self-sacrifice, which is doomed to failure.
Gregor’s transformation into ‘vermin’ may have been inspired by Dostoyevsky, who
had already used vermin (in Notes from the Underground) as a literary figuration of the
conflict between father and son, associating it with lust, degradation, and oppressive
office work.
Openness to multiple interpretations is the very essence of Kafka’s art. If the
human-animal hybrid, Gregor Samsa has been read as a displaced self-representa-
tion of the author, and “Metamorphosis” as a parable reflecting the psychotic state
arising out of experiences ranging from ethnic discrimination to troubled masculin-
ity, the story has equally been read as a reflection on the position of Jews in the Aus-
tro-Hungarian empire, and as a commentary on the situation of the artist, standing
on the margins of society and sacrificing life to art. Kafka’s animals are often sacrifi-
cial animals, which reflect a special self-understanding of the role of the writer: in a
letter to Max Brod written in 1922 reflecting on the nature and function of literature,
Kafka (1979, 295) refers to the writer as the “scapegoat of mankind,” for “he makes
it possible for men to enjoy sin without guilt, almost without guilt.” As Chris Danta
(2007, 723) points out, it is not merely that Kafka sees the writer facilitating human
salvation by suffering on behalf of others, taking on the sins of the human community
and bearing them away: the ‘scapegoat’ metaphor he uses also reinforces the link,
ubiquitous in his work, between writers and (abused) animals. Writers identify with
animals and express their suffering. Literature sparks our imagination, enabling us to
inhabit their bodies. This gives access to a point of view outside the human: the (liter-
ary) story of violence is told from the side of the animal and our own animality. In the
following sections I turn to the concept of biocentric writing and its instantiation in
Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” in which Kafka bears witness to animal victimhood
and foregrounds human animality.
4 Zoontology: Kafka as Biocentric Writer

Although Fingerhut acknowledged the complexity and diversity of the functions of
Kafka’s animals, his focus on them as symbols conveying insights into the human
world led him to play down Kafka’s engagement with real animals, and to overlook
the author’s critical reflection on the validity of common assumptions about our
difference from animals. The opening pages of “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” for
instance, lampoon our exploitative use of pets for companionship, affection and affir-
mation. Blumfeld “only wants a companion, an animal to which he doesn’t have to
pay much attention, which doesn’t mind an occasional kick, which even, in an emer-
gency, can spend the night in the street, but which nevertheless, when Blumfeld feels
like it, is promptly at his disposal with its barking, jumping, and licking of hands”
(Kafka 1995, 208). The bouncing balls which mysteriously appear and follow him have
been interpreted as perverted concretisations of this desire to live in companionship
while denying others care and attention.
A second example is “A Crossbreed.” Kafka’s imaginary creature, the “kit-
ten-lamb,” has been interpreted as a model of the assimilated Jew and a figure for
the author’s cultural and spiritual complexes. However, it also prompts the reader to
reflect on the ultimately arbitrary designation of some species of animal as coddled
pets while others are treated as sources of food. The story challenges our assumptions
about the right to kill and eat animals, while (through the lamb) hinting that animals’
relationship with humans is that of a sacrificial victim (see Kriesberg 2010, 35–40).
Publications on Kafka’s literary animals took a new turn with Margot Norris’s
(1985) study, Beasts of the Modern Imagination. Of particular importance for Kafka
scholarship were her introduction (on the ‘biocentric tradition’), and chapter 3, in
which she read “A Report to an Academy” against the grain of allegorical interpre-
tations as an imaginative act of animal witness. Norris (1985, 20) describes Kafka’s
“radical animal ontology” as his greatest achievement, contrasting his “brilliant
animal narratives” with his “inconclusive and incomplete” novels. She locates Kafka
in a tradition of biocentric writing which was grounded in Darwin’s collapse of the
cardinal distinction between animal and human, on the basis that the intellectual,
moral, and cultural differences which these exhibit are ones of degree only, not of
264 Axel Goodbody
kind. The second major influence on biocentric writing was Nietzsche’s valorisation
of the body and its instinctual epistemology over the mind and mediated human
experience. Norris (1985, 221) presents Nietzsche’s understanding of animals and
human animality in Lacanian terms: “Nietzsche was able to identify in the enthrall-
ment to the symbolic ‘other’ the precondition for consciousness, social interaction,
and cultural ambition, all quintessentially ‘human’ states that depend on the deval-
uation of the material body, the repression of instinct, the oppression of the animal,
and the obliteration of creatural or ‘animal’ man.” The animal’s putative inferiority to
the human is, Norris (1985, 3–4) argues, traditionally ascribed to “a lack, a deficiency
in reason, speech, soul, morality,” while the human being is viewed as “complete,
perfect, fulfilled.” Biocentric writers, however, treat the animal (including the human
as animal) as a plenum, and cultural man as suffering an imaginary lack, which gives
birth to desire, and makes him produce language and the Lacanian symbolic order
governed by reliance on the other (Norris 1985, 4). The animal lives for itself in the
fullness of its being, but cultural man lives in imitation and desire of the other.
Norris (1985, 1) discusses Kafka, the surrealist artist Max Ernst and the novelist
D. H. Lawrence as representatives of a third generation of biocentrist thinkers (fol-
lowing those of Darwin and Nietzsche), and argues that their narrators, protagonists
and figures reappropriate their animality in an anthropocentric world. Kafka was, as
already noted, no unqualified admirer of the untamed animal instincts which some
of his contemporaries celebrated as a panacea for man in advanced civilisation.
However, “A Report to an Academy” and other stories such as “A Hunger-Artist” and
“In the Penal Colony” depict the oppression and suppression of what is creatural in
the human – the body, feeling, pain, libido – in the ostensible interest of rationalism
and idealism. Deconstructing the human by exaggerating rationality and presenting
it as a site of perversity, Kafka seeks to recuperate “an imagined animal sensibility,
reflecting a subversive image of the human as seen through animal eyes” (Norris 2010,
19). Kafka’s deconstruction of the false oppositions to the animal on which notions of
the human have been built, in “A Report to an Academy” in particular, prefigured Der-
rida’s (2002, 377) undertaking to “think concerning the animal,” and Agamben’s call
to discard the ‘anthropological machine’ which is responsible for both the Holocaust
and the ongoing mass slaughter of animals.
Biocentric thinking has implications for form: Norris (1985, 5) claims it cannot
find adequate expression in realist art, because realism involves imitation, and is
implicated in the abstraction from and displacement of nature inherent in anthro-
pocentric art: “Subversive interrogation of the anthropocentric premises of Western
philosophy and art” goes hand in hand with “the invention of artistic and philosoph-
ical strategies that would allow the animal, the unconscious, the instincts, the body,
to speak again in their work.” She regards Kafka as one of a small group of thinkers,
writers and artists who “create as the animal – not like the animal, in imitation of the
animal – but with their animality speaking” (1985, 1). As biocentrists, they are both
philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, and producers of “self-reflexive
metaphors of recognising the animal in oneself” (21), responding to the implications

of their own animality for writing by transforming their work into “bestial acts and
gestures” (1).
Kafka’s particular form of biocentric art invokes representation only to dismantle
it, thereby uniting an affective and a deconstructive aim, and meeting the require-
ment of a mode of creation that rebuffs interpretation, frustrates communication, and
negates authority. As Norris (1985, 3, 19–20) writes: “The art produced by a biocen-
tric discourse consists […] of tormented generic and rhetorical experiments,” for “the
rationalistic assumptions of conventional realism (including a logical subject, cause
and effect, the relationship of part and whole, ‘plausibility,’ noncontradiction) could
scarcely accommodate the exploration of organic, feral, natural life.” Kafka’s “antire-
presentational” mode of writing includes designification of the figure of the animal
(denying it unitary meaning), and experiments with animal points of view (16). Norris
argues that Kafka’s “experiential, spontaneous, gestural, performative” (5) writing is
“a major weapon in the biocentric critique of an anthropocentric art in the service of
human (as opposed to animal) desire” (12).
5 “ Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to an

Academy”
“Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to an Academy” are two stories in which
Kafka subjects to sustained scrutiny our treatment of animals, and what distinguishes
human beings from other animals. In the former, a late piece written in 1922, Kafka
parodies human pretence to universal knowledge and forensic self-examination by
placing these in the mouth of a dog. As Margot Norris (2010, 23–26) demonstrates in
her contribution to Lucht and Yarri’s edited volume, Kafka’s Creatures, the central
conceit of the tale is that humans are invisible to dogs and oblivious to human agency.
The dog (a species which we regard as the prototype of the domesticated animal)
speaks as though dogs lived wholly autonomously from the human world: “All I cared
for was the race of dogs, that and nothing else. For what is there actually except our
own species? To whom but it can one appeal in the wide and empty world? All knowl-
edge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog” (Kafka
1995, 321).
Satirising the blinkeredness of humanist morality and research into primate
intelligence at the time, he attempts to interpret the behaviour of performing circus
dogs, who did “the very thing which is both most ridiculous and indecent in our eyes;
they were walking on their hind legs” (Kafka 1995, 316), and that of lapdogs, who
appear to him to float on cushions in the air (326–327). He takes it as axiomatic that
all food comes from the earth, which “when it is watered and scratched according to
the rules of science, extrudes nourishment”, and that the emergence of food can be
266 Axel Goodbody
“hastened by certain spells, songs, and ritual movements” (in other words, begging!)
(319–320). “Investigations of a Dog” parodies Descartes’ understanding of animals
as creatures devoid of subjectivity and the means of self-expression, mere instinct-
driven machines, and satirizes the arrogance of science and the human subsuma-
tion of the diversity of animal life under the generic term ‘the animal’: “Apart from us
dogs there are all sorts of creatures in the world, wretched, limited, dumb creatures,
who have no language but mechanical cries; many of us dogs study them, have given
them names, try to help them, educate them, uplift them, and so on. For my part I am
quite indifferent to them except when they try to disturb me, I confuse them with one
another, I ignore them” (311).
“A Report to an Academy” (1917), Kafka’s first tale told from the perspective of an
animal, and the story on which most interest in Kafka has focused among thinkers
and writers on the animal question, is more complex. Not least because it was first
published in a Zionist magazine, it has traditionally been interpreted as an allegori-
cal account of the attempt of Jews to assimilate into Western society. It has, however,
equally been read figuratively as a satire on colonial subjects, and a study of self-al-
ienation. Fingerhut (1969, 103–105; 251–255) discusses the story at two points in his
book, rehearsing a range of different interpretations. Commentators understanding
the ape narrator as deceived (i.e. as not recognising his failure to get beyond appear-
ing in a variety show) have read the narrative as reflecting critically on assimilated
Jews (interpreting the ape as fraudulently seeking to become human). However, it is
equally possible to interpret the tale as a satirical critique of human society through
the eyes of an outsider. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello reads it in this light as an allegory
of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles, and Fingerhut’s preferred interpretation
appears to be that of an allegorical account of the artist’s relationship with bourgeois
society (with ‘apeness’ serving as a metaphor for the artistry he must give up in order
to survive). In support of this last interpretation, it is worth noting that while apes are
traditionally associated with physical ugliness and malice, and presented in Christian
iconography as emblems for the vices of vanity, greed, and lechery, they are also char-
acterised as prone to imitation: since the Renaissance artists have periodically been
portrayed as apes.
Norris’s biocentric interpretation focuses on Red Peter’s strategies of deception,
arguing that he is consciously concealing the violence done to him. Through the ape’s
very circumlocutions and euphemisms for the pain and injury incurred in his trans-
formation into a human being, “A Report to an Academy” exposes human cruelty.
The story tells of Red Peter’s violent capture (he refers to it as a “criminal assault”
[Kafka 2007, 227]) and “training” to imitate human behaviour in such a way as to
present ‘brutality’ as a human feature, and animals as superior. At the same time, the
ape’s exaggerated academic parlance, rhetorical sophistication, urbanity, self-control
and irony parody notions of these qualities as distinguishing features of humanity,
thereby deconstructing notions of human perfectibility and superiority over animals.
Kafka was prompted to write the story by a newspaper report on the appearance of
a chimpanzee as a variety show artist. Whereas other narratives of apes captured

in Africa and brought to civilisation such as the 1933 film King Kong have tended to
represent primates as the violent ‘beast within us’, symbolising a barbarism which
threatens to wreck modern civilisation, Kafka critically references the hunting and
zoological practices of the time.
The form of the story parodies contemporary scientific reports, in which a
researcher presented findings on ape behaviour to an academic audience: here it is
the ape himself who speaks. He has been asked to tell of his life as an ape prior to
being captured on the Gold Coast, but claims he cannot remember anything of this.
Shifting the subject of his report from the story of his ape life to that of his accelerated
evolution from ape to man enables Red Peter to become a subject and cease to be
an object, and focuses attention on the barbaric methods of his humanization and
civilization.
The fact that Red Peter describes his learning of language not as a way of gaining
liberty, but merely as a ‘way out’ (Ausgang – the term that Kant used to define Enlight-
enment’s release of humans from subjection to despotic rule and irrational author-
ity) prompts us to read “A Report to an Academy” as an allegory of our entry into
modernity through enlightenment and the concomitant loss of animality. The ape’s
‘gradual enlightenment’ is an imposed conformity to the ‘way of humanity’: the
ostensibly emancipatory process is subverted by irony and satirical exaggeration. As
Norris remarks, the ape’s report is a sophisticated dissimulative performance. Associ-
ating humanity with vice and trickery rather than rational thinking or moral virtues,
Kafka “decodes cultural performance as atrocity.” Here and in other stories, Kafka’s
technique is one of “slyly repealing the representation, by de-signifying the event,
stripping it of symbolic meaning, rendering its justifications absurd” (Norris 1985, 12).
Kafka critiques civilisation in general and traditional forms of mimetic art for their
sacrifice of the interests of the animal and the body to “reason, spirit, ideals, virtues,
beauty, form” (11).
In a recent contribution to a collection of essays on Philosophy and Kafka, Chris
Danta (2013) argues, following Margot Norris and Kari Weil, that Kafka was a pro-
phetic precursor of contemporary critics of speciesism. Few authors can lay claim
to a worldview as creaturely as Kafka’s, which Danta sees encapsulated in a passage
from Kafka’s diaries: “If I closely examine what is my ultimate aim […], I strive to
know the whole human and animal community, to recognize their basic predilections,
desires, moral ideas […]” (Kafka 1999, 387; emphasis added). This human-and-animal
community is constructed through variants of animal-to-human and human-to-ani-
mal transformation in Kaka’s stories, including animals invading human space and
supplanting humans, and human subjects responding to exposure to external forces,
projecting themselves out of the human community into the community of animals
and adopting the position of the animal victim.
To become an animal in Kafka is to become a special kind of victim, Danta (2013,
129–130) argues, through separation from one’s species. Red Peter’s ‘report’ demon-
268 Axel Goodbody
strates how the birth of the human has traditionally involved victimization of the
animal. By changing from ape to human, he makes the physical and moral proximity
of humans and apes self-evident. Danta compares “A Report to an Academy” with a
folk tale known as the “Animal Bachelor” story. Here, animals masquerade as human
beings: they are often beast by day and man by night. Such tales contain the truth that
the human being is an animal. But usually the story is resolved by the subject being
either a human or an animal. Kafka’s animals are in contrast close to us yet strange,
at once animal and human. They convey a sense of “proximate estrangement” (Danta
2013, 130). Humanity has founded its superiority on forgetting our animality, and
contempt for animals, reducing them to the level of things, enslaved and butchered.
Kafka utilises the mythic permeability of animal and human identity to convey the
alienation of modern humans, not just from other animals, but also from each other.
6 C
ritical Zoomorphism
Kafka played a pioneering role in adapting to modernity cultural traditions running
counter to the human-animal philosophical binary, using animals as personas for
human emotional states and as allegories for suppressed minorities. At the same time
he focalised his animal narratives in such a way as to avoid the domesticating, mor-
alising anthropomorphism of classical fables and tales of transformation into animal
form. His stories exemplify the critical anthropomorphism of which Weil, and eco-
critics including Garrard and Clark, write that, combining affect with critical aware-
ness of irreducible difference, it can do justice to the agency of the non-human, and
serve as a tool for questioning the complacency of dominant human self-conceptions.
Anthropomorphic attentiveness to the other and imagination of their perspective
may ultimately be the best means at our disposal to bring readers to act on behalf of
animals’ perceived needs and desires (see Weil 2002, 19).
Kafka’s animal tales conform to the epistemology of literary modernism in that
they critique modernity’s instrumental reason and domination of other species, and
figure the repression of our own animality. However, while sharing modernism’s
break with nineteenth-century sentimental engagement with animals in the aesthetic
sphere, they do not participate in its turn to revitalising savagery, either in the form of
D. H. Lawrence’s recuperative stance towards the animal, which imagined restoring a
primal union between human and beast, or in a struggle to the death between the two
as a way of stepping out of the empty artifice of modern living into truth, as in Ernest
Hemingway’s depictions of bullfighting, big game hunting and fishing. This makes
Kafka’s disruption of anthropocentrism a particularly rewarding subject for analysis
in animal studies.
Kafka’s stories are also modernist in aesthetic terms, as we have seen, with their
formal experimentation and richly suggestive symbolism. Modernist formal innova-
tion was in fact closely linked with the project of undermining the human-animal
binary, as Carrie Rohman has argued. The breakdown of traditional literary syntax,
structure and narration through the introduction of circuitous and unstable narra-
tive devices coincided with the post-Darwinian eruption of non-human chaotic forces
within humanism, forging a distinctly modernist formal embodiment of the animal
problem (Rohman 2009, 27). These qualities have made Kafka’s stories a locus classi-
cus of literary animal representation, which has served as an inspiration for younger
writers: Philip Armstrong (2008, 202) has described “A Report to an Academy” as “the
most influential literary great ape narrative of the twentieth century” (2008, 202).
Such writing subverts the categories and distinctions which we rely on to make
sense of the world and elevate ourselves above it, challenges us to reconsider assump-
tions about our uniqueness and virtue, and moves us towards overcoming our alien-
ation from the natural world and our own bodies. Kafka exemplifies the role of fiction
writers in negotiating change in our perceptions of animals, nature and environment,
and demonstrates the ability of narrative to contribute to debates on issues of public
concern alongside conceptual discourses. Animal studies thus reveals itself as a field
in which literature serves as a prime medium of cultural ecology (↗7 Cultural Ecology
of Literature), serving to restore “the richness, diversity and complexity of those inner
landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the emotions, and interpersonal communi-
cation that make up the cultural ecosystems of modern humans, but are threatened
by impoverishment from an increasingly overeconomised, standardised, and deper-
sonalised contemporary world” (Zapf 2008, 852).
Work examining the representation of animals and analysing conceptions of
human-animal relations in literature, film and art has until recently only been loosely
connected with ecocriticism (which has had closer links with feminist and postco-
lonial studies): of the 34 essays recently presented by Greg Garrard in the Oxford
Handbook of Ecocriticism, only four (contributions on posthumanism, ferality tales,
extinctions, and children’s literature) engage significantly with animal questions.
Although at first sight Kafka’s writing does not appear to address ecocritical themes,
his animal stories have nonetheless provided a forum for “the enactment of the dia-
logical interdependence between self and other” (Zapf 2008, 853) which Zapf calls
for, while offering the necessary resistance to simplistic interpretation and appropri-
ation of life’s complex, dynamic processes. Staging and exploring “the complex feed-
back relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations
of human and non-human nature” (852), they make a significant contribution to cul-
tural self-renewal.
270 Axel Goodbody
7 B
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Serpil Oppermann
14 F rom Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism:
Hybridity, Stories, Natures
Abstract: By highlighting the intersections between material ecocriticism and post-
humanism, this chapter explores how ecocriticism is becoming more post-human
and post-natural in its questioning of the entrenched notion of the human, as well as
the blurred boundaries between inorganic and organic matter. Posthuman ecocriti-
cism expands the material ecocritical vision of storied matter to critically discern the
cultural implications of currently emerging posthuman agencies – such as synthetic
matter responding to stimuli and exhibiting signs of spontaneous activity – that osten-
sibly transfigure human ecologies and material-discursive practices. With selected
literary texts that are labeled posthuman novels, and bio-technological examples, the
chapter aims to shed critical light on how posthuman ecologies accentuate the impact
of bios-zoe-techno-eco-cultures in re-imagining what it means to be human, or non-
human, in a world of hybrid configurations, strange natures, and stories.
Key Terms: Material ecocriticism, posthuman ecocriticism, posthumanism, new

materialisms
1 I ntroduction
Life, as marine anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2009, ix) writes, “materializes as a
networked phenomenon linking the microscopic to the macrocosmic, bacteria to the
biosphere, genes to globe.” Life, in other words, discloses an environmental intimacy
of connective matter, explained as “the co-constitutive materiality of human corpore-
ality and nonhuman natures” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 9). Being an often alluring
but also a lethal vortex of churning forces and substances that affect the vulnerability
of human bodies and the accountability of human prospects, this restless materiality
underlies the theoretical discourses of the new materialist paradigm. Informed by
scientific developments, the new materialist scholarship conceives matter as agentic,
generative, active, and expressive, and investigates its existential implications.
According to Karen Barad (2007, 139), the new discernment of materiality “represents
a profound conceptual shift” in the orbits of scientific and theoretical inquiry.
When Barad (2007, 26) famously stated that “we are a part of that nature that we
seek to understand” (emphasis in the original), highlighting Niels Bohr’s quantum
274 Serpil Oppermann
logic, she did so to draw attention to the importance of a “participatory universe,”1

our concerted involvement in the world’s becoming. In her words: “conceptions of
materiality, social practice, nature, and discourse must change to accommodate their
mutual involvement” (2007, 25). In the ecological context, being part of nature means
not remaining perceptually out-side as if we exist independent of the world’s conflu-
ent biotic and abiotic components. If we want to intuit our worldly embodiment, we
need to be more alert and less distant to the material world. In a more emphatic note,
David Abram (2014, 301) asks: “What is climate change if not a consequence of failing
to respect or even to notice the elemental medium in which we are immersed?” The
elemental immersion, being a corporeal one, is a seamless mesh of bodies and the
environments, otherwise named as “trans-corporeality” by Stacy Alaimo (2014, 187),
“a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as perpetually intercon-
nected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments.” Like Abram
and Alaimo, many new materialist scholars work to theorize this permeable materi-
ality where all bodies are knottily interfaced, insisting that “the ways we understand
and interact with nature are in need of a commensurate updating” (Coole and Frost
2010, 5). Composing what increasingly seems a shared platform, posthumanism is the
site of such updates, where various theoretical threads of new materialisms – among
them material feminisms, eco-materialism, agential realism, prismatic ecology, and
material ecocriticism – converge to produce new epistemological configurations. Like
the “unrolling of a coil,” to borrow Henri Bergson’s (1965, 727) simile, all these the-
oretical positions are superposable on one another, but in a heterogeneous sense,
not homogeneously as Bergson would think, producing rather different shades of
the posthuman spectrum. Stacy Alaimo (2011, 282), for example, speaks of “Post-hu-
manist new materialisms” when she refers to the intersections and alliances between
these interrelated theoretical discourses. Posthumanism, then, is like a perturbed
middle space where many crisscrossing discourses mingle to consolidate a non-an-
thropocentric humanism,2 and to negotiate the “boundaries of posthuman concern,
whether they are moral, political or cultural” (Miah 2008, 87).
Already signaled by material ecocriticism, which focuses on the world’s fluid
dynamics in both material and discursive terms, ecocriticism holds a crucial posi-
tion among these theories. The conceptual argument of material ecocriticism is that
matter is endowed with creative expressions, manifesting as storied matter. Creative
materiality is encoded everywhere; there are, for example, “stories of cosmology,
geology, history, ecology, and life embodied in every form of materiality” (Oppermann
2013, 57). Storied matter in the posthuman moment exhibits itself in matter’s overlap-
ping biotic and abiotic components transmitted through technoscientific practices
that seek to graft the technological onto the biological – for example, inorganic nano-
1 I borrow this phrase from physicist John A. Wheeler.

2 Serenella Iovino coined this term in her essay “Ecocriticism and Non-Anthropocentric Humanism.”
14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism: Hybridity, Stories, Natures 275
designing of biophysical systems (Parisi 2008, 294). In this chapter, I argue that since
material ecocriticism variously engrosses the critical posthuman visions, it is quintes-
sentially posthumanist. This is an osmosis through which material ecocriticism forges
a post-naturalist environmental imagination in the making. In what follows, I will
first discuss the posthuman turn in a general theoretical outline and then explore the
ways in which material ecocriticism morphs into posthuman ecocriticism.
2 P
osthumanism
Similar to postmodernism that contested the liberal humanist culture from within its
own assumptions through a disrupting set of discourses, but did so without denying
it, posthumanism promises a new critical paradigm without leaving humanism
entirely behind, and progressively co-opts postmodern skepticism towards the idea of
a central human subject. Not surprisingly, posthumanism has elicited unique episte-
mological configurations, encompassing theoretical discourse, literary-cultural pro-
duction, and biotechnological developments. Scholars like Katherine Hayles (1999,
285), who helped inaugurate posthumanist theorizing, aver that “the posthuman
evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening
up new ways of thinking about what being human means” Like Hayles, Cary Wolfe
(1998, 42) suggests that we must “rethink the notion of the human tout court” (empha-
sis in the original). Thinking the human tout court means rethinking the conceptual
frameworks within which we have defined human subjectivity, agency, identity and
self, acknowledging the permeable boundaries of species in the natural-cultural con-
tinuum, and recognizing the profound interconnections between different forms of
life in the composite world where previously we had seen separations. One crucial
outcome of posthumanist thinking is, therefore, delegitimation of human excep-
tionalism as implicitly determined by illusory rules. Pramod K. Nayar (2014, 4), for
instance, posits that “the human incorporates difference in the form of other DNA,
species and forms of life, so that its uniqueness is a myth” (emphasis in the original).
Seen from this perspective, posthumanism places the human self in a new conceptual
category, fundamentally reframing the ambits in which human identity is enacted, as
pertinently explained by Eileen Joy and Christine M. Neufeld:
Much of the contemporary debates over posthumanism have mainly focused on the ways in
which new biotechnologies and new findings in the cognitive sciences have complicated how
we conceptualize and enact our human identities, ushering in the language of crisis over the
supposed destabilization of the category “human,” in its biological, social, and political aspects.
(2007, 171)
Although the destabilization of the category human evokes considerable angst, the
posthuman “does not really mean the end of humanity” as Katherine Hayles (1999,
286) maintains: “It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human.” We
are joined together, Hayles (2006, 164) claims, “in a dynamic co-evolutionary spiral
with intelligent machines as well as with the other biological species with whom we
share the planet,” which entails confronting the question of “the identity of human-
ness itself” (Kirby 1997, 5) outside the human hubris. This formulation of posthuman-
ism therefore calls upon a relational ontology that announces itself in an affirmative
fashion. Rather than worrying about the undermined status of human ontologies and
mourning the loss of a concept of self as immutable, we should read the new category
human in terms of co-emergence within a shared field of existence marked by the inter-
dependency of life. If human and nonhuman bodies are “networked with each other
and with technologies, practices, and disciplines which may cluster and co-constitute
them regardless of species designation” (Wolfe 2013, 34–35), humans can no longer be
defined in a separate ontological zone, but as “hybrids of nature and culture” (Latour
1993, 11). In this hybridized world, while we can understandably remain skeptical of
the possibility of our dissolution into an utterly alien category, like disembodied intel-
ligence entrenched in a digital medium, many of us would acknowledge the human
indexed in processes of co-emergence with other beings. Jane Bennett’s (2010, 31)
identification of human agency as “an interfolding network of humanity and non-
humanity” exemplifies this process as the key point in posthumanist accounts of
human ontologies. Importantly, this shift away from the conjectural singularity of the
human agency is not a wholesale rejection of humanism (or the human), but a critical
reframing aimed to dissolve the accompanying impulse of exploiting the coexisting
sphere of the nonhuman. The prospect of posthumanism in this sense entails a deter-
mined theoretical move to resist the tenacious patterns of humanist resurrection that
potentially harbor such impulses. Put differently, by mobilizing a significant depar-
ture from predominantly anthropocentric discourses and practices in all aspects of
social, cultural, political, biological, and ecological relations, posthumanism essen-
tially contests their presumptive power to abolish what Timothy Morton (2008) calls
“ecologocentrism.”3 This is of course an endorsement of the postmodern challenge of
the grand narratives of humanist culture fashioned by the Enlightenment paradigms,
but, going further, posthumanism significantly accentuates the last metanarrative
postmodernism mostly de-emphasized, “namely,” to quote Stefan Herbrechter (2013,
78), “anthropocentric humanism.”
Emerging thus from the “postmodernist critiques of Enlightenment thought”
(Heise 2011, 454), and abandoning all anthropocentric dualisms, posthumanism
espouses a progressive thought that dispenses with the species barriers. At the same
time, however, engaging with technoscientific reconceptualizations of life, it also
3 In his essay “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” Morton (2008, 75) holds that “ecologocen-
trism underpins most environmental philosophy, preventing access to the full scope of interconnect-
edness.”
blurs the boundaries between humans and machines. It is in this sense that post-
humanism evokes strange possibilities and impending crises suggested by biotech-
nological developments, such as synthetic intelligence, robotics, genetic modifica-
tion, and bio-engineering that insinuate a dystopian condition filled with anxieties
about a fuzzy human existence. Since posthumanism upholds the idea that “the oth-
er-than-human resides at the very core of the human” (Wolfe 2003, 17), it occasions
both unease and enthusiasm, because the other-than-human in the posthumanist
vision is not a biological category only. Calling attention to this dual sensibility, Rosi
Braidotti (2013, 2) concedes that the posthuman “evokes elation but also anxiety […]
about the possibility of a serious de-centering of ‘Man,’ the former measure of all
things.” The aura of ambivalence on the consequences of de-centering the human-
ist subject stems from what Helena Feder (2014a, 5) refers to as “two poles of the
term”: “trans-humanist (teleological, transcendent) and critical (materialist) posthu-
manisms.”4 Both poles, I would suggest, converge in what the intellectual itinerary
of posthumanism spells out as post-anthropocentric humanism. But what precipitates
a crisis here is a cultural imaginary increasingly fraught with subversive meanings,
mainly due to the trans-humanist quandaries. In How We Became Posthuman (1999),
Katherine Hayles (3), for instance, sees “no essential differences or absolute demarca-
tions between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and
biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.” While this understanding of
posthumanism has dehumanizing implications (if we assume no essential difference
between humans and computer simulations), thinking “[m]achine, organism, and
human embodiment” (Haraway, 2008a, 163) in co-constitutive relationships negates
this effect. More important perhaps is viewing such technoscientific scenarios from the
perspective of nonhumans (both plants and animals) who are bio-engineered, genet-
ically modified and thus “tailored to fit […] market slots,” as Val Plumwood (2002, 25)
would say. Indeed, the question here is not to what extent humans are dehumanized
in the technologized world, but how extensively the nonhuman beings are relentlessly
manipulated by the new technologies to meet the demands of global free-markets for
foodstuff. Thus, on the one hand, technoscientific developments bring the biosphere
and the technosphere together (i.e. designing self-reproducing molecular machines),
eliciting new conceptual tools to theorize the complex dynamism of interconnected
agencies (for example, “the tools of the new genetic sciences offer new ways to think
about the growing malleability of the concept of ‘nature’” [Helmreich 2010, 52]), on
the other hand, they carry the threat of a “ratiogenetic (reason generated) damage to
the earth” (Plumwood 2002, 25). This threat is signaled by, among other catastrophic
4 In “Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, and the Biological Idea of Culture,” Helena Feder (2014b) em-
phasizes the point that since posthumanism has many meanings, “some of which are mutually ex-
clusive,” it has become an equivocal term. According to Feder, “It may function as a spatial category,
as a landscape of virtuality or the possibility of new connections between material agencies” (226).
changes, receding glaciers, disappearance of the honeybee colonies, appearance of

androgynous fish in rivers, climate disasters, ocean acidification, and global pollu-
tion. In thinking the human and the nonhuman together this way, and in critically
assessing their “imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic net-
works” (Wolfe 2010, xv), posthumanism can be as uncanny as it can be liberating.
As Donna Haraway (2008b, 15) claims, “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,
and outcomes are not guaranteed.” For humans who are closely bound to material
networks, the posthuman landscape can foreseeably become “a swirling landscape
of uncertainty,” as Stacy Alaimo (2011, 282) points out. And apparently, in the thick
of many uncertainties, it is impossible to disregard the immediacy of those stakes
Haraway mentions, since the human and the nonhuman realms and bodies in today’s
post-natural world are more mutually determined and intermeshed than ever. Cecilia
Åsberg (2013, 10) pertinently illuminates this point:
transgenic biotechnology and patented genes, wildlife conservation and anthropocene rhet-
orics, in-vitro meat and in-vivo foetal imaging, embryo selection and consumer custom-made
pharmacology are the post-natural orders of the day (2013, 10, emphasis in the original).
In such a post-natural environment, cultural, ecological, and biotechnological forces

render the corporeal divisions between species meaningless, making the human self
increasingly fluid in a sea of distributed agency, and the body a permeable sponge in
its trans-corporeal interchanges with other bodies. Moving through bodies, bacteria,
microbes, and many environmental elements draw their potency from this process
of material transits. As Dorion Sagan (2013, 21–22) writes: “We are crisscrossed and
cohabited by stranger beings, intimate visitors who affect our behavior, appreciate
our warmth, and are in no rush to leave.” We are, in a way, what Pramod K. Nayar
(2014) dubs “humanimal”; we can never disengage from being “an instantiation of
a network of connections, exchanges, linkages and crossings with all forms of life”
(2014, 5). As envisioned in the British poet Ted Hughes’s poignant account in his poem
“If,” networks characterize all environmental relations. “If” is penned in an apt met-
aphor that strikingly reflects the environmental knot crystallized in somatic connec-
tions: “If the sky is infected,” writes Hughes (1993, 137), “The river has to drink it.”
Such a causal unfolding of ecological networks highlights the materializing effects
of nature’s agency, which – as the poem implies – is ostensibly disrupted by anthro-
pogenic factors. The posthuman condition here is an entanglement in the formida-
ble efficacy of antagonistic forces. There is also the ecological understanding of an
embodied kinship in the sense of what Ted Hughes (1993, 136) considers “dissolv-
ing in earth-wave” that co-constitutes the posthuman condition, linking the humans
“to the planet both personally and evolutionarily” (Helmreich, 2010, 50). For Rosi
Braidotti, this condition is a question of vital materiality, which disturbs the regu-
lative idea of impermeable bodies and ensures the continuity between human and
nonhuman natures. The common denominator of posthuman condition, then, can be
located in “the assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic
structure of living matter itself” (2013, 2).
Similar to Braidotti’s view, I would also define the posthuman condition in terms
of an agentic realm where every material formation, every narrative and image of the
world reveals the passionate ontics of matter’s connecting threads – the porous mate-
riality made visceral by the enactments of human-nonhuman natures and bodies.
Here, lively organisms, inorganic matter, and Titanic forces blend and clash to expose
human frailties, arrogance, and negative capabilities. This vision is clearer perhaps
in Gaston Bachelard’s (2002, 17–18) claim that “matter is the mirror of our energies;
a mirror that focuses our strengths by illuminating them with imaginary gratifica-
tions” (emphasis in the original). Like the sea that speaks anthropomorphically in
the opening pages of Morgan Llywelyn’s novel The Elementals (1993), “Our sentience
is in your blood, in everything that contains water” (emphasis in the original), vibrant
forces compose all that exists and humans are not immune to their material effects.
Consider the challenges of carbon emissions, hydraulic fracturing,5 the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, electronic waste discarded in landfills,6 radioactive debris, invasive
species, mutating viruses, and other environmental complexities inseparable from
socio-economic life on this planet. It is impossible not to be aware that the nonhuman
not only dramatically underscores our daily lives, but also shapes our environments
and social dynamics in a very direct way. As Jane Bennett (2010, 108) rightly says, we
live at a time “when interactions between human, viral, animal, and technological
bodies are becoming more and more intense.” On a larger scale, this connection is
also manifest in dramatic earth changes from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, torna-
does and tsunamis to deterioration of ocean ecologies, and extreme weather condi-
tions, such as the 2014 polar vortex in the U.S, which deeply affect bodies, daily lives,
economy, health, and politics. The striking image Ted Hughes (1993, 53) sketches in
his poem “Wadsworth Moor” epitomizes the consequences of such earth changes:
“Earth bleeds her raw true darkness / A land naked now as a wound / That the sun
swabs and dabs.” But astonishingly, the best delineation of our times that arrestingly
captures the intrinsic irony of posthuman existence comes from a nineteenth century
writer. In this regard, no other definition can compete with the famous first words
of Charles Dickens’s (1939, 1) A Tale of Two Cities in describing the present posthu-
man condition: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” From another equally enticing literary per-
spective, living in the best and the worst of times can occasion a Gulliver syndrome.
5 Also known as “fracking,” this is the process of drilling and injecting fluid, filled with carcinogens
and toxins, into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas
inside.
6 20 to 50 million metric tons of electronic waste discarded in landfills or incinerators release various
toxics into the air.
Like Gulliver, we are forced to step into somewhat strange environments of beings and
forces that are “worlding”7 with us.
Strange though it may seem, this previously uncharted phenomenon of world-
ing designates posthumanism as the cognitive key to conceptualizing life anew with
a higher awareness and more conscious ecological perception than humanity had
before. This is so despite the inherent uncertainties caused by the technologies of
genetic engineering, cloning, reproductive technologies, and pharmacological
manipulation of human and nonhuman biologies. Simply because there is no escape
from the webs of connections and exchanges in a shared environment saturated with
alien substances and metabolic forces; and, more importantly, there is a real sense
in which the naturalcultural forces, bodies, and countless material agencies bear
witness to the viral condition within which the nonhuman (animal, vegetal, mineral)
is as much enmeshed as the human. Like the “acidic tomatoes” that can “power a
small radio / or cause / phototoxic / burns on exposed skin” in the Canadian poet
Adam Dickinson’s (2013, 57) poem “Hand Picked,” this viral condition is visible in
every aspect of life. Indicated by Dickinson’s poems, “the animating force of hydro-
carbons and their crudely oiled futures” (100), or what he calls the “age of polymers”
(100), thus become significant poetic substances in the contentious landscape of
posthumanism. Expressing some of the contours of the posthuman, Dickinson iron-
ically writes: “A human has the alien right to viruses in her genome, microbes in his
gut, phthalates in her blood, pharmaceuticals in his brain, contacts in her eyes, and a
battery against his heart” (100). Although such poetic images imply that we have shot
the albatross like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, and are “now living on a qualitatively
different planet,” as Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (2013, 8) contend, we can
reinvent our knowledge practices “from an entirely different angle” to understand the
complexity of the world’s posthuman co-shapers, and to apprehend the significance
and depth of our interactions with the earth’s variously uncanny nonhuman players.
Think of the story of the ocean-travelling plastic bag, whose ironic fate is narrated
in The Majestic Plastic Bag (2010) by Jeremy Irons. The plastic bag’s struggle to reach
its destination, the Great Pacific Plastic Patch, where it will join millions of its own
so-called petroleum “species” to contribute to the pollution of marine environments
and to the demise of countless fish, penguins, dolphins and other oceanic creatures
is a telling narrative of the posthuman condition. To fulfill its detrimental destiny and
using the wind to move, the bag “flees for its life,” acting as if it is endemic to the
ocean like the sperm whale that travels great distances. Following such a trajectory,
the plastic bag arrives at the Great Pacific Plastic Patch and completes its “plastic
cycle of life.” Of course this is not a natural location, but an area of human debris com-
posed of synthetic substances that demolish the oceanic ecosystem. What is impor-
7 I use the term “worlding” in the sense of becoming and being-in-the world, as something generative
and coexisting.
tant here is not that the plastic bag is portrayed as a naturalcultural agency in the
complex dynamics of materiality to prove there is ‘thing power’ as Jane Bennett would
say; but that in its material cycle, the plastic bag has an impact, a conclusive one, on
other bodies, ecosystems, health, economy, politics, and also material imagination
as epitomized in Adam Dickinson’s book of poems, The Polymers. Plastic, Dickinson
writes, “recreates the world as an alternate or translated reality” (2013, 1). Simply
put, the plastic bag’s epic journey in this documentary film signifies a posthuman
environmentalism of “the incalculability of other than human forces we typically fail
to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change” (Hird
2010, 54).
When read together with similar documentaries, such as Chris Jordan’s feature
film Midway (2009) that lays bare the tragic story of the Laysan albatross on Midway
Island in the North Pacific ocean, the plastic bag’s journey remarkably demonstrates
the dire consequences of the social and the natural interpenetrating each other. Worse
than T. S. Eliot’s river that sweats oil and tar, the landscape here sweats unfortunate
birds engulfed in plastic inducing deadly effect on their bodies. Is it any wonder that
plastic permeates biological organisms, their flesh, their blood stream, their bodily
mechanisms, practically interfering with the evolutionary cycles of life by its very
indestructible nature? Midway reveals this fact as a “ghastly tale” by zooming into the
plastic-filled stomachs of dead birds. “Do we have the courage to face the realities of
our time?” asks Jordan, inviting the audience to a journey “across an ocean of grief.”
Marked by an explosion of material vitality literally colored by the countless plastic
objects, and by a shocking recognition, the images of the dead albatross confront
the challenge of dissolution when the agency of manufactured substances dominates
the ecosystems. In this film, the “ocean of grief” is caused by “petroleum-species,”
which are manufactured by greedy human petro-cultures. Therefore, their agentic
power becomes alarmingly disquieting when it is shown interacting recursively with
the oceanic environment, colonizing it relentlessly like an unstoppable virus. It is
also an ironic homage to what Serenella Iovino (2012b, 136) calls “the power of matter
to build dynamics of meaning in and across bodies.” According to Eileen Joy (2014,
n.p.), this dynamic incites a serious interest in exploring the “creative materialism
of things,” which encourages “critical examinations of the aliveness and agency of
animals, objects, environments, and other nonhuman forces and propensities, all
enmeshed with humans.” The link, then, between “the natural life forms” and “cul-
tural forms of life” (Helmreich 2009, xi) signifies both creativity and destructiveness
across the entangled spheres of human and other biotic forces, and material agen-
cies. It is in this province of interplays that humans become differential composites,
assemblages, and congeries of persistent agencies.
“Every species is a multispecies crowd” (Haraway 2008b, 165). That’s how Donna
Haraway systematically describes this mélange of entwined agencies in When Species
Meet (2008). The life-principle of matter is enhanced, Jane Bennet (2010, 23) concurs,
“in or as a heterogeneous assemblage” (emphasis in the original). Echoing Bruno
Latour, Dorion Sagan (2013, 22) says that “[l]ike all visible life-forms, we are compos-
ites.” Thinking agency as “an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring
entanglements,” rather than as “a property of persons and things,” Karen Barad (2012,
54) also discerns material agency in its compositional state. A more poetic expression
comes from the Chicano poet Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2009, 25) “The New Speakers”: “We
don’t want to be / Stars but parts / of constellations.” But this lyrical image evaporates
when we consider what kind of constellations we are becoming. Already evident in
the anthropogenic biomes and toxin-infused ecospheres, we engage in patterns that
form dark constellations, or what I would like to call posthuman biochoreographies.8
They engender narratives that can be called ‘compositionist’ in Latour’s (2010, 473–74)
sense (“that things have to be put together […] while retaining their heterogeneity”).
In the ecocritical context, a compositionist narrative would be a material-discur-
sive template for a process that consolidates organisms, languages, ideas, and imag-
ination as in symbiogenesis – a merger of two organisms from distant lineages into
a more complex organism. It is not, of course, a narrative written by humans, but
consists of layers of stories, meanings, and signs stored and encoded in material pro-
cesses, organisms, and semiotic objects that become visible when in interaction with
human imagination. This narrative resembles symbiogenesis in its fusion of human
and nonhuman codes, which is “like the growth of complex symbolic meanings in
literature” (Wheeler 2014, 77). Life, then, as Wendy Wheeler contends, “is made of
stories” (77). Being emblematic of a map of agentive expressiveness found across dif-
ferent spectrums and vibrancies of being, these stories describe “our ever-increasing
degree of intimacy with the new natures we are constantly creating” (Latour 2011,
n.p.; emphasis in the original); therefore they are “all about ‘multi-naturalism,’” as
Latour [2010, 476] would say. If Latour (2010, 481) is right, “micro-and macrocosm are
now literally” as well as “symbolically connected.” Material ecocriticism analyzes this
embodied narrativity mapped onto the meaning-generating evolutionary structures
as storied matter, “storying itself through humankind” (Abram 2014, 307). It means
that “bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction” in terms of cumu-
lative narratives with “undeniable signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 2,
emphasis in the original). Among these signifying forces are the new biotech forms
that are as story-filled as biological agencies, revealing “a posthuman performativity
in its narrative disclosures” (Iovino 2012a, 58). From such an ecocritical perspective,
whether elemental, biological, geological, climactic, or technological, the world’s
manifold agencies are always deeply interlaced with human mindscapes, reflexiv-
ity, and imagination (↗18 Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death
in Venice). This is a re-alignment of material ecocriticism’s conceptual templates to
critically discern the cultural implications of life sciences and new technologies. In
this approach, the world’s dynamic self-articulation, or narrativity, is deemed to open
8 In coining this term I am inspired by Jeffrey J. Cohen’s (2010, 5) “geochoreographies.”

a radical perspective, one that cannot be dismissed as the stuff of dreams, though it
strangely “alters the tenor of our reflections and the tonality of our dreams,” as David
Abram (2010, 141) eloquently articulates it.
This is the voyage of the storied matter as it convokes the compositionist nar-
ratives of what Latour (2004, 61) also calls an “ecology of collectives consisting of
humans and nonhumans.” Now intelligent machines also story themselves to join
the hybrid compounds of the Earth. This is the juncture where material ecocriticism
becomes post-human and post-natural, and also post-green in critiquing the taxon-
omy of the human, the nonhuman, and the machine.
3 P
osthuman Ecocriticism
A posthumanist material ecocriticism begins from the premise of the ecology of col-
lectives and compositionist narratives conserving the new materialist understanding
of the nonhuman as already part of the human in the world’s becoming. It seeks to
maintain a sustainable ecological critique of the material interaction of bodies and
natures in a highly technologized world and their conceptualizations in literary and
cultural texts. The central concepts of material ecocriticism – storied matter and nar-
rative agency – that explain the agentic dimension of living matter in terms of stories
embodied in material formations, are particularly suited to explore the emerging post-
human agencies, the technological posthuman forms.9 By re-working these concepts
in the light of abiotic visions of materiality, posthuman ecocriticism becomes a way
of reading the biosphere and technosphere transversally in the variations of matter,
and interpreting ecologically the ethical and social implications of existence beneath
the carbon-based life embedded in agential intra-actions with the biotic forms. The
literary reflections of the new reconceptualizations of life attend concurrently to post-
human ecocritical analyses, making a unique contribution to redefining nature, body,
gender identity, race, sexuality, reproduction, and evolution.
Neither fully imaginary nor real, animal-machine hybrids, cyborgs, cloned
animals, aliens, synthetic matter, and toxic bodies populate contemporary scientific
and literary narratives, offering a critical prism for posthuman ecocriticism to scru-
tinize their stories’ corrosive as well as productive powers. The cataclysmic stories of
toxic accretion in the human body, for example, are also the stories of massively dis-
tributed pollution in the earth’s biosphere, showing the “extent to which all bodies are
kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (Bennett
2010, 13). They may appear in scientifically convoluted literature not too accessible
9 They are dense with agency. As Luciana Parisi (2008, 293) explains, “technical machines are able to
enter in direct relations with the biophysical layers of matter.”
to the general public, but when these stories appear in visceral states of anguish in
literary texts such as Richard Powers’s Gain (1998) and John Burnside’s The Glister
(2008), two highly disconcerting novels about how densely bodies and ecosystems
are interrelated in ominous toxic kinship, they bring many resistant forms of non-
human agency into sharper focus. In Gain, we encounter two interrelated plots with
a reciprocal focus on Clare, an international chemical conglomerate founded in the
nineteenth century as a soap company, and on Laura Bodey, whose body (the pun
here is intentional) gradually deteriorates with ovarian cancer while the company’s
toxic waste poisons Lacewood, Illinois where she lives. The company’s “super-pesti-
cides” (Powers 1998, 293) literally control Laura’s body, while they also play a central
role in changing the environment. When Laura realizes that Clare is “hiding under
the sink, swarming her medicine chest, lining the shelves in the basement, parked
out in the garage, piled up in the shed” (345), she gives expression to the bodily and
environmental effects of toxic chemicals. The Scottish writer Burnside’s novel The
Glister undertakes a similar depiction of how toxic forces induce a bodily crisis and
also cause spiritual infection in the vicinity of a chemical plant. The runoff from the
shut-down plant, which was built 30 years ago by the Consortium to manufacture
chemicals, has not only thoroughly poisoned the inhabitants of the Innertown, but
also irreversibly contaminated the entire environment. Incurable diseases, “myste-
rious behavioral problems,” and mutant creatures haunt the Innertown daily. The
local constable John Morrison says: “You could see evidence wherever you looked of
the plant’s effects on the land: avenues of dead trees, black and skeletal along the old
rail tracks and access roads; great piles of sulfurous rocks where pools of effluent had
been left to evaporate in the sun” (Burnside 2010 [2008], ch. 1, n.p.). The forest nearby
is so contaminated that the people call it “the poison wood,” where the trees “were
veined with a dark, poisoned sap” (ch. 1, n.p.). Leonard Wilson, a pedantic teenager,
says that “[t]his wood has poison running in its veins, in the sap of every tree, in
every crumb of loam and every blade of grass.” (ch. 7, n.p.). In such a dismal envi-
ronment where “the entire land under their feet is […] poisoned by years of runoff”
(ch. 1, n.p.), humans, living like Latour’s collectives, suffer from “unexplained clus-
ters of rare cancers,” “terrible diseases,” “untreatable illnesses,” “depression,” and
“blossoming madness,” while animals develop “swollen, twisted bodies” (ch. 1, n.p.).
Disclosing a posthuman condition not too remote from our reality, these novels shed
light on the fact that “we, our technologies, and nature can no more be disentangled”
(Latour 2011, n.p.), and invite a complementary reading of natural-cultural dynamics
of human-nonhuman existence. The intra-actions of material and human agencies
dramatized in these novels point to the hazy nature of boundaries between the social
and the scientific, technology and morality in an illuminating way.
Exposing the lethal interchanges of bodies and xenobiotic substances that per-
colate through soil, air, and water, such texts are also narratively useful for under-
standing the nature of compositionism as a hybrid formation. The intimate entan-
glement, for example, between humans and “microbial, molecular, and mobile life
forms” (Helmreich, 2009, 73) is figured as diagrammatic invocations for posthuman

hybridity. These novels gather meaning from the dystopian categories through which
posthumanism becomes a matter of concern for environmental humanities scholars,
ecocritics, and scientists. But, instead of imagined dystopian futures, they present
quite realistic scenarios of humans dwelling in daunting material networks. As
Michel Serres (1995, 105) says, this is “a complex and supple network,” which invites
us to examine the corporeal dimension of a poisoned nature and the intensities of its
transformed vital forces. A posthumanist material ecocriticism exposes the dynamics
of this unfolding causality in humanity’s composite story, with a special focus on the
constitutive role of posthumanly intertwined agencies in this story. We are all parts of
the composite narratives engendered by entangled forces whose impact may range, to
quote Rob Nixon (2011, 47), “from the cellular to the transnational.” The varieties of
biotechnological relationships that emerge from within hybrid geographies, as show-
cased by The Glister, require distinct ecocritical attention, not only in order to expose
the toxic kinship, but to analyze the currents of compositionist narratives running
through the social, the technological, and the political. Compositionist narratives are
like roads, one can say, borrowing Potteiger and Purinton’s (1998, 281) words, “that
lead to both actual and metaphorical destinations.” They not only put the storied
matter into perspective, but also reveal the ways in which the human is submerged
in inhuman loops. Focusing on this entrancing posthuman reality discloses how lit-
erature, biology, chemistry, technology, aesthetics, and politics become inseparable
from the material webs, forming a material-discursive space as an intermingling spill-
way of science and literature. Contemporary fictions also cast social, political, and
ethical concerns about hybrid life forms, and draw attention to the ambivalent ethical
stakes of certain likely scenarios; for example the redesigning of biotic life by the inor-
ganic components, as nanotechnologies are already attempting to do today.
Take, for example, the synthetic cells that defy our definitions of ‘being alive.’
A recent research project at the University of Glasgow has proven that it is possible
to create life from carbon-free, inorganic chemicals, which the researchers called
iCHELLS: inorganic-chemical-cells. Similar to carbon-based cells, they saw, these
inorganic chemical compounds could self-replicate and evolve in their environment
(see Quick 2011). iCHELLS are now part of a bio-technological evolution, projecting
interesting life patterns emerging from the traffic of nonliving and living beings.
iCHELLS, to borrow Jeffrey J. Cohen’s (2014, xxii) words, exemplify “inorganic com-
pounds that act like living creatures.” They perform what Luciana Parisi (2008, 292)
calls “a chimeric bio-logic.” The story of iCHELLS, then, is the story of matter as a
dynamic becoming, because iCHELLS are queer constructions, hybrids of life and
nonlife, with a capacity to evolve.10 Their story supports a profound conceptual
10 Another example is the invention of “the world’s first synthetic life form” by geneticist Craig Ven-
ter and his team in 2010. This is a single-celled organism, Venter claims, that “heralds the dawn of a
shift in our understanding of evolution, as it inscribes the artificial into the natural
and writes life into nonlife. Apparently, this story is a compositionist narrative that
expressly closes the great divide between the natural and the artificial. It is not about
a “technologization of nature” (Herbrechter 2013, 91), but what we can call a ‘biol-
ogization’ of inorganic matter in the posthuman world, refiguring our foundational
notions of agency, matter, and life.
Posthuman ecocriticism offers compositionist narrative as a viable expression for
this new understanding of life that has gone post in almost every sense. When natural
and technological actors transcend their radical divides, what happens is a shift from
nature, as Latour (2010, 477) says, “to an assemblage to be slowly composed.” Such a
slowly composed posthuman life-text tells a story, not of the “continuity of all agents
in space and time,” to quote Latour (2010, 484) again, but of their discontinuous
pieces progressively forming a material-discursive composition that often projects a
messy vision of coexistence. This is a story of untotalizable heterogeneity that began
with ecological postmodernism,11 got forged into new kinds of collective with mate-
rial ecocriticism and is now pulling more of the unexpected into this hybrid formation
with posthuman ecocriticism. It is, thus, no longer possible to rely on notions of green
ecologies, such as cooperative, congenial coexistence in this new ecocritical frame-
work. Instead, posthuman ecocriticism entertains the intricacies of environmental
anomalies caused by climate change, ozone-fleeing ultraviolet radiation, anaerobic
environments, pesticides, invasive species, toxic bodies, hybrid natures, intelligent
machines, and a motley of other strange agencies. Embedded in this background are
the intriguing maps of co-evolution of organisms, inorganic matter, ecological colors,
perception and imagination in interesting hybrid life-worlds. Taking this complex
background into account, posthuman ecocriticism scrutinizes the intertwined expe-
riences of emerging naturecultures to build novel forms of post-anthropocentric
discourses. In view of the narrative horizons, posthuman ecocritical accounts offer
a diffractive analysis of compositionist narratives and literary texts, reading the sci-
entific and the literary through one another. The result is a picture of “constitutive
and intractable hybridities” (Cohen 2014, xx). And this picture is replete with ethical,
ecological, and cultural questions, “questions that need to be put to the ideology and
value system that is humanism” (Herbrechter 2013, 57).
Probing thus into the interfaces between biophysical, cultural, and technological
environments, and by engaging strategically with a vast array of nonhumans that
are not always biological, posthuman ecocriticism discloses the “topographies of the
world’s hybridization” (Iovino and Oppermann 2013, 334). Like a “fluid map in flux”
new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels,
soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines.” This invention Venter
also says, changed his “views of definitions of life and how life works” (Sample 2010).
11 On this point, see Oppermann 2014.
(Duckert 2013, 48), this form of ecocriticism captures a sense of “what we made and
what we became co-evolved together” (Hayles 2006, 164). In a fundamental sense,
then, posthuman ecocriticism, as a constellation of posts (postmodern, post-anthro-
pocentric, post-natural), confronts the challenges and possibilities posed by the mul-
ti-sited cartography of posthumanism: from nonhuman and often deviant material
agencies to unknown forms of life lodged in newly visible territories, as indicated by
the example of iCHELLS.
Posthuman ecocriticism also posits that emergent entities like iCHELLS push life
to its “conceptual limits spilling across scales and substrates, becoming other, even
alien to itself” (Helmreich 2009, 8). When borders between life and nonlife are so
blurred, one feels compelled to ask the “question of what, exactly, is alive” (Hunter
2009, 4), as molecular biologist Lawrence E. Hunter pertinently does in The Processes
of Life. Claiming that even “fundamentally ordinary materials can be alive in so many
extraordinary ways” (2009, 1), Hunter invites us to the study of life:
While some materials (like DNA and proteins) are found in nearly all living things, it is not a
special kind of stuff that makes something alive. The mere presence of any particular material
(including DNA) doesn’t make something alive. The materials of life, it turns out, are just fairly
ordinary chemicals, in particular combinations. What makes something alive is not what it is,
but what it does. (2009, 2, emphasis in the original)
If “doing” is the life-principle, matter, organic or synthetically engineered like the

iCHELL, emerges as the enactment of its ongoing materialization. Posthuman eco-
criticism integrates the power of expressiveness that the materials of life exhibit to
the principle of “doing,” and thus rethinking matter in terms of its own signifying
power “irreducible to representations,” as Levi Bryant (2011, 23) also posits, enables
us to acknowledge being as comprised of heterogeneous partners intersecting one
another, rather than as signifiers of human cultural codes or norms. This understand-
ing rejects the idea that nonhuman entities are “screens upon which humans project
their intentions, meanings, signs, and discourses” (2011, 247). All forms of life in this
vision – living organisms, forces of nature, a DNA protein, or an inorganic chemical
compound – are co-constituted. As Morgan Llywelyn (1993, 281) writes, “[l]ife in any
form is part of life in every form.” Since all life forms are capable of generating order,
as Manuel DeLanda (1996) claims, hurricanes, for instance, that he calls “creatures
which inhabit the atmosphere,” become “creatures that create themselves. They don’t
have genes, they don’t have anything that tells them what to do. They are completely
spontaneous creatures” (1996, n.p.). There are also interesting literary instances of
these volatile agencies. Morgan Llywelyn’s (1993, 195) novel The Elementals presents
several cases, such as the stone that sits on its hillside and “thinks,” fire that pos-
sesses “vigor, ardor, intensity, vehemence, fervor, passion, fury, magic, inspiration,
genius, brilliance” (1993, 76), and the air that is alive and articulate. They all enact
“a cauldron of creativity” (DeLanda 2003, 279). They don’t need viscera, but their
thoughts, like that of the stone, “are the thoughts of the earth” (Llywelyn 1993, 195).
The air in The Elementals stands out as the most conspicuous instance of material
agency. “Myriad life forms dance in what appears, to human eyes, to be empty air.
Air is not empty. Air is alive” (1993, 281). Interestingly, scientists also agree with this
allegedly fictional statement. In the words of biologists Ann M. Womack, Brendan
J. M. Bohannan and Jessica L. Green:
As humans, we have an intimate relationship with the air around us. This relationship is by and
large unconscious; we breathe in without thinking, move through the eddies and tides of air
often without notice. This largely unconscious relationship has led to a delayed appreciation of
the air as a biological entity. But air is as alive as soil or water. Not only does it host large macro-
scopic organisms […] but it also hosts a wide variety of micro-organisms. Hundreds of thousands
of individual microbial cells can exist in a cubic metre of air. (2010, 3645; emphasis mine)
In making this argument, Womack et al. (2010, 3646) rely on four sources of infor-
mation: 1. “the atmosphere [has] environmental characteristics consistent with other
microbial habitats;” 2. “biogeochemical cycling […] occurs in the atmosphere;” 3.
“at least some microbes found in the atmosphere are metabolically active;” 4. “res-
idence times of microbes in the atmosphere are long.” Hence, the air is a wonderful
example of being an incipient determinant of life, an agentic materiality with pro-
found effects on human and nonhuman natures. In her essay “Teaching a Stone to
Talk,” nature writer Annie Dillard (1988, 72) refers to this agentic materiality as “[t]
he whole inhuman array.” When one becomes “wholly attentive,” says Dillard, one
can “feel the world’s word” (72), and be aware of the agency of things: “those created
objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on and raining, held,
flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread” (72). These objects may not be metabolically
active, but they possess creative agency, and represent different episodes of life’s
alterity. This is a good way to understand why all agencies matter, and why we should
be more attentive to their agentic role in today’s world, and be ecologically aware of
the crisscrossing strands of their stories. Once in the purviews of posthuman ecocriti-
cism, the study of the episodes of such alterity, not only as they emerge from scientific
research, but also in their emulated fictional accounts, now traverses a range of dis-
ciplines as a seismic shift in the way life is imagined and experienced. The complexly
bio-engineered and mechanically augmented hybrid forms in Justina Robson’s (2004)
sci-fi novel Natural History illustrate this shift in vision and thus provide a palpable
literary example.
Natural History focuses on a distant future, the third millennium, when the
expansion of humanity through the solar system is made possible via many rede-
signed humans represented by hybrid beings, the Forged. They “had originally been
created for work of specific kinds” (Robson 2004, 85) for the Earth-bound humans
called the Unevolved, or monkeys. Being embodiments of human DNA and animal
genes coupled with metal and silicon, the Forged come in all sizes and shapes: hives
of bees, birds, beasts, spiders, armored machines, space combat vehicles, titanic Gaia-
forms (terraforming spaceships designed to rebuild planets), and other monstrous
and protean forms that can travel between planets. Realizing “the Monkey wasn’t
worth the effort any longer” (85) – because they find the human claims to superiority
and governance false – the Forged “want to make a new beginning and forget their
origins” (86). As posthuman entities composed of multi-natures, the Forged epito-
mize “the co-extensive materiality of humans and nonhumans” (Alaimo and Hekman
2008, 9), as in the case of the Pigeon, a gigantic human-bird hybrid designed to carry
passengers:
What was the protocol for dealing with the entry into another’s bodily cavity? Should she move
the hatch membrane aside like a curtain? The Pigeon put her out of misery by drawing aside the
sheets of skin with a smooth flex of muscle and machinery in her hatch-rim. (Robson 2004, 82)
With the Forged representing “trans-species flows of becoming through interaction

with multiple others” (Braidotti 2013, 89), Natural History poses fundamental ques-
tions about the nature of life, the future of evolution, and the possible coalitions of
humans and nonhumans that spawn the posthumanist vision of “the differential con-
stitution of the ‘human’” (Barad 2008, 144). If fictional texts can project such imag-
inable pathways for material-conceptual horizon of humanity, literature becomes a
useful site to explore the unfolding implications of posthuman identities, bodies,
and natures. All are essentially multiple within themselves, like identity is, as Karen
Barad (2012, 32) states; “identity is diffracted through itself”, as it is envisioned in
Natural History. For example, Isol’s identity – the Forged entity searching for earth-
like planets – is at once in the skin of her hand, her organic cells, her engine, her
reactor core, and her dreams. She also finds her “self” entangled with ocean creatures
like the octopus, sharks, and whales. This is what makes her radically posthuman.
Isol is shaped by technological and biopolitical forces as effectively as evolutionary
ones, and this is not an ultimately distant issue from our own posthuman reality, with
possibilities opened up by biology and technology. As Ursula Heise concurs (2011,
456), “[t]he cyborg and the animal mixing with the human are no longer figures of the
future, but dimensions of human identity as it exists now, in these authors’ visions.”
Although not all literary examples focus on the extreme forms of otherness like
Robson’s human-animal-machine hybrids, they help amplify environmental aware-
ness by dramatizing global anthropogenic processes with devastating effects on plan-
etary life and ecosystems. Their stories are meant to be disturbing, because they hold
a mirror to a condition that is likely to happen in our reality marked by similar risks.
These fictions12 are important, because they urge us to “rethink ‘the human’ in more
than human terms” (Rose et al. 2012, 3) in the actual posthuman world represented
12 See also works by Don DeLillo, Peter Heller, Kim Stanley Robinson, Liz Jensen Sarah Hall, Marga-
ret Atwood, Nathaniel Rich, Maggie Gee, Paolo Bacigalupi, Stephen Baxter, Jeanette Winterson, Bar-
bara Kingsolver, Michael Crichton, David Kramb, John Barnes, Alan Weisman. These novelists bring
into play ethical and cultural implications of the posthuman developments. Working in genres such
by dispersive torrents of surprising relations, like viruses and parasites in our diges-
tive tract, pesticides in food, and radioactive specks in air currents. Timothy Morton
(2013, 53) calls them agents with “dark designs,” which impinge on and constitute the
present-day environments in unnerving, dark constellations, and designate an apod-
ictic posthumanity. Since this composite reality demands new forms of engagement
with “the realities of our changing world” (Rose et al. 2012, 3), the critical entryway
posthuman ecocriticism provides becomes a significant area of theoretical inquiry
and practice in the compendium of posthuman approaches. It indeed shows that life
itself “as a networked phenomenon” (Helmreich 2009, ix) invites such a compendium
of stories from cultural, literary, and scientific accounts. On this view, genealogies of
humans and nonhumans overlap, creating a new “epic of creation as understood by
modern science” (Chaisson 2005, xiii) as well as by literature, culture, and philoso-
phy.
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Greg Garrard
15 C
onciliation and Consilience: Climate
Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight
Behaviour
Abstract: This chapter argues that climate change politics is characterized by com-
peting temporalities: ‘warmists’ claim time is running out, while skeptics assert that
global temperature rise has stopped. In addition, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change) process is yielding diminishing returns in terms of public support
for emissions reductions, which suggests a broader approach than the purely scien-
tific is required. The chapter examines the specific contribution of Barbara Kingsolv-
er’s (2012) Flight Behaviour, which epitomizes both ‘conciliation’ of polarized per-
spectives in the USA and ‘consilient’ integration of scientific and literary knowledge.
Key Terms: Climate change, climate fiction, consilience, ecocriticism, narrative, tem-
porality
1 Climate Temporality: The Gap and the Pause

On 1 August, 2008, Andrew Simms (2008) warned that “in just 100 months’ time, if
we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping
point for the beginnings of runaway climate change.” Factoring in a range of feedback
effects that could accelerate a warming trend alongside existing calculations of global
emissions and probable effects on the world’s climate, he and his colleagues at the
New Economic Foundation estimated that this was the last window of opportunity to
initiate a decarbonising transformation of the world’s economic and energy systems.
Britain, Simms observed, had achieved something similar once before:
Under different circumstances, Britain achieved astonishing things while preparing for, fighting
and recovering from the second world war. In the six years between 1938 and 1944, the economy
was re-engineered and there were dramatic cuts in resource use and household consumption.
These coincided with rising life expectancy and falling infant mortality. We consumed less of
almost everything, but ate more healthily and used our disposable income on what, today, we
might call “low-carbon good times.” (Simms 2008)
The wartime analogy recalls the ‘Blitz spirit’ of social solidarity, in which economic
planning was seen as necessitated by a national emergency; it neglects the resent-
ment and black marketeering fostered by rationing, as well as the rapid abandon-
ment of most austerity measures after the war (Bowlby 2011). For British Greens, it
296 Greg Garrard
is an appealing parable, hybridising nationalist and environmentalist forms of nos-

talgia. Indeed, a NEF report commissioned by the UK Green Party entitled “The New
Home Front” sought explicitly to seek solutions to the climate impasse in the era of
war mobilization (Lucas 2011, drawing on Andrew Simms). Although Caroline Lucas
admits in her Preface that “[t]he 1930s and 1940s were anything but a golden age and
it would be wrong to romanticise those times” (Lucas 2011), she must know that the
British public has an inexhaustible appetite for the mythology of World War II. In that
context, “The New Home Front” is a wily response politically.
Al Gore invoked Winston Churchill’s prognostications about the Nazi threat in An
Inconvenient Truth (2006). At a pivotal moment, Gore presented a quotation from a
1936 speech in which Churchill warned that “[t]he era of procrastination, of half-meas-
ures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place
we are entering a period of consequences.” The wartime analogy functions somewhat
differently in this context, invoking the popular meteorological metaphor of Nazism
as a gathering storm; the retrospective condemnation of ‘appeasement’ (though it was
immensely popular in Britain at the time) and the near-disaster that the reluctance to
militarize early enough in the 1930s wrought upon the Western Allies. Regardless of
the distinctions, Gore, Simms and Lucas are appealing to popular British and Amer-
ican mythology in which Nazism was an unequivocal existential threat, which the
Allies vanquished with great sacrifice in a common purpose.
The myth incorporates both historical truths and nationalistically aggrandizing
half-truths – most notably concerning the achievements and disproportionate casu-
alties of the Red Army – the ratio of which need not concern us here. More salient
is the way these commentators seek to telescope the temporality of climate change
into a more recognizable political and historical timescale: the Nazi threat emerged
on the European stage over a decade, approximately, and was defeated in less than
half that time, whereas climate change has had strong scientific support for about
two decades and will probably unfold over several centuries. Such is the persistence
of some greenhouse gas emissions that cuts achieved today would only alter tem-
perature trends half a century from now (Hulme 2009, 121). At the same time, we are
urged – with good reason – to treat the crisis as imminent.
For some authors, it is already too late. Clive Hamilton argues, with devastating
clarity, that global growth in wealth and population, combined with the limited tem-
poral horizon of democratic governments and the inherent inertia of large-scale econ-
omies and energy systems, means that there is no realistic possibility of averting the
catastrophic climate impacts associated with a 4 degree rise in global mean temper-
ature over the next century. Every technological silver bullet is evaluated in turn and
dismissed; every pious hope for global unanimity quashed. Hamilton concludes that:
In the face of the evidence of climate disruption, clinging to hopefulness becomes a way of fore-
stalling the truth. Sooner or later we must respond and that means allowing ourselves to enter a
phase of desolation and hopelessness, in short, to grieve. (Hamilton 2010, 211)
15 Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour 297
What is so peculiar about Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species is that it invites us to start
grieving now for a future that will probably occur, but which we personally might
not live to see. Such is the strange temporality of climate change that anticipatory
emotions – grief, shame, anger – appear to be required. If climate change develops a
distinctive grammar, its tense and mood will be the future perfect subjunctive, as we
learn to regret what may come to have been.
With every passing year the measurements taken on Mauna Loa register ever-
higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a growing gap opens up between this
series and the falling emissions a livable future requires. This gap, in turn, recalls the
remarkable disparity between scientific assessments of the risk of climate change and
the paucity of concerted political action. There are, by now, dozens of explanations
for this gap: the power of organized scepticism; the limitations of our evolved psycho-
logical capabilities; the ingrained tendency of media reports to misrepresent the sci-
entific consensus as a ‘debate’; the incompatibility of capitalism and climate action;
the influence of social norms that prevent honest discussion of climate change; the
resistance of fossil fuel infrastructures to rapid change; and so on. Ecocriticism, as we
shall see, has explored the gap in its own terms.
For years, scientists have lamented the knowledge-action gap, scholars in the
social sciences and humanities have sought to account for it, and activists have
fought to eliminate it. In the meantime, though, another gap has appeared to trouble
climate politics: the apparent divergence between rapidly rising emissions of green-
house gases (GHG) and global mean surface temperature trends. The latter has
remained visibly flat since 1998, although climate scientists stress that this lack of
change remains – just – inside the error bars for their earlier projections. Climate
scientists call it a ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause,’ to emphasize their confidence that it will be
temporary; sceptics describe it as ‘flatlining.’ The right-wing British newspaper The
Daily Mail complained in October 2012 that, “with the country committed by Act of
Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds
of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as
something of a shock” (Rose 2012). Climate scientists point to satellite observations
that prove energy is still accumulating in the Earth’s systems, presumably the deep
oceans, and insist that the hiatus reflects poorly characterized decadal oscillations
in marine circulation. However, given the way that global mean surface temperature
changes, charted in graphs such as Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick,’ have served as
icons of global warming, the pause is a public relations disaster. Until (or unless)
global surface temperatures resume the remorseless upward trend that was obvious
until the late 1990s, the gap between projection and reality will continue to be the
nemesis of that other gap, between the scientific assessment of climatic risk and polit-
ical responses. Where environmentalists see far too little concerted action, sceptics
see too much. Since, in the polarized politics of the USA in particular, there are few
voices seeking common ground, here might be a specific role for climate literature:
imagining conciliation of these viciously warring factions.
298 Greg Garrard
2 Ecocriticism and Climate Change

Ecocritics, by contrast with their colleagues in media communication studies, were
slow to engage with climate change, perhaps because of a bias in favour of the liter-
ature of place and against science fiction, where climatic concerns were first delin-
eated. Adeline Johns-Putra (2010, 749), a leading scholar of climate change litera-
ture, commented that “few literary scholars have risen to the challenge of discussing
climate change,” although the number has increased dramatically since then (Ker-
ridge 2014; Garrard 2013a, b; Clark 2010; Trexler 2014; Kluwick 2014). Ecocritics see
the evidence-action gap as a sign of our inability, psychologically and culturally, to
accommodate the enormity of climate change, and, more locally, they explore the dif-
ficulties that literary forms and genres – which at once express and perpetuate such
limitations – have in conveying its temporal and spatial scale.
The novelist Jonathan Franzen expresses the first explanation in his complaint
that climate change has overwhelmed the more immediate, quotidian concerns
of conservationists, even though action to limit carbon emissions seems futile. He
describes a disorientating blend of infinitesimal individual and vast communal con-
tributions to global warming, which I have called “the unbearable lightness of green”
(Garrard 2013b). Franzen (2015) writes that:
The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these emissions
affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely dispersed in time and space that no spe-
cific instance of harm could ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to emis-
sions. I may abstractly fault myself for emitting way more than the global per-capita average.
But if I calculate the average annual quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this
century I find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home exceeds it in two
weeks.
Critics of Franzen point out that his contrast between ‘Puritanical’ obsession with
future climate doom and ‘Franciscan’ action to protect specific habitats in the here-
and-now is exaggerated: the Audubon Society, whose report on climate change he crit-
icises, undertakes lots of Franciscan conservation work even though it also stresses
the eschatological climatic risk to bird populations. The more nuanced responses,
though, acknowledge that he has a point about the psychological difficulties. David
Roberts points out that non-specialists, sceptics and believers alike, fixate on some
specific detail of the climate story – a ‘Climate Thing’ – as a way of coping with it:
Climate is so unfathomably large and diffuse, and our actions – individually, even as countries –
so local and parochial in comparison. It’s difficult to live with that gap.
People naturally need some sort of entrée, some way in, some angle that reduces the brain-frying
complexity and ambiguity to manageable proportions. They will adopt whatever Climate Thing
reaches them first or most powerfully, whatever latches on and helps ease the cognitive strain,
whatever speaks to their experience. (Roberts 2015)
While he accepts Franzen’s criticism of climate politics is mistaken, Roberts stresses

that:
people need a story to tell themselves, a way of fitting climate change into their world. Knocking
down bad stories will be ineffective unless there are more, better stories available. So let’s be
better storytellers. (Roberts 2015)
Mediating between writers and readers, environmental critics would, at their best,
help to illuminate the best kind of climate narratives.
The role is both necessary and opportune because there is growing awareness
that the IPCC process, which has marshalled an impressive consensus of specialists
to produce a series of increasingly voluminous and authoritative Assessment Reports,
has not produced commensurate growth in public awareness or political energy,
partial success in Paris notwithstanding. Recognizing the diminishing returns of an
approach that conceptualizes climate in purely scientific and material terms, clima-
tologist Mike Hulme argues that
“[t]he idea of climate exists as much in the human mind and in the matrices of cultural practices
as it exists as an independent and objective physical category.” (2009, 28)
The question posed in the title of Hulme’s (2009) book Why we Disagree About Climate
Change, can only be answered with knowledge derived from multiple disciplinary per-
spectives. As such, it seems to exemplify E. O. Wilson’s (1998, 6) ideal of “consilience,”
of which he says: “The greatest activity of the mind has always been and always will
be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities.” Unlike Wilson, whose
conception of consilience seems to imply annexation of the humanities by the natural
sciences, Hulme stipulates that:
To shed new light on the multiple meanings of climate change in diverse cultures, and to create
new entry points for policy innovation, the interpretive social sciences, arts and humanities need
new spaces for meeting as equals with the positivist sciences. (2011, 179)
At the conceptual level, the most promising space for such a meeting would appear
to be the idea of ‘risk’. As Ursula Heise has demonstrated, thinking about risk pro-
vides opportunities for different disciplines to render divergent vocabularies mutu-
ally legible and informative. In particular, ecocriticism and risk theory stand to learn
from one another:
Ecocritics, who have made it their principal task to investigate the cultural practices and artifacts
that evolve out of particular conceptions of the relationship between nature and human socie-
ties, have a vested interest in the findings of risk theory as an essential part of such conceptions.
Not only is risk theorists’ exploration of the ways cultural worldviews and institutions shape
risk perceptions fundamental background knowledge for anyone interested in the forms that
environmental art and writing have taken at different historical moments and in various cultural
300 Greg Garrard
communities, but inversely, literary critics’ detailed analyses of cultural practices stand to enrich
and expand the body of data that an interdisciplinary risk theory can build on. (Heise 2008, 136)
In terms of climatic risk, the IPCC exemplifies a quantitative approach, which has
been supplemented in communication studies by population-level sociological anal-
ysis of variations in risk perception. Ecocriticism is only now beginning to explore the
ways in which climatic risk is inflected by inherited narratives, as well as amplified or
attenuated by specific artefacts of contemporary culture.
The principal approach in ecocriticism to date has employed genre criticism as a
way of exploring the limits and possibilities of climate fiction. A good deal of empha-
sis has been placed on the ways in which climatic risk conflicts with existing literary
conventions and formal techniques. As Heise observes:
Like other processes of global system transformation, ecological or not, climate change poses a
challenge for narrative and lyrical forms that have conventionally focused above all on individu-
als, families, or nations, since it requires the articulation of connections between events at vastly
different scales. (2008, 205)
As a result, climate fiction ought to test the boundaries of narrative and genre, perhaps
to a breaking point. Johns-Putra suggests that, in this respect, it is paradigmatic for
environmental fiction in general:
The question of climate change, so much more abstract than, say, rocks, and so ideologically
charged, allows us greater scope for exploring the process by which understandings of environ-
ment, and, in this case, of environmental crisis, might be shaped by generic conventions and
located within generic habitats. (Johns-Putra 2010, 748)
Richard Kerridge’s (2000, 2007, 2010) long-standing interest in the relationship of

poetic and prose genres with environmental representation has yielded a wealth of
insights of this kind. In a recent survey, he discusses the grounds for skepticism that
realist literary forms will be adequate to the climate crisis and explores the affinities
between ecocriticism and neo-modernist poetics perceived by critics such as Heise.
He asks:
Does ecocriticism have to choose between these still, for the most part, avant-garde literary strat-
egies and those able to reach larger audiences and deploy more familiar narrative and lyrical
forms, connecting with the personal stories we tell ourselves? (Kerridge 2014, 369)
For Kerridge, the tension between the inevitable compromises imposed by tradi-
tional literary forms and the radical potential, but minimal social impact, of avant-
garde writing maps onto a larger tension between the practice of slow, close reading
enjoined by professors of literature and the political urgency of climate change. In
other words, the specifically literary questions with which scholars are concerned
are inseparable, finally, from the larger problems of temporality with which climate
change confronts us, in much the same way that the Audubon Society insists, contra
Franzen, it needs to undertake both short-term Franciscan conservation and publi-
cize the apocalyptic risks to bird populations over the next century. At the end, Ker-
ridge asks, somewhat plaintively: “Where are the rigorously realist novels, with pres-
ent-day settings, dealing with people’s emotional responses to the threat of climate
change?” (2014, 373) No sooner were those words written than Barbara Kingsolver
published the nearest thing we have to an answer: her climate fiction masterpiece
Flight Behaviour.
3 Climate Fiction as Metanarrative of Risk

We have discerned that there are prospects for climate fiction that could be catego-
rized as centripetal and centrifugal. In the latter category, one might include the claim
that the weird spatial and temporal dimensions of climate call for radical literary
techniques. In the former category is the possibility that climate fiction might have
both conciliatory and consilient functions: bringing into an imaginative relationship
competing ‘warmist’ and ‘sceptic’ factions, and assembling scientific, social scien-
tific and humanistic forms of knowledge around a transdisciplinary conception of
climatic risk. Clearly, no single work of fiction can fulfill perfectly such contradictory
demands, nor can it encapsulate in a representative manner the range of enculturated
perspectives on climate change that an ethnographic or sociological study might seek
to capture. The kind of “data” provided by “literary critics’ detailed analyses of cul-
tural practices” therefore remains to be specified.
Scientists and literary critics attach nearly opposite meanings to the term ‘experi-
mental’. While both would include the idea of innovation in any definition, scientists
insist that an experiment ultimately derives its validity from iterability: an experiment
that cannot be replicated must be discounted. Artistic experiments, by contrast, are
inherently unrepeatable; they derive their authority from their singularity (Attridge
2004). It is therefore risky to specify too closely how an individual work of fiction can
be expected to advance our understanding of climatic risk. Indeed, the disappoint-
ment that attended the publication of Ian McEwan’s much-anticipated climate fiction
Solar can be understood partly in terms of the author’s unsuccessful struggle with
the expectations – at once elevated and constrained – that his own advance publicity
had generated (Garrard 2013a). Other examples, such as Helen Simpson’s In-Flight
Entertainment (2010) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), resort to
some variety of apocalyptic narrative, which sacrifices nuanced representation of risk
in favour of an emotive worst-case scenario.
Problematic though it is to generalize, we can say that climate fiction has to
balance imaginative intervention in the climate debate with agnostic depiction of
302 Greg Garrard
the individual and social processes in which risk awareness is aroused and trans-
formed. Where sociologists and opinion researchers track shifts in public anxiety and
communications scholars identify the influential actors and narrative frames at the
population level, climate fiction reflects on changes as they are in the process of occur-
ring. Reflexivity as such does not distinguish it: for sociologist Ulrich Beck, moder-
nity is already ‘reflexive’, in that its social, economic and cultural bases are always
in a process of recursive transformation. Despite the recursivity of social change,
however, Beck (2009) insists that it is not inherently more rational, willed or self-con-
scious than ‘first’ or ‘simple’ modernity. On the contrary, reflexive modernity involves
the proliferation of what Donald Rumsfeld famously dubbed “unknown unknowns”:
The controlling rationality of risk cannot be applied to the uncertainty of the effects, the side
effects and the side effects of the side effects. […] Rather, the converse holds: all attempts at
rational control give rise to new “irrational”, incalculable, unpredictable consequences. This is
shown by the history of “side effects” – for example, of climate change […]. Control of the control
of control can become a source of threats and side effects of threats without end. (Beck 2009,
18–19)
The question then arises how, individually and socially, we might bring these unan-
ticipated processes of emergence to consciousness.
Literary fiction is poorly suited to the task of climate activism; the inverse ratio
of writerly excellence and deliberate political design is too well-established. What it
can do, diagnostically, is stage some of the processes by which climatic risk becomes
knowable, over and above the quantification attempted by the IPCC. This is what I
have in mind when I describe Flight Behaviour as a metanarrative of climatic risk.
4 Flight Behaviour: Journey and Symbol

Climate change becomes knowable in two closely-linked ways in Barbara Kingsolv-
er’s novel: through the protagonist Dellarobia’s cognitive and affective development
as a character; and through the brilliantly-conceived symbol of the monarch butter-
flies, whose migratory life-cycle has been disrupted by global warming in the novel’s
storyworld. As Patrick Murphy (2014, 158–159) points out, the novel’s title alludes to
both plots at once, further emphasizing the affinities we perceive between the fates
of the woman and the butterflies. At the same time, Flight Behaviour explores both
the capacities and limits of a purely scientific understanding of climatic risk: ento-
mologist Ovid Byron’s discussions with Dellarobia and his fractious encounters with
the media thematize the place of science in public discourse, so that the novel itself
implicitly enters a plea for the importance of imaginative literature in a consilient
re-conceptualization of climate change (↗25 World Risk Society and Ecoglobalism).
Two aspects of Dellarobia’s personal journey (as one feels compelled to describe
it) stand out: one is that Kingsolver engages the reader’s sympathies very effectively,
and very quickly, and the other is that ‘climate change’ as such is not introduced into
it until very late (2012, 228). She knows what she is doing: holding back on the con-
troversial, potentially preachy stuff until she can be confident we are hooked. The
opening scene is superb, right from the first lines:
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it
seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise.
(Kingsolver 2012, 1)
When her name is eventually introduced, nine pages in, it is through the imagined
speech of those who would condemn the immorality she intends: “They would say
the same thing she’d heard her mother-in-law tell [her husband] Cub: that Dellarobia
was a piece of work” (9). For now, she is torn between an irresistible desire for escape
and the undertow of knowledge that adultery will prove futile and self-defeating.
There is, moreover, scarcely a glimmer of space between the heterodiegetic narra-
tor and Dellarobia as focalizer, as free indirect discourse ensures the protagonist’s
own language pervades the narrative voice. The moralistic language of “rapture” and
“demise” helps establish the church-dominated mental and physical landscape of the
storyworld, even from the ironic, tangential angle of the independent woman who
cannot help thinking with such words. Everything around her seems to comment on
her predicament: of the daft, “luckless sheep”, she reflects that “[l]ife was just one
long proposition they never saw coming” (3). Climbing over a fallen tree, she consid-
ers that, “[l]ike herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life” (5).
Given her heightened sensitivity to omens, then, it is no surprise that she is primed
to interpret a vision of a forest seemingly aflame – a whole valley glowing, fluttering,
moving, yet silently – in epiphanic, reluctantly-religious terms:
Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone
these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the
inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean some-
thing. (Kingsolver 2012, 15–16)
In a stroke of novelistic genius, at once convincing and enabling, Kingsolver imagines

Dellarobia striding up the hill to her assignation having left her glasses at home. Her
protagonist’s vision is therefore without literal vision, and vanity itself leads, without
the cruelty of shame, to a humbling awareness: “The impossible” (16).
What she has seen, as she later determines, is a vast flight of monarch butter-
flies roosting in the wood above her home in the Appalachians. It is only the first
of a series of mild embarrassments that expose the limited compass of her experi-
ence: she shows off her paragraph of knowledge of monarchs in front of Ovid Byron,
a professional entomologist, then does the same for the benefit of a Mexican family
304 Greg Garrard
who, it turns out, also know plenty about butterflies. Crucially, though, she is intelli-
gent enough to perceive how little she knows, unlike her family and neighbours who
content themselves with saying that Nature is ‘God’s work’, which leads, gradually
but inexorably, to her decision to break up her family so she can go back to college.
The narrative interest in the early chapters is overwhelmingly Dellarobia’s love-
less marriage within a judgmental, parochial family, and her tricky position within
a community that revolves around the church. There are unsympathetic characters,
notably her father-in-law Bear Turnbow, who wants to clear-cut the forest, butterflies
or no, to pay off debts, and Hester, a mother-in-law who always dresses as if for a line
dance and whose beady gaze maintains an oppressive social morality. The tempta-
tion might be, then, for Kingsolver to contrast the feisty heroine simplistically with
the “hick” simpletons that surround her, as Hector Tobar (2012) alleges she does in
a sharply critical Los Angeles Times review. Picking out a couple of comically ste-
reotypical minor characters, Tobar claims that “it’s a Blue State morality tale about
Red State people and Red State thinking.” In other words, Tobar is arguing that King-
solver adopts the liberal perspective of Democrat-dominated parts of the USA (“Blue
States”) that sees the conservative, Republican-dominated “Red” states as bigoted
and backward. What this reading misses, though, is the extent to which Flight Behav-
iour is deeply thoughtful and compassionate towards rural poverty, and even-handed
in its treatment of the gulf in social attitudes between the people of Feathertown and
the wealthy, educated outsiders – scientists and environmentalists – who arrive fol-
lowing the butterflies. So although Dellarobia comes to feel her ignorance keenly, she
also confronts metropolitan condescension whenever she encounters it. There are
wry, comic asides on the unacknowledged reality of class in America, as exemplified
by the progeny of big-haired Crystal:
[…] two freckled, big-for-their-age elementary boys in buzz cuts and tight T-shirts just a little
past expired. Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids’ names on purpose?
(Kingsolver 2012, 29)
Dellarobia covets Byron’s graduate students’ wealth and wide horizons, but she also
envies their comparative androgyny and comfort with one another, male or female:
“Just sometimes, to be with men without being with them” (142). Such sharp-eyed
observation redound to Dellarobia’s credit, intellectually, whilst also sustaining the
novel’s human interest. The discomforting blend of envy and resentment of the out-
siders’ perspective is consistently believable:
She felt herself looking at things through their eyes sometimes. A lot of times, in fact. Their days
here were like channel-surfing the Hillbilly Network: the potholed roads, the Wayside [Inn], the
sketchy diner, her tacky house. She herself was a fixture in their reality show, Redneck Survivor.
(162)
Yet some of the most emotive scenes in the novel emphasize the punishing cruelty of
poverty in a wealthy nation, such as Cub and Dellarobia’s fractious visit to a dollar
store to attempt Christmas ‘shopping’. TV comedies that mock rural poverty amplify
the self-hatred Dellarobia feels for despising her own situation:
Some sickness made her deride [Cub’s] simplicity. Really the infection was everywhere. On tel-
evision, deriding people was hip. […] A night or two ago they’d seen comedians mocking some
old guy in camo overalls who could have been anybody, a neighbor. Not an actor, this was a real
man, standing near his barn someplace with a plug of tobacco in his lip, discussing the weather
and his coonhounds. Billy Ray Hatch: she and Cub repeated the name aloud, as though he might
be some kin. (187)
Precisely insofar as we empathize with Dellarobia’s frustrations and aspirations, we

are invited to question the social attitudes on which they are based. Despite Tobar’s
assertions, it is anything but a simplistic, patronizing “morality tale,” not least
because a central interest in the novel is the tribal character of all knowledge and
beliefs. While the Feathertown hillbillies seem conspicuously ignorant by compari-
son with the suave, enquiring grad students, Dellarobia comes to realize that:
Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did
was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a
wide array of topics. (166)
On the one hand, we witness the patient, often tedious accumulation of scientific
knowledge in the field, and encounter a classic scientist-hero in the handsome, gen-
erous, passionate Ovid Byron; on the other, the novel questions the science communi-
cation model on which the IPCC process is based, in which a massive accumulation of
scientific knowledge is meant to generate democratic political will of its own accord
(Hulme 2009, 72–108). It is not facts that people primarily believe, as Kingsolver
shows us, but other people; Dellarobia is swayed as much by Byron’s charisma as by
anything he tells her.
The particular genius of a novel like Flight Behaviour, we can infer, is that it
can incorporate both true facts and attractive (imaginary) people. While the novel
abstains from overt gestures of reflexivity – the ‘fourth wall’ of illusion between sto-
ryworld and audience is never broken – there are frequent discussions between Del-
larobia and the scientists about the inherent constraints under which they work. In
pedagogical contexts that highlight their muted metanarrative function, these con-
versations effectively justify the existence of Flight Behaviour itself, as a complement
to the necessary work of scientific investigation. For example, at a critical moment in
the narrative when the fate of butterflies hangs in the balance, Ovid comments that
their volunteers may have dried up because “not everyone has the stomach to watch
an extinction” (Kingsolver 2012, 319). The dawning horror of the butterflies’ losing
struggle against destruction recalls, for Dellarobia, Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle
306 Greg Garrard
into that good night, a poem that embodies human ambivalence towards the extinc-
tion of life. For Byron, too, it is as if “someone you loved was dying” (319), and yet, as
a scientist, he insists: “I am not a zookeeper […]. I’m not here to save monarchs. I’m
trying to read what they are writing on our wall” (320).
Open-minded impartiality is fundamental to the phenomenal success of Western
scientific methods, in all their diversity, but it is ensured by processes, centrally
the institutions of double-blind peer-review and public and charitable funding of
research, independent of political and commercial interests. Byron, like many within
and without the scientific academy, confuses institutional safeguards of impartiality
with the rhetoric of dispassionate impersonality, which is by no means essential to it.
As a result, he is caught in an excruciating double-bind: deeply committed to the sur-
vival and flourishing of the monarch butterflies, and at the same time feeling himself
bound by scientific protocols only to “read,” not to “save.”
Byron’s predicament exactly reflects Val Plumwood’s brilliant ecofeminist anal-
ysis of the dualism initiated by the rationalist philosopher René Descartes, which set
up Reason – identified with masculinity, freedom, activity, and human culture – as
distinct from, and superior to, a feminized Nature, which was imagined as passive
and mechanical. The requisite impartiality of academic research was misrepresented
as ‘objectivity’ – an impossible, God-like ‘view from nowhere’ – that required scien-
tists, as sovereign human ‘subjects’, to disavow all emotional and moral connection
from their ‘objects’ of study. Citing an influential feminist philosopher of science,
Plumwood observes:
For Evelyn Fox Keller, the insistence on an impartiality which rules out any blurring of bound-
aries between subject and object, and the relationship of sympathy and continuity with what
is known, is the feature which most clearly marks out such an epistemology of objectivity as
masculine. (1993, 116)
Plumwood (1993, 117) accepts some degree of distance is necessary for responsible
research, but insists that the ideology of ‘objectivity’ “involves not just separation but
hyperseparation, construing sharing and connection as hindrance to knowledge, the
object known as alien to the knower, and the knowledge relation as power.” Trapped
between his passionate acknowledgment of a shared, climatically-altered corporeal
existence alongside the butterflies and his constrained, enculturated understanding
of scientific objectivity, Professor Byron oscillates between wild grief about the mass
death of butterflies and disavowal of emotional or political involvement in their fate.
The issue for Dellarobia is focused in a single question about her own response
to the marvel of the butterflies’ migration: “How was that even normal, to cry over
insects?” (Kingsolver 2012, 146) The answer is that it is not, which is precisely the
cultural problem we face. Dellarobia, not yet inducted into the demanding rhetorical
protocols of science, is different: her intense curiosity about the butterflies, which
she shares with her son Preston, is of a piece with her emotional involvement, and
she chastises Byron for his reluctance to fight for his fellow-creatures. Eventually, he
admits:
Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact. It does not mean recy-
cling aluminum cans. It’s an experimental and theoretical science, like physics. But if we try to
make our science relevant to outsiders, right away they look for a picket sign. (324)
While real scientists experience this bind, usually privately, the conversation of Byron
and Dellarobia stages it for metanarrative reflection on the part of the reader. The
novel erodes the distance between knower and known insofar as both butterflies and
scientists are represented in both categories, and while it may or may not stimulate
readers to “cry over insects”, it certainly does convey powerfully what it would mean
to feel that way about them.
The butterflies themselves are, with few exceptions, scarcely individuated. They
are narrated, as they must appear to any observer in such numbers, as “an orange
blaze” (14), “golden darts” (52), “an unbounded, uncountable congregation” (53),
“special grace” (72), “a whole butterfly forest” (94), and so on. A significant exception
occurs at the moment Dellarobia confronts “the dying of the light” for the butterflies:
Dellarobia suddenly found she could scarcely bear this day at all. She stepped out in the rain
to pick up one of the pitiful survivors and bring it under their roof. She held it close to her face.
A female. And ladylike, with its slender velvet abdomen, its black eyes huge and dolorous. The
proboscis curled and uncurled like a spring. (319)
An individualized encounter such as this is crucial as counterweight to the symboliza-

tion afforded by the monarch flight more generally in the novel. Indeed, the butterfly
plot – the other meaning of the title’s Flight Behaviour – could be seen in two ways:
first, the monarch “character” is subjected to the peril of complete annihilation that
grows through the winter and is narrowly avoided, with huge casualties, at the end;
and second, a series of symbolic meanings gathers around the composite character,
none of which is ever completely dismissed. This accumulating symbolism, incorpo-
rating the perspectives of numerous human characters – scientists, locals, Mexican
migrants, British hippies and others – endows the monarch character with a function
that is, at once, socially conciliatory and epistemologically consilient.
At first, the monarch character gathers symbolic meanings that are socially con-
flictual: Bear sees it as a threat to his plans to log the hillside, while Cub embarrasses
Dellarobia by announcing that she “foretold” its miraculous advent. Hester seeks to
turn Bear’s pessimistic economic symbolism to positive account by charging visitors
for tours. The arrival of the scientists, with their agnostic, materialist practices and
cognitive frames, challenges the community’s Christian and economic symbolism at
once, as well as Dellarobia’s sense that the butterflies have a personal meaning for her
alone. Beliefs and behaviours, while seldom simplistically interrelated, continually
inform one another: the grasping symbolism Hester attaches to the “King Billies,”
308 Greg Garrard
as she calls them, is gradually supplanted on further acquaintance and religious

instruction by more compassionate meanings, while Dellarobia is gradually inducted
into the arduous, meticulous tasks of biological fieldwork.
Set to counting dead insects in quadrats laid out in the woods along a transect,
Dellarobia learns to know the butterflies by watching the grad students work:
She kept quiet, watching to see how they went about the task: kneeling, inching forwards […].
She surveyed her assigned corpses in despair, doubting she could count that high without just
a wee little bit of nicotine. But she soon grew absorbed, feeling something change in her brain
as her eyes shut out everything else in the world but the particulars of monarch butterfly and
gender. And noticing the smell: like dirt and lightning bugs […] and also like the firs themselves,
musky-pungent. (Kingsolver 2012, 141)
There are several notable aspects of this scene. The methodological reductionism
involved in setting out quadrats, counting bodies in random squares instead of trying
to count the whole forest, does not translate here into the kind of metaphysical reduc-
tionism – the hyperseparation of knower and known, the denial of interdependence –
mandated by Cartesian objectivity in Plumwood’s account. On the contrary, counting
corpses is a rigorously embodied practice, albeit not, at this moment, an emotive one.
The physical demands of fieldwork, which include the sheer difficulty of concentra-
tion over long periods of discomfort, are counterpointed by the sensory immersion
Dellarobia experiences as she comes to smell the butterflies for the first time. Over
time, as Ovid Byron and his students explain the extraordinary facts and equally
remarkable lacunas of current scientific lepidoptery, the monarch flight acquires
materialist meanings: initially, it symbolizes the triumph of scientific “organized curi-
osity” as a way of learning about the natural world, but then gradually, as the peril
grows, it morphs into a “canary in a coal mine” warning of the biological disruptions
attending climate change. Insofar as the butterflies risk complete destruction, it is
also a compelling imaginary instance of the sixth global extinction event now under
way, which is caused only in part by climatic changes at present.
The conciliatory intent of the novel is evident from the fact that the scientific
meanings that gather around the butterflies never altogether prevail. In one comic
scene, Hester and Dellarobia meet a couple of British hippies, who have come to the
forest to express solidarity with the monarchs by knitting replicas out of old sweaters.
Although Dellarobia wonders “what Hester made of these women who claimed to be
knitting the earth together, one unraveled sweater at a time” (Kingsolver 2012, 339),
they find a common language in talking about knitting, in spite of the other huge
cultural differences. While Hester never renounces her theocentric perspective, she
adjusts it to accommodate something nearer to that of the hippy girls, who proclaim
they are making “Icons. […] Or symbols, yeah? So people all over the world will know
about the monarchs’ plight” (341). The Mexican migrants, too, combine materialist
knowledge acquired by assisting scientists with the traditional belief that monarchs
embody the souls of dead babies, both of which conduce to protecting them.
Having symbolized miraculous, divine beauty and blessing in the beginning, the
butterflies come to represent appalling, unfathomable ecological harm, much to Del-
larobia’s dismay. As Ursula Heise has suggested, there is subversive potential in this
encounter of politically-loaded symbolisms:
Through the clash between the cultural meanings of the butterflies’ arrival – their aesthetic
appeal, their suggestion of divine presence, their power to alter the course of human lives – and
its ecological meanings – species loss, climate change – Kingsolver signals how conventional
ways of understanding nature fall short in the Anthropocene. (Heise 2013)
It is certainly the case that the accumulation of symbolism never comes close to
exhausting the potential of the monarch flight. Even so, Heise’s comment understates
the degree to which, through the agency of Pastor Bobby Ogle (a surprisingly liberal,
tree-hugging spiritual leader for a conservative rural town), challenging “ecological
meanings” are quite comfortingly accommodated by the Turnbows and their com-
munity. Indeed, the way in which a large socio-ecological ill is resolved as a family
melodrama recalls the work of Charles Dickens, even to the revelation of a lost family
relationship and a dramatic moral change of heart on the part of an antagonist. The
conciliation occurs at some cost, in novelistic terms: if Pastor Ogle stretches credulity
somewhat, the lack of any obdurate, informed climate skepticism in this conservative
community surely shatters it. Addressing the polarized climate debate in Anglophone
countries from a cultural perspective will, one suspects, require taking skepticism
more seriously than Kingsolver seems prepared to do. Ron Charles’s review in the
Washington Post (a skeptical right-wing American newspaper), while it is overwhelm-
ingly complimentary about Kingsolver’s achievement, points out that:
[…] there’s a marked absence of villains throughout this story, which, frankly, saps its drama a
bit: no corrupt ministers or rapacious developers; Dellarobia’s unambitious husband is boring
but never unkind; even Dellarobia’s bitter mother-in-law evolves into one of the more compli-
cated characters. (Charles 2012)
The novel’s avoidance of irresolvable political conflicts is of a piece with this observa-
tion. Dellarobia leaves Cub because he is the wrong man for her, not because he is an
unreflective climate skeptic.
Still more problematic, though, is the seeming transformation of the monarch
character from a symbol of fragility to one of resilience, which complements –
perhaps too reassuringly – Dellarobia’s painful decision to divorce Cub and move to
the nearest university town. As Timothy Clark (2015, 177) argues, the cost of the dual
plot is borne disproportionately on the nonhuman side: “Because the monarch but-
terflies acquire so many personal associations for Dellarobia at a crucial point in her
life, their final fate becomes increasingly impossible not to be read as symbolic of her
personal trajectory.” Thus the redemptive language in the final pages risks reducing
the scale of the threat climate change poses to global biodiversity to equivalence with
310 Greg Garrard
the anxiety attending a major life-change for a Tennessee mother-of-two. Clark’s chal-
lenge is fundamental:
Even with a focus on such spectacular insects, readers’ imaginations are still so much more
easily engaged and drawn in by the human drama, with its humour, suspense, love interest
and psychological identification, than by the environmental one, concerned with insect behav-
iour, largely invisible ecological and population dynamics, climate projections and slow-motion
ecocide. Is the human imagination really so depressingly enclosed, able to be captivated only by
immediate images of itself? (2015, 178)
For Clark, reading in the Anthropocene necessitates unceasing, unflinching encoun-

ters with the impossibility of satisfactory representation of that condition. An emo-
tionally-satisfying novel like Flight Behaviour is inevitably evasive in the larger
context of climate change and mass extinction. It would be better, on this view, for
Dellarobia’s redemption to fly free of the butterflies: for the flight to be annihilated
while she is saved, or vice versa.
While Clark’s argument is persuasive, it is important to recall the warnings in the
narrative that we are not to mistake the butterflies’ mere survival for “being saved”;
they will remain precarious: “They were so beautiful, that was the thing. The hardest
work of all was to resist taking comfort” (Kingsolver 2012, 422). In a novel whose own
prose is testament to the seductions of beauty, it is a radical message that cannot
be repeated too often: ecological harm can be beautiful, and “natural beauty” is no
index of health. While the mood of the conclusion is unmistakably elevated, there are
enough reminders of the “wrecked generation” (433) of butterflies that has survived,
just barely, that we must read of it flying out “to a new earth” as precarious endur-
ance, not biblical redemption.
As for Clark’s concluding question, the simple answer is: it depends on the
reader. Professional ecologists, we must assume, need not be coaxed and coddled to
be captivated with more-than-human dramas. For the rest of us, the limited political
success of the IPCC process indicates, among other things, that human-centredness is
a definite bias of human nature: never deterministic or unequivocal, but always exert-
ing a certain gravitational force on our imaginative artifacts. Literary fiction inhabits
this paradox most acutely: the enculturated expectations of plot and character are
inherently anthropomorphic, which often (though not invariably) means their bias is
anthropocentric, and yet, as Derek Attridge explains, literature exhibits a distinctive
orientation towards “alterity” or otherness, which ensures it is always exposing its
readers to what they cannot easily or comfortably think. The “other,” in this context,
means “that which the existing cultural order has to occlude in order to maintain its
capacities and configurations, its value-systems and hierarchies of importance; that
which it cannot afford to acknowledge if it is to continue without change” (Attridge
2004, 30). While Flight Behaviour does not register the pressure of climate change as
just such an “other” with radical literary innovation, it does stage the cultural accu-
mulation of meanings around the strikingly memorable figure of the monarch flight
with unparalleled courage and fidelity. While this novel is far from the first to stage
climate change as fiction, it is the most successful to date, and – more encourag-
ingly – it breeds confidence in the untraveled storyworlds of Anthropocene fictions
to come.
5 B
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Part III B
etween the Local and the Global: Cultural
Diversity vs. Eco-Cosmopolitanism
Scott Slovic
16 N
arrative Scholarship as an American
Contribution to Global Ecocriticism
Abstract: Ecocritics wrestle with the challenge of conceptualizing and representing
the human-scale meaning of our relationship with non-human phenomena, such as
‘place’ and ‘other species.’ American ecocritics, in particular, have experimented with
the insertion of storytelling within academic books and articles, using what has come
to be known as ‘narrative scholarship’ as a means of vivifying the ‘immediate context’
for scholarly analysis and striving for a mode of communication that captures the
emotional and moral urgency of environmental experience. It is also useful to note
the parallels between ecocritical narrative scholarship and the use of autobiographi-
cal gestures in feminist and multicultural criticism and in anthropological discourse.
This study tracks the development of narrative scholarship in ecocriticism, points to
key examples of such writing, and attempts to explain how storytelling both symbol-
izes and recreates authors’ engagement with the material world.
Key Terms: Narrative scholarship, storytelling, autobiographical literary criticism,

relationship, engagement
1 S
peaking Thirty-one Words for the Environmental
Arts and Humanities
In grappling with the complexities of our own species, the environmental arts and
humanities – including the literary, visual, and performing arts and environmentally
inflected branches of anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies, philosophy,
religion, and related disciplines – contribute profoundly to shedding light on and
potentially mitigating the impacts we have upon the planet.
I occasionally find myself explaining my field and its methodologies to unex-
pected audiences, ranging from the assistant minister for the environment in Malay-
sia to the Queen of Sweden. In May 2006, when I was lecturing at the University of the
Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan, I met with the U.S. General Consul in Naha. We shook
hands and sat down, and he then said: “Please explain ‘ecocriticism’ to me in twen-
ty-five words or less.” I launched into my practiced ‘overview lecture’: The study of
various forms of cultural expression, not simply literature per se, in order to under-
stand human behavior, historical trends, communication strategies, conceptual
paradigms, aesthetic tendencies etc. The government official raised his hand after
a minute and protested, “[t]hat’s more than twenty-five words.” You might think it a
316 Scott Slovic
missed opportunity – not having a one-sentence summary ready to deploy. But that
encounter has remained with me, motivating me to be ever more concise, straight
forward, and colorful in speaking a word (as Thoreau would say) for the role of the
arts and humanities in guiding fellow academics, corporate and government officials,
and the broader public in our thinking about human relationships with the ‘environ-
ment.’
Let me try my response to the General Consul again, this time representing the
environmental arts and humanities more broadly: These fields, ranging from art (and
art criticism) to theology, explore how and why humans interact with environments
and other species and how we communicate about these interactions. Twenty-eight
words. It’s not easy, even when being reductive, to produce a twenty-five-word sound-
bite.
In the 1994 essay “Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact,” I
condensed the entire discipline into four words and then glossed each term, conclud-
ing with a story about meeting Japanese organic farming guru Fukuoka Masanobu,
who urged me to get out of my jargon-mind and simply pay attention to the world.
The arts and humanities collectively are essential to comprehensive environmental
studies – and to society – in their capacity to demonstrate (and assess) how we expe-
rience the world, how we think about these environmental experiences, and how
we construct, communicate, and act upon particular attitudes and values. Historian
Donald Worster (1993) eloquently captures the latter idea in The Wealth of Nature,
arguing that the natural sciences can explain what is happening in the environment,
but we need the humanities to explain why humans behave as we do.
In sum: the environmental arts and humanities, including the field of ecocriti-
cism, are central to environmental studies – not peripheral, not decorative – because
they illuminate our own nature in all its beauty and horror. Thirty-one words.
2 A
n “Immediate Context” for the Environmental
Imagination
One of the pivotal works in the field of ecocriticism is Lawrence Buell’s 1995 mono-
graph The Environmental Imagination, which explores Henry David Thoreau’s central
role in focusing North American – and to some extent, global – approaches to imagin-
ing the relationship between human beings and the non-human environment. Buell
explores a disparate array of overarching topics in his study, extending Leo Marx’s
(1964) The Machine in the Garden by commenting on “pastoral ideology” in the Tho-
reauvian context (Buell 1995, 31), considering the erasure of human narrators in envi-
ronmental discourse as a kind of “relinquishment of self” (1995, 143), and proposing
that writers sometimes describe places in terms transferred from other geographies,
which he calls “the aesthetics of the not-there” (68), but a crucial thrust of his study
16 Narrative Scholarship as an American Contribution to Global Ecocriticism 317
is the focus on overcoming the human tendency to become so controlled by abstract

ideologies and preconceptions that we fail to engage with realities that are staring us
in the face. In his early chapter titled “New World Dreams and Environmental Actual-
ities,” Buell writes that we need to understand our responsibility to “earth’s interest
as well as […] humanity’s” and that we, in the new world, must begin to look past and
through the pastoral myth of a “green world” (55) that is somehow free of the degra-
dations caused by human activities.
As we seek to become more engaged with ‘environmental actualities,’ human
beings, especially in urban or white collar situations, need to find ways not only to
recognize and step beyond our mental constructs but to perceive the raw physicality
of the world. In the field of ecocriticism, the mode of writing known as ‘narrative
scholarship’ has played a particular role in viscerally emphasizing the scholar’s sense
of situatedness in a living, breathing world, in an ecological reality where there is
give and take between the human and the broader realities of the planet. The Environ-
mental Imagination is, for the most part, a work of detached, impersonal scholarship,
where the pronoun “I” and first-person narrative do not enter prominently into the
discourse. But there is a strange moment early in the book where the scholar subtly
asserts his material presence in the world:
American literary history […] presents the spectacle of having identified representation of the
natural environment as a major theme while marginalizing the literature devoted most specif-
ically to it and reading the canonical books in ways that minimize their interest in represent-
ing the environment as such. To put this abstract point in an immediate context: the grove of
second-growth white pines that sway at this moment of writing, with their blue-yellow-green
five-needle clusters above spiky circles of atrophied lower limbs, along a brown needle-strewn
ridge of shale forty feet from my computer screen – this grove can be found in the pages of Amer-
ican literature also, but it is not the woods imagined by American criticism. The forest of Ameri-
can scholarship is the far more blurry and highly symbolic delta landscape of William Faulkner’s
“The Bear,” built from chant-like reiterated and generalized images: a forest where treeness
matters but the identities and material properties of the trees are inconsequential. (Buell 1995,
9–10)
This subtle gesture toward narrative in Lawrence Buell’s book signals the inclina-
tion of ecocriticism to push back against “blurry and highly symbolic” tendencies –
against the abstractions – toward which literary criticism and theory are prone. Even
in this loaded passage from The Environmental Imagination, Buell is hesitant to use
the pronoun “I” and place himself, “at this moment of writing,” fully in the mate-
rial world his book is seeking to valorize. As is the case with all language, autobio-
graphical writing itself mediates between lived experience and communication with
the audience (↗17 Ecology and Life Writing); but the narrative mode of expression
seeks to approximate (or create the illusion of approximating) physical and cognitive
experience, drawing readers and listeners toward a heightened appreciation of their
own parallel experiences. Some might think of the inclusion (or intrusion) of narrative
prose in a work of academic writing to be a form of subjective scholarship, and, to be
318 Scott Slovic
sure, there is a certain degree of titillating intimacy in the relaxing of objective guard-
edness when the scholarly authority turns to his or her reader and says, implicitly,
“[l]et me tell you a story that might help clarify my point here.” However, the goal of
narrative scholarship is usually not to highlight the unique subjectivity of the scholar,
but rather to use the seemingly subjective language of story as a scaffolding to reveal
a shared human experience of ideas, texts, social realities, and the physical world.
Buell’s apparent hesitancy to use the pronoun “I” in the passage quoted above
seems to display an uneasiness with the mixing of storytelling and authoritative schol-
arly prose similar to what several scholars, such as Glen A. Love and Ann Ronald,
admitted in their contributions to the October 1995 roundtable session at the Western
Literature Association panel on “Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism”
(available online at www.asle.org). Love, who several years later published the impor-
tant book Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (2003), men-
tions that he made his first attempt at narrative scholarship after thirty-five years of
college teaching and work in the field of literary criticism, pointing to his own “timid-
ity” in doing so, in part because, “[f]or me, in the best nature writing eco outweighs
ego, though both are present. For me, nature writing and ecocriticism are never far
from the common world, the real world. (And, yes, there is a real world)” (Love 1995).
As Buell’s gesture indicates in the above-quoted passage, the hint of the scholar’s
presence in the real, material world, the burst of ego in a work of scholarship, can
itself be a way of recognizing the relationship with ’eco.’ Ann Ronald, well known for
her 1982 book on American environmental icon Edward Abbey, argues in her contri-
bution to the collection of 1995 roundtable essays that narrative and personal voice
were expected elements of literary criticism until the rise of New Criticism in the mid-
twentieth century. She points to the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle
and suggests that the emergence of narrative as an ingredient in ecocriticism has
swung the pendulum of criticism back toward the roots of literary studies, opening
new possibilities for “men and women whose readings of literary texts weave anec-
dotes and personal experiences together with observations on culture and society,
thinkers who write with voices of their own” (Ronald 1995).
The pendulum toward identifying the ‘immediate context’ (in Buell’s phrase) for
ecocriticism has its roots not only in the idiosyncratic voices of Arnold and Carlyle,
but in the drift toward ‘positioned’ scholarship in the context of multicultural and
feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances
Murphy Zauhar refer to this as ‘autobiographical literary criticism’ in their 1993 edited
collection The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism. The editors
argue in their introduction that the autobiographical approach assumes that “gender,
race, class, and ability are among the matrices that influence [scholars’] reading,
knowing, and writing” and that the individual particularities of each scholar’s life
can and should contribute to the form of her or his scholarly expression (Freedman
et al. 1993, 10). Nearly a decade later, Deborah H. Holdstein and David Bleich (2001),
in their introduction to Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing,
refer to Michael Bérubé’s 1996 assertion in PMLA that “as long as the scholarship in
question concerns humans and is written by humans, readers should at least enter-
tain the possibility that nothing human should be alien to it” (qtd. in Holdstein and
Bleich 2001, 1). Holdstein and Bleich (2001, 1) point out that “admit[ting] the full
range of human experience into formal scholarly writing” was just “becoming accept-
able in the humanities” at the time when they were completing their book. One of
the most vexing questions for scholars opting to admit the personal dimension into
their academic writing is the question of necessity – how and why might a personal
anecdote enrich and enliven and clarify the work? As narrative anthropologist Ruth
Behar (1996, 14) puts it in The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your
Heart: “The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere
we couldn’t otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative
flourish, not exposure for its own sake.”
For me, the crucial aspect of this shift toward authorial engagement with the
subject matter at hand in ecocriticism is not so much the explicit existence of the
authorial self, the autobiographical aspect, as the bold insertion of story into what
has been presented as a theoretical and/or analytical mode of language: ‘literary crit-
icism.’ I sought to emphasize the significance of storytelling in the small essay where
I coined the term ‘narrative scholarship’ (Slovic 2008 [1994]). In this piece, titled
“Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact,” I argue that “[e]cocrit-
ics should tell stories, should use narrative as a constant or intermittent strategy for
literary analysis. […] We must not reduce our scholarship to an arid, hyperintellectual
game, devoid of smells and tastes, devoid of actual experience. Encounter the world
and literature together, then report about the conjunctions, the intersecting patterns”
(2008, 28).
When I wrote this in 1994, I had recently experimented with storytelling in the
Coda at the end of my 1992 book Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing,
telling stories about exploring the natural world with my young son Jacinto as a way
of grounding my analysis of the motif of awareness in American writing about the
environment in my own lived experience. This book emerged from my doctoral disser-
tation at Brown University, which concluded without any personal narrative. Ecocritic
John Tallmadge, who read the revised dissertation for the University of Utah Press,
suggested in his comments to the press that it would be a good idea for the author
to reveal something of himself to his readers as a way of producing a more engaging
conclusion. On the strength of this advice, and emboldened by models such as John
Elder’s elegant 1985 study of nature poetry, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision
of Nature, I added several personal anecdotes about encounters with material nature
with my young son – specifically, encounters with ants and vultures and fenced land-
scapes – into the revised final chapter of the book. Elder’s 1985 book had included
two narrative interludes, which he calls ’Excursions,’ in his depersonalized work of
literary criticism. In explaining his use of these narrative passages in his otherwise
non-narrative study, Elder comments,
320 Scott Slovic
[…] the Excursions are framed […] by certain experiences I have had in the Vermont landscape
where my family and I live. It seems important to acknowledge that natural scenes engender and
inform meditations on literature as well as the other way around. I also hope through these two
essays to convey something of the particular natural settings in which this book was conceived.
In the Excursions, as well as in the character of my voice throughout the book, I have tried to
emphasize that this consideration of poetry and the vision of nature is highly selective and per-
sonal. (1985, 3)
Although one might read this explanation as being somewhat apologetic for the selec-
tivity and perhaps even the eccentricity of the scholar’s choices of poetic examples
and his interpretations of the literature, I believe it is more significant to note Elder’s
suggestion that he comes to his way of reading literature – that all readers come to
their views of culture – as a result of our experiences in the world and we misrepre-
sent our ideas, or represent them in a problematically incomplete way, when we fail to
acknowledge the physical milieu out of which they developed. Likewise, in a way that
anticipates Ann Ronald’s 1995 statement about the tradition of the personal voice in
literary criticism, Elder (1985, 3) points to the “character of [his] voice.” This, too, has
become a hallmark of some of the most poignant and interesting American ecocriti-
cism in the past three decades, evident in the humor of Ian Marshall, the biting wit of
Dana Phillips, and the activist intensity of Stacy Alaimo and Greta Gaard.
Elder’s intermittent use of storytelling in Imagining the Earth served as my model
in the final chapter of Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. In the ensuing
years, Elder (1998) developed his approach to narrative scholarship dramatically
by producing Reading the Mountains of Home, a book-length study of Robert Frost’s
intricate poem “Directive,” in which his analysis of the key moments in the poem
is treated in separate narrative chapters that interweave the scholar’s discussion of
Frost with stories about his own family. Elder expanded upon his narrative approach
to ecocriticism in his 2006 volume Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy
in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh, where he told the story of his journey to Italy
with his wife in the process of learning about Marsh, the important environmental
thinker whose ideas about how human beings have changed the physical environ-
ment prefigured twenty-first-century theories of the Anthropocene.
Other particularly notable examples of narrative ecocriticism in the 1990s include
the work of Ian Marshall and Kent Ryden. Marshall’s 1998 book Story Line: Exploring
the Literature of the Appalachian Trail uses the trope of a series of hiking excursions
on the trail that traces the East Coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine as
the scaffolding for his study of literature that represents and explores that region of
the world. Marshall explains his decision to rely on the narrative approach to literary
analysis as follows:
The subjective approach seems compatible with much contemporary literary theory. Neohistori-
cists, for instance, assume that all readings are somehow “situated,” so true objectivity requires
clarifying your position in terms of its historical or cultural context. Feminist scholars claim that
the “personal is political,” so larger cultural implications are always embedded in individual
experience. The subjective approach also seems entirely compatible with ecocritical ideas. Nar-
rative scholarship is a way of putting into practice the ecological principle of interconnected-
ness. To look at something from some objective distance implies that you are outside of it, not
part of it. To be aware of our role not just as observer but as participant, as part and parcel of the
world, is a healthy attitude to apply not just to studies of the natural world but to explorations of
the literary world as well. (1998, 8)
This last point about ecological interconnectedness seems to be the primary motiva-
tion for Marshall’s use of storytelling in his book – he does so out of an intuitive sense
that he can integrate his interest in literature and the world by way of the glue of story,
using tales of experience as a unifying force, making his life as a hiking literary critic
coherent in the process. In the narrative, he actually acts out processes he discerns in
the important literary texts he discusses, such as the idea of perceiving the world with
active intentionality, or “stalking,” as described in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek. Marshall writes:
I leave the cliffs, descend to Scorched Earth Gap, so named for the supposed effects of the “exu-
berant” language of a hiker distressed by the difficult terraine. I’m in the thick of the cicadas
here. Up close, I note that the sound, like the whine of an alien spacecraft, is not at a constant
volume and pitch. It rises and falls. The cicadas seem to sing or whatever it is they’re doing
together. In truth, the singing cicadas are all males, and far from harmonizing, they are compet-
ing to attract females.
I camp at Lambert’s Meadow, next to Sawmill Brook, along with Palouche, the Dutchman,
Wild Goose, Timber Pixie, and (really) a guy going by the trail name of Pilgrim. I watch crayfish
for a while, stalk them, see them scuttle backwards under rocks when I lean toward them, watch
the mud burst into a brown cloud that rises in the water and then falls, dissolves, glides away.
“You have to stalk everything,” I read. “Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and
goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too.” (1998, 205)
It’s Dillard’s book I’m stalking now, its meaning my prey. Right about when darkness drops its
first hint, I’m starting chapter twelve, “Nightwatch.” (97–98)
Just as the time of day represented in the text mirrors the daily rhythm of the eco
critical text, the scholar’s stalking frame of mind mirrors (and sometimes deviates
from) the world views and experiences revealed in the literary works he reads as he
makes his way through the landscapes that engendered the texts. The result is work
of literary criticism that gains its authority not only through convincing readings of
the texts but through the author’s groundedness in the material reality of his subject
matter. Five years later, Marshall (2003) applied the strategy of narrative scholarship
in his book Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need,
in which he offers a series of essays responding to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s
famous ‘hierarchy of needs,’ first articulated in the 1954 book Motivation and Person-
ality. One of Marshall’s gifts as a writer of narrative scholarship is his ability to convey
tangible experience to the reader, bringing the audience even into the mundane expe-
rience of drinking water:
322 Scott Slovic
When I’ve filled three bottles, I drink from the last one. A long drink – eight, ten ounces’ worth.
Release the obligatory gasping, satisfied “aahhh!” Top off the bottle.
This is one of the great joys of hiking. “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in
water,” said Loren Eiseley. It’s not just the clean taste, or the cold on the tongue. Getting water
from a stream is a treat for all the senses. Visually, you’ve got all kinds of special effects caused
by the interplay of light and hydrologic motion, gravity having a heyday with the idea of fluidity.
Around this rock, across these glistening stones, over this clump of decomposing leaves caught
on a stick hung up on rock and streambank, the water jitterbugs downstream. Aside from the oral
delights, there are the aural – the symphony of subtle sound, from a rivulet’s flutelike trickling
to the tympani of falls to the gush of water like a bow drawn across geologic gut. And overhead,
woodwinds. All the senses are engaged, except maybe smell, and I don’t know, when I get near
running water I swear I pick up the same delicious ions that make the air smell so good after a
rain. (Marshall 2003, 23–24)
Is this literary criticism ecocriticism? This is storytelling in the service of understand-

ing the broader and deeper implications of an important theory of human cognition:
Maslow’s hierarchy. Marshall’s book builds through the layers of Maslow’s concept
toward a resounding final chapter, titled “Self-Actualization: Song of Bald Eagle,”
which is a tour de force response to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Marshall pre-
sents a diaristic series of narratives based on his experience of hiking up Bald Moun-
tain, near his home in Pennsylvania, where he read each of the fifty-two sections of
Whitman’s poem aloud to the mountain over the course of the first year of the new
millennium and then contemplated each poetic passage in light of Maslow’s idea that
“[w]hat a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we
call self-actualization” (Marshall 2003, 163). I was present to observe Marshall when
he read section thirteen of Whitman’s poem aloud and recorded the following words
in his diary:
Another great line: “the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me” –
the gamut meaning the musical scale. We are not superior musicians for knowing or inventing
the scale, or for having the capacity for book learning – or book-writing.
Listen to the jay trilling pretty well. Singing of the soul of spring? Actually that’s a chickadee
I hear now. Listen to the rising stream-sound of the west-born wind filtering through leafless
stalks and boughs. I take it in. I give it back. I’m breathing. (Marshall 2003, 187)
What strikes me here is the mounting sense of the human author’s humility, even
in reading a splendid work of literature to a mere mountain, to the jays – or chick-
adees – in the woods. And his sense of give and take and deep emplacement in the
reality of the place where he lives. It is through this deepening sense of belonging to
the world that Marshall achieves his sense of self-actualization. And the narrative
mode of expression enables him to reveal and evoke this achievement. Commenting
on the effectiveness of narrative scholarship as a strategy in Marshall’s work and the
work of such scholars as Rebecca Solnit, John Elder, and Richard Mabey, ecocritic
Terry Gifford, in his chapter “Walking into Narrative Scholarship” from the 2006 book
Reconnecting with John Muir, refers to the “density of meaning [achieved] through an
integration of modes of knowing and their discourses” (118).
A similar use of narrative as a way of evoking the scholar’s own thought processes
occurs in Kent C. Ryden’s 1993 Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and
the Sense of Place, which uses concepts from geography and folklore to argue that our
‘sense of place’ exists in an invisible ‘mental map’ in the form of story, not merely as
a material reality that can be captured through traditional cartography. Ryden (1993,
xiv) argues that “[t]he sense of place achieves its clearest articulation through narra-
tive, providing the thematic drive and focus for the stories the people tell about the
places of their lives.” In addition to using published literary works and folk narra-
tives gathered through interviews with local people, the author tells his own stories
remembered from youthful experiences of place and collected at the time he was
writing his book, demonstrating that ‘field work,’ lived experience in the world, is as
essential to scholarship as work done in the laboratory or the library. While thinking
about the processes by which people mark land and assert their understanding of
its contours and relationships to human inhabitants and owners, Ryden wandered
through the state of Rhode Island, where he was living at the time; at one point, he
discovered a stone post with the letter ‘C’ on it, apparently indicating the state border
with Connecticut. He writes:
The post suggests history, emanates mystery, and draws questions out of the person contem-
plating it, questions which imply a history both of the artifact and of the landscape in which it
is set. […]
The post sits mute. It demands that words and stories be woven around it, that questions be
answered, that imagination be loosed in speculation, that research be done in the field and the
library and written into history. (Ryden 1993, 13)
In essence, the scholar narrates here his own process of discovery, not merely report-
ing his findings and arguments but actually describing through the story of a dis-
covery his own state of mind while making the discovery. The reader thus becomes
complicit in the act of learning. Not only is this a valuable rhetorical move on the part
of the writer, but it helps the reader to appreciate the human process of making sense
of the world.
Examples of narrative scholarship abound in American ecocriticism and related
scholarship. Donna Haraway’s (2008) When Species Meet, which extends her post-
humanist project by contemplating the phenomenon of “companion species,” high-
lights her relationship with her dogs Roland and Cayenne in a “collage of e-mails”
(181) in the chapter “Species of Friendship,” placed in the middle of her book. That
same year, Tom Lynch began his ecocritical study of Southwestern American litera-
ture, Xerophilia, with a narrative introduction that immerses readers in the physical
reality of that arid region. William Major, by contrast, offers a narrative afterword,
titled “How I Became an Agrarian,” as a way of presenting a vivid capstone to his
2011 book Grounded Vision: New Agrarianism and the Academy, an ecocritical study
324 Scott Slovic
of agricultural motifs in American literature. Other ecocritics, such as rhetorician and

poetry scholar M. Jimmie Killingsworth (2014), in Facing It: Epiphany & Apocalypse
in the New Nature, have adopted a predominantly narrative style throughout entire
monographs. And sometimes noted literary essayists, such as David Gessner, have
turned their attention to a kind of narrative ecocriticism, as in his book All the Wild
that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West (2015), which
interweaves travel stories, personal reflection, environmental arguments, biograph-
ical speculation, and textual commentary; as Gessner (2015, 279) puts it: “If mine
was an adventure in geography, it was just as much as adventure in reading.” Even
Lawrence Buell (2005), in the third work of his ecocritical trilogy, The Future of Envi-
ronmental Criticism, amplifies his abbreviated autobiographical gesture in The Envi-
ronmental Imagination (as I discussed above) to a full page of personal narrative in
the chapter “Space, Place, and Imagination from Local to Global,” telling the story
of his experience of non-places when visiting various government offices to secure a
new license plate for his car and even when sitting in front of his computer writing
ecocritical articles, during which, he says, “I exist for all practical purposes only in
the abstract space of ideas and books, my body immobile except for the flicker of
fingers at the keyboard” (2005, 70).
The methodology and philosophy of narrative scholarship has become wide-
spread in American ecocriticism and is also gradually emerging in works by schol-
ars elsewhere in the world, such as Australian scholars Mark Tredinnick (2005) in
The Land’s Wild Music and Deborah Bird Rose (2011) in Wild Dog Dreaming: Love
and Extinction and Japanese scholars Suga Keijiro (2013, in Japanese) in Strangeogra-
phy and Masami Yuki (2015 [2012]) in Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women
Writers: An Ecocritical Journey around the Hearth of Modernity. Tredinnick (2005, 17),
for instance, explains his choice of narrative language by asserting that it “sings the
lifeworld of the research experience.” Yuki, for her part, expresses her interest in
paying attention “to the extremely concrete, non-conceptual way that the relation-
ship with things-unto-themselves” (manuscript) occurs in the work of writers such
as Ishimure Michiko and Nashiki Kaho. British poet and ecocritic Terry Gifford (2013)
has also contributed to the field of narrative scholarship through his analysis of this
methodology in Reconnecting with John Muir and his use of narrative techniques in
such articles as “Pastoral, Antipastoral, and Postpastoral as Reading Strategies.”
But it is important to note, too, that many other important examples of contem-
porary ecocriticism continue to operate in a mostly depersonalized, formal mode
of discourse, as is the case in Ursula K. Heise’s (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global and Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) Bodily
Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Rob Nixon’s (2011) acclaimed
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor has few elements of personal
narrative in it, aside from occasional asides about his academic discoveries and a
short passage in the chapter “Stranger in the Eco-Village: Race, Tourism, and Envi-
ronmental Time,” where he visits a hunting lodge in the South African bush just prior
to the 1994 presidential election and experiences “arguably the world’s most vora-
cious master bedroom” (its walls and floors populated with preserved body parts of
“mounted carnivores”) (Nixon 2011, 177–180).
When ecocritic Wei Qingqi, who translated my book Going Away to Think into
Chinese, was working on the translation, he also conducted a written interview with
me that was included in the translation. Wei was particularly interested in my use
of narrative scholarship in various essays in that book and my blurring of the line
between scholarly and narrative nonfiction, which he expected to be ‘provocative’ for
Chinese readers. Here is part of my response:
What good would it do if you went to the trouble to translate a new volume of American liter-
ary scholarship for a Chinese audience, but readers in China found that this scholarship looked
exactly like what they’re already familiar with? Likewise, if I were to read a new work of Chinese
scholarship translated into English, I would hope to encounter something different and surpris-
ing, perhaps even unsettling. I hope readers of your translation of Going Away to Think will be
inspired to rethink their own views of the relationship between scholarly writing and literary
writing – and I hope your translation will succeed in capturing some of the passion I feel for the
subjects I’ve approached in these essays. Even though I’ve been studying environmental liter-
ature and ecocriticism for many years (going back to when I was still an undergraduate in the
early 1980s), I am not a disembodied brain, a thinker who never leaves the confines of his office
or the university library. To the contrary, I spend much of my life out in the world, experiencing
physical and social realities, talking with people, observing plants and animals and rocks and
weather. I use my engagement with literature as a means of sharpening my understanding of
the world, not as a retreat from the world. Sometimes it is important simply to immerse oneself
in the internal patterns of a work of art – I can appreciate the thrill of understanding how these
patterns cohere. Other times it is valuable to close our books and allow ourselves to be deeply
present in the world – this is one of the themes of my essay “Out of Time” in the present collec-
tion, especially the section that describes my experience of running on the beautiful trail near
the McKenzie River in Oregon. But generally the structure of my life as an ecocritic involves a
constant movement back and forth between language and the world, between text and context.
I find that the seemingly experimental, perhaps even transgressive, mode of writing called “nar-
rative scholarship” is actually a very logical strategy for exploring the linkages between textual
experience and worldly experience, worldly concerns. (Wei 2010)
What I’m describing here is actually an abiding sense of my relationship with the
material world, not only with the realm of textuality. To me, this is a particularly vital
dimension of ecocriticism. I have written various overviews of global ecocriticism,
such as my introduction to Nature and the Environment for a volume in EBSCO’s
Critical Insights Series (2012c) and the essay “Landmarks in Chinese Ecocritism and
Environmental Literature” for Chinese Social Sciences Today (2012b). But I have not
detected a significant trend toward narrative scholarship in places other than the
United States, which I attribute, in part, to the prominent influence of nonfiction
environmental writing, with its frequent use of eloquent first-person narrative, on
many of the ecocritics, such as John Elder, who played a vital role in framing the early
discourse of American ecocriticism in the 1980s and 1990s. I believe it would be fair
326 Scott Slovic
to claim that narrative scholarship is a specifically American contribution to inter-

national ecocriticism, although we do now see hybrid modes of ecocritical writing
beginning to appear in other countries, as in the Australian and Japanese examples I
have offered above.
3 An Abiding Sense of Relationship

Some of the most stimulating and disconcerting work in contemporary ecocriticism
occurs in Timothy Morton’s books Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental
Aesthetics (2009), The Ecological Thought (2012), and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology after the End of the World (2013). This work is, in a sense, the antithesis of the
impulse toward relationship and worldly engagement expressed in narrative schol-
arship. In 2012, the editors of English Language Notes invited me to offer a response
to Morton’s (2011) short essay “Waking Up Inside an Object: The Subject of Ecology,”
and Morton’s piece appeared alongside my comments and two other responses in the
Spring/Summer 2012 issue of ELN (2012a). Because my response, in its focus on rela-
tionship and engagement is directly germaine to my treatment of narrative scholar-
ship, I will include selections from it below.
When I read Timothy Morton’s (2011, 190) nimbly articulated discussion of
“ecology without Nature” and the notion that “the appropriate philosophy for an eco-
logical era is an object-oriented ontology (OOO),” I feel as if I’ve entered a Twilight
Zone in which the ecological discourse of the 1970s has been turned inside out and
re-written as a hyper-rationalist thought experiment, devoid of all ethos and most
pathos (there is a certain enthusiasm discernable in the author’s call for “[a]n ecology
without boxes. Without reserve. Infinite coexistence” (2011, 189) – language that
echoes Gary Snyder’s concluding lines in “Ripples on the Surface”: “No nature / Both
together, one big empty house” (Snyder 1992, 381). This is basically the project of Deep
Ecology, stripped of moral urgency. It is also, I would argue, just as idealistic as Deep
Ecology’s biocentricism in its misapprehension of human psychology. OOO strikes
me as another way of getting at biocentrism – understanding the egalitarianism and
interconnectedness among all beings (or ‘objects’). In the end, both biocentrism and
object-orientation seem unable to overturn the intrinsic human tendency to draw
inward toward anthropocentrism and, in many instances, even egocentrism. Morton’s
‘subject of ecology’ – or ecological subjectivity – might better be described as ‘ecolog-
ical objectivity,’ and it is the philosophical equivalent of a poetic passage from Louis
Zukofsky (1978, 19–20), say Section 5 in A, in which “The answer” is simply “Under
sky / The winds breathe in the fields. / Standing there chest to chest, / One horse /
Walked off, / The trees showing sunlight / Sunlight trees, / Words ranging forms.”
Here is a kind of object-oriented ontology – phenomena coexisting in affectless jux-
taposition to each other. But how far does this thinking take us in a warming world?
I sense in Morton’s “Waking Up Inside an Object: The Subject of Ecology” an

effort to get at the objective truth of ecology, rejecting the same sentimentalist claims
to Nature-attachment that Dana Phillips critiques in The Truth of Ecology (2003). For
Morton, the ‘true’ apprehension of objective ecological reality will occur when we
come to terms with our own existence as objects akin to all other objects. There is no
world ‘out there’ because in this vision of coexistence there is only ‘we,’ no ‘I’ and
no ‘you’ (certainly no ‘thou’) – no hierarchy, in other words. I find Morton’s objective
and all-inclusive imaginary to be fascinating and challenging, especially when he
writes:
This superimposition of background and foreground, giving rise to a disturbing of expected

relationships between sound and noise, and between sign and medium, is a common trait of
environmental art that explores ecological awareness in form as well as in content. The creeping
realization that global warming is real, running parallel to this kind of environmental art, is also
the uncanny sensation of waking up inside an object. ‘Climate’ is a massively distributed object
that surrounds Earth and that includes the Sun and greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere.
‘Too weak to even recognize’ from a human point of view (it requires terabytes of RAM processing
speed to model in real time), global warming has real, devastating effects on all parts of Earth’s
surface. (Morton 2011, 187; emphasis original)
Texts that experiment with new formal demonstrations of ecological “systems and
interconnectivity,” as Morton (2011, 185) states, might enable readers to consider what
it would be like to think in coldly rational ways about our egalitarian coexistence with
everything that is. But it will require an enormous evolutionary leap before humans
can actually go about their lives by invoking such thought processes, and I am not
sure human societies and the physical planet would be any better off. Perhaps what’s
needed is actually a better cognitive system for separating “sound” and “noise,” for
ranking the importance of various sensory signals and bits of information, rather than
simply conflating – or “superimpos[ing]” – “sound and noise, […] sign and medium.”
Asking how we ought to think about “massively distributed object[s]” and what
forms of environmental expression might propel us toward new ways of apprehending
such phenomena is clearly central to the current project of ecocriticism and environ-
mental literature/art. When Lawrence Buell (2005, 92) asks, in The Future of Environ-
mental Criticism, “[i]s place-responsive ecoliterature of a global scope an impossibility
[…]?,” he seems to be formulating another version of Morton’s (2011, 187) emotionally
and ethically neutral description of the fact that vast, global phenomena, ranging
from climate change to extinction, are “‘Too weak to even recognize’ from a human
point of view.” However, I would suggest that the discipline needs to acknowledge
and work with actual human cognitive processes and thus facilitate our heightened
responsiveness to sub-sensory information, not simply re-conceptualize humans as
objective robots. Back in 1989, neuroscientist Robert Ornstein and population biol-
ogist Paul Ehrlich published a penetrating study of the potentially catastrophic gap
between human perceptual and cognitive processes and the most serious threats to
328 Scott Slovic
the survival. As they put it in New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evo-
lution, “[t]he human world, of course, is primarily a sight and secondarily a sound
world. […] Now the sight-sound world is woefully inadequate, because many of the
threats to our lives and future are not simple sensory events that can be incorporated
into our caricatures of the world. Indeed many of them aren’t directly accessible to
our senses at all” (Ornstein and Ehrlich 1989, 75). Simply redefining ourselves as
objects among/within a universe of fellow objects does not seem likely to overcome
the human tendency to caricature or distort the world. If anything, OOO undermines
the perception of depth and hierarchy – of external structure. Of relationships. If we
were to “wak[e] up inside an object” (i.e., as objects ourselves and as coextensive
elements of the “massively distributed” planetary object), how would this trigger a
new realization of global warming (Morton 2011, 187)? Even if such a wake-up process
could sharpen the human sense of interconnectedness, the erasure of relationships
would only complicate the perception of causality in the case of anthropogenic climate
change, pollution, extinction, desertification, and other large-scale phenomena.
I find myself thinking back through the most jarring and mind-blowing passages
of environmental literature I can recall, trying to figure out what makes these words
so memorable and moving to me – and how such writing might move readers “toward
conscious evolution”. I think of the section in Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House
where he and Tanya decide to return home to Kentucky:
[T]here at the Camp we had around us the elemental world of water and light and earth and air.
We felt the presences of the wild creatures, the river, the trees, the stars. Though we had our
troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see on any night, is unim-
aginably large, and mostly empty, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than
we needed to be apart. (Berry 1969, 133)
I think of Annie Dillard’s (1999, 78–79) effort to be mindfully present in the moment
in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this
empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I
am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this
awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque,
so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also
realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand […].” I recall Barry
Lopez’s (1986, 414) concluding revelation of respect in Arctic Dreams: “I looked out
over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed
from the waist deeply toward the north, that great strait filled with life, the ice and the
water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held
the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs,
its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my
life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful.” And I think of Richard K.
Nelson’s (1986, 249) appreciation of coextextensiveness in The Island Within: “There
is nothing in me that is not of earth, no split instant of separateness, no particle that
disunites me from the surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself. The rivers run
through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh,
the sun’s heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that befalls the earth befalls
me. A fouled molecule that runs through the earth runs through me. Where the earth
is cleansed and nourished, its purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my own life.
My eyes are the earth gazing at itself.”
Other poignant scenes representing human engagement with the physical reality
of nature appear in the works of Matsuo Bashō, Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Orhan
Pamuk, Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Swander, Bill McKibben, and Sandra Steingra-
ber – and in innumerable other literary texts. I think, too, of the moments of affect-
ing self-consciousness that stay with me from the writings of Paul Ehrlich, Lawrence
Buell, John Elder, Randy Malamud, and other environmental scholars. In all of these
words there is an abiding sense of relationship – an emotional interaction with some-
thing other than and beyond the self. The human mind – my own mind, at least,
and, it seems, the minds of these writers – requires a not-me in order to engage in
the process, which may or may not be successful, of attachment. From attachment
comes the possibility of concern or commitment. Merely understanding the basic
coexistence of all things (the basic tenet of ‘ecology without Nature,’ as I understand
it) does not inspire me to care about all things. As Scott Russell Sanders (1991, 226)
once wrote: “The gospel of ecology has become an intellectual commonplace. But it is
not yet an emotional one. For most of us, most of the time, nature appears framed in
a window or a video screen or inside the borders of a photograph. We do not feel the
organic web passing through our guts.” OOO and its presentation in a wholly disem-
bodied style of academic discourse, I’m afraid, do not help me feel what it means to
be part of ecological reality.
When I interviewed Seattle-based photographer and digital artist Chris Jordan
in June 2011 for the book Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning
in a World of Data (2015), he explained at length how he uses visual images to spur
viewers to experience repeatedly the ‘trans-scalar’ relationship between the one
and the many, between themselves and the societal collective. He mentioned one
particular case when he stood near a friend who was viewing his composition titled
“Plastic Bottles, 2007” (see Running the Numbers at www.chrisjordan.com), which
from a distance depicts an abstract and appealing field of multi-colored dots. As the
gallery viewer steps closer to the large-format print, the fact that the ‘dots’ are actually
individual water bottles becomes evident. The caption to the piece reads: “Depicts
two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the United States every five
minutes.” The effect of this and other images of human consumption on viewers
occurs as follows:
I was at an exhibition in Boulder, Colorado, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art with a
friend of mine […], and we were standing in front of that piece, and he had a bottle of water in his
hand and was drinking from this plastic bottle. And he said just a second, and he went and threw
330 Scott Slovic
the bottle in the garbage. Then he came back and stood in front of that piece again, and he got
this sheepish look on his face and said, “Well, that was just one bottle.” Then he looked back at
my piece, and I saw him sort of reel back. His neck snapped back, his eyes opened, and he looked
at me and said, “I just got your piece. That’s two million one-bottles.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s
exactly it.” That’s one of the issues I try to raise with all of the Running the Numbers pieces. I’m
trying to raise the issue of the individual’s role in the collective. With each piece, when you stand
back, you see the collective. I scale it so that when you stand back at a distance, you can’t see
the individuals that make up the collective. You only see the homogenous collective, and when
you get up close you see all the individuals, but by the time you get all the way up close and you
can see all the individuals, you can no longer make out the collective. It’s a kind of Google Earth
process. A friend of mine calls it “the trans-scalar imaginary.” When you stand back at a dis-
tance, you can’t see the details; and when you can see the details, you have to use your memory
or your imagination to recall what the big picture looked like. (Hornung and Zhao 2013, 392–393)
What Jordan and many other environmental artists and writers are seeking to promote
is a ‘conscious evolution,’ to use the phrase of Ornstein and Ehrlich, in how human
beings apprehend the relationship between the individual self and the large-scale
collective. Such work is the artistic equivalent of Mitchell Thomashow’s (2012) efforts,
in Bringing the Biosphere Home, to invent perceptual exercises enabling the individ-
ual human mind to begin apprehending the ‘massively distributed’ processes that
occur on a ‘biospheric,’ or planetary, scale. For relationships between the self and
the other to mean anything, there must be an emotional dimension to them – and for
concrete behavioral transformations to occur, there must be an ethical provocation as
well (though not necessarily overt didacticism). These elements, to me, are essential
to the understanding of our places, as individuals and collectively, in an ecological
context: relationships, emotional attachments, and ethical/political actions inspired
by such attachments.
Narrative approaches to ecocritical discourse, with their emphasis on situating
the scholarly perspective within in what Alison Deming (2014, 10) calls “the world
that […] teems and steams with the shared breath of creatures,” a world of innumer-
able relationships, many of them viscerally tangible, are an essential contribution to
the significance of this field.
4 B
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4.1 W
orks Cited
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Illinois Press, 1985.
Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Elder, John. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins
Marsh. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, eds. The Intimate Critique:
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New York: Norton, 2015.
Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Antipastoral, and Postpastoral.” Nature and the Environment. Ed. Scott
Slovic. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013. 42–61.
Gifford, Terry. “Walking into Narrative Scholarship.” Reconnecting with John Muir. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2006. 105–18.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Holdstein, Deborah H., and David Bleich, eds. Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly
Writing. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Facing It: Epiphany & Apocalypse in the New Nature. College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2014.
Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. New York: Scribners,
1986.
Love, Glen A. “Errant Thoughts on Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism.” Narrative
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Love, Glen A. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville:
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech
Major, William H. Grounded Vision: New Agrarianism and the Academy. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2011.
Marshall, Ian. Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need.
Marshall, Ian. Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail. Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1998.
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49.2 (2011): 183–191.
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York: Doubleday, 1989.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford
Ronald, Ann. “Narrative Voices: Past to Present.” Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism.
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Alfred Hornung
17 E
cology and Life Writing in Transnational
and Transcultural Perspective
Abstract: In this chapter I argue that the correlation of nature and culture is exem-
plified in the genre of life writing. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden serves as a model
for the practical application of this interrelation in the romantic period and encapsu-
lates all areas of ecological concerns for my transcultural and transnational survey of
American, Asian, and Canadian expressions of nature and life from the fourth to the
twenty-first century. Based on Thoreau’s reading of Asian sources and his association
with indigenous lives the survey includes a discussion of the poetry of the Chinese
poet Tao Qian (365–427), Chinese garden culture of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644),
Terry Tempest Williams’ ecofeminist Refuge (1991), Gao Xingjiang’s Soul Mountain
(1990), life writing on the mountains in Tibetan villages in the Himalayas and the
ecological work of the Japanese Canadian zoologist David Suzuki.
Key Terms: Life writing, Daoism, ecoglobalism, indigenous lives, environmental

activism
The natural course of human life corresponds to the natural cycles of all organisms
shared universally. The evolutionary principle of all organic life, if not stopped by
artificial interventions, also implies a natural end. Many are the efforts to prolong the
natural cycle and to stay the end. The formation of culture has accompanied organic
processes in nature, supporting or counteracting them. Overall, it is the task of culture
to negotiate potential interferences and to establish standards which guarantee the
preservation of life on earth.
1 Life Writing as Ecological Genre

The correlation of nature and culture might be exemplified best in the genre of life
writing encompassing all forms of the representation of human lives, such as autobio
graphy, biography, diary, portraits, blogs and selfies in the new social media, with
the intention to capture fleeting moments and evolutionary stages of life in narrative
structures or concrete images (see Smith and Watson 2010; Poletti and Rak 2013). His-
torically, the metaphors for representing the course of life have varied. Thus Peter
17 Ecology and Life Writing in Transnational and Transcultural Perspective 335
Alheit (see 2013, 511) distinguishes five types of metaphors for subject positions: the
idea of generational cycles of life in the Middle Ages, the metaphor of an arch or stairs
with an upward and downward direction in the sixteenth century, the modern bour-
geois assumption of a line in an ascending professional career, the post-bourgeois
formation in industrial work, and the patchwork or puzzle in postmodern times.
Anxieties connected with the inevitable change in the course from the ascending to
the descending stages of life, often experienced as mid-life crises, have resulted in
a variety of self-representations and psychoanalytic interpretations (see Hornung
1987). C. G. Jung, e.g., posits a first and a second half of life and sees life as a transi-
tion of nature to culture, from the constantly changing biological factors of individual
life to the more permanent spiritual components of a transindividual mind (see Jung
1953, 124–125). This transition is connected to a reorientation brought about by a look
backward. Jung explains:
Conservative tendencies develop if all goes well: instead of looking forward one looks backward,
for the most part involuntarily, and one begins to take account of the manner in which life has
developed up to this point. Thus the real motivations are sought and real discoveries made.
The critical survey of himself and his fate permits a man to recognize his individuality, but this
knowledge does not come to him easily. It is gained only through severest shocks. (1953, 120)
Practitioners and critics of autobiography alike have been aware of and have com-
mented on the illusionary features of such backward glances for the personal assess-
ment of life. The Catholic Church Father Saint Augustine uses his Confessions (397–
400) for a disquisition of time in view of eternity; the American Founding Father
Benjamin Franklin conceives of the retrospective account of his life in his Autobiog-
raphy (1771–1790) as the revisions made in the second edition of a book; Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe emphasizes the interaction of illusion and reality in the title of his
autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833). Autobiography critic Roy Pascal
(1960) takes up Goethe’s notion in titling his study Design and Truth in Autobiography;
postmodern critic Ihab Hassan (1980, 593) speaks of autobiography as an “impossi-
ble,” “deadly,” and “abject” form of writing whose secret subject is death. Contrary to
this existentialist perspective, the romantic interpretation of death as a transition to
rebirth is also the starting point for the correlation of the course of human life and the
cyclical processes of nature.
Henry David Thoreau’s (1971 [1854]) Walden; Or Life in the Woods stands para-
digmatically for the poetic correlation of nature and culture. In this series of auto-
biographical essays the author condenses the actual experience of two years and
1 For an English version of this essay, see: Alheit, Peter. “‘Subject Figurations’ within Modernity:
The Change of Autobiographical Formats.” Embodied Narratives: Connecting Stories, Bodies, Cultures
and Ecologies. Eds. Laura Formenti, Marianne Horsdal, and Linden West. Viborg: University Press of
Southern Denmark, 2014. 107–128.
336 Alfred Hornung
two months (1845–47) into one year and coordinates this lived experience with the
cycle of the seasons. Thoreau’s life writing begins with the erection of his cabin in the
summer, proceeds through autumn and winter and ends with the renewal of nature
in spring. The natural cycle of the seasons serves as an analogy for the regeneration
of life achieved poetically in the narrative. A correlative feature is the political aspect
of a patriotic self who moves into the cabin on the fourth of July to mark his own
declaration of independence. These poetic processes of the transposition of bodily
experiences and political persuasions into the processes of nature are in line with the
philosophical ideas of transcendentalism. This imaginative romantic design allows
Thoreau to transcend the realistic details of concrete experiences and to expand his
local horizon of Walden Pond to a transcultural / transnational context. In the “Con-
clusion” of his life narrative Thoreau (1971, 320–321) refers to Africa, South America
and China only to advise his reader to be “a Columbus to whole new continents and
worlds within” one’s self imaginatively and to “be an Expert in home-cosmography.”
It is not surprising that Henry David Thoreau and his life writing of Walden have
been embraced as the key text and major expression of ecological concerns. Not only
has the site of his restored cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts been turned into
an environmental shrine and location for the respect of nature, but his work has also
become the starting point for all ecocritical scholarship (see e.g. Buell 1995; Zapf 2013).
For my purposes Thoreau and Walden serve as a perfect starting point for the correla-
tion of nature and culture in life writing, for the alignment of ecology and life writing.
Likewise, Hubert Zapf (2013, 19–20) supports the epistemological and ethical value of
the coordination of cultural ecology and “forms of writing about life within the funda-
mental relationship between culture and nature, humans and the nonhuman world,”
and he also “emphasizes the transnational dimensions and global interconnections
of literary knowledge at a time of its production and reception in the context of a
worldwide literary community.” Thus Thoreau’s writing not only encapsulates the
romantic model and incorporates the whole universe in his individual existence, but
his readings in Asian philosophies and the observation of Native American lives turn
Walden into an ecoglobalist project of life writing (cf. Hornung 2013b, x; Buell 2007).2
2 Thoreau’s Ecoglobalist Model

Henry David Thoreau’s concern for evolutionary processes in nature recreated
poetically in his practice of life writing coincides with Charles Darwin’s evolution-
2 The Chinese translation of Ecology and Life Writing (Hornung and Zhao 2013) by Lin Jiang as Sheng-
taixue Yu Shengming Xiezuo (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2016) demonstrates the global
reach of ecocriticism.
ary biology, developed in his Origins of Species (1859), and the embracement of this
theory by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1866) who created the term of ecology
in 1866 for the description of the environment of living beings and forms of house-
keeping.3 Later specifications in the twentieth century as ‘human ecology’ prepared
the ground for research in sociology and psychology before the environmental move-
ment of the 1960s in the United States generated interest for the subject in the fields of
literature and linguistics and supported research on ecological writers. Eventually the
field of ecocriticism formed (see e.g. Glotfelty and Fromm 1996) and spread from the
United States to Europe where Hubert Zapf (2002) developed the concept of literature
as cultural ecology. Research on the nexus of ecology and life writing which naturally
begins with the romantic model as exemplified by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
moves into neglected areas of nature and the habitat of indigenous people in modern-
ism to eventually emphasize the increasing endangerment of the environment and
resultant human diseases in postmodern and postcolonial contexts at the turn of the
past century. The concern for lives in the twenty-first century includes all forms of
living organisms, the promotion of deep ecology, and the transcultural and trans-
national projection of a planetary horizon. In the following I will discuss American,
Canadian and Asian examples of the interrelation of ecology and life writing stressing
the transcultural and transnational dimension (see also Hornung 2009).
The experience of the interaction between human and non-human nature for the
constitution of a holistic and transcendental self in Thoreau’s Walden has received
extensive scholarly attention, recently complemented by investigations into the inter-
relation of autobiography and natural science (Kuhn 2009). In the worldwide recep-
tion, the important influence of Asian readings on Thoreau’s concept of nature and
the self has focused mostly on the Hindu scriptures of Indian philosophy. In addition,
Birgit Capelle (2013, 99) “draws attention to depictions of temporal experience that
display strong affinities with Buddhist and [D]aoist interpretations of time.” Contrary
to a unidirectional and action-based chronological concept of time, Daoism favors
“wuwei 無為 or non-action” (Capelle 103; Zhang 2015b, 4) and a contemplative atti-
tude in view of a cyclical concept of time. In quoting Walden, Capelle (2013, 107) rec-
ognizes in Thoreau the “lucky state of trans-temporal existence […] like an enlight-
ened Buddha.”
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed
bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or
flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise
of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in
3 Bernhard Kuhn (2009, 9) maintains that the Victorian biologist Herbert Spencer, who extended
Darwin’s evolutionary theory to Social Darwinism, used his Autobiography (1904) “to demonstrate the
applicability of Darwinian theory to the life of the individual.”
338 Alfred Hornung
those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would
have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual
allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.
For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work
of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.
Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. (Thoreau 1971,
111–112)
For Thoreau this form of life in nature is part of an uninterrupted ‘poem of creation’
whose qualities he repeats in his life writing, his own poem of creation. Bernhard
Kuhn (2009, 131; 140) actually calls him a “poet-naturalist” and maintains that “[t]he
creative forces expressing themselves in nature, from the inorganic to the organic, are
identical to the creative forces that animate Thoreau in his life and his life-writing.” To
a certain extent his poem of creation resembles the attitude and achievement of the
artist of Kouroo whose timeless efforts to create a perfect staff Thoreau (1971, 326–327)
relates in his “Conclusion”: “His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his ele-
vated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made
no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance
because he could not overcome him.”
3 Daoism and Life in Nature

Thoreau’s practice of a contemplative life in the solitude of a cyclical, hence timeless,
process of nature conforms with the philosophy of Daoism attributed to the Chinese
philosopher Laozi. Laozi’s insistence on the privacy of life in the solitude of nature
presents an alternative to the Confucian philosophy of discipline and conduct in
public life and to the community of the collective. Chinese poets, long before Euro-
pean and American Romanticism, have visualized and propagated a retreat to a sol-
itary life in nature as a realization of Daoist beliefs. In particular, the great Chinese
poet Tao Qian or Tao Yuanming (365–427), who lived in the Wei-Jin period, left his
public office for the privacy of nature and used his poems to set a Daoist way of life
against the long dominance of Confucian orthodoxy.4
4 I am indebted to Zhang Longxi for this valuable reference and his remarkable insights into East-
West literary and cultural relations: See “Tao Qian, the Idea of Garden as Home, and the Utopian
Vision” (2015b) and the discussion of Tao’s works in his monographs Allegoresis: Reading Canonical
Literature East and West (2005, 182–187), Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (2007, 19–20)
and From Comparative to World Literature (Zhang 2015a, 112–113).
In youth, nothing in me fit the common taste,

It’s my nature to love mountains and hills.
By mischance I fell into the net of dust,
And was kept away for thirteen years.
A fastened bird would long for old woods,
A stranded fish would remember the deep pond.
I’ve tilled some land at the edge of southern heath,
Keeping simplicity, I return to my home ground.
Around my house I have a couple of acres,
And eight or nine rooms with thatched roof.
Elms and willows shade the back eaves,
And before the hall a peach and plum grove.
Half-hidden is the village of secluded people,
From their houses a wispy smoke arises.
A dog barks in the depth of a small lane,
On top of a mulberry tree a rooster cries.
No dust soils the pure air within my doors,
In my bare rooms I find plenty of leisure.
Too long I have been caged like a prisoner,
Oh, at last, I now come back to nature. (Tao 1957, 35)5
1500 years before Henry David Thoreau, the Chinese poet Tao Qian prefigures the
American Romantic writer’s interaction of life writing and ecology.6 Like Thoreau, Tao
relates autobiographically his conscious decision to give up public life for the sake of
nature and posits an analogy between his own nature and the natural landscape: “It’s
my nature to love mountains and hills.” Like Thoreau in the first chapter of Walden,
he professes “simplicity” as his economic principle, even though his home is much
more spacious than the American’s cabin. In line with his solitary agrarian preference
over community life he tills some land. And he is not entirely alienated from the world
around him since he sees the smoke arising from the houses of a half-hidden village
of secluded people and hears a dog bark as well as a rooster cry. Instead of being
imprisoned by the busy life of human actions, he enjoys the leisure of his existence
and is happy to have “come back to nature.” This return to nature refers to both his
own natural being and the physical environment. According to Zhang (2015, 45), this
concept of nature “refers to the idea of ziran 自然 … literally ‘self-so’” in the philos-
ophy of Laozi. In contrast to the human actions of Confucians, he argues, “Daoist
philosophers advocated wuwei 無為 or non –action in the sense that one should let
5 I am grateful to Zhang Longxi for his translation from the Chinese edition: Tao Yuanming ji [Tao
Yuanming’s Works] (Wang 1957, 35).
6 Yang Jincai from the Institute of Foreign Literature at Nanjing University and editor of the Chinese
language journal Contemporary Foreign Literature has argued that Chinese scholars, who became fa-
miliar with ecocriticism during their stays in the US, have subsequently rediscovered nature writing
in classical Chinese literature (Yang 2013, 72; Hornung 2014, 257).
340 Alfred Hornung
things take their own course without interference, that is, let things develop accord-
ing to their own nature and come naturally.” This state of non-action privileges a
contemplative form of life in pursuit of truth (cf. Zhang 2007, 19–20) equivalent to
Thoreau’s ‘higher laws.’ Truth is also contained in Thoreau’s conception of nature
as ‘the poem of creation uninterrupted’ which finds another Chinese equivalent in
the thousand-year long tradition of garden culture in China, also prefigured in Tao’s
poetry.
The creation of a miniature copy of nature in Chinese garden culture has tradi-
tionally served as a retreat from official business, and the life gardeners pursued the
goal to achieve a balance between water, plants, rocks and buildings for relaxation
and meditation. Originally created for the Chinese emperors, these imperial garden
projects were imitated by private persons, retired administrators, scholars and intel-
lectuals between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries with a culmination point in
the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). To a certain extent, these landscaping efforts appear
to prefigure Thoreau’s poem of creation both as life in a holistic garden environment
and as the performance of ecological life writing:
The practical work of transforming the physical landscape into a garden culture was com-
plemented by spiritual activities such as composing poetry, painting, calligraphy, music, the
study and discussion of classical literature and meditation. The many pavilions in the garden
were places for individual retreat or communal gatherings. The placement of human buildings
and nature art followed the overall harmonious design of an interdependence of all elements.
(Hornung 2013c, 305).
The long line from Daoist philosophy with its privileging of non-action and a contem-
plative life via early Chinese poetry and garden culture to Transcendentalist beliefs as
expressed in Thoreau’s ecological life writing of Walden resurfaces in the twentieth
century in the movement of deep ecology which advocates the harmonious interac-
tion of all organisms in the biosphere (see Drengson and Inoue 1995). It is not surpris-
ing that these deep ecological ideas surface at a time when modern technologies and
urban life styles have produced destructive features to the human environment which
even threaten the preservation of the planet earth. Reactions to these developments
can be seen in the discovery and appreciation of allegedly unnatural or unfamiliar
aspects of nature, such as the desert or the habitat of Native Americans in Mary Aus-
tin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903), or the utopian community projected in B. F. Skin-
ner’s Walden Two (1948). In the wake of the environmental movement of the 1960s
and 1970s, authors write about the destruction of nature in analogy to physical and
mental diseases. This combination of life writing and ecology is now in the service of
recuperation and healing for both human and physical nature.
4 Healing Nature and Lives

Terry Tempest Williams’ (2001 [1991]) Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
represents a contemporary example of the analogy between ecology and life writing
in which the ‘unnatural’ treatment of nature is the main topic. In her life narrative,
the scholar for Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and ecofeminist
activist establishes a genealogical relationship between her family and the settlement
of the land by Mormons and the biosphere of the state of Utah characterized by its
Great Salt Lake and desert areas in the Southwest of the United States. The lake level
and the adjacent natural habitat of birds structure the chapters of the book and indi-
cate the danger for the existence of the birds with rising water levels. Thus the flood
of the 1980s had destroyed the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, and Williams (2001,
8) deplores the loss of burrowing owls, which for her are “birds you gage your life
by.”7 The intimate interrelation of all organic life is the author’s lifeline: “The birds
and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so
long that the mind and imagination fuse” (21). Disturbances to this harmonious setup
in nature equally affect its inhabitants. The flooding of the Lake and its disastrous
effects for the birds find their equivalent in the destructive exploitation of nature in
the course of the “above ground atomic testing in Nevada […] from January 27, 1951
through July 11, 1962” (283). Based on the interdependence of all organic lives, Wil-
liams senses an analogy between the loss of the birds due to rising lake levels and
the rate of cancer diseases due to the nuclear testing site. In the Prologue and the
Epilogue, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” she connects the losses and grieves
the deaths of seven members of her family who died of cancer, including her mother,
grandmothers, and her brother. In conversation with her father she mentions “this
flash of light in the night in the desert” which she had seen for years, when her father
reminds her of having heard one of the explosions and seen the mushroom cloud on
the road in September 1957 whose fallout led to the contamination of nature and its
inhabitants (282–283). In spite of her upbringing as an obedient Mormon woman she
decides to participate in an illegal walk-in of ten ecofeminists on the testing ground
“taking their cues from coyote, kit fox, antelope squirrel, and quail” (288). When
arrested for this “act of civil disobedience” the ten women began singing joined by
the “voices of their [Native American] sisters across the mesa” (289).
The natural cycle of an advancing and retreating Great Salt Lake, which Williams
records in her Prologue and which allows The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, dev-
astated by the flood, to begin to heal, moves her to follow a similar cycle in her own
generation.
7 The exact count of water levels for each chapter and its influence on the behavior of organic life
recalls Thoreau’s (1971, 291) measurement of Walden Pond and the relation of these empirical facts to
human behavior: “What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics.”
342 Alfred Hornung
Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life. I
sit on the floor of my study with journals all around me. I open them and feathers fall from their
pages, sand cracks their spines, and sprigs of sage pressed between passages of plain heighten
my sense of smell – and I remember the country I come from and how it informs my life. […] I am
telling this story in an attempt to heal myself […]. (Williams 2001, 3–4)
The return of the birds to their restored natural habitat reinforces Terry Tempest Wil-
liams’ (2001, 4) belief in the interdependence of all forms of organic life and generates
her life story: “I have been in retreat. This story is my return.”
The retreat to nature as a refuge for the purpose of healing by re-integrating into
the cycle of organic life also motivated Gao Xingjiang’s journey along the Yangtze
River and the recollection of that experience in his autobiographical novel Soul Moun-
tain (1990). The Chinese born writer and playwright, who went into exile in Paris
in 1988 and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000, experienced the politi-
cal actions of Maoism as a student at Beijing Foreign Studies University and doing
manual labor in the countryside. Out of fear of persecution for his critical writings,
Gao burnt all of his literary works during the Cultural Revolution. Also his plays
written in post-Maoist Beijing met with criticism from the political authorities. When
diagnosed in 1983 with lung cancer, a disease from which his father had died and
which in a later examination proved to be false, he decides to flee Beijing and go to
the remote forest regions of Sichuan province in the South to seek recuperation in
nature by wandering along the Yangtze River from its source in the Himalayas to the
Chinese Sea, covering 15,000 kilometers in ten months (cf. Lee 2004 [2000], viii). The
book to represent this journey of life was begun in Beijing in 1983 and finished in
his Parisian exile in 1989. Although the autobiographical persona presents himself as
a tripartite narrative voice: an objective I-narrator, a passionate you-narrator, and a
neutral he-narrator who also includes a she-variant, and although the narrative does
not fit any Western or Eastern genre since it consists of a medley of “travel notes,
moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like
fables, […] some folk songs, […] some legend-like nonsense […] call[ed] […] fiction!,”
the analogy between life writing and ecology is paramount (Gao 2004, 453). In an
interview Gao affirms: “My novel Soul Mountain (1990) is a testimony of my survival
after having lived next to nature and nothing else for 5 months.” The title itself stands
for the spiritual life journey on which he engages as discussed in the first chapter and
which brings the “ecologist” in close touch with “virgin wilderness” (Gao 2004, 3).
Decisive for his recovery from the dual threats to his life from lung cancer and political
repression are his encounter in nature with local ethnic minorities, Buddhist monks
and Daoist philosophers. Like Thoreau and Williams, who linked up with indigenous
people, Gao learns from the holistic and nature-bound life style of the Qing, Yi, and
Miao cultures in the mountains and along the Yangtze River whose Buddhist beliefs
he embraces. In stark contrast to the Confucian precepts of the political powers, he
turns to Buddhism and Daoism and rediscovers the potential of Traditional Chinese
Medicine. As part of his medical treatment, Gao’s friend recommends the remedy of
qigon, a traditional form of bodily movement derived from Daoism, which combines
physical exercise and meditation for healing purposes (see Heise 1999, 2009). This
reliance on holistic Chinese traditions based on natural sources is also reflected in the
holistic character of the spiritual journey of Soul Mountain and the structure of Gao’s
narrative which replicates the eighty-one chapters of the Laozi Daoist philosophy in
the Daodejing, or Classic Way and Virtue (Hoye 2009; Moeller 2006; see also my dis-
cussion in Efferth et al. 2012, 13–14).
5 Transindigenous Environmental Alliance

The spiritualized scenery of the mountains of Sichuan province, where Gao traveled,
seems to represent an almost perfect integration of life writing and ecology. It is also
the natural habitat of Tibetan people who continue to lead a nomadic life as herds-
men of Yak animals in the Himalayas.8 The most obvious sign of the intimate inter-
relation of landscape, people, and animals as holistic design is the pervasive prom-
inence of sacred words from the Buddhist Sutra written in glaring white characters
on the mountain face. Along with multicolored prayer flags, prayer wheels and the
custom of burning incense and prayer sticks, this spiritualized form of life in nature
is an expression of Asian nature worship. Taken together, these displays of a natural
religion and life style could be considered an inclusive performance of life writing on
the mountains in the form of Tibetan-language mantras, which represents a sacred
script to establish a community of believers and a relationship of all people and the
elements of nature (see Hornung 2016). The spiritual wealth offered in the perfor-
mance of life writing as holy script on the mountain face, the display of prayer flags,
and the ritualistic turn of prayer wheels transcend all political boundaries. It is part of
a belief in the interconnection of all organic life and its cosmic connection, also found
in indigenous communities in Australia and the Americas. This indigenous form of
life shares the beliefs of deep ecology as formulated among others by the Japanese
Canadian zoologist David Suzuki and his co-author Amanda McConnell who seek to
recover our place in nature and to restore a sacred balance:
Every worldview describes a universe in which everything is connected with everything else.
Stars, clouds, forests, oceans and human beings are interconnected components of a single
system in which nothing can exist in isolation. […] Many worldviews endow human beings with
an even more awesome task: they are the caretakers of the entire system, responsible for keeping
the stars on their courses and the living world intact. In this way, many early people who created
8 These observations are based on two field trips to Tibetan villages in Sichuan in 2013 and 2014 (see
Hornung 2016).
344 Alfred Hornung
worldviews constructed a way of life that was truly ecologically sustainable, fulfilling and just.
(Suzuki and McConnell 1999 [1997], 12)
The transcultural and transnational interrelation visible in indigenous customs and

life in nature is the precondition for a planetary vision of the world which the Jap-
anese Canadian zoologist David Suzuki recognizes in midlife and advocates as the
credo of interdependence in his life writing. In two consecutive autobiographies,
Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1987) and David Suzuki: The Autobiography (2006),
he relates his evolution from a scientist interested in genetics to a transnational eco-
logical activist. While Suzuki recollects at the age of fifty and in mid-career his fam-
ily’s experience of racist discrimination after Pearl Harbor in British Columbia and
reflects on the progress of his professional life in Metamorphosis, he shifts the focus in
The Autobiography to a transnational and transcultural analysis of his encounter with
indigenous people. In Metamorphosis he posits an organic link between the common
fruit fly, his first object of study, and human lives:
Fruitflies have been a passion in my life for three decades. In reflecting on their heredity, behav-
iour and life cycle, I’ve come to see that in many ways, the changes in our lives parallel those
remarkable stages that take place in a fly’s life. All life forms receive a genetic legacy from their
ancestors in the form of DNA, the chemical blueprint that shapes the way we are. (Suzuki 1987, 7)
This life-long scientific engagement with analogies between human and animal
organisms appears as an early, undeclared commitment to the ideas of deep ecology.
It eventually coalesces with Suzuki’s political consciousness, which comes to the
fore in his second autobiography. His identification with the cause of African Ameri-
cans in the Civil Rights Movement during his two-year stay in the Biology Division at
Oak Ridge National Lab (1961–1962) in Tennessee brings home to him the dangers of
scientific discoveries in the development of nuclear weapons in “The Atomic City”
and the abuses of genetics in the propagation of Eugenics in North America and Nazi
Germany (Suzuki 1987, 155), which prepare him to see the transcultural connections
of his encounter with First Nations people in the company of his father on a mush-
room-hunting trip into the mountains of British Columbia near Boston Bar along the
Fraser River:
I was surprised at how uptight I was in contrast to my father, who felt right at home. I, a young
professor in genetics, had never met Native people and only knew about them from snippets in
the media. I knew nothing about Dad’s friends or their background, and I didn’t know how to
relate to them in conversation. Dad was relaxed and simply accepted them as people who shared
his interest in fish, trees, and nature […]. (Suzuki 2006, 10)
In the recollection of this experience of Native people in nature he relates the decisive
change of perspective from scientific research and teaching in the academic world to
a wider frame. On the one hand he recognizes “our shared genetic heritage” and “our
physical features” which “made First Nations people immediately more receptive” to
him and made him see the common cultural roots between people of Asian origin in
past and present (Suzuki 2006, 11). On the other hand he takes up the offer to expand
his classroom teaching to a television audience in 1979 by joining the very popular
CBC show The Nature of Things as a host covering a wide range of scientific and phil-
osophical matters. The belief in the interrelation of all organic life and the transcul-
tural indigenous alliance become the basis of his environmental concerns and form
the platform for the formulation of an ecological mission and program in life writing.
Thirteen out of eighteen chapters of Suzuki’s Autobiography are descriptions of
ecological projects, which range from environmental work by First Nations people
in Canada to indigenous life in the rain forests of Brazil, Australia, and Papua New
Guinea. Particularly instructive are the joint projects with the indigenous populations
on the Islands of British Columbia and in the Amazon region for his TV program The
Nature of Things. In chapter 6 of his Autobiography, Suzuki relates his first feature
film about one of America’s rain forests on the Haida Gwaii islands off the coast of
British Columbia, whose natural habitat was endangered by the devastating logging
practices on the islands since the 1970s. In the fight between native environmentalists
and logging companies, David Suzuki aligns himself on the basis of his shared genetic
heritage with the indigenous positions of the nature-based civilization of the Haida
people who have preserved their outsider existence on the islands off the Canadian
coast. This common bond of a nature-based form of community life serves as a link
to the Brazilian rain forest where Suzuki’s environmentalist group travels together
with the Haida activist Guujaaw in support of the indigenous people’s fight against
deforestation in the Amazon region (2006, 134–194). These initial contacts eventu-
ally develop into joint projects and common environmental activities both in Brazil
and Canada: “Canadian First Nations people understood that the Kaiapo were going
through what their own people had suffered and felt an instant bond with them”
(2006, 171). This transindigenous bond of personal relations of Brazilian and Cana-
dian citizens allows Suzuki to set up a transnational organization of environmental-
ists and the David Suzuki Foundation (http://www.davidsuzuki.org/). Further visits
to rain forests and aboriginal communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea round
off the ecoglobalist scheme of Suzuki’s endeavors and allow him to influence political
decisions at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the Kyoto Convention on Climate
Change (see 2006, 267–286, 305–323). The goal is a planetary alliance of all nature
people and their common goal of the preservation of planet earth. The transformation
of his scientific and anthropological insights into an ecological program is the basis
of a development of what Ursula Heise (2008, 10) calls an “ideal of eco-cosmopolitan-
ism or environmental world citizenship” (see also Hornung 2011).
This survey of Asian, American and Canadian writings about nature and life from
the fourth to the twenty-first century shows different approaches to dealing with the
alleged nature-culture divide in different geographical locations. The coordination of
stages of life with evolutionary cycles of nature in all instances transcends the narrow
346 Alfred Hornung
boundaries of fixed political or cultural frames and offers a transcultural perspec-

tive. The retreat to nature for relaxation, consolation or recuperation often finds the
alliance of indigenous forms of life preserved in natural environments to gain new
insights. In the mediation of these experiences life writing in all its varieties seems to
be a privileged mode to express ecological concerns and to generate a transnational
alliance of planetary citizens united in the belief in the common organic ground of the
biosphere and the need to engage in the preservation of planet Earth.
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Serenella Iovino
18 F rom Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera:
Material Ecocriticism, Literary
Interpretation, and Death in Venice
Abstract: ‘Material ecocriticism’ is a methodological approach which, assuming the
active expressiveness of matter, extends the category of text to all material forma-
tions, taking bodies and landscapes as the bearers of ‘material narratives.’ Investi-
gating the trope of ‘death in Venice,’ this chapter proposes a comparative reading of
Mann’s famous novella, Andrea Zanzotto’s lyrical cycle Fu Marghera, and Marco Pao-
lini’s theatrical play Parlamento Chimico/Storie di plastica. Its main point, however,
is an examination of this theme in the city’s own textuality and active materiality.
Applying the categories of material ecocriticism, I concentrate on Venice as a text
made out of embodied stories – a material text, in which natural dynamics, cultural
practices, political visions, and industrial choices are interlaced with human bodies
in issues of justice, health, and ecology.
Key Terms: Venice, hybridity, storied matter, material ecocriticism, cognitive justice,
Thomas Mann, Andrea Zanzotto, Marco Paolini
cocriticism, World, Text1

1 E
In his Practical Ecocriticism, Glen Love (2003, 16) writes: “Teaching and studying liter-
ature without reference to the natural conditions of the world and the basic ecological
principles that underlie all life seems increasingly shortsighted, incongruous.” The
world in which we teach and study literature the world in which literature is made is
the same world in which humans, along with several millions of other species, live.
What physically affects this world, affects all the activities happening in it, including
our intellectual and cultural productions. Ecocriticism is an incitement to consider
‘culture’ not as totally apart from ‘nature,’ but to see nature and culture, world and
text, as mutually permeable. Practically, this can mean many things. For example,
it means to examine how literary texts mirror or elaborate on the ecologies of the
‘outside world’ how they culturally respond to the crises affecting these ecologies.
But it can also mean another, interesting thing, namely, that the world itself becomes
a text in which these crises along with all the encounters between nature and culture
1 Unless otherwise indicated in the bibliography, English translations in the text are my own.
350 Serenella Iovino
are scripted. Thus, ecocriticism is not merely a critical analysis of literary texts, but it
asks us to read the world as a text. There is, in other words, a form of eloquence spread
in the material forms of this world, in the compound that we call “nature-culture” (cf.
Latour 1993, 7; Haraway 2004, 2). This is the standing point of what has been recently
codified as “material ecocriticism” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012a; Phillips and Sul-
livan 2012), a “fourth wave of ecocriticism” (Slovic 2012, 619) that emphasizes the
formative and narrative force inbuilt in matter, as well as in “environmental things,
places, processes, and experiences” (619). In this view, our world is a storied dimen-
sion emerging from the cooperation of nature and culture, of physical elements and
discursive practices. The matter of the world, in the form of landscapes, ecosystems,
and bodies is here read as a text expressing the interactions of human and nonhuman
actors. Ecocriticism becomes therefore an attempt to elicit the implicit message of
this text, while also trying to create comparative connections between these material
forms and their literary representations: when world and literature combine, as in
the case of Venice, the whole expressiveness of reality is enhanced, and we are able
to see more.
What do we see in Venice, if we read it as a text? What is its ‘material narra-
tive’? Textually interpreted, Venice is an exercise in hybridity. It is so not only because
it mixes water and land into a new elemental combination, creating a city out of a
hundred little islands suspended in a lagoon, but also because it is an act of hybris, a
violation of ontological pacts, literally embodying the Faustian dream of taking land
from the waters. It is undeniable that the volatile balance of this combination creates
here an incumbent state of danger. Not only is Venice exposed to its amphibious
nature and to all the ‘natural’ consequences of climate change; it is also exposed to
decades of polluting practices, due to political and industrial choices, which proved
to be ‘abstract’ from this complex reality. The crisis of Venice is therefore the story of
a misinterpretation of its material text. When decisions such as the building of Porto
Marghera’s petrochemical factory were made, the text ‘Venice’ was read in isolation
from all the rest: in isolation from its ecosystem, its history, its elemental natures. The
story of this misinterpretation is narrated by documents and bodies, it is written in
cells and legal files, in industrial sludge and algae, in a landscape transformed into
highways of pipes, in the air turned into smoke.
Using the paradigm of material ecocriticism, this chapter reads material stories
and literary stories through each other, trying to restore the meanings of Venice’s
storied matter via a comparative reading. After considering the narratives embedded
in Venice’s body, I take into account three authors: Thomas Mann, Andrea Zanzotto,
and Marco Paolini, respectively a novelist, a poet, and an actor-playwright. Scrutiniz-
ing how literature interacts and interferes with material textuality, we will see how
such interferences add a further dimension to Venice’s storied matter, thus helping to
accomplish ecocriticism’s project of reading into and hence restoring the world’s nar-
rative layers. This operation is not intended as a ‘local’ journey. “Every time I describe
a city, I am saying something about Venice,” Marco Polo says in Calvino’s (1997) Invis-
18 Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death in Venice 351
ible Cities. Venice is “a first city that remains implicit” in all the others (1997, 78). Com-
plementary to this view, we take Venice as a “planetary metaphor” (Bevilacqua 1998),
and therefore implicit in our discourse are all the places where the balance between
nature and non-nature is precarious, and where this instability becomes an issue of
justice and health. In Venice’s translucid story, we can catch a glimpse of many other
places, near and far, from Bhopal to New Orleans.
2 Text 1: Venice, Lagoon

The first textual approach to Venice begins with a plunge into its nature, its remote
past. As a matter of fact, we cannot read the text of Venice without looking into its
past and “geological unconscious” (Zanzotto 2013, 111), a ‘sub-text’ made of the evo-
lutionary dynamics of waters, land, climate, ecology, and history. It is in this remote
dimension that we find the reasons for Venice’s hybridity.
Elementally amphibious, Venice is situated inside a lagoon, a mobile site where the
blending of fluvial and saline waters determines unique evolutionary conditions for
biomes and ecosystems. Extended over 550 square kilometers, the Venetian Lagoon
displays a rich and delicate web of biodiversity, also due to its distinctive microcli-
mate: temperatures are here 2°C below the Mediterranean average. This determines a
phenomenon called ‘Atlanticism,’ characterized by the existence of a flora and fauna
more similar to the Atlantic than to the rest of the Mediterranean. The Lagoon has a
special feature: it breathes with the moon. Tides, whose cycle lasts twelve hours, are
the expression of this breath: “It is easy to picture the steady coming-in and going-out
of waters as a breath of the lagoon, which ‘inhales’ high tide and ‘exhales’ low tide.
Like a lung expanding with the incoming air, the lagoon increases its surface with the
incoming sea” (Fabbri 2003, 19).
The way the Lagoon looks today is rather recent. Its current hydro-geological con-
formation dates back to 2500 years ago. We need to travel way back in time to see the
Venetian Lagoon originating from the melting of a vast ice gulf, which used to connect
Grado with Ancona, the Alps with the central-Italian Apennines. At the end of the
last Ice Age (10,000 years ago), the glacier waters started flowing to the Adriatic Sea,
forming rivers that carried huge quantities of sediment. In the course of thousands
of years, the heaviest sediments fell on the lagoon bed, hardening into very compact
solidified clay, called caranto (from the late Latin caris, rock). The remaining sedi-
ments accumulated, contributing to the formation of a multitude of small islands.
This is Venice’s core: a hundred sedimentary islands, covered with a unique vegeta-
tion of reeds and other plants, laying on a firm and thick Pleistocene ‘palaeo-ground.’
Even though the terra firma was already populated in the Neolithic and the Bronze
Age, it was not until the fifth and sixth centuries AD that the first settlements started
appearing on this land-sea. The settlers were mostly fishermen, trying to escape the
attacks of Visigoths, Huns, and Lombards, nomadic populations coming from the
Northern forests of Europe. Looking for shelter, these inland people begun to make
their abode on these tiny islands, connecting them with wooden bridges and creating
canals. It is in these canals, the poet Andrea Zanzotto (2013, 112) writes, that Venice’s
“metaphysical blood” flows. But these veins required a skeleton, too. The fishermen
started stacking wooden piles into the muddy seabed, driving them until they reached
the caranto. Underwater, surrounded by salty mud, in an oxygen-free environment,
these 25 meter-long oak trunks mineralized. They literally petrified, becoming as
hard as concrete – as hard as the caranto itself – thus providing the perfect founda-
tion for the world above. It took an immense quantity of trees to make this “urban
forest of buildings” (Zanzotto 2013, 96) and to turn this place into a “beaver-republic”
(as Goethe put it in 1786; cf. Goethe 1970, 74). When the primitive palafittes became
houses, palaces, streets, a generous part of Europe’s forests had joined the caranto in
this watery underworld to resurrect in the form of a city: Venice, la Serenissima, for
centuries one of the most powerful city-states in Mediterranean Europe and in the
world.
What is clear, here, is that this city results from the cooperation of many forces,
human and nonhuman. These forces interact in a hybrid compound, forming hybrid,
collective stories. Venice is thus a text written by human and nonhuman “makers,”
to use Jorge Luis Borges’s (1985) term. And so Borges pictures this collective making
of Venice:
Rocks; the rivers whose cradle lies in the mountain peaks; those rivers’ waters blending with the
waters of the Adriatic sea; the cases and fates of history and geology; riptide; sand; the gradual
formation of the islands; the proximity of Greece; fishes; migrating people; the Armorican and
Baltic wars; the reed huts; the branches mixed with mud; the inextricable network of canals; pri-
meval wolves; the incursions of Dalmatian pirates; the delicate cotto; terraces; marble; horses;
Attila’s spears; the fishermen protected by their own poverty; the Lombards; being a site where
West and East meet; the days and nights of forgotten generations: these were the makers. (1985,
1332)
All these were the makers of the text ‘Venice,’ a text that had been written and care-
fully interpreted by generations of citizens and governors. A lagoon is an amphibious
ecosystem whose unstable balance is due to the combined action of two concurrent
forces: river waters and sea tides. River waters are responsible for carrying sediments
to the sea. If this force prevails, the fate of lagoons is to become, in the long run,
land. If tides prevail, lagoons become bays or gulfs. For over a thousand years, the
Venetian Lagoon – whose main problem was not so much that of being submerged
by water, but of being covered by fluvial sediment – was able to keep its peculiar con-
ditions thanks to the wise management strategically carried out by the Republican
government. This form of wisdom was a sensible interpretation of Venice’s material
text: the public authorities and institutions read it as a lagoon, and acted accordingly,
thus seconding this ‘Faustian dream’ before Faust. ‘Faustian dream’ is here meant
literally. In his Italian Journey Goethe, though not particularly sympathetic with the
population of this ‘beaver-republic,’ praised the way Venetians controlled their envi-
ronment, only recommending a few corrections in terms of ‘waste management.’ So
he noticed in the fall of 1786:
[B]y intelligently improving their system of dredged channels [the Venetians] will do their best to
keep their possessions intact.
If only they would keep their city cleaner! It may be forbidden, under severe penalties, to empty
garbage into the canals, but that does not prevent a sudden downpour from sweeping into them
all the rubbish that has accumulated at the street corners, or, what is worse, from washing it into
the drains, which are only meant to carry off waters, and choking them, so that the main squares
are in constant danger of being flooded. (Goethe 1970, 98)
In spite of Goethe’s recommendations and of the Serenissima’s long tradition of water

management, the ‘sensitive interpretation’ of the lagoon’s text lasted until 1797, when,
by means of the Treaty of Campoformio, Venice and the largest part of its territory
were yielded by Napoleon to the Emperor of Austria in compensation for the Nether-
lands, united to France. Following a bad practice inaugurated by the French conquer-
ors, many portions of the Lagoon were privatized under the Habsburg domination;
they were either transformed into agricultural land, or turned into fish farms (Bev-
ilacqua 1998, 129–137). Almost one third of the lagoon was thus subtracted from the
free expansion of tides and fluvial waters, and even more damage was inflicted by
lowering the level of the canals connecting the city with the lagoon and by enlarging
the harbor mouth. Finally, the creation of groundwater wells for industrial use caused
the ground level to sink even deeper: the ‘economy of land’ was devouring the space
of the waters (Bevilacqua 1998, 140; De Lucia 2013, 86–90; Salzano 2011).
At the end of the nineteenth century, besides deeper canals, bridges and railways
were also built. Other factors, such as the construction of the Porto Marghera indus-
trial plant (here, too, with deep canals to allow huge cargo ships), or the enclosing of
sometimes illegal and often unsustainable fisheries, contributed to expose Venice to
the force of high tides. The reclaimed areas, once storage spaces for tidewaters, have
now become useless: “Less absorption surface, more incoming water, land sinking,
sea-level rise, disappearance of natural barriers: these are all little tiles of the puzzle
composing Venice’s ruin” (Fabbri 2003, 48–49; cf. also Pirazzoli 2011; Somma 2012).
As if they were completely removed from the physical world, some human activ-
ities fatally concur with (partly natural) phenomena like subsidence and eustatism,
favoring the crumbling of this delicate body. And so the lagoon, from a living place,
has turned into scenery. In this ‘beautiful setting’ thousands of ferries, working and
private boats, the enormous cruise ships touching on San Marco Square, cause a sup-
plement of wave power that shatters the palace walls, eroding the wooden piles that
constitute the foundations of the city.
Today, in spite of a number of important studies and requests coming from the
citizens, the prevailing approach to the protection of Venice’s Lagoon continues with
the practice of textual misinterpretations. Instead of promoting ecologically sustaina-

ble measures, the national and local governments have chosen to protect this fragile
geo-ecological balance from the water by closing the harbor mouth with a mechan-
ical system of dams. The so-called MOSE project (an acronym for Modulo Sperimen-
tale Elettro-Meccanico, Experimental Electromechanical Module) is not only the latest
misreading of the city’s material textuality, but also one of the biggest financial
businesses in Italy. Not only, in fact, is the MOSE a “monstrous solution” (De Lucia
2013, 90) draining all the money allocated for the protection of the Lagoon, strongly
impacting the landscape, but it is already proving insufficient for its purpose.
3 Text 2: Venice, Industry

Thomas Mann’s Lido, that on which Aschenbach dies in the early 1900s, had already
become extinct at the end of the 1960s, chased away by the reclamation works neces-
sary to make room for industry. In the Land Use Plan of 1962 (still valid in 1990), this
destination (or induced destiny) was expressed with threatening recklessness: “The
industrial area of Porto Marghera will chiefly contain those plants emitting smoke,
dust or health-impairing fumes in the atmosphere, releasing polluting substances
into the water, and producing vibrations and noises” (qtd. in Fabbri 2003, 66). Again,
the abstraction of this ‘narrative of development’ from the material text of Venice is
patent. And it is also patently uncanny, if one considers the magnitude of this artifi-
cial satellite, launched into Venice’s orbit: “18 kilometers of navigable canals (water-
ways), 33 kilometers of docks, and over 2000 hectares of industrialized peninsulas
that, like metastases, [spread] into water” (2003, 37–38).
A rigorous description of Porto Marghera could match Calvino’s Invisible Cities;
with a substantial difference, though: the Petrolchimico is indeed very visible, and
smellable, too:
A true city, entirely surrounded by high walls, not far from Marghera’s residential area, with
miles and miles of inner roads and little streets, bordering on the lagoon. From here, in the dis-
tance, you [can] see Venice and its belfries. But if you [turn] around, you [see] the endless pipes,
thin and huge, new and old, rusty and repaired, whole or covered with creative patches [crea-
tively mended], at the ground level as well as 15 meters high or more, endlessly long, straight or
crooked. They [enter] in mysterious hangars and barracks, whence they [get] out, to chase other
hangars and barracks in a senseless, unfathomable labyrinth. [Everything is] merged in pungent
and acrid smells, sometimes sweetish, sometimes intolerable, among fumes and gas spills of any
color and extension. (Casson 2007, 34–35)
More than a satellite, industrial Venice materializes here as “a planet fallen into sea”
(Marchiori 2003, 127), an anti-Venice. Indeed, the above-ground face of Marghera is
the macabre, grotesque, and surreal pendant of Venice’s watery underworld. In this
industrial surrealism, the elemental hybridity of this city is forced to merge with other
elements, unknown, unexpected, frightening, and unforgiving. The human is here

only a disposable wedge in the cannibal mechanism of the ‘development narrative.’
But this ‘futurist’ chapter was inaugurated well before the time of artificial sat-
ellites and space exploration. Exactly one year before Thomas Mann’s visit to Venice
(and four before the beginning of WWI), the theorist of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, cast a spell Against Passéist Venice (Contro Venezia passatista). It was 27
April 1910:
We repudiate the old Venice, enfeebled and undone by centuries of worldly pleasure […].
We repudiate the Venice of foreigners, a market for counterfeiting antiquarians, a magnet of
snobbery and universal imbecility, a bed whose bottom has been staved in by caravans of lovers,
the bejeweled hip-bath of cosmopolitan courtesans, the cloaca maxima of passéism.
We want to cure and heal this putrefying city, this magnificent sore from the past. We want to
reanimate and ennoble the Venetian people, fallen from their ancient grandeur […].
We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice that can dominate the Adriatic
Sea, that great Italian lake.
Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals with the ruins from its leprous and crumbling
palaces.
Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heavens the imposing geom-
etry of metal bridges and factories plumed with smoke, to abolish the cascading curves of the
old architecture.
Let the reign of divine Electric Light finally come to liberate Venice from its venal moonlight for
furnished rooms to let. (Marinetti et al. 2009, 67–68)
“Let the reign of divine Electric Light finally come,” Marinetti said. And divine Elec-
tric Light came into Venice by way of Giuseppe Volpi, first Count of Misurata. Volpi,
who would later become Mussolini’s Minister of Finance, was the owner of SADE, at
that time the major Italian corporation for the production of electric energy. Volpi had
promoted the creation of an “industrial Venice” to be placed in an area of the lagoon
which had to be reclaimed and filled with ground. Its construction started in 1917. The
land, which was state-owned, was conceded to the industrial group completely free
of charge. In 1919, the first industrial plants had been completed, and in 1920–1921
Marghera was already host to metallurgic factories and units for the production of
sulfuric acid. Around 1923 “the productive plants [were] already twenty-seven, […] all
powered with the energy furnished by the SADE corporation […]. In 1929, the factories
[were] fifty-five, out of which fifteen produce[d] chemicals; the workers [were] around
ten thousand” (Fabbri 2003, 26). A considerable urban expansion started to surround
the industrial area. In 1932, there were 5000 residents (today there are about 28000).
The history of Marghera is also the story of a dense concentration of industrial
and financial interests, binding together the main industrial corporations in Italy and
beyond: SAVA furnished aluminum alloys, ILVA the iron and steel products, whereas
Montecatini provided the chemical agents necessary to transform mineral and petro-
liferous products. All these corporations are part of the not always glorious epopee of
Italian industrial capitalism. But Marghera’s history is also a story of war: Marghera,
in fact, was a production site for yperite or sulphur mustards, the infamous ‘mustard
gas’ used by the Italian army in Ethiopia and Libya (1936), in spite of the Geneva Pro-
tocol of 1925. Predictably, the Venetian industrial site also became a ‘sensitive target’
during WWII.
In the 1950s the era of petrochemical production began. The former corporations
operating in Marghera merged in a new company named “Edison,” which became
“Montedison” after merging with Monsanto and Union Carbide (the owner of Bho-
pal’s Union Carbide). In 1951, on a new expanse of land (called Industrial Zone II),
the production of chlorine and PVC started: Italy entered the plastic era. Certainly,
in these wealthy years of ‘well-mannered’ tycoons and enlightened working classes,
ecological or ‘merely aesthetic’ concerns were not part of any political agenda.
As a symbol at once ironic and gruesome of the material textuality of this place,
we can consider the way Industrial Zone II was constructed. While the first industrial
site was built on clean ground, the foundations of Industrial Zone II were assembled
using the chemical and metallurgical sludge of the ‘early days’: “To put it bluntly, it
was an industrial site laying on a humongous toxic dump, quantifiable in ten million
tons” (Fabbri 2003, 41). Textually interpreted, this site is a material mise en abyme
of the whole pollution system, almost a metaphysical self-representation of toxicity.
Obviously, the whole existence of the Petrolchimico comes at an astounding cost
for the human and natural ecology of the lagoon. Incredible amounts of toxic waste
are produced over the decades, in spite of the denunciations of people, workers,
environmental associations, and notwithstanding systems of rules meant to protect
public health. Marghera is therefore also a story of irresponsibility, deceit, and stub-
born denial. It is a story of how the pursuit of industrial interests (or economic inter-
ests in general) became so ‘absolute’ (that is, so abstract) as to falsify the texts of
reality in form of territory, peoples’ rights and health, an age-old landscape and the
lagoon’s ecological balance. In order to accumulate profit, this absolute industrial
narrative became literally world-less. As a matter of fact, ever since its foundation, the
Marghera petrochemical factory had produced the most dangerous agents (including
dioxin and phosgene), systematically keeping the workers uniformed about their nox-
iousness, occulting and manipulating scientific reports, which were already available
from the 1950s and 1960s. In 1973, the World Health Organization officially declared
the carcinogenicity of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), whose most frequently induced
pathologies include cirrhosis, hepatopathologies, brain, lung, and liver cancer. But
the production in the Petrolchimico continued.
In the 1980s, Marghera finally became an environmental case due to its system-
atic practice of dumping in the lagoon toxic pollutants such as sludge from the pro-
duction of aluminum, zinc, sulfuric and fluorhydric acid. As the historian Piero Bev-
ilacqua (1998, 147) notes, the lagoon “has now turned into a private landfill for [these]
factories.” In 1984, it was documented that every day and for at least two decades
some 4000 tons of phosphogypsum had been poured into the sea. This reckless prac-
tice ceased (at least officially) only in 1988, but for some years that sludge continued
to be processed and used as the basis for construction and road-making materials.
After that date, many of those pollutants were illegally dumped in Africa, or sank in
the Mediterranean Sea on board of the so-called ‘ships of poison’: secretly wretched
ships clandestinely loaded with tons of all sorts of hazardous pollutants (cf. ↗19 Med-
iterranean Ecocriticism).
In his long and important memoir titled La fabbrica dei veleni (The Poison
Factory, 2007), the magistrate Felice Casson has demonstrated how, in the decades
of its industrial flourishing, the chief executive officers of Porto Marghera did their
best to bury all the medical and scientific evidence related to the actual toxicity of
the chemicals produced in the factory. The studies conducted by Italian and interna-
tional researchers were deliberately ignored or boycotted, in a game of trans-Atlantic
industrial complicities aimed at the singular goal of continuing a dangerous produc-
tion, regardless of the cost for the workers’ health. Casson’s (2007, 31) investigations
evinced a ‘secrecy protocol’ binding the world’s major petrochemical corporations: “A
criminal and generalized ‘pact of silence,’ agreed upon between 1972 and 1973 by all
the leaders of the world’s [petrochemical] industries. This agreement was promoted
by European corporations, with Montedison in the front row.” The result of the epi-
demiological research, when authorized, should remain top secret. The risk of con-
tamination for workers and residents was generally undermined, if not completely
denied (cf. also Bettin and Dianese 2003; Rabitti 1998). Among all the layers of justice
(social, ecological, historical) of which residents and workers were deprived, the most
important was the cognitive one.
But the voice of the cells was telling another story, and this story became grad-
ually evident and understandable by the affected subject. To speak of the voice of
the cells, here, is not simply a metaphor (cf. ↗1 The Lightest Burden). As biosemioti-
cian Wendy Wheeler (2006, 12) notes, our social life, our work, the hierarchies we are
placed in, are “written in our bodies in terms of flourishing or […] illness.” In terms
of our biology, the coupling of environment and body “is a form of conversation, […]
a kind of narrative of conversational developments” (2006, 126). In this conversation,
the human body, in its immune, nervous, and endocrine systems, elaborates and
keeps the memory of “the many ‘not-me’ which it encounters” (122). This memory
is elaborated by our cells, and shows itself in pathological forms. To Marghera’s
workers, the cells’ voice was telling a story of inner mutation, of trans-substantiation
between plastic and flesh. As Nancy Tuana explains:
Beginning at a molecular level, we know that phtalates and vinyl chloride affect […] a complex
interaction that can result in cancer. Workers inhale PVC dust, and those who live by incinerators
inhale it as plastics are burned. The viscous porosity of our bodies and that of PVC allow for an
exchange of molecules, where PVC and phtalates pass through the porosity of skin and flesh […].
Plastic becomes flesh. (2008, 200–201)
Tuana’s words describe a situation taking place in New Orleans in the aftermath of
Katrina. In this respect, there are strong similarities between Venice and New Orleans.
Like the undeniable evidence of cancer cases and pollution lays bare the hidden story
of Marghera’s factory, Katrina, too, exposes the plots of reality told by these material
texts: the body cells, the bodies of the people suffering from exploitation and lack
of protection. In Marghera, like in New Orleans, these bodily stories were ironically
denied for many years. Rather than stopping the production, the workers were forced
to operate wearing anti-gas masks; it was recommended that they use special tooth-
paste, or drink milk.
Finally, mostly thanks to the collective efforts of the workers, a trial was ordered
in 1998. Thirty-one executives were indicted. The accusations were mass murder,
environmental disaster, mass culpable homicide, missing workplace safety, water
and food poisoning, and the construction of illegal waste dumps. In a shocking deci-
sion, however, in 2001 all the defendants were acquitted. In 2004, though, the Appeal
Court reversed the verdict, sentencing five executives to serve one and a half years
in jail for culpable homicide. The supreme level of justice finally confirmed this sen-
tence. What can be said today is that the Marghera petrochemical factory is responsi-
ble for killing one hundred fifty-seven workers (this figure is necessarily increasing),
and it has caused the almost irremediable ecological degradation of Venice’s Lagoon.
The “putrefying city,” whose “leprous and crumbling” matter Marinetti (2009)
wished to “reanimate” by means of “metal bridges and factories plumed with smoke”
in 1910 was dying of cancer less than a century later. And this cancer was caused by
those very factories, by those very smokes. This was, after all, the Italian industrial
dream. But this dream was, unfortunately, ‘absolute’: it was completely disconnected
from the textual evidence of reality. Marghera (and the Margheras of the world) are
the price paid for this dream of an ‘absolute industrial narrative.’ The only way left
to “cure and heal” this new “magnificent sore” is to restore the material textuality of
Venice’s body.
4 Text 3: Venice, Literature

In May 1911, Thomas Mann finally touches Venice’s body. He will give this experience
a literary elaboration almost immediately thereafter, publishing Der Tod in Venedig
the following year. Much has been said about this work. Prominent scholars and
skilled critics have seen this masterpiece of modernist literature as a manifesto of
decadence, scrutinized the inner conflict of art and life, or analyzed the queer aes-
thetics of Aschenbach’s voyeuristic relationship to the young Tatzio. Also particularly
intense have been the explorations of the autobiographical background of the novel,
in search of the inspiration sources behind the protagonist’s figure (cf. Schede 2006;
Shookman 2003; Lenhert and Wessel 2004). In the context of our reading, however,
there are two main points to which I would like to draw attention: first, the fact that
Mann’s novella is a story about bodies, whose macro-category is Venice’s body itself
as a hybrid and collective organism; secondly, the fact that Death in Venice is also the
story of how discursive falsifications of Venice’s bodily texts generate forms of cogni-
tive injustice, culminating in death.
Venice’s body is Aschenbach’s body: an aging, decaying, unquiet, “embellished”
body – a dirty, sweating, sublimely dying artist’s body. But Venice’s body is also Tatzio’s
body an unspeakably beautiful young body. In this beautiful body, the germ of decay
resides for the very fact that this is a living body, a biologically determined matter.
The only possibility for this body to stay beautiful would be to have its form frozen in
time, to die. It might be for this very reason that the artist Aschenbach secretly enjoys
the idea of Tatzio being ill and not destined to a long life, of his teeth revealing poor
health (Mann 2004, 62): this early death would thus preserve his exquisite form from
corruption. But Venice’s body is all of this city’s bodies, its dirty streets and white
Istria stones, its seabirds and sandbanks, its brackish waters, its people – rich and
poor, powerful and powerless. They are all caught in the tangle of space-time-matter
on which biology depends. Here, Mann’s decadent aesthetics inhibit any romantici-
zation of Venice’s landscape. In his iconographic imagination, rather than Canaletto
we sense Guercino, Et in Arcadia Ego. In fact, Venice is not a landscape here. It is not
a picturesque setting, a mere background, but it is itself a character of Mann’s novella.
It is a corporeal presence one can smell, feel, touch. Venice possesses here its own
pervasive metabolic agency. This uncanny agency becomes fatal when another actor
enters into the mix: cholera. In this heavily breathing atmosphere, Venice and all its
bodies share the same fate.
Nevertheless, this fate is not due to a combination of merely material circum-
stances: “the city was diseased and was concealing it out of cupidity” (Mann
2004,104). Indeed, Death in Venice is the story of a sanitary emergency, and of the
fraudulent way the city’s authorities handle this emergency. The cholera outbreak is
caused by a number of coalescing agencies: environmental conditions, the climate,
poor hygiene, “the prevailing insecurity” of the populace (122). Fatal, however, is the
way “corruption in high places,” undermining or covering the danger, mingles with all
these agencies, thereby amplifying the explosion of the epidemic (122). We have here
a clear example of how material elements coupled with discursive practices result
in a series of “often unpredictable and unwanted actions” (Alaimo 2010, 2), whose
effects are fractally disseminated throughout the bodies of reality. In the porosity of
Venice’s bodies, matter and discourse interact, producing uncontrollable effects. The
mediators of such interaction are here the sirocco and the lagoon’s “feverous vapors”
(Mann 2004, 64), body cells and police, a basket of strawberries, and the complicity
between negligent authorities and the people in Venice. What is striking, however, is
the way information is deliberately manipulated and the truth artfully disguised. But
finally, everything comes into sight in a clear and comprehensive picture:
The Venetian authorities issued a statement to the effect that health conditions had never been
better, then took the most essential precautions against the disease. But some food must have
been contaminated […] because, denied or concealed as it was, death ate a path through the
narrow streets, and the premature summer heat […] was particularly conducive to its spread. […]
[F]ear of the overall damage that would be done, concern over the recently opened art exhibition
in the Public Gardens and the tremendous losses with which the hotels, the shops, the entire,
multifaceted tourist trade would be threatened in case of panic and loss of confidence – proved
stronger in the city than the love of truth and respect for international covenants: it made the
authorities stick stubbornly to their policy of secrecy and denial. The chief medical officer of
Venice, a man of outstanding merit, had […] been quietly replaced by a more pliable individual.
The populace knew all this, and corruption in high places together with the prevailing insecurity
and the state of emergency […] led to a certain degeneracy. (Mann 2004, 122)
In the face of the materiality of danger, a falsifying narrative provides reassuring dis-
courses, so as to disable the alarm without neutralizing the bomb. The echoes between
this story and that of the petrochemical factory are hard to overlook. In saying this,
however, I am not alluding to a bizarre mimicry between art and life. What I mean is
that literature, combined with the material texts of reality, provides theory to better
understand these texts. If we read literature and reality through each other, we might
better recognize recurring patterns: in our case, a game of unheeded material elo-
quence and pursued discursive deception. In this game, cognitive justice people’s
right to know and to choose accordingly is completely nullified. Both in Mann’s Venice
and in Porto Marghera, the combination of physical danger, political complicity, and
textual falsification of reality are fatal. As Belle-époque travelers become disposable
resources for an economic system feeding on tourists, so Porto Marghera’s workers
and residents taste the violence of an abstract, world-less, and indifferent industrial
narrative. The only difference between the two situations emerges if we consider
Aschenbach’s death. Aschenbach is aware of the epidemic and willfully decides to
die, whereas Porto Marghera’s people undergo a much more subtle coercion, accentu-
ated by the economic blackmail that the factory exercises on the community.
But, by providing a theory to better see reality, literature can also provide catego-
ries to interpret reality. In so doing, literature transforms reality itself into its own nar-
rative. This is what two Italian authors, Andrea Zanzotto and Marco Paolini, respec-
tively do. Zanzotto does it by offering a poetic reading of Venice’s invisible natures
and wounded body. Paolini does it by socializing these wounds and turning them into
a performative memory that can be shared, cognized, and re-enacted (cf. ↗29 Literary
Place and Cultural Memory).
Andrea Zanzotto (1921–2011) is without any doubt one of the most important con-
temporary European poets (cf. Barron 2007). Among the numerous compositions he
devotes to Venice, particularly interesting for our purpose are five poems composing
a cycle titled “Fu Marghera (?)” (“The Late Marghera (?),” published in 2009) and a
work of narrative prose, “Venezia, forse” (“Perhaps, Venice,” 1976). I concentrate here
on the latter.
In “Venezia, forse” Zanzotto is not afraid of Venice’s ambiguous textuality. His

prose strips the city of its picturesque aura, and gives it back to its weird life – a
strange, quasi-zombie life, in which destructive and vivifying forces co-exist along
with the discordant fates of the city’s storied body. After an intensely lyrical opening,
hesitating between geological vastness and a delicate coming-near, Zanzotto focuses
on Venice’s inner fluctuations and ambivalences. These fluctuations, he suggests,
require first of all a different way of thinking Venice: “every thought referring to it
has to be located elsewhere” (Zanzotto 2013, 88), it has to “shatter any confirmed
perspective” (87). In other words, to entirely meet Venice, we need to uproot ourselves
from it, “entering so deep inside as to ‘pierce’ [it], arriving elsewhere, and seeing [this
place] anew” (Giancotti 2013, 13). “Perhaps” one can approach Venice only from this
elsewhere, Zanzotto suggests, or “perhaps” we can possess it only as a simulacrum,
a picture in a painting, a postcard replica, or a fragment of the huge touristic imag-
ination. But, comprehended from the distance of this elsewhere, Venice appears as
a whole, a round universe, in which the idealized pictures make way for the mate-
rial complexity of a ‘monstrous’ ecology (cf. Cohen 2014). We are here in a “world of
crossings” (Zanzotto 2013, 96), a “precarious/eternal” dimension (88) where the Adri-
atic sea shows “its nature of poor pool now thickened with sludge, where the purest
mother-of-pearl blends with the shady rainbows of industrial dejections” (89), where
“[p]us and petroleum, phosgene and worms […], incompetence and vain ambition,
are […] facts” (108). As Zanzotto says:
Humans and things find themselves together in asking for help against the neighboring furnaces
for chlorine and phosgene, against the black magic that fertilizes all earth with death. Quite
different from the traditional myth of the “death in Venice” is the death looming from Marghera
and from the whole womb of the dry land, whose horizons are worm-eaten by the encastellations
and towers of “industry.” (2013, 103)
To accept Venice’s double nature means to go past its metanarratives – whether of

‘absolute beauty’ or ‘industrial progress.’ Beauty, Zanzotto says (consonant with
Mann) is not absolute; it has not loosen its tie with the materiality of its object; hence,
it implies decay, corruption, and death: every living matter is, sub specie aeternita-
tis, a corpse. ‘Industrial progress,’ on the other side, is an abstraction – and it is an
abstraction as it abstracts its substantive processes of withdrawal, transformation,
consumption, and pollution from the world. Its very reality, though, depends on the
world and therefore it is, like beauty, non-absolute, but ultimately embedded in its
materiality. In that it mesmerizes governments, decision makers, and workers, ‘indus-
trial progress’ is as fatally deceitful as black magic. But death is also a chance of sol-
idarity for getting together humans and nonhumans, because “the haunting of mon-
sters reveals communal values, shared aspirations and lived ethics […] as well as the
coinhabitance and alien thriving of the nonhuman” (Cohen 2014, 273). This shocking
coinhabitance implies thus ethical and cognitive disclosures:
The most distressingly strident couple in the world, Venice fastened together with Mestre-Mar-
ghera (which one is the living, which one is the corpse?), all of a sudden challenges you to a
salvaging suture through the obscenity of the real and of the present; it challenges you […] to
‘move further,’ […] toward a never-seen where even evil could be stopped, emptied of its power,
and rehabilitated as a sign, a trace, a form. (Zanzotto 2013, 104–105)
Like living body and corpse, the mother-of-pearl blended with industrial dejections,
matter and anti-matter, Venice and Marghera – this anti-Venice – are one and the
same. To see Venice means to see this living monstrosity. As an alternative, we should
concur with Giorgio Agamben (2011, 11) and admit that Venice is no longer a corpse, but
rather a specter – a “blabbering” presence “left to drain on the fondamente, together
with rotten algae and plastic bottles.” But, if we really want “to move further,” we
have to transform mourning into cognition, and develop new ways of seeing that stop
the evil, as Zanzotto demands. And this is just what a material-ecocritical interpre-
tation of all the ‘implicit Venices’ aims at: stopping the evil and rehabilitating it as
a sign. To see Venice (which is the same as to see the world) is to embrace all these
contradictions and to recognize them as parts of this place’s bodily text. It means to
recognize the world as a site of unremitting interferences, hybridizations, encounters.
In this ‘moving-further,’ even beyond the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction
(“which one is the living, which one is the corpse?”), is the key to understanding the
many wounds of this huge body of which we are part.
Even more than novels and poetic prose, theater can contribute to socializing
these wounds. One of the most original and engagé Italian playwrights, Marco Paolini
(born in Belluno in 1956) is the author of a number of plays which enact what he calls
teatro civico, ‘a civic theater’: long monologues about events of the recent past, often,
but not exclusively, from an Italian standpoint (his most celebrated works are about
two socio-environmental catastrophes, both displaying an underground connection
to Venice: the collapse of the SADE-owned Vajont dam in Friuli and the Union Car-
bide’s factory disaster in Bhopal, India). Through these acts of ‘narrative resistance,’ a
collective civil memory is reconstructed as a necessary operation of cognitive justice.
Venice is ‘implicit’ in many of his plays, but it emerges as the subject of two of them:
Il Milione: Quaderno veneziano (The Million: A Venetian Notebook, 1997) and Parla-
mento chimico: Storie di plastica (Chemical Parliament: Plastic Stories, 2001). This
latter play is about Porto Marghera.
Parlamento chimico is based on a significant amount of data, including histori-
cal documents, the workers’ medical records, the proceedings of the trial against the
heads of the petrochemical factory, scientific and technological descriptions of the
production processes, and many personal stories of people living inside or near the
factory. Here again, the ‘narrative agencies’ are material. As Paolini (qtd. in Marchiori
2003, 79) says in an interview: “productive processes and plants play the leading role;
finance, chlorine: they have now become my characters.” The factory itself emerges
as a body. Paolini portrays this body as a naked body, so naked that one can almost
picture it through X-rays: “you see the whole skeleton and all the nerves, the circula-
tory system and the inner organs of the factory: cracking towers, refinery plants, auto-
claves, pipes” (qtd. in Marchiori 2003, 38). Looking into this organic nudity creates a
new porn, an industrial porn:
Naked factories that, when the lights are turned on, let you glimpse their circulatory system,
their organs… this is porn. Therefore men like it. I know of many people seduced at night by the
petrochemical factories spread in the landscape: this is something that lures mostly males, with
all those fires, lights, structures… (Paolini 2002, n. p.)
This obscenity is the same that Zanzotto saw in the ambivalent corpse/body of Venice:
the present, for Paolini like for Zanzotto (and like for Pier Paolo Pasolini before them),
is obscene. Still more so, if one considers the circularity between such obscenity and
the discursive obscenity of the Italian industrial metanarrative. All this is obscene not
because it reveals too much, but because it hides what should be shown.
Paolini connects facts and framework into a narrative ‘civic’ memory and thus
creates a game of mirroring and resonances within the naked and wounded bodies of
reality, clearly enacting literature’s function of being a ‘cultural ecology’ of a society
(cf. ↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature). And so Marghera becomes all the Margheras
of the world, near and far: it is Bhopal; but it is also the archetype figure of the global
theaters of war, from WWI and WWII to more recent wars: “Marghera plants can help
us picture the VCM factory bombed in Belgrade, and the euphorizing sweetish-tasting
cloud, which goes unnoticed, covered by smoke and the exploding bombs” (Marchiori
2003, 39). Performed in front of an audience of workers (which are themselves textual
matter on which this story is written), of informed citizens and of common people, the
play echoes reality indefinitely, and in so doing, it produces multiple reverberations
of meanings. (It is worth noting that the preparatory representation of Parlamento
chimico took place in 2001 in Castiglioncello, Tuscany, near the Solvay petrochemical
plant of Piombino, an ‘associate’ of Montedison: the Marghera factory’s story was
thus set within another similarly storied factory.) Paolini’s play connects all these
people with all these places, putting together all the pieces of this puzzle. Literature
is here helping reality to perform itself and its interconnectedness via the story, the
stage, and the audience. This is a practice of civil resistance and narrative liberation.
Put on stage in Venice in 2003, during the Carnival, and right after the second
sentence of the Marghera trial, Parlamento chimico is the story of a political failure in
front of the textuality of matter. In an interview, Paolini commented: “The language
of politics do not include the admission of failure. Its narrative ‘art’ is conventionally
structured as to always tell things in terms of defense, consolidation. But who shall
tell failures, if no politician will care to do it?” (qtd. in Marchiori 2003, 155). Venice’s
bodies do. But literature does it, too. It does it by transforming evils into signs, thus
liberating the voices of reality.
5 T
ext 4: World
The way we, not only as ecocritics, but as intellectuals in general, relate to the mate-
rial eloquence of the world, is crucial to our work. This approach involves, in fact, a
reflection on the ethical role of the humanities in creating tools apt to understand
the tangles of material agencies, socio-ecological sustainability, and human respon-
sibilities. To read the world as a text and to implement correct interpretations of this
textuality is not only ecologically correct, but also a necessary condition for creating
social forms of cognitive justice, and hence practices of social liberation and environ-
mental responsiveness.
The importance of this approach is evident. Whenever the ‘text’ of the world is
misread, uncontrollable consequences ensue. This misreading happens all the times
we believe that the boundaries between ‘the outside’ and ‘the inside’ are firm and
solid; it happens when we think of the ‘world outside’ as inert matter and we imagine
it as unrelated to the ‘world inside’ (cf. Alaimo 2010). It happens all the times we set
up an alienated relationship to reality. Whenever this occurs, as Barbara Kingsolver
wrote, we fall into
a mass hallucinatory fantasy in which the megatons of waste we dump in our rivers and bays are
not poisoning the water, the hydrocarbons we pump into the air are not changing the climate,
overfishing is not depleting our oceans, fossil fuel will never run out, wars that kill masses of
civilians are an appropriate way to keep our hands on what’s left, we are not desperately over-
drawn at the environmental bank, and, really, the kids are all right. (Kingsolver 2003, 13)
An alienated relationship to (and, therefore, misinterpretation of) reality is also the

one that, for example in Italy, leads ecomafia clans to intersperse densely populated
areas with toxic waste, areas where their own families and they themselves live. In
their criminal hallucination, they act as if they do not have to breathe the same air,
drink the same water, eat the same food produced in that land, or live in houses built
on polluted ground.
A city always hovering above itself, Venice, too, has fallen prey to an alienated
narrative. It is often an abstract narrative, hard to reconcile with the reality of things.
The aim of this chapter was exactly this: to use literary and material texts in order to
‘restore’ Venice’s story, trying to do justice to this complex reality. In this, my idea of
material ecocriticism is consonant with the premises of Hubert Zapf’s (2010, 138; cf.
↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature) theory of literature as cultural ecology: combined
with the evidence of Venice’s material textuality, literary works play, in my view, too,
a decisive role in highlighting socio-historical injustices, at the same time contribut-
ing to processes of “cultural self-renewal, in which the neglected biophilic energies
can find a symbolic space of expression and of (re-)integration into the larger ecology
of cultural discourses.” In both Zapf’s vision and mine, literature is instrumental for
reality to emerge as a whole picture, in a way that discloses the enclosed parts and
sheds light on the unspoken bonds hidden in this whole.
Barry Commoner’s (1971, 39) first law of ecology reads: “Everything is connected
to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects
one, affects all.” However empirically hard to prove, this “law” is helpful for under-
standing our discourse. If we think that most of the plastic composing the infamous
Great Pacific Plastic Patch consists of PVC and related substances, essentially deriving
from petroleum; if we think how these eerie bodily presences are interacting with the
sea’s biodiversity, oceanic streams, the atmosphere, climate, and (via the food chain)
our own life; and if we consider that this oceanic plastic was produced in industrial
plants like Marghera (or like Bhopal, or New Orleans), using the same procedures,
creating the same pollution, generating the same diseases, exploiting and cognitively
defrauding people in the same way, and participating in the same deceitful industrial
‘narratives’ – whereas “corruption in high places” (Mann 2004, 122) means death in
lower ones, whether human or not – then we will admit that Commoner might be on
the right track, and that there is an actual connection between the tiles of this mosaic.
Like the cholera and death in Venice, the climate change that threatens to erase a
lagoon in Northern Italy is also due to interplaying factors, which include ‘natural’
agents as well as human discourses, sometimes disconnected from the matter of the
world.
A material ecocritical approach is the way we, as literary critics who believe in
the existence of reality, try to see all these apparently disconnected elements as parts
of a wide story, and to make sense of this story. This is, to use Zapf’s words, our way
to re-integrate these elements in the ‘larger ecology’ of reality. As our moral duty, we
have to responsibly discard falsifying narratives and heed the eloquence of things,
using literary imagination as a privileged tool to penetrate this eloquence. Maybe not
arbitrarily, we put all these elements – both material and cultural – into a comprehen-
sive frame, one that acts like Kant’s regulatory ideas: it provides directions, inviting
us to act as if these apparently disjointed tiles would compose a picture, a chapter in a
complex text we call ‘the world.’ Such an as if is our strongest weapon in the struggle
for cognitive justice. If we really hope that “the evil is blocked, emptied of its power,
and rehabilitated as a sign,” that is the means we have.
6 B
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Elena Past
19 M
editerranean Ecocriticism: The Sea in the
Middle
Abstract: This chapter traces the fluid outlines of the emerging field of Mediterra-
nean ecocriticism, which finds in the hybridities and crossings of Mediterranean pol-
itics, history, geology, and ecology an invitation to engage with a region of intense
natural-cultural cohabitation. The multiple forms of connectedness and contin-
gency generated by the Mediterranean Sea shift the borders of ontological certainty
and humanist privilege, rendering possible what Rosi Braidotti (2013, 49) calls an
“eco-philosophy of multiple becomings.” Following a theoretical overview, I propose
a case study for Mediterranean ecocriticism, a reading of director Daniele Vicari’s
documentary film Il mio paese (My Country, 2006). In developing a line of inquiry
for Mediterranean ecocriticism, the chapter focuses attention on the entanglement
of people and matter, creative and material texts, and specifically on the petroleum,
liquid Mediterranean currents, and humans that are all eloquent actors in the film.
Key Terms: Mediterranean ecocriticism, ecocinema studies, Daniele Vicari, Italian

cinema, petroleum culture
An Italian proverb, “Tra il dire e il fare c’è di mezzo il mare,” warns that “between
saying and doing, there is a world of difference.” Translated literally, though, this
traditional wisdom underlines that “saying” and “doing” have the sea between them
(“Between saying and doing, the sea is in the middle”). The Italian verb “fare” can
signify not only “to do,” “to make,” “to act,” but also “to give birth to,” “to produce,”
“to compose or construct.” In highlighting the complex relation between word and
generative act, this proverb might stand as a statement of philosophy for the complex,
co-evolving field of ‘Mediterranean ecocriticism,’ whose name articulates some of
the intricacies of the scholarly enterprise it describes. Mediterranean: a composite
term defined, like the proverb, by its in-betweenness, signifying sea “in the middle
of the land”; a contested land-space that can be specified by a watershed, a climate,
a zone of cultivation of certain plant species, or the countries that define its borders;
but also a sea, a crossing. Ecocriticism: a scholarly commitment to oikos and to the
work of interpreting texts, to our shared household and to the stories that narrate it.
Mediterranean ecocriticism, then, is a compound of already compound terms that
hybridizes geographies and texts, or land, sea, human and nonhuman inhabitants,
and discourse.
The first task of Mediterranean ecocriticism is to acknowledge the difficulty
of agreeing on what we mean when we discuss the Mediterranean. The term most
directly refers to the sea, which itself is a geological middle ground. A landlocked,
semi-enclosed sea with an estimated 74,000 kilometers of coastline, the Mediter-

ranean sits at the encounter of three continents, occupying “the convergence zone
between two major tectonic plates, Africa and Europe, with a third, Arabia, pressing
from the east” (Stewart and Morhange 2009, 385). The collision of plates means that
the region is ‘restless’: mountains rose from the land and islands from the sea; the
shattering European plate formed many islands and peninsulas; other tracts of land
have sunk hundreds of meters in the last two million years. Today the Mediterranean
is still on the move, as frequent earthquakes and active volcanoes in the region attest
(see Grove and Rackham 2001, 37–38). A common way to specify the extension of the
Mediterranean landmass is as a climatic zone, where the olive tree, grape vine, holm
oak, and palm tree grow, for example. But as geographer Russell King’s study of the
Mediterranean shows, each plant maps onto a slightly different area of the landscape,
creating a mutable ecological atlas (see 1997, 6–7). The zones of cultivation for each
plant species likely also shifted through time (see Harris 2005, 13, 21).
The restless geological and ecological layers that characterize the region have
made it a complicated and productive theater for encounters of human and more-
than-human history. According to geographer Jamie Woodward (2009, 167), “the
region is unique because of the very early and widespread impact of humans in land-
scape and ecosystem change – and the richness of the archaeological and geological
archives in which it is chronicled.” The Mediterranean, then, is a material text into
whose fabric are woven millennia of stories about the human relationship with the
more-than-human world. (On places as material texts, see ↗18 Material Ecocriticism).
The mobility of the landscape conceals and reveals, fragments and reshapes the
stories we tell about ourselves and the places we inhabit: from volcanic ash covering
but also preserving Pompeii, to a landslide covering and preserving the Chauvet Cave,
to shifting sea levels around Roman piscinae or fish ponds, eco-cultural markers of
change recount both the material past and tell how human cultures co-evolved with
their surroundings.
As a region of human activity, the question of whether or not there exists any kind
of Mediterranean ‘unity’ is an open one. We can start with the question of language
itself, since to speak of ‘Mediterranean’ is to choose English or the Romance tradition
as an etymological framework, rather than Turkish or Hebrew, for example (see Abu-
lafia 2011, xxiii). Fernand Braudel (1966, 170) imagined “a hundred frontiers, not one,
some political, some economic, and some cultural.” With twenty nations and a host
of languages, religious practices, agricultural and industrial systems, and artistic tra-
ditions animating its coasts, the Mediterranean is more anthology than monograph.
And like the region’s geology, languages, cultures, and political formations also con-
stantly shift: over centuries, Arabic displaced the Coptic language; chariots gave way
to cars; colonial empires became sovereign nations; countries at war became allies
and then went to war again.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of the Mediterranean, then, is the limit-space
of the sea, the region’s quality of “liquid continent” (Abulafia 2011, xxiii). For Braudel
370 Elena Past
(2001, 3), the sea is the “best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past,” and
“patiently recreates for us scenes from the past.” Franco Cassano (2012, 34) argues
for a human experience of Mediterraneanism that shares its quality of “middleness,”
writing that: “Mediterranean man […] lives always between land and sea.” In the
form of the sea, too, we encounter a realm of assemblages and multiplicities. Abulafia
has pointed out that the Mediterranean Sea is actually “a group of interconnected
seas, sub-Mediterraneans with their own history of cross-cultural exchange” (Abula-
fia 2005, 67). The sea’s waters commingle people and things, as currents and winds,
straits and deltas facilitate a slow but steady flux of matter and meaning. Thus, as
Bertrand Westphal (2013, 28) says (following Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri), the
entire Mediterranean takes on “the shape of water.”
1 Navigating Mediterranean Ecocriticism

In her now-canonical introduction to the nascent field of ecocriticism, Cheryll Glotf-
elty (1996, xix) assessed that “[a]s a critical stance, [ecocriticism] has one foot in liter-
ature and the other on land.” In Mediterranean ecocriticism, though, between saying
and doing, there is inevitably the sea, and thus liquid pathways of connectedness
conjoin creative acts of all kinds. To practice Mediterranean ecocriticism, a space that
Serenella Iovino (2013) proposes should be inhabited by ’cultural amphibians,’ we
need a foot planted in the text, another on land, and a tail (or a fin) in the water, too.
Glotfelty’s ecocritical anthology reflects the field’s rooting in North American
scholarship and American nature writing. Four essay titles feature the word “Amer-
ican,” and the volume’s index includes lengthy entries for Aldo Leopold, John Muir,
and Henry David Thoreau, as well as National Parks and wilderness. Yet though
American writers and their notion of wilderness continue to occupy an important
place in the ecocritical landscape, as Glotfelty predicted and as this volume amply
demonstrates, scholars increasingly note the border-defying scope of environmental
problems and the plural cultural contexts of environmental discourse. These observa-
tions lead ecocriticism in global, transnational, postcolonial, and even anti-national
directions (as, arguably, the oceanic turn in ecocriticism led by Stacy Alaimo). In the
Mediterranean region in particular, it is interesting to note, as Patrick Barron (2003,
xxv) does, that there is no Italian equivalent for ‘wilderness.’ The same can be said for
other Mediterranean languages, for which the notion of wild, uncultivated land makes
less sense either geographically or as a touchstone of the environmental imagination.
Barron (xxiv) observes that: “Italy is rife with overlaying human and nonhuman signs
of residence and alteration.” Any Mediterranean landscape is likely to betray traces
of modification and border crossing – terraced hillsides, nonnative species, forests
cleared for grazing and then reforested. Thus the Mediterranean context requires an
ecocritical position allowing for anthropogenic change, urban dwellers, impurity, or
what Anthony Lioi (2007, 17) calls (following Mary Douglas), “matter-out-of-place.”
These fertile histories of the intermingling of human and more-than-human, and the
rich documentation of such cohabitation in the multi-layered textual fabric that con-
stitutes its past, encourage a Mediterranean ecocriticism attentive to such encoun-
ters, dirty, tangled, or impure though they may be.
Mediterranean ecocriticism thus finds in the hybridities and crossings of Medi-
terranean politics, history, geology, and ecology an invitation to engage with a region
of intense natural-cultural cohabitation. It proposes to read a host of texts – literary,
cinematic, geological, volcanic, tectonic, marine, urban, rural, biological – within
this contested space. Studies by historians and environmental historians, archaeol-
ogists, classicists, ecologists, sociologists, philosophers, and scholars of literature
and media are gathered under the rubric ‘Mediterranean studies.’ Journals including
Mediterranean Studies, Mediterranean Quarterly, and the Mediterranean Journal of
Humanities, as well as a number of special journal issues (see the “Further Reading”
section) have dedicated space to understanding the region’s intricate dynamics, but
few have evoked a specifically ecocritical lens. In the context of the Mediterranean,
ecocriticism’s ethical investment in the more-than-human world, its tendency to dest-
abilize borders and binaries, and its attention to voices and texts of all kinds, has
much to offer as an invitation to conversation between disciplines. In a special issue
of Ecozon@, Iovino articulates the first “blueprint” for Mediterranean ecocriticism.
Envisioning Mediterranean history as a “repository […] of agencies and narratives, of
elements and people, of natural materialities and political forces, steadily co-evolv-
ing into an open aggregate of landscapes and imagination,” Iovino (2013, 9) calls for
“a heuristic framework for examining every natural-cultural interformation and for
theorizing figures of hybridity which involve identities as well as landscapes, politics
as well as ecosystems.”
Complementing and at times contrasting the humanist focus on questions of ‘civ-
ilization,’ Mediterranean ecocriticism is strongly marked by a posthumanist strain
(see ↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism), which de-centers the human role
in Mediterranean history and articulates the ethical and material stories told by the
more-than-human world. Posthumanism struggles against notions of ‘pure’ nature or
‘pure’ humanity, qualities that have always been impossible in the region. Sociologist
Franco Cassano’s landmark study, Southern Thought, argues for an inherent contami-
nation by Otherness in Mediterranean experience:
In a land where many others have arrived, there is no monolithic and pure ‘we’ to defend from
the snare of the Other. It is sufficient to scroll through the list of names in any city’s phone book
[…] or to look back a few generations at our very own history, to discover contaminations, arrivals
and departures, that restless genetic mobility that […] turns the many people of the Mediterra-
nean […] into incurable mongrels, into the antithesis of any purity, integrity, and fundamental-
ism: Our ‘we’ is full of Others. (Cassano 2012, xlvii)
372 Elena Past
In his celebration of the impure, anti-fundamentalist Mediterraneans, Cassano traces

a landscape populated by posthuman inhabitants. The multiple forms of connected-
ness and contingency generated by the Mediterranean Sea shift the borders of onto-
logical certainty and humanist privilege, rendering possible what Braidotti (2013, 49)
calls an “eco-philosophy of multiple becomings.” This posthuman Mediterranean
subject (like all posthuman subjects) is also characterized by its hybridizations with
the world of technology, by the “entanglements of beings in technoculture that work
through reciprocal inductions” (Haraway 2008, 281; see also Marchesini 2009, 155–
180). The history of the Mediterranean space is marked by collaborative relationships
with technologies and skills: among these, advanced nautical technology, textile
production, mining, and “forms of connectedness” that include “migration, external
markets, and the importation of basic commodities” (Harris 2005, 19). As these lists
intimate, however, the results of such relations are not always pacific or beneficial,
but sometimes conflictual, unequal, bellicose.
And in spite of its hybrid ecological and social realities, in the conflict over how
to define the Mediterranean we also find behaviors that attempt to enforce what Brai-
dotti (2013, 15) calls “Eurocentric paradigms.” Mediterranean crossings, migrations,
and hybridizations have also engendered forms of entrenchment along imagined
borders. Cassano sees a pressing concern in the economic and political dominance
of the Global North, while philosopher Roberto Marchesini focuses attention on the
species boundaries and anthropocentric privilege exalted by the Humanist tradi-
tion (see Cassano 2012; Marchesini 2009). In their various forms, these paradigms
of thought are entrenched in a binary logic that separates self from other, north from
south, and they threaten the foundations, however fluid, of Mediterranean thought.
In such logic, Braidotti (2013, 15) warns that: “difference spells inferiority, it acquires
both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others.’”
Thus Mediterranean experience can also be characterized by “negative unity,” or a
“shared form of vulnerability” generated by “contemporary bio-genetic capitalism”
(2013, 50). Such negative unity is mapped onto the liquid landscapes of the Medi-
terranean region, as for example when migrants lose their lives attempting to cross
from Northern Africa into Italy and Spain, or when toxic waste is dumped in the sea
or seeps into the water table.
In The Great Sea, Abulafia (2011, xxx) expresses concern that studying this history
of the Mediterranean may be “to observe a symbiosis of man and nature that may be
about to end.” Mediterranean ecocriticism, though, while deeply concerned about
the region’s human and more-than-human future, challenges the notion that stability
was ever possible. Instead it acknowledges, with Haraway (2008, 15), the constant
negotiations and struggles that cohabitation implies: the “Great Divides of animal/
human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic flatten into mundane
differences – the kinds that have consequences and demand respect and response.”
Recognizing, as Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme (2013, 14) point out, that “the
Mediterranean has endured a long tradition of totalizing imaginings, visions, and
hegemonic projects, of which geographical mappings and rigid cartographies are but
one obvious expression,” Mediterranean ecocriticism searches for texts that nuance
these visions or read them with an eye to contaminations, collaborations, and cross-
ings.
Thus Mediterranean ecocriticism becomes, like Braidotti’s (2013, 5) posthumanist
framework, a “navigational tool” with an ethical purpose, a “generative tool to help
us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as
‘anthropocene.’” And like Braidotti’s posthuman subject, the subject of Mediterra-
nean ecocriticism has a place, and it is a place. The field proposes to answer the risks
of shared vulnerability with a “politics of location” that is “materialist and vitalist,
embodied and embedded” (2013, 51) and as such benefits from the hybrid method-
ologies and eclectic textualities of material ecocriticism (see ↗18 Material Ecocri
ticism). The only difference here is that rather than being “firmly located somewhere”
as Braidotti (2013, 51) says her posthuman subject is, the place is composed of the
liquid currents of shifting political and economic regimes, winds and currents, global
capital, petroleum, contested border regions, colliding tectonic plates, and volcanic
landscapes. The ‘firm location’ of the Mediterranean inevitably, insistently, shifts the
very foundations on which criticism is itself positioned.
2 M
editerranean ‘Road’ Trips: Sicily and the Liquid
Road
In response to the challenges of the Mediterranean as site of ecocritical thinking,
Iovino (2013, 10) calls for a “post-terrestrial” imagination to complement the post-
human one. As an Italianist, my frame of reference begins in the geophysical space
called Italy. Yet a Mediterranean ecocritical framework urges me to see not only that
‘Italy’ should be understood as a ‘notion’ and not a stable entity (see Dickie 2008),
but also the ways that migratory pathways of humans and nonhumans, circulations
of global capital and toxic waste, narrative, alimentary, and energy cultures, to name
but a few, complicate its composition and push resolutely beyond its borders. In what
follows, I propose a case study for Mediterranean ecocriticism, a reading of direc-
tor Daniele Vicari’s documentary film Il mio paese (My Country, 2006). Engaging this
framework, I focus attention on the entanglement of people and matter, creative and
material texts, and specifically on the petroleum, liquid Mediterranean currents, and
humans that are all eloquent actors in the film.
My Country is a road trip up the Italian peninsula, beginning just off the shores of
the Sicilian town of Gela and ending beyond the borders of Italy in Germany. Although
the title’s possessive “my” might seem to recall the ‘proprietary’ habits of thinking the
mare nostrum in a way that re-colonizes the space from a Euro-Atlantic perspective
(see Iovino 2013, 6), the film’s hybrid structure and commitment to liquid land- and
374 Elena Past
seascapes instead foreground cinematic, geographic, and ontological contingency.

My Country takes inspiration from a film by Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens, L’Italia
non è un paese povero (Italy is Not a Poor Country, 1959). The film was commissioned
by Enrico Mattei, president of the multi-national state-owned corporation ENI (Italian
National Hydrocarbon Authority), and by RAI, the Italian national media organism, to
document Italy’s exploration for energy. In those same years, between 1953 and 1962
when his plane exploded in midair, Mattei was building an “incomparable indus-
trial empire” within the Italian state, constructing gas and oil pipelines so rapidly
that he was becoming a legend (Ginsborg 1989, 219–220). For historian Paul Ginsborg
(1989, 219–220), Mattei, who challenged Italian state policy by attempting to negotiate
directly with Middle Eastern countries for petroleum sources (rather than with the
petroleum monopoly), physically changed the face of Italy. Although commissioned
as part of ENI’s vast media strategy, Italy is Not a Poor Country, which depicted a
country that was unquestionably still poor in many respects, was suppressed upon
completion both by ENI and RAI. The version released in Italy was drastically cut,
and thus appropriately titled “Frammenti di un film di Joris Ivens” (“Fragments of
a Film by Joris Ivens”). Today copies are hard to find (see Verdicchio 2011, 112–113).
My Country fills a lacuna by offering extensive clips from the never-fully-seen 1959
documentary; as a remediated digital archive of the celluloid past, Vicari’s film shows
how narratives can interweave technologies, geographic and human histories, and
materials.
Fashioned as a road trip across Italy, My Country connects to the familiar cin-
ematic genre typically characterized by sweeping landscapes, small-town life, and
coming-of-age narratives. Like the French-language road movies discussed in the
volume edited by Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt (2013, 3), the film works to “stage
crucial discussions on Europe’s so-called open border policies and shifting migration
patterns.” Yet by beginning the road trip on insular and not peninsular Italy, the film
also focuses on the post-terrestrial status of Mediterranean existence in a globalized
world. Starting a ‘road’ trip in Sicily, an island region composed of dozens of islands,
means that the travelled road will necessarily give way to either air or water. Human
protagonists are obliged to relinquish the ground beneath their feet and entrust
themselves to technologies and forces that are physically and ontologically less solid.
Thus to the road movie’s metaphorical, “inherent capacity to emphasise the quest for
mobility as a social and economic imperative” (Gott and Schilt 2013, 8), My Country
adds a liquid component whereby the road itself becomes mobile, and the dynamics
of Mediterranean connectedness and disunity persistently lap at the margins of the
frame.
The film’s Sicilian sequence highlights human fragility in the parallel contexts
of the sea and globalization, all the while recalling human dependence on the fluid
currents of the Mediterranean. Under the opening credits, which appear on a black
background, the sound of waves precedes the first image by a full minute, assigning
primacy to nonhuman voices. The first black-and-white frame, which gently rocks
with the motion of waves, depicts a sailor standing in a boat, and eventually cuts to
a disorienting, mobile shot of asphalt in color. The diegetic soundtrack shifts from
water and fishermen shouting in Sicilian dialect, to the sound of a large truck. Sutur-
ing together frames from the Ivens film (celluloid) and contemporary footage (digital),
two different millennia, two different aspect ratios (narrower for the old footage), two
forms of transportation, this opening montage specifically activates liquid Mediterra-
nean kinesis to intermingle histories, stories, technologies.
As its filmic borders open to let in other films and formats, My Country shows
that trans-Mediterranean socio-political problems and alliances require us to open
our imagination of Italy to the forces that are inevitably, constantly, reshaping it. A
montage in the Sicilian episode brings Mediterranean political and social tensions
into sharp relief. Mass migration from Sicily in black-and-white footage evokes 1950s-
era departures from Italy during what is commonly called the economic ‘miracle.’
These scenes conjure up the disparities between Italy’s north and south, and recall
the diaspora of southern Italians who departed for northern Italy in a great inter-
nal migration, as well as those who crossed the Alps to reach northern Europe and
the oceans on their way to the Americas and Australia. This sequence connects to
footage of authorities searching for a body lost at sea, probably one of the thousands
of migrants who attempted the crossing from northern Africa. A handheld shot of
tombstones recalls a 2005 tragedy, when 140 immigrants from the horn of Africa
shipwrecked off the coast near Gela, and eleven died attempting to reach the shores
(“Tragico sbarco a Gela” 2005). In footage of a prison-like structure, a holding area for
migrants, evidence accumulates of the shattered dreams and lost lives that litter the
coasts of Sicily, as the camps and their “impassable biopolitical space” imprint their
“biological-scientific principles into the political order” (Agamben 1998, 72–73). The
visual layers recall that Italy, land of hope for many, can also be a prison, and that the
Mediterranean is also a graveyard, where the bodies of migrants continue to be lost
and the borders of Europe contract to push back those people deemed undesirable.
They point to Mediterranean assemblages of northern African countries, including
Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, which become “launching pads” for attempted cross-
ings into “Fortress Europe” (King 2009, 66). Finally, a young Sicilian fisherman brings
the global crisis ‘home.’ His desire to migrate mirrors that of the people arriving on
nearby shores, and his daily catch can include, besides fish, lost passports, satellite
phones jettisoned by human traffickers, or migrant bodies. This fisherman’s concerns
tell a familiar tale of uncertainty in the face of poverty and scant job opportunity, and
extend beyond the borders of Italy, literally propelling him into the space in-between,
the sea.
In a Mediterranean ecocritical reading, these poignant stories of global politics
also reveal the material entanglement of the subjects with their space, and show how
the cluster of islands called ‘Sicily’ is a hybrid of human and nonhuman agency; myth,
matter, and liquid flows. Italy is a productive place from which to observe the conflicts
and cohabitations that constitute Mediterranean existence. It is unique in Europe for
376 Elena Past
its four active volcanoes and the liquid rock that bubbles inside them, testifying to the
peninsula’s relative youth in geological terms (see Bevilacqua 2010, 15–17), its rela-
tionship to the sea, and its recent geological past as sea. The film’s acoustic focus
on lapping water and its maritime footage emphasize the fluid quality of story and
matter in this Mediterranean space, invoking the sea as co-protagonist.
This story of the entanglement of humans and sea shows that liquid forces shape
geographies and discourses, or in this case, films. My Country situates itself in rela-
tionship to geological and mythological narrative: a voiceover in the Ivens film links
Sicily of myth and materia as the camera pans up an imposing drilling platform in the
sea: “For the first time in Sicily since the age of the Cyclopes, our feet are planted on
the bottom of the sea” (Italy Is Not a Poor Country, 1959). The 1959 film’s successive
frames place a fleet of fishing boats around the base of the drilling rig, with precip-
itous exchanges of low- and high-angle shots capturing the divide between the ele-
vated platform and the crafts. As the fishermen and rig workers exchange pleasantries
(“How’s your catch?,” “Did you find oil yet?”), they find common cause in the search
for prosperity in the form of consumable resources. Technological progress and myth
are linked, and the miracle of petroleum discovery promises to elevate Sicily to the
status of industrial giant.
Yet these misreadings of mythical, colonial, and ecological history offer comple-
mentary cautions. The Sicilian islands, according to tradition, are in fact the mate-
rial spaces of myth: Vulcan forged instruments of war in the cones of the Sicilian
volcanoes; Scylla and Charybdis made the Straits of Messina treacherous to seafar-
ers; Polyphemus hurled stones after Ulysses, boulders now visible off the Sicilian
coast. Polyphemus, though, was blinded and then tricked by Ulysses, and is hardly
a paragon of foresight. Ulysses/Odysseus, with his dual Latin and Greek names,
denotes the hybridity of southern Italy in the ‘age of the Cyclopes,’ (Italy Is Not a Poor
Country, 1959) and reminds that southern Italy for many years was Magna Graecia,
a collection of thirty or more independent poleis that would eventually be subject to
Roman rule. The Cyclopes stand as a testament to the rise and fall of empires, and to
the danger of collapsing notions of myth and progress. In juxtaposing Ivens’ film and
modern images of Gela, Vicari reveals that the petrochemical industry, which a voice-
over in the 1959 film promises will “wake” the sleeping town, is another impermanent
empire. Contemporary shots of aging industrial infrastructure and dilapidated neigh-
borhoods testify to the differing lifespans of matter, myth, and ‘progress.’
Thus rather than take comfort in the idea that we, like the Cyclopes, stand with
our feet on the bottom of the sea, we might realize, as Alaimo (2012, 490) notes, that
from an ontological perspective “there is no solid ground, no foundation, no safe
place to stand.” In a Mediterranean ecocritical framework, which can in some senses
parallel Alaimo’s (477–478) turn towards an oceanic ecocriticism, looking to the sea
and its buoyancy gives us a “sense that the human is held, but not held up, by invis-
ible genealogies and a maelstrom of often imperceptible substances that disclose
connections between humans and the sea.” Rather, the post-terrestrial inhabitants
of My Country “dwell within and as part of a dynamic, intra-active, watery world”

(490). Both narratively and visually, the film focuses on the liquid connectedness
of humans, nonhumans, and the environment across this Mediterranean space. We
see steam rising from factory smokestacks, jugs being filled with water, wastewater
canals, fishermen pouring water over fish. We see rain, tears, bottles of water, vats of
fabric dye, water towers, people washing at bathroom sinks, and most frequently, the
waves of the Mediterranean Sea. We are reminded that we ingest water, that things we
eat move through it, that factory waste is transported in it; it cools, insulates, cleans;
it contaminates, and it kills. Porous human borders correspond to the porous borders
of other creatures; they are the porous borders of Italy, which have become the
borders of the Schengen zone, more permeable for some than for others. They are the
borders of global capital, global merchandise, and global labor. They are the borders
of the documentary film, which flex to admit archival content and unexpected subject
matter. They are the nomadic borders of Mediterranean ecocriticism.
3 Power, Liquid Energy, and the Cinematic Road

When, following the cues of material ecocriticism, we open our interpretations to
the voices of the nonhuman world, and when we widen our critical landscape to see
matter as an eloquent, generative force, we find the cinematic soundtrack and screen
enlivened by a throng of new protagonists. The “material turn,” as Iovino (2012,
450) explains, searches for “new conceptual modes apt to theorize the connections
between matter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures,
and meanings on the other side.” When matter is a text, the “narrative potentialities
of reality” are broadened (459), and so are the narrative potentialities of ‘traditional’
texts, like books and films. These texts become the sites of encounter for conversa-
tions between “matters” of all kinds. In Sicily, Mount Etna, the Mediterranean Sea,
the bodies of fish and migrants all have stories to tell. But in My Country, one family
of substances emerges that fuels Mediterranean conflict, migration, imbalances of
wealth, and environmental hazards perhaps more than any other: petroleum. In the
present case study, petroleum becomes the material text that speaks most powerfully;
it is thus an evocative subject for a Mediterranean ecocritical analysis that seeks to
displace boundaries between the human and nonhuman, self and other.
As a liquid road trip film built on an ENI documentary, My Country situates itself
in a discussion about energy consumption, biopolitical power, and prosperity, and
about how the media frames these forces. Under Mattei, ENI opened a film office in
1958, part of a media strategy that recognized the power of culture to shape ENI’s
mission. The film office drew on Italy’s top talents; the crew for Italy Is Not a Poor
Country also included Tinto Brass, Valentino Orsini, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
(see Latini 2011, xv). Energy and culture thus intermingle, an entanglement that
378 Elena Past
underlies all modern media forms but usually in more implicit ways. After all, as
Nadia Bozak (2012, 1) argues, “cinema is intricately woven into industrial culture and
the energy economy that sustains it.”
As it crosses the Italian peninsula, My Country frames the manifold energy sources
that fuel the Mediterranean lifestyle: hydrological, fossil fuel-based, solar, wind-pow-
ered, human and nonhuman animal labor, nutritional, volcanic. Historic footage
from Ivens’ film shows inhabitants in a village in Basilicata gathered to observe as an
engineer lights a methane plume on fire; later, a truck delivers a canister of natural
gas to an isolated house as a voiceover announces that the availability of energy con-
stitutes a “silent revolution” (Italy Is Not a Poor Country 1959). Historic celebrations
of petroleum are juxtaposed with contemporary discussions of all kinds of energy:
olive oil producers, wind farms, workers at a Fiat assembly plant, a team working to
develop hydrogen power, and crews building commercial aircraft and cruise ships in
Porto Marghera (see ↗18 Material Ecocriticism). Under the images, running through
the film, fueling the voyage, forming the media that documents it, generating its own
narratives, is petroleum (including natural gas and oil), a force of geopolitical and
environmental change across the Mediterranean.
Petroleum is an active narrative agent that can reveal the limits of anthropocentric
hubris and our dependence on the nonhuman world. Oil’s ‘liquid character’ makes it
‘a fugitive resource’: oil and gas are extracted from discrete points, but their extraction
“has a punctuated and discontinuous geographical expression that does not coincide
with notions of national territory or development” (Bridge 2011, 318). Thus extraction
and distribution require complicated transnational negotiations, which can be col-
laborative but are more often conflictual, confounding “notions of the modern state,
justice and democracy” (2011, 319). Following the rhizomatic Mediterranean path-
ways – geological, geopolitical, temporal, corporeal – of oil and natural gas, we find
that Vicari’s ‘road trip’ begins long before the 1959 film, and extends beyond Italy’s
borders. The Mediterranean drilling platforms were an attempt, on the part of ENI,
to guarantee greater Italian energy independence. The petrochemical industry, too,
was intended to change the flows of human movement in the region, as Italy Is Not
a Poor Country promised that industry would help stem the tide of emigration from
Sicily and bring revenue south. Yet a Mediterranean ecocritical lens instead sees, in
Vicari’s film, the interdependence of Italy with its Mediterranean neighbors, humans
with the nonhuman world, and the continual flows that characterize life there. As
screenwriter Antonio Medici (2007, 44) recalls in describing the motives for beginning
in Sicily, Gela is part of an arterial system of submarine pipelines carrying oil and gas
around the Mediterranean, linking the city to natural gas supplies departing from
Mellitah, Libya, where it is compressed into liquid form before making its journey
more than 1000 meters below the sea’s surface. The 520 kilometer-long Greenstream
pipeline, completed in 2004 in an agreement between Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio
Berlusconi, links up with other systems of pipelines extending from Sicily across the
Straits of Messina, into Italy and through to continental Europe. The Greenstream’s
companion, the older Transmed pipeline (opened in 1984), recently renamed in

memory of Mattei, transports natural gas from Algeria and Tunisia. From the Med-
iterranean, oil and gas pipelines carry liquid energy for use in Europe, and tankers
ship it to the United States (Dunford 1997, 142). Though humans and petroleum both
undertake the trans-Mediterranean voyage, the real priorities motivating the 2008
agreement for “friendship, partnership, and cooperation” between Gaddafi and Ber-
lusconi were clear: “fewer illegal immigrants and more petroleum” (“Berlusconi da
Gheddafi” 2008). Just three years later, however, the tables turned when, on October
10, 2011, an American Air Force base in Sicily launched an American Predator Drone
to bomb a convoy carrying Gaddafi (Braidotti 2013, 8–9). In both instances, petroleum
fuels Mediterranean conflicts and crossings, its material capabilities provoking “the
perverse spiral of conflict among civilizations” (Cassano 2012, xlvii).
For Cassano (2012, xlviii), to “demilitarize” identities and instead nourish “inter-
nal multiplicity,” we must understand Mediterranean hybridity and the “complex
and manifold structures, permeable and subject to different interpretations, which
depend, first of all, on the relationship that every tradition has with the environment
that surrounds it.” Engaging ecocriticism to understand petroleum in the Mediter-
ranean as a material substance and as an actor helps underline the urgency of this
vision. The convergence of ‘Transmed’ petrochemical technologies in Gela created a
landscape that passed into the bodies – human and nonhuman, marine and terres-
trial – of the area’s inhabitants. This is true of petrochemical products everywhere;
as Frederick Buell points out, fossil fuels have been transformed in seemingly innu-
merable ways: they “changed into what people dressed in, evacuated into, viewed,
and even ate, not just what they put into their power machinery. Oil thus now reap-
peared as an agent of chemical and social metamorphosis. Bodies became literally
oily” (Buell 2012, 290). In petrochemical establishments in and around Gela, many
substances passing into bodies were highly toxic. For years, an estimated 56 % of
industrial wastewater was dumped directly into the sea; the rest went into Gela’s river
(Saitta 2009, 98). Since 1990, the city has officially been recognized as an “Area with
an Elevated Risk of Environmental Crisis” (qtd. in Mudu 2009, 12): the water table con-
tains levels of carcinogens including arsenic, mercury, benzene, vinyl chloride, and
dichloroethane vastly higher than those permissible for human consumption, and
much higher than in other contaminated areas, even polluted Porto Marghera. Studies
have shown an elevated incidence of premature deaths, cancers, and congenital mal-
formations among the city’s human inhabitants (Mudu 2009, 13–14). For a community
reliant on agriculture and fishing, contaminated ground and seawater and fish die-
offs mean that the toxic crisis reaches local human bodies via a plethora of pathways:
alimentary, economic, and uterine, for starters. Far from being a regional, national or
exclusively human problem, toxicity in the waters (or “anthropogenic litter”) around
Gela intermingles with the wider Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Sea is infused
with wastewater from other industrial areas; host to “poison ships” deliberately sunk
by organized crime to dispose of radioactive waste (see Bocca, in particular 2009);
380 Elena Past
marked by high levels of plastic pollution (Suaria and Aliani 2014); and chosen as the
site for neutralizing chemical weapons relinquished by the Syrian government (“Armi
chimiche siriane” 2014). The effects of maritime contamination are many and signif-
icant. Plastic, for example, one of the petroleum industry’s most prolific products,
can be ingested by marine mammals, sea birds, fish, turtles, and other animals or can
entangle them; it can be a “dispersal vector” for invasive species and bacterial path-
ogens; it can cause problems in navigation and threaten economies based on tourism
and fishing (Suaria and Aliani 2014). Focusing on liquid energy landscapes through-
out My Country reminds us that the trans-corporeal flow of water and toxins in the
Mediterranean, as Alaimo (2012, 477, 485) argues for the seas, “renders the human
permeable, dissolving stable outlines,” and forces us to acknowledge “human culpa-
bilities and vulnerabilities.”
Besides performing as liquid, hybridized matter, petroleum moves through verti-
cal layers of space and, in a parallel movement, geological layers of time. Petroleum
extraction requires burrowing into the earth and below the sea’s surface in a way that
metaphorically recalls archaeological processes and literally unearths the layers of
culture and history that underlie all Mediterranean experience: the “buried civiliza-
tions” evinced by amphorae, coins, and jewels found under the earth and sea (Latini
2011, 66). Buried objects offer material signs of Mediterranean trade routes, as well as
ancient practices of mineral extraction. Beneath these archaeological troves, stores
of petroleum also testify to ancient life. Stephanie LeMenager (2014, 7) highlights a
“category confusion” of oil and life that stems from the fact that petroleum was once
“live matter.” Citing its “deep geologic history as life-through-time,” she suggests that
petroleum “forces questions of how biology, geology, and culture come together to
define what counts as living matter” (2014, 6–7). In the short story “The Petrol Pump,”
writer Italo Calvino (1996, 160) takes this notion a step further, literally liquidating
human life to recall the different flows of geological and human time: “The day when
the earth’s crust reabsorbs the city, the plankton sediment that was the human race
will be covered by geological layers of asphalt and cement, and in millions of years
will condense into oily deposits. For whose benefit, we do not know” (my transla-
tion). Thus using the materiality of petroleum as philosophical agent, Calvino ‘de-an-
thropocenters’ “history” in a vision of becoming-oil that will one day be our story. In
the imagined distant future, Calvino’s playful tale casts humanity (or, rather, post-
humanity) as narrative agent, but reminds us that someday our fate will be to fuel
stories, not to drive them.
4 In Between the Sea(s) Between

The end of My Country takes viewers to Venice and Gela’s sister industrial center,
Porto Marghera. The construction of an airplane and a cruise ship, vaporetti and
bridges, waterways and footpaths all trace lines of connection between Vicari’s film
and Ivens’, between Sicily and the Veneto, from Libya to Italy, between wastewater
and seawater. In the shipyards and on the factory floors, men and women work to
further build our dependence on the petrochemical industry and further entangle
Italy in a globalized market. Yet the film also features people making the tools of
future voyages and future films about voyages, and we see, in black and white and
then in color, the material-discursive pathways that bring all of these stories to our
screen. My Country counters petroleum energy with Mediterranean cultural energy,
even as it acknowledges the degree to which this, too, is fueled by hydrocarbons and
industry.
In his article “Seeing Like an Oil Company,” James Ferguson (2005, 379) points
out that global capital does not “flow”: “it hops, neatly skipping over most of what
lies in between. When capital is invested in spatially segregated mineral-extraction
enclaves, the ‘flow’ of capital does not cover the globe, it connects discrete points on
it.” Yet as the story of Mediterranean petroleum tells us, hydrocarbons do not move
in this way. They flow through pipelines, travel on ships, swirl in oceanic garbage
patches, and fail to decompose in the bodies of plankton, sea turtles, and fish. They
move through geological layers, through political formations; they carry tourists,
migrants, drones, military convoys, and documentarians. Mediterranean ecocriti-
cism, with its liquid focus, responds to an ethical imperative to reconnect the flows of
matter and narrative and meaning. Such a trans-corporeal, transnational, amphibi-
ous perspective can begin to patch the holes left in the wake of global capital, putting
“a stop to the fundamentalism of the continents” (Cassano 2012, xlvii–xlix).
In this chapter, Vicari’s film and the liquid materiality of petroleum offer but one
lens onto innumerable possible Mediterranean ecocritical case studies. Like Cassa-
no’s work, My Country demonstrates the parallels between thinking from the sea and
thinking from the South:
Southern thought is the thought one feels welling inside where the sea begins, where the shore
interrupts all land-based fundamentalisms (especially those related to commerce and develop-
ment), at a time when one discovers that the borderland is not a place where the world ends,
but where those who are different come into contact, and the relationship game with the other
becomes difficult and real. (Cassano 2012, 3)
In the hybridized, posthuman space that is the habitat for Mediterranean ecocriti-
cism, this “relationship game” considers human and nonhuman forces, voices, and
agencies as integral to the conversation. Even across the landmass, Mediterranean
waters flow in the form of maritime winds, rainfall, and tides of globalization, bring-
ing waves of immigration, systems of pipelines, sea plastic, and ultimately cinema
itself. Mediterranean ecocriticism must paddle out to meet the hybrid, more-than-
human others whose complex voices and forces recount liquid stories that need our
attention.
382 Elena Past
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Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus
20 E
co- and Geo- Approaches in French and
Francophone Literary Studies
Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, French and Francophone literary studies have seen the
rise of a number of approaches looking at representations of space and place in liter-
ary texts. Rethinking the relationship between the literary text and the world outside
the text, these eco- and geo- approaches have their own histories, theories, and meth-
odologies. In this chapter, we outline these differences, looking at each approach indi-
vidually, before then analyzing a bestselling French novel, Michel Tournier’s Friday,
or The Other Island (1967), from the perspective of géopoétique and then écocritique.
This analysis allows us to illustrate the ways in which each theoretical perspective is
modified in light of the specificities of the literary text in question. At the same time,
it allows us to point to some of the ways in which French and Francophone literary
studies have developed independently of Anglo-Saxon traditions.
Key Terms: Geopoetics, French ecocriticism, geocriticism, ecopoetics
1 I ntroduction
A wide variety of approaches to space, place, landscape, and nature have been devel-
oping in French and Francophone literary studies over the last decade or so, many of
them strongly influenced by the ‘spatial turn.’ For example, literary geography draws
on landscape studies to examine the representation of a place in a novel or collec-
tion of poems (Collot 2014). Geocriticism, on the other hand, focuses on the ways
in which space becomes place with respect to specific geographical referents (West-
phal 2007). As for geopoetics, it aims to redefine the role of personal experience of
the real world (White 2014) and outline a methodology for analyzing the relationship
between humans and places in literary texts (Bouvet 2011). Following an ‘ecologi-
cal turn’ more than the ‘spatial turn,’ French and Francophone forms of ecocriticism
and ecopoetics align themselves with the critical concepts of place and home. Some
of these approaches work with a notion of the natural world (Schoentjes 2015) and
environmental literature (Suberchicot 2012), while others are developing a broader
interest in post-apocalyptic literature and urban and industrial environments (Post-
humus 2014).
To clear up the misconception that French and Francophone literary studies
remain rooted in traditional analysis of nature as setting or background, we will care-
fully compare and contrast four of these literary approaches – geocriticism, geopoet-
386 Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus
ics, ecocriticism and ecopoetics.1 Each co-author will present the field in which she
specializes alongside a second field that fits best with her area of specialization – geo-
poetics and geocriticism in the case of Rachel Bouvet, ecocriticism and ecopoetics in
the case of Stephanie Posthumus. This organization will allow us to discuss the differ-
ences between geo- (earth) and eco- (home) approaches. But this alignment does not
preclude other possibilities. For example, we could have emphasized the similarities
between geopoetics and ecopoetics that both pay close attention to the role of lan-
guage and literary techniques, in contrast to geocriticism and ecocriticism that pay
more attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts. Or we could have aligned
geopoetics and ecocriticism in terms of their call for a less harmful, more mindful way
of dwelling in the world, in contrast to geocriticism’s outright rejection of ecological
politics and ecopoetics’ implied ecological principles.
These alternative arrangements of geocriticism, ecocriticism, geopoetics and
ecopoetics illustrate the importance of looking more closely at their similarities and
differences. In addition, each co-author will use her respective literary approach –
geopoetics in Bouvet’s case and ecocriticism in Posthumus’ case – to analyze the
novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or the Other Island, 1967) by French
author Michel Tournier. These readings will offer another look at the understanding
of space, place, nature and environment at the heart of geo- and eco- approaches
(see also ↗30 The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes). Finally, we will draw some prac-
tical conclusions about the ways in which French and Francophone literary studies
can contribute more fully to ecocriticism’s current projects as well as to its “emerging
trends” (Buell 2011).
2 É cocritique: A Culturally Diverse, Comparative

Approach
For a variety of political, philosophical, and cultural reasons, ecocriticism remains
less well known in French and Francophone Literary Studies than in American and
Anglo-Saxon circles. The early publication of a special issue on “Écologie, écocri-
tique et littérature” in Mots pluriels (1999) went almost entirely unnoticed, despite the
fact that it included contributions by important French and Francophone thinkers
and writers. One reason may be the particular climate of literary studies in France
where approaches grounded in identity politics such as queer studies, gender studies
1 We will not include Michel Collot’s literary geography in this overview because his work is more
deeply rooted in landscape studies and has only more recently shifted to questions of place and space.
20 Eco- and Geo- Approaches in French and Francophone Literary Studies 387
and animal studies have often been dismissed as less relevant or irrelevant.2 Even
with approaches that place the literary text in the context of the real world, such
as renewed interest in reader reception theory (Macé 2013), there has been tension
around the fact that this reader is stripped of class, gender, and race markings (Moi
2013). Given this climate, it is not surprising that ecocriticism has been developing in
small, often marginalized pockets taken up by literary scholars working on French
and Francophone literature outside of France.
Published in 1999, the special issue of Mots pluriels set the stakes for doing eco-
critical studies in French and Francophone literary studies. In her introduction to
“Écologie, écocritique et littérature,” Hélène Jaccomard (1999, n.p.) states that ecocrit-
icism must have “an eco-ethic” otherwise it is simply another analysis of representa-
tions of landscape, nature and setting in literary texts. The articles in this c ollection
illustrate the ways in which nature has been transformed into environment, a politi-
cal cause around which scientists, philosophers, and literary scholars rally in search
of a less destructive way of living on planet earth. And yet these articles also reveal
that ‘eco-ethics’ exist in the plural rather than in the singular. For example, French
geographer Augustin Berque (1999) carefully distances himself from a strong anti-an-
thropocentric view and develops instead an ‘ontology of human milieux’ Moreover,
the contributions from African literary scholars, sociologists and thinkers create a
portrait of an écocritique rooted in a very different landscape than that of the French
and North American contributors. While asserting a necessary ecological ethics, this
special issue on écocritique reflects the diversity that is at the heart of francophonie
more generally as a political, cultural and linguistic entity.
In the recently edited collection Aspects écocritiques de l’imaginaire africain, Éti-
enne-Marie Lassi (2013) underlines the role that post-colonial studies have to play in
écocritique. In his introduction, Lassi critiques the representation of African tribes as
less environmental and raises the issue of colonial tendencies of ‘green’ initiatives in
Africa. In many respects, this Francophone écocritique can be seen as a challenge to
calls for a global environmentalism (Buell 1996) or a shared set of terms for talking
about environmental issues (Adamson 2016). In the 1999 special issue of Mots pluriels,
the tension is already present between an écocritique emerging from a ‘full-stomach
environmentalism’ and an écocritique associated with a ‘hungry-belly environmental-
ism,’ to borrow two expressions from Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier’s
(1997) Varieties of Environmentalism. This means that écocritique will always carry
the traces of multiple environmentalisms and so may not come together in the same
way as ecocriticism has. But at the same time, it will resonate deeply with scholars
who work on Anglophone post-colonial literatures (see for example Mita Banerjee’s
contribution in this collection).
2 See Gunther 2005 for the reception of queer studies in France and Simon 2015 for animal studies.
In addition to its cultural diversity, écocritique is strongly influenced by a com-

parative perspective. In her introduction to a special issue on “Éco-littérature” in L’Es-
prit Créateur, Lucile Desblache (2006, 2) points out the importance of contrasting the
ways in which ecological concerns are represented in Anglophone and Francophone
literatures. The articles in the collection focus, however, on one or the other of the two
literatures and do not outline the type of comparative cultural approach described by
Desblache.3 One French scholar who has been working towards such an approach is
Alain Suberchicot. In his first book, Littérature américaine et écologie, Suberchicot
(2003) focuses on nature writing and presents ecocriticism as an American phenome-
non.4 However, in his second book, Littérature et environnement. Pour une écocritique
comparée, Suberchicot (2012) works across three national literatures – American,
Chinese, and French – analyzing literary texts in which nature and ecology come to
the foreground. Suberchicot defines environmental literature not necessarily as polit-
ically motivated, but as driven by the question of the natural world.5 For example, in
his discussion of Julien Gracq’s novels, Suberchicot explains that the geography of
place plays the dominant role, leaving human characters to fade into the background.
Using the lens of littérature environnementale, Suberchicot develops a comparative
approach that underlines similarities across different national literatures, leaving
less room for the specificities of the cultural contexts under consideration.
Working from within a French literary and intellectual tradition, co-author Steph-
anie Posthumus argues for an écocritique that is interdisciplinary and politically
engaged, yet specific to the French cultural context. Placing literary texts in dialogue
with French political ecology and environmental philosophy, she outlines the eco-
critical potential of contemporary texts that are not about environmental issues or
texts that may even be highly critical of such issues. She reads these texts in light
of the thinking of Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Félix Guattari whose concepts
such as nature-culture (Latour 2004), the natural contract (Serres 1995) and ecosophy
(Guattari 1989) have been useful for building a French écocritique. This leads to new
interpretations of the ways in which literary texts represent complex human/non-hu-
3 In her introduction to the special issue, she asserts that analyzing the relationship between humans
and the environment in the literary text can often reveal the “cultural profile of a country or a period”
(Desblache 2006, 2).
4 This is quite typical of how ecocriticism has been received in France. Introducing ecocriticism to
a French readership, Michel Granger and Tom Pughe underline the fact that nature writing and the
environmental imagination arise from “preoccupations that are rooted in American cultural history”
(2005).
5 In this sense, Suberchicot’s understanding of littérature environnementale is different from Buell’s
(1995, 7–8) “environmental text” that has a definite environmentalist stance as part of its “ethical ori-
entation.” Suberchicot does take into account this type of text when he considers littérature à vocation
environnementale as a branch of littérature environnementale along with littérature à motif environne-
mental non-spécialisée.
man relationships in a wide variety of natural, urban, industrial, apocalyptic environ-

ments and on different regional, national, transnational and global levels. Without
reducing the literary text to a single concept or theory, this ecocritical approach aims
to place literature in dialogue with other social discourses about nature and the envi-
ronment. This interdisciplinary approach is complemented by a comparative angle
that focuses on the specificity of the literary text, but also on the cultural specificity
of the political and philosophical texts. A French écocritique carefully considers the
role of linguistic, historical, political, and socio-cultural differences, not in order to
reconstruct national boundaries, but so as to better understand the plurality of per-
spectives that will be needed to address a global environmental crisis.
Given the diversity of approaches discussed here, speaking of an écocritique in
the singular may very well be a leurre, that is, an illusion. But it is a leurre that also
announces l’heure de l’écocritique, or the fact that the time has come for ecocritical
studies to more fully emerge in French and Francophone studies. Rather than repre-
senting a lag, the recent developments in écocritique reveal its future potential. Avoid-
ing some of the issues that have cropped up in Anglo-Saxon ecocriticism such as a
focus on one particular literary genre or one type of natural environment or one set of
environmentalist politics, écocritique will be home to diverse Francophone perspec-
tives, literatures and intellectual traditions – Québécois, French, African, Belgian, to
name a few. Moreover, its connections to comparative studies means that écocritique
will work from the fundamental premise of cultural difference to frame the under-
standing of a planetary ecological crisis.6
3 Écopoétique: Place, Aesthetics and Poetics

While écocritique spans various French and Francophone literary traditions, écopoé-
tique is more limited in its geographical scope. It has emerged in France and Belgium,
gaining momentum over the last few years to define itself as something other than a
French translation of Anglo-Saxon ecopoetics. Offering a short overview of the devel-
opment of écopoétique, we will again emphasize the fact that this is an emerging area
that has not benefitted from the momentum of a group of like-minded poets (Hume
2012) or a set of theoretical works by a seminal literary scholar (Bate 1991; 2000).
In his essay “Réinventer la nature: vers une éco-poétique,” Thomas Pughe (2005)
begins to build the foundations of a literary theory of aesthetics that draws on the
ideas of British literary scholar Jonathan Bate, but also distinguishes itself through
6 Ursula Heise (2013) discusses in depth the important role that comparative studies can play in mak-
ing ecocriticism a more transcultural, less monolingual approach.
its emphasis on the act of writing as production.7 Pughe carefully outlines that he
does not wish to close the gap between word and world (cf. Buell 1996), but instead to
better understand the literary and stylistic techniques used to write about nature. He
is thus particularly interested in developing an “éco-logie esthétique” or an aesthetics
that works from a “generalized ecology” in which humans and nature are intimately
connected (Pughe 2005, 78–79). Distancing himself from ecocriticism’s emphasis on
environmentally oriented literature, Pughe (80) calls for an écopoétique that focuses
on the ways in which new literary forms give rise to an aesthetic theory of nature.8 On
the one hand, Pughe’s écopoétique acts as a corrective to a lack of engagement with
a text’s form, structure and genre in some ecocritical work. On the other, it remains
unclear as to the role of the literary critic and writer when it comes to engaging directly
with environmental concerns. Pughe (80) avoids the issue, ending his article with a
general call for reading that tries to “save a world in danger.”9
Many of these same issues crop up in a more recent article, written by Nathalie
Blanc, Denis Chartier and Tom Pughe, as an introduction to a special 2008 issue of
Écologie & Politique on “Littérature et écologie.” The authors first summarize the
history of Anglophone ecocriticism, in particular Jonathan Bate’s work, and then
propose the term écopoétique as a way of shifting the emphasis from an ecological
politics to an ecological aesthetics. They use the term environnement not to refer to
a political movement, but to speak of the context and conditions of the production
and reception of art more generally. What is different about their understanding of
an écopoétique is that it outlines an environmental aesthetics that goes beyond the
literary text. Cultural geographers and not literary scholars, co-authors Blanc and
Chartier bring to the notion of écopoétique a wider perspective rooted in the many
ways in which humans construct place and interact with the world. For example, they
look at land art and poetic performance in terms of the ways in which they inscribe
the human in a physical world of sound and sight (2008, 10). Even if the articles in
this special issue focus on literary texts, there is a productive tension in the way Blanc,
Chartier and Pughe think through écopoétique from an interdisciplinary perspective.
A Belgian literary scholar, Pierre Schoentjes uses the term écopoétique to describe
his work on representations of the natural environment in contemporary texts largely
from the French tradition. In his book Ce qui a lieu, Essai d’écopoétique, Schoentjes
(2015) explains that his approach is different from that of ecocriticism because it com-
bines a thematic analysis with careful readings of literary form, style and tone. He
7 In their article, Granger and Pughe (2005) make this clear by translating “nature writing” not as
“écriture de la nature” but as “écrire la nature.”
8 Citing thinkers like Jauss and Adorno, Pughe anticipates the work of an ecocritic like Timothy Mor-
ton (2007) who is also highly critical of ecomimesis and works to define a new environmental aes-
thetics.
9 Unless otherwise indicated in the bibliography, English translations in the text are my own.
recognizes the important political work that North American ecocriticism has done,
but insists on the need for a less cultural studies driven approach within French lit-
erary studies. Calling for a cosmopolitan perspective that does not get caught up in
the divisions of national literatures, he nevertheless takes up the notion of lieu or
place as the best way to articulate thinking about nature and environment in literary
texts. Moreover, his focus is on the natural environment, rather than industrial, urban
or post-apocalyptic environments, and so follows the patterns of earlier versions of
North American ecocriticism. The influence of ecocritical work on Schoentjes’ (2013)
work is clear in an earlier article, “Littérature et environnement: écrire la nature.” The
first part of the title recalls Cheryl Glotfelty’s definition of ecocriticism as the study of
the relationship between literature and the physical environment, while the second
part of the title echoes Pughe and Granger’s insistence on writing as production.
Offering an overview of many nature-related themes and motifs in different types of
literary texts, Schoentjes challenges the idea that French contemporary literature is
void of issues relating to nature and environment in this article. He also reiterates the
fact that rereading these texts using an ecopoetics lens means paying close attention
to formal and stylistic differences between the texts.
Also a specialist of literature of the First World War, Schoentjes (2009) traces the
marks left on the French cultural imaginary of this devastating military campaign.
Without outlining his literary project in ecopoetic terms, Schoentjes illustrates one of
the major traits of the French environmental imagination: the effects of the Great War
on the landscape.10 Environmental history has been examining the ways in which the
world wars of the first half of the twentieth century marked the physical landscape
as well as attitudes towards the natural world. 11 But literary studies also have much
to contribute. Schoentjes’ work in this area can serve as a starting point for a more
in-depth analysis of the ways in which WWI and WWII played a much more impor-
tant role shaping the European environmental imagination than the North American
environmental imagination.12
To conclude this overview of écocritique and écopoétique, it is useful to briefly
compare the two in terms of their status within French and Francophone literary
studies. Neither of these approaches has seen the success that ecocriticism has in
Anglo-Saxon literature departments and they have emerged in the margins com-
pared to more traditional approaches such as literary history, reader reception theory,
and genetic criticism. This said, écopoétique has had an uptake in the last year or
10 See also Keith 2012.

11 See for example the recent workshop on “The Global Environmental History of World War I in Per-
spective” held at Georgetown University and organized by John McNeill, Martin Schmid and Richard
Tucker in 2014.
12 For an overview of some of the differences between European and North American ecocriticism,
see Goodbody and Rigby 2011.
so with the call for a special issue of the scholarly journal Fixxion and the publica-
tion of Schoentjes’ book. As for écocritique, it has received more attention with the
publication of Suberchicot’s monograph and the organization of different panels and
journées d’étude in this area. While both of these approaches echo ecocriticism’s call
for reading literature in light of today’s contemporary environmental crisis, they also
outline a more culturally specific approach within the context of French and Franco-
phone literary, cultural and intellectual traditions.
4 Géopoétique and Géocritique: A Comparison

Geopoetics and geocriticism have emerged and developed independently of each
other with few connections between them until now. In order to better understand
these two geo- approaches, we will look first at their foundations, then at their fields
of specialisation, and finally at their methodologies.
4.1 F oundations
The founder of geopoetics, Kenneth White, is a bilingual writer, traveler and philos-
opher, Scottish by birth, but living in France for many years now. After formulating
the concept of geopoetics in his nonfiction essays, White created the International
Institute of Geopoetics in 1989. Six years later, he proposed that the Institute be trans-
formed into an archipelago of several research and artistic creation groups. Since
that time, different working groups and centers have been created in Belgium, Chile,
France, Italy, Scotland, Sweden and Quebec. In collaboration with other colleagues,
co-author Rachel Bouvet established the Quebecois branch of geopoetics called La
Traversée, and led the group for eight years. The group has since become affiliated
with Figura, a research centre for the study of literary texts and imagination at the
University of Quebec in Montreal. The Quebecois geopoetics branch is the only one to
have an academic home. Each of the geopoetics centres or workshops has their own
particular characteristics and together they form a network that is called the Geopoet-
ics Archipelago. Growing outside of an academic setting, geopoetics brings together
writers, artists, professors, students, and professionals. To fully understand geopoet-
ics, it is necessary to read White’s texts (Le plateau de l’albatros, 1994) and the Cahiers
de géopoétique, published between 1990 and 2008, as well as the diverse publications
of working groups like the Atelier du Héron and the Traversée’s Carnets de navigation.
But it is just as important to go outside and explore both the external world and the
world of ideas in order to develop an individual and personal relationship to the earth
rooted in mind and body.
Given geopoetics’ emphasis on developing a body and mind relationship to the

earth, it is not surprising that White has also expressed concern about ecological
issues. This concern has, however, given rise to some misunderstandings, as can be
seen in Bertrand Westphal’s (2000, 16) article “Pour une approche géocritique” in
which he presents geopoetics as principally an environmental movement. In reality,
the artist or writer’s role of raising ecological awareness is only one aspect of this area
of research and artistic creation. Advocating for the outdoors, radical critique and
movement, geopoeticians choose to work in the margins: adopting a certain distance
with respect to familiar positions and dominant ways of thinking allows for a new cor-
poreal experience of the world to be lived, and new avenues of creation and research
to be explored.
A more recent development, geocriticism emerged in an academic setting in
2000 at a literature conference entitled “Geocriticism: A Working Model,” held at the
University of Limoges. Organized by Bertrand Westphal, this conference resulted in
a published collection of essays by scholars such as Daniel-Henri Pageaux, Juliette
Vion-Dury, Jean-Marie Grassin, etc. According to Grassin (2000, xiii), geocritics is “not
only a science of the imagination of space, but also the art of interpreting imaginative
spaces.” Compared to previous studies of place in literary texts, geocriticism attrib-
utes a greater importance to the referent, drawing on imagology to study the traveler’s
construction of space. While these studies tend to focus on issues of exoticism and
Otherness, geocriticism calls for “a geocentric approach that centers its debates on
place” (Grassin 2000, 185; italics in original). Westphal (2000, 17) has been the most
active in developing this geocentric approach that he describes as “a poetics whose
object of study is not the representation of space in literature, but the interactions
between humans and literature that are one of the major contributing factors to the
creation and undoing of cultural identities.” In his book La géocritique. Réel, fiction,
espace, Westphal (2007) examines in depth the question of the referent and the rela-
tionship between space as real and imagined by studying literary representations of
different European and American cities.
4.2 F ields
Because White is a poet, the movement has been too quickly associated with ‘poetics’
as a way of writing, as a form of literary creation. Translating geo as earth and poetics
as poetry, scholars have described geopoetics as a ‘poetry of the earth.’ Even if this
is partly true, geopoetics cannot be reduced to this one element. It is important to
clear up this misconception. The suffix poetics does not refer to poetry – even if this
literary genre plays a key role in geopoetics – nor does it refer to White’s particu-
lar way of writing – even if he has inspired others to follow his example. The term
poetics needs to be understood in the broadest sense of the word, similar to what
Aristotle meant when he spoke of ‘poetic intelligence’ (noûs poiêtikos). It refers to “the
fundamental dynamics of thought” (White 2008) that maximizes a human being’s

physical and mental resources, including sensorial perception, emotional sensitivity,
and critical thinking. This is a poetics that “synthesizes all the forces of body and
spirit” (White (a) n.d.). This means perceiving the world’s beauty, understanding the
minute changes in the natural and urban environment, but also creating and com-
posing using ideas, words, images, and many other kinds of material: “Composing
(organizing, giving form to) is another one of the strengths of the human spirit at
its best, when it penetrates, with all the faculties of perception and understanding,
into a larger space-time” (White 1994b). The deeper the encounter with the world, the
greater the possibilities, and the more vivid the ‘composition.’ Geopoetics does not
exclude a priori any form of expression or creation; the dynamic nature of thought can
be expressed through many different mediums such as writing, drawing, sculpture,
painting, photography, on site installations, paths, gardens, musical compositions.
Each individual has a unique way of understanding and expressing their relation-
ship to the world, their foundational landscapes, their on-going research, their read-
ings and most memorable encounters, etc. It is from the alliance between ‘geo’ and
‘poetics’ that a livable world is born: “A world […] emerges from a contact between
Mind and Earth. When the contact is sensitive, intelligent, subtle, you have a world
in the full sense of the word. When the contact is stupid and brutal, you have nothing
like a world, nothing like a culture, only, and more and more so, an accumulation of
refuse, including a lot of ‘cultural products’” (White n.d. [b]).
To the spatial metaphors of world, space, and field, that are all rooted in lan-
guage, we can add the word ‘territory.’ Geopoetics aims to construct a new territory
(cf. e.g. Bouvet and White 2008), a space where each individual can breathe fully,
grow and establish harmonious relationships with others on the basis of a shared
community and project. Geopoetics is a vast field of research and artistic creation
that brings together the sciences, the arts, and literature, in other words, a transdis-
ciplinary field. Research and artistic creation are inseparable, equally necessary for
moving towards a deeper understanding of the world in which we live.
Transdisciplinary does not mean simply bringing together different disciplinary
perspectives from geography, science, literature, philosophy and the arts; it means
creating a place of encounter situated beyond these disciplines. As Basarab Nicolescu
(1996, 66) explains, transdisciplinarity is “as the prefix trans indicates, between
disciplines, across different disciplines, and beyond any one discipline” (italics in
original). Geopoetics envisions transdisciplinarity as a movement towards a “field
of potential convergence arising from science, philosophy and poetry” (White 1994,
27). White has invited as many scientists to work with him as he has philosophers,
artists, and literary scholars. Moreover, articles published in Cahiers de géopoétique
are often more tied to “earth sciences (exploration of the earth, geography, ethnogra-
phy)” (Duclos 2006, 196) than to literature.
Understood as a ‘densification of geography,’ geopoetics attributes a more central
place to work being done by geographers on the relationship between humans and
environment than other literary approaches to space and place. In addition to knowl-
edge about real places, critical concepts from humanistic geography provide impor-
tant tools for analyzing literary texts. This work is framed by what White calls “tex-
tonics,” that is, textual analysis that aims to open up to the larger world: “Textonics is
the opposite of textualism. This latter term is ultra-literary and marks an intellectual
absolutism that wants to reduce everything to text including the world. Textonics, on
the contrary, opens the ‘text’ up to the Earth/World” (White 2014, 108).
Geocriticism, on the other hand, is first and foremost a literary approach, a criti-
cal perspective for reading literary texts. Even if geocriticism draws on cultural geog-
raphy at times, very few theoretical concepts are borrowed from other disciplines.
Intertextual elements in the text require looking at historical archives for example,
or cinema studies or architecture, but these disciplines are already close to literary
studies. Moreover, there is little to no connection made between research and artistic
creation, with the exception of Christiane Lahaye’s (2009) experiment in geocriticism.
Lahaye first invited a group of writers to describe a specific place, and she then studied
their texts using a typology of important spatial figures. But Lahaye’s approach is less
aligned with geocriticism as outlined by its founder, Westphal, because it does not
use the same tools and methods such as multifocalization, that we will discuss in the
next section.
4.3 M
ethods
Geopoetics and geocriticism are very different in terms of the literary genres and
places they consider. Geocriticism was first interested in the study of those human
spaces that have been the subject of numerous cultural representations: cities. West-
phal does however recognize that “geocriticism is relevant when a geocentric and
multifocalized approach is needed. This means that certain thematic places without
a named referent can still be the focus of a geocritical study: a desert, an archipelago,
etc. These studies will necessarily be more abstract and take a more general turn”
(Westphal 2007, 194). In terms of literary genres, geocriticism has been most inter-
ested in the novel.13
As Westphal explains, geocriticism has a clear methodology built around four key
concepts: multifocalization, polysensoriality, stratigraphy and intertextuality. Mul-
tifocalization consists of comparing different cultural representations of a specific
place. While imagology looks at the exogenous perspective, that of the writer-traveler,
for example, geocriticism juxtaposes the endogenous perspective, that of the native
13 One notable exception is the work of Christiane Lahaye (2009) who uses a geocritical perspective
to analyze short stories. Travel writing has also been the subject of geocritical analysis, which is not
surprising given the earlier connections to imagology.
city dweller, with an allogenous perspective, the in-between perspective of the migrant
writer for example. Geocriticism does not look at a single literary text nor at the work
of a single author: “Rather than study an author’s perspective or even that of a series
of authors with the same sense of identity, geocriticism will study multiple, hetero-
geneous points of view that converge on a single, given place, the primum mobile of
the analysis” (Westphal 2007, 198–199). The second critical concept, polysensoriality,
requires looking at the different sense perceptions described in the text, going beyond
the visual aspect that is often the only focus of attention. The third critical concept,
stratigraphy, means the unearthing of different historical and archaeological strata of
the representations of place. This part of geocriticism requires studying the simulta-
neous or successive temporalities constructed by different cultural communities. The
final critical concept, intertextuality, raises the question of stereotypes. Avoiding a
set of superficial images frozen in time, a geocritical analysis looks closely at different
forms of mimetic art, such as film, photography, painting, etc.
Geopoetics initially favoured spaces like margins and natural places. Shores,
forests and mountains played a central role in White’s way of thinking and writing
about the world. But urban spaces have also become an object of reflection, notably
in the work of Jean-Paul Loubes, professor of architecture in Bordeaux, and in the
work of Bertrand Lévy, professor of geography in Geneva. Cities are seen as places
for wandering flâneurs even if urban geopoetics continue to raise some questions.14
The most important literary genres have been poetry, travel writing, short fragments
and non-fiction writing. White often refers to nature writer poets such as Thoreau,
Whitman, and Muir even though he does not use the expression nature writing. The
novel, on the other hand, and fiction more generally, have not been the object of as
much attention.
The fact that geopoetics constitutes a field of research and artistic creation rather
than a critical approach does not mean it does not have a set of methods. Geopoetics
as defined by White also includes critical analysis of maps, landscapes, land art, etc.
But because of its transdisciplinary dimension that opens up to the world, geopoetics
cannot be reduced to the study of the relationship between space and artistic creation
nor to the critical analysis of literature. Central to geopoetics is the personal, individ-
ual approach of the literary critic who willingly follows the text where it leads him
or her, into biology, geography, geology, philosophy, even to other cultures, regions,
places, if need be. The literary analysis of the text is rigorous, but does not erase the
reader’s subjectivity. Preferences for certain landscapes, different personal experi-
ences, cultural and aesthetic filters, and geographical location all play an important
role in interpretation. It is not enough to identify the spatial figures and configuration
14 A conference was held in Paris in June 2014, on the subject of urban geopoetics. A collection of
essays entitled Ville et géopoétique and edited by Georges Amar, Rachel Bouvet and Jean-Paul Loubes,
is forthcoming.
of places in the narrative; it is also necessary to examine the emotional and symbolic
elements that are unique to the subject reader and shape his or her particular rela-
tionship to the world.
4.4 Geopoetics as Literary Analysis
Co-author Rachel Bouvet (2011) has developed a specific methodology for the geopo-
etic study of place and space in fiction, adopting concepts from mathematics to iden-
tify the text’s spatial dimensions.15 Using the geometrical categories of point, line,
surface and volume, this analysis opens up the literary space one dimension at a time.
A geopoetic approach starts by identifying the anchoring point of a specific land-
scape. As the smallest spatial dimension, the point represents the centre around
which the literary landscape takes form. While the frame, horizon line and depth
are also important, these all change when the anchoring point moves. Experienced
through sensory perception – visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and even gustative –
the literary landscape varies with the anchoring point and engages different readers’
schemas. Even if the landscape is a written text, it is absolutely necessary to consider
sensorial and emotional experiences, in short the phenomenological dimension. The
written landscape depends in part on the interactions between a subject and an envi-
ronment, on what Charles Avocat (1984) calls the ‘act of landscape.’ But these inter-
actions are subject to a set of cultural and aesthetic filters that are just as important
as the forms and colours of the landscape’s physical elements. Moreover, future read-
ings give rise to other acts of creating landscape as in the case of young readers who
discover new ways of “seeing” the text.
A geopoetic approach then looks at a second dimension, the line traced by the
characters’ routes. The main character is generally the only one who transgresses
boundaries, as Iuri Lotman explains in La sémiosphère. According to Lotman (1999),
the main character has more room for manoeuvre than the other characters, whose
routes are limited to movement within certain confines. The boundary in this case
both separates and unites different semiospheres, that is, semiotic spaces, spa-
tio-temporal structures necessary to the functioning of different languages.16 Study-
ing a character’s routes entails identifying the lines that cross and re-cross over each
other in the narrative, either when different participants meet or when boundaries are
traversed. The geopoetician focuses on shores, paths, and lines of flight, since these
create the meaning of place and space in the text.
The third dimension that a geopoetic approach considers is the surface of the
map. The reader creates his or her own mental map that becomes more complex as the
15 For a geopoetic analysis of travel writing, see Bouvet and Marcil-Bergeron 2013.
16 In terms of boundaries, see Jourde 1991.
text evolves by identifying the tension between places that are easily imagined and
those that are impossible to construct, by extrapolating from descriptions of natural
places such as rivers, seas, mountains, forests, islands, etc., and by piecing together
the itineraries of the characters whose paths converge and diverge. If we can ask what
history a map tells, as Peter Turchi does in Maps of Imagination (2004), we can also
ask what map the text traces when we read it. A map implies a global understanding
of space, a scale that could be that of a country, a continent, oceans, the planet, or
even the galaxy; but it also implies a distancing movement. This is because the simple
fact of situating a place in terms of its geographical coordinates brings into play the
map of the world we have stored in our memories, more or less consciously, more
or less correctly, in other words, subjectively. The imagining of places that happens
as we read sets in motion a process of mental cartography during which an implicit
map of the text begins to emerge, or more precisely a map constructed by the act of
interpretation.
The fourth dimension that a geopoetic approach looks at is that of volume defined
in terms of dwelling. To understand this final spatial dimension, it is necessary to draw
on Heidegger’s work on poetic dwelling, work that has inspired numerous geogra-
phers to rethink places, practices and modes of dwelling. In his article “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger examines a crisis that is caused, he explains, by the
fact that humans no longer know how to live in the world. He holds that poetry is a
kind of building (“making habitable”) in the sense that the poet’s words send the
reader back to earth, providing a way of inhabiting the world harmoniously. If dwell-
ing is the “fundamental trait of being” (Heidegger 1958, 192), we can ask whether
literary genres other than poetry can be included. Connecting literature, geography
and architecture, we can ask if the narrative can also be considered from the angle
of building or making habitable: “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on
the earth” (175). Literary texts offer a diversity of ways of dwelling, and so represent a
rich source of reflection for thinking about our relationship to the world. We can then
come back to the etymology of the word ecology, the oikos that is the place or dwell-
ing specific to humans, and examine more closely the necessity of taking care of this
place, our environment.
To conclude, it is important to remember that the geometrical terms of point, line,
surface and volume are not to be used as a grid for literary analysis. On the contrary, a
geopoetic approach remains rooted in the pleasure of reading a text that amplifies the
call to go outside, that awakens the ties that link us to the world and that intensifies
our perception of reality.
eopoetic Analysis – Michel Tournier’s Friday, or

5 G
the Other Island (1967)17
Analyzing Michel Tournier’s Friday or the Other Island from a geopoetic perspective
means first noting that the four dimensions outlined in the previous section are not
all equally present or important in the novel. If we consider the main character’s
transformation in the novel that successively highlights different spaces, the most
interesting avenues of inquiry are the map, the landscape, and dwelling. But even
this observation must take into account the fact that each reader will have different
insights so that the analysis depends on each reader’s capacity to recreate the spatial
dimensions in the text. It is quite clear that space is not traversed in the same way at
the beginning, the middle and the end of the novel. Instead, it is measured, explored
and discovered in light of Robinson and Friday’s experiences that evolve over the
course of the novel. This progression reveals different ways of coming into contact
with the world and different kinds of landscapes: the seascape, the marsh/backwater,
the cave, the prairie, the forest, and the sky. Drawing on a geopoetic perspective, we
will analyze the most important landscapes and ways of dwelling in the order they are
presented in the novel.
But first, it is important to map the novel in terms of geographical names and
referents. Recounting the initial storm at sea, the novel’s prologue (in italics) is full
of names of places – York, Lima, the Tropic of Capricorn, the Venturados islands,
the Fernandez Archipelago, Mas a Tierra island. All of these names serve to anchor
the novel’s fictional space in a map of the world. The ship’s captain knows very well
where they are and even Robinson has no trouble situating himself on an island off
the coast of Chile after the shipwreck. What has changed, however, since Robinson’s
fictional shipwreck is that Mas a Tierra island has been renamed Robinson Island,
inscribing fiction on the real world, at least as far as geographical names go. In the
novel, Robinson is constantly naming places on the island – Bay of Salvation, the
Western cliff, the Eastern cliff – and so producing what Christian Morissonneau (1977;
1978) calls “choronymiques acts.” The first name reflects Robinson’s hope that a ship
will come to save him, and the two others the island’s positioning, an east/west orien-
tation common to many cultures. When Robinson begins to explore the island more
methodically, he immediately begins to draw up a map. He notes that the island has
the shape of a female body without a head (Tournier 1969, 47), a shape that prefig-
17 A geocritical analysis of Tournier’s novel is not possible because geocriticism looks at multiple
cultural representations of a single place (multifocalization) and not at one single literary text. It
would have been necessary to find other cultural or textual representations of the geographical space
represented in the novel (l’Archipel des îles Fernandez, île Mas a Tierra) to develop a geocritical anal-
ysis. Moreover, geocriticism is interested in the interactions between humans and particular places
whereas the island in Tournier’s novel is uninhabited before the arrival of Robinson.
ures the island’s feminine nature later in the novel. Later, in his logbook, Robinson
describes the island as seen by other human observers at different viewpoints: “The
island was thus charted by a network of interpolations and extrapolations which
lent it different aspects and rendered it meaningful” (55). Since Robinson is the only
person measuring the surface of the island, he uses his imagination to make up for
the lack of other humans. The need to master space can be seen through the act of
cartography that creates an order for the elements that make up this territory and that
multiplies the possible number of survey points. Mastery represents one of the major
structuring principles in this first part of the novel. When Robinson finds a footprint
on a rock, he takes it as the ultimate sign of possession: “There could be no doubt
about it, no fantasy or mystification: it was not Adam’s footprint when he had taken
possession of the Garden, or that of Venus rising from the sea; it was his personal sig-
nature and his alone, impressed in the living rock, indelible and eternal […] Speranza
bore the seal of her lord and master” (57–58).
Named, mapped, and marked, Speranza becomes man’s creation. From the
mark (footprint) to the symbol (map, names), the signs of the relationship between
man and the world give rise to a geography in the literal sense of the word of writing
(-graphie) on the world (geo-).18 Creating a land registry, Robinson goes even further
in his desire to rationalize, master and classify the space around him: “I shall not
be content until this opaque and impenetrable place, filled with secret ferments and
malignant stirrings, has been transformed into a rational structure, visible and intel-
ligible to its very depths!” (Tournier 1969, 66). At the root of this need to control and
manage everything is a fear of the unformed and the unknown. Keeping “a meticu-
lous chart of his seedings” (158), “the Governor of the Island of Speranza, situated in
the Pacific Ocean between the Islands of Juan Fernàndez and the coast of Chile” (69)
officially announces the birth of his “mandrake-daughters.” Naming, mapping, regis-
tering, inseminating – it is as if Robinson is giving birth to the island itself.
After analyzing the importance of mapping in the novel, a geopoetic approach
will examine the different landscapes and ways of dwelling that appear progressively
in the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Robinson is resolutely turned towards the
sea, the only place from which escape may possibly come. It is no surprise then that
the seascape dominates this part of the novel. The first thing Robinson does upon
finding himself shipwrecked on the island’s shore is to look around: “North and
east the skyline was open sea, but to the west it was broken by a rocky promontory
which seemed to continue under water in a series of reefs” (Tournier 1969, 17). Next,
he tries to find a higher point from which to situate himself: “Reaching the summit,
he found that indeed he could see the whole circle of the horizon – and the sea was
everywhere” (19–20). This panoramic view confirms the predominance of the marine
18 Marc Brosseau (1996) develops the idea of novels as geographers in his book Des romans-géog-
raphes.
element. During this first part of the novel, Robinson continuously directs his view
seaward: “With his back turned obstinately to the land, he kept his eyes fixed on the
rolling, metallic surface of the sea, from which, surely, hope would soon come” (23).
Surface without depth, expanse without limits, whose curves evoke the coldness and
sharpness of metal, this marine immensity appears as a figure of emptiness, an emp-
tiness that must urgently be filled if Robinson is not to be swallowed up by it. It is
the lack of ships on the horizon or from time to time the appearance of a ship on the
horizon that gives meaning to this seascape. Quite the opposite is true of the next
landscape that Robinson experiences: the swamp or backwater that is characterized
by its materiality, its viscosity, its repulsive elements. Attracted like a magnet, Rob-
inson tries to lose himself, to dissolve himself in the landscape’s indistinguishable
earth, water, and vegetal matter.
Driven by despair to the swamps, Robinson submerges himself in the mud like
the peccaries around him, losing little by little his human attributes. This period of
dehumanization reawakens childhood memories, in particular olfactory memories
that Robinson associates with his father, such as the smell of suint in the wool factory:
“I have always preferred the feel of things to their look. The sense of touch and smell
are to me more moving and instructive than those of sight and hearing” (Tournier
1969, 78). Robinson experiences the swamp bogs first and foremost by touch and
smell, entering into contact with the island by way of his skin and his nose, by way
of the senses that are considered to be the closest to animality.19 But as he does with
the seascape, Robinson abandons the swamp. From this landscape, associated with
a form of autodestruction and the abject, he moves on to something more familiar,
landscapes of houses with doors and windows.
In the third part of the novel, acts of creation and construction abound and the
question of dwelling comes to dominate. The first house that Robinson builds looks
surprisingly like a tropical isba (Tournier 1969, 64). This first dwelling has a purely
symbolic role and is not meant to be lived in. It serves instead as a “museum of civ-
ilized living” (65), dedicated to the memory of Western civilization. Robinson only
enters it when he is dressed in his finest clothes “as though he were paying a formal
call on all that was best in himself” (65). Why exclude domestic functions from this
dwelling? Normally, a house serves as a shelter from the outside elements, a place
for routines related to the body (eating, sleeping, washing, getting dressed). Quite
the opposite is true of Robinson’s first home. Purely symbolic and decorative, it acts
as a precursor for the fortified village to come: “In front of the official Residence, the
Pavilion of Weights and Measures, the Palace of Justice, and the Meeting Hall, there
was now a crenelated wall made out of the earth excavated from a dry moat twelve
19 Sight and sound are considered the most valued senses in Western cultures because they appeal to
cognitive abilities and are seen as the most intellectual of the senses (cf. Corbin 1986, 2001; Le Breton
2006).
feet deep and ten feet wide, running in an ample semicircle from one side of the cave
to the other” (75–76). Dedicated to justice, religion and economy, these buildings fill
no practical purpose. They do not however fill Robinson’s need to dwell because
they are modeled on forms imported from far away, from England. Although Robin-
son ingeniously uses the materials around him to construct these buildings, he does
not fully appreciate the value of his new surroundings. Coming back to Heidegger’s
distinction, we can say that building does not always allow man to dwell on earth.
Robinson himself begins to see the gap between his civilizing project and the island’s
resistance to this project; he begins to take note of “other” possible ways of dwelling
on the island.
The first “temporary solution” that Robinson undertakes in his search for another
way of dwelling on the island is the cave. Burrowing as deep as possible into the
cave, Robinson begins his “telluric or foetal period.” Whereas the swamp was expe-
rienced largely through touch and smell, the landscape in the cave is experienced
through silences and sounds. It is then a soundscape: “With my whole being intent
like a single ear, I note the particular quality of the silence at a given moment. There
are airy, scented silences like a June night in England, others with the glaucous thick-
ness of the mire, and yet others that are hard and sonorous as ebony. I find myself
plumbing the tomblike depths of night silence in the cave with a vague, queasy pleas-
ure that somewhat perturbs me” (Tournier 1969, 81–82). Listening to this absolute
silence, Robinson perceives the island landscape, imagines it from the “heart of the
island” that closely resembles a mother’s womb. This foyer of perception confers on
him a great power: that of seeing the invisible and feeling what is in reality far away.
“Around him absolute quiet prevailed” (99): this complete silence allows Robinson
to see in the darkness elements elsewhere on the island (waves, palm trees blowing
in the wind, a hummingbird, a hermit crab, a seagull) and to feel the fresh air on the
shore. An entire landscape unfolds by way of Robinson’s memories and his mystical
union with the rock, the belly of the island. But like the seascape, the marsh and the
construction of buildings, this “telluric period” does not last.
The next temporary solution that Robinson undertakes is that of inseminating
the combes. Walking through these valleys or hollows – an area of the island he had
not seen before – Robinson succumbs to the charm of the landscape: “He was stand-
ing in a gently rolling meadow broken by folds and slopes dressed in a covering of
round-stemmed, pink-tinted grass, like a coat of hair. ‘It’s a combe,’ he murmured to
himself. ‘A pink combe’” (Tournier 1969, 120). For Robinson, the shape of the valley
evokes a woman’s loins. Tournier’s use of the word “combes” (valleys) that rhymes
with “lombes” (loins) is an example of the kinds of metaphors that associate the
body with geographical features. 20 But this is not the only erotic element of the land-
20 Geographers have studied the close connections between body and earth that are at the root of
many organicist metaphors. In Terra erotica, Luc Bureau (2009) examines numerous commonly used
scape: the colour (pink), the texture (soft), and the scattered vegetation (cylindrical
plants shaped like hair) also evoke female sexual organs. Robinson inseminates the
earth, and small plants are born from this union between the human and the vegetal,
mandrakes that he calls his “daughters.” Robinson has become “the man who had
married the earth” (120) and the landscape is transformed because of this union: “The
meadowland drifted away into shadow like a silken cloak fluttering here and there in
the faint breeze. […] A breath of perfume told him that he was approaching the pink
combe, whose soft ridges the moonlight threw into sharp relief. The mandrakes were
now so numerous that the whole aspect of the place had changed” (157).
The relationship between Robinson and the island progresses from “cultivated-is-
land” to “mother-island” to “wife-island” (Tournier 1969, 173). Yet even this stage
during which Robinson develops a more corporeal and complicit connection to the
earth is still governed by a sense of possession. He keeps track of his “seedings” in
the land registry and becomes violently jealous when he notices another colour of
mandrake, a “bastard” child supposedly born from Friday’s “union” with the island.
Suddenly, the intimate connection Robinson had with the island is broken, leaving
him feeling betrayed. It is shortly after this moment in the novel that the relationship
between Robinson and Friday are inverted and Robinson enters into a new relation-
ship with the “other island.”
Examining the landscapes in the rest of the novel goes beyond the scope of the
present geopoetic analysis. Instead, we will conclude this section by underlining the
diversity of relationships between Robinson and the many landscapes in the novel.
This diversity leads the reader to question his or her own relationship to the world and
examine the ways in which he or she forges connections with the mineral, aquatic,
vegetal, animal and human worlds. Robinson must learn not only to live without
other humans, but also to ‘live with’ his surroundings, without possessing, master-
ing, and subjugating, all attempts that prove unfruitful and destructive in the end.
cocritical Analysis – Michel Tournier’s Friday, or

6 E
the Other Island (1967)
As Tournier (1990 [1977]) notes in his autobiography Le Vent Paraclet, he decided to
rewrite Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in light of the ideas with which he had come
into contact while a student of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1949–1950. One
expressions that associate a part of the body with a spatial element: for example, words that describe
a landscape’s contours and forms: a mountain “gorge” (throat in French), a hillside’s knoll (“mamel-
on” in French), words that are used to describe a city (arteries), and words that evoke the body and
sex (tuft, seed).
of Tournier’s objectives in writing the novel was to reveal the fallacy of the idea of
Western civilization as superior to that of so-called ‘primitive’ societies. In the novel,
Tournier reverses the relationship between Friday, the Araucanian Indian, and Rob-
inson, so that Friday becomes Robinson’s teacher after an explosion puts an end to
Robinson’s socio-economic order. Whereas Defoe’s story thoroughly reinforced the
colonialist project, Tournier’s novel reveals the questions being raised about Western
imperialism at a time when formerly colonized African countries were gaining inde-
pendence.
Given Tournier’s desire to rewrite the role of the colonized Other, his novel offers
interesting possibilities for a Francophone ecocritical reading. Friday’s relationship
with the non-human world is clearly demarcated from that of Robinson’s. The reader
is struck by Friday’s spontaneous interactions with Robinson’s dog, Tenn, his upside
down replanting of small bushes, his dressing up of cacti with Robinson’s clothes.
These playful, intimate encounters between Friday and the non-human world nev-
ertheless avoid the “myth of the ecological Indian” as necessarily more caring of the
environment (Krech 1999). Friday does not hesitate to place a live turtle on a burning
fire so that he can peel off the shell to use as a shield. What the novel illustrates is that
Friday’s interactions with nature and animals follow their own logic, one that Robin-
son has great difficulty understanding until he stops trying to impose his colonialist
order on the island and discovers the existence of ‘another island.’
From a postcolonial perspective, the novel does pose some problems because of
the fact that Robinson dominates the narrative voice. The reader is given glimpses
into Friday’s way of seeing the world, but always through the lens of the omnisci-
ent narrator.21 Tournier (1990, 229) recognizes, however, that he would have had to
write a very different book if his aim had been to tell the full story of two civilizations
coming together: “It was not the marriage of two civilizations at a given stage in their
development that interested me, but rather the destruction of all traces of civilization
in a man subjected to the abrasive effects of inhuman solitude, the stripping of all
foundations of being and life, and on this clean slate the creation of a new world by
way of tests, probes, discoveries, revelations and raptures.” In other words, Tourni-
er’s literary project remains firmly rooted in the philosophical question of how the
white Western individual constructs a sense of identity and a relationship to the real
world when the usual social props have been stripped away.22
Another way of reading the novel from a French ecocritical perspective is to
look more closely at Tournier’s own ecological leanings. As Mairi Maclean (2003, 7)
explains, “there is with Tournier an exogamic compulsion, an age-defying receptivity
21 This omniscient narrator is however the product of an author who was deeply affected by Lé-
vi-Strauss’ critiques of the notion of ‘primitive’ cultures and the so-called ‘good savage.’
22 Tournier initially did his studies in philosophy, largely German Continental, and so his literary
texts are often steeped in ontological questions about the nature of reality (cf. 1977).
to the outside world.” In collections of essays such as Célébrations (1999), Journal

extime (2002), Le Miroir des idées (1996), and Petites proses (1986), Tournier includes
many examples that illustrate his respect and astonishment at the richness of the
natural world. While he fully appreciates the beauty of a well-tended garden, he
describes in detail the anxiety caused by the overabundance of vegetation in an
Amazon jungle (cf. Tournier 1999). In this sense, Tournier’s appreciation of nature
reflects a French or European sensibility that prefers cultivated landscapes to nature
sauvage. The novel follows a similar line of thinking with Robinson’s initial reaction
to non-human nature on the island being one of fear and disgust. The description of
his experience in the mud/mire as a regression to a former ‘animal’-like state also
illustrates this notion of the dangers of uncivilized nature. It is not until Robinson
begins to work the island, mapping it out geographically, developing forms of agri-
culture and raising animals, that he calls the island Speranza (or hope). Even if Rob-
inson discovers the follies of this path towards civilization, the novel never embraces
a notion of untamed or savage nature. As we will explain later, it remains committed
to the notion of a mediated experience of the non-human world.
Another side of Tournier’s ecological leanings is his critique of the lifestyles of
modern man in the West today. He compares our destructive relationship with the
planet to that of a parasite who kills its host: “Apparently, the beetle is the only crea-
ture as stupid as man currently destroying the planet on which he lives as a parasite
and to which he owes his subsistence” (Tournier 1995, 19). The image of humans over-
running the planet reappears in another of his essays: “We now know that nature is
under threat of death because of the proliferation of human vermin” (Tournier 1996,
48).23 But very rarely does Tournier integrate an explicitly ecological message in his
fiction. One of the few exceptions is his short story “La fugue du Petit Poucet” (1978),
that describes a hippy, marijuana smoking eco-commune as a preferable alternative
to living in a high-rise, hermetically sealed apartment. Very critical of the roman à
thèse, that is, novels in which the author tries to convey a clearly political message
(cf. 1977), Tournier (1990, 179) instead aims to write stories that allow his readers to
smell “the smell of a campfire, autumn mushrooms and an animal’s wet fur,” in other
words, to write novels that bring readers closer to an embodied experience of the
world. This is clear in Friday in which the body and the senses play a key role. Such
rich experiences of the natural environment can be seen as one possible path away
from a parasitic to a more symbiotic relationship with the earth.24
23 Both of these citations are taken from texts that Tournier published in the 1990s, after Michel
Serres (1980) published his well-known text Le Parasite, in which he fully develops the metaphor of
man as parasite.
24 See for example David Abram’s (1996) argument in The Spell of the Sensuous for a richer, more
intimate experience of the natural world.
Examining a text in light of the author’s ecological leanings is one way an eco-
critical approach contextualizes the text. Another way is to look more closely at the
socio-historical events of the time that led to changing attitudes towards nature and
the environment. Although slightly after the publication of Tournier’s novel in 1967,
the Larzac conflict (1971–1981) represents such a tidal shift, bringing together ecolo-
gists and farmers driven by strong anti-capitalist sentiment. In response to the French
government’s decision to extend the military base in Larzac, mass rallies and Paris
marches set the tone for resistance. Landowners rose up to protect the heathland in
the Larzac, drawing attention to the value of the natural landscape. They eventually
won their cause and the Larzac has come to represent a victory of small communities
banding together to protect the land.
Tournier’s novel anticipates the critique of capitalism and globalization at the
heart of the Larzac conflict. The novel troubles the narrative of Western progress
and civilization by ultimately rejecting the georgic tradition of working the land, the
protestant work ethic of saving and storing, and the integration of Friday as working
labourer.25 After the explosion, Robinson sees the folly of his attempt to recreate the
Judeo-Christian tradition of stewardship and domination on the island.26 To develop
a new relationship with the island, he tries to follow Friday’s lead, but Robinson
is not capable of the same spontaneous interactions with the non-human world.
Instead, he adopts a new grille d’interprétation as the ‘homme-chevalier,’ renewing
his strength every morning with the rise of the sun on the eastern side of the island.
This closed system that has reached its equilibrium and in which the human being
lives in harmony with nature is reminiscent of ecological theories in the 1960s that
embraced models of steady-state equilibrium and holistic communities.27 All the
elements remain in the same dynamic relationship once the system has reached its
climax or stable state.
But when a ship arrives on the island, this equilibrium is destroyed. The sailors
‘pillage’ the fruits on the island, taking more than they need to restock the ship. The
captain’s description of events in the real world remind Robinson that historical time
marches forward in contrast to the circular, eternal time on the island. He is relieved
when the ship leaves, eager to re-establish his sun routine with Friday and the island.
But Friday has left with the ship. One of the crucial components of the island’s equi-
librium has been removed, leaving Robinson once again in a binary relationship with
nature. He considers suicide until he finds the ship’s young galley boy, Jaan, hidden
in the rocks of a cave. With the discovery of this young boy, equilibrium is restored.
But Jaan’s light skin and red hair means he resembles Robinson much more closely
25 See Anthony Purdy’s (1996) analysis of this aspect of the novel.

26 See Lynn White’s (1995) thorough analysis of the ecological effects of the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion.
27 These models are still largely present in Jean-Paul Deléage’s (1991) Une histoire de l’écologie.
than Friday the Auracanian Indian did. This raises the troubling question of same-
ness begetting sameness, creating a closed system that is even less dynamic than the
one of which Friday was a part. The novel ends with the image of Robinson as once
again the ‘homme-chevalier’ basking in the rays of the rising sun.
From an ecocritical perspective, Tournier’s novel ends problematically. The
utopian dream of living on a deserted island far from the rest of human civilization
does not present a viable socio-ecological model. But this reading does not do justice
to the novel’s engagement with problems related to the polis and the non-human
world. As Gilles Deleuze explains, the novel reveals the effects of the Other even if
there are no human others on the island for the first half of the novel. This is because
the Other does not represent a specific subject or object; it is instead a set of structur-
ing processes: “But the other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a
subject that perceives me: it is first and foremost a structure of the perceptive field,
without which this field would not function as it does” (Deleuze 1967, 264). Even if he
is alone, Robinson continues to perceive the world as if there were others around him.
Moreover, he interacts with the non-human world in this same way, organizing “the
Elements into Earth, the earth into a body and bodies into objects” (280).
Tournier’s novel reminds the reader that there is no return to nature in some
unmediated form even if an individual is living on a deserted island (or in the woods
alone à la Thoreau). Before the explosion, Robinson interacts with the non-human
world first as a dominating settler, then as a child nostalgic for an innocent past,
and finally as a jealous lover. These different frames serve as supporting structures
for Robinson’s experiences but also for the narrative development. After the explo-
sion, Robinson no longer attempts to dominate and tame the island, but his experi-
ences are filtered through the lens of Greek mythology and astrology. He describes
the cosmic harmony that he experiences every morning as the sun rises and refers to
the figures of Jupiter, Venus, Lena and the twins to explain the meaning of past and
present events on the island. Moreover, these figures are drawn from the initial scene
in the novel when the ship’s captain is predicting Robinson’s future using a set of
tarot cards during the storm. Narrative structure begets plot structure and vice versa.
In the end, the novel underlines the structuralist thinking at the heart of Tournier’s
literary project: myth and story are what allow us to experience and make sense of
the world.
While such a conclusion hardly seems ecocritical in the sense of closing the gap
between word and world, it can be read in light of a call made by French philosopher
Michel Serres.28 In his seminal 1990 text Le Contrat naturel, Serres (1995, 4) asks how
we can begin to account for the fact that humanity as a global phenomenon has now
affected the earth in its entirety: “At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity,
28 Another way in which écocritique contextualizes the literary text is to consider concepts from con-
temporary French political ecology and environmental philosophy.
collectively. Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is some-
thing utterly new in philosophy.” Serres goes on to examine the ways in which human
history and nature have become more and more bound together with the emergence
of global ecological issues. He notes, however, that philosophy may not be the right
venue for coming to terms with this new humanitary and planetary condition. Liter-
ature can go even deeper than philosophy, he asserts (Serres 1994, 111). This should
give the ecocritic much hope. Even if Tournier’s novel does not offer a narrative about
global humanity and Planet Earth (it predates Serres’ text by almost twenty-five
years), it does relate a similar message about the primordial role of story and myth.
What we now need are new stories, images, and metaphors that will help us imagine
the future of the human species on planet earth, the only home we have ever known.
7 C
onclusion
Our overview of geo- and eco- approaches in French and Francophone literary con-
texts has emphasized the potential of their diversity. Each of the approaches is creat-
ing its own critical concepts, methods and areas of specialization: landscape, travel,
dwelling, and the relationship between humans and the earth in the case of géopoé-
tique; polysensoriality, multifocalization, stratigraphy, and the relationship between
humans and urban spaces in the case of géocritique; nature, art, performance, eco-
logy and place in the case of écopoétique; and environmental issues, cultural differ-
ences, political ecologies, and colonial histories in the case of écocritique. Problems
can of course arise when niches and vocabularies become too specialized. This is why
we have tried in the present article to find a shared ground from which to outline
our areas of expertise, geopoetics and ecocriticism. While each individual analysis
of Tournier’s novel illustrates some of the important differences in the way we read
and interpret literary texts, the explanation of each approach illustrates a common
call for paying more attention to the real world outside the text. While it is too early to
speak of a paradigm shift within French and Francophone literary studies, it is clear
that room is being made for less traditional approaches to reading and interpreting
cultural texts.
To conclude, it is important to ask how Francophone and Anglophone communi-
ties can better converse on the subject of reading texts ecologically or geographically.
It is true that cross-cultural dialogue has been taking place: Kenneth White writes
poetry in English and essays in French, Bertrand Westphal’s work has been quickly
picked up and translated by bilingual ecocritical scholars (Prieto 2012; Tally 2011),
and comparative scholars such as Suberchicot are promoting a culturally diverse éco-
critique. But monolingualism still dominates much of ecocritical work. It is appropri-
ate then to make a call once again for more bilingualism and multilingualism within
ecocriticism. Even though the present chapter is in English, it is the product of col-
laboration between a Francophone and a bilingual literary scholar. Much discussion

and negotiation were needed to arrive at agreements about translated sections. It is
for this reason that we caution against the idea of a global vision of environment and
environmentalism. While we agree that we need more analysis of “planetary-scale
tendencies” (Buell, Heise and Thornber 2011, 434), global has too often meant Anglo-
phone. We need to be more aware of differences at the local, regional, and national
levels when we discuss environmental issues, whether this be something as wide-
spread (and uneven) as the effects of climate change or something as delimited as the
development of eco- and geo- approaches in specific literary studies’ contexts.
8 B
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Elmar Schmidt
21 L atin American Environmental Discourses,
Indigenous Ecological Consciousness and
the Problem of ‘Authentic’ Native Identities
Abstract: One central and actively discussed component of environmental discourses
in Latin America is the tension between the stereotypical representation of indigenous
cultures as essentialized ‘ecological natives,’ and the pragmatic possibilities the ste-
reotype implies for indigenous social actors in the context of political struggles. The
debate is constantly threatened by culminating into an ‘authenticity fallacy,’ which
deprives indigenous communities of the possibility to position themselves in medi-
alized global discourses as actors with recognized flexible political identities. In this
context, Francesco Taboada Tabone’s documentary 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua,
el aire y la tierra (2008) serves to illustrate how the imagery of indigenous ‘defenders
of nature’ can be strategically employed in the particular circumstances of the joint
resistance of several villages in the Mexican state of Morelos against governmental
construction plans, to generate symbolic capital on regional, national, and transna-
tional levels. The film merges an anti-neoliberal, Neozapatista argumentation with
contemporary environmental discourse, dedicating special attention to the creation
of an indigenous, communitarian, and ecologically sustainable identity. Neverthe-
less, the film transcends this ethnically and locally limited identity and converts it
into a basis of identification available to non-indigenous anti-neoliberal movements
on a broader scale.
Key Terms: Authenticity fallacy, documentary film, ecological native, Francesco

Taboada Tabone, indigenous identity, Latin America, Mexico, social movements
1 L atin American Environmental Discourse,

Contemporary Literature and the Critique of
Neoliberal Development Policies
In the multiple and heterogeneous realities and modernities that coexist, overlap,
and intertwine on the Latin American continent, environmental problems and con-
cerns are treated in very different ways and forms, depending on the most diverse
contexts. Ecological agendas in the megacities may contrast with those fought about
in rural areas. The environmental challenges faced by the inhabitants of the US-Mex-
ican border area might be distinguished from those of the Patagonian population,
414 Elmar Schmidt
whilst the mining industry in Peru may produce another ecological imagery than oil
extraction in Venezuela or dam building in Brazil. Environmental issues discussed in
the Andean highlands emphasize other issues than those disputed in coastal areas
or in the Amazon basin. Yet, despite the cultural and ethnical, social and political,
as well as geographical and biological diversity of the Latin American continent, one
common denominator seems to stand out in the public debates about environmental
affairs. In a general situation where massive ecological degradation tends to affect
particularly the marginalized parts of the populations, aspects of ecological crisis
are mainly discussed not only as possible threats to living standards but as serious
socio-environmental problems. Environmental destruction is often debated in very
politicized ways and directly linked to the neoliberal political agendas imposed
since the 1980s, to extractive development concepts, and to economic modernization
framed by the external demands of globalized capitalist markets. The Uruguayan
intellectual Eduardo Galeano, e.g., adds ecological aspects to the arguments of the
dependency theory developed in the second half of the 20th century. He demonstrates
that since the conquest environmental deterioration in Latin America is the result
of the continuous exploitation of the continent’s natural resources for the exclusive
benefits of changing regional elites and global centers of power. In this context of
what Galeano (1994, 13) calls the “desarrollo hacia afuera” (“development toward the
outside”1), he invokes the principles of environmental justice, condemns an “ecología
neutral, que más bien se parece a la jardinería” (“neutral ecology that appears to be
more like gardening,” 1994, 19), and propagates a politicized environmentalism that
confronts ecological destruction as well as exploitative and unjust global economic
structures. Galeano’s writings can also be seen as one prominent example of how
essayistic writing, literature, artistic expression and, more recently, film and new
media, have accompanied and influenced the emergence of specific Latin American
perceptions of nature, environmental discourses and political ecologies. For example,
as Barbas-Rhoden (2011) points out, a growing number of contemporary Latin Ameri-
can authors dedicate their fictional works to the recovery of specific local senses and
knowledges of place and, at the same time, register environmental problems against
the background of a broad range of historically rooted sociopolitical topics as well as
global economic dependencies:
New novels of ecological imagination have appeared in a moment of rapidly accelerating glo-
balization in Latin America. […] New Latin American ecological imaginations instill in the minds
of readers a world with real limits. They emphasize the boundaries imposed by the nonhuman
world on human societies. They draw attention to both environmental degradation and unre-
solved social issues: land claims, indigenous rights, classism, sexism, and ethnic exclusion.
And ultimately, […] authors of ecological imagination from Latin America wield the discourse
of nature as a literary weapon against the homogenizing agenda of neocolonial and neoliberal
1 All translations by the author.

21 Latin American Environmental Discourses 415
enterprises. They craft this discourse of nature in their fictions as an intervention for democracy,
for local knowledge, for human rights and environmental justice. (167–168)
The conjunction of local ecological and social problems with global political and
economic power structures also seems to embed literary environmental discourses
in Latin America into a broader ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Martínez Alier 2002)
articulated from the Global South. (On postcolonialism and environmental perspec-
tives from the Global South, cf. ↗10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies and ↗22
Women Writing Nature in the Global South). As Slovic, Rangarajan and Sarveswaran
explicate:
What is particularly poignant in the literature and ecocritical commentary from the Global
South, though, is the frequent critique of the impacts of global capitalism, a force largely trans-
planted from the Global North to the developing world, usually against the will of the human
population of non-industrialized areas (and, of course, without any effort to consult with the
natural environment). (2015, 9)
From a global point of view, the environmental discourses in Latin American culture,
literature, film, and media produce similar critical positions towards capitalist con-
cepts of economic modernization and development. At the same time, they also
absorb the ecological imagery of the Global North and participate in its constant
development and reformulation from a peripheral perspective, as they appropriate
and modify distinctive elements. Local perceptions, concerns and debates thus trans-
form global environmental discourses, as they adopt and translate them into regional
ecological realities. The heterogeneous realities of Latin America, “the first born
child of modernity (Ashcroft 1998, 14), have, since the conquest, been distinguished
by processes of transculturation in a diversified “contact zone” (Pratt 2008, 7). They
continue to produce hybrid cultural formations and expressions in the age of global
environmental transformation and ecological crisis.
2 L atin American Appropriations of Global

Environmental Imagination
What Heise (2008, 21) postulates as the “field of tension between the embrace of and
the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a plane-
tary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local” can be observed in specific,
paradigmatic forms and variations in Latin America. Contemporary Latin Ameri-
can writers such as Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Gioconda Belli, or Homero Aridjis
draw on the complete arsenal of dystopian and apocalyptic as well as place-based
bucolic and edenic rhetoric and imagery available in current occidental environmen-
tal discourses. At the same time, they reinscribe this imagery in the contexts of the
416 Elmar Schmidt
peculiar historical conditions as well as the hybrid cultural and literary traditions
of Latin America, adopting it to the complex sets of ecological problems of specific
urban or rural realities. The cultural implications of recycling could be mentioned
as another example. As Heffes shows, collecting and reusing the consumer society’s
waste has become a widespread practice in Latin America, but, unlike in the indus-
trialized parts of the world, it is primarily connected to dehumanizing circumstances
of subaltern subsistence and survival. Simultaneously, as an informal practice at the
margins of society, it holds a transgressive, insubordinate moment against neolib-
eral modernity, and, as such, is reflected with new meanings in literature, theatre,
and art (Heffes 2013, 243). The most prominent example for the multiple processes
of how global environmental imaginations entangle with local discourses in Latin
America, are appropriated, transformed, and retransferred, with new connotations,
to global circulation, probably is the concept of buen vivir. As the principle of ‘good
living,’ buen vivir is commonly and congruently defined as an ethics of human life in
social equality and sustainable harmony with nature (cf. Hidalgo-Capitán and Cubil-
lo-Guevara 2014, 26). The concept, on one hand, draws on a wide range of discursive
sources, from Aristotelian thought to aspects of Kantian Enlightenment philosophy
adding positions critical to Western civilization such as Nietzsche’s or Adorno and
Horkheimer’s (cf. Bretón, Cortez and García 2014, 16), from contemporary environ-
mentalism and feminist positions to liberation theology and (neo-)Marxist ideas (cf.
Bretón 2013, 87). On the other hand, buen vivir develops in concrete sociopolitical
situations in Latin America. From very heterogeneous perspectives, political actors
and social movements appropriate and transform the discursive material by rebuild-
ing it on rediscovered – or maybe “legitimately reinvented” (2013, 87) – indigenous
knowledge and traditions such as the Quechua sumak kawsay. Interpretations differ
widely, from the implementations in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia and
its consecutive, highly debated applications to actual social, political and economic
realities in both nations or particular forms of exegesis by indigenous intellectuals
themselves, to readings by anti-neoliberal scholars advocating decolonized post-de-
velopment politics (cf. Hidalgo-Capitán and Cubillo-Guevara 2014). In any case, the
Latin American concept of buen vivir is channeled back to global debates and circuits
of imaginations. Here, it seems to offer a highly successful reference for positions in
search of ecologically and socially sustainable alternatives to capitalist globalization
and a destructive modernity based on the perpetuation of (neo-)colonial power struc-
tures (cf. Quijano 2012). It could be postulated that the popularity of buen vivir can be
traced back precisely to the fact that it is interpretable as an open concept that works
on local as well as on global scales. Moreover, it successfully integrates aspects of
indigenous cultural difference as opposed to non-sustainable industrialized culture
and, at the same time, builds partially on discursive material and a set of ideas that
were already available, e.g., to Western audiences, but are now restructured from a
new point of view.
3 R
epresentations of Indigenous Cultures, Socio-
environmental Commitment and Documentary
Filmmaking
The discussion of buen vivir, thus, does not only exemplify how “the adverse effects of
global ecological crisis transform nearly all national socio-cultural formations, ren-
dering place based narratives to be more ‘translocal’ than purely bioregional” (Opper-
mann 2012, 412). It also leads us to the central topic that is to be discussed in the
following lines, and that so far has only been partially evoked. The tension between
the stereotypical representation of indigenous cultures as essentialized “ecologically
noble savages” (Redford 1991, 46), on the one hand, and the pragmatic possibilities
for indigenous social actors in the context of political struggles implied in the image
of “nature’s defenders” (Gibbings 2007, 257), on the other, is a central and actively
debated component of environmental discourses and imaginations in Latin America.
The appropriation and utilization of stereotypes, e.g., by indigenous social move-
ments, involves the risk of relying on the construction of a “hyperreal Indian” (Ramos
1994), a construction continuously threatened, as the case may be, by the possible
discrepancy between the lived reality of the indigenous populations and its stylized
projection. Discursively contrasted with destructive industrialized modernity, this
projection depends on the maintenance and fostering of an ‘authentic’ cultural dif-
ference. The present contribution proposes the reconceptualization of the strategic
potential of the image of “the ecological native” (Ulloa 2005, 134), while problema-
tizing and discarding the seemingly inevitable presupposition of ‘authenticity.’ I will
suggest the recognition of indigenous social movements as social actors that, like any
other actor in a globalized, mediated world, can, should and know how to strategi-
cally operate flexible identities.
The examination of the argumentative structures, audio-visual approaches, as
well as the ecological imaginations of a representative Mexican documentary film,
Francesco Taboada Tabone’s 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra (2008),
will serve to illustrate the possibilities of (self-)representation of indigenous popula-
tions, the strategic power of global environmental imagery translated to and trans-
formed by local contexts, and the importance of particular regional political con-
stellations and circumstances such as, e.g., a whole range of national foundational
narratives that may frame and embed environmentalist activism as well as specific
interactions between different social movements. Taboada Tabone’s film can also be
seen in the context of the rise of socially and ecologically committed cinematogra-
phy, especially documentary, productions throughout Latin America, proving, once
again, the specific preoccupations of regional environmental debates. (On ecocinema
see also ↗33 PANORAMA: Three Ecocinematic Territories) As common denomina-
tors, Forns-Broggi (cf. 2012, 210–211) highlights elements of environmental justice,
risk narratives, and critical revision of globalization, the focus on the historical
418 Elmar Schmidt
roots of ecological problems in colonization and the persistence of the sociopolitical

power relations it created, as well as the desire to represent a plurality of perspec-
tives including the continent’s indigenous populations. As an initial approximation to
Taboada Tabone’s film, some brief details concerning the director’s work and his own
artistic understanding of the raison d’être of documentary filmmaking shall precede
the analysis.
4 T
aboada Tabone, Mexican Social Movements
and the Political Capacities of the Audio-Visual
Chronicle
Before the release of his documentary 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra
in 2008, Francesco Taboada Tabone already had gathered recognition as a director
with award-winning works on topics related to the Mexican Revolution.2 His earlier
documentaries, Los últimos zapatistas, héroes olvidados (2002) or Pancho Villa: La
revolución no ha terminado (2006), outline an ideological position that combines a
rearticulation of history with critical perspectives on contemporary culture, society,
and politics developed by Mexican social movements. Taboada Tabone expresses
a demand for democratic participation, civil rights, justice, and liberty associated
with the explicit evocation of social resistance symbolized by the historical figures
of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. He thus inscribes his work in the context of
the political discourses of the versatile, multidimensional and socially heterogeneous
neozapatismo movement.3
Beyond that, he situates himself in the long tradition of the Mexican chronicle.
When defining this literary form, Carlos Monsiváis (cf. 2002, 26) resorts to the chron-
iclers of the colonial period, like Fray Bernardino de Sahagún or Bernal Díaz del Cas-
tillo, to identify its historical roots. The genre can be traced back through Independ-
ence, early Republican times and Revolution. It is steeped in varying discourses and
has diverse social functions. From the 1960s onward, it was adopted as a medium
for the critical observation of cultural processes, driven by the desire “to provide an
2 Likewise, 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra was awarded prizes at festivals such as
the Festival Présence Autochtone in Montréal, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, and
the Mexican Festival de la Memoria de Cine Documental Iberoamericano.
3 Leyva-Solano and Sonnleitner (2000) point out that the Chiapas-based uprising of the EZLN in-
itiated the mobilization of various sectors of Mexican society (rural, urban, middle class, popular,
etc.), which share the same Zapatista discourse and symbols, but not necessarily a common concept
of armed resistance. The different parts of neozapatismo civil maintain strategic and decentralized
alliances for civil resistance on regional as well as national or international levels.
ongoing narrative of Mexican society from a perspective that often diverges from offi-
cial culture” (Corona and Jörgensen 2002, 12). Authors such as Monsiváis himself,
with his work Entrada libre. Crónicas de la sociedad que se organiza (1987), developed
a literary form that combined documentation, historiography, and reportage with
narrative properties of the novel, the essay or the diary. While these cronistas did not
pretend to write from a neutral, objective point of view, they redefined the chronicle
as a possible alternative to official interpretations of past and present events. Similar
to the emerging genre of testimonial literature, commitment to marginalized parts
of society was programmatic, and one of the objectives was, and is, to communicate
subaltern experiences to a wider public (cf. Borsò 1992, 89). Taboada Tabone’s work
complies with these parameters, and it could be argued that its audio-visuality in par-
ticular adds a new variant to the chronicle which is by definition, a hybrid form. The
documentary, as a medium of growing importance due to factors such as the budget-
priced availability of video cameras or the internet as an easy-to-handle distribution
channel, create new spaces for the articulation of alternative points of view. Like the
written chronicle, documentaries extend the possibilities for the representation of
voices that would otherwise remain unheard. Thus, the video documentary seems
to be a most appropriate medium for a social movement as diverse, decentralized,
and heterogeneous as the neozapatismo movement. Consequently, Taboada Tabone
appropriates the video camera and its possibilities in the context of a broader political
project. He outlines his approach to filmmaking in the following statement given to
La Jornada:
Para Taboada, los directores de cine mexicano “no podemos darnos el lujo de producir películas
de ficción o de ‘arte puro’; tenemos que reflejar las injusticias del país y denunciar lo que no
denuncian los medios de comunicación. Debemos ser cronistas visuales de lo que sucede y ser la
voz natural del pueblo.”4 (Camacho Servín 2008)
For Taboada Tabone, a film director is not an artist per se, or at least not an artist
who does his job exclusively for art’s sake, nor a storyteller who invents to entertain.
Rather, he should operate as a ‘visual chronicler’ and politically committed researcher
who brings to light to a broader audience what would otherwise remain unseen.
In 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, Taboada Tabone focuses on
his Mexican home-state of Morelos and narrates the resistance of a coalition of several
indigenous communities against governmental construction plans for the region. In
one case, official infrastructure projects for the area include the construction of about
100,000 new private homes and a golf course. According to statements made in the
4 For Taboada, [we] the directors of Mexican cinema “cannot allow us the luxury to produce fictional
movies or ‘pure art’; we have to reflect the country’s injustices and denounce what the mass media
do not denounce. We have to be visual chroniclers of what happens and have to be the natural voice
of the people.”
420 Elmar Schmidt
film, this would threaten not only the villages’ water supplies but the whole local
ecosystem. In a second case, the administration of Morelos’ capital Cuernavaca pre-
pares the installation of a new waste dump in a zone partly covered by forests and
partly used by ejidatarios5 as communally shared agricultural land. The members of
these communities who have refused to give up their lands fear the contamination of
the lands they live on. To illustrate the concerns of the people, as well as the forma-
tion, organization, and demonstration of resistance and the respective governmental
responses, Taboada Tabone assembles an hour of fragments of the material he col-
lected while accompanying the villagers’ protest over several months.
13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra is loosely structured by the three
Nahuatl-Spanish intertitles TOUAXKA NEH NEMILISTLI – Nuestra historia, TIK IN
PALEHUIKAN TOC NIHUAN – Los pueblos se unen, and TLAZOKAMATI – El agradeci-
miento. The film is largely made up of sequences recorded at demonstrations, protest
marches, and the weekly meetings of the consejo de pueblos, the council of represent-
atives that affected villages formed to coordinate joint activities. Furthermore, it con-
tains interviews with some of the council members as well as with affected villagers
and shows the futile attempts to speak to mendacious and hypocritical governmental
representatives. The unpredictable urgency of the situation is emphasized by scenes
of peaceful, everyday life in the villages, contrasted with images of waste dumps and
vast construction areas filmed in other parts of the country.
5 T
he Film’s Discursive Structure: Historic Rights,
Ethnic Identity, Resistance, and Indigenous
Environmental Consciousness
The film’s discursive structure is based on several aspects that interweave and inter-
act during the course of the film. 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra
opens up by pointing out the communities’ historic rights: both water rights and the
fact that the area endangered by the future waste dump had once been declared a pro-
tected nature reserve are traced back to the Mexican Revolution and the presidency
of Lázaro Cárdenas.
Right from the opening sequence, ethnic identity is performed as a further central
aspect of the film’s discourse. Resistance itself is explained and legitimized by ethnic
5 The Mexican system of ejidos, communal land used for agricultural purposes, was established dur-
ing the land reforms after the Mexican Revolution, especially under the presidency of Lazaro Cárde-
nas (1934–40).
difference; it is presented as rooted in indigenous identity and history. Julia Salazar,

one of the members of the consejo de pueblos, explains: 6
Mi pueblo se llama Xoxocotla, aquí nací y aquí nacieron mis padres, mis abuelos y mis bisabue-
los. Todos nacimos aquí. Nosotros hablamos el náhuatl. Nuestro idioma no es el español. Nues-
tras costumbres no es de la ciudad, es del pueblo, porque somos del pueblo. Desde que llegaron
los españoles estamos en lucha. En la Independencia estuvimos con Morelos y en la Revolución
con Zapata. Por eso no nos dejamos.7 (13 Pueblos 3:25)
The fact that this statement is made partly in Spanish, partly in subtitled Nahuatl,
right at the beginning of the film, can itself be understood as a marker of cultural dif-
ference and as an expression of indigenous identity. In this context, the subtitles can
be interpreted as an audio-visual equivalent of the post-colonial literary strategy that
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin specify as “glossing”. The “implicit gap” between the
indigenous original and its translation into a European language produces a “cultural
sign” and “presents the difference through which an identity (created or recovered)
can be expressed” (1989, 62). The villagers’ opposition to governmental construction
plans is thus shown as originating in a tradition that draws on the indigenous resist-
ance against Spanish conquest and on the indigenous support for Emiliano Zapata
during the Mexican Revolution.
Indigenous identity also serves to construct a crucial difference between the gov-
ernment and the resisting indigenous villagers, between a destructive capitalist logic
based on profit and private property and the indigenous, sustainable, and communi-
tarian cosmology, as declared in the filmmaker’s interview with Armando Soriano,
another member of the consejo de pueblos:
Los pueblos tienen que entender que los dueños de las tierras no son los gobiernos sino somos
los pueblos indígenas. Y nosotros sí queremos compartirlas, por nuestras costumbres comuni-
tarias. Nadie es dueño de nada, todos somos dueños de todo. Es algo que tienen que aprender las
nuevas generaciones, porque nosotros no estamos de acuerdo con la propiedad privada sino con
la propiedad comunitaria. Cada quien que tenga lo que necesita. Nos vemos como los pájaros.
No hay ningún pájaro que diga, yo compré este laurel de la india, yo compré esto, o esto es mío,
no es cierto. Cada pájaro se para en cualquier árbol y allí consigue su propina. Entonces tenemos
6 In the written transcriptions of statements given in the film, I will not adjust elements of orality,
like the use of the grammatical singular for verbs in combination with a plural subject, to ‘standard’
Spanish, as they can be seen as representative of regional cultural identity.
7 “My village is called Xoxocotla, here I was born and here were born my fathers, my grandfathers
and my great-grandfathers. We were all born here. We speak Nahuatl. Spanish is not our language.
Our customs are not from the city, they are from the countryside, because we are from the countryside.
Since the Spanish arrived we are fighting. In the Independence we were with Morelos and in the Rev-
olution with Zapata. That is why we do not surrender.”
422 Elmar Schmidt
que comprender la naturaleza. Yo creo que hace falta conocer muy bien la cultura indígena, pero
de fondo.8 (13 Pueblos 15:07)
The statement demonstrates that the opposition between capitalist and indigenous
logic as well as the insistence on indigenous land rights only gains its full effect when
connected to, complemented with, and strengthened by the environmentalist argu-
ment. The film explains not only the communities’ resistance and their grass-roots
organization as based on indigenous culture, but also their approach to environmen-
tal protection and conservation.
6 E
nvironmental Discourse and the Representation
of Indigenous People
For Buell (2001, 27), “the most distinctive ground condition of present-day environ-
mental reflection” is “toxic discourse” (30). The “fear of a poisoned world” (30) is
also one of the common denominators of the public debates on environmental prob-
lems in Latin America, as, e.g., argued by Miller in his Environmental History of Latin
America:
Environmental disasters and rumors of disaster have broadened environmentalism’s appeal

in Latin America, as elsewhere. […] Across Latin America, environmentalism is today present
in nearly all forms of media and makes up a significant part of public and private education.
Nearly every newspaper features daily articles on environmental issues, disasters, and efforts to
save species, and the region’s major television networks carry more programming with nature as
subject than do the major private networks of North America. […] And as environmentalism dis-
seminated to the masses, politics took notice. By the late 1980s, and often earlier, environmental
rhetoric became an increasingly common component of political platforms. (Miller 2007, 211)
As Buell explains, toxic discourse mostly appears linked to images of lost pastoral
peace and harmony when gaining its full strategic effect:
[…] it makes sense for toxic discourse to enlist pastoral support. It refocuses and democratizes
the pastoral ideal: a nurturing space of clean air, clean water, and pleasant uncluttered sur-
roundings that ought to be one’s by right. Disenchantment from the illusion of the green oasis is
8 “The people must understand that it is not the government who owns the land but us the indige-
nous people. And we want to share it, because of our communitarian customs. Nobody owns nothing,
we all own everything. That is something the new generations have to learn, because we do not agree
with private property but with communal property. Everybody should have what he needs. We see
ourselves like birds. There is no bird that says, I bought this tree, I bought that, or this is mine, for
sure. Every bird settles in any tree and gets what he needs. That is why we have to understand nature.
I think the indigenous culture has to be recognized very profoundly.”
accompanied or precipitated by totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetra-
tion. (Buell 2001, 38)
In Western, i.e., US and European discourses on environmental protection, indige-

nous people are allocated the role of abstract inhabitants of that lost green oasis.
Drawing on the stereotype of the ‘noble savage’ available to collective imagination
since the times of Rousseau, the “ecologically noble savage” (Redford 1991, 46) pro-
vides Western imagination with a discursive figure onto which environmentalist prin-
ciples can be projected: “Native people in general, and Native Americans in particu-
lar, came to be widely viewed as ‘natural conservationists’ who use environmental
resources in ways that are nondestructive, sustainable, and mindful of the effects
on future generations” (Conklin and Graham 1995, 697). This discursive figure gains
its effect particularly through being employed as the antipode to Western concepts
of progress, profit, and exploitation. Gibbings explains the function of the strong
emphasis on the notions of local knowledge, community, and place in this dualism:
Local systems of knowledge ostensibly are based on sustainability, harmony, and reciprocity
with nature, whereas Western society is destructive, exploitative and patriarchal. Far from defin-
ing a negative relation to modernity, however, community is defined by the failure of modernity,
or what modernity lacks. Therefore, for environmentalist critics of modernity and development,
community and locality become an alternative and sustainable space, resistant to colonialism,
the state, capitalism, and ecological domination. Identities of “dwelling-in-place” and belonging
to community thus become privileged actors in the saga of environmentalist destruction and
salvation. (Gibbings 2007, 259)
Environmental discourse tends to include indigenous people in an idealized way, as

the inhabitants of a pastoral idyll. As Gibbings indicates, this virtual antithesis of
the contaminated world has to be understood as a highly politicized, symbolic place.
With its alternative concepts of community and place-bound identity, it serves as a
canvas for the projection of industrialized societies’ longings.
In Taboada Tabone’s 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, however, the
indigenous protagonists seem to take on a much more precise function. The villages,
fields and valleys they long to protect maintain their symbolic status as an alternative
to capitalist, non-sustainable politics and economy. Nevertheless, within the film’s
Neozapatista discourse, places and protagonists are imbued with new meaning. They
appear to be part of the social movement’s permanent process of constructing and
negotiating an identity as a heterogeneous “comunidad de resistencia” (“resistance
community”) (Gadea 2002, 69). This new symbolic place is not located outside of the
movement’s realms, as an abstract canvas. Rather, its indigenous inhabitants are
themselves displayed as protagonists and an integral part of the movement, with a
particular environmentalist agenda. Romero Navarrete underlines that civil protest,
social resistance and contemporary Mexican environmental discourse tend to inter-
lace as
424 Elmar Schmidt
un activismo ambientalista integrado por ciudadanos cuyo origen es sumamente heterogéneo.

Campesinos indígenas y no indígenas, amas de casa, usuarios de servicios urbanos, líderes pop-
ulares, académicos, jóvenes estudiantes, todos ellos bajo el fin común de llevar al centro del
debate la relación: empleo de los recursos naturales, mercado y pobreza y, como una consecuen-
cia, a la democracia.9 (Romero Navarrete 2008, 164)
Before returning to a more detailed analysis of the film’s approach to the creation of a
common identity for Neozapatista, anti-neoliberal resistance, I will exemplify how it
performs a particular environmental discourse by taking a closer look at a pertinent
set of sequences. Its central position as the narrative climax of the film underlines its
importance and persuasive potential.
First, we are shown images of a paradisiacal place, which apparently is one of the
threatened areas of land the resisting indigenous communities are fighting for. We
see trees, waterfalls and people in a peaceful setting on a riverside. We are presented
with close-up shots of plants and animals, such as fish, crabs, and iguanas. Even-tem-
pered, somewhat sad music emphasizes the harmony of the place.
Fig. 1: 13 Pueblos en
defensa del agua, el
aire y la tierra (44:18)
Then subtitles are blended in to point out that some of the animals are endangered
endemic species. The scene might as well be taken from a TV documentary on a wild-
life reserve, and argumentative patterns seem to work in full accord with Western
9 “[…] an environmentalist activism formed by citizens with very heterogeneous backgrounds. Indig-
enous and non indigenous peasants, housewives, users of urban services, popular leaders, academ-
ics, young students, all of them with the common goal to bring to the center of the debate the con-
nection between the use of natural resources, market and poverty, and in consequence, democracy.”
environmental discourse, as the images of the threatened idyll are confronted with
the evocation of environmental destruction.
Thereafter the inter-title TLAZOKAMATI – El agradacemiento is blended in to indicate

once more the indigenous context and to initiate the next sequence, in which we are
shown public addresses given by the villagers’ representatives, and rituals alongside
the banks of several of the region’s water wells. In the first scene, Saúl Roque Morales
from the village’s council of representatives makes the following statement:
El día de hoy estamos iniciando un recorrido a los manantiales de nuestro estado […]. A la Madre
Tierra, estamos con ella. Le mandamos que se revoquen todas las concesiones y permisos a
proyectos de cualquier índole, que afecten contra la seguridad, salud y el medio ambiente de los
Morelenses.10 (13 Pueblos 45:35)
During the whole sequence, people are shown wearing traditional garments and
costumes, beating the drums, performing dances, saying prayers – again partly in
Spanish, partly in Nahuatl – and a variety of oblations are offered to the sagrada
aguita, the holy water.
10 “Today we start a round trip to the wells of our state […]. To Mother Earth, we are with her. We
demand the abrogation of all concessions and permissions for any kind of projects that affect the
security, health and environment of the people of Morelos.”
426 Elmar Schmidt
Three important aspects can be observed in the sequence. The first is the emotion-
ally captivating presentation of the pastoral idyll, the paradisiacal, untouched but
threatened place. The second is the introduction of the stylistic means and patterns
of semi-scientific wildlife documentaries to call up the recipients’ prior viewing expe-
riences with the genre and to confer upon the sequence a rational quality in addition
to its ideological content. The importance of scientific grounding of environmental
argumentation is explained by Conklin:
One of environmentalism’s major strengths is its grounding in science, a system of knowledge

with claims to authority acknowledged by a large portion of the world’s public and the institu-
tions of nation-states and global capitalism. As both a knowledge system and a political force,
science has many advantages, including its goal of seeking empirical truths, its ability to change
and adapt as new information comes to light, and its partial independence from political struc-
tures and state institutions. […] Scientific knowledge has become a powerful tool for local groups
attempting to resist top-down development schemes and outsider’s claims on local natural
resources. (2006, 166)
The third factor is the representation of indigenous environmental consciousness.

The environmental discourse underlying the first sequence of images showing a
threatened environment is complemented by images of what seems to be the indig-
enous community of the historically and culturally legitimized “nature’s defenders”
(Gibbings 2007, 257). In the film, the imagined community of the ‘ecologically noble
savage’ enjoying the green oasis seems to be as present as in Western imagination, but
with a different function within the parameters of toxic discourse. Here the rhetoric of
the ‘dwelling-in-place-identity’ of the ‘ecologically noble savage’ is not only imbued
with the promise of an unpolluted refuge from contamination. Far from bearing a mere
metonymic significance, it serves as a concrete location of the forces of active struggle
against the neoliberal political and economic system. Taboada Tabone’s environmen-
tal argument opens up the gates of the green oasis, hauls out the ‘ecologically noble
savage’ and incorporates it in the construction of a new strategic identity of political
resistance. In this new context, an extended concept of ecological identity is created
and made available for adoption not only by members of indigenous communities,
but also by non-indigenous citizens associated with neozapatismo, as an expression
of discontent with non-sustainable and socially unjust politics.
7 I ndigenous Environmentalism and the Construc-

tion of an Identity for Anti-Neoliberal Resistance
Yashar indicates that the category of ‘Indianness’ itself, as the fundamental common
denominator of supra-regional, pan-indigenous movements has never been
a natural category. It is a category imposed by colonial powers; it does not recognize the diver-
sity (and at times historical animosity) among indigenous communities. To forge an indigenous
movement in the contemporary era, activists had to convince people to expand their self-identi-
fication from Quichua, or Shuar, or Totzil or something else to Indian. This was not a given. And
in the process of organizing and protesting, those identities, interests and preferences were open
to further change. (Yashar 2005, 10)
In 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, the expansion from local to trans-
national indigenous identification is explicitly performed in speeches and rituals,
when the resisting villagers receive groups of delegates from indigenous movements
from all over the Americas (15:30). This can be described as an instance of what criti-
cal analysis has specified as the re-ethnicization of the political field in Latin America
since the 1970s and 1980s. The subsequent step in this development was the merging
of indigenous with other subaltern social movements. The shared ground for the redef-
inition of goals, strategies, and alliances of indigenous and other social movements
was the transition from authoritarian to neoliberal forms of Latin American govern-
mental organization (cf. Postero and Zamosc 2004, 21). The recognition of a common
objective and the joint struggle against neoliberalism brought with it new possibilities
to cooperate with other social and political actors, the readjustment of organizational
structures and, consequently, the strengthening of the movements’ potentials for col-
lective identification (cf. Johnston and Almeida 2006, 15). Kaltmeier points out that in
this new situation, on one hand, ethnicity plays an ever more important role while,
on the other hand, the distinctions between different social movements tend not to
be geared as much to ethnic aspects. In the context of anti-neoliberal resistance,
indigenous movements ground their existence on the interpretation of indigenous
cultures in opposition to neoliberal discourse (cf. Kaltmeier 2007, 204). With reference
to Ramirez-Voltaire (2004), Kaltmeier (2007) explains that, while indigenous move-
428 Elmar Schmidt
ments forge new alliances with other social movements, they introduce into these
coalitions a new paradigm for subaltern self-identification. Now, ‘being indígena’
does not refer anymore to an exclusively ethnic identity, but has become synonymous
of a cultural alternative to neoliberalism and subaltern resistance in general (2007,
204). In other words, the dissolution of the boundaries between different subaltern
groups has led to a regrouping of dissident forces and, at the same time, to the pro-
duction of new meanings. Local concerns mix with national and transnational ones,
and are argumentatively backed by an explicit reference to indigenous identity. The
new rhetorical strategies, now legitimized by the construction of cultural difference
between a supposed indigenous and a capitalist perception of the world, are accessi-
ble to the whole social movement. In the case of Mexican neozapatismo, Gadea (2000,
63) confirms that “el movimiento introduce un debate político y cultural que lo man-
tendrá en ‘conexión’ con otros sujetos colectivos desde una identidad que trasciende
lo puramente indígena, pero que incuestionablemente parte de ella.”11
In the process of the construction of an expanded identity of resistance, envi-
ronmentalism can be employed as a decisive unifying element. As one of the central
aspects of social and political debates of the twenty-first century, it is – as we have
seen – exceedingly persuasive and basically immune to attack because of its scientific
rather than limited ideological approach. It is capable of serving as a rallying point for
the most diverse social actors:
Identities, commitments, and communities are constructed through practice, in the performance
of behavior, rituals, and identifying markers. Environmentalism offers a host of practices for
communicating individual values, identity, and affiliation with others. […] Environmentalism
offers a language, concepts, and tangible forms of action to express cultural critique and assert
moral agency and identity. Its ethical dimensions make it compatible with many other social
movements concerned with human rights and social justice. (Conklin 2006, 168)
In 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, Taboada Tabone apparently

appropriates environmentalism’s possibilities to broaden anti-neoliberal protest.
Drawing on Neozapatista discourses, he combines the presentation of the communi-
ties’ resistance against environmental contamination with multiple references to the
Mexican Revolution, to revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, and to the possibilities
of a new uprising of the discontented Mexican people. Throughout the film Taboada
Tabone insists on the shared history, ideology, enemy, and political goal of the indig-
enous communities and the other sectors of the social movement. Taboada Tabone
portrays an indigenous identity consisting of cultural difference, resistance, and envi-
ronmental consciousness, and merges it with Neozapatista, anti-neoliberal protest to
11 “[…] the movement introduces a political and cultural debate that keeps it in ‘connection’ with
other collective subjects from an identity that transcends the purely indigenous, but unquestionably
originates from it.”
construct a new strategic identity of common resistance. This becomes evident, e.g.,
in the thematic framings at the beginning and at the end of the documentary, where
the local concerns of the inhabitants of the 13 pueblos are extended to a national level.
The film opens with the introductory written words: “En el futuro las guerras ya no
se pelearán por el petróleo, sino por el agua. En México esa guerra ya comenzó.”12
Then follow recordings from a protest march that turns into a street battle between
the protesters and federal police forces. The documentary thus not only ties in with
debates actually held in the Mexican public sphere concerning, e.g., the legality of
the privatization of water supplies. It also evokes images that are not explicitly tied
to local events from Morelos, and creates parallels to other, similar incidents, e.g.,
the protests in Atenco summarized in another contemporary documentary, Nicolás
Défossé’s and Mario Viveros’ Romper el cerco (2007).
Towards the end of 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, we are shown
images from another demonstration. The event closes with the singing of the Mexican
national anthem, which – with its pledge to stand up against all enemies that try to
rob the soil of the Mexican people – is now interpreted as a justification for the resist-
ance against the construction plans and the building of the waste dump: “Más si osare
un extraño enemigo / profanar con su planta tu suelo / piensa ¡oh Patria querida!
que el cielo / un soldado en cada hijo te dio”13 (56:50). The montage concludes with
comments from each of the central spokespersons that had been introduced during
the course of the film. Moreover, it is one of the very few times that Taboada Tabone
is personally present.14 From an off-camera position, he initiates a conversation by
asking counselor Armando Soriano a direct question:
– ¿Usted cree que vamos a hacer una revolución en México?

– Creo que se están dando las condiciones, ¿no? Creo que se están dando las condiciones, pero
tenemos una mentalidad cerrada de los panistas y ni modo, ¿no? Si no se abran, bueno, cama-
radas, los pueblos tienen que llegar a rescatar sus derechos, y no vemos los caminos legales
para llegar a rescatar a sus derechos, entonces nos vamos a buscar otro camino, ¿no? La con-
stitución lo dice, pues. El pueblo tiene en todo momento el derecho de modificar o alterar el tipo
de gobierno que mal le convenga, el pueblo, caramba, artículo 39.15 (13 Pueblos 56:55)
12 “In the future, wars will not be fought for oil anymore, but for water. In Mexico, this war has
already begun.”
13 “But if some enemy outlander should dare / to profane your ground with his sole / think, oh be-
loved Fatherland! that heaven / has given you a soldier in every son.”
14 In another sequence, he appears for a very short moment as part of an audience at a meeting.
15 “– Do you think we will make a revolution in Mexico? – I think the conditions are being given, no?
I think the conditions are being given, but we have the closed mentality of the PAN party, so there is
no way. If they do not open up themselves, the people have to recover their rights, and we do not see
the legal ways to recover their rights, so we will look for other ways, no? It is in the constitution. At
any moment, the people have the right to modify or change the type of government that does not suit
them, article 39.”
430 Elmar Schmidt
The Mexican Revolution, as another important lieu de mémoire of Mexican collective

consciousness, is mentioned again at the end of the film, in two more statements by
Armando Soriano and Julia Salazar:
Y además, acuérdense que ya falta poco para que se cumplan los cien años que ha sido la Revolu-
ción, y los 200 que ha sido la guerra de la Independencia. Acuérdense también que los pueblos
no nos olvidamos del papel que nos corresponde hacer.16 (58:55)
Por eso le decimos al gobierno: si va a seguir destruyendo nuestra tierra, los pueblos nos vamos
a alzar. Porque Zapata desde arriba ve todo, está con nosotros y la lucha de los trece pueblos,
que ya no somos trece, sino todo Morelos, por eso nos llamamos hoy ‘el consejo de pueblos.’ Esta
lucha la vamos a ganar, y quien nos va a agradecer son los que vienen. Porque les vamos a dejar
un territorio limpio, sano, porque la lucha no es contra nadie. Es solo para defender el agua, el
aire y la tierra.17 (1:00:55)
As we can see, the film invokes three of the most prominent national symbols – the
national anthem, the constitution, and the Revolution – to back the protest, which
thus becomes metonymic for the concerns and the fight for the rights of all Mexicans.
This finally leads me to discuss the indigenous communities’ own role in fashion-
ing this strategic identity and to ask whether indigenous populations play an active
role, or whether they are passively functionalized by social movements to improve the
positions of the latter in political negotiations.
8 I ndigenous Participation in Shaping Environ

mental Discourse
The practice of incorporating an imagined indigenous subject in political discourse
certainly has historical roots in Latin America. Since the very beginning of the con-
quest an imagined indigenous subject has been part of political strategies, and the
power to interpret that image has usually been of utmost importance in political dis-
courses. Ethnicity has, in one way or another, by means of inclusion or exclusion of
16 “Also remember that there is little time left until the hundredth anniversary of the revolution and
the 200th of the Independence. Remember as well that we the people do not forget our corresponding
part.”
17 “That is why we say to the government: if you keep on destroying our land, we the people will
rise up. Because Zapata sees all from above, he is with us und the struggle of the thirteen villages,
which are not thirteen anymore, but all of Morelos, that is why today we call ourselves ‘the people’s
council.’ We will win this fight and the ones to come will thank us. Because we will leave them a clean
and healthy territory, because the struggle is not against anyone. It is just to defend the water, the air
and the land.”
indigenous components, continuously been used as a point of reference in the intel-

lectual debates concerning Latin American identity. But what is characteristic of the
contemporary environmental discourse is that indigenous communities and their
representatives now do not just have the possibility to position themselves in this
discourse, but actually participate in shaping it. The appearance of ‘toxic discourse’
in transnational and national political fields roughly coincided with a change in rural
development politics throughout Latin America:
Indigenous peoples and campesinos are no longer the objects of the national modernization
projects that sought to transform them into modern citizens and proletarians for the industrial
state in earlier times up until roughly the 1970s. It is the resource-rich lands they live on, not the
people themselves, that have become the object of development. Indigenous lands are integral
to the economic strategies of nation-states attempting to survive in the global marketplace, and
this fact has transformed social movements. For example, peasants around the world have recast
‘red’ struggles, demanding a more equitable distribution of state resources, into ‘green’ ones that
access international environmentalist resources to protect lands. (Doane 2007, 453)
Well aware of the symbolic capital18 of the role that was assigned to them as ‘ecolog-
ically noble savages’ inhabiting the lost green oasis, indigenous movements adopt
“the well-developed symbolic toolkit of the environmental movement” (Doane 2007,
452). If we take into account that indigenous communities, just like any other social
actor, “create, maintain, and modify collective identities in the face of changing
social, political, and economical circumstances” (Kraay 2007, 1), we can conclude that
indigenous environmentalist identities were deliberately fashioned to be employed in
the struggles for indigenous land rights, access to natural resources, and cultural or
political self-determination. Ulloa (2005, 54) states that “an ecological identity has
been conferred on indigenous peoples who, at the same time, have contributed to the
existence of that identity by reaffirming their identity, practices and conceptions in
its terms.” In this context, the image of “the ecological native is not only a stereotype,
but a useful and effective means of indigenous self-representation in non-indigenous
arenas” (134). Moreover, their capacity to orchestrate ethnicity strategically demon-
strates that indigenous social actors are not only very well aware of the global rules of
mediated negotiation of norms and values, but that the participation in this negotia-
tion itself has become an integral factor of indigenous identities.
If “expressions of identity are flexible, strategic, and formulated in relationship
to both historical and contemporary constraints and opportunities” (Doane 2007,
452), it can be argued that 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra serves as a
platform for such a strategically defined indigenous identity. The indigenous commu-
nities appropriate environmental discourse by employing “self-stylized representa-
18 Conklin and Graham (1995, 696) introduce Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic capital’ into the study
of the construction of the ‘ecologically noble savage.’
432 Elmar Schmidt
tion as […] ‘nature’s defenders’” (Gibbings 2007, 257). Nevertheless, the appropria-
tion and strategic utilization of the ‘ecological native’ image also involves the risk of
producing an all-too-wide gap between indigenous everyday reality and what Ramos
(1994, 161) calls the ‘hyperreal Indian,’ the projection and “model that by anticipa-
tion replaces the lived experience of indigenous peoples,” in the sense of Baudril-
lard’s simulacrum.19 If reality cannot meet the high expectations towards the “ethical
hologram” (162) of the upright and morally untouchable indigenous steward of the
environment, the produced symbolic capital and the formerly forged alliances will
probably be threatened to erode. However, one might suppose that this risk is not as
present on a national level as on a transnational one, seeing as, e.g., living standards,
political experiences, and visions for the social future between the involved actors
are not as different. In 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, some of
the evoked common denominators are – as we have seen – Mexican revolutionary
history, its martyr Emiliano Zapata, and the shared experience of corrupt govern-
mental policies. Thus, local interests and national anti-neoliberal protest merge and
mutually strengthen each other. On the one hand, markers of cultural difference, like
the sequences in Nahuatl that require Spanish subtitles, or the components of indig-
enous ritual and spirituality, are displayed in accordance with patterns of strategic
essentialism. This way, they increase indigenous impact on environmental discourse,
where
native people are treated not as peripheral members whose inclusion requires shedding their
own traditions but as paradigmatic exemplars of the community’s core values. Indigenous
people are natural partners in the global, ecological imaginary because of – not in spite of – their
cultural difference. (Conklin and Graham 1995, 697)
On the other hand, the symbolic capital of imagined indigenous environmental con-
sciousness, now conferred to anti-neoliberal protest, offers a shared ground for iden-
tification, a means to express disapproval with capitalist logic, and an internationally
audible articulation of discontent.
9 C
onclusions: Indigenous Identity, Ecological
Symbolic Capital and the ‘Authenticity Fallacy’
In his documentary 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, Francesco
Taboada Tabone merges environmentalist and anti-neoliberal, Neozapatista dis-
courses. The film portrays and performs what Leyva-Solano and Sonnleitner (2000,
19 Ramos refers to Baudrillard 1983, 4.

174) refer to as strategic alliances between different sectors of Mexican society.

Starting from a local conflict in Morelos between indigenous campesinos and the
regional government, environmentalism as well as the Neozapatista reappropriation
of national icons of the Mexican Revolution serve to build a symbolic bridge to the
national and international audience. Indigenous identity is strategically employed to
strengthen the film’s claims. The cultural difference between indigenous cosmology
and capitalist economy is integrated into the environmentalist argumentation. At the
same time, it is converted into a platform for identification that is available to non-in-
digenous anti-neoliberal resistance so as to emphasize that the difference in question
is not so much an ethnical, but rather an ethical one. Local indigenous voices and
social critique on a national level thus mutually reinforce each other’s standpoints.
It can be argued that it is this mutuality which enables the film to construct an essen-
tialized image of ‘nature’s defenders,’ while it avoids selling a ‘hyperreal hologram’ of
its indigenous protagonists. Rather, it activates, and plays with, the spectators’ own
longings for authentic ‘ecologically noble savages’ and thereby generates symbolic
capital for the communities it represents.
Although 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra does not actively reflect
its own ways of constructing essentialized ‘ecological natives,’ it still may be outlining
a possible path to cope with what I would like to postulate as the ‘authenticity fallacy’
of environmental imagination when it comes to the perception of indigenous cul-
tures. On one hand, e.g., indigenous activists seem to be locked into a sort of vicious
circle. While trying to provoke international attention and support for their legitimate
causes, they activate the stereotype of the ‘ecologically noble savage.’ Simultaneously,
they risk to get entangled in the springes of their own essentialized simulacrum,
the ‘hyperreal Indian.’ Symbolic capital depends almost entirely on the continuous
upholding of an implicated ‘authenticity,’ rooted not in indigenous culture but in the
Western image of the ‘noble savage.’ On the other hand, the ‘noble savage’ carburized
in Western collective imagery appears like an overly demanding requirement, when
applied to a whole set of cultures in exchange for moral and/or financial support. In a
medialized world, where continuous reinventions of individual and collective, social
and political identities have become a rather normal procedure, it stands out as some-
thing fairly strange, obsolete and archaic. It appears as if the inhabitants of the ‘global
village,’ the ‘nomadic’ subjects facing ecological crisis in their global non-lieux (cf.
Augé 1992), are longing for place-attached, ‘authentically’ localized and naturalized
objects. They find them in the ‘ecologically othered’ (cf. Schmidt 2010, 285) simula-
crum of the ‘ecological native.’ Yet, instead of requiring simulated ‘authenticity’ from
indigenous cultures, social actors and movements, it would seem more productive to
reconceptualize this specific aspect of global environmental discourses. To escape the
‘authenticity fallacy,’ it would be necessary to accept indigenous social actors as ones
that legitimately reformulate social and political identities, invent alternative tradi-
tions, and image new communities. They apparently do so in perpetual exchange
and communication with global developments and imaginations, with knowledge
434 Elmar Schmidt
about the images that circulate about them, appropriating, integrating and modifying
certain elements, the way networked communities have always done. However, when
it comes to environmental implications, unlike other imagined communities, the
indigenous ones seem to do so under constant observation in the magnifying prism
of ‘authenticity.’ In this context, Taboada Tabone’s 13 Pueblos en defensa del agua, el
aire y la tierra might be representative of the contemporary remapping of possible dis-
cursive alternatives. The documentary applies strategic stereotypes, but at the same
time tries to indicate the historical a priori of ethnic identity and social struggles,
framing them into Mexican sociopolitical development. According to the common
political goals of indigenous and non indigenous actors, it converts essentialized
cultural difference into political difference between sustainable und destructive con-
cepts of modernity and development. Moreover, a similar trend can be observed in
the context of the evolution of the concept of buen vivir, discussed in the introductory
part of the present contribution, as a transnational, decolonized, post-development,
and post-capitalist proposal for the development of an alternative, sustainable yet
utopian modernity.
10 B
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Swarnalatha Rangarajan
22 W
omen Writing Nature in the Global
South: New Forest Texts from Fractured
Indian Forests
Abstract: Environmental writing from the Global South are largely about ‘narratives
of matter’ that reconceptualize material terrains in which the rural poor and subal-
terns carry a disproportionately large imbalanced environmental load. This chapter
discusses how the articulation of place-based attachments by women writers writing
from the ‘manywheres’ of the Global South pose important questions for ecocriticism
by taking up for analysis tribal narratives by three Indian women writers: C. K. Janu,
a tribal activist; Mahasweta Devi, a mainstream writer and social activist and Anita
Agnihotri, an officer of the Indian Administrative Services and a creative writer. These
narratives that are set in fractured Indian forestscapes explore the contradictions and
ambiguities that emerge in the tribal relationship with nature, advocate resistance
to land encroachment by statist policies and multinational corporations and affirm
local knowledge and the power of the bioregional.
Key Terms: Environmental justice, Global South, Environmentalism of the poor, New
forest texts, Adivasi rights, Survival economy
1 I ntroduction
Environmental writing from the Global South is closer in spirit to the original Greek
meaning of oikos (home) and locates the notion of ‘environment’ in the home and
neighbourhood where the imbrication of the social and the environmental are
evident. Raymond Williams (2005, 111) refers to this complex material web composed
of water, soil, animals, humans and land as “a world of properly materialist history”
where “there is no room for the separate abstract categories of ‘nature’ and ‘man’[…].”
These ‘narratives of matter’ that move away from dichotomized discourses of ‘nature
writing’ to a more inclusive dialogue regarding the reconceptualization of material
terrains are specially relevant to third wave ecocriticism which deeply engages with
environmental justice issues in fissured lands where the rural poor and subalterns
carry a disproportionately large imbalanced environmental load (cf. ↗10 Ecocriticism
and Postcolonial Studies). Michael Bennet (2005) calls this the mixing of the “red
and the green” since most influential political movements involving environmental
justice and anti-globalisation issues are directly linked to the ecological plight of the
poor. The colour ‘brown,’ which emerges as a result of this fusion of colours, might
22 Women Writing Nature in the Global South 439
as well be a “natural metaphor” for ecocriticism since it recalls not just the soil and
barks of trees but is also the defining colour linking the blighted spots of the earth and
human waste with global structures of domination (Bennet 2005, 99).
Ecocritical practices from the Global South interrogate the “construction of our-
selves against nature” (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 6) and the material and ideological
aspects of “ecological imperialism” (Crosby 1986) that subalternise certain groups of
people on account of their perceived closeness to ‘nature’ in addition to displacing
local species and ecosystems. The term ‘Global South’ would have been unproblem-
atic thirty years ago going by markers like the Brandt’s Line. Today the perspective
is different, and perhaps even paradoxical, since economic development in some
parts of the Global South has given countries a high income on a par with their North-
ern counterparts. The Global South is an emerging new expression of political and
socio-cultural entities from multiple locations and cultures in which questions of
identity, culture, sustainable development and environment governance become vital
in the articulation of a new world order. The complexity of the term ‘Global South’ is
evident from its diverse ‘loci of enunciation’ (Grosfoguel 2007). According to Slovic,
Rangarajan and Sarveswaran (2015), the Global South is: an entity that has emerged
as a space of resistance in the struggle between imperial global domination and deco-
lonial forces; a geopolitical concept and a location of underdevelopment replacing the
‘Third World’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union; and also a new trajectory within
the Global North that is the result of migrations from Africa, Asia, South-Central
America, the Caribbean islands and the ‘former Eastern Europe.’ “The ‘manywheres’
of the ‘global’ South acts as a springboard for critical imaginations of environmental
consciousness and race” (2015, 12–13). Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier
(1998) use the term ‘environmentalism of the poor’ to emphasize that there are signif-
icant differences between the environmentalisms of the Euro-North American zones
and the Global South, which are determined mainly by monetary issues and patterns
of uneven development. ‘The poor’ in the Global South is a highly diverse category
influenced by issues of gender, class, caste, ethnicity and region. In his important
book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon (2011) points
out that impoverished communities are the worst affected in environmental disasters
since in their case the violence is, “driven inward, somatised into cellular dramas of
mutation that – particularly in the bodies of the poor – remain largely unobserved,
undiagnosed, and untreated” (2011, 6).
The narratives of ‘slow violence,’ namely the stories of toxic buildup, deforesta-
tion, accelerated species loss and loss of habitats, are rescued from invisibility and
representational bias by women writing nature in the Global South. The écriture of
resuscitation by these women writers radically critiques the categories of ‘nature’ and
‘culture’ together with an affirmation of the degraded partner in all patriarchal dual-
ities. These writers question the idea of separateness by inventing new stories about
the body and land in social contexts that define both the female body and the land as
‘resource.’ Ecological restoration, a prominent trope in these writings, critiques con-
440 Swarnalatha Rangarajan
structions of land as ‘terra nullius’ – empty land that can be occupied and put to use
by erasing the presence of indigenous people and native species of plants. Women
writers endorse a stewardship ethic of care in which the great earth-body is celebrated
through myth, metaphor and symbol. A very brief survey of representative women
writers from the Global South is undertaken in this section to illustrate how their
narratives reexamine existing political and socio-economic dispensations in order to
function as a voice of protest when state and global agendas ruthlessly remake nature
and shift the boundary between the human and the non-human.
Indigenous women writers advocate what Christopher Nordon (1998, 270) refers
to as the “twinned processes of environmental and cultural recovery” with respect
to degraded environments. For instance, Maori writers like Patricia Grace and Keri
Hulme’s narratives construct the landscape as a vital actor whose health is essential
to the flourishing of humans and culture. These writers approach ecological restora-
tion in holistic ways and consider the re-narrativising of traditional ecological knowl-
edge as essential for building a sustainable relationship between land and humans.
Similarly, women writers from the Pacific Islands communities who share histories of
neo-colonialism with other constituencies of the Global South consider indigenous
identity to be co-constituted by place-based affiliations. The Kanaka Maoli/Native
Hawaiian writer, Haunani-Kay Trask, Marshallese poet, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and the
I-Kiribati/Banaban poet, Teresia Teaiwa write in protest against nuclear weapons
testing, articulating and positing environmental damage as a threat that is both
regional as well as planetary. Defining intimate relationships between humans and
land as essential for both material and cultural survival is a distinct feature of Native
Indian women writers like Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Joy Harjo (Muskogee), and
Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), among others. The South African novelist, Sindiwe Magona
and Nigerian novelist, Flora Nwapa discuss the deep psychic wounding of indige-
nous cultures and alienation from the land as a result of colonial history and advo-
cate self-healing in local contexts through their writing. These indigenous writers
combat issues like loss of culture and identity, displacement and resource extraction
of natural resources on tribal lands by using writing as a tool of resistance to speak for
the natural world from within the larger framework of community.
The complex and uneven processes of globalisation defined by Vandana Shiva
(1991, 336) as “the anarchy of development based on market economy,” resulted in
the unequal distribution of environmental burdens between different world regions,
with the most environment-intensive activities happening in developing countries.
Latina writers like Ana Castilo and Helena Maria Viramontes write about the crea-
tion of new subaltern working class identities as a result of globalising practices that
encourage labour flow across borders in the United States and the disastrous effects
of environmental toxicity on the female body (cf. ↗11 Ecofeminisms). Japanese-Amer-
ican writer, Karen Yamashita’s novels critique corporate globalisation which reduces
both humans and nature to things that can be commoditised and circulated in global
markets. Japanese writer, Ishimure Michiko’s creative non-fiction about the Minamata
disease and the slow violence caused to humans and nature due to methyl sulfate
dumped by Chisso factory into the Minamata waters can be categorised as a Global
South text since it foregrounds the regional inequalities and environmental injustices
prevalent in the predominantly Global North society of Japan. Toxic consciousness
is also the main theme in the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong, a former migrant worker
in Southern China. Xiaoquiong’s poetry traces the intertwined connections between
the female migrant workers’ sickness, economic globalization and environmental
destruction in China. Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s novels similarly dwell on
polluted urban landscapes and the encroachment of indigenous habitats by indus-
trial corporates. Indian writer-activist Arundhati Roy’s polemical tracts and fiction
critique the forces of global capitalism and state control that wield power though the
subjugation of nature over humans and non-human others. Tribal activist and writer,
Mahasweta Devi’s narratives uphold a vision of ecological justice by critiquing the
violence done to the tribals and land by the hegemonic practices of colonialism and
global capitalism. Temsula Ao, Easterine Iralu and Mamang Dai among other women
writers from the North-Eastern states of India explore how the question of identity
becomes intertwined with issues of ecology in the case of tribal culture The wounding
of the land, massive deforestation, environmental refugeeism and the socio-ecolog-
ical production of nature through paradise tourism and military reterritorialization
inform the writings of Sri Lankan women writers like Chandani Lokuge, Jean Arasan-
ayagam, Ameena Hussein and Roma Tearne.
To summarise, these women writers writing from the ‘manywheres’ of the Global
South pose important questions for ecocriticism. Despite the diversity of environmen-
tal perspectives that these writings embody, they “emphasize a sense of place as a
basic prerequisite for environmental awareness and activism” (Heise 2008, 33). The
articulation of place-based attachments emerge as powerful cultural nodal narratives
of being-in-the-world that contain the potential of being grounded in a larger cul-
tural understanding of the global which Heise (2008, 59) calls “environmentally ori-
ented cosmopolitanism.” Not only do these diverse voices challenge the universalism
of ethical claims that are held by dominant Euro-American modes of environmental
thought but they also establish the web of connections between environmentalism
and multicultural social justice movements (cf. ↗16 Narrative Scholarship).
The local narratives by women writers that are discussed in the following sections
of this essay are synecdochal texts in the sense that they mirror the map of violated
earthscapes across the Global South, advocate resistance to land encroachment by
statist policies and multinational corporations and affirm local knowledge and the
power of the bioregional.
2 N
ew Forest Texts
India has a sizeable tribal population of more than seventy five million people (Kothari
2005, 59), and although there is enormous heterogeneity amongst the tribals (also
known as ‘adivasis’ or the original inhabitants of the land), these diverse tribes share
traditional attachments to the land and forest as a means of livelihood and also long
histories of exploitation and otherisation (Collu 1999, 45–46). This chapter takes up
for analysis tribal narratives by three women writers: Mother Forest: The Unfinished
Story of C. K. Janu, an autobiographical narrative by C. K. Janu (2004), a tribal activist;
“Salt,” a short story by Mahasweta Devi (1993), a mainstream writer and social activist
and Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and Fiction by Anita Agnihotri (2001),
an officer of the Indian Administrative Services and a creative writer. These narratives
that are set in fractured Indian forestscapes foreground the troubled history of state
domination and also explore the contradictions and ambiguities that emerge in the
tribal relationship with nature.
The current chapter uses the term ‘new forest texts’ to distinguish these narra-
tives from the traditional ‘aranyakas’ or forest books written around 700 BCE, which
constitute the philosophical limb of the Vedas. Unlike the ‘aranyaka’ texts that advo-
cated the pursuit of oneness with the universe in the wilderness unhindered by the
tensions that characterize life in society, the new forest texts by these women writers
bring to the foreground a bricolage of themes which uncover the subsistence and
survival based issues of Indian environmentalism faced by forest dwellers who have
been traditionally dependent on local natural resources.
3 Forests in India: A Brief Contextual Overview

‘Aranya’ is the common Sanskrit word for ‘forest’ that denotes wilderness and abun-
dance of vegetation. Michael Dove (2003) observes that the ‘forest’ in Vedic times as
depicted in the Rig Veda and the Laws of Manu referred to a natural environment con-
sisting of open bushlands interlaced with fields and pastures, that reflected “a his-
toric conflation of the categories of nature and culture ” (2003, 109). Dove notes that
a major shift took place with regard to the geographical and symbolic connotation
of the forest in the post-Vedic period which now came to designate the wild and the
undomesticated and also the boundary between civilization and barabarism (109).
Lutgendorf (2000) highlights the archaic sense of ‘aranya’ as “a foreign or distant
land” to draw attention to the eco-history of land clearing for pastoralism and agricul-
ture that pushed the forest and its denizens to the margins of the densely settled Indo-
Gangetic plain. The ‘otherness’ of the forest landscape is firmly established in epics
like the Ramayana and Mahabharata through references to the forest as a “crowded
cosmos” abounding in plant and animal life and also the human presence of tribal
dwellers who are often depicted as strange mythical creatures (Lutgendorf 2000, 272–
280). Forests have been perceived as being vital to Indian civilization. India’s first
Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore (1909) defines the culture of the forest as the
“the unifying principle of life in diversity” and the “intimate relationship between
human life and living nature” that is the source of all knowledge (qtd. in Shiva 1989,
55). Leading environmental activist, Vandana Shiva also defines India’s ‘aranya sam-
skriti’ (forest culture) as a model for the life-enhancing paradigm of India’s ecological
civilization and acknowledges the role played by tribal culture. According to her, the
knowledge acquired by the deep knowledge of the life and processes of the forest is
therefore “the substance not just of Aranyakas or forest texts, but also of the everyday
beliefs of tribal and peasant society” (1989, 56). Shiva attributes to British colonial
practices the displacement of indigenous knowledge systems of forest management
and by extension, ‘aranya samskriti’ itself. Shiva’s argument which locates continu-
ing devastation of Indian forests in Western imperialism has been contested by critics
like Jennifer Wenzel (1998, 130) who argue that pre-colonial India is marked, “as
much by contests over its forests as by peaceful existence within them.” Epics like
the Ramayana and Mahabharata depict the periodic protests by tribals resisting the
subjugation by the mainstream as the peopling of the forest by fearful and malevo-
lent spirits (DN 1990, 795–96). Clearing the forest for settled cultivation involved the
systematic decimation and suppression of a vibrant forest culture and the destruction
of their sacred groves. The otherisation process continued during the British colonial
period with tribals being compared to dangerous animals who need to be watched
over, tamed and hunted (Nigam 1990, 149). Environmental historians, Madhav Gadgil
and Ramachandra Guha (1992, 5) hold colonial forestry practices accountable for the
“profound dislocations at various levels of Indian society.” For instance, the tribal
practice of kumri (swidden or shifting cultivation) – a rotational form of agriculture
in which the land was allowed to lie fallow for a period after harvesting crops – was
declared to be an unsustainable form of agriculture that led to deforestation and soil
exhaustion. The Indian Forest Acts passed during the years 1865 and 1878 invested the
colonial state with sovereign rights over all forest and uncultivated land and reduced
the local people’s rights to access minor forest produce to privileges that could be
withdrawn by the colonial state at any point of time. The rigid logic of boundaries
deprived the villagers of uncultivated commons commonly used for grazing and wood
supplies since these spaces were defined as ‘wastelands’ by the colonial government
and incorporated into state forests.
Beinhart and Hughes (2007, 121) observed that these acts “marked the beginning
of a process of marginalization and discrimination against indigenous forest users
that was to climax in major protest movements” in postcolonial India. Peasant strug-
gles in the central provinces were a striking feature of the 1920s and 1930s with the
‘forest satyagrahas’ that were inspired by the Gandhian non-violent mode of protest,
attaining a national fervor. Grass root leaders of these forest struggles mostly hailed
from tribal communities and resistance took the form of woodcutting and forest inva-
sions. Post-independent India, which took to rapid industrialization, witnessed the

intensification of these forest struggles. The National Forest Policy of 1952 reinforced
state control and encouraged new patterns of displacement with woodlands being
penetrated by various aspects of the industrializing process. The Chipko movement,
the culmination of a series of autonomous efforts to protest against the rampant
deforestation brought about by commercial forestry of the 1970s, was spearheaded
by the village women of Uttarakhand who hugged trees to protect them from the axes
of government-sanctioned commercial loggers. The Chipko movement that attracted
worldwide attention culminated in the government imposing a fifteen-year ban on
green felling in the Himalayan forests. Resistance movements in recent times like
the Jharkhand forest struggles, the opposition offered by Dongria Kondh community
to the bauxite mining project of Vedanta Resources in the Niyamgiri hills of Orissa,
the mobilization of adivasi support in the forest areas of the Chattisgarh-Andhra
Pradesh-Maharashtra border by the Maoists are linked to issues of indebtedness, dis-
placement by giant power and irrigation projects, poverty, degradation and commod-
ification of women among other issues. The Forest Rights Act 2006 attempted to undo
the ‘historic injustice’ done to tribals and other traditional forest dwellers by taking
into consideration their livelihood issues. For the first time, the Act recognized the
rights of forest dwellers to access minor forest produce, right to ownership of culti-
vated forest land, right to dwell in the forest, right to protect natural resources in the
customary manner and the right of access to traditional knowledge related to biodi-
versity and cultural diversity (Rajamani 2010, 461). However, there is a lot of criticism
regarding the way in which the Central and State governments have pursued policies
that violate the act. Despite the controversies surrounding the Act, the perceptible
change that has come to characterize Indian forest spaces is the way in which forest
dwellers are reclaiming their rights to use and manage forests, by asserting local gov-
ernance and challenging centralized state control.
4 Mother Forest: From the Oikeion to the Politikon

C. K.Janu is a tribal activist from the tribal belt of Wayanad in Kerala, the southern-
most state of India known for its natural beauty and high indicators of social and
material development when compared to other states in the country. However, the
celebrated Kerala model of development has not done much for the adivasis, who
constitute nearly 1.1 percent of the total population and suffer extreme poverty and
high levels of social and development exclusion. These forest dwelling tribals com-
prising different communities like the Paniyars, Adiyars, Irulars and Mudugars have
been subjected to displacement in many ways during the colonial period which chal-
lenged their autonomy and distinct cultural way of life. Even the much acclaimed
Kerala Land Reforms Act of 1963 which aimed to “return land to the tiller” proved to
be disadvantageous to the tribals since the settlers and the migrants took possession
of the lands under the new laws and relentlessly exploited these tribals who were the
real owners of the land. Attempts on the part of the adivasis to assert their rights have
resulted in the unleashing of state violence on several occasions like the Muthanga
agitation in Wynad in 2005 and the Chengera land struggle between 2001 and 2005.
Coming from a condition of abject poverty and bondage, C. K. Janu rose to prom-
inence during the Muthanga agitation in 2003 when Adivasis encroached on govern-
ment land and built huts in protest against sluggish government action regarding
land reforms. Arundhati Roy describes the Muthanga agitation as “the real fight of the
truly powerless against the powerful” (Bhaskaran 2004, 63) during which the Kerala
police opened fire on a group of hundreds of tribals including women, children, old
people and infants. C. K. Janu’s sustained activism has culminated in over four thou-
sand hectares of land being assigned to landless tribals. Originally an active member
and worker of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist), C. K. Janu parted ways
with the Party to form the Aadivaasi Vikasana Pravarthaka Samithi (Organisation for
Tribal Development Workers).
C. K. Janu’s autobiography in Malayalam (C. K. Januvinte Jeevitha Katha) was
brought out in Malayalam in 2002 by Bhaskaran (2004, xi) who recorded her life story
and later wrote “the piece in her language as if she were speaking it.” The English
translator of this work, Ravi Shankar, acknowledges that an authentic rendering of
Janu’s life narrative is problematic since there are several layers of mediation inher-
ent in the construction of this tribal text. The text titled Mother Forest: The Unfin-
ished Story of C. K. Janu (2004) straddles the contrasting realms of the forest and the
mainstream world. According to Elen Turner (2012, 336), the structure of the narrative
is divided into the “feminized private sphere” which influences the first part of the
book, namely “the unconscious, pre-modern, private, tribal childhood half” and the
“masculine public sphere” of the second part, which articulates “the rational, polit-
ical, modern, public half.” Lyotard’s (2000) definition of ecology as the “discourse
of the secluded” is particularly appropriate to this text. Lyotard points out that in
ancient Greece, there existed a clear opposition between oikeion, the home space and
politikon, the public space where all action took place. The secluded (women, slaves
and children) were confined to the ‘oikeion’ or home space, which is “the shadowy
space of all that escapes the light of public speech, and it is precisely in this darkness
that tragedy occurs” (Lyotard 2000, 135). Mother Forest marks the rites of passage
from the oikeion to the politikon and the articulation of an environmental justice
ethic of care both for the indigenous people and the environment.
The forest in Janu’s autobiography is a place of emergence which undermines the
concept of autonomous human existence since survival is dependent on a complex
set of interrelationships between both animate and inanimate agents. Janu talks
about this complex web of interrelationships that keeps hunger at bay in the forest:
“We would look for honey in the tall trees […] would dig into rocky fissures looking
for water, or bring home pieces of cane.in the forests one never knew what hunger
was” (Bhaskaran 2004, 2). In Janu’s narrative, the forest is constructed as a hetero-
topic space that inverts and contests the order of the mainstream world. The narrative
employs a kinaesthetic mode of writing that conveys a rich immersion in the senses
since listening to nature is the key to survival in the tribal worldview. Janu describes
her childhood days in the forest where there were no modern amenities like kerosene,
lamps or matchboxes to keep out the darkness. Janu writes, “when it grew really dark
outside everyone would gather in the courtyard, […] we would sit for hours listen-
ing to what the forest mumbled” (Bhaskaran 2004, 3). Christopher Manes (1996, 15)
contrasts the silence of nature in mainstream cultures with the vibrancy of animistic
cultures in which the voice of nature is expressed by the “wind, earthworms, wolves,
and waterfalls – a world of autonomous speakers whose intents […] one ignores at
one’s peril.” Janu recounts her childhood days in the forest when she and her friends
would perch on the erumaadam (the high wooden platform) between giant trees and
watch the trees bow down their heads in deference to the signalling wind that issues
a warning of torrential rainfall which in turn alerts the tribal community to elephants
huddling close to the huts and also to the attendant dangers of uprooted trees falling
on the huts and of rains that were likely to wash away the huts. The forest in Janu’s
autobiography is a complex matrix of relationships that is predicated on much more
than simple proximity. As Janu poignantly puts it, “no one knows the forest like we
do, the forest is mother to us. More than a mother, because she never abandons us”
(Bhaskaran 2004, 5).
The forest in Janu’s narrative is not a pristine wilderness that is unmediated by
human presence and labour since the relationship between the tribals and forests is
manifested in “the language of ecology, parasitism, mutualism and symbiosis” (Knott
1998, 99). Janu’s life narrative offers many instances of this inter-being between man
and nature. For instance, Janu describes a tribal agricultural practice called burning
the punam (forest) in which the undergrowth of a certain area of a forest is burnt
down to cultivate crops. Unlike mainstream farming practices that exploit the same
land time and again, the adivasis move to a new area after harvest and allow the
cleared forest to grow back again. The anthropomorphizing language of Janu’s narra-
tive likens a hill set on fire to a “human being burnt alive” and the rains falling on a
hill burning set ablaze with a forest fire to “a woman with her hair shorn” (Bhaskaran
2004, 2). The narrative is steeped in the philosophy of place and the tribals who toil
in the fields belonging to the jenmi (feudal landlord) are described as clothed in the
slush of the earth. Calling attention to the earth that has different smells in differ-
ent seasons, Janu declares, “the earth gives out its scent only when we work on it.
Fallow land is like a tree untouched by the wind” (2004, 13). These lines exemplify the
place-responsive, bioregional mooring vision advocated by Kirkpatrick Sale. Accord-
ing to Sale (2000, 42), “the crucial and perhaps only and all-encompassing task is to
understand place, the immediate specific place where we live. The kinds of soils and
rocks under our feet; the source of the waters we drink […] these are the things that are
necessary to know.” This intimate knowledge of place which is an essential feature
of Janu’s narrative resonates with other individually responsive, ecologically sound

communities in the Global South that have evolved through centuries of direct obser-
vation of the forest and the earth (cf. ↗12 Ecocriticism and Place Studies). Whenever
there is a violation of this life-sustaining bond to the land, there is an accompanying
disruption of the complex tribal economy involving local resources. Janu’s narrative
evokes the poverty of the non-places to which the displaced tribals are forcibly relo-
cated, “where there is no space even to stand up straight. Without drinking water or a
place to relieve themselves, the image of a group of unclean people was slowly being
created” (Bhaskaran 2004, 48).
The second part of Mother Forest illustrates how “survival economy” (Shiva 1989,
13) runs the risk of invisibilisation in market-oriented development paradigms when
natural resources that form the material basis of survival and sustenance to commu-
nities who depend directly on nature are diverted in service of the market economy.
Janu’s narrative poignantly outlines the history of tribal land loss by drawing atten-
tion to the noxious cycle of dependency that was initiated by the feudal landlords
and mainstream migrants who snatched away generations of toil from the tribals by
clearing the undergrowth in the woods and converting the earth into fields. The lands
were thereafter stealthily transferred in the names of these landlords and immigrants
by bribing the tribal men with gifts of arrack and small sums of money. Since the
land was being reduced to survey numbers, those who were unable to prove their
ownership were forced to relinquish their right to lands on which their forefathers
had dwelt for generations. Civil cases regarding land disputes were protracted and
the tribals living on disputed land could not demand access to drinking water or other
amenities.
The narrative also brings into focus tribal understandings of land which have
dimensions other than the utilitarian. As opposed to mainstream understandings
of land, the tribal perspective maintains that land does not belong to anyone since
everything belongs to the land. Hence the loss of ancestral lands containing the burial
mounds of ancestors becomes a deeply unsettling experience which is tied to the loss
of cultural identity and meaningful existence in time. Janu evokes the burial land-
scape of the Adiyar community on a hillside strewn with boulders where the commu-
nity used to perform its gaddiga (death rites) rituals. In an attempt to keep encroach-
ers from entering this sacred burial land, the tribals build a fence which results in
police intervention leading to the arrest of the menfolk of the community.
The second half of the narrative makes an ideational shift from “Mother Forest”
to “Departmental Forest” (Bhaskaran 2004, 30). Displacement from the forest to the
tribal colonies fashioned by the civil society happened during the 1960s when new
land reforms laws decreed that the upper limit of land that could be possessed by
an individual was fifteen acres which in turn led to the Government seizing land and
forcing the adivasis into ghettos. Mother Forest graphically describes this decline:
“The flags of the Party people fly high in the colonies. On colony walls, the crude
designs of election poke fun at both the passage of time and at an ancient social
system” (2004, 51). The buses that arrived every summer to transport impoverished
tribal children to hostels attached to schools subjected them to an education system
that was destructive in many palpable ways. Janu laments the changed condition of
these tribal children who hate the forests and the earth, their original home: “They
return as people who have lost their minds, as the poorest of the poor […] They become
the stuff of cinema stories or statistics” (51).
C. K. Janu’s forest text traces the rites of passage in the journey of exile from the
oikeion of the maternal forest to the politikon, the public spaces of land protest in
places like Vellamunda, Chiniyeru, Kundara and Muthanga. A strong note of advo-
cacy is evident in this section of the narrative when Janu emphasizes that the ineq-
uities which the communities have been subjected to can be ameliorated only if the
tribals continue to live and work close to the land. Janu points out, “[t]hese were not
just land encroachments. They were life and death struggles for our basic right to live
and die where we were born” (Bhaskaran 2004, 54). Janu’s forest text corroborates
Ramachandra Guha’s observation that the emphasis on wilderness is harmful when
applied to the Third World countries. Guha (1989, 73) points out that India’s agrarian
populations have long enjoyed a balanced relationship with nature and therefore “the
setting aside of wilderness areas has resulted in a direct transfer of resources from
the poor to the rich.” In an article called “The Return to Muthanga,” Janu critiques
foreign loan providing agencies, pure environmentalists and development thinkers
who champion projects to protect wild life and forests and do so by “bringing the
tribals outside the forests and into the mainstream” (Janu and Geethanandan 2003,
par.16). This results in what Paul Greenough (2012, 318) refers to as the “bioironies of
the fractured forest” which results when modern practices of conservation expel tra-
ditional forest dwellers only to foster the intrusion of criminals, poachers and rebels.
Janu is vocal about the corrupt practices of forest officers who oppose the distribution
of land to adivasis in order to protect the interests of the sandal, ivory and ganja mafia
who are powerful in forest areas. Mother Forest offers a harsh critique of the hypoc-
risy of mainstream migrants who bought land at high prices and “wrote article after
article lamenting the state of the environment” (Bhaskaran 2004, 49).
Janu’s forest text is unique in the sense that it forges a continuum between the
oikeion and the politikon, eschews victim rhetoric and resists any primitive, essen-
tialising discourse about the adivasis to emphasize the point that they share the same
temporal space with mainstream Indians. The form and idiom of this text creates
a contemporary picture of the adivasi that is not subject to museumization. For
instance, the narrative employs the striking symbol of a ginglli flower beetle to convey
the endurance of tribal resistance in the face of all opposition. Janu compares the
tribals to this dark looking beetle, a favourite with children who like to imprison it
in a matchbox in order to listen to its humming which never stops despite long days
of imprisonment and food deprivation. Though C. K. Janu admits that “[t]he ginglli
flower beetle cannot argue with a microphone that makes a great noise” she also indi-
cates that the persistent watchful humming of the adivasis cannot be drowned out by
the official double speak of the nation state (Bhaskaran 2004, 54).
5 Salt: Competing Human-Animal Priorities

Mahasweta Devi’s short story, “Salt” focuses on the exploitation of the vulnerable
bonded tribal labourers of the Palamau district in Bihar – a region though rich in
terms of forests and mineral resources, is considered to be one of the least developed
parts of the country. Mahasweta Devi was closely associated with the formation of
the first association of bonded labourers of Palamau in 1981. Although the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition) Act came into force in 1976, the bonded labour system con-
tinues to remain a reality for tribals and other subalterns in many states of India.
Very often bonded labour is an inter-generational affair triggered by a family member
taking a loan for a small amount and getting into bondage with an employer who
was free to compensate him on his own terms. In a journalistic essay titled “Back to
Bondage” Devi (1997, 9) writes: “Palamau is, in reality, a mirror of true India […] See
Palamau with an outsider’s eye and you will feel that the district machinery, the land-
holders, the contractors, all think that the poor are born to serve them. It is as natural
to the exploiters as the sky and the hills they see.”
Mahasweta Devi has remained committed to the cause of the socially marginal-
ized tribals and the poor in the tribal areas of Bihar and West Bengal. Her voluminous
journalistic and fictional output focus on themes ranging from the poverty and dis-
placement of tribals, questions of tribal identity and survival, sexual subjugation of
women to livelihood struggles caused by environmental devastation in tribal belts
and the glaring discrepancies between international capital and the fragile local eco-
nomics of the Global South which makes the possibility of social redistribution among
the poor a difficult task. Devi has done monumental work for the denotified tribes of
West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, who are still perceived as criminals and thieves by the
police and administration. The impact of colonial laws like the Criminal Tribes Act of
1871 still continues to influence the Government of India. For instance, the 1952 Act
‘de-stigmatised’ the tribals without making any provisions for their livelihood and
the 1959 ‘Habitual Offender’s Act’ reclassified the tribals as habitual offenders with
latent criminal tendencies. Devi’s fictional works like Aranyer Adhikar (1977) focus on
the forest struggles of tribals and emphasize the importance of forests to tribals. In
an interview with Gayathri Spivak, Devi (1995, x) comments, “[a]s long as the forests
were there, the hunting tribes did not suffer so much, because the forests used to
provide them with food, shelter, timber, hunting. But now that the forests are gone,
the tribals are in dire distress.”
“Salt” (Devi 1993) provides a more comprehensive meaning of the word ‘envi-
ronment’ as experienced in typical Global South scenarios by presenting a material
matrix composed of diverse players and agents both human and non-human. To quote
Pablo Mukherjee (2010, 5), it is “[t]he complex (and often conflict-ridden) web, field,
or system […] composed of relationships between human and non-human agents or
actors that define the history of the Indian subcontinent is what I understand as ‘envi-
ronment.’”
The setting of the story is located in the tribal village of Jhujhar along the fringes
of the Palamau Reserve Forest. The arable lands of the village that were traditionally
owned by the tribals are appropriated by the unscrupulous money lender, Uttam-
chand, who shackles the tribals into forced labour taking advantage of their igno-
rance. As a result of this slavery, they are forced to walk the distance of twelve miles
to his village every day to till his land in return for a meagre share of the harvest. The
tiny tribal village of seventeen families does not exist on the map of civilization. The
tribal department in the city is way beyond their reach and the government did not
know of their existence till the third general elections after independence. Trouble
begins for this cloistered community when Purti Munda, a vocal youth of the com-
munity who has some exposure to the outside world, organizes a band of young men
and demands fair pay for work from Uttamchand by quoting the law on forced labour.
In retaliation Uttamchand instructs the grocery shops in the vicinity that are owned
by him to stop selling salt to the tribals. The lack of salt destabilizes the tribals and
very soon they begin experiencing weakness in the limbs. Purti Munda learns from
a casual conversation with a medical representative at the local fair that lack of salt
causes degeneration of muscle and nerve cells, coagulation of blood and the gradual
decay of the body itself. The ending of forced slavery and newly gained rights over
the harvest hardly come to matter because the tribals start bartering their crops for a
small quantity of salt.
Salt has been the cornerstone of economies through human history and has con-
tributed to both civilizational and destructive impulses. Lane (2008) draws attention
to early civilizations that sprung along the edges of the desert because of salt deposits
found in the vicinity and also to wars fought over “this precious and portable com-
modity” in the ancient cities like Essalt on the Jordan river which had abundant salt
deposits (2008, 102). Salt has multiple resonances in Indian history and is historically
linked with oppression. Woven into this web of semantic connections is the notorious
salt tax imposed by the British on Indian salt to facilitate its import, and the resistance
offered by Gandhi through the protest march to Dandi Beach which was a catalyst for
other nationalistic rebellions that ushered in India’s independence. Devi’s salt narra-
tive achieves a special resonance since it presents what Rob Nixon (2011, 55) calls “the
unsettling confrontation with the abject” which constitutes the invisibility of slow
violence in the lives of the poor. In “Salt” the abject tribal subjects betray the leaki-
ness of boundaries as a result of which they compete with elephants for a commonly
available degraded variety of dark and brackish salt. When Purti Munda is tipped by
the forest guard about a salt lick in the forest for the elephants, he begins combing the
forest and discovers it much to the ire of a loner elephant, called ‘Ekoya’ in the local
tongue, which is feared by the tribals for its errant and violent behavior. The loner
wets the salt lick before leaving as a result of which Purti is forced to scrape meagre
portions from the dry parts of the lick and share the brackish salt with the community.
The village headman is unhappy about antagonizing the Ekoya elephant since the
tribal villagers had been subjected to the destructive actions of ravaging elephants
in the recent years. Although Purti and his friends are careful in their salt-procuring
activities, the Ekoya senses their presence and appears at odd hours on highways and
in the village thereby instilling fear in the forest workers. The tribals are defenseless
against the rampaging elephant since an elephant of the reserve forest was protected
by the law and could not be shot unless it is denoted as a ‘mankiller’ or a ‘rogue.’
The headman orders Purti and his friends to keep away from the lick so as to
divert the elephant’s attention. They obey the order for some time only to break it
and are trampled to death by the loner. As a finale to the whole unfortunate episode,
a commissioned hunter is summoned by the Forest department to shoot the Ekoya
down. The police inspector who conducts an enquiry into these deaths finds it strange
that the tribals should go about the business of stealing something as cheap as salt
and comes to the conclusion that they must have been drunk to do something so irra-
tional. Failing to understand the complex thread of connections which link the trader
and the tribal with the elephant, the police inspector who handles this case sums up
the whole event using this rationale, “[t]hey went to steal salt from elephant’s lick and
died” (Devi 1993, 113). The action of Purti and his kinsmen is pronounced ‘unnatural’
and the tribals of Jhujhar are declared to be untrustworthy people. Most importantly
the whole incident is perceived as an act of violence towards wildlife and the wil-
derness principle: “This unnatural act of Purti and his kinsmen again emphasized
the difficulty of preserving wildlife without human interference” (113). The village
headman is aware of the absurdity of oversimplifying the complex reality of the sit-
uation. The three tribals and the elephant did not have to die if salt had been readily
available. Being inarticulate he could not explain it to the officials that the real cause
lay not just with Uttamchand, the money trader who refused to sell salt but also with
the system that allowed him to go scot-free. Therefore he haltingly tells the govern-
ment officials, “[t]his has not been fair at all” fully knowing that “the urbanites would
never understand how salt could be the root of a life-and-death battle” (114).
“Salt” offers a striking instance of what Karen Thornber (2013, 1) refers to as
“ecoambiguity” – the “complex, contradictory interactions between people and
their environments with a significant non-human presence.” Ecoambiguity arises in
tribal texts due to the confused relationship that tribals share with their homestead
on account of the intrusion of modernity and the need to adapt to changing circum-
stances. Nature, in the contemporary Indian tribal context is about contested spaces
fraught with ambiguity and the politics of marginalization and therefore green con-
servationist programmes that undertake wilderness and wildlife protection without
any consideration of the human cost become inauthentic models of sham environ-
mentalism. Novels like Amitav Ghosh’s (2005) The Hungry Tide compellingly critique
myopic conservation programmes in India like the ‘Project Tiger’ that pitch humans
and non-humans against each other in a battle over resources. Devi’s tribal text also
emphasizes the absence of simple answers and surface solutions to the environmen-
tal problems faced by the tribal poor in India. The tribal relationship with nature in
the Global South remains ambiguous for it is both an agent of sustenance as well as
development.
6 Forest Interludes: Rights to Soil and Nature

Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and Fiction was written originally in Bengali,
by Anita Agnihotri, an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer who was actively
involved in rural development projects in the poverty-stricken tribal areas of Orissa
and east-central India. Agnihotri writes from the confluence point of her roles as an
administrator and woman writer who is sympathetic to tribulations of Adivasi life.
Forest Interludes is a genre-blurring work that collapses the boundaries between the
public and the personal, fiction and autobiography, the bureaucrat and the creative
writer, the outsider and the insider. The essays and novella in this collection offer
scope for a critique of the “developmentalisation” of the Global South, to use Esco-
bar’s term, by holding up for scrutiny the mechanisms of discursive control that treat
people as “abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down (at will) in
the charts of ‘progress’” (Escobar 1995, 44).
Forest Interludes includes portraits of grass-roots environmental workers like
Annasaheb Hazare, who brought the green cover back to an arid, poverty-stricken
village in Maharashtra by involving the villagers in watershed development and in
the task of conserving water and soil. Hazare’s efforts inspired the villagers to plant
over two hundred thousand trees and substantially increase the area of tilled land
with the help of stable underground water tables. During a meeting with the author,
Hazare points out that the rapid deforestation happening in India will hinder the
success of any large irrigation project and advises Agnihotri to persuade the govern-
ment to do “small things” that will bring the people together to protect water and
the soil. Agnihotri’s (2001, 66) response to the project of doing ‘small things’ reflects
the self-questioning that needs to be woven into the State machinery as a measure
of responsible environmentalism: “No matter where I go, ultimately I come back to
the same question – in the name of development does the State machinery really
have unlimited rights to evict the defenseless, unarmed, poorest communities who
are dependent on nature’s resources?” Agnihotri’s narrative raises significant ques-
tions about the rights of the poor to soil and nature and “the history and geography
of their forced uprooting and summary scattering along the development highway”
(66–67). Agnihotri illustrates the poignancy of the question involving land ownership
through a micro narrative about a Santal tribal, Saheb Murrey Baske, who executes
an unusual deed of gift to his grandson after failing to establish his legal rights to
ownership of the land traditionally owned by him and his forefathers. The witnesses
to this timeless deed of gift include the “cloud, forest-covered Earth and Soil, the giver
of life’s birth” (67) and the land is bequeathed not only to the grandson but also to all
the people born of the soil. Like Chief Seattle’s speech, Saheb Baske’s letter illustrates
an indigenous worldview where land is sacred and notions of private ownership con-
cerning natural resources are not entertained.
However, this forest text acknowledges the absence of easy answers and the
humanized administrator who is described in the first person singular is yoked to an
acute self-consciousness that manifests itself in the contradictions and ambiguities of
the work. Kalpana Bardhan, the English translator of Forest Interludes comments: “In
most of the narratives […] the protagonist is a civil servant of competence and integ-
rity, faced with the painful conflicts and tensions unleashed by the very processes of
development and modernization s/he is in charge of administering” (Agnihotri 2001,
xiv).
The thinly disguised autobiographical novella, Mahuldiha Days, included in
Forest Interludes, also reveals the tensions of the liminal space from which the writing
emerges. The novel’s female protagonist is an administrator who grapples with the
dynamics of oppression in a tribal village and advocates a nature-culture zone in
which the customs of the local people are acknowledged to be vital to conservation
and environmental management (cf. ↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature). Mahuldiha is
named after the Mahul tree that is revered for its varied uses by the tribal communities
of the Mundas, the Oraons, Kands and Juangs who are the original inhabitants of the
land. The creamy flowers of the Mahul tree (Bassia latifolia) which flowers during the
summer months in the belt of Central India from Gujarat to Orissa provides food during
seasons when grains were scarce in addition to firewood, timber and liquor. It is not
surprising that Bondo origin myths associate the tree with laughter and dancing. The
competing discourses of ‘minor’ forest products like Mahua have been differentially
structured for different groups of people through the colonial and postcolonial times.
The British tried to centralize distilleries and extinguish indigenous brands of mahua
whereas postcolonial Indian states continue to earn substantial revenue through the
sale of mahua and related products (Jeffrey et al. 2004, 79–80).
In Agnihotri’s novella, a solitary Mahul tree serves as a synecdoche for the chang-
ing contours of tribal life. The tribals of Mahudiha hold a sacral view of an inter-con-
nected, dynamic universe. Cutting a Mahul tree that kept them alive through the year
was therefore considered a grave offence: “An adivasi would die rather than cut a
living mahul” (Agnihotri 2001, 204). However the affluent farmers and traders who
move into the district do not invest the local trees with sacredness. They run illegal
log-selling businesses in the adjoining Kanika forests and reap profits whereas the
landless adivasis get arrested by the forest guards and police for taking away a head-
load of timber. The Mahul trees in the neighbourhood are axed to make way for
licensed liquor shops and brothels where women are procured from the tribal villages
to provide ‘service’ to the outsiders.
The novella evokes the picture of a self-sufficient oikic community of the Munda
tribes and Juangs with their unique customs, rules and vibrant cultures. At the same
time, it also catalogues the drastic change in their lives that came with the advent of
colonialism and trade leading to loss of land and culture. Agnihotri offers a stark view
of this tribal microcosmos where children drop out of middle school to herd goats or
to work as housemaids and cleaners in wayside hotels. The ‘reservation’ policies of
the Government don’t help much since nobody can wait for such a long time without
succumbing to hunger and the harsh realities of the tribal village in which, “men
age prematurely, their lungs eaten by tuberculosis […] the prostitutes are riddled with
venereal diseases even before their youthful glow has faded” (Agnihotri 2001, 211).
Though appreciative of the important role played by tribal welfare organisations and
NGOs, Agnihotri predicts that it may take an entire generation before the beginnings
of change become visible. The novella gloomily prophesies that rehabilitating the
landless tribals along the riverbank is as impossible a socio-economic feat as “bring-
ing back the mahul trees” (204).
7 C
onclusion
The new forest texts taken up for analysis in this chapter complicate the idea of forest
space as pure wilderness and a space of radical alterity free of human interference.
The forest narratives demonstrate the cultural continuities of the indigenous people
with the forest and the common thread that runs through these narratives is rep-
resentation of the tribal situations in which environmental and social justice issues
are intertwined. These narratives establish that the oppression of the natural world is
linked to the othering and devaluing of the tribal subaltern and hence these writers
advocate change based on “an ethic of responsibility of care” (Gaard 1993, 2). The
ecological democracy that they advocate has its roots in environment justice leading
to awareness of the “web of concrete relations that includes not only ecological, but
cultural, economic and political processes” (Zehle 2002, 338). These narratives chal-
lenge stereotypical images of indigenous people that essentialise them as spiritual
ecologists living in deep harmony with nature. On the contrary, they expose the ambi-
guities that characterize the tribal-nature relationship and the harsh realities of the
Indian tribals who continue to live in highly degraded toxic landscapes and are forced
to fit into modernizing mainstream society in search of better jobs and incomes. These
narratives are characterised by the ambivalence that arises due to engagement with
forces of modernity, which are the results of the city’s multiple penetration of the
forest. The uneasy dialectic between the forest and the city manifests as the objec-
tification of both women and land. C. K. Janu writes about the illegitimate children
who are conceived for “a pinch of tobacco […] or some food” (Bhaskaran 2004, 35).
Devi’s other forest fictions like The Hunt (1995), Dhowli (1990) and Draupadi (1981)
foreground social evils sanctioned by caste and class norms such as prostitution and
enforced rape that tribal women are often subjected to. The landscape of Palamau,
the setting of the “Salt” is also the locus of a flourishing prostitute trade in Devi’s
short story, Doulati the Bountiful (1995). The branding of Palamau as a ‘wild’ area
dissuades the surging numbers of labourers involved in developmental projects from
bringing their wives along as a result of which there is a boom in flesh trade involving
tribal women. Anita Agnihotri’s (2011, 211) novella also paints a picture of “endlessly
virile truck drivers from the states in the north and south” who travel to the small
tribal village of Mahuldihi as a result of flourishing business and development and
the “fresh supplies of female flesh” that is procured to meet the growing demand.
These Southern environmental narratives by women writers fundamentally
rethink the notion of ‘environment’ and provide a powerful Global South environ-
mental critique which questions constructions of environment as a domain of elitist
privilege. They argue in favour of a more inclusive meaning of the term ‘environment’
by demonstrating that environment is what we are surrounded by, that human beings
are each other’s environment in addition to the elements of land, water and air that
have become severely polluted as a result of the lack of ecological thought. For tribals
to achieve subjecthood as the denizens of a democratic India in their forest homes,
these women writers, seem to suggest that ecological thought regarding the environ-
mentalism of the poor is a process of becoming sensitive to the paradigm shift from
authority to a rhizomatic relationality characterised by non-hierarchy and “connec-
tions between fields” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12).
8 B
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Ogaga Okuyade
23 E
cocultures and the African Literary
Tradition
Abstract: Some of the studies on African cultural ecology hardly notice the eco-tem-
per of most African cultural art forms and how ecocriticism as an interpretative art
functions beyond just locating or situating the natural world in literary texts. This
chapter therefore examines how African literatures engage tropes of eco-violence
that underwrite the agitations for environmental remediation and advocate eco-con-
sciousness and eco-logic in the eco-human relations. Furthermore, I equally interro-
gate the representation of the relationships between humanity and the non-human
world in some literary texts from the African continent as well as the impact of certain
human activities on the environment, be it land, water, animals or the atmosphere.
Keywords: African eco-culture, capitalism, oil spillage, displacement, ecological

ethics, forest, festival seasons, the supernatural, water, animism, violence, eco-iner-
tia, pastoral
My childhood stretched
one unbroken park,
teeming with life
in the forest green was
the lingua franca (Ojaide 1998, 12–14)
How can we forget

The stirring songs of crickets
that ushered us
to the open hands of dawn? (Yeibo)
The relationship between nature and culture is the key intellectual

problem of the twenty-first century. (Bate 2000, xvii)
1 I ntroduction
Quite a number of studies on the interface between African literature and the envi-
ronment usually proceed from the charge of the sparse critical response of African
critics to ecolit criticism or the nascence of this aspect of criticism in Africa’s interpre-
tative art. Such studies include: Slaymaker 2001, Okuyade 2011, Ojaide 2012, Vambe
2013 and Njanji 2014. The obvious reasons for this identified gap are easy to fathom.
African literature from its inception has been very utilitarian. Literature for the African
writer is a sphere from which issues emerge on how the African person negotiates
460 Ogaga Okuyade
existence and identity within a turbulent geography – turbulence provoked by the

colonial incursion into Africa, the consequences of that contact, post-independence
crises and the burden of nationhood. Invariably, as noted above, the primary reason
attributable for this paucity remains the fact that critics of African literature over time
continue to engage texts on issues associated with colonialism and the liberation
struggles that followed, gender issues, as well as the disillusionment that has become
the marker for the derailment from the progressivist temper nationalism assumed
during the liberation struggles in the immediate post-independence period in most
African states. These themes, as important as they seem, appear to confine analyses
of the representations of the environment in African literature to the margins of criti-
cal discourse. The point I try to make here is to insist that African literature does not
only continue to remain just another important cultural product and artefact but that
it has become a kind of barometer to calibrate the African experience.
Like Ifeyinwa Okolo suggests in her essay, “Landscaping as a Plot and Character
Development Medium in Ngugi wa Thiong’O’s Wizard of the Crow,” critics like William
Slaymaker argue that African literature has not contributed much to ecocriticism or
environmental literature because writers see ecocriticism as western and in conflict
with African concerns (cf. Okolo 2013). Slaymaker’s argument is contentious if one
considers the fact that environment, as Tanure Ojaide (2012, 65) suggests, is a nec-
essary aspect of African experience that informs the literature. African literature is
therefore, socially conditioned, especially considering the utilitarian function of cre-
ative art on the continent. The socio-economic conditions of the African people are
without doubt a primary propeller when the African writer creates. This chapter is
geared towards assessing Africa’s contributions to the environmental crises of our age
and how artists deploy cultural art forms to arrest the attention of the reader/audi-
ence with different rhetorical strategies, thereby making them come to terms with the
fact that we are not only in an age of global environmental catastrophe or that we live
in a watershed moment, but that the twenty-first century person is in a perpetual state
of crisis. A situation created by mankind’s uncanny translation of the functions of the
environment to meet his/her ever insatiate greed for satisfying his/her unquenchable
taste for resources. From this dimension, the earth becomes a mere product which is
to be constantly consumed.
Furthermore, I equally interrogate the representation of the relationships
between humanity and the environment/nature in some literary texts from the con-
tinent as well as the impact of certain human activities on the environment be it the
land, water, the animals and the atmosphere. A critical reassessment of most African
cultural art forms which focus on environmental issues will demonstrate that they
explore the eco-human relations from four major dimensions. The first, which is also
the most popular, is to deploy the resources of memory to recapture the pastoral idyll
of a once unique landscape devoid of the vagaries of industrial capitalism facilitated
by the unprecedented and capricious force of science and technology. This style
usually represents the nostalgic recall of childhood as a textual mechanics to come to
terms with the extent of ecological disasters engendered by humanity in the present.
The other displays a threnodic temper with a kind of combative engagement with the
systems and institutions responsible for the eco-seismic devastation of the non-hu-
man worlds. This tradition is popular with most of the imaginative arts from and on
Nigeria’s Niger Delta and Southern Africa. The third dimension is eco-romantic with
pastoral elements (though not completely romantic in the sense of the Wordswor-
thian or Keatsian tradition of romanticism), and the fourth is eco-feminist in temper,
exploring the relationship of the woman’s body to the earth. It must be noted here,
that there may be other dimensions in the exploration of the eco-human relation in
African cultural art forms, however, I have only enumerated the most dominant.
2 T
he Environment, Ecocriticism and African
Literature
The figurations and exploration of the environment in African literature over time
largely focus on issues like deforestation, land use and water management, mining
activities and their impact on the environment, oil/petro capital and host communi-
ties, ecologically induced abductions and displacement as well as issues of poaching
and the protection of the endangered species. It will be a little difficult to adequately
address how these subjects or issues are expressed in some of the texts I discuss
within the scope of this chapter. Thus, I will not attempt an in-depth analysis in order
to discuss as many texts in African literature that explore the eco-human relations as
possible.
The environmental crises humanity continues to try to surmount are not visceral,
but human- made. However, the most amazing feature of ecocritical studies remains
the fact that, regardless of the fact that humanity has created a kind of apocalyptic
state as Lawrence Buell (1995, 285) puts it in his book The Environmental Imagination,
the idea of the apocalypse has become “the single most powerful master metaphor
that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal,” as it has awak-
ened in many concerned persons, the awareness of the need for corrective action to
halt the pillage of planet earth.
Besides the threat of global terrorism, the state of the environment has become
humanity’s most pressing and daunting concern over time. Humanity hardly remem-
bers that the ecosystem constitutes what makes up human culture and bequeaths
one an identity which accentuates one’s relationship to a particular space and place.
The need to ensure an eco-friendly world usually overwhelms humanity only after
a natural disaster has occurred. One of the most problematic issues the world con-
tinues to contend with even beyond the close of the twentieth century is the mon-
strosity the environment has turned into, or the unimaginable disappearance of the
nonhuman worlds. Humanity has continued to make concerted efforts to ensure that
462 Ogaga Okuyade
the other worlds are kept alive since the human world solely depends on them for
sustenance and existence. Interestingly, therefore, the nonhuman world appears to
be more important than the human, since it provides the material support base for
the latter. Summits of different kinds with the environment taking the center stage
are organized the world over in order to draw humanity’s attention to its mindless
exploitation of natural resources, which in turn continues to make human existence
precarious. However, as environmental activists across the world continue to advocate
the need for an eco-friendly universe, there appears to be a global systemic problem
with fashioning pragmatic policies that will ensure the preservation and sustenance
of the environment. This may be viewed as a moot point, but the absence of a prag-
matic and proactive eco-policy and its strict implementation essentialise the need to
protect these worlds that cannot fight for themselves, but can only draw attention
to the debilitating and devastating blows (un)consciously and constantly thrown at
them by humanity’s sense of capitalist industrialism and consumerism through their
visible disappearance.
As the world continues to experience an unprecedented urbanization facili-
tated by human progress in science and technology, Africa appears to still retain an
enormous proportion of its rural, eden-like state, which has become the signpost for
natural resources on the continent. As I have noted elsewhere, “If there is any one
thing Africa has in abundance, it is, without doubt, natural resources” (Okuyade
2013, ix). Africa is arguably endowed with natural resources, but the inability to
translate these natural endowments into socio-economic bliss for the empowerment
of the African peoples, which will in turn power their economy, lamentably positions
Africa at the margins. This inaptitude to purposively utilize natural endowments to
empower the African people is usually attributed to the governmental misrule and
bureaucratic inefficiency of Africa’s political systems, which are usually predicated
on the dialectic of the belly1 and the personalisation of the commonwealth.
The dialectic of the belly and the personalisation of the commonwealth as a term
or phrase offers a kind of conceptual grid with which to interrogate and interpret
Africa’s political systems and forms of democracy with the colonial and postcolonial
history of the continent as the calibrating indices or tools. Considering the existen-
tial horizon of the contemporary postcolonial situation in most African states, one
can conveniently argue that the political landscape in Africa provides a sphere where
democracy and dictatorship are seamlessly harmonised in conducting the business of
governance and bureaucracy. The above assertion may seem a moot point, however,
a close reading of most African political systems, the lived experiences of the African
1 For more on this subject, which attempts to foreground the various undercurrents which help to
shape African states and societies with emphasis on the place of history, hegemony, exploitative cap-
italism or capitalism devoid of economic base and governmentality, see Mbembe 2001; Bayart 1996;
Berman 1998; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Lonsdale 1994.
people and a productive existential engagement with socio-cultural formations in the

continent only reinforce the fact that the business of governance for most African
elites is specifically private. Interestingly therefore, public offices or state institutions
ultimately become private or personal. Thus rather than the presidency being an
institution, it is regarded as an individual. Invariably, the president of a country, for
example, Nigeria may travel out of the country on official capacity for weeks and the
salaries of both public and civil servants may not be paid when due until he returns
from his journey. By this standard it becomes obvious that most African states are run
or governed by politically dysfunctional logics because power and authority reside
in the individual and not the office. This in turn creates room for outlandish corrupt
systems where public office holders are hardly accountable to the public. Thus, it
has become commonplace to remark that the “disruption of the landscape is tied to
political corruption” (Slaymaker 2007a, 131). However, the environmental crisis in
Africa today spans beyond the moral depravity of government and the bureaucratic
inefficiency with which the business of governance is run or conducted. The crisis is
complex, if we consider Rob Nixon’s idea of ‘Slow Violence’ – the kind which encom-
passes all manners of chaos that occur steadily and out of sight. A kind of violence
that is monumental, but whose consequences are strategically delayed. For example,
one will wonder how a gas flare or incessant oil spillage can deprive a child from
attending school three years after the flare or spillage, especially when the school is
many kilometres from the sight of the flare or spillage. Nixon’s (2011) idea of slow vio-
lence expresses violence without blood. This kind of violence is neither spectacular
nor instantaneous, but “incremental and accretive” (Nixon 2011, 2).
Ecocriticism as a theoretical approach to the study of cultural art forms offers an
appropriate middle ground; thereby emphasizing a vibrant relationship between the
humanities and other disciplines. As an interdisciplinary field it enables us to reas-
sess African writings from different frameworks within a single forum. The most fun-
damental feature of eco-criticism is basically to theorize the unending environmental
crisis humanity continues to create and invoke different strategies (which are usually
interdisciplinary) as means of bridging the frightening gap between humans and the
environment. Hence, Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (1998, 5) remark that the
dominant tradition of ecocriticism is to “evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their
coherence and usefulness as responses to the environmental crisis.” Cheryll Glotf-
elty’s formulation of cardinal aspects of ecocriticism has become perhaps the most
quoted definition in the field. Her definition of the term is somewhat simple when
she remarks that ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and
the physical environment”, distinctly accentuating an “earth-centered approach to
literary studies” (Glotfelty 1996, xviii). This relationship between humans and the
environment is not that simple if one considers the fact that humans continue to con-
sistently reduce the environment to a mere object or item that can be exploited for
their sustenance or corporate greed. Ecocriticism, I think, is more of an attempt to
counter an (un)conscious violence orchestrated by humans on the environment. This
464 Ogaga Okuyade
approach, therefore, becomes an alternative means of advancing the recovery and

preservation of the nonhuman worlds.
The twenty-first century individual negotiates existence under chaotic environ-
mental conditions. Beyond drawing attention to the interface between environment,
literature and other cultural art forms, ecocriticism reminds us that we are in an age of
global environmental and biological catastrophes and the need for exigent remedies
for our ever-vanishing worlds. Raj Kumar Mishra puts it explicitly when he remarks
that:
Today we live in a world of tropical warmth, chronic drought, desertification, deforestation, acid-
ifying of oceans, frequent coastal inundation, tsunami, cyclones, increasing food and shelter
shortage, accidents at nuclear power stations, oxytocin applied vegetables, industrial pollution,
and many more lethal activities. It is most pressing need to keep our environment safe so that
we can live and let other beings live and survive too. Environment affects and even largely deter-
mines all things ranging from food, fashion, technology to race, class, gender, sexuality, men-
tality, nationality, law, religion, economics etc. Eco-imbalance is not specific (one nation, one
place, or one city) problem. It is a global phenomenon. Hence whole world unanimously whether
partially or fully affected, should come forward and launch a global campaign with honesty for
the service of environment and the restoration of healthy environment. (2011, 1)
In view of the persistent disappearance or, simply put, extinction of different species
from the non-human worlds, the knowledge-based industries continue to evolve or
inaugurate concepts and theories which are geared toward drawing or attracting
attention to these dangerous ecological situations humanity has created, and fore-
ground the fact that s/he is duty-bound or has the ethical responsibility to protect
and preserve the physical environment. Significantly, therefore, raping – or the mate-
rialist wastage of the environment for the advancement of society – is problematic
by all standards. This is so because such capitalistic acts cannot help sustain human
development, but rather endanger human existence because, as the natural resources
continue to be depleted without conscious efforts for their replenishment, the life
expectancy of wo/man will definitely be reduced. The advocacy for the respect and
the proper usage of natural resources is therefore not negotiable. Rather it is a task.
African literature on environment does not only give expression to the envi-
ronment, it equally challenges global capitalist industrialism as it affects through
transnational engagements and the visionless government policies which are not
people-oriented. Significantly therefore, like other literatures, there appears to be a
conscious relationship between environmental and human rights in African cultural
art forms. The advocacy for environmental rights will be inconsequential if the advo-
cator is unable to assess the varied instruments and facilities which bequeath him/her
the nomenclature of freedom – “No human rights, no environmental rights” (Okuyade
2013, xiii). With the enthronement of democracy in Africa (even if it is nominal), the
time to question the relationship between the African and the nonhuman worlds need
not be postponed till democracy becomes enduringly functional.
As noted in the introductory part of this chapter, its aim is to further familiar-
ize scholars and students working in African literature with the theoretical concerns
of ecoculture and ecocriticism within postcolonial Africa. Moreover, it particularly
reflects new developments in African ecocritical studies. Like Sule Egya (2012, 1)
observes, “the question of environmentalism is arguably most radically manifest in
African poetry written in recent times” (with emphasis). I therefore push the debate
beyond ecopoetry and engage ecocritical conversation with other genres of literature,
especially prose narratives.
3 The Environmentality of African Literature

As already observed above, until recently, scholarship on African literature and envi-
ronment hardly attracted critical attention within the domain of cultural studies in
Africa. However, this does not in any way indicate that African writers did not explore
issues that border on the environment in early African writings or that the subject is
a recent phenomenon in African imaginative arts. A close reading of African oral arts
and written African literature from the 1930s would reveal how this literature vibrantly
expresses the intricate relationship between Africans and their environment. Conse-
quently, the environment occupies a towering position within African metaphysics
and culture. This in turn brings to the fore that the environment is not just the ‘other
world’, but the life force of human existence. The environment is therefore encapsu-
lated within the culture of the African people since it is an integral part of what makes
up the African world-view or ethos. In exploring the relationship between culture,
tradition and African society, Emmanuel Obiechina remarks that:
The traditional world view has an important bearing on attitudes to nature and this in turn is
reflected in the novels. It implies the mystical yet utilitarian outlook on nature instead of an
externalized appreciation of it in forms like fine landscapes, beautiful flowers, cascading waters
or the colours of the rainbow. In this tradition the beauty of the particular tree comes to be insep-
arable from “vital” property, demonstrable in pharmaceutical efficacy or the shade it provides
from the heat of the sun. The uniqueness of a particular stream or wooded landscape resides
in some supernatural manifestation, either as the abode of a communal deity or a local spirit
identifiable with the destiny of the community. The rainbow is apprehended first and foremost as
an externalization of an internal force portending good or ill for an entire community. (1975, 42)
Obiechina’s assertion above reinforces the commanding and abiding force of the envi-
ronment in the eco-human relation; nature therefore, spans beyond mere commodity
to be consumed or tourist ornamentation, it constitutes an organic entity which deter-
mines how the African negotiates his/her existence within the African geography.
Thus the connection between geography and culture is not only implicit but inher-
ently close. The argument above is not to place humanity and nature on the same
pedestal – considering the question of anthropomorphism – but to amplify the instru-
466 Ogaga Okuyade
mentality of the non-human worlds in the sustenance of human life. The environment
is not the ‘other’ as in the industrialized and urbanized West or the biblical injunc-
tion in the book of Genesis, but an extension of life itself. African literature from the
very beginning continues to pay attention to environmental issues, if one considers
how Chinua Achebe’s canonical text, Things Fall Apart, gives life to the environment.
Although the novel gives expression to the colonial incursion into Africa and how that
incursion sent Africa crashing from its vital balance, the narrative equally demon-
strates how rural people use the environment, thereby foregrounding the symbiotic
relationship between humanity and the environment. It is therefore pertinent to note
here that within the tradition of African imaginative creativity, the environment is
arguably part of what I call the cultural construction of the text. The representation
of the environment in African literature has taken a new dimension, considering the
spate of crises emanating from resource wars, which range from the asymmetric dis-
tribution of resources to the outlandish strategies government across the continent
deploy to silence the civil society when the state society is engaged diplomatically
through the resources of the public sphere on pressing ecological issues. African liter-
ature on environment continues to be engagingly combative, in order to re-order the
lopsided ecological geometry of the continent.
Although in narratives like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God
one may misunderstand the writer’s intention if one considers an aspect of the envi-
ronment signified in the evil bush as having an overwhelming force over the people
of Umuofia and Umuaro, the forest nevertheless offers an eloquent illustration of all
existence as a continuous flux and the relationship between mortals and the super-
natural world. This is so because it is not only treated with awe, it is equally a space
associated with malevolent spirits, which makes it the final resting place for indi-
viduals who suffer different kinds of abominable ailments or those who defy mor-
al-ethical laws codifying mortal-spiritual/ancestral relations. The evil forest captures
the relationship between humanity and the gods, embodying the unmovable limits
of mortality. However, both narratives clearly mark the environment as the determi-
nant force in the experience of transition in society, inasmuch as human progress is
defined by nature, as expressed in the numerous rituals observed during traditional
festivals (Ernest-Samuel 2013, 77). Consequently, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is not just
an attempt at “reversing Conrad’s male characters’ view of the African forest as a site
of death” (Mwangi 2004, 2). Mwangi argues further that:
Things Fall Apart typifies African village life and its richness as an organic self-sustaining forest
which has almost everything that the west – in its arrogance – claims to have come to introduce.
In the forest of Umuofia, there is a system of education, a rich philosophy, and a sophisticated
art, not to mention complex religion and medical practice. (2004, 2)
The narrative captures a unique African society in transition, with its rural façade
still almost unaltered by industrial capitalism. It remaps how rural folks deploy the
resources of nature and the bucolic strategies with which the environment is replen-
ished and sustained. The evil forest becomes the hallmark of Africa’s conservationist
strategy. The idea of nature as environment enunciated in the evil forest finds expres-
sion in Al Gedicks’ (2001, 3) observation on native cultures that “share a belief in
the idea of a delicate balance in the universe that must be maintained by reference
toward the natural world.” Although the iconography of the evil forest makes no
overt ideological point, the theme of preservation, renewal, continuity and hope are
intensely valorised because it eventually becomes a site from which a new transna-
tional society and administration was to emerge. Paradoxically branded evil forest, it
became the haven for societal rejects who will eventually facilitate the process of the
westernisation of rural communities and by extension the beginning of the gradual
deforestation of Africa. The point I try to make here is that the evil forest, is somewhat
sacred, and as such left untouched, therefore protected, even if inadvertently. The
people who invaded the sanctity and protectionist logic of Umuofia’s environmen-
talism are the missionaries. By cutting down the evil forest to build a church2, the
missionaries destroy a protected forest that had invaluable environmental relevance
to the community. Senanyo Olaoluwa’s essay, “Ecocriticism beyond Animist Limita-
tions in Things Fall Apart,” draws attention to a vital aspect of African environmental
consciousness which most studies on the novel continue to eschew – the culture-en-
vironmental import of the week of peace:
By declaring a week as sacred and one in which there should be absolute peace, the Umuofia
community forbids noise or disharmony of any kind. Today there are various forms of research
devoted to the reduction of noise in our environment in order to mitigate its impact on atmos-
pheric pollution, and it is in this very sense that the epistemic wisdom of Umofia displays a
sophisticated form of environmental awareness. (Olaoluwa 2015, 202)
Over time, global warming and climate change have remained the main significa-
tions for an ecological downturn or ecological crisis the world over. A reassessment
of Achebe’s narrative indicates the dangers and enormity of climate change on the
mainstay of Umuofia – farming in particular and its implications on the survival of
the community. The “heavy rains” that drown the yams and the unbearable heat of
the sun (Achebe 1958, 18–19), which eventually culminates into something close to a
famine is an eloquent dramatization of climatic asymmetry engendered by mankind’s
ecocidal ventures. Furthermore, the story of the feud between the Earth and Sky nar-
rated by Nwoye’s mother presents another dimension of Africa’s epistemic logic on
the eco-human relations which finds expression in Hubert Zapf’s concept of cultural
ecology (↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature):
2 Kofi Awoonor’s (1976, 209) “The Cathedral” metaphorically expresses (through the rituals of
lament) the inherent crisis in the felling of the tree like Achebe’s evil forest. In its place, a cathedral
of doom is erected.
468 Ogaga Okuyade
The vital interrelatedness between culture and nature has been a special focus of literary culture
from its archaic beginnings in myth, ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales,
in the genres of pastoral literature, nature poetry, and the stories of mutual transformations
between human and nonhuman life as most famously collected in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
which has become a highly influential text throughout literary history and across different cul-
tures. This attention to the culture-nature-interaction became especially prominent in the era of
Romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of literary stagings of human experience up to
the present. Indeed, the mutual opening and symbolic reconnection of culture and nature, mind
and body, human and nonhuman life in a holistic and yet radically pluralistic way seems to be
one significant mode in which literature functions and in which literary knowledge is produced.
(2010, 139)
Beside the exploration of the colonial rupture of an indigenous African eco-cultural

base, Things Fall Apart reminds one of the western capitalist arrogance and the
destruction of traditional hierarchical structure by assuming the non-existence of
local-folk logic of sustenance and of keeping alive the ecosystems. And above all, the
narrative arguably absolves the African and African cultural arts from the charge of
ecoignorance or ecoblindness.
However, for writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’O, the environment signifies life itself:
The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a
valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and
ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke.
They just slept, the big deep sleep of their Creator. A river flowed through the valley of life […] The
river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring back-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to
possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. (Ngugi 1965, 1).
The clarity with which Ngugi captures the ecosystem described above brings to the fore
the rustic nature of the African landscape before the violent incursion of Europe into
Africa. For this writer the environment is life itself. The African people who occupied
this landscape led a happy, peaceful and united life with their traditions and customs
which bound them to the environment, in particular the land. For these Africans, the
land becomes their parent and God, Murunga’s gift to their first parents – Gikuyu
and Mumbi. Murunga told them: “This land, I give to you, oh, man and woman. It is
yours to rule and till, you and your posterity” (Ngugi 1965, 2). The parenting qualities
of nature are vital in the sustenance of human life in Ngugi’s narratives. Although the
idea of the earth as provider is a very popular phenomenon in Africa, there are var-
iations among ethnic groups, depending on their agricultural orientation. There are
predominantly two orientations – hunting and planting.
Chenjerai Hove’s exploration of the eco-human relations in Bones almost par-
allels Ngugi’s. However, the imagery with which Hove captures the environment
oscillates between humans, animals and the landscape. Like Ngugi, Hove (1988,
28) uses the image of the mother earth to articulate Marita’s failure to conceive: “the
man [Murume, Marita’s husband] planted his seed in me but the soil inside me did
not make it grow to a plant.” Invariably, the woman’s body takes the attribute of the
earthly image as an incubator of seeds which will in turn develop into plants, a sig-
nification for children. This relationship between the earth and woman’s body finds
expression in Ancestors, another novel by Hove, and some of his poetry collections
like Up in Arms, Red Hills of Home, Rainbows in the Dust and Blind Moon. The image of
the mother as earth is equally metaphorised to symbolise the symbiotic relationship
between Africans and their land. The earth or land becomes the soul of the African.
Thus, Bones becomes an eloquent demonstration of the harmonious relationship, or
perhaps the unanimity of the African and his/her land.
In Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, we see the protagonist, Camagu, an envi-
ronmental activist, struggle to ensure that the pristine environment of Qolorha is pre-
served. The novel gives expression to the importance of eco-awareness within the
African context. The novel explores issues related to economic exploitation, political
marginalization and modern capitalist tourism which is detrimental to the health of
the environment. The novel enunciates the struggle a local marginalized community
put up in contesting the threat of an environmental apocalypse posed by a mind-
less tourist development scheme (De Loughrey and Handley 2011, 291). The novel
explores the potential dangers such a developmental scheme which is not people-ori-
ented might have on the indigenous people and their environment: “[…] a project of
this magnitude cannot be built without cutting down the forest of indigenous trees,
without disturbing the bird life, and without polluting the rivers, the sea, and its great
lagoon” (Mda 2000, 119).
Western colonialism remains a scheme or agenda which privileges dominant
cultures above colonised ones, which in turn creates the rationale for the colonial
attempt to civilise indigenous societies because the lands of the indigenous people
are assumed – from Eurocentric arrogance – to be underdeveloped and empty (Reed
2009, 29). The Heart of Redness underpins proactive environmental justice concerns
to ecotourism, and at the same time proffers pragmatic solutions to pressing postco-
lonial concerns (cf. Vital 2005, 306). The principal issue Mda deals with in the novel
is the conflict over natural resources. The historical past, signified by the cattle-kill-
ings during the 1850’s, is linked to the present through the ecological consciousness
of Qukezwa. The tourism scheme is appraised differently by the two major groups of
the village, thereby bifurcating their position on the matter depending on what kind
of socio-political and economic development they prefer for their village. On one side
are the Unbelievers, led by Bhonco, who see the tourism project as applaudable and
believe in modernization and civilization, and on the other side the Believers, led by
Zim, who vehemently insist on the imminent risks of the project because they feel it
will endanger their indigenous culture, plants, and birds. The Believers’ insistence
on the danger the project may likely generate stems from the fact that the project
would only benefit a few villagers and create a wide rift among the contending groups
and between the people and the environment. Considering the possible deforesta-
tion of the local environment – which in turn would make numerous winged species
470 Ogaga Okuyade
migrate – and the threat to the water supply, the project appears as a severe risk for
the sustenance of human life to this indigenous people. Contrasting and negotiating
between these positions, therefore, The Heart of Redness unequivocally advocates a
kind of eco-tourism that would not only help in the preservation of the environment
but also create room for functional tourism, which does not displace local people
from their indigenous economic base.
One of the major problems environmental crisis engenders the world over is the
numerous kinds of displacements that give expression to various forms of socio-cul-
tural dislocation created by the inordinate consumption of natural resources. Helon
Habila’s (2011) Oil on Water details the crisis of survival in the Niger Delta and how
it underscores the gradual loss of the identity of micro-minority groups in Nigeria,
an identity shaped by the relationship between humanity and the places they asso-
ciate with home. The kind of displacement I discuss here falls within the latitude of
what Rob Nixon (2011, 2) describes as “slow violence.” A good example is Michael, the
youth in Oil on Water whose school has been closed down because of the oil crisis in
the area (Habila 2011, 36); and the protagonist of Kaine Agary’s (2006) Yellow-Yellow,
who is forced to go to the city to begin a new life since her mother’s only means of
livelihood – the land – has been destroyed as a result of incessant oil spillages equally
falls within the parameters of Nixon’s concept of slow violence. The two characters
referred to here are not injured physically in any way. However, the truncation of their
education in their respective communities and the need to relocate elsewhere impera-
tively bear the stamp of violence, the kind that is not instantaneous or immediate, but
whose long-term consequences are severe. Though an anomaly – since oil-induced
displacement threatens the inalienable rights of the displaced – the phenomenon in
the Niger Delta has come to appear ‘normal’ since those displaced hardly move, living
in a kind of displacement without movement. Oil on Water is therefore a narrative that
recounts the debilitating and abysmal conditions under which the Niger Delta people
of Nigeria negotiate their existence.
Beside the frustrating compulsion to evacuate what is home for these people, the
oil companies, backed by federal might, have caused not only social marginalization,
but also destruction of the ecology and decomposition of culture. Michael Cernea
(2000, 3660) makes eloquent the above position when he suggests that some of the
most negative consequences of development-induced displacement, which includes
mining and oil exploitation, are usually devastating to the psyche of the displaced.
The displaced often struggles to put up with problems of permanent itinerancy,
landlessness, loss of access to common property, homelessness, joblessness, food
insecurity, social marginalisation, increased morbidity, and social disarticulation.
Unfortunately, until recently, “according to many scientific studies, oil production
in developing countries almost never contributes to improving the situation of local
communities. Loss of land lead to loss of economic base functioning of the whole
community” (Terminski 2011, 2). Ibeanu (1998, 86) pushes the debate further when
he argues that these numerous forms of injustices have not only been going on for so
long a time, but the primary issues which generate these conflicts with monstrous
consequences are hardly resolved; hence a potent marker of many oil-producing com-
munities “is a strong presence of military and police detachments; and systematic
state repression, sometimes taking the form of extra-judicial killings, has remained
a fact of life.” By this innovation, chief Ibiram and his people and other neighboring
communities like Irikefe in Habila’s Oil on Water are forever dislocated from places
that offer them not only socio-economic security, but a sense of belonging. Conse-
quently, “Community and kinship webs were changed irrevocably as resettlement
hauled people – many of whom had hauled their houses with them – into the indus-
trial world of the twentieth century, leaving, for many, grief and loss in their wake”
(Brinklow 2013, 41). For these indigenous peoples of the Niger Delta, the “seamless
progression of time [becomes] snapped” (Hay 2006, 33), leaving many of them to
come to terms with the capricious loss of their homes, land, sense of socioeconomic
security, means of livelihoods, communities, religious belief systems and above all,
their identity.
For writers like Gabriel Okara and J.P Clark-Bekederemo, two writers whose imag-
inative craft occupies an inaugural position in what is gradually becoming an exten-
sion of contemporary Nigerian poetic tradition – Niger Delta literature, a tradition
that continues to blossom with the passage of time, while the deltascape it expresses
or recreates vanishes with every new imaginative art form published on the subject –
nature appears to be a little hostile in the eco-human relations, specifically because of
the terrain or physical geography where the Niger Delta people negotiate their exist-
ence. Okara’s “Call of the River Nun” and Clark-Bekederemo’s “Night Rain,” “Return
of the Fisherman” and “Stream Side Exchange” easily come to mind here. The exis-
tential angst and the struggle to make the wetland habitable become a manifestation
of nature’s essence and how the supernatural world governs the movement of life. In
“Night Rain,” Clark-Bekederemo (1991, 6) paints a concrete scenic picture of a tropical
storm and its effects on rural households. Beside the ferocity of the ambience evoked
in the poem, reinforced by “lightning,” the poem equally celebrates the image of a
mother filled with solitude for her children. The poem articulates how nature, envi-
ronment, culture and human experience are interwoven into poetic sensibility that
affirms motherly love and devotion, rustic life in a wetland environment. The setting
of the poem does not only assume a primal quality, the image of the mother becomes
the landscape itself.
The personal role of Tanure Ojaide in the genesis of poetic engagement with the
environment and ecological restoration which has become the stamp of Niger Delta
literature has been articulated in numerous studies on the environmental literature in
Africa. Thus I will not reiterate once more the precedent set by his imaginative com-
positions on the environment. However, it must be noted that scholars like Rob Nixon
(1996, 43) erroneously argue that Ken Saro-Wiwa (the Nigerian environmental activist
and writer from Ogoni – one of the micro-minorities in the Niger Delta – hanged by
the Abacha administration in 1995) “was the first African writer to articulate the liter-
472 Ogaga Okuyade
ature of commitment in expressively environmental terms.” Saro-Wiwa’s imaginative

compositions hardly discuss environmentalism; his environmental consciousness is
only well articulated in his political rhetoric. While Ojaide is the most environmen-
tally conscious African writer today, Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth arguably
occupies an inaugural position in modern African literature on environmentalism.
The most remarkable aspect of Ojaide’s art is his eternal attachment to his geog-
raphy, something that is of immense importance for him. Ojaide’s attachment to his
nativity is often expressed in the metaphor of the soil or the earth, the forest, and
the infinite waters. Ojaide’s greatest asset as a writer is his eternal connection to his
birthplace. He is rooted in this geography, and this rootedness reverberates in his
poetry, private diary, and narratives. The bucolic memory of his childhood occupies a
looming space in his oeuvre. His childhood has become the touchstone of his entire
existence. He measures everything by his childhood, from which he gets his ‘green’
symbols and which is the impulse for his art. It has become the standard of his moral
values, the source of his art, political indignation, environmental awareness, and
disenchantment with the failures of Africa’s independent states. In “I Want to Be an
Oracle,” Ojaide asserts that:
My roots thus run deep into the Delta area. Its traditions, folklore, fauna, and flora no doubt
enriched my children of Iroko and Labyrinths of the Delta. This area of constant rains, where
we children thought we saw fish fall from the sky in hurricanes, did not remain the same. By
the 1960s the rivers had been dredged to take in pontoons or even ships to enter our backyard.
Shell-BP has started to pollute the rivers, streams and farmlands with oil and flaring gas. Forest
had been cleared by poachers and others to feed the African Timber and Plywood company in
Sapele. Streams and marches dried up. Rubber trees were planted in a frenzy to make money and
were soon tapped to death […] How quickly times had changed […] My Delta years have become
the touchstone with which I measure the rest of my life. The streams, the fauna, and the flora are
the symbols I continually tap. Even when I wander outside to many places, I have experienced,
that land of streams, the Iroko tree, antelopes, anthills and so much life remain indelible in
my memory and imprinted in my thought. Home remains for me the Delta, where I continue to
anchor myself. (1996, 122)
In this passage, Ojaide’s artistry oscillates between a bipolarity signposting his anger
with the de-vegetation of his landscape and the urgent need for the physical and
spiritual regeneration of the deltascape.
In order to understand the nature of Ojaide’s environmentalism, I identify seven
dominant themes of the expression of ecology in Ojaide’s art: human beings as part
of the ecosystem; the bounty of natural resources, the ecophobic inclination of man;
the need to re-vegetate human consciousness; regret at environmental degradation
(and perhaps despair for the future); love and respect for species and natural land-
scapes; and the role of the Nigeria government in the devastation of the ecology of the
deltascape. As a painter on a broad canvas, Ojaide uses the Delta region as his point
of reference to reach other communities in the fraternity of minority voices. The ques-
tion of minorities and their environment continue to spark much debate, particularly
in literary and socio-economic circles. Ojaide presents the pains and burdens of the
Delta people from varied perspectives. In “We Are Many,” the poet tactically assumes
the entire burden of the people of the Niger Delta, personifying their plight by apply-
ing the authorial first-person ‘I’ to the voiceless, marginalized Delta, lamenting with
a communal accent:
From birth I have been in the custody

of three overlords […]
They extract oil from my wet soil,
Prospect for iron in my bones,
and level and forests for timber.
Then they heap barrels on my back,
Strap billets on my shoulders and
tie hardwood to my sides (Ojaide 1986, 72)
These lines, without doubt, conjure images of pain, enslavement, and exploitation.
The “three overlords” are the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria – the Hausa-Fu-
lani, Yorùbá, and Ibo – who use their numerical strength to employ the fraudulent
apparatus of power, reducing the deltascape and its inhabitants to the status of a
donkey, “[a]nd they take turns to ride me” (Ojaide 1986, 72). Along with the issues of
the inequity in the distribution of oil resources among the federating units that make
up Nigeria, political and economic marginalization, Ojaide addresses the issue of the
mindlessness of the majority ethnic groups who alternate power among themselves
as they deplete the Delta ecology in their greedy quest for natural resources which
better only their lives, at the expense of the minority stakeholders.
In “Ughelli,” which is the name of a community in the Niger Delta where oil is
explored and exploited, the same ambience of insensitivity to the plight of the minor-
ity producer and the image of exploitation are established. Aderemi Bamikunle (1992,
77) describes Ughelli, in personification, as “the owner neglected and dying of need
when her possession helps make others comfortable.” Ughelli becomes a metaphor
for the mixed blessings of the Delta inhabitants; the great deposits of oil and gas have
become a curse for them – a kind of satan ex machina. Denied any benefit from this
wealth, they are exposed to devastating environmental pollution and degradation:
To see her dry-skinned when her oil rejuvenates hags

to leave her in darkness when her fuel lights the universe
to starve her despite all her produce
to let her dehydrate before the wells bored into her heart
to have her naked despite her innate industry
to keep her without roads when her sweat tars the outside world
[…]
and for her to be sucked anemic by an army of leeches,
it is a big shame (Bamikunle 1992, 74).
474 Ogaga Okuyade
The incessant exploitation of the Delta people and the unwillingness of government
and multinational oil companies to replenish the battered fortunes of the people have
become the greatest disaster in the geopolitical history of Nigeria – a “big shame” at
the very least. Ojaide employs incremental repetition to enumerate the levels of the
assault on the minority and their environment; from one level to the next, the people
of the Delta have been robbed of their fundamental dignity and their environment
plundered and stripped bare. Other writers whose poetry fall under this tradition
include: Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta, Nnimmo Bassey’s Poems on the Run
and We thought it was Oil but it was Blood, Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp, Ebi Yeibo’s
Shadows of the Setting Sun and The Fourth Masquerade, Ebinyo Ogbowei’s Song of a
dying River and Marsh Boy and other Poems, Sophia Obi-Apoko’s Tears in a Basket,
Lambert Ototo’s Letters from the Earth, Doutimi Kpakiama’s Salute to the Mangrove
Giants among others.
One other aspect of the non-human world explored in African literature is the
deployment of avian metaphors or winged emblems, birds in particular, to draw atten-
tion to eco-human relations within the African context in order to establish important
insights into the meaning and value of birds in African cultures. This aspect of African
eco-arts is popular with the genre of poetry, the kind of poetry Scott Bryson describes
as ecopoetry:
[a] subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also
advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues.
(2002, 6)
Malawian poets like Frank Chipasula and Jack Mapanje have used their poetry to
contest tyranny and despotism in their country. However, through the use of avian
metaphors, Mapanje appears to be more artful in his ability to veil his intention.
Although blood, wounds, scars and torture are dominant features in the poetry of
both poets, through the deployment of winged emblems Mapanje uses wit, irony,
sarcasm and repulsive imagery to express his disgust and contempt for corruption
and tyranny of those he criticizes. In The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, Of
Chameleon and Gods and Skipping Without Ropes, Mapanje employs the metaphor of
birds to expose the repressive Banda regime in Malawi. The collections draw attention
to the suffering of political prisoners and the way birds either exacerbate their suffer-
ing or give them hope for release.
The poem “Song of Chickens” (Mapanje 1989, 4) in Of Chameleon and Gods is a
protest against a master who claims he protects his chickens from hawks, yet he preys
on them himself. In the poem, the poet persona asks the master a rhetorical question,
who he says just recently used bows and arrows and catapults, his hands “steaming
with hawk blood” (4) to protect the chicken:
Why do you talk with knives now,

Your hands teaming with eggshells
And hot blood from your own chickens?
Is it to impress your visitors? (Mapanje1989, 4)
Although the poem may not seem overtly political, it is geared towards ridiculing
Banda’s pretentiousness and his act of Orwellian double speak. Reuben Makayiko
Chirambo (2007, 145) argues that, “[t]he poem criticizes Banda on multiple levels,
attacking his lavish entertainment of the visiting South African leader, as well as his
Messianic claims. It asks him why after calling himself a Saviour and Nkhoswe of his
people he has turned into the very beast that successfully preys on his people.” The
poem aptly expresses a systemic and institutional failure in the inability of a gov-
ernment to offer protection to its citizens. “Chickens” and “eggshells” constitute the
items that guarantee the existence and continuity of this domestic bird. However, the
destruction of the eggs is by no means a strategy for the preservation of this bird.
Invariably, the poem makes a potent statement about the recklessness of the state
and its inability to preserve natural life signified in the metaphors of the egg and
the chicken, which in turn reinforces not only humanity’s sense of destruction, but
the parasitic relationship between humanity and the other worlds. Ojaide’s The Fate
of Vultures falls within this paradigm because it uses the metaphor of the vulture to
accentuate the insensitivity of government and the debility of the masses.
The Nigerian nonagenarian poet, Christian Otobotekere’s use of avian meta-
phors – birds in particular – differs from both Mapanje and Ojaide in the sense that
through childhood recollection he recreates in the present the pristine environment
of his homeland and nativity. This style of musing about the vegetative wholeness of
a once virile environment reminds one of the poetry of William Blake and William
Wordsworth. Austine Amanze Apkuda (2015, 194) insists that “any consideration
of the constant references to and romps with birds would show him closer to John
Keats.” However, it does not mean that without the English Romantic poets Otobot-
okere could not have written the type of poems, in such collections as Playful Notes
and Keys (1987), My River: Poems on Riverine Ecology (2010) and Beyond Sound and
Voice (2010). This is so because of the uniqueness of the deltascape, which “alongside
her own indigenous birds often hosts migrating birds from Europe on yearly basis”
(Akpuda 2015, 195). The virginal wholesomeness of this landscape is what gives Oto-
botekere a kind of pastoral ideal easily noticed in the constant reference to “a new
Eden” in his poems in Playful Notes and Keys. This attachment to his nativity – espe-
cially the river, a kind of water-world – is what makes the river birds and other birds
the dominant items in the poetry of Otobotokere.
The poetic canvas of Otobotekere becomes a vehicle through which the poet
remembers the “inescapable joy of childhood” – a product of a harmonious world
with the pristine serenity of a natural habitat:
476 Ogaga Okuyade
Land of day light and green,

Of forests, rivers, lakes
And breeze-fanned glades
Fun-fair of bright and chirping birds (Otobotekere 1987, 44)
In a world not truncated by the vagaries of capitalist modernity, one witnesses such
edenic quality and serenity of the deltascape; first through the eagle’s vision in Oto-
botekere’s “Royal Flight” where we are thrilled by the eagle in royal flight:
Coolly surveying
Inland lakes, forests,
Tiny birds,
River and man,
In one round view (1987, 1)
If the lines above serve as an introduction into the enchanting world of a child, it
is the same image that resonates in the nostalgic echoes which reverberate in “Bird
in the Room”, “Little Bird”, “Miracle Lake”, “Sun Flower” among poems in Playful
Notes and Keys, or “Tombia Little Place”, “Fishing Friends”, “Guest Mid-River”, “Osu-
ma-Opopo” and others in My River: Poems on Riverine Ecology.
“Little Bird” equally expresses and evokes the idea of childhood for the poet
persona because the poem offers a succinct description of how the little bird engages
the child; the first stanza becomes something close to an invocation which familiar-
ises the reader with the incredible little bird that provides the rhythm of eternal child-
hood:
O little bird,
Morning, noon, or evening
My best companion,
Today auburn beauty,
Smooth and inviting,
From twig to tuft,
Down to playfield level (Otobotekere 1987, 2)
Though weakened by time, the poet, Otobotekere continues to passionately and nos-
talgically observe the rural habitat of his childhood – a riverine environment where
humanity and nature are intricately connected, thus making the health of the com-
munity and inhabitants of the Niger Delta dependant on the compositeness of the
natural world. Consequently, the poet “presents the river and the environment as aes-
thetically pleasing and good for the community and the individual” (Ojaide 2015, 137).
4 C
onclusion
To summarize, ecocriticism – as an interpretative approach in the exploration and
explication of how humanity exploits and explores the environment in the cultural
sciences – is ethically grounded, specifically as it advocates the principle of eco-logic
in the use of natural resources. To understand the place of the environment in African
cultural art forms, it becomes important to subject the cultural context from which
the form is derived to a dialectic assessment. The possibility of establishing a non-an-
thropocentric eco-sensitivity within the African context may seem like eco-psychosis.
However, within traditional African indigenous systems, there are numerous strate-
gies for eco-conservationism if one reconsiders Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ojaide’s
Great Boys: An African Childhood and Wangari Maathia’s Unbowed.
From the analysis of texts and the theoretical base of this chapter, I have deployed
the conceptual positions of ecocultural studies in order to illuminate and interpret
some aspects of contemporary African literature. As noted from the outset, the present
chapter does not intend to engage in specific close readings, but rather provides a
starting point for an ecocritical typology of modern African literature – a typology
grounded in the diverse artistic representations of the eco-human relations, as they
articulate different forms of social and environmental degradation orchestrated by
humanity. Although the impact of climate change and global warming on Africa and
their health and economic implications for the African people may have received little
attention at the level of policymaking because of other pressing postcolonial con-
cerns, cultural ecology invariably becomes an imaginative construct geared towards
creative consciousness and responsibility, so that the art of imagining and imaging
becomes an extended strategy for eco-preservation and eco-survival.
Needless to say, this chapter is not in any way exhaustive and, therefore, it settles
for just an analytical survey of a handful of texts. However, the charge of eco-inertia
or eco-hesitation in Africa is not a reflection of an absence of ecological concerns on
the literary map of the continent, but rather signals the fact that most of the ecologi-
cal activism and thought associated with the West is yet to gather momentum here in
Africa. More so, the African texts hardly rely on Western literary models in expressing
the eco-human relations; this likewise points to one major reason why Western critics
hardly notice the eco-temper of most African art forms. Thus the imaginative crafts of
the African writers I have discussed above suggest that their relationships with litera-
ture and the environment are varied and nuanced. Still more importantly, the African
texts I have dealt with reemphasise the fact that literary ecocultures do not merely
privilege the natural world in literary texts but also draw attention to eco-awareness
and eco-consciousness, so that humanity can re-evaluate the ways in which eco-hu-
man relations are represented, interpreted, and actively shaped in the cultural, social,
and political world.
478 Ogaga Okuyade
5 B
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Cheng Xiangzhan
24 E
cosophy and Ecoaesthetics: A Chinese
Perspective
Abstract: Inspired and encouraged by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’ Ecoso-
phy T, this chapter proposes Ecosophy C. C encompasses eight expressions with the
capital C, namely Chinese culture, Confucianism, Continuity of being, Creating life,
Compassion, Cheng Hao, Community, and Cultural evils. The chapter defines ecoaes-
thetics as the theory of ecological aesthetic appreciation based on ecosophy C, and
then goes on to analyze some classic Chinese poems as samples of ecocriticism based
on ecoaesthetics. By this exploration, the author hopes to attract more attention to
the aesthetic dimension of ecological literature and arts, and to promote the aesthetic
research for ecocriticism, which is proposed to be called ‘aesthetic ecocriticism’ com-
pared with other forms of ecocriticism such as ‘cultural ecocriticism’ and ‘material
ecocriticism.’
Key Terms: Ecosophy C, ecoaesthetics, aesthetic ecocriticism
1 I ntroduction
In 2010, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the official
journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), pub-
lished a group of brief articles under the title “Special Forum on Ecocriticism and
Theory.” The aim of the special forum was to propose the theoretical basis for eco-
criticism. I contributed an essay titled “Ecoaesthetics and Ecocriticism” to the forum,
trying to define ecocriticism as a new form of literary criticism based on ecoaesthetics
(Cheng 2010), which means that, from my own perspective, the theoretical basis for
ecocriticism is ecoaesthetics.
However, the construction of ecoaesthetics is an on-going project internationally
far from being mature. The more fundamental question is: what is the theoretical
basis for ecoaesthetics? In other words, what is the deeper basis for ecocriticism? In
order to answer these questions, this chapter first describes ecosophy mainly from
the perspective of traditional Chinese philosophy, then defines ecoaesthetics as the
theory of ecological aesthetic appreciation based on ecosophy, and finally takes some
classic Chinese poems as samples of ecocriticism based on ecoaesthetics (see also
↗17 Ecology and Life Writing).
By this exploration, I hope to attract more attention to the aesthetic dimension of
ecological literature and arts, and to promote the aesthetic research for ecocriticism,
482 Cheng Xiangzhan
which I would propose to call ‘aesthetic ecocriticism’ compared with other forms of
ecocriticism such as ‘cultural ecocriticism’ and ‘material ecocriticism.’
2 F rom Ecosophy T to Ecosophy C: A Chinese

Perspective
Ecosophy as a term is the combination of the prefix “eco-” and the suffix “-sophy.”
The term can be taken to refer to ‘ecological wisdom’ in a more general sense. Norwe-
gian philosopher Arne Naess first proposed this term in 1970s. Naess is most famous
for the idea of ‘deep ecology.’ As the opposite of the word ‘shallow,’ the word ‘deep’
expressed “the most general and basic views” relating to ecology (Naess 1989, 28). As
a branch of the field of biological research, ecology is an interdisciplinary scientific
study of the living conditions of organisms in interaction with each other and with
their environments, organic as well as inorganic. As compared with the science of
ecology, the essence of deep ecology is to ask ‘deeper questions,’ whereby the adjec-
tive ‘deep’ stresses the point that we ask ‘why’ and ‘how,’ i.e., questions related to
value theory. So, ecosophy or deep ecology involves “a shift from science to wisdom”
(Sessions 1995, 27).
Given the fact that Homo sapiens is a biological organism, Naess raised a ‘deeper’
question: Do all possible studies of humankind’s relations with all possible kinds
of surroundings belong to ecology? This question inevitably implies a philosophi-
cal pursuit rather than a scientific inquiry into the place of humanity in nature. In
response to this philosophical pursuit, Naess clearly realized the limits of ecology
and proposed what he called ‘ecophilosophy’ or ‘ecosophy.’ In Naess’s understand-
ing, ecosophy is composed of the prefix “eco-” found in economy and ecology, which
has a broader meaning than the immediate family, household, and community and
means ‘earth household;’ and the suffix “-sophy” found in philosophy, which denotes
insight or wisdom. So, ecosophy becomes “a philosophical world-view or system
inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere” (Naess 1989, 38). Given that every
situation is unique and specific, Naess introduces Ecosophy T to denote his own kind
of ecosophy. The “T” referred to Tvergastein, a mountain hut where he wrote many of
his books. He encouraged his audience to develop his or her own systems of guides,
say, Ecosophies X, Y, or Z.
Inspired and encouraged by Naess, I propose my personal ecosophy, Ecosophy C.
C here denotes eight expressions with the capital C: 1. Chinese culture, which is my
cultural background; 2. Confucianism, which is generally viewed as the symbol of
China in the global cultural ecosystem; 3. Continuity of being, the metaphysical and
ontological promise of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics; 4. Creating life, which is
viewed as the great virtue of Heaven and Earth expressed significantly in one of the
Chinese classics, The Book of Changes (i.e. I Ching); 5. Compassion, which is mainly
embodied in Zhuangzi’s philosophical story of appreciating the fish’s joy and means
having the faculty to share empathy with all life; 6. Cheng Hao, a philosopher in the
Song Dynasty, whose aesthetic thought represents the most systematic expression of
ecological appreciation in Chinese aesthetics; 7. Community, a key term in ecology,
based on which Aldo Leopold developed his idea of ecological conscience; and 8. Cul-
tural evils, a key idea proposed in my own aesthetic theory, “An Aesthetics of Creating
Life” (Cheng 2012).
Firstly, let’s begin with the discussion of point 7, community. In today’s ecological
theory, community is a general term applied to any grouping of populations of dif-
ferent organisms found living together in a particular environment. In his 1947 essay
entitled “The Ecological Conscience,” Leopold (1991, 340) defined ecology as “the
science of communities” and consequently defined ecological conscience as “the
ethics of community life.” He asserted that what is lacking in philosophy, ethics, and
religion is ‘ecological conscience’ and a change in the philosophy of values should be
promoted. In order to develop his ‘land ethic,’ Leopold put the community concept
in the central place. The single premise of all ethics is that an individual is a member
of a community of interdependent parts. Leopold’s land ethic simply enlarged the
“boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals or, collec-
tively, the land” and affirmed the right of these resources to “continued existence in
a natural state” (340).
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fel-
low-members, and also respect for the community as such (Leopold 1949, 204). It is
clear that Leopold’s statement is not a view of scientific ecology but a view of ecos-
ophy: an ecological philosophical view about values embedded in the biosphere as
the whole ecosystem. Based on his emphasis on the concept of community, Leopold
expressed his value system in a widely cited maxim: “A thing is right when it tends to
preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when
it tends otherwise” (224–225). Scientifically speaking, from the perspective of geologi-
cal time or scale (say 10,000 years) planet earth keeps continuously changing dramat-
ically. There is no “integrity” or “stability” at all. However, philosophically speaking,
from the perspective of human civilization, humankind should take preserving the
integrity and stability of the earth as his or her value orientation. Only by doing so can
humankind face the challenges of the global ecological crisis.
Point 5, compassion, generally means sympathetic pity and concern for the suffer-
ings or misfortunes of others. However, with the awareness of the community concept
and an ecological conscience based on it, it would be most reasonable to understand
that ‘others’ should include any individual sharing the same community, no matter
whether it is a plant or an animal. What is more, we can reinterpret the meaning of
the word ‘compassion’ positively to investigate the possibility of sharing others’ joy
or satisfaction, not only the negativity of their sufferings or misfortunes. There is an
484 Cheng Xiangzhan
appealing philosophical story about the joy of fish in Zhuangzi, the Chinese classic of
Taoism, which goes as follows:
Travelling with Huizi over a bridge on the Hao River, Zhuangzi said, “The fish is swimming at
ease. This is how the fish enjoy themselves.” Huizi said, “You are not a fish. How do you know
the fish are enjoying themselves?” Zhuangzi said, “You are not me. How do you know I don’t
know about the fish?”
The philosophical question here is related to what we call intersubjectivity, applied

here to the relation between human beings and non-human things. Is it possible for
us to know a fish’s joy or not? If yes, how? Zhuangzi did not answer these questions
directly; he just said that he could know the fish’s joy on a bridge on the Hao River.
The key is how to understand the word ‘know’ as a human activity. We may ‘know’
something scientifically, philosophically, or aesthetically. It is reasonable to think in
biological terms that when a fish’s desire for survival is satisfied by its living environ-
ment, it can experience a kind of joy or satisfaction. To some extent, it is mankind’s
natural faculty to understand or know this point. I argue that both from the perspec-
tive of traditional Chinese philosophy and of today’s ecological ethics, mankind
should respect non-human beings’ intrinsic value and their right to enjoy their lives.
Briefly, the positive feeling of compassion is a kind of human ability and sensibility
based on ecological ethics, which exemplifies the aesthetic intersubjectivity between
human beings and non-human life.
Community as a key term in ecology shows the interconnectedness or connectiv-
ity among community members, and compassion shows that the boundaries between
these members may disappear to some extent. How, then, should we understand con-
nectivity and compassion philosophically or metaphysically? From the perspective
of Chinese philosophy, we may propose the concept of “the continuity of being” (i.e.,
point 3 of Ecosophy C), which is the title of an essay by Tu Weiming, a former Harvard
professor of Chinese history and philosophy. In his paper, Tu introduces Chinese
visions of nature and asserts:
The Chinese belief in the continuity of being, a basic motif in Chinese ontology, has far-reaching
implications in Chinese philosophy, religion, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. (1998, 105)
This belief is based on the Chinese mode of thought about cosmogony as an organis-
mic process, which holds, in F. W. Mote’s (1988, 15) words, that “all of the parts of the
entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants
in one spontaneously self-generating life process.” The most basic stuff that makes up
the cosmos is a vital force or vital power, ch’i (i.e., matter-energy). This kind of meta-
physical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between
spirit and matter. In the unified cosmos consisting of ch’i, all modalities of being, from
a rock to heaven, are integral parts of a continuum which is often referred to as the
‘great transformation’ (da-hua). Within the continuum, “the chain of being is never
broken and a linkage will always be found between any given pair of things in the uni-
verse […]. The continuous presence of ch’i in all modalities of being makes everything
flow together as the unfolding of a single process” (Tu 1998, 108).
So, in order to understand Ecosophy C completely, it is necessary to return to tra-
ditional Chinese cosmology. In answering the question of “where do we and myriad
things in the universe come from ultimately?” it is not hard to reach the philosophical
presumption of the most primal origin. Ancient Chinese philosophers referred to it
in various kinds of names, such as Tian (which literally means Heaven), or Tiandi
(which literally means Heaven and Earth), or Dao (which literally means way). As
for the case of Tian, the most noticeable example is Confucius’ following story and
statement:
Confucius said, “I do not wish to say anything.” Tzu-kung said, “If you do not say anything,
what can we little disciples ever learn to pass on to others?” Confucius said, “Does Heaven
(Tian, Nature) say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced. Does
Heaven say anything?” (Chan 1963, 47)
In Confucius’ view, Tian produced all things in the universe. Compared with Tian,
Dao, a more philosophical term which is generally translated also as Tao in the West,
is more widely used to describe the ultimate origin and its creations of myriad things
in the universe, including the universe itself. The most important example is stanza
51 of Laozi, which says:
Tao produces them [the ten thousand things]. Virtue fosters them. Matter gives them physical
form. The circumstances and tendencies complete them. Therefore the ten thousand things
esteem Tao and honor virtue. Tao is esteemed and virtue is honored without anyone’s order.
They always come spontaneously. Therefore Tao produces them and virtue fosters them. They
rear them and develop them. They give them security and give them peace. They nurture them
and protect them. [Tao] produces them but does not take possession of them. It acts, but does
not rely on its own ability. It leads them but does not master them. This is called profound and
secret virtue. (Chan 1963, 163–164)
The “profound and secret virtue” in Laozi is also called the “great virtue of Heaven
and Earth” in the traditional Confucianism classic, The Book of Changes (I Ching),
which says that “the great virtue of Heaven and Earth is to produce” (Chan 1963, 521),
and this classic holds that “[c]hanges mean production and reproduction” (266). In
both Laozi and The Book of Changes, “to produce” and “production” in Chan’s English
translation is the same Chinese character, sheng. When sheng is used as a verb in
Chinese, it literally means “to give birth to” or “to create”; when it is used as a noun, it
literally means “life.” So, the verb-noun group of shengsheng in The Book of Changes
means “to create life” or “creating life.” Chan’s English translation of the sentence
quoted here can be revised accordingly as: “Creating life is what is called changes.”
This is point 4 of Ecosophy C.
486 Cheng Xiangzhan
Point 6, Cheng Hao and point 8, Cultural evils, a key idea proposed in my aesthet-
ics of creating life, will be discussed accordingly in the following sections.
3 E
coaesthetics: The Theory of Ecological Aesthetic
Appreciation
Ecoaesthetics or ecological aesthetics first appeared in 1972. In that year, American
scholar Joseph Meeker’s (1972a) article “Notes Toward an Ecological Esthetic” was
published in Canadian Fiction Magazine and in the same year this article was col-
lected in the author’s book The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology as the
sixth chapter of the book, with the slightly revised title “Ecological Esthetics” (Meeker
1972b, 119–136).
Meeker’s argument starts with the reflection of western aesthetic theories. He
declares that since Plato, western aesthetics has always been dominated by the great
‘art versus nature’ debate. Traditionally, aesthetic theory emphasized the separation
of artistic from natural creation and assumed that art was the ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual-
ized’ product of the human soul and not to be confused with the ‘lower’ or ‘animal’
world of biology. For Meeker, no matter how we regard art, as an ‘unnatural’ product
or as man’s spiritual transcendence over nature, both ideas distort the relationship of
nature and art. Darwin’s evolutionary theory shows the evolution processes of living
creatures and indicates that traditional anthropocentric thinking has overestimated
human spirituality and underestimated biological complexity. From the nineteenth
century, philosophers began to re-examine the closeness of biology and humanity
and began to re-evaluate aesthetic theory “in the light of new biological knowledge”
(Meeker 1972b, 120). In line with such science-oriented thinking, Meeker (1972b, 124–
125) asserts that “aesthetic theory may be more successful in defining beauty when
it has incorporated some of the conceptions of nature and its processes which have
been formulated by contemporary biologists and ecologists.” Briefly put, the strategy
and connotation of Meeker’s ecological aesthetics is to take Darwin’s theory of biolog-
ical evolution as its theoretical foundation and to lay emphasis on human’s biological
nature, thereby reflecting and reconstructing aesthetic theory in light of contempo-
rary biological and ecological knowledge.
Meeker’s work did not play an important role in shaping ecoaesthetics after
him, because scholars in the West mostly developed ecoaesthetics within the frame-
work of environmental aesthetics (a much more mature and noticeable field mainly
developed in the West since the 1960s), whereas scholars in China did not realize his
importance until recently. Frankly speaking, there is still disagreement among eco-
critics about the exact object of eco-aesthetic study. Many scholars confuse ecoaes-
thetics with environmental aesthetics, and some scholars still question the legitimacy
of ecoaesthetics (cf. Cheng et al. 2013, ch. 1).
My strategy of proposing ecoaesthetics is to consult the more mature discipline

of environmental aesthetics to help define and develop ecoaesthetics. The objective
of the study of environmental aesthetics is ‘environmental appreciation,’ which is
clearly different from ‘art appreciation.’ It critiques and transcends the Hegelian phi-
losophy of art, which views an artifact as an object of study. For scholars of environ-
mental aesthetics, the main issue concerns the distinction and relationship between
‘environmental appreciation’ and ‘art appreciation.’ As for the study of ecoaesthetics,
its object of study concerns a key question of “how to appreciate aesthetically and
ecologically” (Cheng 2013, 213). While it disapproves of traditional aesthetic appre-
ciation that is not ecologically oriented (or without an ecological awareness), it does
not necessarily oppose a mode of aesthetic enjoyment based on artistic form. In a nut-
shell, the argument of environmental aesthetics centers on the issue of the aesthetic
object: is the object for the study of aesthetics an art work or the environment? By the
same token, the argument of ecoaesthetics concentrates on the issue of the aesthetic
way (or manner) and asks how to engage in an aesthetic activity governed by an eco-
logical awareness. In other words, it asks how to form an ecological aesthetic way (or
manner) by letting ecological awareness play a leading role in human aesthetic activ-
ity and experience (cf. Cheng et al. 2013, ch. 3). My statement goes as below:
Briefly put, ecoaesthetics is different from non-ecological oriented aesthetics (or “traditional
aesthetics” hereafter). It is a new type of aesthetic way and concept responding to global ecolog-
ical crises, using ecological ethics as its theoretical foundation, relying on ecological knowledge
to inspire imagination and elicit emotions, and aiming at conquering conventional, anthropo-
centric aesthetic preferences. (Cheng et al. 2013, 86)
With the above considerations, I define ecoaesthetics as “the theory of ecological

appreciation” (Cheng 2013) or “the study of ecological appreciation” (Cheng et al.
2013, 103). The basic assumption behind the working definition of ecoaesthetics is
the following statement: we can appreciate something aesthetically and ecologically.
The key point is the difference between modern Western aesthetic appreciation and
contemporary ecological appreciation. In order to explain the crucial difference, it is
helpful to introduce American scholar Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics.
Berleant is a leading scholar in the field of environmental aesthetics. He proposes
a key phrase called “aesthetic engagement” and he even calls his aesthetic theory
“aesthetics of engagement.” He asserts that the concept of aesthetic engagement
“claims continuity rather than separation” (Berleant 1991, xiii) and proposes that
this conception of aesthetics centers on appreciative “experience characterized by
continuity, perceptual integration, and engagement” (1991, 4). With his criticism of
modern aesthetics’ reduction of experience to a subjective response, he emphasizes
“experiential continuity” and even calls his aesthetic theory based on this idea an
“aesthetics of the continuity of experience” (15). In order to support his new aesthetic
conception of experiential continuity and its related ideas, such as empathy, Berleant
borrows the idea of intellectual sympathy from Henri Bergson, as well as the idea of
488 Cheng Xiangzhan
Einfühlung (empathy) from Theodor Lipps and the idea of “the interaction of the live
creature with his surroundings” from John Dewey (1991, 16–17). In brief, Berleant’s
aesthetics of engagement is based on his key idea of the continuity of appreciative
experience, which asserts that artist, object, appreciator, and performer are no longer
understood as separate constituents but become functional aspects of the aesthetic
process.
It is easy to raise a more fundamental question: how should we understand –
philosophically and metaphysically – some key terms in Berleant’s aesthetics of
engagement, such as ‘continuity,’ ‘empathy,’ and ‘process’? Ecosophy C can explain
these three terms without too much difficulty. Thus, point 3 (Continuity of being)
can explain the ontological basis of ‘continuity’; point 5 (Compassion) can explain
‘empathy’ and point 4 (Creating life), i.e., the underlying cosmology, can explain
‘process.’
With the reinterpretation of Berleant’s ideas from the perspective of Ecosophy C,
I assert that “we can engage with something aesthetically and ecologically” (Cheng,
2013). So “aesthetic and ecological engagement” is the core of ecoaesthetics, which
implies a “why-how-what” model of nature appreciation.
Firstly, this model inquires into the question of why: Why should we appreciate
nature with respect and awe and believe that everything enjoys its intrinsic value,
rather than having only instrumental value? The answer is that ecological engage-
ment is based on the ontological assumption that everything within a community
enjoys connectivity and continuity (the continuity between mind, body and world)
with each other. Community may vary according to different geological and spatial
scales, from a small pond to a mountain area, from the planet earth to the entire
universe. Scientifically speaking, the inherent tie among all things in the universe
is energy (or ch’i in the Chinese philosophical term), which means that the whole
universe is a great process of the transformation of energy and everything within it is
an intrinsic part of that process. Ecoaesthetics should rest its philosophical base on
this ecological worldview. An important part of ecological literacy, which includes
an enhanced respect for and deeper feeling of connectivity with the different parts of
the natural world, should be cultivated by ecological education (cf. Laura and Cotton
1999, 162–73).
Secondly, the model inquires the question of how: How are we able to appreci-
ate nature? With the ontological assumption and worldview just described above in
mind, to engage with something ecologically means to be able to experience compas-
sion for all life, human and non-human. Human beings have evolved to be equipped
with the natural ability to have compassion for others’ positive joy or negative suf-
ferings. This kind of faculty should be explored scientifically, psychologically, and
philosophically.
Thirdly, the model inquires into the question of what: What should we appreciate
in the natural environment? The answer to this question is that we should be aware
of and appreciate everything that has appeared or is appearing in the great transfor-
mational processes of the universe. This means that the perception of a landscape is
not simply the awareness of scenery but of the complex and dynamic fields of energy
transformation. In terms of Chinese aesthetics, it is the appreciation of nature’s vital-
ity (shengji) or spirit resonance (qiyun).
With this model, a new ecological model of nature appreciation is constructed.
The new model based on Ecosophy C is substantially different from the dominant
model of nature appreciation in today’s Western environmental aesthetics, which
can’t explain some related key terms in a philosophical way, such as ‘continuity,’
‘empathy,’ and ‘process.’. The major difference lies in Ecosophy’s emphasis on meta-
physical promise, which can remedy the limitation of the model of nature apprecia-
tion based mainly on scientific knowledge.
4 E
coaesthetics’ Effectiveness and Application in
Re-reading Some Chinese Poems
The function and value of a theory lies in its power to explain phenomena. So, this
section will put ecoaesthetics based on Ecosophy C into practice to test its effective-
ness.
The first example comes from J. Baird Callicott, an outstanding scholar in the
field of environmental ethics. In his 1983 paper, Callicott narrates his personal expe-
rience as below:
I am acquainted with a certain northern bog which is distinguished from the others in its vicinity
by the presence of pitcher plants, an endangered species of floral insectivore. I visit this bog at
least once each season. The plants themselves are not, by garden standards, beautiful. They are
a dark red in color, less brilliant than maple leaves in fall, and humbly hug the low log floor of
sphagnum moss in the deep shade of fifty-foot, ruler-straight tamaracks. To reach the bog I must
wade across its mucky moat, penetrate a dense thicket of alders and in summer fight off mosqui-
toes, black and deer flies. My shoes and trousers get wet; my skin gets scratched and bitten. The
experience is not particularly pleasant or, for that matter, spectacular; but it is always somehow
satisfying aesthetically. (Callicott, 1983)
Callicott is very clearly aware of the fact that pitcher plants “are not, by garden stand-
ards, beautiful,” which means that according to traditional aesthetic preference, it is
totally impossible to appreciate this kind of plant aesthetically, because it is ‘unscenic
nature’ as discussed in Saito’s (1998) paper titled “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.”
However, as a scholar with strong ecological awareness, Callicott does his very best to
reach the ‘endangered species.’ His experience of wading across mucky moat “is not
particularly pleasant”; “but it is always somehow satisfying aesthetically.” The story
shows that the aesthetic experience of appreciating endangered species from ecologi-
cal consciousness is dramatically different from traditional aesthetic experience.
490 Cheng Xiangzhan
The second example is a theoretical statement by Allen Carlson, another leading

scholar in the field of environmental aesthetics. At the beginning of his paper titled
“Nature and Positive Aesthetics,” Carlson asserts:
I examine the view that all the natural world is beautiful. According to this view, the natural
environment, insofar as it is untouched by man, has mainly positive aesthetic qualities. […] All
virgin nature, in short, is essentially aesthetically good. (Carlson 1984, 211)
This statement has caused widely controversial responses internationally. Carlson

himself has not offered sufficient reasons for his view yet. However, from the perspec-
tive of Ecosophy C’s point 8, Cultural evils, the positive aesthetic quality and value of
“virgin nature” comes from a deep reflection and strong criticism of human culture,
say, the cultivation or humanization of nature. In the Chinese language, the term
‘civilization’ is called wenming. Wen literally means culture and ming literally means
bright, so wenming indicates human creations with positive values. However, with
the increasingly serious ecological crisis, more and more people have realized that
human creations are not always positive; more and more human creations, including
pollution, are very negative. In order to describe the negative side of human culture,
I firstly coined a new Chinese term called wenbi in 2003 and revised it in 2005. Bi lit-
erally means evils, so wenbi is the antonym of wenming (i.e. civilization). Global eco-
logical crisis is the biggest cultural evil caused by the cultivation (or humanization) of
nature (See Cheng 2012, 113, 127). Compared with heavily polluted areas, the “natural
world untouched by man” in Carlson’s words is a kind of escape from cultural evils.
That is why nature’s virgin state is so valuable and significant for the appreciator with
an ecological awareness and consciousness.
As for point 6 of Ecosophy C, Cheng Hao (1032–1085), reading his poem titled “An
Occasional Composing in an Autumn Day” is a very good starting point:
At leisure, nothing is not in an unhurried way.

Waking up, the morning Sun appears red in the eastern window.
Appreciated in a peaceful way, myriad things are enjoying themselves.
The four seasons have various fine moods, which can be shared with me.
Dao extends beyond the shape of Heaven and Earth,
A myriad of thoughts enter into the changing shape of clouds.
Riches and honours can’t corrupt him, he enjoys poverty and humbleness,
He can be called a hero when he reaches this spiritual state. (Cheng and Cheng 1981, 482)
As one of the most important philosophers in Neo-Confucianism in the Northern Song

Dynasty, Cheng Hao inherits the key idea in The Book of Changes, “the great virtue of
Heaven and Earth is to produce.” Based on this idea, he realizes the spirit of life in
all things. To him, this creative quality is ren (humanity), which removes all distinc-
tions between the self and the other and combines Heaven, Earth, and man as one.
As an outstanding teacher, he expresses his philosophy of education as the following
principle, “The student must first of all understand the nature of ren (Humanity).
The man of jen (or ren?) forms one body with all things without any differentiation”
(Cheng and Cheng 1981, 523). So, there are no boundaries between human beings and
non-human beings. Everything in the universe is a whole. When a person reaches this
spiritual state, he or she can appreciate everything’s joy equally in a peaceful way. In
Cheng Hao’s view, the universe is conceived as a continuous process of production,
creation, and growth, an unceasing process of life-giving; everything in the universe
is an intrinsic part of the universal process and should enjoy the same right to grow
and develop. Based on two quotations from The Book of Changes, Cheng Hao explains
his philosophy as follows:
“Change means production and reproduction.” This is how Heaven becomes the Way. To Heaven,
the Way is merely to give life. What follows from this principle of life-giving is good. Goodness
involves the idea of origination (yüan), for origination is the chief quality of goodness. All things
have the impulses of spring (spirit of growth) and this is goodness resulting from the principle
of life. “That which realizes it is the individual nature.” Realization is possible only when the
myriad things fully realize their own nature. (Cheng and Cheng 1981, 532)
With this philosophical view, it is not too hard to understand many Chinese poems
with ecological significance. Let’s read two of them by Du Fu (712–770), the sage of
poetry in China:
One of the Three Quatrains
A cormorant out my door left and dared not come back again.
Looking at me suspiciously, when we meet by chance in the river bank.
Knowing my friendship since then,
She visits my home one hundred times every day. (Yang 1981, 396)
The poet treats the cormorant as a friend and the bird can realize the poet’s friend-
ship. The friendship exists not only between man and a wild bird, but also between
man and grass:
Yard Grass
The lovely grass becomes green after the cold winter,

Its color grows thicker in my eyes when spring comes.
The old fallen leaves are raising again,
The new sprouts are growing fast.
Every step should be careful when you walk,
Appreciating them again and again, while you are enjoying feasts.
Admiring the beauty of flowers, following the rhythm of the seasons,
Daring not to change the appearance of the flowers with my effort. (Yang 1981, 737)
The poet respects the grass and its natural process of growth, through which he
obtains a lot of aesthetic pleasure.
492 Cheng Xiangzhan
5 C
onclusion
Since William Rueckert published his paper titled “Literature and Ecology: An Exper-
iment in Ecocriticism” in 1978, ecocriticism has grown to be a special field interna-
tionally. However, a commonly shared model of doing ecocriticism has not been con-
structed yet during the past four decades. Ecoaesthetics based on Ecosophy C might
act as such a model in the practice of ecocritical study. The possibility depends on its
effectiveness in explaining literary works.
In an interview with Lawrence Buell, a leading scholar in the field of Ecocriticism,
I proposed to differentiate two kinds of ecocriticisms, one called ‘literary ecocriticism,’
and the other ‘cultural ecocriticism.’ The major idea behind this differentiation is my
working definition of literature, which can be expressed as follows: Literature is one
of the artistic forms taking language as its expressing medium in the cultural system.
According to this definition, two points must be taken into account here. Firstly, liter-
ature is an intrinsic part of culture as a whole; secondly, literature has its own unique
characteristics and is not just a cultural phenomenon in general. These two points
show clearly that any work of literature can be analyzed as a cultural text; however,
if it is restricted to this dimension, the analysis misses the specific characteristics of
literary texts. From my personal observation, the dominant tendency of ecocriticism
internationally is actually ‘cultural ecocriticism,’ which reduces literary works of art
to cultural texts in general (cf. Cheng and Buell 2000).
I propose that literary ecocriticism should be ‘aesthetic ecocriticism,’ which is
based on ecoaesthetics and focuses not only on cultural issues, but also on aesthetic
issues. This chapter might be viewed as the beginning of the new form of ecocriticism.
6 B
ibliography
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Sylvia Mayer
25 W
orld Risk Society and Ecoglobalism: Risk,
Literature, and the Anthropocene
Abstract: Since its institutionalization in the 1990s, ecocriticism has been defined as
providing a critical response to ‘environmental crisis,’ thereby identifying the present
as a transitional period characterized by a sense of threat and uncertainty. The field
has only recently begun to fully engage with another concept that equally responds
to environmental threat and uncertainty: the concept of risk. This chapter traces the
emergence of risk research within ecocriticism, in particular in its focus on the chal-
lenges of global environmental risk. Drawing on sociologist Ulrich Beck’s model of
the world risk society and on the concept of the Anthropocene, it shows how liter-
ary and cultural studies have begun to contribute to interdisciplinary risk studies by
identifying the specific and indispensable contribution of fictional risk narratives to
current environmental risk discourses.
Key Terms: Risk, World Risk Society, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Climate Change
Novel
It is the accumulation of risks – ecological, terrorist, military, financial, biomedical and informa-
tional – that has an overwhelming presence in our world today. (Beck 2009b, 291)
Since its institutionalization in the 1990s, ecocriticism has typically been defined as
providing a critical response to ‘environmental crisis,’ thereby identifying the present
as a transitional period characterized by a sense of threat and uncertainty. In its
initial stages, the field did not engage with another concept that equally responds
to environmental threat and uncertainty: the concept of risk. Only fairy recently has
environmental risk become a category of ecocritical analysis – first and foremost
in the work of Ursula Heise, whose monograph Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.
The Environmental Imagination of the Global, published in 2008, was not only the
first sustained study of ecocritical risk research, but in addition can be regarded as
a pioneering work of risk research in literary and cultural studies in general. Heise’s
focus on globality, moreover, responded to the growing number of voices within the
field that called for a more rigorous investigation of the planetary implications of
environmentally relevant texts. It indicated the emergence of a new critical project
that applies, in the words of Lawrence Buell (2007), an ecoglobalist perspective to
the study of literature and culture. This project has gained additional urgency in the
context of theorizing the Anthropocene, the concept of a new geological age created
by human intervention into the planetary ecosphere.
Environmental risks such as the nuclear risk, biochemical risks, or, most sig-
nificantly as it marks their global reach most obviously, the risk of climate change
25 World Risk Society and Ecoglobalism: Risk, Literature, and the Anthropocene 495
caused by anthropogenic global warming were central to the emergence of risk theory
and risk research in the social sciences in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arguing
from different theoretical perspectives, sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony
Giddens, cultural anthropologists such as Mary Douglas, and psychologists such as
Paul Slovic have shown that key social, political, and cultural transformations occur-
ring since the second half of the twentieth century can be understood as responses to
risk perception, risk assessment, and risk communication. Risk research in the social
sciences has demonstrated that pervasive risk awareness, both environmental and
non-environmental, has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in
our period of late (or reflexive) modernity – a sociocultural moment Beck conceptual-
ized as ‘world risk society.’
This chapter traces the emergence of risk research within ecocriticism in order
to delineate how literary and cultural studies have begun to contribute to interdis-
ciplinary risk studies. It will first position ecocritical risk analysis in the contexts of
risk theory and risk research in the social sciences. In doing so, it puts particular
emphasis on global environmental risks and on Ulrich Beck’s model of the world risk
society. It will, moreover, link the insights of risk theory to the concept of the Anthro-
pocene and outline how an ecocritical risk approach can contribute to meet the con-
ceptual and representational challenges this concept poses. Secondly, by focusing on
the relevance of the imagination in risk discourse, it will address the relationship of
fact, fiction, and narrative in order to substantiate the claim that fictional risk nar-
ratives participate in a unique and indispensable way in current environmental risk
discourses. Finally, in the last section, it will use the example of the climate change
novel to briefly exemplify how literary texts have participated in the current discourse
on the risk of global climate change (↗15 Conciliation and Consilience).
1 R
isk Theory and Risk Research in the Social
Sciences and in Ecocriticism
Environmental risks that result from processes of scientific-technological moderni-
zation have been at the heart of contemporary public risk discourses, including the
risk discourse in the social sciences. In addition to a rapidly growing body of studies
on the nuclear risk that marked the immediate aftermath of World War II, publica-
tions such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) or The Club of Rome’s The Limits to
Growth (1972), in their focus on the risks of toxicity, population growth, and resource
scarcity, indicated an increasing risk awareness in the second half of the twentieth
century. It was, however, the late 1970s and the 1980s that mark the historical moment
when risks were fully recognized as fundamentally social and cultural phenomena
that cannot be reduced to probability calculus in an economic context. Seminal risk
studies in the social sciences such as Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s Risk and
496 Sylvia Mayer
Culture. An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (1982)

and Ulrich Beck’s Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (1986; Risk
Society. Towards a New Modernity, 1992) were published in part as responses to the
partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, and
to the Bhopal chemical disaster in 1984. Beck’s study, moreover, was published only
weeks before – and in many of his claims substantiated – the nuclear power catastro-
phe in Chernobyl in 1986. The results of the rapidly growing body of risk research
in such disciplines as sociology, cultural anthropology, and cognitive psychology,
linked to risk research in economics and political sciences, have by now identified
and analyzed a multiplicity of risks, both environmental and non-environmental,
which shape contemporary societies (for a survey from the perspective of the social
sciences see Arnoldi 2009; Lupton 2012; Zinn 2008; for an ecocritical perspective
see Heise 2008, ch. 4). Echoing the epigraph of this essay, Ulrich Beck’s (2009b, 291)
claim that an “accumulation of risks […] has an overwhelming presence in our world
today,” sociologist David Garland (2003, 49) argues that “[t]he idea of risk has come
to appear indispensable for understanding our time,” substantiating this claim by
drawing attention to the multiplicity of meanings the word “risk” reveals, a multiplic-
ity ranging from chance and promise to danger and threat:
Today’s accounts of risk are remarkable for their multiplicity and for the variety of senses they
give to the term. Risk is calculation. Risk is a commodity. Risk is a capital. Risk is a technique of
government. Risk is objective and scientifically knowable. Risk is subjective and socially con-
structed. Risk is a problem, a threat, a source of insecurity. Risk is a pleasure, a thrill, a source of
profit and freedom. Risk is the means whereby we colonize and control the future. “Risk society”
is our late modern world spinning out of control. (Garland 2003, 48)
Human communities have always had to engage with a future that is marked by
uncertainty and insecurity. The concept of risk, however, emerged only in the early
modern era. In the context of colonial, capitalist business ventures, it was defined by
economic decision making, by the calculation of profits and losses. The simultaneous
emergence of the insurance industry with its reliance on probability calculus and its
goals of risk minimization and risk management mark this economic origin of the
concept and illustrate why risk is linked to terms such as ‘calculation,’ ‘commodity,’
and ‘capital.’ In contrast to such definitions, calling risk “a problem, a threat, a source
of insecurity” indicates the rather striking shift in meaning that has strongly char-
acterized our period of late modernity. When Jakob Arnoldi (2009, 36) in his survey
of contemporary risk research in the social sciences claims that we are faced with a
“crisis of risk,” he refers to the observation that at least in today’s highly industrial-
ized, increasingly globalized societies the meaning of risk in public discourse has to
a large extent been narrowed down to a discourse centering on risk as threat. To be
sure, in an economic context, risk still refers to human decision-making and to the
calculation of profits and losses; there are, moreover, specific cultural practices of
risk taking that promise ‘pleasure,’ ‘thrill,’ and ‘freedom‘ to their practitioners (for
instance, in so-called extreme sports). At the same time, however, the belief that prob-
abilistic calculation on the basis of statistical insight is capable of minimizing and
thus managing especially large-scale technological risks has considerably waned.
Garland’s use of the term ‘risk society’ reflects this shift of meaning. It refers to Ulrich
Beck’s groundbreaking study of the mid-1980s, which developed a new model of con-
temporary society that is founded on a definition of risk as threat. Beck’s model has,
arguably, become the best-known sociological concept developed in this context to
date – a model that, over the years, he expanded into the model of the world risk
society.
Beck (2009a, 4) regards risk as a productive force that “represents the percep-
tual and cognitive schema in accordance with which a society mobilizes itself when
it is confronted with the openness, uncertainties and obstructions of a self-created
future.” The risk society, he argues, “designates a developmental phase of modern
society in which the social, political, economic and individual risks increasingly tend
to escape the institutions for monitoring and protection in industrial society” (Beck
1994, 5), the institutions of government, industry, and science. This latest develop-
mental phase of modern society in which the risk society and the world risk society
have emerged Beck calls ‘reflexive modernity,’ a modernity which is compelled to
respond to the forces of modernization, to the ‘unforeseen consequences‘ or ‘side-ef-
fects‘ of the scientific and technological successes of an earlier, industrial modernity.
The risk society, moreover, is defined by a qualitatively new type of risk. It is defined
by risks such as the nuclear threat, the dangers of genetic engineering, or anthropo-
genic global warming, which are the results of technological innovation marked by
an unprecedented degree of complexity and by an ultimately global scale. These new
risks are “manufactured uncertainties” (Beck 2009a, 50), human-made risks that are
largely intangible and latent in their effects and thus can no longer be fully calcu-
lated or minimized by traditional forms of risk management and insurance. In the risk
society, “the very idea of controllability, certainty or security collapses” (Beck 1999, 2)
since it is marked by radicalized uncertainty, by a loss of trust in scientific knowledge,
and by an unprecedented degree of non-knowing. Anthony Giddens (1991, 3), whose
work on late modernity also pivots on the notion of risk, and who regards contempo-
rary culture as a “risk culture,” concurs with Beck by describing a society increas-
ingly dominated by doubt and the loss of belief in notions of progress through science
and technology. As a result, both sociologists have observed transformations of social
structures, of political institutions, and of political processes of decision making
that have in turn affected subjectivities and changed processes of identity formation.
These transformations have, moreover, occurred not simply on the national, but on a
transnational, global scale.
In World at Risk, his last book publication on the world risk society, Beck (1991,
81) argues that “risk society, thought through to its conclusion, means world risk
society.” Especially the three key types of global risks he addresses in this study –
global environmental threats, global economic threats, and the threat of global terror-
498 Sylvia Mayer
ism – demonstrate that “humanly generated, anticipated threats cannot be restricted

either temporally, spatially or in social terms” (81). Global risks such as climate
change defy calculation in conventional time scales and, as deterritorialized risks,
transcend traditional boundaries of the local, regional, or national scale by insisting
on the impact of – more often than not unpredictable – global forces. Their study thus
demands a transnational perspective. Attempts to deal with them in a sufficiently
successful way, Beck argues, require developing a politics and an ethics that acknowl-
edge these factors and indicate awareness of the new difficulties, as well as the new
possibilities of transnational social, political, and economic organization. For the
world risk society, Beck identifies a “cosmopolitan moment” that can bring about the
transformation of the traditional nation-state’s domestic and foreign policies in terms
of a transnationalism that recognizes diversity and cultural otherness as constitutive
social forces (56–57). He is aware that such a “cosmopolitan form of statehood” (66;
emphasis in the original) has yet to be achieved, but he insists that only such trans-
formation can adequately respond to the current situation of radicalized uncertainty.
Beck’s theorizing about risk has been a point of reference for ecocritical schol-
arship for several years, for example in studies like Frederick Buell’s (2003) From
Apocalypse to Way of Life and in introductions to the field by Lawrence Buell (2005),
Timothy Clark (2011) and Greg Garrard (2012). It is, however, in particular the global
dimension of his thought – which already characterized the early publications on
risk society – that has inspired a more sustained ecocritical engagement. In 2007,
Lawrence Buell (2007, 227) refers once again to Beck’s ideas in order to demand an
ecocritical stance that takes into consideration the necessity “to think of environmen-
tal belonging and citizenship in planetary terms.” Buell calls for the development of
an “ecoglobalist” perspective, or, more precisely, for the study of the “ecoglobalist
affect” in environmental texts that are characterized by “an emotion-laden preoccu-
pation with a finite, near-at-hand physical environment defined, at least in part, by
an imagined inextricable linkage of some sort between that specific site and a context
of planetary reach” (232). Such an ecoglobalist perspective would involve, most cen-
trally, a reconsideration of ecocriticism’s key analytical categories of place and space.
Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, published the following year,
undertakes just such a reconsideration. Heise (2008, 9) extensively draws on globali-
zation theory and on risk research in the social sciences “to point to ways of imagin-
ing the global that frame localism from a globalist environmental perspective.” The
risk perspective she considers particularly valuable since “risk scenarios crucially
affect forms of inhabitation, and because the idea of a coming ‘world risk society’
has recently emerged as one of the most important ways of imagining global con-
nectedness” (2008, 11). In its focus on globality, Sense of Place draws in particular on
Beck’s work, but it also incorporates the results of risk research in cultural anthropol-
ogy and cognitive psychology, thereby demonstrating that ecocritical risk study must
engage with risk research in the social sciences as an interdisciplinary project. Cul-
tural anthropology in the tradition of Mary Douglas has, most significantly, pointed
toward the meaning of (moral) values in risk perception and risk assessment, toward
their functioning as cognitive frames, and toward their relevance for the creation and
reproduction of a community’s cultural order. This kind of work has increasingly
influenced work in cognitive psychology, which focuses on the study of factors that
mark the risk perception and risk assessment of the individual. The two disciplines
have indispensably contributed to our understanding of risk as a cultural phenome-
non and as a shaping force on the diversity of individual and collective risk percep-
tions and risk assessments. By engaging with the results of this scholarship, Heise’s
work marks the beginning of a more comprehensive and in-depth study of environ-
mental and technological risks in the field of ecocriticism. In Sense of Place, but also
in Nach der Natur (“After Nature”) and in several essays (Heise 2002a, 2002b, 2009),
she has begun to outline how ecocritical literary and cultural studies can contribute
to interdisciplinary risk research.
Heise (2008, 131) regards environmental risk “as a concept that encompasses far
more than its technical or actuarial definitions to include complex cognitive, affec-
tive, social, and cultural processes without which it cannot be conceived, defined, or
investigated.” Moreover, risks conceived as social and cultural phenomena can only
be fully understood via their narrative articulation: risk perception, risk assessment,
and risk management rely on historically and culturally specific discourses of risk
communication – to which both fictional and non-fictional texts, in various media,
contribute significantly. In Sense of Place and in her essays, Heise (2008, 138) ana-
lyzes a number of primary texts (literary and non-literary printed texts, film, elec-
tronic texts, and installation art) that address such risks as toxic pollution, nuclear
contamination, population growth, and species extinction, thereby substantiating
her claim that “[n]arrative genres […] provide important cultural tools for organizing
information about risks into intelligible and meaningful stories.” In her theoretical
discussions as well as in her textual analyses, she pays particular attention to the
functions of narrative templates such as ‘apocalypse’ and ‘pastoral’ in order to inves-
tigate how “ecological and technological risk scenarios are shaped and filtered … in
both visual and verbal artifacts” (122).
Finally, Heise develops the concept of an eco-cosmopolitanism as an ethically
adequate response to planetary environmental risk – a concept directly related to
Beck’s theorizing on the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ that the shared risk experience of the
world risk society has brought about. Eco-cosmopolitanism, Heise (2008, 61) argues,
is “an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined com-
munities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds.” Moreover, going beyond Beck’s con-
ceptualizations at the time by incorporating central insights of environmental justice
scholarship and postcolonial ecocriticism (cf. ↗10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial
Studies), she insists that such an attempt must take cultural otherness and socioeco-
nomic diversity into account:
500 Sylvia Mayer
[A]n environmentally inflected cosmopolitanism needs to combine sustained familiarity and

fluency in more than one culture with a systemic understanding of global ecology that goes
beyond environmentalist clichés regarding universal connectedness and the pastoral under-
standing of ecology that informed earlier kinds of modern environmentalist thinking. The merit
of environmental justice activism along with Beck’s more sweeping vision of new forms of soli-
darity emerging out of global risk scenarios is their analysis of how such an eco-cosmopolitan-
ism might link experiences of local endangerment to a sense of planet that encompasses both
human and nonhuman worlds. (Heise 2008, 159)
Ecocritical studies of global risk that account for cultural otherness and socioeco-
nomic diversity can, moreover, contribute to current attempts to more fully compre-
hend and draw attention to the representational challenges of yet another concept
of planetary connectedness: the concept of the Anthropocene. In 2000, atmospheric
chemist Paul J. Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer first argued that toward the
end of the eighteenth century, with the onset of industrialization and an ever increas-
ing reliance on fossil fuels, humans became a geophysical force and ushered in a new
geological age, the Anthropocene (cf. Crutzen and Stroemer 2000). More recently, Will
Steffen, Crutzen, and John R. McNeil (2007, 616–618) proposed to distinguish between
two stages of the Anthropocene: stage one, the ‘Industrial Era’, which they date from
ca. 1800–1945, and stage two, the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’, which they date from
1945 to ca. 2015. While both stages are characterized by a massive increase in carbon
dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the stage of the Great Acceleration marks
a “pressure on the global environment” that is “sharply intensifying” (617). Due to
the accelerating globalization of economies, the last 50 years, they claim, have seen
humans change “the world’s ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any
other comparable period in human history” (617). The concept of the Anthropocene
is still debated and has not yet been officially acknowledged in the sciences. It has,
however, already inspired critical work in the environmental humanities (cf., e.g.,
Chakrabarty 2009). In the context of this emerging field of study, ecocritical risk study
can contribute significantly. The fact that the world risk society and the stage of the
Great Acceleration have developed simultaneously invites employment of the prem-
ises and analytical categories of an interdisciplinary risk theory and risk research in
order to expand a concept that is exclusively defined by the sciences into one that is
more fully aware of its sociocultural implications.
Echoing Beck’s thinking about modernity, Timothy Clark (2014, 86) regards the
Anthropocene as indicating “the advent of a kind of new, totalizing reflexivity as a
species.” For the first time, he argues, there is “the demand made upon a species
consciously to consider its impact, as a whole and as a natural/physical force, upon
the whole planet” (86). The Anthropocene poses a conceptual challenge that is
simultaneously a representational one. It insists on conceptualizing and represent-
ing ‘humanity’ as an agent – while not losing sight of diversity and (cultural) other-
ness, both human and non-human, an issue that especially postcolonial ecocriticism
and animal studies have correctly identified as crucial to the ecocritical project (cf.
↗10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies and ↗13 Animal Studies). It insists on a
new way of historicising, on conceptualizing and representing unprecedented time
scales – both in terms of the past and the future – ultimately widening the scope
towards geological time scales. And it insists on ways of conceptualizing and repre-
senting spatial globality that acknowledge both the materiality of place and space
and the impact of processes of deterritorialization. Ecocritical risk studies can con-
tribute to meeting these challenges by reading the Anthropocene as the age of manu-
factured uncertainties, as an age of radicalized uncertainty that is inevitably marked
by a degree of non-knowing and unpredictability. By investigating its narrative artic-
ulation both in factual and fictional texts across media, it can use the analytical cat-
egory of risk to address the various cognitive, affective, social, and cultural implica-
tions of living in the Anthropocene.
2 T
he Imagination and the Reality of Risks: Fact,
Fiction, Narrative
In more recent publications on the world risk society, Ulrich Beck increasingly paid
attention to the role of the imagination and of narrative. The reality of a risk, he argues
in World at Risk, depends on its “staging.” It needs the discursive representation and
communication of risks to make them real, to create awareness of a threat that might
result in catastrophe. Beck (2009a, 16) thus maintains that risks are collective cultural
constructions: “the staging of global risk sets in train a social production and con-
struction of reality.” Central to the staging of risk is the imagination, which figures in
a variety of speculative practices, thereby linking such seemingly categorically differ-
ent practices as probabilistic calculation and fictional literature: “People have always
tried to fill by imaginative means this irrevocable uncertainty regarding the spaces
of the future. These ‘imaginaries’ include religious conceptions of the cosmos, the
worlds of literature, and, of course, the sophisticated rationalities of probability and
risk calculation” (Beck 2009b, 292). The central role of the imagination, moreover, has
him introduce a new conceptual distinction in his definition of risk. He argues:
Risk is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe. Risks
concern the possibility of future occurrences and developments […] Whereas any catastrophe
is spatially, temporally and socially determined, the anticipation of catastrophe lacks any spa-
tio-temporal or social concreteness. Thus the category of risk signifies the controversial reality of
the possible […] Risks are always future events that may occur, that threaten us. But because this
constant danger shapes our expectations, lodges in our heads and guides our actions, it becomes
a political force that transforms the world. (Beck 2009a, 9–10, emphasis in the original)
The reality of risks, their influence on our subjectivities and on our personal and
collective notions of self, strongly relies on the imagination in its concretization as
502 Sylvia Mayer
anticipation. It is risk scenarios, the creation of possible future worlds through narra-
tive, in which the anticipation of a possible future catastrophe expresses itself. Risk
scenarios come in the form of factual and fictional texts, in the graphs and statistics
of scientific modeling as well as in works of literature, film, and art. Moreover, risk
as the anticipation of catastrophe is marked by controversy, by differences in risk
perception and risk assessment that reflect the impact of a variety of factors. Risk
perception depends on the specific socioeconomic, political, geographic, and cul-
tural position of individuals and social groups, and differences can be found both
within a society and between different societies. What is perceived as a major risk
in one society may be regarded as a perfectly calculable phenomenon in another, or
it may not even figure as a risk at all. Only if represented, narrated, and communi-
cated can the ‘controversially real,’ the anticipated, be turned into a shaping force in
the realms of the personal, the political, the social, the economic, and the cultural.
Obviously, this argument is important for literary and cultural studies. If risks emerge
and become effective through representation, narration, and communication, risk
research and theorizing about risk can certainly benefit from the study of fictional risk
narratives which have participated in the various risk discourses of the last decades.
As the emergence of ecocritical risk studies has begun to show, fictional risk
narratives do, in fact, contribute very specifically to risk discourses, both in terms
of theme and form (in addition to Heise’s work see the more recent essays in Mayer/
Weik von Mossner 2014). Their essentially unlimited imaginative and formal range
allows them to explore the complexity, and diversity, of individual and collective risk
experiences in ways that work with and at the same time transcend, and thus com-
plement, factual, scientific representation. They make use of a variety of knowledges
that mark the diversity of human perceptions and experiences of environmental risk,
including differences in vulnerability and adaptability to risk due to socioeconomic
inequality. Formally, a central critical concern has to be the question of genre and
narrative mode: What genres and modes have lent themselves to the representation of
environmental risk? Has the representation of risk generated new genre conventions?
Can an environmental risk narrative be considered a genre in its own right? Heise
(2002b, 367), for instance, has drawn attention to the question whether it is “estab-
lished templates” or “new, experimental ones” that are chosen in single risk narra-
tives – a question that indicates the texts’ “cultural and ideological implications” and
thereby sheds light on the texts’ more general participation “in social and cultural
processes of risk communication.”
Moreover, the intellectual and affective appeal of fictional risk narratives may
succeed in making the various cultural, social, political, economic, and psychologi-
cal factors that figure in specific risk experiences more easily perceptible, intelligible,
and concrete than factual, scientific narratives could. Fictional risk narratives engage
their audiences both intellectually and emotionally and thus participate effectively in
the communication of risk which, as Paul Slovic has shown, relies on both analytical
and emotional responses. Risk perception, according to Slovic (2000, xxxi), does not
exclusively depend on analytical reasoning, but also and indispensably “upon intui-
tive and experiential thinking, guided by emotional and affective processes” (cf. ↗27
Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion).
All these features, finally, substantiate the argument that fictional environmental
risk narratives may contribute more successfully to the development of an eco-cos-
mopolitan environmental ethical stance than factual, for instance scientific or phil-
osophical, narratives which have to follow very different informational and rhetor-
ical rules. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, whose work puts emphasis on the
importance of language and narrative in the creation of the moral spaces in which
our subjectivities are constituted and in which our sense of self develops, often work
with literary texts. It is there, they claim, where a morally particularly rich language
can be found – a claim that ultimately defines literature as an indispensable site of
moral deliberation, as a specific mode of ethical inquiry. Nussbaum attests a reduc-
tionist quality to moral philosophical thought that is preoccupied with universalizing
theories about rights, duties and obligations, while neglecting the concreteness of
human moral experience. She argues that literary language – its formal structures, its
stylistic features and generic conventions – is able to express this concreteness much
more fully, that it is able to articulate moral notions, problems and dilemmas in a way
that the language of what she calls ‘schematic’ philosophy lacks:
Schematic philosophers’ examples almost always lack the particularity, the emotive appeal, the
absorbing plottedness, the variety and indeterminacy, of good fiction; they lack, too, good fic-
tion’s way of making the reader a participant and a friend; and we have argued that it is precisely
in virtue of these structural characteristics that fiction can play the role it does in our reflective
lives. (Nussbaum 1990, 46)
Fictional environmental risk narratives thus tell stories about the anticipation of envi-
ronmental catastrophes. They develop risk scenarios that demonstrate what it means
to inhabit the world risk society, an inhabitation marked by a deterritorialized sense
of place, by controversy, and by the “sense of entrapment, unpredictability, and fra-
gility” (Clark 2014, 84) that characterizes the Anthropocene. In short, they work with
the multiplicity of meanings the term risk involves, from its technical or actuarial to
its diverse cognitive, affective, social, and cultural meanings. The anticipatory char-
acter of risk scenarios, moreover, marks the centrality of the conceptualization of time
in risk narratives. As Heise (2008, 142) has pointed out in her discussion of the rele-
vance of the apocalyptic and pastoral modes for risk narratives, risk scenarios differ
from apocalyptic scenarios “in the way they construe the relation between present,
future, and crisis. In the apocalyptic perspective, utter destruction lies ahead but can
be averted and replaced by an alternative future society; in the risk perspective, crises
are already underway all around, and while their consequences can be mitigated, a
future without their impact has become impossible to envision.” She, furthermore,
argues that apocalyptic narratives tend to “include an ideal socioecological coun-
termodel,” its representation usually relying on the pastoral. Risk narratives lack
504 Sylvia Mayer
such a countermodel. They, in contrast, illustrate what Frederick Buell (2003, 76) has
described as “dwelling in crisis,” a state of being in which environmental crisis “has
become part of the repertoire of normalities in reference to which people construct
their daily lives” and which recognizes risks as the “sources of anxiety woven into
more and more facets of daily life” (2003, 198). Heise (2008, 141) claims that risk nar-
ratives “tend to emphasize persistent uncertainties” and often employ “high modern-
ist patterns of narrative […] in their (implicit or explicit) emphasis on indeterminacy,
uncertainty, and the possibility of a variety of different outcomes” (142). In terms of its
temporal setting, finally, the environmental risk narrative can draw attention either
to the present – the moment of uncertainty when awareness of a risk figures promi-
nently and controversially in a culture, but has not yet led to catastrophe – or it can
draw attention to the future when a catastrophe has materialized; the period that
precedes this catastrophic future may also be introduced, for instance by means of
flashbacks that delineate the characters’ world before the onset of catastrophe, but it
is usually given less narrative space. We can thus distinguish between risk narratives
of anticipation and risk narratives of catastrophe (Mayer 2014).
3 E
nvironmental Risk Narratives: The Example of the
Climate Change Novel
One of the major global risks we are confronted with today is the risk of climate
change. As the latest IPCC report (2013) once again confirmed, decades of research –
and controversy about its results – have culminated in a by now overwhelming sci-
entific consensus that current global warming has anthropogenic causes. Climate
change modeling envisions drastic ecosystemic changes that involve a variety of
far-reaching geographical and biological transformations and pose a threat to exist-
ing life-support systems for the planet’s species. The melting of the polar ice caps,
of glaciers, and permafrost, the acidification of the oceans, the increase in extreme
weather phenomena, may result in large-scale migrations – not only of humans but
also of other species – and in large-scale species extinction. Such ecological changes
obviously also imply dramatic transformations of established economic, social, polit-
ical, and cultural orders.
Politics and public opinion in countries around the globe by now predominantly
acknowledge the existence of this risk. At the same time, however, engagement with
the specific threats climate change poses has, as of today, been inadequate. Fear of
the economic costs of drastic climate legislation and of the loss of political power
this might involve accounts in part for this inadequacy. Yet, inadequacy is also the
consequence of the fact that climate change is in many ways ‘intangible’ (Moser).
Greenhouse gas emissions are invisible, and their accumulation has occurred on a
temporal and spatial scale that not only eludes the individual’s direct perception,
but in its effects also goes far beyond the life-time experience of any single gener-
ation. The effects of global warming are defined by latency, since cause-and-effect
relations, developing globally at a fairly slow pace, are hidden. Moreover, intangibil-
ity is also the result of global power relations. Manifestations of climate change that
have already been recognized are rendered invisible by reducing, or even eliminating,
their presence in media coverage and thus in processes of national and transnational
political decision-making. A case in point are migrant populations, climate refugees
that have had to leave their home environments due to, for instance, sea-level rise,
extreme weather events, or drought and water scarcity. They become “unimagined
communities” (Nixon 2011, 150–174) whose neglected presence illustrates that an
acknowledgement of the reality and possible future consequences of climate change
is firmly linked to socioeconomic privilege. Finally, it is the sciences that also account
for a sense of intangibility. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus on the
anthropogenic causes of global warming, there is still, and has to be, a certain degree
of scientific uncertainty. Computer models of climate change are by definition only
approximations of future developments that occur on a global scale and manifest
themselves locally or regionally in very different ways. They are approximations, not
predictions. Scientific uncertainty thus remains a major source for hesitation – and
manipulation by vested interests – in terms of the acknowledgement that there is a
risk in the first place, in terms of its possible future effects, and in terms of the devel-
opment of national and international climate policies that would curb greenhouse
gas emissions more effectively.
Invisibility and latency of effect, the necessity to acknowledge and respond to
elusive temporal and spatial scales, global power constellations, and the issue of sci-
entific uncertainty: they all point toward the complexity of the risk of climate change,
illustrate the difficulties of relating individual or collective experiences to processes
of global ecological transformation, and indicate the representational challenges
climate change presents for both factual and fictional texts. With respect to the genre
of the climate change novel, they may also serve as an explanation of why this growing
corpus of texts has emerged fairly late. As Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra have
pointed out in their 2011 survey on Anglophone climate change literature, it is only in
the 1990s that the publication of climate change novels began to noticeably increase.
Climate change novels can be distinguished by their focus in terms of tempo-
ral setting. Drawing on Beck’s definition of risk as the anticipation of catastrophe,
a climate change novel can put emphasis either on a present that still anticipates
global collapse, or on a future when global collapse has already occurred. They can be
categorized as risk narratives of anticipation or as risk narratives of catastrophe. Risk
narratives of anticipation concentrate on developing a fictional world that is marked
by the cultural moment of uncertainty in a late twentieth/early twenty-first century
present, when awareness of the risk figures prominently in a society, when the first
symptoms of climate change in deterritorialized local places can be detected, but
have not yet led to full-scale, global climate catastrophe. By orchestrating a variety of
506 Sylvia Mayer
different risk perceptions and by developing characters that respond differently to the
threat of climate change, the novels explore various subjectivities and processes of
identity formation in the world risk society. They demonstrate, in Beck’s words, how
risk shapes people’s expectations, lodges in their heads, and guides their actions.
The novels focus on the strong sense of uncertainty and controversy caused by the
intangibility of climate change – by its invisibility and latency of effect, its depend-
ence on national and global power constellations, and the contested claims of climate
science – and they explore the variety of responses triggered by it, responses ranging
from denial through apathy to activism. Future full-scale global catastrophe is envi-
sioned, but only rather briefly. While climate change is certainly under way in the
novels, while it is transforming the fictional worlds ecologically, socially, politically,
economically, and culturally, it still remains a process with an open outcome.
A few examples for climate change novels that can be categorized as risk nar-
ratives of anticipation are Susan Gaines’ Carbon Dreams (2001) Kim Stanley Robin-
son’s Science in the Capital trilogy, the novels Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees
Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Iliya
Trojanow’s EisTau (Melting Ice, 2011), and Barbara Kingsolvers’s Flight Behavior
(2012). Formally, these novels rely largely on the realist mode, searching for a plau-
sibility of representation that comes close to their contemporary audience’s realities
and may thus be able to make the risk of climate change more concrete and tangible.
A striking feature of these risk narratives is their strong reliance on scientist charac-
ters. These characters serve several purposes: they introduce scientific information
on global warming and climate change, they address the controversy and uncertainty
that mark scientific knowledge, and they draw attention to the complex connec-
tions between science, politics, the economy, and the cultural realm. The novels also
employ the dystopian mode, first and foremost to depict the first destructive signs
and the ominous prospect of a changing climate. The use of the dystopian mode is,
however, often qualified by other modes, such as irony or the comic – modes that are
especially useful for highlighting complexity, ambivalence, uncertainty, controversy,
and openness.
Climate change novels that can be categorized as risk narratives of catastrophe
concentrate on creating a future fictional world when the risk has turned into catastro-
phe; when what used to be a climate change risk scenario has eventually materialized
in global climate collapse, spawning ever new risk scenarios. The novels envision and
explore worlds in which climate change has caused drastic, devastating changes in
the global ecosystemic, socio-economic, political, and cultural orders. Life in these
narratives is marked by dramatic experiences of displacement, toxic pollution, and
species extinction and by attempts to create new kinds of civilization. The period that
precedes this future, the stage of anticipation, is often (sometimes very briefly) also
introduced in these narratives, usually by plotlines that alternate between the char-
acters’ present and their lives before climate collapse. In imagining a diversity of indi-
vidual and communal experiences of climatically changed futures, in exploring what
it means intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually to live in a dramatically changed

dystopian world, these novels, too, make the risk of climate change more concrete
and tangible. Their focus, however, is on exploring the implications of drastic ecolog-
ical and cultural transformation – transformation that puts into stark relief that the
natural and the cultural are inextricably linked to each other.
Some American examples for this type of climate change novel are Octavia But-
ler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), T. C. Boyle’s A
Friend of the Earth (2000), Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009),
and Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (2010). In their focus on
future settings, these risk narratives of catastrophe deal in particular with the rep-
resentational challenge of the elusive time scale climate change implies. They employ
episodic, often fragmented, narration and explore their characters’ experiences of
various stages of climate collapse in terms of its multiple environmental, socioeco-
nomic, political, and cultural implications. The novels employ the dystopian mode of
representation rather than the apocalyptic mode; they offer representations of a con-
tinuing ‘dwelling in crisis’ rather than end-of-the-world scenarios. While the novels
by Butler, Boyle, and Amsterdam choose future settings that are still fairly close to
their readers’ present and move only a few decades into the future, Pendell’s novel
works with a timeline that goes far beyond conventional time scales. The Great Bay
covers millennia, thereby implicating human history in natural history and suggest-
ing the need to think within geological time scales (cf. Weik von Mossner 2014).
4 C
onclusion
The example of the climate change novel shows that analysing fictional texts as risk
narratives reveals the complex ways in which they participate in the global risk dis-
course on climate change. Climate change novels, as well as fictional climate change
risk narratives in other media, probably most importantly in film, go far beyond pro-
viding information that factual scientific or journalistic texts are able to communi-
cate. They are free to explore the full range of experiences the world risk society has
generated in its diverse and historically changing manifestations across the planet,
taking into consideration the various cognitive and affective implications of these
processes. The fact that climate change fiction is, in general, much more easily acces-
sible than factual texts and reaches a much larger audience strongly suggests that this
form of risk communication must have played an important role in climate change
discourse, a role that has not yet been fully understood in its narrative articulations
and in its cultural effects.
As part of the ecoglobalist project of the environmental humanities, ecocriti-
cal literary and cultural risk studies will therefore continue to develop very specific
knowledge on the narrative articulation, the thematic, formal, and genre features of
508 Sylvia Mayer
global risk fiction. It will provide insights into how it responds to the representational
challenges that global risks such as the climate change risk pose. It will reveal and
assess how these responses reflect and contribute to shape our awareness of what
constitutes global connectedness in the Anthropocene. By doing so, ecocritical risk
studies will significantly broaden the scope of interdisciplinary risk theory and risk
research.
5 B
ibliography
5.1 W
orks Cited
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Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications, 1992.
Beck, Ulrich. “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization.” Reflexive
Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Eds. Ulrich Beck,
Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. 1–55.
Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009a.
Beck, Ulrich. “World Risk Society and Manufactured Uncertainties.” IRIS. European Journal of
Philosophy and Public Debate I.2 (2009b): 291–299.
Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. New
Buell, Lawrence. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a
Planetary Scale.” Shades of the Planet. American Literature as World Literature. Eds. Wai Chee
Dimock and Lawrence Buell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 227–248.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History. Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.
Clark, Timothy. “Nature, Post Nature.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment.
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Garland, David. “The Rise of Risk.” Risk and Morality. Eds. R. V. Ericson and A. Doyle. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2003. 48–86.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991.
Heise, Ursula K. “Risk and Narrative at Love Canal.” Literature and Linguistics: Approaches, Models,
and Applications. Eds. Marion Gymnich, et al. Trier: WVT, 2002a. 77–99.
Heise, Ursula K. “Toxins, Drugs and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.”
American Literature 74 (2002b): 747–778.
Heise, Ursula K. “Cultures of Risk and the Aesthetic of Uncertainty.” Scientific Cultures –
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Zwingenberger. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. 17–44.
Heise, Ursula K. Nach der Natur. Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 2010.
Lupton, Deborah. Risk. London: Routledge, 2012.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011.
Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford
Slovic, Paul. The Perception of Risk. London: Earthscan, 2000.
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Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–621.
Trexler, Adam and Adeline Johns-Putra. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism.” WIREs
Climate Change 2 (2012): 185–200.
Zinn, Jens O., ed. Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge
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17–18.
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and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Garrard, Greg, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke. “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing
the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014). http://environmentalhumanities.org/
archives/vol5/. (3 January 2015): 149–153.
Mayer, Sylvia. “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and
the Narrative of Anticipation.” The Anticipation of Catastrophe. Environmental Risk in North
American Literature and Culture. Eds. Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014. 21–37.
Mayer, Sylvia, and Alexa Weik von Mossner, eds. The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk
in North American Literature and Culture. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014.
Moser, Susan. “Communicating Climate Change: History, Challenges, Process and Future
Directions.” WIREs Climate Change 1 (2010): 31–53.
Sørensen, Mads P. S., and Allan Christiansen. Ulrich Beck: An Introduction to the Theory of Second
Modernity and the Risk Society. London: Routledge, 2013.
Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated
Transformations in Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): http://
environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol5/5.11.pdf. (3 January 2015): 203–216.
Part IV Ecologies of Literary Communication
Sieglinde Grimm and Berbeli Wanning
26 C
ultural Ecology and the Teaching of
Literature
Abstract: Applying ecological concepts to the teaching of literature aims to change
young learners’ social and individual awareness of environmental challenges. This
involves creative learning based on the imaginative capacity of literature. The sub-
field of teaching cultural ecology connects literature with Education for Sustainable
Development (ESD). Theoretically the approach is based on the interaction between
the local and the global, on extending (inter)cultural models towards models of global
learning, and on proposing ecological criteria for a new literary canon. It suggests
teaching methods compatible with competence-oriented curricula, focusing on peda-
gogical texts that deal with the relationship between man and nature, such as the role
of animals in children’s literature. Its interpretative potential is based on establishing
literature as core of the curriculum against current priorities of producing testable
knowledge. The approach offers a revision of the idea of education which integrates
the biophysical life-world beyond mere theory, thus preparing future generations to
better deal with environmental questions.
Key Terms: Ecocritical literature, sustainability, consciousness-raising, imagination,

environmental learning
1 T
eaching Literature within an Ecocritical
Framework
Underlining the relevance of ecology for future societies, William Rueckert (1996,
107), who coined the term ‘ecocriticism,’ intends “to develop an ecological poetics by
applying ecological concepts to the reading, teaching and writing about literature.”
Teachers and literary critics alike serve “as creative mediators between literature and
the biosphere” (120). A glance at the origins of ecocriticism shows that aspects of
teaching have always played a central role in this paradigm: it started from “‘teach-
ing-led’ universities and colleges” in the USA and UK (Garrard 2012b, 1). In those insti-
tutions, applying ecological concepts to the teaching of literature has been related to
practical orientation. Approaches to teaching were supposed to be place-based, and
they emphasized the role of an allegedly direct experience of nature. Early ecocritics
repudiated critical theory because they felt it thwarted their attempt “to establish any
kind of advocacy with the earth” (Marland 2013, 848). This is why Lawrence Buell’s
(1995, 7) emphasis on a “text’s ethical orientation” privileged practical aspects as
514 Sieglinde Grimm and Berbeli Wanning
basic elements of ecocriticism when he defined the term as the “study of the relation
between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environ-
mental praxis” (1995, 430). Without a doubt, the most prominent example of a text
that exerted such an influence and induced environmentalist action was Rachel Car-
son’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, as it helped to prevent the use of DDT. At that
time, mainstream ecological pedagogy was prescriptive and didactic.
The pedagogical aim of ecocriticism, the application of ecological concepts to
the teaching of literature, overlaps with a major task of teaching the subject of lan-
guage and literature more generally. For the Anglophone world, Richard Kerridge
(2012) recognizes a “mission of ‘English,’” which he justifies historically by referring
to F. R. Leavis and Matthew Arnold’s liberal-humanist notion that a holistic account
of human needs be pitted against the instrumentalist rationality of modernity. This
is why in the nineteenth century, the subject of (English) language and literature in
schools was established to guarantee “social unity and spiritual health in the teeth
of social and environmental disruption and degradation” (Matthewman 2011, 38).
Today, facing the impact of governmental redefinition of education as vocational
training according to standards of employability, literary studies are still seen as a
shelter – or niche – for the un-alienated self. The correlative for today’s ecocritics is,
as Kerridge (2012, 15–16) suggests, a “neo-indigenous self possessing a new version
of the sensuous relationship with a natural environment that was lost with industri-
alisation.” It can thus be said that the pronounced intention of ecocritics in teaching
language and literature is to give a fresh impulse to the next generation of learners in
order to change practices of reading and modes of interpretation grounded in ossified
postmodern and poststructuralist forms of analysis (cf. Wanning 2014, 6) and, thus,
to counter the capitalist ideologies of over-consumption, materialism or the exploita-
tion of natural resources (Volkmann 2012, 395).
Applying ecocritical concerns to the teaching of literature is often based on
“consciousness raising” as an “important task” of ecocriticism (Glotfelty 1996, xxiv).
Within ecocritical pedagogy, however, Glotfelty’s (xxiv) argument that we cannot
“solve environmental problems unless we start thinking about it” soon led to debates
about whether or not consciousness-raising was compatible with democratic ideas of
teaching in the postmodern era – in other words, whether or not we can be teaching
without preaching. On the one hand, ecocritical pedagogy is grounded in critically
reflective, emancipated and politically left-wing attitudes (cf. Gerhardt 2006, 224).
There are also strong affinities with race, class and gender studies as well as with
postcolonial studies. On the other hand, ecocritical pedagogy often coalesces with a
decidedly normative impetus that partly runs the risk of imposing attitudes and direc-
tives of action by authoritative instruction. As John Parham (2006, 11–12) argues, “crit-
ical pedagogy often appears as a form of paternalism,” which seems hardly appropri-
ate “to higher education and liable to alienate many contemporary students.” In order
to overcome this discrepancy between ‘the Democratic Spirit of Academia’ and ‘the
Imperative Nature of Green Thought’ (Wood 2001), Parham suggests a “reflexive ped-
agogy” for environmental education, which is rather defined by dialogue and trans-
action. This means that environmental pedagogues “must always recognise and work
within the context with which s/he is confronted” including open discussions about
the pedagogues’ partiality and the acceptance of students’ “counter-environmental
ideas” by way of adopting “more neutral methods” (Parham 2006, 15–19).
This tension between teaching and preaching is well-known to ecocritics who
doubt that change can come from consciousness-raising alone or who are sceptical
of the possibility that reading literature can help to save the earth (cf. Gerhard 2006,
225) and who therefore demand turning to activism instead. In general, having polit-
ical influence on environmental matters is a paramount concern for many ecocritics.
This can be seen in the fervent critique a call for papers for an environmental confer-
ence in Germany, which wanted to abstain from “claims of catastrophic urgency,” had
to face: two US scholars felt that here the most evident argument for the ecocritical
cause, i.e. the urgency of activist engagement, was relinquished (Major and McMurry
2014, 233). Contrary to that critique Garrard points to the fact that achievements of
modernity have undermined sustainability from its very beginning; therefore he
pleads for an “Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy” which renounces set precedents
and “received ecological truths” and which reframes a practical ecocritical pedagogy
“that holds urgency and emergence in creative tension” thus yielding a “provisional,
dynamic practice of sustainability that corresponds to postequilibrium ecology for the
first time” (Garrard 2015, 15–16).
The question of creativity leads to another central aspect concerning the impor-
tance of teaching literature within ecocritical frameworks which relies on Buell’s
(1995, 2) assertion that “the environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination.”
This clearly aims at the role of teaching literature and the arts in general. Fostering
the imaginative faculty in young learners as well as the capacity of creative problem
solving has always been one of the main goals of teaching literature. As Buell (2001,
2) explains, “acts of environmental imagination” unleash potential energy leading to
an “engagement with the world.” These imaginative acts may “connect readers vicar-
iously” with unknown areas of empathetic experience in the human and the non-hu-
man world, introduce them to “alternative futures” and enable them to develop an
affective relationship towards the physical world (2001, 2). When Buell observed that
“the advertising budget of U.S. Corporations exceeded the combined budgets of all
the nation’s institutions of higher learning,” he meant to show that imagination is
paramount for making economic profit and that “trust in the power of imagination is
not a literary scholar’s idiosyncrasy” (2001, 1). His argument however evoked fierce
and passionate opposition as it gave rise to the fear that all that was left to ecocritics
in the teaching of literature was to cheer on the activities of those in other fields “who
are better able to engage directly and professionally in environmental activism and
the production of ecological knowledge,” thus leaving reading practise and literary
imagination behind (Phillips 2003, 161).
In light of this tension about the crisis of imagination, Berbeli Wanning suggests
that Hubert Zapf’s concept of literature as a cultural ecology can serve as an alter-
native theoretical foundation for the imaginative capacity of teaching literature (↗7
Cultural Ecology of Literature). Zapf differentiates between a ‘cultural-critical meta-
discourse,’ an ‘imaginative counter-discourse’ and a ‘reintegrative interdiscourse.’
While the latter aims at a reintegration of what has been socially marginalized, the
most important aspect for the teaching of literature is imagination (Zapf 2001). Lit-
erature is able to promote “the imaginative faculty, to interact with otherness, to try
out new patterns of actions, thus paving the way to individual approaches to nature
which otherwise would have been locked up” (Wanning 2014, 7).
2 Introduction to the Subfield

Since the beginning of the century politicians have claimed that education is the key
to changing our habits and attitudes towards nature in order to protect the environ-
ment. Therefore, maintaining sustainable development on all levels of society is a
key political task of our times. This includes building up a deep-rooted awareness of
the different phenomena involved in environmental crises, their multiple causes and
the links connecting them. Furthermore, it is necessary not only to understand the
ecological challenges but to identify options for sustainable action as well, including
an ‘action competency’ required for this task. Sustainable development can therefore
be seen as one of the possible answers to global aspects of essential environmental
issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, acid oceans, disaster risk reduction,
energy solutions, and others, and is recommended as a curricular subject matter by
the educational committees in Germany.
Sustainability in this sense rests on the three principles ecology, economy and
social-cultural life, as already defined in the Brundtland-Report (1987): sustainable
development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, 43). The first Earth summit
in Rio de Janeiro (1992), when the UN conference on environment and development
consolidated international discussions on the critical role of education, training and
public awareness in achieving these goals, can be regarded as a turning point in
this respect. The Advisory Council on Global Change has been warning of the global
risks since 1993: “For the first time in history, human activities are having impacts
of planetary scales. The resultant changes in the global environment are reshaping
the relationship between humankind and the natural basis on which its existence
depends” (WBGU 1997, 38). In 2002, the world summit of sustainable development
(Rio +10) adopted a resolution for the ‘Decade of Education for Sustainable Develop-
ment’ (ESD).
During this decade, from 2005 to 2014, the UNESCO supported thousands of pro-
jects concerned with this transformative process called ‘global change.’ The aim was
to understand the problems involved in this process, which is only possible if the
planet is conceived of holistically as a single system. This is why ESD was supposed
to be implemented in all institutions of education, from kindergartens to universities
and all forms of higher education, not as another school subject but as a cross-sec-
tional task for all subjects. Learners should be responsive to ESD from the point of
view of any subject especially in the humanities; or to put it differently, each area of
knowledge or study should contribute to ESD from its own perspective. The aim was
to increase attention towards the cultural aspects of the environmental crisis. The UN
conference in 2012, also known as Rio +20, claimed to integrate sustainability more
actively in education (UNESCO 2015, 10).
The next generation needs to learn that culture and nature interact. Children
should learn about the multi-complexity of these issues and problems. ESD is no
longer only a part of science or social studies; sustainability now is a part of all dis-
courses, and addresses everybody, not only experts. According to UNESCO, there is
no choice. In other words: sustainability is not an option but an obligation. After ten
years of the UN decade, ESD has become visible in society, politics and education.
The protagonists act as pioneers of change. As a follow-up, the UN has created the
Global Action Programme (GAP) for the post-2015 development that tries to establish
a reliable structure coming from the projects of the decade and their results. As the
UNESCO (2015, 8) mentioned, “political agreement, financial incentives or techno-
logical solutions alone do not suffice to grapple with the challenges of sustainable
development.” ESD nowadays is a key enabler and has been integrated into many
global frameworks and appropriate conventions.
The GAP defines five ‘priority action areas’ within which the third is the most
important one in educational contexts because it enforces the capacities of trainers,
teachers and educators in general to more effectively bring about ESD. All teaching
professionals are considered as change agents with the prominent task to improve
the next generation’s ability to understand and react to the environmental problems
(UNESCO 2015, 15). In other words: learning today for tomorrow. UNESCO attempts
nothing less than a new orientation of education, teaching and learning to reach
these global goals by local paths. Teachers as change agents are supposed to promote
critical and systematic thinking, collaborative decision-making, and taking responsi-
bility for present and future generations. Social transformation depends on their com-
petence of empowering learners of any age to transform themselves and the (future)
society they live in. The next generation should be considered as global citizens
sharing the same problems and assuming active roles to resolve the global challenges
in order to create a sustainable and peaceful world (cf. UNESCO 2015, 12).
3 Presentation of Theoretical Approach

The obligatory tasks of sustainable education have to be put on theoretical grounds
which encompass three aspects: first, teaching environmental literature has to be
thought of in global terms, which involves a tension with the local. Second, to meet
the aims of teaching literature it is necessary to define criteria for an ecological canon.
Third, stage models suggesting methodical steps for teaching have to be worked out
or adapted in order to provide a method for how to arrange the teaching.
Despite global pretension it is less than clear which methods are appropriate
for bringing ecocritical ideas into classrooms and seminars. This consideration rests
upon the tension between the global and the local which has been extensively dis-
cussed in ecocriticism and ecopedagogy. René Dubos’s slogan ‘think globally, act
locally’ presupposes that local politics are positively influenced if they are put in a
frame of global visions (cf. Heise 2008, 38). However, as Ursula Heise (2008, 38–39)
has pointed out, in these cases the local only works as a “miniature version” of the
global. Global ecological as well as cultural issues like migration processes require
“different types of knowledge and experience than an understanding of the local.”
This is why she pleads for a shift by virtue of which ecocritics start to “consider the
role of place in an increasingly global context” and to emphasize the local primarily
“as a matter of political or didactic practicality” (38–39). This shift is marked by Mitch-
ell Thomashow’s (2002) consideration of place in Bringing the Biosphere home: Learn-
ing to Perceive Global Environmental Change, where he asks how average citizens can
become aware of ecological developments (cf. Heise 2008, 39). This, however, can
only be reached through processes of learning which are the main concern of ecocrit-
ical pedagogy. Here it is crucial to understand that the intellectual progress of young
learners passes through various stages, reaching its height only with adolescence.
For this reason Uwe Küchler (2001a, 114) suggests that a ‘sense of place’ emerging
from affective rather than cognitive variables in young learners can develop an indi-
vidual relationship towards environmental issues: “Emotions, attitudes, motivational
and socio-cultural aspects or personality traits go back to back with the conditions in
which the acquisition of linguistic, (inter-)cultural and environmental skills can take
place.” Küchler favours the value of first-hand – and that means ‘local’ – experience
as ‘global views’ presuppose cognition and abstraction on a level more likely to exist
in adolescents and adults. A similar point has been made by scholars of an “ethic of
proximity” (J. Tomlinson) which can be described as the assumption that “sociocul-
tural, ethical and affective allegiances arise spontaneously and ‘naturally’ at the local
level (cf. Heise 2008, 34). Nonetheless, having in mind the Aristotelian (cf. 1987, 29)
definition of poetry presenting not what actually happened, but what can or could
happen, literature offers an excellent way to start with personal experience and then
widen the perspective, thus bridging the gap between local and global issues.
Several eco-pedagogical approaches to the teaching of literature (cf. Brück 2014,
246 and Volkmann 2010, 204) suggest premises for choosing texts and themes follow-
ing Hubert Zapf’s principles of ecological discourse. These principles can be used to
characterize literary and aesthetic criteria for an ecological canon. The first and basic
principle follows the ‘first law of ecology’ that “everything is related to everything else”
(Zapf 2001, 88). Accordingly, ecological literature should present a kind of infinite
global ‘network’ in which single phenomena always appear in relation to others. Lit-
erature brings together what is otherwise separate. The second principle postulates
to accept evolutionary development as belonging “to natural and cultural life” and
the conception of reality as a “changing and self-transformative process.” This means
that literature questions the primacy of linear progress prevalent in modern history
in favour of feedback cycles in which abstract concepts are made accessible by being
embodied in elementary and concrete processes of life (88). The third principle refers
to a “holistic world-view” which means that “individual phenomena must be seen as
embedded within larger ecosystems, but in the sense that here, the whole is more than
the sum of its parts” (89). Thus literary texts can be compared to organic rather than
mechanic models of human life which in themselves are seen as “metaphorical cul-
tural ecosystems.” This idea challenges efforts to eliminate the differences “between
texts in the interest of an ‘equality of all discourses’” (91), which subsequently reduce
literature to a mere play of signifiers prevalent in structuralist and poststructuralist
theory. The fourth premise claims the “emphatic recognition of the diversity of life and
of the uniqueness of its individual manifestations”; consequently literary art forms a
“never finally graspable unity” (89) that cannot be regarded in terms of autonomous
self-determination as autopoetic concepts or New Criticism suggest, but as partici-
pation in a “constantly self-transforming historical environment” (Kroeber qtd. in
Zapf 2001, 91). The fifth principle posits that nature, like culture, is not simple but
complex, which, transferred to an aesthetic quality, leads to the concept of ‘unity in
diversity.’ This implies that literary art draws its energy from a kind of counterforce
aiming to show ways how to compensate for the “one-sided predominance of monop-
olistic cultural world-models and centres of power,” as well as for the concomitant
cognitive, emotional and cultural impoverishment, by primarily addressing what is
“suppressed, disempowered, pushed to the margins or excluded by those systems”
(Zapf 2001, 92). Thus the literary and aesthetic discourse explores and expresses the
tension between cultural rationality and precultural forms of life in a specifically
intensive way and thereby contributes to a continual preservation as well as cultur-
al-ecological regeneration of society.
Teaching the aesthetics of an ecological literature requires specific methods,
which in part can rely on some existing patterns and stage models. Jacobs, Lie and
Amy follow the International Environment Education Program (IEEP) launched by
the UN Environment Program (2003) which suggests “awareness,” “knowledge,”
“attitude,” “skills,” “evaluation ability,” and “participation” (Jacobs et al. 2006,
46–47). A shortened version with three steps – “awareness,” “analysis and evalua-
tion,” and “participation” – is presented by Gabriel and Garrard (2012, 123–124). They
draw on Steve Pratchett’s (2009, 26) ‘Model for Sustainable Development.’ By contrast
and in order to create the possibility to reconcile environmentally oriented teaching

steps with current pedagogic discourse, we suggest a threefold procedure following
the “PISA Reading Literacy Subscales”: “access and retrieval,” “integration and inter-
pretation” and “reflection and evaluation” (OECD 2010, 42–43) which in part overlap
with the models mentioned.
The first step, “access and retrieve,” involves skills associated with “finding,
selecting and collecting information” (OECD 2010, 42). Environmental awareness for
this step can be aroused by questions such as ‘in what way does nature / the envi-
ronment feature in this text?’ The second step, “integrate and interpret,” demands
an understanding of the relations between different parts of a text including “prob-
lem-solution, cause-effect, category-example, equivalency, compare-contrast and
understanding whole-part relationships” (43). As Gabriel and Garrard have shown as
well, analytical and evaluative tasks expect learners to relate environmental aesthet-
ics (such as Buell 1995, 7–8 or Zapf 2001, see above) to literary texts, to explain and
compare the way in which the cultural origin of a text can be positioned in relation
to nature, landscape or the reader, or to critically consider aspects of nature like the
“various conceptions of wilderness” a certain text explores (Gabriel and Garrard 2012,
124). This can be supplemented by analyzing the relationship between human beings
and nature or – more specifically – by exploring if nature is subordinated to human
actions or if it sets limits to human aspirations and (scientific) endeavours.
For the third and final step, “reflect and evaluate,” PISA suggests tasks which
involve “drawing on knowledge, ideas or values external to the text.” Using “knowl-
edge, ideas or values external to the text” means that literary texts have to be related to
pupils’ “personal experience or […] knowledge of the world” (OECD 2010, 43), which
in ecological pedagogy refers to environmental concerns. This again corresponds to
the ecological claim that teaching literature must make visible the embeddedness of
literature in a ‘holistic worldview.’
4 Implication for Literary and Cultural Studies

Ecological concepts for the teaching of literature overlap with the field of (inter-)cul-
tural studies as both share an interest in the cultural embeddedness of literature. Eco-
logical pedagogy on the one hand follows the general cultural approach prepared by
intercultural theory; on the other hand, however, it has to go beyond looking at and
comparing single cultures. Intercultural studies examine the relationship between
different cultures and literatures and the possibility of generally accepted values.
Thus, students have to comprehend literature as a linguistic artefact integrated in
another culture’s history. They are supposed to construct their own identity as (a
place) ‘between’ their own culture/cultural heritage and the foreign culture, i.e.
between the self and the other. In the course of this they learn to change perspectives
from one cultural context and its framework of values and meanings to another. This
skill helps “to create awareness also for individual and communal perspectives on the
environment” (Küchler 2011b, 443). It has to be seen that within environmental learn-
ing the third place ‘between self and other’ is transcended by a global perspective.
Questions of climate change, for example, require a more encompassing approach.
The implications for literary studies in general are manifold. To foster the imagi-
native faculty in children as well as the capacity of creative problem solving has lately
been an important demand of the PISA-studies. From the teacher’s perspective this
role of literature is presented by Matthewman (2011, 44) who states that literature
“has the potential to make the environment more engaging and accessible through
narrative, lyric and media.” More precisely, the implications for literary and cultural
studies lie in an engagement with specific patterns, genres and themes in which the
relationship between man and nature (landscape, animals, climate etc.) plays an
eminent role.
Global visions of nature can already be traced in ancient didactic poetry such as
Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BC), which tells about the origin of the cosmos and the emer-
gence of the Gods from Gaia, the earth. Probably one of the most popular genres for
the teaching of cultural ecology is pastoral, which, in its classical understanding, is
based on the idea of a ‘bucolic’ (from ‘boukolos’ for cowherd) and frugal life close to
nature following the model of a shepherd’s life in the countryside, and which implies
the vision of a ‘Golden Age’ in which social harmony and peace between human and
non-human worlds prevail. In the Romantic period pastoral continues to offer shelter
and repose against the wants of cultural and urban progress, and it perseveres in the
nineteenth century with the aim to overcome the alienation from nature caused by
early industrial revolution. Drawing on the different representations of nature as a
reflection of the human mind in Romanticism or of nineteenth-century naturalists,
learners can compare and discuss criteria of a ‘Golden Age’ and think about their own
position between urban and rural life (↗2 Earth’s Poesy). Thus, from today’s perspec-
tive, early twentieth-century views of literature as a social conscience were reread as
an “ideology of conquest” (Buell 1995, 34–35) in the 1970s. Referring to Zapf’s prin-
ciples it is to be said that of course nature has never been in complete balance but
one can still say that since the age of industrialization the global ecological system
has undergone a change that is manifested in phenomena like climate change and
reflected in concepts like the Anthropocene.
Like pastoral, wilderness writing comprises the pattern of escape and return but
also offers initiatory experience. Old European traditions of the ‘Grand Tour’ through
the Rhine valley or of the Alps as locus classicus of the sublime and an integral part
of education have to be distinguished from the representation of the New World by
the North American frontier motif. Like pastoral, wilderness offers redemptive power,
although it paradoxically presupposes the absence of human culture.
Similar pedagogic aspects are to be found in the genres of utopia and dystopia.
Both challenge the imaginative faculty of learners as well as the capacity to explore
alternative worlds. Whereas utopian writing projects a positive future, the dystopian,
which is prevalent in ecocriticism, is closely linked to the apocalypse. Historically the
apocalypse is produced by Malthusian visions of overpopulation and its devastating
consequences. Young adult dystopias (YAD) meet a certain feeling among adolescent
readers facing their future in a partly destroyed or at least threatened world. Fear and
terror change the societies; general human values, formerly warrants for stability and
peace, are fading and losing their integrative power. The future seems to be dark, it
is impossible to foresee any social or natural development, risks increase. Especially
during the phase of change in their personal lives, adolescents often identify with
similar thoughts and reflections. YAD correspond to this feeling with their characters
and scenarios.
In general, dystopias describe a society in which a powerful group controls every-
body’s life. There are no alternatives because the world is completely devastated
beyond any hope for change, e.g. after an environmental catastrophe. Dystopias as
future fictions can use technical means that either don’t exist yet or will never exist –
what matters is the system of social control and suppression they introduce. This has
a warning function for the young reader who doesn’t want a similar future and thus
feels that he/she should act now. The warning function provokes a cautionary tale
which addresses especially this age group. As YAD mix elements of different literary
subgenres like fantasy, love story and young adult novel, they offer different modes
of interpretation and help young readers on their quest for identity. Therefore, they
gain knowledge on other aspects of environmental questions, which only literature
can provide: characters they sympathize with are involved in dangerous scenarios
of a future to which no one aspires. This refers to the more affirmative and emotional
aspects of learning (cf. Küchler 2011a) but also brings cognitive processes to a new
level of environmental understanding.
When Buell and others claim raising environmental awareness to be one central
aim of ecological pedagogy, teaching literature with YAD implies the necessity of
doing something now to realize the different environmental dangers predicted for the
future, and to look for better alternatives. Thus it is important not only to protect the
planet and human living conditions but to maintain freedom and save societies from
dictatorship, suppression and environmental-related violence. YAD can contribute
to this process although they often depict a world after its almost complete destruc-
tion – nothing remains as we know it. Within this hopeless situation, strategies of
survival come from the young, mostly female heroes – they never give up and some-
times finally win – or leave hope alive in YAD with an open ending. This distinguishes
YAD from adult literature. While utopias and dystopias have been in existence since
the sixteenth century, YAD has been around only since the 1970s and 80s. Young adult
literature in general is conceptualized specially for the needs of education and so the
typical educational aims of an era are inherent. Therefore this literary genre always
represents a typical image of childhood and youth, which today is shaped by globali-
zation, environmental destruction, fear of crisis, loss of values, and neoliberalism
as economic mainstream. The hostile societies of YAD, often a result of environmen-

tal destruction, remind the young readers of their tasks in the present. This is what
they learn from these kinds of narratives, films and computer games, gathered up
within the genre of YAD. However, one has to keep in mind Adam Trexler’s (2015,
95) warning that a regressive concept of nature in the post-apocalyptic genre often
is quite reactionary in displaying “an unaccountable faith that climate change will
restore humanity’s organic inheritance.”
How can YAD provide knowledge about the interdependent relation of social
processes, technological progress and environmental destruction? Individual imag-
ination depends on understanding the specific language of literature. Therefore we
suggest teaching frames as means to enable young readers to learn from literature.
Frames organize everyday experience as well as processes of comprehension and rec-
ognition, and activities. So the future scenarios are coherent and available although
they refer to a reality which hasn’t been experienced yet. YAD make an uncertain
future understandable and release processes of thinking and acting. Stimulating ped-
agogic aspects in apocalyptic sceneries lie in the emotional approach which supports
consciousness-raising. Yet, learners have to develop an awareness that journalis-
tic and media interest might misuse catastrophes for short-term interest and fatal-
istic attitudes, while the long-term consequences of environmental damage remain
hidden. With the pedagogic assumption that the planet does have a future we have to
distinguish between (fictional) projection and prediction when we teach apocalyptic
writing (cf. Garrard 2012a, 115).
Especially with children, fostering environmental awareness often focuses on
animals in literary texts as they represent an early way for children to encounter
nature. As children generally are fond of animals and the subject is prevalent in most
reading books, talking about animals is a promising way to build up a relationship
to nature. This is facilitated by the fact that even theoretical principles of animal
studies (see ↗13 Animal Studies), i.e., the claim that animals share the capacity to feel
pain, can be easily grasped by children. Animals cannot communicate with human
beings in any clearly comprehensible language but they do have communicative
skills. Animal characters in literature profit from these skills of the beasts when their
general capability of communication in the real world is amended by human speech
in the fictional world. Although children never experience talking animals in reality
they accept what animals say in stories, fairy tales, fantasy, films, and computer
games. Therefore interaction with the animal character as a specific way of literary
communication creates a certain directness to share the animal’s message. Who really
wants children to be touched by literature lets animals talk to them. When an animal
character talks in a human voice, children understand that messages put forward
by animals in fiction come from human thinking but are presented from another’s,
the non-human, perspective. However, it is important who tells the message. From a
child’s perspective the animal character has quite different possibilities compared to
a human protagonist because it is a part of nature. Talking animals change the image
of the real animal and make it accessible for processes of symbolization. Through its
ability to talk, the animal is anthropomorphized but still remains non-human. Inte-
grated in the fictional plot as a protagonist, it is real and unreal at the same time. So
this creates an illusion of reality in which the difference between nature and culture
becomes blurred. In a child’s perception there is hardly a difference. Thus the anthro-
pomorphic and talking animal gets close to the child but remains a non-human being.
On the one hand, it intensifies the anthropocentric point of view which it has appar-
ently suspended in the fictional setting. On the other hand, it reminds the child of its
own ‘animality’ when it behaves as an educated and mannered being in ways that
a child sometimes lacks. Therefore the reading child is emotionally touched by the
talking animal that has an irreplaceable function in teaching environmental aware-
ness through children’s literature. Wrapped in emotions, the ‘animal messages’ reach
the child’s cognitive abilities when reflecting on the differences between human and
other beings.
The language the talking animal uses encompasses a special code. While deci-
phering the meaning during the process of literary comprehension, the reader is
influenced by the animal itself. So it matters whether a lion, a raven, a fox, a snail or a
mouse is talking. The more the child is familiar with the animal and can identify with
it, the more effective is the message (Dichtl 2008, 159). Especially small animals like
mice are positively recognized, because the seemingly helpless mouse is clever and
fast and shares the same perspective with the child. It also remains in an inferior posi-
tion because of its small body, but it is smart and fearless as the famous mice heroes
like Mickey Mouse, Jerry, and others.
Referring to Greg Garrard’s (2012a, 154–156) classification of the representation of
animals in fiction the two categories ‘likeness’ and ‘otherness’ define the animal char-
acters in children’s literature. For human understanding, the most distant species are
insects which are considered as disgusting, horrifying or dangerous creatures without
the cuteness most mammals have. According to Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2014,
38), the ideal animal has to fulfil some other qualities besides cuteness before becom-
ing a child’s literary hero: “A further important issue that determines the majority of
animal stories is the concept of friendship between animal and child.” Therefore it is
necessary to empathize with an animal. The concept of friendship encompasses the
opportunity of caring and the possibility of eye contact. This seems to be difficult for
most insects as they are too tiny for eye contact and neither cute nor impressive. Most
children’s books with insects as protagonists prefer anthropomorphism, i.e., they live
in families, sometimes wearing clothes and even owning furniture, they are intelligent
and show empathy. “Only a few contemporary children’s books prompt the reader to
consider insects’ possible superiority because of their sheer number and their ability
to stunningly adapt even to inhospitable life conditions where humans struggle to
survive” (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2014, 43). Therefore, insects symbolize species and
are not recognized as individuals. Although the ‘individual’ insect like the Bee Maya
is a famous hero, the child remarks the difference when comparing its life to human
life conditions. This helps the child to understand that humans are a species too, even
though they may not normally be able to experience themselves in this way, as Ursula
Heise (2014, 24) points out. Nevertheless, it is necessary for the next generations to
consider themselves as a species and as part of the community of all species to fight
biodiversity loss which comes with climate change, soil erosion, ocean acidification,
and pervasive toxification, and which will reach mankind in the end.
Through the ‘animal perspective,’ the differences between human and other
species, which have been blurred before, are now clearly to be seen. The child rec-
ognizes itself as a human and realizes the animal as a nonhuman being, but has
learned something about species and the dangers of their lives from literature. This
is what Dietmar Schmidt (2013, 129) calls the “second rhetoric of the anthropomor-
phic.” Although talking animals constitute the child’s anthropocentric view as shown
above, the tales and stories allow to criticize this conception by analysis and inter-
pretation at the same time. Through reading, initially emotional processes reach a
cognitive level and become part of a new, perhaps posthuman, awareness.
It is children’s and young adult literature in general that has brought up the aes-
thetic discussion on nature and environment since the beginning of the century in sig-
nificant ways. There is a wide range of texts concerning ecological problems and their
political, social and economic risks and results. Most of these books follow at least two
intentions: they want children to think about environmental problems and they want
to show them various options to face the environmentally endangered future. They
use the duality of local and global to illustrate the ecological challenge the young
generation has to face: young children learn about environmental problems accord-
ing to their personal experiences in a familiar and local surrounding; the older ones
learn that environmental protection is a global problem. In these narratives, it is the
children who must save the world, even when there seems to be no solution. Gener-
ally, fear, hopelessness, and senselessness should be overcome by the young heroes.
We see a new development in children’s literature when traditional genre boundaries
are blurred and new genres arise as hybrid forms mixing fiction with factuality. Eco-
critical content leads to changes in the aesthetic discourse of children’s literature (cf.
Wanning and Stemmann 2015, 265). This means that the creation of ecological aware-
ness through literature isn’t supported only by plot or protagonists but also by form,
construction and aesthetic practice. As shown above, animal fiction illustrates social
processes from the perspective of a non-human species. As the young generation is
the first in modernity to live their whole life facing the increasing ecological crisis,
YAD represent a new contemporary subgenre within ecological children’s literature.
5 I nterpretative Potential for Texts: Conclusion and

Further Perspectives
Looking back on what has been outlined so far it becomes clear that applying ecolog-
ical concepts to the teaching of literature has great interpretative potential. Cultur-
al-ecological forms of teaching not only oppose a pedagogy merely oriented towards
rational(ist) and cognitive competences and the general impetus of discourse-oriented
and semiotic approaches, which curtail the holistic dimension of literature; they also
serve as a counterforce against the current concept of (reading) literacy introduced by
national testing. Recent developments in the debates about this concept of literacy,
as suggested by the national literacy strategy for primary schools and for secondary
literature courses, point in the same direction (cf. Matthewman 2011, 43). With the
emphasis on ‘literacy’ as also proposed by PISA frameworks, what students actually
thought became less important than the ways they expressed it in writing. This is
why the teaching of literature became “a less outward-looking subject, less respon-
sive to contemporary issues and to literature and more focused on the development
of literacy skills.” This shift in emphasis from literature to ‘literacy’ was a break not
only with university traditions but also a “move away from literature as being core to
the curriculum” in teaching at schools (43). The reasons for this tendency to narrow
the potential of literature lie in the “accountability demands of national testing” (43–
44), the result of which is a form of a primarily empirical evaluation of tests, which
requires question-and-answer settings, which can only be marked according to a
dualistic system of ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ and which, thus, necessarily restricts individual and
creative forms of literary understanding (cf. Grimm 2015). Similar arguments can be
used against the introduction of formal ‘standards’ to classify the learners’ progress
(cf. Wanning and Grimm 2015, 9–10). Here, an ecocultural pedagogy can contribute
to restoring the “holistic, emotional and aesthetic effects” (Matthewman 2001, 43)
beyond literacy, language awareness and skills.
Thus, a great interpretative potential lies in the integration of ecological aims
like orientational or holistic thinking into the discussions of literary pedagogy. At
the same time, however, the teaching steps introduced with PISA offer pedagogical
opportunities to creatively establish this holistic dimension as a principle of ecology.
There are two aspects which should be named here: first, the PISA-subscales and,
second, the concept of competence.
The third of the PISA subscales, “reflect and evaluate,” requires to rely on “knowl-
edge, ideas or values external to the text” (OECD 2010, 43). In order to be able to eval-
uate or to make a judgment about a text, learners have to draw on either “personal
experience or on knowledge of the world” (67). These instructions overlap with some
of the fundamental premises of ecocriticism stated by Glotfelty (1996, xx), namely that
“human culture is connected to the physical world.” Learners have to transcend the
literary text and create a connection with their own physical and living environment.
Moreover, the introduction of competence-oriented curricula offers pedagogical

opportunities for teaching literature from ecocritical perspectives. This becomes clear
by looking at Franz E. Weinert’s well-known definition according to which ‘compe-
tence’ comprises
the cognitive capabilities and practical skills which are available to or can be learned by indi-
viduals to solve given problems and the corresponding motivational, volitional, and social will-
ingness to make use of the solutions in variable situations in a successful and responsible way.
(Weinert 2002, 27–28; our translation)
In light of this definition, “cognitive capabilities and practical skills” are on even
levels. ‘Competence’ can include areas of experience, applied knowledge, and the
fundamental processes of comprehension associated with it. In doing so, it not only
challenges traditional abstract and elitist ideas of education or Bildung, but it also
allows ecological thinking to be incorporated into the field of education.
This has to be explained in more detail. Ecological concepts have consequences
for theories of Bildung and education as a whole in re-evaluating practical questions
and aspects of dwelling in the Heideggerian sense. In order to point out the interpre-
tative potential of ecological concepts, one first has to look at the tradition of Euro-
pean ideas of education. According to Manfred Fuhrmann (2004, 215), the “continuity
of European Education” rests on humanism and on Christianity, with Frömmigkeit
(piety/devoutness) as its primary value. In the eighteenth century, visions of educa-
tion and Bildung were nourished by Enlightenment ideas, trying to prepare neces-
sary prerequisites for engendering an autonomous subject, which was elaborated in
idealistic thought. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1986, 319), then a principal of a
Gymnasialanstalt, for instance, claimed the priority of “spiritual content,” which has
“value and interest in and for itself,” over any “sensuous matter,” which “finds its way
directly into the child’s imagination” (our translation). This means that exterior influ-
ences (from the natural world) were repudiated in favour of inward-looking reflection.
Likewise, Georg Bollenbeck (1996, 99) observes that the German intelligentsia of the
late eighteenth century rejected “economy, utility, professional education, and tech-
nology” in favour of an “ideal of a purpose-free (zweckfrei) spiritual kind of Bildung”
(our translation). In other words, conceptions of Bildung and education from the late
eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century are marked by a repression of prac-
tical and applicable knowledge as well as interaction with the exterior world and the
environment.
This development in idealist philosophy, which could be described as the peak
of anthropocentrism, is mirrored in David Abram’s (1996, 41) argument that efforts to
reach an objective truth of the world by abstract concepts in modernity have brought
about a decline in the immediacy of ‘dwelling’ as well as our everyday life-world (Leb-
enswelt) and almost led to a “nearly complete forgetting of this living dimension in
which all of our endeavors are rooted.” The idealization of nature through mathemat-
ical methods in the natural sciences and the transfer of these methods to the human-
ities have caused an alarming distance from direct and immediate human experience
as well as from the material world.
European ideas of ‘freedom’ and the preference of Geist and reflection over
‘sensuous matter’ have impacted Western metaphysics in general and persevered
in particular in aspects of the American civil religion shaped by Puritan life with its
strict moral principles, devout piety and individualism. These trajectories of Western
metaphysics have shaped the idea of education until now. Thus U.S. author Michael
Crichton observes a discrepancy between America, and Asian and Far Eastern coun-
tries, which continues in young students’ preference of subjects like law or invest-
ment banking as opposed to engineering, mathematics or physics. This prevalence
is analyzed in Crichton’s (1993, 198) novel Rising Sun, where the narrator faces the
low standard of general education in the US as compared to that of the industrialized
Countries of Asia and Europe: “A class like Physics 101 doesn’t attract Americans. It’s
been that way for years. Industry can’t find them either. We would be up shit creek
if we didn’t have the Asians and Indians who come here to get doctorates in maths
and engineering, and then work for American Companies.” The narrator confronts a
lack of working morale in the young elite. They avoid the important but demanding
and labour-intensive subjects of natural and technological sciences which would be
important for the nation’s economic prosperity and instead choose professions with
a higher social prestige within the fields of law, banking and stockbroking: “That’s
where our productivity’s directed. That’s where our national focus is. […] America
has become Land of Lawyers. Everybody suing. Everybody disputing. Everybody in
court” (Crichton 1993, 199). Rising Sun refers to Japan as the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’
and the novel may be interpreted as a warning that the United States may soon fall
behind in the economic competition with Asian countries. The high social esteem of
the vocational field of bankers, doctors and lawyers in the Anglo-American and Euro-
pean tradition contrasts with the high social prestige of the areas of industry, technol-
ogy and economy in Japan. Drawing on that, this development of educational tenets
and values has not only brought about a separation from immediate experiences with
the living environment; they have also perpetuated the discrepancy between techno-
logical and industrial achievements of civilization, representing the material world,
on the one hand, and high culture, inward-looking Bildung and education on the
other, as Bollenbeck points out. Abram has shown that this development lies at the
heart of Western metaphysics starting with ancient Greek philosophy (cf. Abram 1996,
esp. 109–115).
As a consequence, and to sum up the ideas concerning the teaching of ecocriti-
cism as outlined in this chapter, an ecocritical pedagogy has to integrate three aspects
before choosing subjects for practical lessons of language and literature. First, in
order to meet the general demand of environmental education, the topic of nature,
culture and the environment is interesting and relevant (for the future). Although this
seems to be evident, it is important to realize the global coherence of all items men-
tioned above. Second, traditional as well as modern or contemporary literature uses

language in a special, artistic way to open readers’ minds and to encourage alterna-
tive thinking about nature unlike the natural sciences’ perspectives. No other means
can ever replace this unique significance literature has. For example, emerging dif-
ferences in understanding a poem written in the eighteenth century can describe
today’s thoughts about nature in a historical perspective in addition to present-day
knowledge: now we learn what has influenced our attitudes towards nature. Third,
as teaching literature is closely related to the teaching of values and to the demon-
stration of different ways of acting, learners are definitely challenged to reconsider
their notions of nature. Taken together, all these points can be subsumed under the
umbrella term of ‘ecocriticism’ (cf. Buell 2005, 138). Every literary text, no matter
when it was written, is a reliable witness of the cultural environmental debate. Lit-
erature enables the reader to both change his/her perspective of thought and to use
fictional experience as a base for multiple options of practice in reality. Education
for sustainable development (ESD) doesn’t mean to only read literary texts on nature
without connecting them to other fields of interest. It rather encourages the learner to
combine ‘nature problems’ with other questions such as social conditions, equality,
fair play, humane forms of living, and risks, including violence against our fellow
human beings, fighting for basic needs like water, air, food, and space. After all, this
is a realistic war scenario of the future: “Radical change would appear necessary if
famine, mass migration and armed conflicts over resources are to be avoided in the
current century” (Goodbody 2014, 39). ESD shows that there are no ‘isolated’ conflicts
when people face bad environmental conditions. Environmental issues always corre-
spond with other risks; the safety of the world in total is endangered. Social problems
and technological ones are on the same level, but with one difference: both are based
on human agency, but in contrast to irreversible problems concerning the devastation
of nature and natural resources, no matter whether humans are responsible for them
or not, social structures are always human-made and therefore can principally be
changed by humankind as well.
We are greatly indebted to Roman Bartosch for his challenging comments, inspiring
discussion and help with the English language.
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Alexa Weik von Mossner
27 E
nvironmental Narrative, Embodiment, and
Emotion
Abstract: From its inception, ecocriticism has placed great trust in the ability of envi-
ronmental narratives to have lasting effects on the attitudes and behavior of readers,
yet until recently there has been little interest in analyzing the emotionalizing strat-
egies of such texts from a narratological perspective. Introducing the pioneering
econarratological work done by scholars such as Erin James, Nancy Easterlin, and
Markku Lehtimäki as well as relevant research in affective and cognitive science, the
chapter investigates the role played by embodied simulation and related mirroring
responses in readers’ emotional engagement with environmental narrative. It con-
siders both the empathetic emotions that are evoked through alignment with a pro-
tagonist and the direct emotions that readers experience in response to the virtual
environment of a storyworld, offering passages from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath and Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus as examples.
Key Terms: Environmental narrative, econarratology, cognitive science, emotion,

embodied simulation
From its inception, ecocriticism has placed great trust in the ability of environmental
narratives to have lasting effects on the attitudes and behavior of their readers. Many
ecocritics have had an eye on affective and emotional processes in that context, assert-
ing that they are important not only in the production of environmental narratives
but also for their societal effects. Lawrence Buell (1995, 137), for example, claims in
The Environmental Imagination that for nature writers like Henry David Thoreau and
John Muir “a deeply personal love and reverence for the nonhuman led, over time,
to a deeply protective feeling for nature.” That personal love for the nonhuman and
the resulting protective feeling found expression in texts such as Thoreau’s Walden,
which, according to Buell, had an affective impact not only on specific readers but on
American society as a whole. This implies that the affective and rational understand-
ing of readers – and even that of non-readers – can be shaped or at least influenced
by environmental narrative.
Buell’s belief in the emotional valence and social efficacy of nature writing and
other environmentally oriented texts is shared by many environmental writers and
critics. As Louise Westling (2014, 5) points out in her introduction to the Cambridge
Companion to Literature and the Environment, “[m]id-twentieth-century works such
as Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac urged an ethics of nature and wildlife pres-
ervation, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring dramatized the devastating ecological
effects of pesticides, creating a national uproar that helped to launch the American
environmental movement and spread its influence around the world.” The urging in
Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and the dramatization Westling detects in Carson’s
Silent Spring are the result of rhetorical and narrative techniques that aim to engage
readers emotionally and thereby move them to action. Like Buell, Westling suggests
that historically such emotionalizing techniques have had tangible effects on Amer-
ican readers and, by extension, the public sphere inside and outside of the United
States. There tends to be more ambiguity when it comes to the potential affects and
effects of environmental fiction. Yet while there is considerable disagreement over
what genres are most effective in changing their viewers’ perceptions of and attitudes
towards nonhuman nature (see Heise 2005), there seems to be a certain consensus
that affect and emotion play an important role in such processes of change.
It is all the more remarkable then that, despite their frequent insistence on
environmental narrative’s emotional effects on readers and the general public, eco-
critics have put relatively little effort into analyzing the emotionalizing strategies of
such texts from a narratological perspective. In fact, narratological analyses more
generally are rare to find in ecocritical scholarship. However, as both Markku Leh-
timäki and Erin James have suggested, the vocabulary developed by narratologists
offers valuable analytical tools for ecocritics who are interested in the formal aspects
of representations of environment and can thus sophisticate the way we think about
narratives in ecocritical literary studies and in the environmental humanities more
generally. In her 2015 book The Storyworld Accord, James (2015, xv) brings together
narratological and ecocritical concerns via a mode of reading she calls econarratol-
ogy, a mode that pairs “ecocriticism’s interest in the relationship between literature
and the physical environment with narratology’s focus on the literary structures and
devices by which writers compose narratives.” Like the biocultural approach that
Nancy Easterlin presents in her contribution to this volume (↗12 Ecocriticism and
Place Studies), econarratology explores the cognitive features of literary environ-
ments, or, more broadly, of the storyworlds we find in all kinds of media (↗32 PANO-
RAMA: Three Ecocinematic Territories).
In this chapter, I will argue that taking on board the insights of second-genera-
tion cognitive and affective science allows us to further extend the pioneering work
of Easterlin, Lehtimäki, and James. Not only can it help answering Lehtimäki’s (2013,
137) important question about how techniques for consciousness presentation can
“be leveraged to suggest how characters’ experiences both shape and are shaped
by their engagement with aspects of the natural world.” It can also give us a better
understanding of the role played by affect and emotion in such fictional experiences
and readers’ imaginative simulation of them. The chapter will proceed by first giving
a brief overview of some of the ways in which affective relationships between readers
and environmental narratives have been theorized in recent years. It will then intro-
duce an econarratological approach that draws on relevant scholarship in cognitive
science, affective narratology, and the psychology of fiction. In this context, it will
consider both empathetic emotions that are evoked as human and nonhuman pro-
536 Alexa Weik von Mossner
tagonists move through storyworlds, cueing readers to feel along with them, and
direct emotions that readers experience in response to the virtual environment of a
storyworld. The last section of the chapter will then demonstrate the interpretative
potential of such an approach for ecocritical readings, offering passages from John
Steinbeck’s (2002 [1939]) The Grapes of Wrath and Helena Maria Viramontes’ (1995)
Under the Feet of Jesus as pertinent examples.
1 Environment, Embodiment, and Emotion

That the relationships between humans and their environments are infused with
affect and emotion is an issue that has long been explored in disciplines such as eco-
logical psychology, human geography, sociology, urban studies, and social anthro-
pology, among others. Already in 1974, Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974, 93) Topophilia explored
“the human being’s affective ties with the material environment,” and in more recent
years geographers and other scholars with an interest in place studies have explored
a wide variety of human attachments to place (for a detailed discussion of the rel-
evance of place studies for ecocritical analysis, see Easterlin’s contribution to this
volume). In their introduction to Emotion, Place and Culture, Mick Smith, Joyce David-
son, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi (2009, 2) observe that “emotions are amongst the
most important ways in which […] humans are both connected with and disconnected
from their world.” Emotions, here, are understood as the basic mechanism that con-
nects us to our environment, shapes our knowledge, and motivates our actions. If we
want to understand place attachment as well as many other complex relationships
between (human) animals and their environments, Smith et al. suggest that we need
to pay attention to emotional processes, regardless of the fact that these tend to be
extremely complex and often transitory and elusive. Importantly, cognition cannot be
separated from emotional processes in this or any other context, just as perception,
attention and awareness cannot just be located within the brain or even the nervous
system alone but takes place in the whole body as it interacts with its environment
(↗28 Beyond the Wasteland). With recourse to the work of Antonio Damasio and J. J.
Gibson, social anthropologist Kay Milton (2002, 53) argues that “the way in which an
individual human being comes to understand nature as they do emerges out of that
individual’s perceptive experience of their […] environment.” That perceptive expe-
rience and resulting understanding is not only embodied (in a physical body) and
embedded (in a physical environment), but it is also highly affective. The same is true
for our imaginary experience of narrative worlds because, as the cognitive literary
scholar Patrick Colm Hogan (2003, 5) has shown, narrative “is intimately bound up
with emotion.”
These important insights about the role of emotion in relationships between
humans, cultural texts, and the environment have not yet received enough attention
from ecocritics. In her A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation,

Easterlin (2012, 92) calls this lack of attention to cognitive processes of the mind ironic
because “knowledge of human perception, cognition, and conceptual articulation is
more crucial to ecocriticism than it is to perhaps any other area of contemporary lit-
erary studies.” Given ecocriticism’s great interest in human-nature interactions and
the fact that the objects of their investigations tend to be cultural texts that have been
produced by human minds, a greater attention to embodied processes of perception,
cognition and conceptual articulation – and to the role played by affect and emotion
in such processes – would greatly enrich its analytical project.
One theoretical route to approaching these issues is provided by affect studies,
most notably the theoretical work of philosophers and cultural scholars such as Gilles
Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Charles Altieri, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Sianne
Ngai. In their introduction to Ecologies of Affect, Tonya Davidson, Ondine Park, and
Rob Shields (2011, 4) trace the history of affect studies back to Deleuze’s 1978 lectures
on Spinoza, in which he revived the Latin concept of affectus, defining it as a change
in one’s “force of existing.” The affective dimension of experience, in this definition,
is nothing more and nothing less than an “increasing and decreasing capacity to act”
(4). Affect studies broadly understands affect as a force that “fuses the body with the
imagination into an ethical synthesis that bears directly on the micro-powers inher-
ent in everyday interactions” (5), and such fusing can involve a wide range of negative
and positive feelings. As Sylvan Goldberg points out, “ecocritics have grown adept at
discussing what Sianne Ngai (2015, 56) has called ‘the classical political passions’ –
feelings like anger, grief, and love – and this valuable body of critique stands to gain
useful insights through a more rigorous engagement with theoretical work on affect
from a range of disciplines.” Some ecocritics have found Ngai’s work and that of other
affect theorists productive for the analysis of environmental fiction and nonfiction
texts that present their readers with environmental risk scenarios (Lockwood 2012;
Houser 2014). “It is through affect,” argues Heather Houser (2014, 3–4) in Ecosickness
in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, “that recent fiction envisions the shared endangerment
and technologization of contemporary bodies and environmental systems.” Acknowl-
edging that “[p]henomenology, trauma studies, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory,
and microhistories of the social are just some of the domains where emotion has been
a key analytic for several decades,” Houser (2014, 5) maintains that “two commit-
ments stand out to affiliate accounts of affect in these areas as well as in the cognitive
sciences, aesthetics, and political philosophy: determining how objects and events
rise to attention in our personal worlds and how attachments, detachments, and com-
mitments form from that attention.”
That certainly is true, but it does not change the fact that affect studies’ relation-
ship to the insights of contemporary cognitive and affective science is at best tenuous.
As psychologists Keith Oatley, Raymond Mar, and Maja Djikic (2012, 235) have pointed
out, literary scholars and cognitive psychologists tend to view each other’s methods
with suspicion, with the result that “although [they] might be interested in similar
topics such as character and emotion, they tend to take no notice of each other.”
Oatley, Mar, and Djikic find this intellectual disconnect regrettable, because in car-
rying out the investigation how narrative thinking works, “dialogue between the
humanities and cognitive science is essential” (236). Biocultural and econarratologi-
cal approaches in literary studies engage in such a dialogue, drawing on the insights
of evolutionary and cognitive science which conceptualize the mind as necessarily
embodied and enmeshed with its environment. The theoretical approach that I will
present on the following pages builds on this important work and takes additional
cues from affective science and affective narratology, thereby turning our attention
to the role of empathy and emotion in the imaginative engagement with literary envi-
ronments.
2 A
ffective (Eco)narratology, the Body, and the
Cueing of Direct and Indirect Emotions
Environmental narrative is, broadly defined, any type of narrative that foregrounds
environmental issues or human-nature relationships. In David Herman’s definition,
narrative
is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change – a strategy that
contrasts with, but is not inferior to, ‘scientific’ modes of explanation that characterize phenom-
ena as instances of general covering laws. Science explains how in general water freezes when
(all other things being equal) its temperature reaches zero degrees centigrade; but it takes a story
to convey what it was like to lose one’s footing on slippery ice on a late afternoon in December
2004, under a steel-grey sky.” (2007, 3)
Herman’s example arguably is already an example of an environmental narrative

because it focuses on the sensual experience of and physical interaction with one’s
environment: the experience of losing one’s footing on slippery ice on a winter day.
That sensual experience tends to be personal, subjective, and unique, and thus
involves what cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind call qualia. As the neu-
roscientist Janet Levin (1999, 693) explains, the term qualia is “most commonly used
to characterize the qualitative, experiential or felt properties of mental states.” In his
essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974, 435) puts
the problem in simpler terms: qualia are the sense or feeling of “what it is like” for
someone to undergo conscious experience. A narrative, in Herman’s example, is dif-
ferent from a scientific account in that it will allow readers to imagine that sense or
feeling of what it is like to lose one’s footing on slippery ice. It will cue readers to
simulate that sense or feeling in their minds, using their own real-world experiences
as models and their own bodies as sounding boards for the simulation. As Erin James
(2015, xii) puts it, the storyworlds of narrative texts “provide readers access to highly
subjective understandings of what it is like to live in, conceptualize, and experience

a given space and time.” It is important to understand, however, that what readers
experience when reading about a character – fictional or not – slipping on ice, is not
so much a reenactment of the author’s experience of slipping (which the author pre-
sumably used in creating the narrative) as it is a personal version of that experience,
one that is cued and guided by the words on the page but then enacted by the reader
in a highly individual and idiosyncratic way.
Inevitably, this enactment or performance, as psychologist Richard Gerrig (1993,
17) would call it, will have affective components. As Gerrig explains, readers “must
bring both facts and emotions to bear on the construction of the world of the text. And,
just like actors performing roles, they must give substance to the psychological lives
of characters” (17). Herman’s example of a character slipping on ice, then, involves
both the imagination of the narrative environment and the character’s subjective con-
scious experience of it. As James (2015, xii) points out, “[e]very narrative contains a
virtual environment that readers must come to know and inhabit if they are to under-
stand that narrative’s story.” Narrative perspective plays an important role in such
knowing and inhabitation, because there are basically two ways in which readers can
learn about the virtual environment of narrative: either directly, for example through
the descriptions of a third-person narrator, or indirectly, through the consciousness of
a character or first-person narrator. Marco Caracciolo (2014, 110) argues in The Expe-
rientiality of Narrative that readers construct the subjective experience of a character
either through consciousness-attribution or through consciousness-enactment. In
the case of consciousness-attribution, the character’s words, facial expressions and
actions are rendered from a third-person perspective, and the reader attributes mental
states to that character, much like she would attribute mental states to people in real
life (this is what psychologists call Theory of Mind). In the case of consciousness-en-
actment, the reader is given access to a character’s consciousness, to his sensations,
thoughts and emotions, either because the narrative is told from a first-person per-
spective or because a third-person narrator uses the character as focalizer, slipping
into the character’s mind. This is something that is not possible in real life, yet most
readers will find it quite natural to read a literary character’s embodied mind.
They will also find it natural to simulate in their minds the character’s sensations
and his bodily actions within the virtual environment of the narrative. The Italian
neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese has linked this phenomenon to the mirror neuron
systems in our brains in his theory of liberated embodied simulation. Our engage-
ment with sensory and motor imagery in a literary text, Gallese and literary scholar
Hannah Wojciehowski (2011, 16) argue in a co-written article, is a liberated form of
embodied simulation, since it implies “re-using our motor or visual neural apparatus
to imagine things and situations we are not actually doing or perceiving.” While the
body of the reader is not ever subjected to the environmental conditions of the narra-
tive, the body of the character is. And it is through the mechanism of empathy – and
thus the mirror neuron systems in their brains – that readers map the sensations,
emotions, and movements of that fictional body onto their own, thus understand-
ing, and literally feeling, its interaction with the environment, its pleasures and its
pain. The simulation is embodied because it re-uses parts of the brain that would
also be active in actual physical movement of the reader’s body and in her sensory
and emotional interactions with the environment. It is liberated because it is inde-
pendent from such actual stimuli and movements. As Gallese and Wojciehowski put
it, during the immersive experience of a literary world our cognitive faculties are to a
large degree “freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life” (17).
Although writers (of both fiction and nonfiction) cannot force readers to feel in
certain ways, some authors of environmental narratives make deliberate use of what
the cognitive literary scholar Suzanne Keen (2010, 83) has called “authorial strate-
gic empathizing.” Evoking Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “strategic essen-
tialism,” Keen explains that “strategic empathizing occurs when an author employs
empathy in the crafting of fictional texts, in the service of ‘a scrupulously visible
political interest’” (83). However, even if an environmental narrative isn’t driven by
a “scrupulously visible political interest,” the author will deliberately cue readers’
empathetic and emotional responses to keep them immersed and involved in the
story. As Hogan (2011, 56) points out in Affective Narratology, our engagement with all
literary texts is “some version of an empathic response.” It is an empathic response
that is guided, though not determined, by the structure and narrative strategies of a
given text. In Herman’s example, readers might learn from a first-person perspective
that the character hates the perpetually grey skies of winter and that he is on his way
to the airport to escape to a perfect, sun-soaked beach. Because they are aligned with
the character and have access to his feelings, readers are cued to feel with (empathy)
and for (sympathy) the character and to hope that he will reach that plane. They also
are cued to share the character’s feelings of pain and disappointment when he slips
on the ice and falls so badly that he has to go to a hospital instead.
Another important aspect that inflects readers’ mental enactment of the char-
acter’s slipping on ice is the description of the environment itself. In most literary
texts, explains narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan (2003, 237), “characters stand in the
foreground of narrative interest; and whereas [narrative] space mainly consists of per-
manent features, characters are evolving bodies and minds who continuously add
events to their personal history.” While this might be true for much of literature, envi-
ronmental narrative, in both its fictional and nonfictional forms, is marked by the fact
that narrative space isn’t necessarily in the background, nor is it necessarily perma-
nent or static. Central for readers’ affective engagement with the virtual environment
of a narrative is what Elaine Scarry has called its “vivacity.” In some verbal art, Scarry
(2001, 3) argues, images “acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects” despite the fact
that such works of art “are almost wholly devoid of actual sensory content.” This is
consistent with empirical studies that report that mental imagery is what people tend
to remember about their reading of literary texts and that this correlates closely with
their emotional responses to such texts (see Sadoski et al. 1990; Krasny and Sadoski
2008). Describing natural environments in a way that allows readers to not only “see”
them before their inner eyes, but also have a vivid impression of their aural, olfactory
and tactile qualities is often the hallmark of nature writing. But fiction writers, too,
create environments for us that we can see, hear, smell and feel without them ever
having been real in any material sense. As Caracciolo (2014, 5) points out, “stories
can evoke vivid mental imagery, turning our sketchy imaginings into memorable,
and sometimes unsettling, sensory experiences.” It literally is all in our heads, fed by
descriptions that are evocative enough to give some elements of a narrative’s virtual
environment the vivacity of perceptual objects.
Narrative perspective again matters a great deal here, because Caracciolo’s
differentiation between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment is
also relevant for readers’ emotional experiences of virtual environments. In the case
of first-person narration, the reader is aligned with the character’s consciousness
in a way that allows for no independent experience of the narrative environment.
Everything we learn about the icy landscape and the character’s fall in Herman’s
example is going to be filtered through the character’s consciousness if it is narrated
from a first-person perspective. We are bound to the character’s qualia, to his sub-
jective experience of the world. If the whiteness of the ice is blinding and the color
of the sky oppressive for the character, then we are bound to see it the same way. If a
third-person narrator uses that same character as a focalizer, we also have access to
his qualia and thus his subjective experience of the world, and if he finds it depress-
ing we are cued to feel along. However, in this case the narrator may also give us
information independently of his character about the beauty of the landscape, the
sparkling surface of the ice. If the description is vivid, it might lead us to imagine the
environment in a way that is different from the character’s qualia. Indeed, we might
find that landscape beautiful and enticing, even though we learn that the character
hates it and that he needs to get out. In such moments a productive tension might
arise between the direct emotions cued by the narrative for the surrounding environ-
ment and the empathetic and sympathetic emotions we feel for the character. Both
forms of emotional relationships are of central importance to readers’ experience,
and ultimately understanding, of environmental narratives. By way of example, I
will now offer close readings of select text passages from two works of environmen-
tal fiction: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which imagines a family’s arduous
journey from the parched landscape of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the lush but highly
exploitative environment of Central California, and Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under
the Feet of Jesus, which portrays the harsh lives of contemporary migrant workers in
that very same region.
3 F eeling the Environment: The Grapes of Wrath and

Under the Feet of Jesus
The Grapes of Wrath is a canonical classic of American literature that combines a
social justice argument with detailed descriptions of the landscapes of the Ameri-
can Southwest. In his article on the “cognitive landscapes” of Steinbeck’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, Rick Marshall (2011, 57) maintains that “[w]hereas in most
novels the landscape simply creates a backdrop for the plot, in The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck fashioned it as a living panorama to drive the plot forward, describing it
with great level of care and detail.” Steinbeck, Marshall reminds us, was so metic-
ulous in his landscape description that he created “inter-chapters” that explicitly
focused on changes in the environment while also foreshadowing plot and charac-
ter development. I only have space here for a very cursory treatment of Steinbeck’s
evocations of narrative environments, but my focus will be on how his novel brings
the Oklahoma landscape to life on the page, and how it cues an emotional response
toward that environment in readers. Let’s consider the often-cited opening scene of
the novel:
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and
they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. […] In the
last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the
spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn each day after day until a line
of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and
in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and
they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky
became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.
(Steinbeck 2002 [1939], 1)
The environment of Oklahoma here emerges as a sun-burned and wind-swept place,

evoked by stark visual and sensual imagery that is loaded with affective meaning.
Readers are cued to imaginatively feel the touch and smell of rain falling gently on dry
earth, see the pale, cloudless sky, and feel the heat of the sun “flaring down.” They
are also invited to feel what Gregory Currie (2011) has called “empathy with objects”
when they read about plants trying to “protect themselves” from the stark sunlight.
As Currie notes (2011, 86), the process of embodied simulation can be used not only
to simulate and understand the movements and mental processes of human actors,
but one might also employ it to “imagine swaying in the wind like a tree,” and so the
device enables us to literally feel with “the leaves of the young corn” as they “become
less stiff and erect,” and bend “in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of
strength gr[o]w weak, each leaf tilt[s] downward” (Steinbeck 2002 [1939], 2). While it
would be an overstatement to speak of a personalization of nature here, the passage
nevertheless allows readers to recognize the corn as a living thing that is under dis-
tress. The motor imagery of its slow process of wilting allows readers to simulate the
movement and feel along, even to feel sorry for the plant as it struggles to survive the
drought.
However, there is also another element here that makes the detailed description
of narrative space emotionally salient for readers. As Marshall (2011, 59) notes, the
novel depicts Oklahoma as a “difficult (scarred, earth crusted) place,” and by difficult
he means first and foremost difficult for humans. Although humans are rarely men-
tioned in the first chapter of the novel, and none of the protagonists is introduced,
readers no doubt realize that this is farming country and that the drought will lead
to devastating crop failures. They do so because they know, even before opening the
book, that it is a novel about the Dust Bowl, and they are also led by the narrative
itself to consider that human dimension. It tells them that “[t]he plows crossed and
recrossed the rivulet marks” (Steinbeck 2002 [1939], 1), thus suggesting an activity
of human agriculture, and a little further down it evokes “teams” moving, “wheels”
milling the ground, and even just a single “walking man” lifting “a thin layer [of dust]
as high as the waist” (2). These are just brief images flashing through a reader’s mind,
but even without an extended knowledge of agriculture or of the history of the Dust
Bowl, she will likely understand that this much dust is bad – very bad – for people
who have to live off the land. Easterlin (2012, 102) reminds us that “humans, like all
other species, try to control their environment and the resources it affords and thus
resist acknowledging their apparent insignificance.” The humans we encounter in the
first paragraphs of The Grapes of Wrath are not only nameless, but also completely
helpless and insignificant against the fierceness of the Oklahoma environment. It is
only natural for readers to feel discomfort at this depiction, especially since they must
assume that things will only get worse in the course of the story.
The purpose of Steinbeck’s first chapter, then, is to allow readers to imagina-
tively experience the formation of the Dust Bowl environment, and he does so with
the stylistic tools of realism. As James (2015, 33) points out, “all narratives can trans-
port readers to a particular space and time, and thus all narratives stand to broaden
readers’ conceptions of what it means to inhabit various environments.” But some
narratives are nevertheless more immersive than others, and the genre conventions
of the realist novel are the ones that most deliberately and most consistently seek to
ensure an immersive reading experience for the reader. David Miall and Don Kuiken
(1994, 389) remind us that foregrounding is an important element of literary style.
What is foregrounded in the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath is the natural envi-
ronment of Oklahoma that is the result of a complex, and in this case tragic, combina-
tion of human agency (in the sense of agriculture) and the material agency of the sun,
the wind and other elemental forces (on material agency, see Serpil Oppermann’s
contribution to this volume). This part of the text predominantly cues direct emotions
that take the environment itself as their object, even though, as I have shown, the
meaning of this environment for human protagonists is not wholly absent. They are
cued by vivid landscape imagery with much attention to detail and to active processes
of attack (the sun) and defense (the plants), of paling, parching and dying.
Under the Feet of Jesus uses an entirely different approach to give its readers a
sense of the equally hostile environment of the vineyards of Central California. The
narrative centers on the Chicana girl Estrella, who has spent the first thirteen years
of her life traveling with her family of migrant workers through the Great Valley. Her
father has abandoned the family and so it is now the 73-year old Perfecto Flores who
takes care of her, her pregnant mother, and her four siblings as they keep moving
from one place to the next, always looking for work and always living in poorly
equipped, make-shift homes that are pervaded by “the stink of despair” (Viramontes
1995, 8). The text passage I have selected is particularly suited for my purposes here
because it illustrates well how empathetic character emotions can also be used to
allow readers to imagine and virtually experience a narrative environment. Like The
Grapes of Wrath, Under the Feet of Jesus is told by a third-person-narrator who can
move effortlessly into and out of the consciousness of various characters. Yet, it is a
very different text in terms of tone and style. It often moves from the consciousness of
one character to that of another within a single chapter, a single paragraph even, just
as it moves back and forth in time without much announcement, trusting that readers
will somehow figure out that they have just been transported to another point in time
or into the mind of another character. The following passage is a good example of the
novel’s ability to immerse readers into a narrative environment by allowing them to
experience through the perspective of a character what it is like to interact with that
environment:
The white light of the sun worked hard. Even the birds wavered on the crest of the heat waves.
Under the leafy grapevines, the grapes hung heavy. She had readied the large rectangular sheet
of newsprint paper over an even bed of tractor levelled soil, then placed the wooden frame to
hold the paper down. Now, her basket beneath the bunches, Estrella pulled the vine, slit the
crescent moon knife across the stem, and the cluster of grapes was guided to the basket below.
(Viramontes 1995, 49)
The beginning of the passage – opening Book II of the novel – is a description of

the vineyards that focuses on the visual and sensual perception of heat. We learn
that the light of the sun is white hot and that it “works hard” on whomever or what-
ever it touches. As in Steinbeck’s novel, it is represented as a material force with its
own form of agency, in this case producing waves of heat solid enough for birds to
waver on. Then, the focus moves to the grapes on the grapevines, and it is only with
the introduction of the pronoun “she” and the mentioning of Estrella’s name in the
following sentence that we realize that it is her subjective perspective, her qualia,
that we are sharing here. It is Estrella who feels like the sun is working on her; it is
she who observes the birds sailing above her on the thermal lift of the hot air. As
readers, we are invited to share that perspective, using our own bodies for the mental
simulation of her crouched position underneath the grapevines and our own previ-
ous experiences to imagine the feeling of being exposed to the blazing “white” sun-
light while performing strenuous labor on an extremely hot day. Viramontes does not
waste many words on this, and readers in fact learn very little about the larger envi-
ronment in which Estrella performs her task, but because of the use of strong visual
and sensual imagery, they can vividly imagine how that environment feels: scorching,
sweaty, dusty, and exhausting.
The passage then contrasts this image with another version of the same scene,
one that is much more alluring:
Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw
in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her
smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her. The sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes
sting like an onion, and the baskets of grapes resisted her muscles, pulling their magnetic weight
back to earth. The woman with the red bonnet did not know this. Her knees did not sink in the
hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently
and spread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper. She did not remove the frame,
straighten her creaking knees, the bend of her back, set down another sheet of newsprint paper,
reset the frame, then return to the pisca again, with the empty basket, row after row, sun after
sun. The woman’s bonnet would be as useless as Estrella’s own straw hat under a white sun so
mighty, it toasted the green grapes to black raisins. (Viramontes 1995, 49–50)
The woman with the ruby lips and the fluffy bonnet is, of course, to be found on the
label of the Sun-Maid Growers of California, an advertising illustration that is meant
to make the product (raisins) appealing to customers. The bright colors and even
brighter smile of the happy and healthy-looking woman in the illustration stand in
stark contrast to Estrella’s reality, and Viramontes provides the reader with an abun-
dance of very detailed sensual and motor imagery in order to allow for the embodied
simulation of her back-breaking work.
This detailed imagery is in fact crucial for the reader’s enactment of Estrella’s
experience. Anežka Kuzmičová (2012, 23) has argued with reference to narrative
theory, phenomenology, and cognitive science, that “there is no straightforward rela-
tion between the degree of detail in spatial description on one hand, and the vivid-
ness of spatial imagery and presence on the other.” Rather, “presence arises from
a first-person, enactive process of sensorimotor simulation/resonance” (23).This is
exactly what the narrative achieves in this passage, and it also demonstrates that
a third-person perspective that renders the qualia of a given focalizer can achieve
the same effect as a first-person narrative. Rather than giving readers an abundance
of spatial detail to convey the harsh environment of the vineyards, Viramontes first
evokes the well-known advertising image that effectively conceals the true state of
affairs and then invites readers to imaginatively experience what it really feels like to
harvest the grapes that will later become Sun-Maid raisins. She does so by offering
them vivid mental imagery, which, as Kuzmičová points out,
can be grounded in any sensory modality, deploying the external senses, i.e., the visual (sight),
the auditory (hearing), the olfactory (smell), the gustatory (taste) and the tactile (touch), as well
as the internal senses, i.e., the interoceptive (pain, hunger, etc.), the proprioceptive (balance,
limb and organ position, etc.) or the motor/kinesthetic (movement-related proprioception:

effort, acceleration, etc.). (2014, 276)
In imaginatively simulating Estrella’s movements and sensory perceptions, readers

get a sense of what it is like to wipe your stinging eyes and bend your back, to sink
your knees “in the hot white soil,” and then get up again to reset the frame, “row after
row, sun after sun.” Natural processes, argues Christa Grewe-Volpp (2005, 66) in her
ecocritical reading of Under the Feet of Jesus, are portrayed as “indifferent to human
needs” while at the same time having “a decisive influence on the material existence
and the perception of the Chicano protagonists.” It is through the use of sensory and
motor imagery that Viramontes conveys both the decisive influence of natural pro-
cesses and the characters’ perception of it on the textual level.
Although the passage from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath demonstrates that
detailed spatial description, too, allows readers to get transported into a narrative
world if it entails strong perceptive imagery that is emotionally salient and cues
empathy with objects, Kuzmičová certainly is right in that there is no straightforward
relation between the degree of spatial description and immersion or presence in a
narrative environment. Viramontes’ style is very different from that of Steinbeck, not
only because she offers considerably less spatial description, but also because she
uses a different narrative perspective and a different mode of foregrounding. What
is foregrounded in her narrative is the subjective experience of a thirteen-year old
female farm worker (as well as those of some of the other protagonists in the novel),
and so it is much more succinct and idiosyncratic in its rendering of a perched and
almost hostile environment than Steinbeck’s text. Instead of an ‘objective’ description
of the environment, such as Steinbeck attempts to give his readers in the first chapter
of The Grapes of Wrath, Under the Feet of Jesus focuses on the personal, subjective
environmental experiences of its characters, giving the reader a sense of what it is like
to work in that environment.
Important also, in this context, is the fact that the readers are, through the mech-
anism of strategic authorial empathizing, encouraged to build moral allegiance with
Estrella (on the difference between alignment and allegiance, see Smith 1999). I
cannot expand here on this argument, but clearly, we tend to feel stronger emotions
when we simulate the excruciating experiences of a protagonist whom we like and
want to succeed than when we are confronted with the subjective experience of a
character we know very little about. This is related to what psychologists call empa-
thy’s familiarity bias: we tend to feel stronger for those whom we know and care for
than for those whom we know very little about. As I have demonstrated in Cosmopoli-
tan Minds (Mossner 2014) with reference to the theoretical arguments of Patrick Colm
Hogan, Suzanne Keen and Martha Nussbaum, and the empirical work of psycholo-
gists such as Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar, literary texts can familiarize us with
and encourage us to care for individuals we might have never befriended in real life,
because they belong to a different racial, political, religious or social group. Because
we know that what happens in a novel is not ‘real’ in the sense that it has any imme-
diate consequences for our lives, fiction can “disarm readers of some of the protective
layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world” (Keen 2010,
69). The mechanism of liberated embodied simulation is crucial in such processes of
affective and cognitive empathy, and so experiencing the harsh working conditions
of migrant workers through the consciousness of one may have effects that last much
longer than the reading experience itself.
4 C
onclusion
In this chapter, I have tried to give a brief introduction into an econarratological
approach to literary empathy and emotion, an approach that centrally relies on the
insights of cognitive and affective science and the empirical study of fiction. My two
textual readings have focused on the ways in which environmental narratives make
their stories emotionally salient through vivid perceptual and motor imagery that
can either be direct (as in the textual examples from The Grapes of Wrath) or indirect
through the consciousness of a protagonist (as in the examples from Under the Feet of
Jesus). I hope I have also been able to show, despite the brevity of this account, that
such close analyses of the literary representation of environments and human-nature
relationships is not just a petty exercise with no bearing for ethically or politically ori-
ented ecocritical readings. That human-nature relationships are imbued with affect
in many environmental narratives has always been a core assumption within much of
ecocriticism, as has been the belief that such affectivity has tangible effects both on
individual readers and on the larger public sphere in which they operate.
Affect studies offers one theoretical route to approach these issues, but my sug-
gestion here has been that a narratological approach that takes on board the insights
of second-generation cognitive and affective science may be better equipped to deliver
tangible results, not least because it converges with recent research in the empirical
study of literature and its effects. The econarratological study of literature is still in
its infancy, but it has the potential to greatly advance our understanding of how envi-
ronmental narratives engage the minds and bodies of readers, and how they allow
them to experience natural and built environments that may only have ever existed
within the space of the black dots on a white page. Just as importantly, however, such
work must not, and in fact cannot, be confined to the study of literary texts. Environ-
mental narratives and their imaginary storyworlds exist in all kinds of media formats
and narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Noël Thon (2014) are already
encouraging us to study Storyworlds Across Media. The coming years will hopefully
see more ecocritics engaged in econarratological analysis, formulating new insights
and new questions about the affective interactions between environments, narratives
and embodied minds.
5 B
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Katharina Donn
28 B
eyond the Wasteland: An Ecocritical
Reading of Modernist Trauma Literature
Abstract: This chapter extends ecocritical research on trauma and Virginia Woolf
in order to define the role of nature in modernist trauma literature. An ecocritical
reading takes modernist literary landscapes beyond the wasteland and uncovers their
generative energy. These organic narrative patterns and tropes establish potentials
of meaning and cultural energy, but their effect is far from therapeutic. Rather, it is
disruptive, at times almost violent, but because nature still retains its cyclic proper-
ties, it offers a space which integrates traumatic collapse and creative renewal simul-
taneously. Therefore, an ecocritical reading of Woolf’s texts challenges a controver-
sial premise of trauma studies, namely the notion that trauma lead to a “breakage of
verse” (Felman 1995, 25), when it emphasizes the epistemological possibilities and
metaphoric potentials which natural elements bring to the texts. This chapter thus
aims to contribute to the definition of an ecology of violence in aesthetic as well as in
ethical terms.
Key Terms: Virginia Woolf, trauma, embodiment, landscapes of violence, ecofemi-

nism
There is a certain polite reluctance between studies of modernism and ecocriticism.

After all, an urban focus and technological fascination runs through modernist liter-
ature and corresponding research alike. Relevant handbooks (such as Whitworth’s
[2007] Modernism) accordingly offer chapters on urbanism or gender, but one is hard
pressed to find a similar focus on nature. Raymond Williams (2011) thus defines the
city as the modernists’ typical haunt in his monograph The Country and the City,
and the anguished consciousness, fragmented experience, and disruptive forms of
modernist literature seem to support this urban bias.
A closer look at such seminal modernist texts as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ameri-
can works by Faulkner or Hemingway, or the texts by Virginia Woolf that this chapter
focuses on, however, reveals motifs of nature in modernist literature which challenge
any such preconceived notions. Modernism, as Bonnie Kime Scott (2012, 1) puts it,
is “greening.” On the one hand this means re-defining the relation between nature
and the city, as the modernists’ landscapes are rarely the unspoiled wildernesses of
a romantic imagination. It is the parks, rivers and coastlines that come into view and
transgress the material and conceptual boundaries between nature and the city, or, to
mention an even more basic binary that ecocriticism challenges, between nature and
culture. On the other hand, though, modernist literature not only integrates trauma
into human experience, but also makes it an integral part of the natural world.
552 Katharina Donn
odernist trauma literature therefore provides ecocriticism with a focus on the rela-
M
tion between violence, shock, and nature.
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land foreshadows this central ambivalence in modernist
approaches towards nature; even the first lines,
April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(Eliot 1998 [1922], 31)
show the natural world to be steeped in death and disillusionment. The antithetic
pattern of loss and new beginning, however, not only submits springtime to death;
it also inscribes an ambivalent vitality into Eliot’s otherwise almost cynically bleak
landscapes of memory. Nature in modernist literature has certainly left the exalted
sublime or pastoral idyll far behind, but it retains a more ambivalent metaphoric and
creative energy that infuses these lines. An ecocritical reading of modernist trauma
literature brings to the surface this generative energy of nature, but defines it not in a
therapeutic sense. Rather, it is disruptive, at times almost violent, but because it still
retains its organic and cyclic properties, nature becomes a space which integrates
traumatic collapse and creative renewal simultaneously.
This is vital in a cultural context so widely defined by trauma, the “component
part of modernity” in Rosenberg’s and Saltzman’s (2006, ix) words. The modernist
avant-garde’s striving for new forms of expression carried with it the experience of
collapse and shock that arose from the trenches, and coincided with the development
of a clinical and medical diagnosis of trauma. While modernist art came to regard the
self to be fragmented and narrative to be in crisis, the shell-shocked WWI veterans
ensured that symptoms such as emotional numbing, depersonalization, and trau-
matic flashbacks define the clinical picture of trauma, and in many ways continue to
do so to the present day.
In this chapter, I will build on ecocritical research on trauma and Virginia Woolf,
in order to define the role of nature in modernist trauma literature. Organic narrative
patterns and tropes of nature introduce potentials of meaning and cultural energy
into texts which otherwise explore the modernist wasteland. Therefore, an ecocritical
reading of these texts challenges a controversial premise of trauma studies, namely the
notion that trauma leads to a “breakage of verse” (Felman 1995, 25), when it empha-
sizes the epistemological possibilities and metaphoric potentials which natural ele-
ments bring to the texts. Within ecocriticism itself, this essay aims to contribute to the
definition of an ecology of violence in aesthetic as well as in ethical terms.
28 Beyond the Wasteland: An Ecocritical Reading of Modernist Trauma Literature 553
1 T
rauma, Modernism, Ecocriticism: Theoretical
Trajectories and Contexts of Research
Ecocritics have long noted a tendency among (mainly female) modernist writers to
reposition themselves and their traumatic experiences through images of nature.
H. D.’s autobiographical novel Bid me to Live is one example for this tendency, as it
links nature and water to healing processes, while Gertrude Stein’s imagery of the
female body is equally suggestive of the productivity of natural images in a feminist
trauma literature. Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays are proof of this proximity to
nature, but in ways that are particularly challenging and enriching for an ecocritical
approach. In her work, uses of nature open onto a range of interconnected trajecto-
ries, from references to natural science, ecofeminist implications to epistemological
concerns.
Ecocritical research on Virginia Woolf – or approaches that focus on nature in her
writing without identifying themselves as ecocritical per se – often still feeds on her
own biographical experiences and writing. Woolf’s movements between countryside
and the city define the author’s life experience, as Janice Paul (1987, 23) points out,
but Woolf’s (1978 [1939]) essays show that there is more to this than just a biograph-
ical point: In Moments of Being, she recounts her childhood memories as distinctly
sensual experiences in nature, but even more important is her use of natural imagery
to develop her own poetic approach. One striking example of this is Woolf’s descrip-
tion of a puddle in the park in A Sketch of the Past (1978 [1939], 78), which entails a
moment of suspension and crisis when she finds herself unable to move in the face of
an overwhelmingly shocking “avalanche of meaning,” which crystallizes and shim-
mers in the water. This organic imagery continues in her concept of non-being and
forgetting as “cotton wool” (71), in which such excesses of meaning as seen in the
puddle are embedded. Both examples show capacities that lead to Woolf’s talent as
a writer; her heightened sensitivity on the one hand and her need to gauge a deeper
layer of experience through the forgetfulness of the everyday on the other hand, root
her writing in nature. The interconnection between human and non-human experi-
ence, between nature and the city, therefore leads to an organic form of creativity.
When Kime Scott (2012, 6) thus notes that for Woolf, “[n]ature is implicated in culture
from the start. Conversely, culture is invaded by nature,” this is far more than a mere
biographical detail.
Woolf’s nature writing is transformative and responds to a shock experience that
is close to trauma. When she supposes herself that the “shock-receiving capacity is
what makes me a writer” (1978, 72), she refers to a connection between modernism
and trauma that she shares with other writers, but her natural poetics set her response
apart and make it a fundamentally ecological one. Walter Benjamin’s observation
that experience was shattered and turned non-narratable because of the shock of the
trenches in industrialized warfare is salient here, but Woolf counters this disruption
554 Katharina Donn
of human experience by opening narrative to nature.1 The paralysis and numbing that
are symptoms of trauma, in which the traumatic experience dissociates from narra-
tive memory structures (cf. Janet 2011, 207) and thus forms a ‘foreign body’ (Di Prete
2006) within the mind, is transformed in Woolf’s embodied approach to writing. Inte-
grating nature into modernist literature therefore becomes a trajectory beyond the
radical collapse of experience and disruption of language in a time of trauma.
This is implied in the ecofeminist approaches to Woolf’s writing that have
emerged in recent criticism, and which form the core of ecocritical approaches to this
author. While Kime Scott (2012, 8) cautions that “the most we can argue for Woolf is
proto-ecofeminism,” as ecofeminism dates back only to the 1970s, relevant research
proves the productivity of this approach when thinking about nature, trauma, and
Woolf. Her general sensitivity to the parameters of gender relationships situate Woolf
easily within an ecofeminist framework that has moved beyond the earlier focus on
holistic nature representations and earth mother figures. Stacy Alaimo’s (2000, 9)
arguments for a critical redefinition of gender relations, in order to develop a differ-
ent form of humanity with which to interact with nature, are an important starting
point for thinking about Woolf. Alaimo’s dismissal of the binary nature – culture
divide echoes through ecocritical approaches to Woolf (see above quote by Kime
Scott), but what makes Alaimo’s ecofeminism so interesting here is that it prepares
the ground for ethical, epistemological and discursive projects (↗11 Ecofeminisms).
Its basic premise of a continuum that links human life, the body, and nature, trans-
forms gendered concepts as well as Cartesian (and related) models of knowledge that
are based on a divide between nature and the body on the one hand, and the mind on
the other hand. When Swanson (2011, 24) defines the ecological crisis as a challenge
to rationality, ethics and the imagination, she grasps the formative effect of Woolf’s
writing from an ecofeminist perspective. When she interprets Woolf’s writing as a
simultaneous critique of the master narratives of patriarchy and anthropocentrism
(Swanson 2011, 28), she exemplifies the salience of contemporary ecofeminism for
understanding Woolf.
For an ecocritical approach to trauma in Woolf’s texts, ecofeminist research is
particularly illuminating when it proposes an embodied form of language, knowl-
edge, and creativity inherent in these texts. The “embodied word” by which Sultz-
bach (2006, 76), for instance, characterizes Woolf’s texts points to a deep intercon-
nection between the materiality of the human body and the metaphoric flexibility
of language. In literatures of trauma, this is a vital point, as trauma challenges the
limits of language as such. A short look at research on trauma in literature proves
1 In his essays Der Erzähler (Benjamin 1936) and Über Einige Motive bei Baudelaire (Benjamin 1936),
he makes tangible the change in the nature of experience itself that occurred in this era and generally
links it to the acceleration of life in the city. Crucial, though, is the figure of the returning soldier in
WWI, who is numbed and unable to recount his experiences.
this: based on Lacan’s (1996 [1964], 56) concept of the Real, which self-identically
returns, but cannot be conceptualized, thought or expressed, Cathy Caruth (1996,
62) describes trauma in her influential monograph as a missed experience. In effect
this implies that trauma is such a radical shock that it overwhelms language. In this
train of thought, the affectivity and bodily force of trauma means that it cannot be
represented in language, but remains a haunting presence which manifests itself in
ever-returning flashbacks or re-enactments. “The body keeps the score” is how van
der Kolk (1996, 215) describes this pathology which seemingly resists representation
in language and persists within affect and corporeality alone. Accordingly, Felman
states (1995, 25) that “the breakage of verse enacts the breakage of the world,” but
the ecocritical perspective shows that this explains only one side of trauma literature.
Ecofeminist approaches to Woolf help develop a different approach to trauma
in her texts. Understanding her language (with Sultzbach 2006, 76) as an organic
process which allows for new and unexpected meanings, and integrates emotive
forces, is more than an ecofeminist statement. It also counters the paralysis of trauma,
because it sees the human mind in a continuum with an active non-human world.
Whereas a necessarily anthropocentric, psychoanalytical concept of trauma focuses
on numbing, ecocritical approaches show how literary texts subvert this alleged
unspeakability. The incessantly engendering natural environment is not only a con-
trastive foil to the collapse and shock in the human mind, but becomes the source of
a voice to express trauma. This embodied language forges a vital connection between
corporeality and affectivity on the one hand, and the metaphoric flexibility of literary
texts on the other hand. That this interconnection does not lead to harmony will be
seen very clearly in the analyses of The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway.
What this ‘ecology of language’ (Waller 2000) does provide, however, is a tra-
jectory beyond the unspeakability of trauma. The shared materiality of the human
and the non-human world defines the ‘ecocritical psyche’ (Rowland 2012) in ways
that prove particularly creative in the face of the collapse of a rational world order, to
which trauma literature testifies. From the viewpoint of an ecocritical trauma theory,
this means taking the general material and bodily turns inherent in ecocriticism onto
a different level. The interconnections between human bodily precariousness and
nature here pose the question of literary possibilities of representation. In the silence
which trauma entails, it is the body within, and in relation to, nature that becomes a
source of metaphoric and indirect expression.
Woolf gives this a fascinating turn. Her texts do not look for post-traumatic
therapy, but establish innovative practices of knowledge via this ecological literary
creativity. Again, this is a vital aspect of these texts, as trauma not only challenges
language. The fact that trauma is often dissociated from memory and difficult to com-
556 Katharina Donn
municate also makes it a “crisis of truth” (Felman 1995, 16) which has an impact not
only on what, but also on how we can know the world that surrounds us.2
When Owen writes that “I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank
air I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt” (Das 2014) this is symptomatic for
the failure of the empirical gaze as basis for knowledge in a traumatic reality. It is the
affective resonance of a “music of ideas” (Sherry 2003, 73), a bodily and associative
exploration of the possibility of knowledge after a traumatic collapse, which emerges
here. The clarity of vision is replaced by perceptions that are inherently ephemeral,
corporeal, and associative. In imaginative texts, thus, the experimental structures of
modernist trauma literature are not emanations of collapse, but starting points for
moving beyond trauma. The ecological and organic impact of modernist trauma liter-
ature therefore not only deconstructs the alleged negativity of trauma literature, but
is pivotal for the aesthetics of a literary genre that is engendered by collapse.
What does all this entail for the conception of nature that underlies these mod-
ernist trauma texts? Cathy Caruth (1996, 2) begins her seminal monograph Unclaimed
Experience, with Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, which recounts the double killing of
Clorinda by her unwitting lover, Tancred.3 He slays her once when she is disguised
in the armor of an enemy knight, and the second time wounds her soul which is cap-
tured in a tree that bleeds Clorinda’s blood. While Caruth focuses on the repeated
injury and the outcry of the wound, an ecocritical reading draws attention to the
inherent interconnection between human body and nature in this story. The non-an-
thropocentric implications in this are crucial for an ecocritical theory of trauma, but
even more so is the fact that it is the tree which incorporates the wounded soul and
expresses its pain. This story crystalizes a pattern that reemerges in modernist trauma
literature. The numbed silence of the individual human being encounters nature as
a field of energy and metaphoric expressiveness. It can be taken as a point of orien-
tation with which to navigate the (still relatively unsystematic) research on nature,
trauma, and violence.
The relation between nature and violence has been studied in particular detail in
the context of African American, post-slavery literature. Concepts such as the ‘lynch-
ing sites’ which Daniel J. Martin (2007) uses to distinguish the history of violence
inherent in the Southern American landscape from idealized notions of the pasto-
2 Christina Alt proposes an alternative take on the relation between knowledge and nature in Woolf’s
texts. She traces Woolf’s representations of nature and its study by considering the natural sciences of
the time. While the focus on biography and the history of science means that Alt’s monograph is not
quite as relevant to the argumentation here, it is a highly worthwhile contribution to the epistemology
of nature in Woolf’s writing.
3 In Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Freud (1923) also refers to this story and interprets this doubled wound-
ing in terms of the repetition compulsion (26); he links this to traumatic experiences and eventually to
the death drive, and thus prefigures elements of Caruth’s reading. It is her link to questions of expres-
sion and representation, though, which make this scene truly salient for the context here.
ral, or Alison Deming’s study of the interconnected (but fraught) relations between
people, nature, and ethnic groups, are part of an ecocritical impetus to combine eco-
logical questions with cultural critique. Ecopsychological or geographical approaches
towards landscapes of violence mirror this double interest. When de Jong talks about
‘traumascapes,’ he refers to the ways in which sites of extreme violence become mate-
rial mediators between people, social ecologies, and culture. His pragmatic focus
on actual policies which might enable such interrelations and allow for site-specific
practices of memory, grief and mourning, thus takes this critical aspect of ecological
approaches to landscapes of violence one step further and contrasts Kahn and Has-
bach’s (2012) ecopsychology. What all these approaches share is an awareness that
the basic ecopsychological thesis, the human need for nature as a source of well-being
and meaningfulness, has a blind spot where violent events are concerned and thus
does not suffice to account for the complexities of the human-nature relationship.
When looking at Woolf’s texts, this research spectrum provides interesting
impulses, but in the end, her work makes it necessary to individually readjust these
premises. Rebecca Schisler points out that a nature-related theory of violence for
Woolf’s texts involves the realization that the cyclical processes of nature also imply
the inescapable return of violence. When she thus defines nature as the “material
staging ground for violent subject formation” (Schisler 2012, 18), she refers to one
central aspect of Woolf’s approach to trauma in nature. However, questions of iden-
tity, though important for trauma studies and ecofeminism alike, are only one aspect
in the relation between violence and trauma, nature, and the human being. Woolf’s
nature is neither a mirror, nor a therapy, for individual traumata. Rather it transforms
the premise that organic, psychic, and environmental instances of trauma and vio-
lence are interconnected and cannot be reduced to either side (cf. Matts and Tynan
2012) into a literary principle. If taken seriously, this means that the consequences of
traumatic collapse – the crises not only of identity, but of knowledge and truth – need
to be thought anew in ecocritical terms.
Researchers frequently evoke Deleuze and Guattari (cf. Kime Scott 2012, 6; Alaimo
2000, 12), when it comes to ecofeminist ideas, but their understanding of knowledge
in terms of rhizomes or assemblages is an interesting starting point for defining this
post-traumatic crisis as well. Far from a disembodied or abstract entity, Deleuze and
Guattari embed knowledge within place and space. From a purely ecocritical perspec-
tive this is well-known and notable for giving the re-definition of place and space,
developed by Buell (among others), an additional edge. The realization that places
are not fixed entities, but palimpsests of ingrained histories, individual memories and
displaced experiences therefore moves beyond individual subjectivities and leads
to an ecology of place with an epistemological impact. When considering the ques-
tion of ecological forms of knowledge in Woolf’s post-traumatic texts, this becomes
even more salient. In her texts, post-traumatic expression, meaning, and knowledge
emerge from inherent interconnections between textual form, metaphor, and a lan-
guage steeped in the material, organic world. In an ecocritical perspective on liter-
558 Katharina Donn
ary trauma, shock therefore does not entail unspeakability or a collapse of language.
Rather, it gives rise to complex and amorphous experiments with the embodiment of
narrative.
2 C
reative Discord: Virginia Woolf’s Landscapes of
Trauma in The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway
‘Yet these roaring waters,’ said Neville, ‘upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable
than the wild, the weak and insconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise.
(Woolf 2000 [1931], 76)
The interconnection between nature and language, and the precariousness of human
identity, is a fundamental feature of Virginia Woolf’s texts. She is in all likelihood
the modernist author most closely associated with trauma, but through her unique,
ecological approach to the experience of collapse, her texts open up trajectories that
lead from shock into an embodied aesthetic between material nature and aesthetic
experiment. While most of Woolf’s texts offer fascinating starting points for this, I will
focus on Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, because these texts can illuminate the wide
spectrum of nature representations, in a trauma context, that Woolf offers. Septimus
Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, serves as a study of the traumatized soldiers
returning from the trenches of World War I, while the more experimental narrative
strategies of The Waves give unique insights into the productivity of nature as a trope
and narrative principle. As Wulfman (2007, 160) also notices, this is a premise of her
essayistic texts, too. If the experience of shock reverberates through Woolf’s texts, it
is always encountered by a distinctly sensual form of perception. Her textuality thus
becomes rooted in the body within nature, so that her use of language and metaphor,
as well as her epistemology, derives its experimental literary form out of the inter-
connectedness of language, the mind, and nature. Kime Scott (2012, 198) describes
these dynamic processes as a double, oscillating movement, “that takes up things of
the earth, disperses the self onto them, and enters a collective of creatures,” and in
so deconstructs conventional ideas of order. To put it more specifically, an ecocritical
approach to trauma in Woolf’s text can unearth not only the interrelations between
human and non-human nature, but also the constellations formed by the organic and
material world, textual processes, and meaning.
ature and Violence: Mrs. Dalloway

2.1 N
Mrs. Dalloway is a text full of ecofeminist possibilities, but it derives its special edge
from the juxtaposition of two fundamentally different characters. Clarissa Dalloway
and Septimus Smith are both struck by their memories, the latter in a more traumat-
ically pathological sense than the former. What they share is a particular form of
“nervous embodiment,” as Gordon (2007, 142) calls it, which makes them particularly
susceptible to their own material being and repositions them in new and interesting
ways with regard to the cultured urban setting, and the natural world. Even more to
the point, though, it is WWI veteran Septimus Smith’s traumatic suffering that turns
him into a particularly fascinating agent where an ecology of violence is concerned. A
decorated world war veteran suffering from severe PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disor-
der) after witnessing the death of his friend Evans, Smith at first seems to be a foreign
body in this story. The patterns of natural imagery and the interwoven narrative per-
spectives, however, make him the pivotal point of interconnection between nature
and the human mind. It is his traumatic collapse that leads to a non-anthropocentric
vision of the human-nonhuman relationship.
Woolf’s multiperspectival narrative technique and her protagonists’ streams-of-
consciousness are deeply rooted in a post-anthropocentric experience of embodiment
which becomes particularly tangible in Smith’s post-traumatic state of breakdown.
For the context of this contribution I will focus on the ecology of literary trauma
where the individual, collapsing psyche is concerned. This leads to a central question
within the novel that concerns the relation between society on the one hand, and
the embodied individual on the other hand. While Big Ben continuously strikes the
hour and forces the progression of time on the plot, Clarissa Dalloway’s and Septi-
mus Smith’s days evolve in ways that evade this outward, normative timing. Clar-
issa’s party preparations are disrupted by memories and encounters with old loves
and friends. Septimus’ repeated flashbacks and hallucinations in the end lead to his
suicide in the afternoon. It is nature, and the interconnectedness of the human body
with its natural environments, that accounts for these disruptions and establishes an
alternative order of life against the regulated norms of London high society. Smith’s
perspective is an especially forceful example of the ambivalence of nature between
violence and unity that permeates this text.
The image of the tree reoccurs in Mrs. Dalloway, and different conceptions of
nature in this novel crystallize in this motif. Clarissa Dalloway begins her day moving
around the city on urban streets and paths of the mind that swerve around Smith’s
traumatic collapse without ever encountering him, or a similarly radical state of
mind, directly. In her intuitive vision, the city streets merge with the trees at her girl-
hood home into an organic metaphor of life that overcomes the ephemerity of human
existence.
560 Katharina Donn
Or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the
streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived
in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home. (Woolf 1996 [1925], 11)
This vision of interconnectedness not only counters the incessant progression of time
towards death that is symbolized by Big Ben throughout the text, but it also under-
mines the social constrictions and the finality of individual choices that have kept
her and her former lover Peter Walsh apart for most of their lives. While Clarissa’s
recollections of her youth are tied to clearly defined places, Smith’s trauma implodes
space and time into a deepened present of amorphous spaces. This is no pure col-
lapse, though, but accounts for the general, fluid narrative structure of the novel. The
affective, associative mindset which Septimus Smith represents in its most radical
form is marked by trauma, but simultaneously it introduces a psychologically realis-
tic quality into the novel when it gives access to the repressed underworld of emotion
and desire from which all of the protagonists suffer to a greater or lesser extent.
This image of the tree resurfaces in the mind of Septimus Smith, where it carries
similar notions of interconnectedness. However, this integrates Smith into a non-an-
thropocentric, organic pattern that is characterized by violence rather than empathic
unity. From a psychoanalytical point of view, Smith’s symptoms exemplify severe
trauma as diagnosed in the 1920s. He feels estranged from the world and numbed to
all emotion. What is striking from an ecocritical perspective, though, is that this man-
ifests a crisis between what he conceives as “human nature” (Woolf 1996, 101) and its
non-human equivalent. In so, it is this impression of inadequate affect that disturbs
him most; “the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death,”is, to his
mind, “that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed” (101). Human
nature itself, however, is an ambivalent concept here. It does not denote the strong
bonds which Clarissa Dalloway envisages, but is based on the conceptual metaphor
of humans as animals that engulfs them in a nature in upheaval, which Septimus
perceives.
For the truth is […] that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond
what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. […] Their packs scour the desert and vanish
screaming into the wilderness. (Woolf 1996, 99)
Mrs. Dalloway, therefore, stages the conflict between the competing realities of the
human mind, nature, and an uncontained, non-anthropocentric underworld of shock
and suffering. Comparing the first instance in which Septimus responds to the image
of a tree to Clarissa Dalloway shows the complex implications this has on an ecology
of trauma in Woolf’s text. This manifestation of nature as a source of interconnection
entails a dualism that can lead to both, inextricable violence and comforting feelings
of transcendent existence.
A car with drawn blinds makes its way through Westminster and evokes glam-
orous thoughts of a hidden royalty within in the imaginations of Clarissa Dalloway,
and other bystanders. As it becomes a projective screen of the observers’ inner lives,
Septimus Smith’s response is crucially different. He sees a “curious pattern like a tree,
[…] and this gradual drawing together of everything to one center before his eyes, as
if some horror had almost come to the surface and was about to burst into flames”
(Woolf 1996, 18). The concept of nature behind this tree of shadow is markedly differ-
ent from the domesticated nature in the flower shop, from which Clarissa Dalloway
is looking out at the same time. What emerges here is nature in turmoil, but the tree
pattern also prepares a trajectory into the painful, traumatic presence in Septimus’
mind. Similar to the tree in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, this pattern of shades on
a drawn blind makes the voice of trauma heard in ways that polite society in a gentri-
fied street otherwise would not allow.
The potential of nature to aid the testimony of a repressed memory takes on a
more complex form in Regent’s Park, where Smith’s wife takes him in the hope of
calming him down. The environment becomes amorphous here, and the shared mate-
riality of body and nature – “the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with
his own body” (26) – undoes Septimus’ attempts to control his mind. In an outbreak
of feverish hallucination, he tries to note what he holds to be eternal truths by lis-
tening to the birdsong, in which he hears voices telling him that “there is no death”
(28). In this state of exalted interconnection, the lines between death and life thus
shift and take Septimus to an envisioned encounter with his friend Evans in complete
health. In Mrs. Dalloway, therefore, society displaces trauma while nature engenders
a holistic state which is unsettling and, in Septimus’ friends’ terms, pure madness.
The vitality of nature here is complex and neither harmonious nor purely therapeutic.
Rather, it frees the mind into the amorphous space of the material world. In it, time
loses its power in a stark contrast to the incessant chime of Big Ben throughout the
novel. While the past and the present merge, geographical spaces implode. “Evans
answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the
orchids” (78). Nature, therefore, provides the space of traumatic re-enactments and
in a crucial twist also becomes the origin of song, and therefore an artistic expression
of trauma. Woolf also uses Septimus’ sensibility to critique the narrow-mindedness
of the medical profession; Septimus’ doctor, after all, remains fatally unaware of the
ways in which such phrases as “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God” (28)
and the hallucinated songs are more than just symptoms of his mental disturbance.
More to the point here, though, is the observation that the intricate representation of
trauma in this novel clearly envisages nature as a testimonial force. The mind inter-
connected with nature gives voice to the chaos and overwhelming suffering amidst
the buzz of a summer morning in the city.
If nature is connected to trauma, the true landscape of violence, however,
remains with Smith’s definition of human nature as arbitrary violence. This is also
why his eventual suicide is triggered not by his hallucinations, but by the appear-
ance of the doctor who patronizes his suffering. It is non-human nature – while far
from harmonious – that is the source of a holistic artistic expression for which Sep-
562 Katharina Donn
timus feels himself to be the interpreter. It not only holds sensuous beauty, but also
causes time to “split its husk; pour[ed] his riches over him” (78). Most importantly,
the signifying force behind literary language is nature, when she breathes “through
her hollowed hands Shakespeare’s words, her meaning” (154). Smith’s traumatized
state thus subverts the human-nonhuman relation. The traumatic collapse in Mrs.
Dalloway is therefore an ecological crisis, in which the alleged hierarchy of man over
nature is subverted and instead, organic, non-rational patterns of time, meaning, and
memory define the protagonists’ interconnected experiences.
2.2 The Embodiment of Language after Trauma: The Waves
In The Waves, nature takes a more formally narrative, epistemological turn. This is a
text that is explicitly based on the modernist condition and a fragmented sense of self,
of being “whirled asunder” (Woolf 2000 [1931], 39), and the limits of literary narrative
are equally challenged. As a whole, the text weaves in and out of 6 characters’ con-
sciousnesses and traces their thoughts from nursery to old age. It is therefore a mul-
ti-voiced, dialogical text in which consciousness rather than plot drives the narrative,
but its most important feature already inheres in the title. The trope of the coastline
and its daily metamorphosis, from fresh beginning to darkness and nightfall, not only
structures the text, but the flux of ocean water also defines its narrative technique.
Even more so than Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves is set within a multidimensional liminal
space: of nature, with the recurrent setting of the coastline between land, water, and
sky; of consciousness, with its patterned and interconnected narrative perspectives;
and of language itself, which becomes sensual and embodied.
These interconnections are the result of the collapse of a former order as repre-
sented by the death of Percival, who loses his life at a young age in an accident that is
explicitly linked to a critique of the British Empire. The trauma that motivates this text
is structurally different from the psychological pathology which, for instance, Sep-
timus Smith suffers. There is no Freudian kernel of repressed memories that would
logically account for the disruption in mind and narrative, as Henke rightly observes
(Henke 2007, 126). Therefore, The Waves is an ecological response to the structural
trauma of modernity in which experience detaches from language. The cyclic change
of natural borderline spaces here subverts the shock of trauma, which is situated
itself at the border of human experience. The organic flux of the waves becomes the
starting point to redefine narrative and knowledge in modernity.
Thus, The Waves is a text that is structured in very complex ways by patterns
of voices, images, and tropes; and yet its key experience is a perception of division,
between subjectivities, and between experience and language. The structural trauma
that permeates The Waves, therefore, inherently embeds human relations in nature.
The Lacanian, traumatic rift that accounts for this concept of experience-as-shock
is, from the beginning, conceived in ecological terms. We find Louis, for instance, in
a state of merging with nature, “[b]ut let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in
the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the
earth” (Woolf 2000, 6) but he is rift from this when he is found: “She has found me. I
am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered” (6). Through
entering the society of others as an individual, and the outward perspective on the
self that this entails, the initially holistic being rips apart. This implies a unified state
of being with nature that is lost in early childhood, but the relation between the self,
corporeality, and nature becomes more complex later on.
Bernard, the most committed storyteller of the six childhood friends, embodies
the particular effect this has on language itself. In their childhood, Percival’s ‘No’
destroys Bernard’s attempts at sequential and extravagantly phrased narrative (21).
In this crisis of conventional narrative, language changes its nature and becomes
organic, fluctuating, and material. This is indicated when Bernard’s phrases and
images are described to “bubble” (20), so that his listening friends, lying in the grass,
can catch them. This language is tangible and points to what Sultzbach describes
as an ecophenomenological approach. Bernard’s materialized words which bubble
on the grass evoke Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world” (qtd. in Sultzbach 2006, 71),
when they mediate an intercorporeal relation between the language of human beings
and their environment. Language itself becomes an unexpected, organic happening
that carries cognitive meaning, affectivity, as well as material components.
This amorphous embodied expression, however, is as ambivalent as the nature
of Mrs. Dalloway. The Waves is a text motivated by absence and loss (of Percival, of
youth, of unity). A Lacanian4 split dissociates consciousness from the lost unity of
language and reference, and initially seems to leave the characters adrift in differ-
ence. It therefore increasingly becomes the language of pain, rather than of a child-
hood idyll.
But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over
chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in
passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood
spurting. (Woolf 2000 [1931], 149)
4 In his 11th Seminar, Lacan (1996, 56) conceptualizes this Real as that which self-identically returns,
but which cannot be encountered by thought. It is excluded from the signifying chain, disrupts it, but
is nevertheless the center around which this process of signification revolves. This missed encounter
with the Real is manifested, among other forms, in trauma itself (61) and makes trauma a potentially
ethical call of the un-thinkable (see Caruth 106). This concept of the Real goes beyond the conceptual
limitations of specific pathologies, but makes it possible to grasp the Real, that which is impossible to
think, as a general level of underlying consciousness and, by extension, reality. It is this interrelation
between trauma as pathology of shock, and the referentiality (or rather the failed referentiality of
language) that interests me here.
564 Katharina Donn
In Bernard’s description of language after death, this materiality takes on a differ-

ent hue. The Waves thus provides an embodied language in which expression is per-
meated by the corporeality of shock. Equally, knowledge and perception are rooted in
forceful bodily experience. The sudden “arrows of sensation” (Woolf 2000, 136) which
Bernard describes, or the “shock of recognition” (67) which afflicts Rhoda, are only
two examples to show that the way to gain knowledge and experience in The Waves is
affective rather than cognitive, and corporeal rather than abstract. Quite in contrast
to readings of this text that interpret it as a highly aesthetic, disembodied form of con-
sciousness (see chapter nine in Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass Politics for an
account of this trend), The Waves develops an epistemology of non-anthropocentric
embodiment. Gordon (2007, 152) shows how this can be read in neuroscientific terms,
too, in which the affective body opens to the outward world.
The ecological aspects of Woolf’s text therefore resist the traumatic breakdown
and develop an innovative approach to language and meaning from the experience
of collapse. Nature and corporeality provide the starting points for recreating the cul-
tural energy of narrative beyond trauma. The Waves therefore echoes the fragmenta-
tion of trauma, but it is not simply a mirror of pathological symptoms. The natural
image of the coastline with its cyclic and repetitive rhythms becomes a vital impetus
for moving narrative beyond the paralysis of trauma. This organic energy reverber-
ates, too, in the alternative epistemology based in the body and embodied language
of this text.
In a text that is fluctuating by name, the statically repetitive structure of trauma,
with its flashbacks and re-enactments of the same, loses its finality. The character-
istic, organically fluctuating narrative structure of The Waves, and particularly the
preludes to each chapter with their multidimensional natural imageries, award
center-stage to a post-anthropocentric reading of trauma. These interludes have two
forms of repetition: one is that of the waves themselves, a movement of reaching out
and erasure that is not unlike the insistence of a traumatic absence in the psyche to
reach the mental surface. In this sense, the waves are a tortuous force, “dragging me
open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul” (Woolf 2000, 49), as Bernard
notes at one point. On the other hand, though, there is the cyclic repetitiveness of the
sun. What emerges from the interplay of these two structures is a liminal space which
retains the repercussions of trauma in the flow of the waves, but simultaneously also
embeds them in the possibility of a new beginning which inheres in the morning-and-
night cycle.
The interludes, with their descriptions of the coastline, are also pivotal when
it comes to exploring the forms of representation which make it possible to express
trauma in this ecocritical narrative. Contrary to any expectations of natural harmony
one might harbor here, the spaces Woolf describes are actually defined by a sharp
tension between a cyclic, fertile nature on the one hand, and almost violent divides,
discords, and rifts on the other hand.
This becomes clear when considering Woolf’s use of an imagery of fragmenta-

tion in her descriptions of sunlight itself – “The rocks which had been misty and
soft hardened and were marked with red clefts,” the “sharp stripes of shadow” and
the “blades” (Woolf 2000, 15) of light mirror the traumatic rift which the whole text
revolves around, just as the almost militaristic quality of ocean waves – “the mus-
cularity of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again” (60) adds a tone of
darkness and harshness to these preludes. The theme of violent dissociation and divi-
sion, however, is more complex than that: when considering the recurring theme of
birdsong a metapoetic comment emerges on the relation between art and violence,
literature and narrative:
the birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. […] Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehe-
mence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with
harsh discord. […] They sang, exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun. […] They sang as if
the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light.
(Woolf 2000, 60)
The traumatic rift therefore might entail a fragmentation of expression, its end it is
certainly not. The theme of birdsong provides a conceptual metaphor for the narrative
structure of The Waves as a whole, and embeds the individual characters’ embodied
expressions within a larger pattern. This is particularly significant when considering
this nature imagery in terms of trauma studies: the birdsong is a metapoetic comment
on the “breakage of verse” (Felman 1995, 25), as Felman calls it, in the face of trauma,
but it also provides a source of creative energy. The prediscursive cry and sounds, as
well as the more elemental roll of the waves, engender a narrative that overcomes the
anthropocentric fixation on the shock of trauma. Rather than falling into the nega-
tivity of trauma and complete collapse of artistic representation, the natural spaces
which frame Woolf’s text provide the narrative structure and symbolic patterns of a
post-traumatic renewal of narrative.
3 C
onclusion
In Woolf’s texts, trauma therefore moves beyond the technological origins which
Luckhurst (2008, 25) proposes for this pathology. The fluxus and organic narra-
tive structure of The Waves is a prime example for the ways in which an ecocritical
epistemology and a traumatic reality interconnect, while the complex interactions
between individual minds and nature in Mrs. Dalloway develop a non-anthropocen-
tric approach to the experience of violence and trauma. Here, the violent fissures
and fragmentations are generative and let emerge a transgressive form of embodied
knowledge. This evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994, 91) connective and anti-hierar-
chical concepts, which counteract sedentary orders and give the ecocritical project of
566 Katharina Donn
transforming the binaries between nature and culture an additional, epistemological

impetus. The relational constellations that come with it reoccur in the fluid patterns
and amorphous spaces of Woolf’s trauma literature. If thought emerges from border
crossings and transgressions, this makes modernist trauma literature a space where
any conceptual grids, fixed orders and well-measured expectations implode in the
face of industrial warfare. The alleged wastelands of modernist literature therefore
become the starting point for innovations in language and knowledge in literary
texts.5 This also pertains to questions of how to establish literature as a form of life
knowledge that is multidimensional and symbolic (see Zapf 2007; see also ↗7 Cul-
tural Ecology of Literature) from an ecocritical point of view. In between metaphor
and materiality emerges a textual creativity linked to nature, which is vital when it
takes literature beyond the paralysis of trauma.
4 B
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Christopher Schliephake
29 Literary Place and Cultural Memory
Abstract: In contemporary theory, the role of memory has been underlined as being
crucial to the way in which people and collectives situate themselves in their natural
environment and construct a sense of the past. In the present chapter, the ecocritical
concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ will be seen as connecting links that can be used to
bring ecocriticism together with the interdisciplinary study of cultural memory. By
focusing on the spatial dimension of memory it becomes possible to integrate the
natural world into the overall conceptual framework of ‘memory cultures,’ since it
is not merely to be perceived as the background to cultural processes but rather as
a central actor within them. These aspects will be examined with the help of three
contemporary American novels, Philipp Meyer’s The Son, Louise Erdrich’s The Round
House, and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds.
Key Terms: Cultural memory, space, place, ecology, storytelling
Waves gently ripple across a grey sea under an overcast sky. The landscape looks
desolate and unforgiving, made hard by a cold climate. Small hump-shaped islands
overgrown with pine trees lie in the water. As we enter one of them by boat, a wooden
path leads us through the forest that becomes ever thicker as we approach the other
end of the island. Suddenly our path leads us into a tunnel, through the earthen heart
of the place itself. Just when the dim light at its end suggests an exit, the path abruptly
stops. A cut has been made into the landscape. We can hear the soft rhythm of the
waves that pass through the cut underneath our feet. When we look up, we see the
other half of the island, laid open with mechanical precision. Into the firm layers of
earth and stone that make up its interior, a stone slab has been embedded. Names
are carved into it that can be read clearly from where we stand. Yet, try as we might,
we cannot reach out and touch the engravings, nor can we reach the other side of the
island. The excavation is too wide to be overcome by physical effort. All we can do is
look and wonder and feel the void that has been left in this place and it slowly dawns
on us that we have no other choice but to turn back.
This is what a visitor to one of the planned memorial sites of the 2011 Norwe-
gian massacres might feel. On July 22nd of that year, the right-wing extremist Anders
Breivik went on a killing spree that left 77 people dead, most of them teenagers who
spent their holidays in a summer camp on the secluded island of Utøya. Swedish
artist Jonas Dahlberg’s concept was chosen unanimously by an official committee in
a closed competition and will be built on the neighboring island of Sørbråten. It is a
highly unusual and creative, but also controversial concept that has incited heated
debates in Norway. Instead of making monuments or sculptures that are often used
for commemorating historic or traumatic events and that are visible manifestations
570 Christopher Schliephake
of memory built into a landscape, Dahlberg’s concept is a meditation on absence and

literally uses the landscape itself in bringing about what he sees as the ultimate illus-
tration of loss. Instead of adding something to a natural or built surrounding, his
“Memory Wound” is about taking away, about creating distance by splitting the earth
in half and by engendering a visual rupture in a natural environment that becomes,
in turn, a silent monument itself (cf. the artist’s website http://www.jonasdahlberg.
com).
Dahlberg’s concept is a good example of how memory and place combine to
make up integral parts of our collective cultural landscape. The design of a museum
or monument is never arbitrary, but rather a complex social as well as political under-
taking in which many different people and interest groups are involved. And it is an
undertaking that is always accompanied by aesthetic and creative forms of expres-
sion and procedures. Cultural memory is thus about two things at the same time:
About integrating historic events that political decision makers or society as a whole
deem worthy of remembering into our collective frameworks and about using forms
of symbolic expression and world-making that allow for a meaningful depiction and
(material) manifestation of the past. In this context, the particular places that are
connected with a historic event play a fundamental role as spatial containers that can
attest to what happened there, but that are likewise marked by the absence of what
once was. The latter aspect makes clear why places are never self-explanatory per se,
but rather need narratives and interpretations that attach meaning to abstract geo-
graphical space. It is in this context, that imaginative literature gains its importance
and potential in our memory cultures – not only because it ascribes meanings to sites,
but also because it can tell alternative stories connected to locations, unearthing mar-
ginalized or forgotten narratives, and because it can create new (imaginative) places
that, like Dahlberg’s “Memory Wound,” uncover and symbolize traumatic experi-
ences, deeply entrenched in our collective consciousness. In the following, literature
will be characterized as a form of cultural ecology that constantly interacts with our
ecosystemically organized memory cultures. The ecocritical concepts of ‘space’ and
‘place’ will thereby be seen as connecting links that can be used to bring ecocriticism
together with the interdisciplinary study of cultural memory. Moreover, by focusing
on the spatial dimension of memory it becomes possible to integrate the natural world
into the overall conceptual framework of ‘memory cultures,’ since it is, as Dahlberg’s
work of art shows, not merely to be perceived as the background to cultural processes
but rather has to be seen as a central actor within them.
1 Ecocriticism and Cultural Memory Studies

Until recently, ecocriticism and cultural memory studies have rarely converged. While
the former has mainly been concerned with studying the interrelations between the
non-human world and cultural formations and has thereby sought to challenge tra-
ditional notions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ the latter has explored how societies make
sense of their history by creating a common set of cultural denominators based on
shared readings of the past. And although ecocriticism has focused more broadly on
how humans have appropriated and transformed natural space and cultural memory
studies have studied the way in which societies ascribe meaning to historic sites and
construct their collective identity based on specific events, both fields of research
have more in common than one would usually suggest.
First of all, both developed at a similar time: When ecocriticism became a dis-
tinct strand of textual interpretation in Anglo-American literary studies during the
1990s (cf. also ↗0 Introduction), cultural memory studies developed as a new par-
adigm within cultural studies and historiography. Grounded in poststructuralist
thought and the postmodern ambivalence towards grand narratives, the emergence
of memory as a key term in historical discourse aimed at introducing a meta-category
that would allow for a new type of history (cf. Klein 2000); namely a history, where
the focus shifted from the question of what happened in the past to how this past is
actively remembered, symbolized, and collectively shared.
Secondly, both ecocriticism and cultural memory studies are areas of research
that have arguably been, at least in their early stages, “more practiced than theo-
rized” (Confino 1997, 1386), easily giving way to essentialist notions of nature or the
collectivization of individual psychological phenomena. Whereas ecocriticism sought
to recover the extra-textual category of ‘nature’ from the firm grasp of social construc-
tivism without reflecting on the linguistic mediatedness of the very notion, cultural
memory studies were keen on positioning memory in contrast or even in opposition
to history as a form of ‘lived experience’ without keeping in mind that historiography
itself is an integral part of the memory cultures within a society.
Thirdly, connected to these aspects is the political impulse of both fields, since
both did not primarily grow out of disciplinary contexts, but rather out of pressing
social concerns: While ecocriticism developed out of the environmentalist movement
and addressed issues of environmental degradation, injustice, and pollution, cultural
memory studies coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union as well as with the death
of the generation that lived during the Second World War, especially of Holocaust
survivors. Both fields of research can thus be seen as counter-discoursive undertak-
ings, focusing on aspects that were either marginalized in hegemonic discourse or
that could not be adequately dealt with by politics alone.
Fourthly, imaginative literature and imaginative world-making have featured
prominently in both areas of research from the very beginning. Literature is here seen
as a central medium that can stage social issues, political shortcomings, and cultural
blind spots in a depragmatized medium and that can integrate marginalized, forgot-
ten, or entirely new aspects into our common systems of knowledge. This culture crit-
ical impulse is thereby accompanied by a more regenerative or therapeutic impulse
that seeks to settle imbalances and traumatic experiences within an overarching cul-
tural framework.
The fifth and final common aspect is the central position that notions of space
and place take on in the theoretical underpinnings of both ecocriticism and cultural
memory studies. From the beginning, ecocritics emphasized the importance of the
ties between people and their natural environments for engendering a sense of envi-
ronmental awareness (cf. ↗12 Ecocriticism and Place Studies). In the same vein, cul-
tural historians have underlined the way in which the history of a people is often
connected to entire topographies of memory. And although the spatial dimension
of memory will be further discussed in the following paragraph, it is important to
note that it is exactly this shared interest in the spatial organization of perception
and knowledge that has led scholars to bring both fields of study together. Goodbody
(2011) and Schliephake (2012) have both illustrated how ecocritical readings of fic-
tional texts can benefit from a cultural memory approach and have underlined in how
far cultural memory studies can incorporate environmentalist notions of space and
place into their considerations of how individuals orient themselves in time.
Before I will elaborate further on these ideas and points of convergence, let me
briefly sketch out some subject areas within ecocriticism where the interplay between
memory and space plays a fundamental role and could benefit from a stronger inter-
disciplinary exchange with memory studies: The first one is an area of research that
originally stems from environmental history but that has been integrated into the
framework of the ‘environmental humanities’ more broadly, namely the study of the
long-term effects of environmental pollution on natural habitats and human organ-
isms. Notably Rob Nixon (2011) has, in his influential study Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, shown how spatial and temporal aspects interrelate
to make and re-make environmental pollution. Drawing on man-made catastrophes
like the Bhopal or Chernobyl Disasters, Nixon shows how the natural and built sur-
roundings of specific technological sites become polluted with toxins whose effects
play themselves out over long periods of time, removed from (media) attention. While
his approach is mainly concerned with coming up with a concept that can be used
to hold political systems accountable for the slow degradation of natural areas and
the deterioration of living conditions due to environmental pollution and to develop
ethical positions on risk scenarios, it also opens up new ways of thinking about how
an event like Chernobyl or Fukushima can be stored and remembered in our memory
cultures. On the other hand, cultural memory studies can lend ecocritics concepts for
analyzing the way in which political and social systems deal with such events through
an interplay of the highlighting and the silencing of certain aspects associated with it.
The second sub-strand of ecocriticism that lends itself to a closer connection
with cultural memory studies is the one that has traditionally been mainly concerned
with notions of space and place, namely the paradigm of Bioregionalism. As Lynch,
Glotfelty and Armbruster (2012, 2) have put it in their collection of essays The Biore-
gional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, bioregionalists seek “to address
matters of pressing environmental concern through a politics derived from a local

sense of place.” As they point out, “one key dimension” of developing a sense of place
“involves the creation of art” (10), while the “imagination,” in general, is seen as “one
key to developing new and better ideas about how to live in our specific places” (11).
Their book is important since it lays emphasis on “the cultural dimension of biore-
gionalism that has been undertheorized” (12). However, an integral part of this cul-
tural dimension are the memories and specific histories that have, over the centu-
ries, become attached to specific bioregions and that are not merely issues of sensual
perception, but of cultural construction and knowledge. The stories and narratives
associated with particular bioregions (Aberley 1999, 14) as well as their distinct envi-
ronmental, “bioregional histories” (Flores 1999, 44) are also cultural phenomena,
where both ecological and economic issues are of fundamental importance. Against
this background, it can be studied how the notion of ‘bioregion’ has become a part
of our memory cultures by being associated with specific narratives and in how far
cultural memory itself is influenced by the sensual perception of natural geographic
systems. There are many more points of convergence that allow for a closer interdisci-
plinary exchange between ecocriticism and cultural memory studies, some of which
will be further illustrated in the remainder of this chapter by discussing the spatial
dimension of memory and the way in which the non-human world can be seen as an
active agent in our memory cultures.
2 The Spatial Dimension of Memory

Ever since antiquity, the close relationship between memory and place has been a
recurrent cultural phenomenon – one only needs to think of their metaphorical com-
bination in ancient rhetoric as loci memoriae. The Greek poet Simonides, who was
said to have invented the mnemonic technique, attached images of the things or
facts he wanted to remember to specific imaginative places (usually associated with
a house or building) that he could easily recover while strolling through his imag-
ination. According to Frances Yates (1966) this technique was a widely practiced
cultural phenomenon until early modern history and had a huge influence on how
knowledge was stored and symbolized in Western culture. Even modern neurosci-
ence has underlined the importance of spatial perception for the way our memory
works – the perception of space and the storage of memory are interlinked through
the creation of a cognitive map, where complex information is constantly ordered and
re-ordered, so that, in the end, the retrieval of memory can be said to be a creative
process (Kandel 2007, 295–306) in which fragmented aspects of past experiences are
retrieved and become reactivated based on present needs and concerns. It may be sur-
prising how prominently words usually associated with human culture like “imagina-
tion” and “creation” feature in studies concerning memory, which is not an objective
storehouse of the past, but rather a manufacture of past images that are embedded
in culturally encoded frames of meaning – and it is exactly this latter aspect of how
we make meaning of our pasts that has become a main concern and even the starting
point of modern cultural memory studies.
Cultural memory studies began to evolve shortly after the founding fathers of
psychology and psychoanalysis like Sigmund Freud or Henri Bergson proclaimed
that memory was predominantly a stable individual phenomenon closely interlinked
with our own sense of subjectivity. Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist who was
influenced by Emile Durkheim and Marc Bloch and who was to die at the hand of the
Nazi regime in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, challenged this belief and
came up with the notion of les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. According to Halbwachs
(1992), memories were not so much a distinctive feature of our individual brains, but
were rather dependent on the “social frames” in which we remembered the past and
the way we made sense of our experiences through social interaction. Memory was
thus no longer solely perceived as a mental operation, but rather as a context-depend-
ent social undertaking in which culturally decoded frames of meaning (e.g. narrative
patterns, metaphors, symbols) play a fundamental role. Accordingly, memory was
re-located within an external, collective context and became an inherent cultural trait
which did not only take place in our brains, but rather in the social settings of daily
interaction. In consequence, memory moved from the internally imagined landscapes
of ars memoriae to the real, concrete spaces of the physical world.
It was the French historian Pierre Nora who, in the late 1980s, drew on Hal-
bwachs in the theoretical conception of his immensely influential notion of lieux de
mémoire. Nora’s (1989, 9) lieux, his sites of memory, were about places, objects, or
simply symbols stored in the collective consciousness that functioned as containers
of traditions that had lost their prior meanings and contexts but that were neverthe-
less important for the formation of group identities and national self-images. As he
famously stated in his introduction to his multi-volume tome, “memory attaches itself
to sites” (1989, 22), to concrete manifestations, relics, and landscapes of past events.
However, the distinctive feature of these lieux is not their physical or geographic
reality, but rather their imaginative quality: “A purely material site, like an archive,
becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invites it with a symbolic aura”
(19). In other words, imaginative texts, mediated images, and social interactions
combine to “connect stories of past events to a particular physical setting” so that
environments come to be considered as “historical” (Glassberg 2008, 376). “Memo-
ries,” thereby, “provide meaning to places” (Glassberg 2001, 18). As the American
nature writer Wallace Stegner (1992, 202) has put it, “no place is a place until the
things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends,
or monuments.”
The role of memory – and with it, of imaginative world-making – has thus been
underlined as being crucial to the way in which people and collectives situate them-
selves in their natural environment and construct a sense of the past. Place is, in this
context, thought of as a kind of spatial container or framework for human action and
as the stage of historical experience so that, in the end, a sense of place is deeply
intertwined with both individual as well as collective memory. Environmental psy-
chologists, too, stress the importance of memories of (childhood) places as “psychic
anchors” (Marcus 1992, 89) for the formation of self-identity. Against this background,
Carter, Donald and Squires (1993, xii) define place as “space to which meaning has
been ascribed,” while the development of “place attachment involves an interplay of
affect and emotions, knowledge and beliefs, and behaviors and actions in reference to
a place” (Low and Altman 1992, 5). “A sense of history and a sense of place” become
therefore “inextricably intertwined” (Glassberg 2001, 7), with “our perception of the
environment” not solely shaped by personal dispositions, but “by the products of our
larger culture” (116).
From these considerations it is only a short way to ecocritical notions of ‘space’
and ‘place’ that are likewise based on the experiential base of the social and physical
world and on the tight bonds that are formed between people and places through the
means of perception, stories, and symbols. Cultural memory studies can become a
central ingredient in activating environmental concern by showing how we become
bonded with an environment and how the relationship we have with a place is medi-
ated by the larger cultural frameworks in which we are situated. As geographer John
Agnew (1987, 28) reminds us, our common notion of environment and “place […] com-
bines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so
on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols).” This leads Lawrence Buell (2003, 67)
to note that “places themselves are not stable, free-standing entities but continually
shaped and reshaped by forces from both inside and outside. Places have histories;
place is not just a noun but also a verb, a verb of action.” As Edward Casey (1998, ix)
puts it, “nothing we do is unplaced.” This dynamic relationship with the places we
live in should remind ecocritics of the culturally mediated frames of meaning that
help us to make sense of our experiences and of our perceptions of the environments
we live in – a landscape may come across as natural, but there are always (hi)stories
attached to it that are waiting to be unearthed and/or determine how we interact with
them. This leads David Harvey (2009, 176) to conclude that there is not solely a cogni-
tive or emotional element involved in place attachment, but also a normative and an
ethical one: “In making places […], we make ourselves, and as we remake ourselves,
so we perpetually reshape the places we are in, materially, conceptually, as well as in
how we live in them.” It is in this way that the past of places reaches into our present
and into our futures.
While the latter aspect can be incorporated into ecocritical notions of space and
place from cultural memory studies, ecocriticism can likewise influence the way we
think about our memory cultures and about the sign systems that help us to make
sense of our individual and collective pasts. The topography of memory that is a
defining characteristic of our modern nation states is an integral part of what Jan and
Aleida Assmann (1992 and 1999) have termed the “cultural memory” of a society. The
cultural memory is made up of a highly conventionalized pool of texts, images, mon-

uments, and civic celebrations, which are intricately bound up with the realm of pol-
itics and the way in which “communities imagine” themselves. Although the cultural
memory of a society is thus marked by a high degree of stylization and normativity, it
is nevertheless, as they have repeatedly pointed out, also multilayered and heteroge-
neous, since cultures are also characterized by the circulation of multiple and often
divergent accounts of the past. Next to the highly stylized and politically sanctioned
cultural memory, there is also the realm of what they have termed “communicative or
social memory.” It usually consists of small groups spanning a few generations and
of their interaction that has been made the focus of attention of oral history, but that
is also often marked by a tendency to include marginalized or forgotten aspects or
alternative versions of historic events. This means that our perception of a particular
environment or site associated with a specific past may be dominated by a certain
narrative, but that there are, at the same time, multiple accounts of the history written
into it that can be unearthed and that can run counter to each other. Our memory
cultures are therefore, just like the places that they invoke or consist of, never stable,
but dynamic and ever-shifting repositories of our cultural frameworks. They possess,
in other words, a porosity and openness which can make room for new accounts of
the past to enter into our collective memory and can thereby be compared to ecosys-
tems which have long been metaphorically used by proponents of cultural ecology to
describe cultural processes.
The German scholar Peter Finke (2006, 175), for instance, has, drawing on ideas
first brought forth by Gregory Bateson, described culture in ecological terms by defin-
ing it “as an ecosystemically organized product of overall evolutionary processes.”
This view is vital for questioning the anthropocentric autonomy of cultural systems
by thinking about how natural processes and energies interact with sign-making
systems and by showing the “high degree of independence and self-organization”
that they have gained “in the process of cultural evolution” (Zapf 2008, 142). For, as
Finke has repeatedly stressed, cultural energies constantly act and re-act upon each
other in the complex energetic relationships that make up our cultures so that cultural
systems stay open to change and evolution. The interplay of feedback processes and
creative energies that characterize culture and that are metaphorically captured in the
notion of a ‘cultural ecosystem’ can, I would argue, fruitfully be applied to cultural
memory studies. The realm of cultural memory is, after all, made up of a broad range
of cultural media, political interest groups, and natural or built environments whose
constant inter- and co-relation makes up our mnemonic cultural frameworks which
do not, as has been shown, only possess a normative and stylized quality but also a
highly imaginative and creative quality that persistently acts upon its source. This
also explains why culturally storied places are not only the subject matter of polit-
ical interest groups and historiography, but also of imaginative texts and literature.
Instead of functioning as a static container of historical self-images and identities
with unanimous views of the past, the cultural memory can therefore be conceptual-
ized as a cultural ecosystem in the sense of Peter Finke, one that is open to negotia-
tion, conflict, and, eventually, change. Against this background, the next paragraph
will be concerned with the way in which imaginative literature can be said to serve as
a cultural ecological force within cultural memory, re-imagining and refiguring it in
textual form.
3 ‘ Storied Places’: Literary Place-Making and the

(Non-)Human World
Conceptualizing our memory cultures metaphorically as ecosystems allows us to inte-
grate and to analyze more fully the role that literature and imaginative world-making
can play within them. As Peter Finke has shown, our cultures are not only dominated
by the external contexts and environments in which they are situated, but they are
also characterized by the “internal landscapes” (Finke 2006, 175) (cf. Zapf 2008, 145)
that are created through the reception and reading of forms of art. They are, as he
maintains, vital, since they “restore the richness, diversity and complexity of those
inner landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the psyche, and of interpersonal
communication which make up the cultural ecosystems of modern humans, but are
threatened with impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomized, standardized
and depersonalized contemporary culture” (Finke 2006, 146). Elsewhere I have dis-
cussed in how far our modern memory cultures reflect this trend by becoming inte-
grated into a calculated cost-benefit approach or by turning into tourist attractions
that are in danger of losing their prior meaning (Schliephake 2014). I have argued that
imaginative literature cannot only become a meta-discourse that critically engages
with this development, but that also works to imbue the narratives attached to our
memory sites and mnemonic environments with new meanings and/or alternative
histories. One of literature’s primary functions within our memory cultures is thus
to turn the sometimes abstract or distant spaces they consist of into “storied places”
(Glassberg 2001, 377; Schliephake 2012, 95–98). Accordingly, literary place-making
is central to the way we orient ourselves in our larger environments and to how we
translate the perception and experience of our external world into the ‘internal land-
scapes’ of the mind that cultural ecologists invoke.
In her monography Erinnerungsräume, Aleida Assmann (1999) has underlined
the central importance of literature for rendering, interpreting, and challenging the
meanings of our memory cultures. She perceives ‘places’ as central containers of
memory, since their material quality attests to the presence of the past in the contem-
porary world. And although the authenticity of these places sometimes constitutes a
problem – once they have turned into ‘historic sites’ that are restored etc. – their special
‘aura’ allows for an encounter with the past. Narratives and storytelling attached to
these places are vital for imbuing them with meaning, while the immediate contact
with a place is, in imaginative literature, often also associated with epiphanies where
the past or repressed aspects thereof suddenly return. In the same vein, but under dif-
ferent premises, Lawrence Buell has discussed the integral importance that literature
and creative world-making can take on in processes of identity-formation by creating
fictional or imagined places to which individuals or collectives cling their memories.
This is a phenomenon that can be perceived with many diasporic communities all
over the world where the conception of a ‘native land’ plays a fundamental role. As
Buell (2005, 73) remarks, “the fact that the imaginer hasn’t been there and maybe
never will hardly lessens the intensity of such storied or imagined places to induce
longing and loyalty […] It’s entirely possible to care more about places you’ve never
been […] than the ones you know firsthand.” This comment reminds us that literary
place-making does not have to be rooted in the concrete presence of a physical reality
but can rather transcend the material and social contexts in which we live.
In so far as these considerations help to show how literature can actually func-
tion within our social and collective worlds, they also underline the importance of
the analysis of place-making processes within literary and cultural studies. In order
to analyze them and to show how they interact with our ecosystemically organized
memory cultures, I propose two functional models that stem from cultural ecology as
well as from cultural memory studies. Hubert Zapf’s conception of the “function of lit-
erature as cultural ecology” (2002; cf. also ↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature) posits the
interrelatedness between literature as a mode of exploration and a balancing factor
and the wider cultural contexts and the human (and non-human) worlds in which it is
situated. In Zapf’s view, imaginative literature is a depragmatized discourse that “acts
like an ecological force within the larger systems of cultural discourses”, where it
both “appears as a sensorium and imaginative sounding board for hidden problems,
deficits, and imbalances of the larger culture” and “symbolically articulates what is
marginalized, neglected, repressed or excluded” within it. By engendering “plural
perspectives, multiple meanings and dynamic interrelationships, literature becomes
the site of a constant, creative renewal of language, perception, communication, and
imagination” (Zapf 2008, 148). I would argue that this potential of fictional texts can
be seen with regard to our memory cultures in general and with regard to their ‘storied
places’ in particular. Imaginative literature can, against this background, become
“imaginative sites of the (re)negotiation and (re)appropriation of historical places,
(re)connecting them to alternative memories and stories” by either critically reflect-
ing on deficiencies and blind spots within our memory cultures or by becoming the
placeholder of a forgotten or repressed memory, by, in other words, turning into lieux
de mémoire themselves (Schliephake 2012, 110).
This approach is similar to the concept of literature as an integral part of cul-
tural memory brought forth by a research group at the University of Giessen (see Erll
2005; Erll and Nünning 2008). Based on Paul Ricoeur’s triple mimesis developed in
Time and Narrative, they distinguish between the (1) memory cultural pre-figuration
of literary texts in which literature draws on the symbols and elements taken from
extra-textual reality that literature can reflect on in its full spectrum; the (2) literary
configuration of those contents through literary means (e.g. metaphors, intertextual-
ity) and thereby the creation of new relationships between the different elements of
our memory cultures that allow for new and different perspectives on them; and the
(3) collective refiguration of those perspectives in the act of reception so that litera-
ture re-connects with the reality system and integrates new aspects that have thus far
been repressed or marginalized into our cultural frameworks (see Erll 2005, 150–155).
These mimetic relations show a strong resemblance to Zapf’s (2002) triadic functional
model of literature and illustrate how literature constantly interacts with our memory
cultures that are made and re-made by a wide array of cultural texts. This model can
also be used for the analysis of the ways in which memory sites are incorporated and
depicted by textual means and how texts can help to transcend their prior meanings
by attaching new semantic connotations to them, thus breaking up traditional inter-
pretations of historical places.
Before I want to engage in some exemplary readings of contemporary fictional
texts with this theoretical framework in mind, let me briefly address an aspect that
has thus far been neglected (especially in cultural memory studies): So far spaces and
places have figured as the objects of anthropocentric memory and storytelling. Yet, I
would argue that places themselves have a strong narrative agency – not only because
they can attest to historical events, but because they have a history themselves,
removed from human intention or control. I mean a history in a geomorphological
sense (that can be read in the rings of trees or the layers of soil) as well as in a biophilic
sense, where they have functioned as the habitat of beings long vanished from the
earth. The German director Wim Wenders (2005) claims that there are places which
demand us to invent stories and characters attached to them. Places therefore are not
only storied, but they do story. One only needs to think of the accounts of faraway
lands and natural phenomena encountered by Greek seafarers that would inspire
early myths like the Odyssey. Rock formations, straits, shifting dunes, or thick forests
have always resonated with a sense of wonder and fascination and they have played
a prominent role in the way in which humans have, over the centuries, imagined our
world and the places we live in. Imaginative literature attests, in ever new scenarios
and ways to the strange narrative agency that places themselves possess and it may
be seen not so much as a medium with which humans have described the world, but
with which they have learned to listen to its many non-human voices.
4 R
eadings
hilipp Meyer – The Son (2013)

4.1 P
In the following, I will try to show in three exemplary readings how contemporary
American authors deal with the interrelatedness between memory and literary
place-making, how they reflect on historical places as an inspiration and how they
subvert their mnemonic quality by the creation of new places that they draw on in
order to illustrate, undermine, and re-figure our memory cultures. Thereby, I also
want to address the narrative agency that the non-human world and places them-
selves possess. A good starting point for analyzing these aspects is Philipp Meyer’s
breath-taking family epic The Son, published in 2013. Its narrative follows the rise
of the fictional McCullough family from early settlers beyond the frontier to one of
Texas’s leading oil dynasties. Interweaving different time layers and narrative strands
and spanning five generations, The Son is about the transformation of the space
between what is now South Texas and North Mexico and about the merciless toll it
takes to build and sustain an empire. Rich in historical detail and the description
of the ways of life of early settlers, Indian tribes, and the natural geography of the
lands that once rimmed the imaginary borderzone between civilization and wilder-
ness, Meyer’s novel works to invoke manifold myths connected to the ‘West’ – from
Indian captives and lonesome rangers to oil tycoons – and to cleverly subvert them in
an intricate mixture of literary styles and perspectives (the memoir, the journal, and
third-person narration). It thereby manages to play on many motives connected to
one of the foremost lieux de mémoire of America’s national heritage, namely the ‘fron-
tier,’ and to de-construct it in showing that the narrative of the progress of civilization
and of the domestication of the wilderness and the Indian ‘savage’ contained its own
destructive impulse, based on a rigid world view of excluding opposites (nature –
culture; Indian – Mexican – White) and of the brutal subjugation of the respective
‘other.’
The narrative tone and the main motives of the novel are introduced right from
the beginning, in the first-person narration of Eli, the hundred year old patriarch of
the McCullough family, who was born in 1836 as “the first son” of the newly founded
republic of Texas. After an Indian raid on his home, he was abducted by Comanche
and worked as their slave until he got introduced into the tribe and became a hunter
himself, learning the ways and world views of the Indians that are strongly opposed
to the Western culture that he finally re-enters when his tribe succumbs to disease
brought by white settlers and starvation due to the depletion of wild life. Working his
way up from being a ranger and a colonel in the Confederate Army, Eli soon leaves
his Indian teachings behind and becomes a ruthless proto-Capitalist who makes a
fortune, first by breeding cattle, later by the drilling of oil. It is mainly through his per-
spective and his manifold adventures that the landscape is introduced as a primary
narrative force within the novel. He literally learns to read his natural surroundings
from the Indians and becomes a talented tracker of the movements of animals and
humans. The narrative trajectory therefore starts out with the spectacular description
of the natural sceneries that young Eli discovers beyond the settlements of his early
youth and that characterize the first part of the novel which begins to shift to the ren-
dering of rugged wastelands that dominate the second half and that have lost their
old fertility and greenery, marked by the signs of oil drilling and urbanity. As Eli rumi-
nates right at the beginning: “[…] the land and the animals that lived upon it were flat
and slick […], and even the steepest hillsides overrun with wildflowers. It was not the
dry rocky place it is today […] – the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with
people today” (Meyer 2013, 6).
The Son thereby sets out to offer a meditation on the transformation both of the
nature of South Texas and of the human society that settles there. Yet, rather than
just constituting the mere background to the action, the natural environment is often
brought center stage in the narrative, which evokes the age old history that is written
deep into its material fabric. The novel engages in a literary archaeology that seeks to
unearth the environmental history of the natural spaces it describes and that pits it
against the human history that constantly works to transform the natural into a built
environment. Thus, the young Eli marvels at the “stone creatures” that can be found
“in every river and sea bank” beyond the settled land and that are larger “than any-
thing still alive on the earth” (Meyer 2013, 66). However, this place is “a blank space
on the map” (67), far removed from the scientific gaze and cultural control of Western
human civilization. Only enormous herds of buffalo use the canyon as a water source,
while “figures” that are “scratched into the rock” tell of ancient times long forgotten
in the cultural memory (66). Against this background, the novel constantly reflects on
the material traces that are embedded in the ground and that, once unraveled, begin
to tell a different story of the ‘West’ and of the Earth altogether. Since they have to
be made sense of, they are turned into sources of the imagination that nevertheless
resist anthropocentric interpretation and appropriation. And although the remain-
der of the narrative sketches out how the rich vegetation and wildlife of the Western
plains were destroyed through human settlement, stock farming, and oil drilling, it
remains a counter discoursive force within Meyer’s novel that constantly embeds the
actions of the protagonists within a far larger framework that cannot be overcome by
any cultural or human force.
The brutal and technological subjugation of the land is equated with the un-re-
straining violence that characterizes human relationships within the narrative. The
Son is concerned with describing “the blood that runs through history” (Meyer 2013,
629), or rather through human history that is marked by the merciless struggle over
territory and shifting power formations. At numerous times within the narrative,
bones and weapons of ancient Indian tribes and Spanish conquistadors are found by
digging in the earth, next to the bones of animals that have long become extinct or
depleted on the plains of the West. These are markers of history, but they also func-
tion on a metaphorical level as a past that is unearthed within the narrative, as a way
of rendering the violence that has been written into the landscape itself. The digging
and drilling of soil is thereby equated with hidden traumas deeply entrenched in the
collective consciousness of the McCullough family and the social structures in which
they live which are dominated by exploitation, slavery, and murder. The material sig-
nifier of this trauma is the mansion of the Garcia family. Originally set on a rich, watery
parcel of land adjoining the McCullough territory, it is taken over, in a brutal display
of power, by Eli McCullough with the help of his sons and some rangers, through the
killing of the Garcia family on an ominous legal pretense. While Eli justifies the killing
as one of the many social Darwinist acts that have dominated his whole life, his son
Peter is deeply traumatized by it, constantly haunted by the “shadows” (2013, 777; cf.
also 132) of the past that he re-visits by tending the graves of the Garcias and by falling
in love with Maria, a survivor of the massacre who he eventually follows into Mexico,
abandoning his own family.
The Garcia mansion is thus integrated into McCullough land, but it is not lived
in – it rather takes on the presence, first of a ghost house, then, once the generations
who knew the truth about the killing have died, into a ruin attesting to the times of
the early settlers. The novel reflects on the way in which memory clings to material
traces and how it shifts with the transformation of the environment in which it is set.
While the house of the Garcias is in the process of literally being taken back by nature,
with animals nesting in it and weeds growing through the walls, the land on which it
is set is likewise transformed by human agency. At first by the overgrazing with stock
cattle that use up the grass and water, later by the oil rigs that pollute the area and, in
the end, turn it into a badland. Accordingly, Jeannie, Eli’s great grand-daughter who
becomes the last exponent of the McCulloughs’ powerful rise and makes a fortune
with oil, tries to “see the land as it once had been” (Meyer 2013, 229), but is unable
to do so, having to rely on the stories that her great-grandfather had told her. The
story thereby reflects on the way in which the settlement of Texas and technological
progress have disturbed and transformed an age-old natural ecosystem and offers,
on a meta-layer, a meditation on how stories and narratives attached to a landscape
become one way of illustrating the interrelations that have marked human – nature
relationships. It also attests to the way in which the anthropocentric story of progress
has turned foul by corrupting the natural balance of the land and the social systems
of the people living on it. While it thus undermines the hegemonic view and the cul-
tural memory of the ‘West,’ it also unearths the non-human history of the place as a
factor that constantly acts upon humans and their imagination.
4.2 L ouise Erdrich – The Round House (2012)
Another example that lends itself to an exploration of how cultural memory and liter-
ary place-making interact is Louise Erdrich’s 2012 novel The Round House. Set on the
fictional Indian Ojibwe reservation in rural North Dakota, an imaginative place that
Erdrich has conjured again and again in her work, the novel self-reflectively plays with
the narrations, legal frameworks, and social systems that make up our environments
and that qualify their existential status. Literary place-making functions, for Erdrich,
as one way of imaginatively sketching out a portrait of contemporary Indian (and
American) life and of combining diverse aspects of lived experience into an unsettling
territory whose geography stands in for countless real Indian reservations, dispersed
all across the U.S. Her story is itself a hybrid, drawing on diverse literary traditions
like the whodunit and the coming-of-age story, while also incorporating oral forms
of storytelling and mythical folktales. At the center stands Joe Coutts, the narrator
of the story, who grew up to become a public prosecutor and who relates the trau-
matic incidents that marked the summer of 1988, the year when he turned thirteen.
His first-person narration revolves around the brutal rape of his mother, her ensuing
trauma and the frustrating quest for justice against the background of a moving story
of friendship and of the loss of innocence. Although the novel is primarily told from
the perspective of young Joe, official judicial documents and oral mythical accounts
of the Indian heritage of the Chippewa are repeatedly interwoven into his account
to unravel the dysfunctional social systems, grievances and maimed life energies in
which he grows up.
The beginning of the novel opens with one of the main motifs that will constantly
recur in the course of the narrative, namely the prying out of some seedlings that
have grown into the foundation of the Coutts’ family home. “Small trees had attacked
my parents’ house at the foundation,” the narrator relates right at the beginning and
marvels at how “it was almost impossible not to break off the plant before its roots
could be drawn intact from their stubborn hiding place” (Erdrich 2012, 3–4). The vio-
lence against non-human life forms and the struggle against an agency that can hardly
be repressed foreshadows the brutal assault of the mother by an unknown offender
which occurs only a few pages later; on a metaphorical level, however, they point
far deeper, namely at a traumatic past that is, in an act of remembrance, unearthed
and brought to light as well as to their own cultural roots which are likewise tied to a
specific geographical region and which are hard to be eradicated, try as one might.
The latter aspect is reflected by Joe’s reading through an extensive amount of judicial
literature, especially through Felix Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law that his
father, a local Indian judge, keeps in his study. The official language of land use reg-
ulations which had deprived Indians of their traditional ties to the land and which
resettled them in reservations is thereby pitted against the old Indian stories and nar-
ratives that explain how the Indians are connected to the land of their ancestors as
well as how they have repeatedly been severed from their traditions. The trauma that
will haunt Joe’s family for the remainder of the story is thus brought together with a
repressive legal framework and social system that dominates and regulates the daily
life of the Indian population.
The main narrative symbol which uncovers the precarious legal situation of the
Indians and which, at the same time, comes to undermine the official language, is
the place where the crime was committed and which gives the novel its title, namely
the round house. An old ceremonial place, the round house itself possesses a high
symbolic aura, imbued with many mythical stories, but the strip of land on which it
is located tells another story altogether, since it stands on an intersection of reserva-
tion land, federal territory and a strip of “fee land,” sold by the tribe. Since it remains
unclear on which parcel the crime was committed, it cannot be decided which type
of law applies. Moreover, the offender, Linden Lark, turns out to be white and cannot
be prosecuted by a tribal court so that he is soon released from custody. Joe, who sets
out, at first, to find the perpetrator and later to kill him together with his friend Cappy
in an act of self-administered justice, is clearly startled by the round house when he
first goes there in search of evidence. His experience of the place is dominated not so
much by his cultural knowledge, but by perception:
a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started
with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled me and
flooded me. […] The place seemed peaceful. There was no door. There had been one, but the big
plank rectangle was now wrenched off and thrown to the side. The grass was already growing
through the cracks between the boards. I stood in the doorway. Inside, it was dim although four
small busted-out windows opened in each direction. (Erdrich 2012, 70)
The round house seems to possess a strange agency of its own and almost becomes
a living thing in Joe’s description that seems to mourn its own battered appearance
which hints at the violence perpetrated in and on this place itself. For, as Joe learns
from old Mooshum, the round house had once been an integral part of the upholding
of the old Indian traditions and of community life. Not only had it been used as a
place where Indians could practice their religion hidden from the supervising gaze
of Catholicism, but it was also seen as a spiritual place symbolizing regeneration and
redemption. In three consecutive dreams, Mooshum relates interconnected mythical
stories that tell about how the round house was built following troubled times within
the Indian tribe and in the life of a young Indian called Nanapush who, after having
defended his mother’s life against crazed agitators, hunted the sole buffalo left on the
plains in order to provide food for his tribe. The structure of the round house should
commemorate the body and the interior of the buffalo, which provided shelter for
Nanapush during a terrible snowstorm and whose spirit appears in the young man’s
mind, explaining that: “The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire
my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way. As
the mother is intent on her baby’s life, so your people should think of their children”
(Erdrich 2012, 251).
Consequently, the round house can be seen as a storied place, a place to which
the cultural memory of the Indian population is attached but which has lost its old
integral function for community life and identity. Rather, it has become multilayered,
since it embodies both the scene of a crime as well as the multi-tangled intersection
of abstract administered and owned spaces. The violence and trauma attached to the
place have thus maimed its old life-giving energies, which are, however, uncovered
layer by layer in Erdrich’s novel which works to restore the old oral accounts of how
Indians interacted with the land and how they settled their own legal affairs. Thereby
the overimposing cultural systems of jurisdiction and ownership are repeatedly ques-
tioned within an imaginative framework in which other meaning-making systems like
ceremonial dances, dreams, and visions are rendered through literary means. Against
this background, Erdrich’s novel opens a lot of room for reflection and raises serious
moral and ethical questions, which are, in the end, delegated to the reader who has to
decide on how to judge the vigilantism of the children and who to blame for the acts
of violence committed within the narrative. Erdrich’s highly readable novel therefore
becomes a serious ethical undertaking in which literary place making and cultural
memory combine to unearth a contemporary tragedy deeply rooted within the tradi-
tional legal frameworks of the U.S. today – yet, like the seeds that Joe’s mother sows
and that begin to bloom once she is healing, there is also the feeling that regeneration
is possible.
evin Powers – The Yellow Birds (2012)

4.3 K
My last example, Kevin Powers’ deeply moving and stirring 2012 novel The Yellow
Birds, is also a story about deep-seated trauma and harrowing loss, dealing with the
memories of the Iraq war veteran John Bartle, who remembers his time in the army, the
street fights in the city of Al Tafar, and his return home in a complex narrative, whose
inner coherence only develops slowly, marked by numerous chronological leaps and
narrative ruptures that become, in turn, a meditation on the nature of memory and
the way in which the human imagination works to overwrite the perception of a dis-
tinct place with the images of an absent, far-away past. John is tormented by the sense
of guilt he feels about the death of his fellow private, Daniel Murphy. Originally, John
had promised Daniel’s mother to watch over him; yet, John cannot console his friend
when he begins to drift away due to severe shell shock and when he leaves the army
camp disoriented, only to be found badly mutilated in the city of Al Tafar shortly after.
Unable to stand the sight of the disfigured corpse and unwilling to send his friend
home like this, John and the war-scarred Sergeant Sterling throw his body into the
Tigris river, thus covering up his death. Ridden by guilt and his sense of loss, John
writes a letter to Daniel’s mother that will confine him to army prison for a few years,
where he “tries to piece the war into a pattern” (Powers 2012, 216), but comes up short.
In the end, it is “a wash” (218), with “half” his “memory” being “imagination” (186),
a “misguided archaeology” (138) of the characters, places, and things he has seen or
done. The Yellow Birds disrupts our general sense of the stability of time and place
and breaks it open in order to reflect on a traumatic war experience that has long
entered into America’s cultural memory.
The content of the novel thus has a bearing on its structure, fragmenting it into bits
and pieces that the reader has to make sense of, while the instability of the memory
clings to places that begin to meld into one another in compelling and awe-inspiring
passages of nature writing. The thoughts and memories of the narrator drift into one
another, as he is constantly, in a trick of the imagination, brought to other places in
his mind. When John sits in a war trench in Iraq, he “thought of home, remembering
the cicadas fluttering their wings in the scrub pines and oaks that ringed the pond
behind my mother’s house outside Richmond,” so that “the space between home […]
and the scratched-out fighting positions we occupied, collapsed” (2012, 78). In the
same vein, the perception of the places of his childhood seems to change once he has
returned from war. When he is driven from the airport to his home, he catches himself
“making strange adjustments to the landscape:”
I stared out at the broad valley below. The sun coming up and a light the color of unripe oranges
fell and broke up the mist that hung in the bottom-land. I pictured myself there. Not as I could
be in a few months swimming along the banks beneath the low-slung trunks and branches of
walnut and black alder trees, but as I had been. It seemed as if I watched myself patrol through
the fields along the river in the yellow light, like I had transposed the happenings of that world
onto the contours of this one. (Powers 2012, 109–110)
The narrative thereby reflects on the way in which the perception of natural land-
scapes and memories that were attached to them become disrupted by another
sudden image or association triggered by subconscious impulses in the body or the
mind and how they become, in turn, overwritten with the images of other memories
and places so that a past trauma constantly reaches out into the present, stirring up
the stable framework of one’s identity and sense of self and belonging (cf. ↗28 Beyond
the Wasteland). When he walks along the river that runs by his house, he suddenly
imagines “one man fall in a heap near” its “banks” (2012, 125). His landscape at home
becomes littered with the bodies he saw at Al Tafar, where they literally “were part of
the landscape” (124). He thus “disowned the waters of” his “youth. My memories of
them became a useless luxury […] I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would even
be in my home, in my misremembered history” (125). The literary place-making of the
narrative thus works to create an imaginative space in which the inner workings of
the mind of a traumatized war veteran are brought to light and in which his episodic
memories are self-reflectively brought into relation with the realm of the imaginary.
In this context, it is interesting to note the vital importance that nature and the
perception of the non-human world have in the novel. From its opening lines, “the
war tried to kill us in the spring” (Powers 2012, 3), to its poetic ending, the non-human
world and its geographical landscapes possess an agency that can offer, despite the
harrowing events that go on around them, a sense of quiet and even peace, but that
can also be marked by the signs of the past that lead to sudden, violent images that
become, in the end, associated with natural spaces. The beautiful “fields of hyacinth”
(14) and the orchards surrounding the city of Al Tafar were once the markers of a
peaceful community life, but they have turned into places of death, where enemies
are hidden and where shells of mortar have left “wounds in the earth” (19). Accord-
ingly, the title of the novel, which invokes colorful, singing birds is actually taken
from a U.S. Army Marching Cadence quoted in the epigraph, which is about a man
who “lures” a “yellow bird” inside “with a piece of bread” to smash “his fucking
head.” The literary place making of Powers works the same way, creating moments
of sheer beauty that suddenly burst open with unspeakable acts of violence. He thus
manages to offer a shocking account of the Iraq War that is as compelling as it is
devastating, leaving a lot of room for reflection. In the end, the permanence of the
aching loss and the absence of Daniel is transcended by the narrator in his imagina-
tion, when he pictures how the disfigured body of his friend is washed clean by the
waters of the Tigris that carry him onwards into the ocean: “And I saw his body finally
break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of date palms fell in long,
dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept them out to sea, toward a line of
waves that break forever as he enters them” (226). Powers’ novel therefore illustrates
that the inner workings and the “inner landscapes of the mind” (Finke 2006, 175; Zapf
2008, 145) are every bit as important in our memory cultures as the historic sites and
monuments that make up its material fabric.
In conclusion, my three examples show, each in its own way, how literary place
making and cultural memory interrelate and interact and how literature can be said
to be an active agent and integral part within and of our memory cultures. Literature
not only functions as a medium of reflection that constantly tries to point to their
shortcomings and to fill in their blanks, but that also creates new imaginative places
that enable remembrance and that become place-holders of a past in danger of van-
ishing or being forgotten. In describing how individual memory works, in unearth-
ing traumas and their cultural and social undercurrents and in showing how place
perception influences (and is likewise influenced by) the internal landscapes of the
mind, literature can be said to be a cultural ecological force within our ecosystemi-
cally organized memory cultures.
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Timo Müller
30 The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes
Abstract: This chapter offers an ecological perspective on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept
of the ‘chronotope,’ which Bakhtin defines as the time-space configuration specific to
a literary text, genre, or motif. After a brief survey of Bakhtin’s reception in the field of
ecocriticism, the chapter identifies the different levels on which chronotopes operate
and addresses four valorizations implicit in Bakhtin’s discussion of the concept: of
the novel over poetry; of time over space; of linear over cyclical time; and of cultural
chronotopes over chronotopes derived from nature. The last section of the chapter
examines the problems these valorizations entail from an environmental perspective
and traces more environmentally sensitive and sustainable chronotopes in literary
texts that Bakhtin relegates to the margins of his analysis.
Key Terms: Mikhail Bakhtin, chronotope, environmental humanities, space, time
1 Bakhtin and Ecocriticism

With their emphasis on dialogue, openness, and relation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s works
garnered attention from ecocritics at an early point. Despite the rapid expansion of
ecocriticism in recent years, however, interest in Bakhtin seems to have flagged. One
reason for this development might be the increasing self-reflection of the field, whose
conception of human-nature relations has moved beyond the striking but rather
anthropocentric metaphors Bakhtin offers. Another reason might be the shift of focus
from literary to cultural analysis – observable in the very structure of this handbook –
that ecocriticism has experienced in recent years. No longer just a method for reading
and evaluating literary texts, ecocriticism is now the core component of a far-rang-
ing, interdisciplinary inquiry into the cultural perception of nature: the ‘environmen-
tal humanities.’ Bakhtin’s focus on close reading and canonical literary texts might
appear outdated in this new phase of ecocriticism. As we will see in the following,
however, it is precisely the theoretical connection Bakhtin establishes between the
microstructure of narrative texts and the macrostructure of the collective imagination
that makes his work so productive for the environmental humanities.
While ecocritical discussions of Bakhtin have mostly revolved around his con-
cepts of the dialogic and the carnivalesque, this chapter focuses on the concept of
the chronotope, whose potential for the environmental humanities has hardly been
noticed so far. After a brief survey of Bakhtin’s reception in the field of ecocriticism,
the contribution offers a detailed examination of the chronotope as conceptualized in
Bakhtin’s (1981 [1937/1973]) essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”
It identifies the different levels – the motivic, the generic, and the epistemological –
on which chronotopes operate and addresses four implicit valorizations in Bakhtin’s
essay: of the novel over poetry; of time over space; of linear over cyclical time; and
of cultural chronotopes over chronotopes derived from nature. The last section of
the chapter examines the problems these valorizations entail from an environmental
perspective and traces more environmentally sensitive and sustainable chronotopes
in literary texts that Bakhtin relegates to the margins of his analysis. If these prob-
lems are taken into account and the concept is modified accordingly, it can become a
highly productive matrix for ecocritical analysis.
The environmentalist implications of Bakhtin’s work were already apparent to
the first generation of ecocritics. The most substantial early approach was Michael
Gardiner’s (1993) essay “Ecology and Carnival: Traces of a ‘Green’ Social Theory
in the Writings of M. M. Bakhtin,” which focuses on Bakhtin’s theory of the carni-
valesque but includes numerous observations about the environmentalist potential
of such concepts as dialogism and unfinalizability. Most importantly, Gardiner argues
that Bakhtin anticipated the critique of industrial society and its estrangement from
nature that ecocriticism inherited from the Frankfurt School. While this particular
argument was not taken up in scholarly debate, Gardiner correctly predicted the two
main directions ecocritical interest in Bakhtin would take: the pursuit of an “ecologi-
cal ethics” based on his concept of self/other relations, and the incorporation of dia-
logism into an ecology of culture in the tradition of Gregory Bateson (1993, 766). The
former project was pioneered by Patrick D. Murphy, another first-generation ecocritic,
who began exploring the various facets of a Bakhtinian ecological ethics in the early
1990s. His early publications on the feminist (1991), multicultural (1998), and trans-
national (2006) potential of this approach revolve around the idea that nature should
be seen as an ethically deserving subject – an ‘another,’ in Bakhtin’s term. This is ulti-
mately an anthropocentric idea in that it imagines the non-human world as human,
occluding the differences between the two that an ethical approach would claim to
negotiate. Murphy (2009) is closer to current ecocritical debate when he focuses on
the cultural transmission of environmentalist ideas, as he does in his book Ecocritical
Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies. Here he takes up and develops Bakhtin’s
claim that the novel is a culturally active medium that involves its readers in concrete
ethical choices and thus ideally disseminates a dialogic worldview.
This shift of focus reflects the increasing interest among ecocritics in the cultural
perception of nature. Imaginative texts have widely been recognized as a crucial factor
in shaping this perception, and since most of Bakhtin’s concepts were specifically
developed for the analysis of literary texts they easily lend themselves to this strand
of inquiry. An early argument in this vein can be found in The Ecocriticism Reader,
where Michael J. McDowell (1996, 378) argued that Bakhtinian concepts such as the
chronotope could extend the range of literary ecocriticism to texts that lack an overtly
environmental agenda. This extension was also a driving force behind Hubert Zapf’s
model of ‘cultural ecology,’ which posits that literary texts help sustain the cultural
592 Timo Müller
‘ecosystem’ by negotiating the complementary necessities of stability and change, of

communal organization and individual freedom (see ↗7 Cultural Ecology of Litera-
ture). This model has since been linked to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, with which
it shares the assumption that categories such as openness and fluidity are ethically
valuable and that they operate on the epistemological, cultural, and textual levels (cf.
Müller 2008, 503–508).
These approaches indicate the usefulness and the untapped potential of Bakh-
tin’s work for ecocritical inquiry. They also show, however, that this potential can
only be realized if Bakhtin’s concepts, which are a product of their time and intel-
lectual milieu, are subjected to critical analysis. Such analysis needs to attend to the
dualisms, value judgments, and exclusions implied in Bakhtin’s work. It should take
into account the current state of ecocritical scholarship, especially constructivist
approaches, and look for ways further to increase the analytical use value of Bakh-
tin’s concepts in an age of environmental crisis. As I have noted elsewhere (Müller
2010), the chronotope seems particularly germane to such ecocritical adaptation.
While several of the scholars discussed above mention the chronotope (Gardiner
1993, 700; McDowell 1996, 376; Murphy 2011, 164–165), none offers a systematic dis-
cussion from an environmental perspective, which is the more surprising as Bakhtin’s
explication of the concept is centrally concerned with the spatiotemporal embedded-
ness of human life.
2 An Ecological Critique of Bakhtin’s Chronotope

In the introductory remarks of his chronotope essay, Bakhtin (1981, 84) stresses the
“intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature.” He draws an analogy to Einstein’s theory of relativity to
emphasize that time and space are inseparable and that there is not just one stable
time-space configuration but a variety of chronotopes that compete on different levels
of the collective imagination. Bakhtin (85 n. 2) also invokes Kant’s assertion that time
and space are “indispensable forms of any cognition, beginning with elementary per-
ceptions and representations,” but he is quick to point out that he regards time and
space not as “transcendental” but as “forms of the most immediate reality.” This is an
important qualification. Kant employs the notion of “transcendental” conditions of
perception because the seeming stability and unity of time and space does not fit with
his subject-centered epistemology: if we all perceive our own world, the parameters
that all our worlds have in common must be given a priori. The Kantian quandary was
effectively solved by Einstein, who showed that time and space do depend on the indi-
vidual’s location within them and that the stability Kant observed is conditional on
our being on the same planet and moving at roughly the same speed. As Einstein also
pointed out, the relativity of time and space is much more palpable in our imagina-
tion than it is on a physical plane: an hour with one’s sweetheart tends to pass more
quickly than an hour of class in school. It is this transference of scientific findings into
the cultural sphere that Bakhtin follows as it allows him to conceptualize the chrono-
tope as an immanent rather than a transcendental category. The different forms we
have developed of representing time and space (mathematics, painting, geography,
physics, literature, technology, etc.) are all drawn from our “immediate” perception.
While Bakhtin does not problematize the notion of immediacy, his argument accom-
modates the constructivist idea that our perception is in fact conditioned by such
forms of representation. In this view, chronotopes are not mere representations of
time and space but epistemological structures that influence our very perception of
time and space.
Of the different cultural forms of time-space assimilation, it is literature that inter-
ests Bakhtin most – not only, it seems, because he is a literary scholar but because
he regards literature as a particularly complex, comprehensive, and flexible medium
of the collective imagination. While the chronotopes of mathematics, for instance,
emerge within the strict confines of the scientific ethos and thus have little room for
variety and innovation, fictional literature allows for a variety of coexisting chrono-
topes, even where they contradict each other or our conventional perception of reality.
Bakhtin touches on several different levels of the literary text on which chronotopes
can constitute themselves. On the smallest level, we have recurrent motifs that repre-
sent a certain chronotope. These motifs can be specific to a limited period or cultural
sphere, or they can develop to accommodate changing chronotopic assumptions over
time. As an example for the first type Bakhtin mentions the parlor or salon of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois novel, where the entrances and exits, the temporal and
spatial barriers connected with a visit, the formation of groups and spatial indicators
of intimacy all combine to represent metonymically the power structures of the sur-
rounding social milieu. The second type of chronotopic motif is exemplified by the
road, which has always been an important element of fictional plots as it has allowed
for encounters random and planned, for journeys and quests, for surprise arrivals
and decisive delays. In different cultures and periods, the road has carried different
connotations concerning, for example, safety and danger, speed and slowness, con-
nection and isolation, nature and culture (Bakhtin 1981, 243–247; cf. Mitterand 1990a,
93–95; Pittman 1995, 779–789).
On the next level, motifs and plot structures can combine to form a chronotope
common to a larger corpus of texts. Such ‘generic’ chronotopes, too, can be either
specific to a certain period and culture or they can metamorphose over time as they
integrate new spatiotemporal components into their traditional pattern. One of Bakh-
tin’s examples for the latter type, the idyll, will be discussed in more detail below;
his best-known example for the first type is the Greek adventure novel. This genre,
which comprises “all the so-called ‘Greek’ or ‘Sophist’ novels written between the
second and sixth centuries A.D” (Bakhtin 1981, 86), evinces a number of recurrent
chronotopic motifs and structures: it takes place in an abstract space and undefined
594 Timo Müller
time; characters do not show signs of aging over time; coincidence plays an important
role; the plot is cyclical in that the hero and heroine are reunited after their various
adventures. Bakhtin insists that the chronotope of the Greek adventure novel is more
than the sum of its motifs and structures: its component parts “entered into a new
and unique artistic unity, one, moreover, that was far from being a mere mechanical
mélange of various ancient genres” (104). A new way of conceiving space and time,
the chronotope is also a new way of seeing the world and the position of humans in
the world: in Bakhtin’s words, the “image of man” of a period and culture “is always
intrinsically chronotopic” (85).
This opens up a third, epistemological level on which literary texts represent the
spatiotemporal configurations current in the collective imagination of their period
and cultural sphere. Since Bakhtin (1986, 165) regards all genres as selective archives
or “crystallizations” of “congealed old world views,” the generic and the epistemo-
logical levels of the chronotope concept are closely intertwined. Michael V. Mont-
gomery (1993, 125 n. 2) points out, however, “that Bakhtin refers to literary genres
in his essays primarily when characterizing an audience’s habits of association as
being either ‘established’ or of long duration,” whereas he regards the chronotope as
a means of exploring “the more fundamental discursive patterns from which artistic
works take their shape and which permit them to be understood and analyzed as
cultural artifacts.” This is a valuable observation because it raises the crucial ques-
tion of how text and world relate in Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope. Bakhtin
assumes that there are “actual historical chronotopes” that are then “assimilated”
in literature. As soon as that process has been completed, these chronotopes can be
“reinforced by tradition” so that they continue “stubbornly to exist” in texts, even
over “widely separate periods of time” (Bakhtin 1981, 85). In other words, these texts
become cultural artifacts precisely because they preserve and revise chronotopes of
the past. Moreover, there is at least an implication in this argument that chronotopes
are always transmitted via texts. It is difficult to imagine, at least, how a particular set
of time-space parameters could be disseminated in the collective imagination were
it not for some kind of textual mediation. In consequence, literary texts do not just
assimilate the epistemological parameters of their period and cultural sphere, but
they have a part in shaping these very parameters.
Bakhtin tends to neglect this aspect of text-world interaction. He is interested in
the “actual historical chronotopes” depicted in literature; in consequence, he prefers
those texts and genres that provide realistic renderings of actual historical phenom-
ena. The examples in the chronotope essay are usually taken from the realist novel
and its precursors, the epic and the folk tale; no other genre receives more than a
casual aside. This rather restrictive focus, which Bakhtin (1981, 1986) retains in
related essays on the bildungsroman and the epic, is hard to justify; for some critics
it amounts to partial blindness (Mitterand 1990b, 195). Gary Saul Morson (1994, 108–
110) suggests that for Bakhtin the realist novel has a stronger ethical appeal because
it describes the choices open to the individual in a specific society and insists that
the individual is both shaped by society and responsible for his actions. This would
presumably distinguish the novel from poetry, which Bakhtin (1981, 399) sees as the
lesser genre of the two and which could in Morson’s argument be faulted for exalt-
ing individuality at the expense of communality. In Creation of a Prosaics, Morson
and Caryl Emerson (1990, 372) suggest that since “Bakhtin described the novel as
having the most complex sense of language,” he might have believed that “novels
also have the richest sense of the world.” These views are difficult to maintain, espe-
cially in comparison with poetry. Even if we accept them, however, they still fail to
justify Bakhtin’s privileging of the realist novel, as opposed to the experimental or
self-reflexive, for instance. Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake undoubtedly have
a rich sense of language and of the world, and they do create powerful time-space
configurations. The reasons behind Bakhtin’s preference, we may assume, are to be
found in the discursive environment from which his work emerged: in Marxism, and
more specifically in historical materialism, both of which insist on the reducibility of
literary texts to social issues. In their view, literature, like other social forces, must
take a stand on existing social problems and help overcome them through its ethical
or didactic appeal.
This framework explains not only Bakhtin’s preference for realist fiction but also
several other, related instances of privileging that occur in the chronotope essay.
Early on, for example, Bakhtin (1981, 86) says that time is “the dominant principle
in the chronotope,” and he seems to mean not only the Greek novels he is discuss-
ing at that point but chronotopes in general. This might reflect his general opinion
that time is a prerequisite of dialogicity and openness, or it might indicate that he
regards time as the constitutive element of narrative (Morson 1994, 97; Riffaterre 1996,
245; cf. McDowell 1996, 376). This latter view, however, has been contested by various
critics, some of whom have taken the opposite stance and argued that we experience
space more immediately than time. Robert Reid (1992, 556), for instance, argues that
space in literary texts “performs a hermeneutic role with respect to time, whereas, if
space is indeed ‘drawn in’ to plot and history, it comes in of itself, needing no inter-
preter, as the site of plot.” More specifically, Darko Suvin (1986, 58–59) points out
that “Bakhtin’s best developed chronotope, the Rabelaisian one,” is characterized
by the fact that “time is profoundly spatial and concrete.” Suvin concludes that the
privilege Bakhtin accords to time is “theoretically unsupported and practically […]
contravened.” Given that the chronotope represents time and space in their inextrica-
ble unity, there is indeed no reason for according structural primacy to the temporal
aspect.
If we want to make structural distinctions at all, I would argue, we need to begin
with Bakhtin’s basic distinction between generic and motivic chronotopes. A survey
of Bakhtin’s examples suggests that time dominates in neither of these two types. We
have already established that either time or space can dominate in generic chrono-
topes, and the motivic chronotopes Bakhtin describes in his “Concluding Remarks”
are all predominantly spatial. In fact, the inclusion of the chronotope-as-motif argua-
596 Timo Müller
bly contravenes the earlier assertion of the dominance of time, as do some other pas-
sages in the “Concluding Remarks” (which Bakhtin wrote some 35 years after the rest
of the essay). Another way of retaining the time/space distinction for analytical pur-
poses might be to adopt a historical perspective. One could argue, for instance, that
some chronotopes stress the temporal aspect while others are predominantly spatial,
depending on the epistemological coordinates of the historical and cultural environ-
ment in which they emerged. The material assembled in Bakhtin’s essay suggests that
the ancient novel is mainly defined by (adventure) time, while the medieval folklore
tradition in which Rabelais worked emphasized settings and loci.
3 Chronotopic Motifs and Ecocritical Reading

Chronotopic motifs are of particular interest in this context, I suggest, because they
manifest across different cultures and historical periods, thus allowing for compar-
ison between the perceptual coordinates of these cultures and periods. This sort of
comparative epistemological analysis clearly has environmental implications. A
closer look at one of Bakhtin’s main examples for a chronotopic motif can serve to
open our discussion of the productive impulses ecocriticism and chronotopic anal-
ysis can derive from each other. The first and major example Bakhtin mentions is
the road, whose chronotopic implications he briefly traces in novels from Apuleius
through Gogol. He describes it as “a particularly good place for random encounters”
because it is the point at which “the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied
people […] intersect” (1981, 243):
The chronotope of the road is both a point of new departures and a place for events to find their
denouement. Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road); this is
the source of the rich metaphorical expansion on the image of the road as a course: “the course
of a life,” “to set out on a new course,” “the course of history” and so on. […] the road is always
one that passes through familiar territory […]; it is the sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own
country that is revealed and depicted. (1981, 243–245)
Even a cursory glance at twentieth-century literature indicates a time-space relation

different from the one Bakhtin finds in novels like Don Quixote and Wilhelm Meister.
With the emergence of the automobile, the chronotope of the road is radically rede-
fined. In the road novels of the twentieth century, the importance of chance encoun-
ters diminishes as older, communal forms of transportation – including pedestrian
travel – are effectively banned from most roads. While encounters on the road still
occur in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for instance, they have mostly disap-
peared in Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1971), and even in more reflexive novels like Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996).
Encounters now happen off the road: in cities, in rest areas, on farms. The sole excep-
tion in these novels is hitchhiking, but it rarely brings people together in any meaning-
ful sense. Nor do the travelers usually engage with the country and its socio-cultural
diversity while they are on the road. This still happens in Steinbeck, and occasionally
in Kerouac, as far as travel is done in open cars (trucks, convertibles); it is absent from
the egocentric drug-and-car trips of Fear and Loathing and from the self-enclosed
ruminations of Swift’s characters, who only interact with each other, inside the car.
This short overview already indicates that the road is not just an isolated motif. Its
chronotopic significance extends onto the generic level, where it has come to define
the road novel and the road movie as distinct text types, and even onto the epistemo-
logical level, since its various representations form implicit patterns that have influ-
enced our perception of time and space. From an ecological perspective, one notable
epistemological feature these novels have in common is their lack of interest in the
road as a physical space. Even though much of the action takes place on roads, the
characters never seem to think of these roads as in any way important or related to
them, and they rarely (if ever) talk about them. Kerouac’s novel is particularly striking
in this respect: it takes its title from the road, most of its scenes are either set on or
involve the road, but there is no concrete description of any road in the entire novel.
The closest the narrator, Sal Paradise, gets to such a description is the scene in which
he crouches on the floor of the car because he is afraid that the driver, his friend Dean,
will cause an accident. In this scene, Sal has a brief vision of the tar and the white
strip whizzing by a mere twenty inches underneath him. Other than that, the only
information we get about the roads consists in occasional comments on the driving
condition or on other cars on the road. When Sal and his friends pass through cities
on their trips, their interest is often limited to slowing down their car and discussing
the girls on the sidewalks. The trips are usually concluded by Sal’s calculations of
how fast they were going and how quickly they made it to their destination.
Even though the road is a spatial construct, the spatial component seems to be of
minor importance to the road chronotope that emerges in these novels. At first glance
this seems to feed into arguments like Riffaterre’s (1996, 247), who claims that time
is the dominant principle in the chronotope because even a spatial construct like the
staircase “serves only as a stage for the flow of time.” Even if we accept his argument,
however, it does not show conclusively why this should be characteristic of narrative
texts in general. For one thing, the spatial component is certainly important in many
of the novels Bakhtin discusses; besides, the chronotope of the modern road arguably
obliterates time in the same degree as it obliterates space. The modern road is after
all designed to overcome large distances in as short a time as possible. The linearity
of the road as a spatial formation is repeated in its temporal structure: the time of the
road is the time one spends getting from start to finish, and the less time that is the
better. Instead of regarding the devaluation of space as a general characteristic of nar-
rative texts and their chronotopes, it seems more productive to examine the attempt to
eliminate space and time as a dated cultural ideal that expresses an epistemology – or
598 Timo Müller
in Bakhtin’s (1981, 169) terms, a “picture of the world” and an “image of man” (85) –
specific to its culture and period.
There is a third preference in Bakhtin’s essay whose implications are similarly
pervasive from an environmental point of view: the preference for what Henri Mitter-
and (1990b, 183–184) calls “historical” over “natural” time, that is, for the notion of
human progress over the cyclical and recursive temporality of the non-human world
(my translation). Indeed, Bakhtin’s discussion of novelistic chronotopes is based on
the ideal of linear progress. His essay chronicles both the progress of literature, which
becomes more and more adept at representing reality, and the civilizational progress
of the “image of man” that generates and is generated by literature. The great novel-
ists, he suggests, are those who record historical development and thus contribute to
the intertwined advance of literature and society. It is stunning how badly nonlinear
time fares in this view. Here are two quotations from Bakhtin’s essay – the first about
the Rabelaisian chronotope, the second about the provincial novel.
But a final feature of this time […], its cyclicity, is a negative feature, one that limits the force and
ideological productivity of this time. The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repet-
itiveness, is imprinted on all events occurring in this type of time. Time’s forward impulse is
limited by the cycle. For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic “becoming.”
(1981, 209–210)
[…] this type of the novel nevertheless exhibits the most limited novelistic use of folkloric time.
Here there is no broad or deep realistic emblematic; meaning does not exceed the sociohistorical
limitations inherent in the images. Cyclicity makes itself felt with particular force, therefore the
beginnings of growth and the perpetual renewal of life are weakened, separated from the pro-
gressive forces of history and even opposed to them; thus growth, in this context, makes life a
senseless running-in-place at one historical point, at one level of historical development. (1981,
230)
These remarks reflect the privilege modern Western culture as a whole has tradition-
ally accorded to a linear, future-oriented model of time and to the related principle
of continual growth. It is significant that Bakhtin does not question this privilege; on
the contrary, the second quotation shows that he tries to impose it even on texts and
genres that are based on alternative chronotopes.
The idyll is one of these alternative chronotopes, and Bakhtin’s discussion of
it is marked by a revealing tension between the hierarchical categories he employs
and the counterbalancing tendencies of the texts on which his analysis is based. For
instance, he introduces his discussion with the claim that all of the generic features
of the idyll are determined by “the immanent unity of folkloric time” (1981, 225). In
the following, however, time is rarely mentioned, and space takes over as the defin-
ing principle of the genre. Idyllic life, Bakhtin explains, is bound up with the specific
location in which it takes place. “The unity of the life of generations (in general, the
life of men) in an idyll is in most instances primarily defined by the unity of place […].
This unity of place in the life of generations weakens and renders less distinct all
the temporal boundaries between individual lives and between various phases of one
and the same life” (225). Contrary to Bakhtin’s initial assertion, then, it is the spatial
aspect that predominates in the idyllic chronotope.
This reversal affects several related categories Bakhtin employs. In particular, it
unsettles the privileges he accords to linearity (over cyclicality) and to culture (over
nature). The “blurring of temporal boundaries,” he says, “also contributes in an
essential way to the creation of the cyclic rhythmicalness of time so characteristic of
the idyll” (225). Similarly, the idyll’s emphasis on concrete physical space turns its
focus to nature, which serves not only as its constitutive setting but also as its main
conceptual tool. There is an abundance in the idyll of what we might call ecologi-
cal patterns and images. They provide, in Bakhtin’s words, “the common language
used to describe phenomena of nature and the events of human life” (226). From a
historical-materialist point of view, of course, this imaginative nature language lacks
societal relevance. Bakhtin complains that language in the idyll “has become in large
part purely metaphorical and only to an insignificant degree […] retains anything of
the actual about it”; thus, “the idyll does not know the trivial details of everyday life”
that are crucial for the ethical impact he envisions for literature (226). Given this neg-
ative judgment, it is surprising to what extent Bakhtin’s own language is informed
by the kind of nature language he disapproves of in theory. His definition of the
idyll – “an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place” (225) –
draws heavily on metaphors and images taken from nature. This seems to support
the assumption, common to environmental perspectives on literature, that nature
imagery is not an unfortunate deviation from clear, rational description but a source
of creativity in itself. Anything but devoid of societal relevance, it acts as a correc-
tive to the dominant patterns in which we think (causality, linearity, rationality) as it
asserts and disseminates organic conceptions of language, thought, and life.
The ecological approach thus revalorizes alternative chronotopes like the
idyll, which preserve older conceptions of human (cultural) life and its relation to
its spatiotemporal environment. Indeed, over the last two decades retrieving these
alternative chronotopes has become an important function of environmental literary
criticism, which has usually emphasized the very aspects Bakhtin neglects: space,
nature, and cyclicality. The new perspectives it has opened on Romantic literature
are a case in point. In the 1970s and 1980s, the critical field of Romanticism was dom-
inated by the deconstructivists, who typically read literary texts as self-referential
negotiations of linguistic, cultural, and ideological presuppositions. Harold Bloom’s
focus on intertextuality and cultural precursor figures belongs here, as do Paul de
Man’s dissections of Romantic rhetoric and tropology. In chronotopic terms, decon-
structivism was primarily interested in time, in the ever-changing, dynamic play of
signifiers that constitutes texts. (One of de Man’s best-known essays is entitled “The
Rhetoric of Temporality.”) Space, in contrast, became a problematic concept in several
respects. Not only did it evoke Euclidean geometry with its supposedly simplifying
abstractions; it generally resisted integration into a set of ideas that presupposed a
600 Timo Müller
rupture between signification and the physical world. Thus deconstructivism, while
it certainly inspired much brilliant work, neglected a central aspect of the Romantic
chronotope: its rootedness in concrete, physical spaces, in rural and natural envi-
ronments. Ecocritics have restored this aspect and have drawn attention to the many
ways in which the Romantic “poetry of earth” (Keats) anticipated and negotiated the
complexities of culture/nature interaction whose disregard has affected us so funda-
mentally since the Industrial Revolution.
4 Toward an Ecology of the Chronotope

There are, then, four privileges or imbalances in Bakhtin’s account of the chrono-
tope that an ecocritical approach might lead us to question and, ultimately, discard.
The first and most obvious case is the privilege he accords to chronotopes specific
to human culture over those derived from spatiotemporal patterns found in nature,
which is problematic both from a literary and a societal point of view. In literary
criticism, it results in the exclusion or devalorization of texts, genres, and periods
in which the natural environment figures prominently. Bakhtin’s derogatory analy-
sis of the idyll and the provincial novel are telling in this respect, and one suspects
that Romantic or American transcendentalist texts would not do much better in his
analysis. It does not take an ecocritic to point out that the genealogy formed by these
nature-centered texts has contributed decisively to modern conceptions of subjectivity
and has remained a productive, inspiring literary influence to the present day. What
the environmental approach does point out is the cultural relevance of nature-derived
chronotopes and of texts that preserve and disseminate these chronotopes. In a time
when human culture is organized in a way that necessitates the destruction of its
natural environment even though that destruction has come to endanger the very sur-
vival of humankind, this relevance is higher than ever. For much the same reasons,
an environmental perspective would seek to reverse another preference of Bakhtin’s,
namely, that of linear over cyclical time. It is the notion of linear progress regardless of
the environment in which one progresses that has led to the nature/culture rift in the
first place, and many of the ideologemes connected with it (steady economic growth
and cultural expansion, for instance) have widened that rift.
In this vein, an environmental perspective might lead us to question more gen-
erally the anthropocentric implications of a third privilege Bakhtin (1981, 86) estab-
lishes, namely his claim that time is “the dominant principle in the chronotope.”
After all, our perception of space is more highly developed than our perception of
time, and this is a trait we seem to share with most life-forms. Ecosystems are above
all spatial entities whose self-organization proceeds on principles of balance and
stability to a larger degree than upheaval and change. Nature, in Gregory Bateson’s
(2000, 448) words, is conservative, and the vast majority of human cultures emulates
its principles. It is only in modern Western society – if at all – that time has become
more important than space, and arguably this is because of that society’s devalua-
tion of space (i.e., of the environment) rather than its purposive valuation of time. In
Bakhtin’s defense, one might point out that the textual material on which his claim
is based comes out of modern Western society, and the chronotopes he describes
necessarily reflect the notions of time and space prevalent in this society. Even if we
limit our focus to the purely literary, however, Bakhtin’s privileging of time remains
questionable. We have already seen that the idyllic chronotope, for one, is dominated
by spatial rather than temporal concerns, and Bakhtin’s analysis of the provincial
novel results in similar findings. The theoretical pitfalls of his claim become strik-
ingly evident in Riffaterre’s elaborations on it. Riffaterre (1996, 245) argues that time is
necessarily dominant in narrative texts because it is their constitutive element. “The
principal mechanism of narrative,” he says, “is time and its impact on characters and
situations. The impact translates as a sequence of transformations of an initial given
order for the story to reach its assigned telos.” What this argument ignores, however,
is the difference between time as a condition for narrative and time as a theme of
narrative. While narrative certainly requires temporal progression, this does not
mean that it need concern itself with the impact of time on characters and situations.
Bakhtin himself demonstrates that time has very little impact in the Greek adventure
novel, and there are narrative texts of the reflexive sort – such as Virginia Woolf’s
“The Mark on the Wall” (1917) – that take place within a few minutes and bring about
little change in characters or situations. Generally, on a thematic level narratives can
focus on the impact of space just as they can focus on the impact of time. There is no
inherent bias toward either the one or the other – nor, for that matter, is narrative
always as neatly teleological as Riffaterre implies.
The next step in Riffaterre’s argument brings to the open the anthropocentric
implications of the privileging of time. Having established the structural and thematic
primacy of time, Riffaterre goes on to explain why space is the subordinate element:
space is the medium or “code” through which time manifests itself to a perceiving
consciousness. “Time made visible as it is translated into space is time significant for
someone from someone’s point of view, a subjectivized object, as it were” (1996, 245).
What this argument shows above all is that the supposed dominance of time over
space needs quite a lot of explaining. Not only does time depend on space as its trans-
lator, but it also requires a conscious observer who is aware that the change in space is
a manifestation of time. If we take the environmental point of view, on the other hand,
and look at the phenomenon in spatial terms, an easier solution appears. Space does
not require a refined (human) consciousness to manifest itself, nor does it need to be
made visible to become perceptible. It is not surprising, then, that space is the dom-
inant principle in so many chronotopes. In fact, one could make an argument that
this is the case in almost all non-Western and pre-modern genres, and also in those in
which earlier chronotopic structures survive. Examples for the latter type include not
only the idyll, the folk tale, and the provincial novel: T. S. Eliot’s (1975, 178) concept of
602 Timo Müller
the “mythical method” indicates that even experimental modernist texts such as The
Waste Land and Ulysses have a predominantly spatial chronotope.
Thus, an ecological perspective on the chronotope will contribute to a revaloriza-
tion of space and its manifestations – especially the natural environment – in literary
analysis. At the same time, it can be expected to address the fourth imbalance we
have identified in Bakhtin’s essay: his preference for narrative texts over poetry. There
are poems that give very little attention to time and space, to be sure – many love
poems fall into this category – but since Romanticism at the latest, space has become
a defining aspect of the genre. Detailed description of a setting and its impact on the
speaker is a standard pattern in modern poetry, and one that ecocriticism has tended
to emphasize because it draws attention to the embeddedness of human life in the
natural environment. Gray’s (1966 [1751]) “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,”
one of the few poems Bakhtin mentions, is a famous example of this pattern. It starts
from an evocative, sensual description of the countryside as the sun begins to set and
humans and animals retire from the scene, leaving “the world to darkness and to me”
(line 4). Given this strong spatial component, which is sustained throughout, Bakh-
tin’s (1981, 228) categorization of the poem appears somewhat tendentious: “an elegy
of the meditative type with a strong idyllic component […] incorporating the matri-
ces of the grave, love, new life, spring, children, old age and so forth.” Once again,
Bakhtin privileges the temporal aspect of the text and its chronotope. He has nothing
to say about the rich natural images and spatial metaphors by which the speaker’s
meditations on transience are inspired in the first place and nurtured throughout the
poem, up to the concluding epitaph, which begins “Here rests his head upon the lap
of Earth” (line 117). An environmental approach would emphasize these spatial com-
ponents of the idyllic chronotope and read them as indicative of the way the speaker
imagines his relationship with the natural environment. It would draw on Gray’s
popular poem to recover a historically specific perception of the environment that
had a considerable cultural influence in its time and can help disseminate an ecolog-
ically viable perception of space today.
An environmental approach can supplement the concept of the chronotope in
other ways as well. It can draw attention to the fact that, while the linear model has
been dominant for some time in our culture, there have always been texts that have
preserved, adapted, and disseminated alternative chronotopes. It can also restore and
revalorize such alternative chronotopes, especially those based on cyclical time and
natural space, which are neglected in Bakhtin’s work. The functional theories of lit-
erary ecology that have emerged in recent years (Zapf 2002) seem particularly well
equipped for this task, as do approaches that conceive literature as an archive of cul-
tural conceptions of nature (cf. Böhme 1994, 74–75). As this chapter has indicated, the
adaptation of Bakhtin’s concept into ecocritical inquiry will also require a thorough
examination of the political and ideological contexts in which Bakhtin was working.
The Caribbean writer Wilson Harris’s warning that “a civilization which is geared
towards progressive realism cannot solve the hazards and dangers and the pollu-
tion which it has inflicted upon the globe” could serve as a starting point for such
an examination, which would need to problematize the epistemological premises
of Bakhtin’s essay and inquire more broadly into the cultural relativity and the dis-
cursive negotiation of chronotopes (qtd. in DeLoughrey and Hadley 2011, 4). It could
draw on the analytical tools provided by the growing field of postcolonial ecocriticism
(see ↗10 Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies) and by ecologically informed cultural
analysis more generally (Heise 2008). While all of these approaches can contribute to
an ecocritical adaptation of the chronotope, they could profit in their turn from the
connections Bakhtin’s concept reveals between the formal intricacies of literary texts
and the epistemological coordinates of our collective imagination.
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Perchey, Graham. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London: Routledge, 2007.
Primeau, Roland. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996.
Steinby, Liisa, and Tintti Klapuri, eds. Bakhtin and His Others: (Inter)Subjectivity, Chronotope,
Dialogism. New York: Anthem Press, 2013.
Erik Redling
31 Cultural Ecology and Literary Translation
Abstract: This chapter adapts Hubert Zapf’s triadic functional model of literature as
cultural ecology to processes of translation and explores the cultural work of transla-
tions made by genteel thinkers from the 1840s to 1860s with the help of three exam-
ples. It demonstrates (a) how genteel thinkers such as Charles Eliot Norton and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow used their translations of ‘sacred’ European literary icons like
Dante to establish the cultural authority of Standard English in the face of Ameri-
can regionalist dialect writings, (b) Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s efforts to morally
reform post-Civil War America with his translation of the Greek philosopher Epicte-
tus’ writings, and (c) Higginson’s practice of revitalizing ‘dead’ European poems by
translating a few sonnets by Petrarch in an American setting.
Key Terms: Translation, cultural ecology, dialect writing, genteel culture, post-Civil
War America
1 I ntroduction
The recent ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies introduced a marked shift from strictly
linguistic to cultural approaches to translation. Programmatically announced in the
1990 collection of essays Translation, History and Culture edited by Susan Bassnett
and André Lefevere, this change has led to a wide spectrum of new studies that range
from investigations of the ways in which translation renders cultural differences (‘cul-
tural translation’; Sturge 2011, 67) to examinations of translation from postcolonial-
and gender-studies perspectives (Munday 2012, 192–193). The ‘cultural turn’ has also
opened the door to various studies that connect translation with notions of mobility
such as ‘traveling’ and explored the translation process as “a form of transportation
or appropriation of the foreign within the language and culture of the nation” (Polezzi
2009, 172). Yet even though the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies has generated a
plethora of valuable work on the complex and multifaceted interactions of translation
and culture over the last few decades, little critical attention has been paid to the use
of translation as a way of confronting perceived deficiencies in a given culture: Trans-
lators may identify a particular lack or impoverishment in their own culture (target
culture) and translate literary texts from a foreign culture (source culture) into their
familiar cultural context with the aim of infusing the latter with desired aspects from
the former (e.g. ideas from ‘great minds’, ethical values, and aesthetic beauty).
A useful model for explaining this shortcoming is provided by Hubert Zapf’s cul-
tural-ecological approach to literature (↗7 Cultural Ecology of Literature). Zapf argues
606 Erik Redling
that literature as a cultural-ecological medium symbolically expresses marginalized

dimensions of human life and reintegrates them into larger “cultural ecosystems”
(Zapf 2002, 63–68): “Literature,” he states, is
a cultural medium which developed a special sensibility for the ecopsychological and ecocul-
tural impoverishment caused by conformist, standardized structures of a one-sided economic
and technocentric modernization. In reintegrating the culturally separated spheres, literature
restores diversity-within-connectivity as a creative potential of cultural ecosystems. (Zapf 2014,
229)
In order to explore the different ways in which translations can, on the one hand,
enrich an impoverished culture and, on the other hand, reintegrate previously sepa-
rated cultural spheres, I will follow Zapf’s (2014, 235) triadic functional model of lit-
erature as cultural ecology and adapt it to the processes of translation: (1) translation
as a cultural-critical metadiscursive act which reveals impoverished cultural struc-
tures; (2) translation as an imaginative counter-discursive force, which foregrounds
and symbolically empowers the culturally excluded and marginalized; (3) translation
as a reintegrative discourse, which brings together culturally separated spheres and
“thereby contributes to the constant renewal of the cultural center from its margins.”
Guided by such a cultural-ecological model of translation, I will illustrate its use-
fulness with the help of three examples from translations by genteel thinkers in nine-
teenth-century America: First, I will focus on genteel thinkers such as Charles Eliot
Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell and demonstrate
that their translations of European literary icons like Dante, Michelangelo, Petrarch,
and Goethe served as a counterweight to the emerging regionalist writings in the
1830s and 1840s. Second, I will examine Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s effort of
reforming the American post-Civil War society with ideal moral values via the trans-
lation of the Greek philosopher Epictetus’ writings. And finally, I will explore Higgin-
son’s translation of a few sonnets by Petrarch in an American setting with which he
tries to reenergize the ‘dead’ poems and, thus, make their aesthetic beauty available
to the American public.
My overall intention is to generate a narrative about the cultural work of trans-
lations made by genteel thinkers from the 1840s to 1860s. Rather than viewing the
genteel thinkers’ translations from a purely linguistic standpoint, I want to place
them in their historical and cultural contexts and show that they were meant to estab-
lish the genteel thinkers’ cultural authority and promote Standard English and Euro-
pean masterpieces as models for a budding American literature.
2 D
ialect Writing, Translation, and the Sacraliza-
tion of Standard English in Nineteenth-Century
America
Genteel thinkers like Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James
Russell Lowell could not but notice the popularity of the so-called Southwestern
humor tradition in the 1830s and 1840s. They turned to translating widely acknowl-
edged works written by European literary giants such as Dante, Michelangelo,
Petrarch, and Goethe into Standard English in order to counteract what they per-
ceived as a lack of aesthetic quality and even a threat to refinement, education, and
the ‘purity’ of Standard English in the proliferation of dialect writing.
A helpful framework for understanding the genteel thinkers’ struggle against
the immensely popular dialect writings by Southwestern humorists such as Augus-
tus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1875), and Johnson
Jones Hooper (1815–1862) is provided by the critic Lawrence Levine, who claims in
his work Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was the outcome of a gradual
sacralization process of cultural artifacts that began in the 1850s: Public intellectuals
created an aura of sacredness around cultural objects they deemed to be aesthetically
superior (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays and Richard Wagner’s operas) and downgraded
other cultural artifacts which they perceived as being aesthetically inferior. As Levine
(1990, 224) persuasively demonstrates, a cluster of adjectives such as “highbrow,”
“lowbrow,” “rude,” “lesser,” “high,” “low,” “beautiful,” “legitimate,” “vulgar,”
“pure,” “true,” and many others were applied to nouns such as “arts” and “culture”:
“Though plentiful, the adjectives were not random. They clustered around a conge-
ries of values, a set of categories that defined and distinguished culture vertically, that
created hierarchies which were to remain meaningful for much of this century.” As a
result, the culture gap between “false” entertainment of the masses and “real” art,
which, according to a small elite, had to be met “with reverent, informed, disciplined
seriousness” (229), widened and became firmly entrenched in late nineteenth-cen-
tury America.
Levine’s framework permits a better understanding of the genteel thinkers’ dislike
of the Southwestern humor tradition, which consisted of sketches and tales based in
“the newly settled areas of the frontier in the South reaching from Georgia into Ten-
nessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, known at the time as the ‘South-West’”
(Arac 2005, 32) and featured depictions of rural folk and their local customs, crude
humor, and regional dialects. A typical Southwestern humorist writer, according to
the critic Jonathan Arac (2005, 34), was “a person of considerable cultural authority:
white, male, a practitioner of a highly literate profession such as journalism or the
law, and politically active,” who generated a sense of ‘humor’ in their body of work by
portraying “the eccentricities of people of lower social standing than that of its writers
608 Erik Redling
and presumed readers” (35–36). Well-known authors like Longstreet, Thorpe, and
Hooper, who, as highly educated white men, developed an interest in the budding
American vernacular culture, created literary dialects with idiosyncratic spellings, as
the dialect excerpt from Longstreet’s (1850 [1840], 24) short story “The Horse-Swap”
demonstrates: “Well, fetch up your nag, my old cock; you’re jist the lark I wanted
to get hold of. I am perhaps a leetle, jist a leetle, of the best man at a horse-swap
that ever stole crackling out of his mammy’s fat gourd. Where is your hoss?” These
“local narratives” (Arac 2005, 31) often evinced a frame structure (consisting of the
sequence “Standard English – Literary Dialect – Standard English”), which allowed
their authors to establish a contrast between a standard speaking, literate, and gen-
tlemanly narrator from the North and uneducated, uncivilized, dialect speaking
people from the Southwest territory. Such frame tales operate not only as “strategies
of containment” (11), that is, as ‘prison-houses’ of dialect language, but also demon-
strate the Southwestern humorists’ deliberate emphasis on the difference between a
nonstandard and a standard script in order to elevate the latter.
Similar to the dialect writers of the Southwestern humorist tradition, Norton,
Longfellow, Lowell and other genteel thinkers regarded the dialects of the local nar-
ratives as a threat to the national Standard English. They were by far not alone in this
assessment. In Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America,
Gavin Jones (1999, 15) argues that the evolving interest in vernacular speech corre-
lated with anxiety about linguistic and cultural disintegration in postbellum America:
“Alongside the new interest in American dialects, a profound fear was developing: a
language that remains in touch with the nation’s diverse cultural groups is a chaotic
threat to the coherence of cultural authority.” Dreading the breakdown of cultural
norms and hierarchies, conservative critics like Richard Grant White, the author of
the immensely popular Words and Their Uses (1870), wanted to uphold the cultural
elite and “preserve the purity of its cultivated standards” (Jones 1999, 18). As Jones
puts it:
The problem for White was dissolution: American political and economic life was pushing uncul-
tivated people into prominent positions, from where their degenerate language attained massive
powers of infection. The standards of authority were under threat because people were handling
the symbols of elegance without care for their meaning, and language itself was losing its value
as a medium of communication. The only solution for the general culture of the “middling folk,”
thought White, was their submission to the “minds of the highest class,” whose inborn ration-
ality and purity of expression alone could prevent further deterioration in the nation’s moral
fabric. (1999, 20)
Preoccupied with the decay of cultural authority and cultivated standards, critics like
White participated in what Jones (1999, 20) calls a post-Civil War “craze for verbal crit-
icism” and engaged in general debates on the American language without examining
the particularities of American speech and writing and devising a plan of action to
slow down or stop the process of linguistic and cultural fragmentation.
Genteel thinkers like Norton, Longfellow, and Lowell shared the anxiety about
dissolving cultivated standards expressed by “verbal critics” like White (Jones 1999,
20) and perceived the dialect writings of the Southwestern Humorists as an actual
threat to the purity and unity of written Standard English. In order to contain the
dialect disease and ward off the threat to the sacralized authority of the standard
script, they turned to the translation of Dante’s poetry into Standard English in the
late 1850s and early 1860s. Triggered by the obsession with Dante in England, they,
like their English friends John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, revered Dante’s master-
pieces, but also recognized two major links between Dante and the USA at the brink
of a civil war: First, the great Italian poet witnessed how a conflict between two
parties – the Guelphs and the Ghibellines – escalated into a civil war (which led to
Dante’s exile from Florence); second, Dante wrote his poetic works such as La Vita
Nuova (“The New Life”) and the Divina Commedia (“The Divine Comedy”) not in the
commonly used Latin language but in the Tuscan dialect (cf. Dante’s De Vulgari Elo-
quentia / “On the Eloquence of Vernacular), which eventually became the national
language of Italy. Against the backdrop of the American conflict between North and
South, Norton and other genteel thinkers accordingly agreed that Dante was the ideal
European poet for their translation efforts. Not only did he experience a civil war, but
he also composed poetic works in a distinct national language which were widely
acknowledged masterpieces of world literature and thus “worth translating” (Norton
1867, 143). Their translations of Dante had two goals: on the one hand, they would
provide the relatively young American literature with a representative model of cul-
tivated standards and taste and thus enrich American literature and culture with the
genius of Dante; on the other hand, the translations of Dante’s works into written
Standard English could reinforce and elevate the cultural authority of the standard
language above the regionally bound literary dialects.
During the Civil War, the so-called Dante Club, which included the poets Long-
fellow and Lowell as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and other thinkers such as
Norton and William Dean Howells, met on a regular basis and discussed Longfellow’s
translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1910),
Howells reminisces on the meetings of the Dante Club and mentions the shadow
of the Civil War cast on the translation activity as well as Longfellow’s reverential
approach to the act of translating and reading Dante:
Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in the very
heart of it Longfellow was setting about his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he
has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking. (Howells 2004 [1910],
59)
Indeed, the speaker of Longfellow’s first of six sonnets, which Longfellow placed
before the translated text (1866, Flower-De-Luce, after the publication of the Divine
Comedy in 1865–1867), describes a cathedral as well as a praying laborer and then
610 Erik Redling
relates the daily activity of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy metaphorically to a

daily visit to a cathedral:
I.
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er:
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an indistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minister gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait. (Longfellow 1867, 480)
The metaphor (Dante’s divine comedy is a cathedral) is framed by the simile “So,
[…] The tumult […]” and, if we are to believe William Dean Howells’ words, captures
Longfellow’s prayer-like attitude towards translating Dante. Apparently, Longfellow
perceived the act of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy as a process of worship that,
after the horrific death of his wife Fanny in 1861 (alluded to in the poem with the ref-
erence to “burden”), became his spiritual and therapeutic consolation. Although the
other members of the Dante Club may not have shared Longfellow’s view of translat-
ing Dante’s Divine Comedy as an act of spiritual veneration, they certainly shared his
admiration of Dante and helped him in his endeavor of creating a faithful translation
of Dante’s masterpiece.
The concerted effort of re-establishing the cultural authority of written Standard
English via the translation of generally recognized literary works of art began after
the Civil War ended in 1865. Norton published his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova
alongside Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1867 only two years
after the celebration of the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth in 1265. Other translations
of canonical literary works followed in short succession: William Cullen Bryant trans-
lated Homer’s Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1871) into blank verse; the poet and critic
Bayard Taylor also published his translation of Goethe’s Faust in 1870–1871; and the
writer and artist Christopher Cranch published his translation of Virgil’s epic poem,
the Aeneid, as The Aeneid of Virgil in 1872. These and many other translations of
European masterpieces serve as a “cultural-critical metadiscourse” (Zapf 2014, 235):
they expose what the genteel thinkers thought were blatant deficits in American lit-
erature and culture. Regarding regional dialect writings as signs of an impoverished
culture and imagination as well as an outright threat to written Standard English,
they devised a strategy of using translations of literary masterpieces as an “imagi-
native counter-discursive” force (235) to empower and elevate the marginalized and
dissolving cultivated standards. As liberal and reform-oriented critics, these “critical
Americans” (Butler 2007, 6) undertook the endeavor of “reforming” the moral values
and the prevailing conceptions of aesthetics in the post-Civil War United States of
America. A case in point is the genteel intellectual Thomas Wentworth Higginson
whose translations of the writings of the Greek philosopher Epictectus (published in
1865) and selected sonnets by Petrarch (published in 1867) will be discussed below.
3 T
he New Life of Postbellum America: Thomas
Wentworth Higginson’s Translations of Epictetus
and Petrarch
Without a doubt, the members of the Dante Club noticed the connection between the
opportunity for a fresh start after the Civil War and the title of Dante’s first poetic work:
Vita Nuova (“The New Life”). In the preface to his Notes of Travel and Study in Italy
(published together with The New Life of Dante Alighieri in 1859), Norton (1887 [1859],
v) claimed that the on-going unification process in Italy, the so-called ‘Risorgimento,’
will give Italy “[a] new life.” Similarly, he and other Dante aficionados must have
regarded the political unification of North and South as a chance to give a “new life”
to the United States of America. Surely this phrase crossed Norton’s mind when the
Dante Club celebrated the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1865, which
coincided with the end of the American Civil War, at a time when he published his
translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova alongside Longfellow’s Dante translation in 1867.
In order to facilitate the process of unification and help bridge the deep rifts between
North and South in literature and culture, the genteel intellectuals used the transla-
tion of Dante’s work and other masterpieces of literature and philosophy into written
Standard English to strengthen its cultural authority in postbellum America. From
their point of view, a strong standard language would forge a cultural unity against
existing divisions and visible forms of dissolution (e.g., regional literary dialects). It
therefore goes without saying that their translations would also allow them – public
intellectuals from the North (in particular from Boston) – to establish their cultural
authority and make them arbiters of literature and culture in post Civil War America.
One of the genteel thinkers who deliberately employed translation as a way of
giving a “new life” to the unified nation was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1823, Higginson attended Harvard College at the age of
thirteen and graduated in 1841. Participating in a variety of reform movements, he
became one of the most prominent male advocates of women’s rights and a fervent
supporter of the abolitionist cause in the antebellum period. In August 1862, he
started recruiting soldiers for the 51st Massachusetts Infantry regiment as a captain,
612 Erik Redling
but quickly received “a letter from Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, military com-
mander of the Department of the South, offering him the colonelcy of the first reg-
iment of emancipated slaves” (Madison 1997, xii). Higginson accepted the offer and
became a colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers regiment from November
1862 to October 1864. After retiring from his colonelcy, he translated the writings of
the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, which was published as The Works of Epictetus in
1865, as well as selected sonnets of Petrarch, which he published in his 1867 essay
“Sunshine and Petrarch” for the journal Atlantic Monthly. In the following brief dis-
cussion, I want to demonstrate that Higginson perceived the act of translating the
works of Epictetus and Petrarch as a cultural-critical metadiscursive act as well as an
imaginative counter-discursive act, which permitted him to shape the literature and
culture of a new, unified America.
Critics usually neglect the cultural work of Higginson’s translations. Madison, for
instance, argues that Higginson’s act of translating the writings of Epictetus was his
therapeutic way of distancing himself from and processing his war experiences:
Perhaps in despair he turned to Epictetus, the Greek slave who had become the great teacher
of stoicism, and who, Higginson had learned from Redpath, had been the solace of Toussaint,
another slave who had liberated his race only to return to prison himself. As an exercise in
detachment and restoration of health and soul, Higginson prepared a revision of Elizabeth Cart-
er’s translation of the discourses, fragments, and Enchiridion of Epictetus, which appeared in
1865. (Madison 1997, xvii)
Madison, however, pays only partial attention to Higginson’s own explanation of

why he translated Epictetus’ works, which the author stated in the preface of the 1865
edition:
It has seemed to me strange, but very natural, to pass from camp life to the study of Epictetus.
Where should a student find contentment in enforced withdrawal from active service, if not in
“the still air of delightful studies”? There seemed a special appropriateness, also, in coming to
this work from a camp of colored soldiers, whose great exemplar, Toussaint l’Ouverture, made
the works of this his fellow-slave a favorite manual. Moreover, the return to peace seems a fitting
time to call anew the public attention to those eternal principles on which alone true prosper-
ity is based; and, in a period of increasing religious toleration, to revive the voice of one who
bore witness to the highest spiritual truths, ere the present sects were born. (Higginson 1865, x;
emphasis added)
A comparison between Madison’s appraisal of Higginson’s translation of Epictetus

and the passage from Higginson’s preface clearly shows that Madison was influenced
by this particular section (see, for instance, his reference to Toussaint l’Ouverture).
But it also demonstrates that he gave little consideration to the final part of the
preface, especially the first part of the sentence (italicized above) in which Higginson
explicitly states that, after the Civil War, he wants to make the Americans aware of
“those eternal principles” and “highest spiritual truths” which, from his viewpoint,
represent a necessary precondition for America’s future prosperity.
Higginson selected Epictetus’ text for his rewriting process because he saw paral-
lels between Epictetus’ ideas and the contemporary American context. A particularly
telling example is Epictetus’ discourse on virtue and prosperity in Chapter IV of Book
I; a comparison of the same passage in both translations will illustrate Higginson’s
practice of revising Carter’s translation in the light of the U.S.A. as a unified nation:
Elizabeth Carter’s Translation:

Chapter IV: Of Improvement
Now if Virtue promises Happiness, Prosperity, and Ease; then, an Improvement in Virtue is cer-
tainly an Improvement in each of these. For to whatever Point the Perfection of any thing abso-
lutely brings us, Improvement is always an Approach towards it. (1758, 14; emphasis added)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Revision:

Chapter IV: Of Progress
Now if virtue promises happiness, prosperity, and peace; then progress in virtue is certainly
progress in each of these. For to whatever point the perfection of anything absolutely brings us,
progress is always an approach towards it. (1890, 13–14; emphasis added)
Higginson’s apparent substitution of “ease” by “peace” (boldface) points to the fact

that he had the end of the Civil War in mind. But what is more striking is his deliberate
change of Carter’s use of “improvement” to “progress” (italicized). Deciding against
the term “improvement” with its possible allusion to Benjamin Franklin’s emphasis
on self-improvement as the key to happiness and success, Higginson favored the term
“progress,” as it tied the notion of virtue to the progress-oriented reform movements
of the nineteenth-century and linked the history of the United States to the history of
social and cultural progress. Hence he used his translation of Epictetus’ writings to
advocate a return to ‘eternal principles’ such as virtue and other moral values, which,
from his viewpoint, would ensure America’s progress and prosperity.
By translating selected sonnets by Petrarch in the essay “Sunshine and Petrarch”
(1867), Higginson (1867, 307) pursues the idea of translation as a process of revital-
ization, which resuscitates the beautiful Italian sonnets via the beautiful natural
American surroundings of the translator during the translation process, and posits
it against a purely technical approach to the Italian poems: “With the world thus
young, beauty eternal, fancy free, why should these delicious Italian pages exist but
to be tortured into grammatical examples?” Higginson begins his essay with a lengthy
description of the setting where he aims to perform the translations. These are the
first two sentences: “Near my summer home there is a little cove or landing by the
bay, where nothing larger than a boat can ever anchor. I sit above it now, upon the
steep bank, knee-deep in buttercups, and amid grass so lush and green that it seems
to ripple and flow instead of waving” (307). He then poses the question which triggers
his innovative experiment:
614 Erik Redling
Is it not possible, by bringing such a book into the open air, to separate it from the grimness of
commentators, and bring it back to life and light and Italy? The beautiful earth is the same as
when this poetry and passion were new; there is the same sunlight, the same blue water and
green grass; yonder pleasure-boat might bear, for aught we know, the friends and lovers of five
centuries ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with Boccaccio and Fiammetta as comrades,
and with Chaucer as their stranger guest. (Higginson 1867, 307)
Based on the premise that the “beautiful earth is the same as” the beautiful earth
at the time when Petrarch wrote his sonnets, Higginson creates correspondences
between the beauty of the landscape he is pretending to see at the moment and the
imagined Italian landscape of the past (the same sunlight, blue water, green grass,
and pleasure-boats) and then permits his fantasy to associatively link Petrarch and
Laura to another famous historical couple, Boccaccio and Fiammetta, as well as to the
great English poet of the Middle Ages, Chaucer.
In a next step, he explores the translation process in the subsequent transla-
tions of nine sonnets and one song (“Canzone XXIII”), trying to discover what kind of
impact the translation of the Italian texts has on him: “let me translate a sonnet, and
see if anything is left after the sweet Italian syllables are gone” (Higginson 1867, 308).
After this announcement and learned reference to the “dolce stil nuovo” (“sweet new
style”) which characterizes Petrarch’s poetic style, Higginson asserts that Petrarch’s
words are as fresh as they were five hundred years ago: “Before this continent was
discovered, before English literature existed, when Chaucer was a child, these words
were written. Yet they are to-day as fresh and perfect as these laburnum-blossoms
that droop above my head” (308). He then provides the reader with his translation of
Petrarch’s sonnet 129, before answering the question of why a person would want to
translate a perfect poem:
The more one praises a poem, the more absurd becomes one’s position, perhaps, in trying to
translate it. If it is so perfect – is the natural inquiry, – why not let it alone? It is a doubtful
blessing to the human race, that the instinct of translation still prevails, stronger than reason;
and after one has once yielded to it, then each untranslated favorite is like the trees round a
backwoodsman’s clearing, each of which stands, a silent defiance, until he has cut it down. Let
us try the axe again. (Higginson 1867, 308)
Claiming that the human race has an “instinct of translation,” Higginson compares
the act of translation to the cutting down of defiant trees with an axe and then pro-
ceeds to metaphorically cut down another sonnet by Petrarch. In the subsequent
comments on his translations and the act of translation, he mentions the “pleasant
problem” of following “the strict order of the original” (309) and contends that “there
seems a kind of deity who presides over this union of languages, and who sometimes
silently lays the words in order, after all one’s own poor attempts have failed” (309).
Apart from such reflections on mystic elements of the translation process, he gen-
erally views the translation of Petrarch’s sonnets as a way of giving new life to the
immortal Italian poems.
Higginson’s translations of Epictetus’s writings and Petrarch’s poems constitute

reactions to what he considered to be deficits in American society and culture. First,
he identifies a lack of virtue and ethical behavior in postbellum America and utilizes
his revision of Carter’s translation of Epictetus’ works to advocate an ideal model of
virtue and ethics to which Americans of the newly unified nation should strive if they
want to live in happiness and prosperity. Indeed, he regards the “eternal principles”
like virtue put forth by the Greek philosopher Epictetus to be prerequisites for per-
sonal progress in particular and the progress of the American nation in general. In the
1890 preface to the revised edition of Epictetus’ works, Higginson (1890, iii) expresses
his satisfaction that his translation (together with the two other translations of Epic-
tetus that have appeared since 1865) has apparently succeeded in gaining and reform-
ing a large American readership: “It is […] of very little importance who receives the
credit of the version, as long as the high thoughts of Epictetus secure a renewal and
enlargement of their audience.” Secondly, he perceives his translation of Petrarch’s
sonnets in the essay “Sunshine and Petrarch” as an imaginative counter-discursive
act to the impoverished experience of using the sonnets merely as grammatical exer-
cises. The essay also shows his awareness of the fact that time and place influence
the act of translation: Higginson’s text invites the readers to believe that he is trans-
lating and thinking about the sonnets and the process of translation at the moment
of reading. In other words, the readers are supposed to think that they are witnessing
the act of translation in the here and now. He also emphasizes the beauty of the place
where he is sitting and translating a selection of Petrarch’s sonnets (the sunshine, the
green grass, the blue water and boats in the distance) and explores the idea that the
translation of the Italian sonnets in the middle of beautiful nature brings the poems
back to life and light again. It is very likely that his novel approach to translation,
which liberates the imagination from a strict adherence to the text (see, for instance,
his train of associations surrounding Petrarch and Laura), is also directed against his
fellow genteel thinkers who were obsessed with creating a hyper-literal translation of
Dante’s Divina Commedia during the Civil War.
Though perhaps critical of other translation efforts, Higginson and his transla-
tions have to be placed in the larger context of the genteel thinkers’ struggle against
the dissolution and fragmentation of cultivated standards. Perceiving dialect writing
as ‘low’ culture that marginalized and even threatened what they considered to be
‘high’ culture, Norton, Longfellow, Higginson, Lowell, and many other intellectu-
als from the North engaged in the translation of literary masterpieces into written
Standard English to counter the spread of dialect writing and establish themselves
as arbiters of literature and culture – the cultural elite – as well as re-establish the
cultural authority of the standard script. Living in a time characterized by various
reform movements (e.g., Fourierism, Unitarianism, abolitionism, and women’s suf-
frage), they devised their translation project as a reform movement with which they
wanted to safeguard and improve postbellum America in the face of the emerging
mass culture.
616 Erik Redling
4 B
ibliography
4.1 W
orks Cited
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Butler, Leslie. Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Carter, Elizabeth. All the Works of Epictetus, Which are Now Extant; Consisting of His Discourses,
Preserved by Arrian, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments. Trans. Elizabeth Carter.
London: S. Richardson, 1758.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. The Works of Epictetus. Trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Sunshine and Petrarch.” Atlantic Monthly 119 (September 1867):
307–311.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Preface to Revised Edition.” The Works of Epictetus. Trans. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1890. iii.
Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1910. Boston, MA: IndyPublish.com,
2004.
Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999.
Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “Oft Have I Seen at Some Cathedral Door.” The Divine Comedy of
Dante Alighieri. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company,
1867.
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin. “The Horse-Swap.” Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, Etc., in the
First Half Century of the Republic. New York: Harper, 1850. 23–31.
Madison, Robert D. “Introduction.” Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings. By Thomas
Wentworth Higginson. New York: Penguin, 1997. vii–xxii.
Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London: Routledge,
2012.
Norton, Charles Eliot. The New Life of Dante Alighieri. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Norton, Charles Eliot. Notes of Travel and Study in Italy. 1859. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and
Company, 1887.
Polezzi, Loredana. “Mobility.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Eds. Mona Baker and
Gabriela Saldanha. London: Routledge, 2009. 172–178.
Sturge, Kate. “Cultural Translation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Eds. Mona Baker
and Gabriela Saldanha. London: Routledge, 2011. 67–70.
Zapf, Hubert. “Ecology, Culture, and Literature.” American Studies Today: New Research Agendas.
Eds. Winfried Fluck et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. 221–241.

Bassnett, Susan. “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies.” Constructing Cultures: Essays on
Literary Translation. Eds. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters,
1998. 123–140.
Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere. Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter, 1990.
Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century
America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2012.
Part V Genre and Media Ecologies
Scott MacDonald
32 PANORAMA: Three Ecocinematic Territories
Abstract: “Panorama: Three Ecocinematic Territories” explores three types of film that
do ecocinematic work. In Part 1, “Meta-film,” a discussion of James Cameron’s Avatar
reveals the ways in which this mega-budget, ecocinematic Trojan horse explicitly and
implicitly considers and critiques patterns of environmental and human exploita-
tion as they have been represented within modern film history. Part 2, “Polemic,”
discusses the recent spate of documentaries that confront the issue of hydraulic frac-
turing, and considers some of the formal and political achievements and failures of
their overtly polemical approach. Part 3, “Slow Cinema,” focuses on recent films and
digital works that use the theatrical screening space to model resistance to the hyster-
ical consumption promoted by modern advertising and modern media in general. The
arrival of digital filmmaking technologies has allowed moving-image artists to extend
cinematic duration in order to help individuals and audiences develop healthy forms
of perceptual and conceptual patience and presence.
Key Terms: Ecocinema, polemical cinema, slow cinema, films about fracking
I’ve been teaching film history to college undergraduates in the United States for more
than forty years, and my interest in using my teaching to engage students with issues
around the environment has evolved along with the growing worldwide concern
about the short- and long-term impacts of an ever-expanding global population and
a warming planet. The potential for various forms of environmental catastrophe has
created various kinds of intellectual and practical response, including the develop-
ment of what we now call the field of ecocinema. There are, of course, a variety of
ways to do ecocinematic work as teachers and scholars, but the most important is
probably the most obvious: we can try our best to see that we, our colleagues, our
students, and, ideally, the communities in which we live are exposed to the consider-
able range of cinematic accomplishment in which filmmakers deal intelligently with
ecocinematic issues.
1 M
etafilm
The 2009 release of James Cameron’s Avatar, in IMAX 3D, regular 3D, and non-3D, and
subsequently on television and on DVD/BluRay, remains a significant event for the
study of ecocinema – though during the film’s original run a good many intellectuals
and sophisticated critics ignored the film as fully as was possible in a hyped-up media
atmosphere. Even many cineastes for whom the advertising campaign for Avatar or
622 Scott MacDonald
a personal history with Cameron’s previous films was alluring enough to draw them
into theaters tended to undervalue the film at first look. One of my sons, then a Ph.D.
student in postcolonial literature at Columbia, can serve as an example. Given his
admiration of earlier Cameron films, Ian went to see Avatar in IMAX-3D not long after
it was released, at the Lincoln Square cinema in New York City, and after the screen-
ing, phoned me to say that he wasn’t all that impressed: the plot seemed clichéd to
him and the film in some ways too typical to be a breakthrough.
During the following months, I found it fascinating that despite his disappoint-
ment (and despite the high cost of IMAX screenings!) Ian returned to see Avatar five
more times in IMAX – and might have returned again, except that the IMAX expe-
rience itself had begun to exhaust him. I believe I originally saw the film in regular
3D in a local theater in central New York State. Unlike Ian, I was an instant fan, and,
during the following months saw Avatar four more times (twice in IMAX and twice in
regular 3D). I have seen bits of the film on (non-3D) television, but seeing Avatar on a
small screen is like looking at a sketch of the film, not the film itself.
My admiration of Avatar was originally a function of the imaginative visual world
it envisioned, once the action moved into the jungle, and the engaging narrative
experience it created. Particularly in IMAX 3D, the sequence where Jake Sully, Neytiri,
and their colleagues climb up to the island in the sky where Sully chooses a banshee
and learns to fly remains for me one of the most viscerally memorable moments in
film history. But what has come to seem most interesting to me is the way in which
Cameron created not simply another entertaining, big-budget Hollywood action-ad-
venture/sci-fi melodrama with a number of familiar elements, but a meta-film that
can be understood as an epic encapsulation of the history of cinema, insofar as that
history has explicitly and implicitly engaged what we now consider ecocinematic
issues.
That Avatar is meant not simply as a narrative entertainment, but as an evocation
of a major strand in the weave of American narrative cinema is made evident early in
the film, first, as we see shots of a jungle and hear Jake Sully’s narration, evoking the
opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), then again when Colonel
Miles Quaritch, in introducing the new recruits to Pandora, exclaims, “You’re not in
Kansas anymore!”– an allusion to The Wizard of Oz (1939) that is soon relevant to
Avatar on several levels. Actually, the allusive nature of Cameron’s film goes beyond
cinema itself – the corporate tactic of using Jake Sully to infiltrate the world of the
Na’vi so that the corporate army can invade evokes The Iliad, just as his adventures
in the jungle envoke The Odyssey – but Cameron’s awareness of cinema history is
particularly pervasive.
Avatar bundles together a considerable number of what are usually considered
typical Hollywood plots. Jake Sully’s personal evolution, once he has signed onto his
mission to learn about the Na’vi, is a modern coming-of-age story, another film in
which a young man learns to overcome his limitations and become a warrior. The
romance that develops between Sully and Neytiri replays the romantic comedy par-
adigm of ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ And of course, Avatar turns
into a war movie in which the fundamentally peaceful underdogs rise up to defeat
the invaders: it cannot be an accident that when Sully is ready to lead the Na’vi into
battle, he calls upon his Na’vi colleagues to assemble “the clans” – an obvious refer-
ence to a famous sequence in America’s original war epic, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation (1915).
The number of films and kinds of film that Avatar evokes is remarkable – and the
very pervasiveness of the film’s allusiveness is probably what could make it seem like
a cliché to many viewers. The divided world of Pandora, a division between indig-
enous culture and the arrival of a new, more technologically advanced culture that
will come to destroy the indigenous life, recalls landmark popular films from King
Kong (1933) to The Emerald Forest (1985) and Dances with Wolves (1990) – indeed, the
Tommy Markham character (Tommé, once he has become part of an indigenous tribe)
in the John Boorman film and the Lieutenant John J. Dunbar character in the Kevin
Costner western are in many ways premonitions of the Jake Sully character: both
Markham and Dunbar become committed to the indigenous cultures of the ‘smiling
people’ of the Brazilian rainforest and the Lakota Sioux.
Particular sequences within Cameron’s narrative also recall specific moments
from earlier cinema. Neytiri’s introduction of Jake Sully into the gathered Na’vi (once
the spirit world has provided her with a sign that Sully can be trusted) evokes a crucial
scene in John Ford’s Fort Apache, where Captain Kirby York meets with Apache
leaders (not realizing that Colonel Owen Thursday means to use his mission not to
make peace with, but to imprison the Apache within an inhumane reservation – a
mission that, as in Avatar, ultimately fails); as well as a scene late in Michael Mann’s
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) when Hawkeye arrives in a hostile Native-American
village. Two sequences where the Na’vi join together, first, to welcome Jake Sully into
the tribe and later, to work at transforming Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver)
into a Na’vi before she dies, are reminiscent of Kecak, the Balinese Monkey Chant, as
depicted memorably in Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992).
There is no point here in trying to name all the many (conscious and uncon-
scious) references in Avatar to popular American cinema – and not only American
popular cinema: a sequence where Neytiri defends herself with a knife will evoke a
similar scene in Rashomon (1950) for anyone who knows the Kurosawa film. Suffice it
to say that the consistent allusiveness of Cameron’s film is meant to be recognized and
understood as a way of positioning Avatar as a culmination of one major strand in the
history of industrially produced cinema.
Another set of allusions in Avatar may be less obvious to many cineastes. The
arrival of high-tech culture into an indigenous world in Avatar recalls an important
strand of documentary filmmaking (↗21 Latin American Environmental Discourses):
the history of proto-ethnographic and ethnographic film, from Robert Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North (1921) and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Grass
(1925) to the films of John Marshall (The Hunters, 1957; Marshall’s many films about
624 Scott MacDonald
particular !Kung practices and events, such as Bitter Melons, 1971; N!ai, the Story of
a !Kung Woman, 1980; and A Kalahari Family, 2002); Robert Gardner (Dead Birds,
1964; Rivers of Sand, 1974); and Timothy Asch (many films made in collaboration with
Napoleon Chagnon about the Yanomami in the rain forests of southern Venezuela).
The Asch films in particular seem closely related to Avatar, not just because the
Na’vi, like the Yanomami, live in a jungle environment, but in a cine-historical sense:
on the website for Avatar, there is a link to “Pandorapedia: The Official Field Guide,”
which is organized so as to suggest an ethnographic study of the people of this cultural
group, their language, beliefs and activities, and the flora and fauna that surrounds
them. It is well known that during his formative years Cameron studied moving-im-
age technology at the University of Southern California (USC), and became fascinated
with the idea of bringing together science and film art, which is precisely what Asch
was doing in his films (from 1982 on, Asch taught at USC and for years was the director
of the Center for Visual Anthropology). The early generations of proto-ethnographic
and ethnographic filmmakers meant to provide ‘salvage ethnography’ for ways of life
not yet affected by the onslaught of modern industrial culture – though we can see
now that while their attempt was to document indigenous groups without affecting
them, in fact, the filmmakers’ arrival in what had once been worlds isolated from
what we think of as modern life was itself an early instance of the cultural invasion
that would soon transform these indigenous groups. This particular history is reen-
acted in Avatar.
The Dr. Grace Augustine character is an anthropologist who has been doing
anthropological work with the Na’vi; she is depicted as a representative of the par-
ticipant-observation tradition of cultural anthropology (with a bit of the missionary
thrown in: she has founded a school for the indigenous children). And Dr. Norm Spell-
man (Joel David Moore) arrives on Pandora (just as Asch joined Chagnon to assist him
in his ongoing study of the Yanomami) in order to assist Augustine with her struggle
to help demonstrate that Na’vi culture deserves to be respected and that the search
for deposits of unobtanium should not become an exercise in cultural genocide. That
is, Avatar recreates the historical positioning of the anthropological study of indige-
nous cultures in regions of the planet where new modern technology and industrial
exploitation were immanent. It is suggestive that Grace is always seen with a cigarette
hanging from her mouth (her first words at arriving back on Pandora are “Who’s got
my goddam cigarette!”; is this an allusion to the cigarette in a canonical photograph
of Gardner and/or to the cigarette hanging from John Marshall’s mouth during his
appearances in his later films and videos?
Essentially, of course, Avatar encapsulates two related themes fundamental
to a concern with ecocinema. First, the film engages the now widespread concern
about the way in which global capitalism and global media continue to diminish the
variety and complexity of both the Earth’s human cultures and its diversity of flora
and fauna. Second, the basic context of the action is that a huge industrial installa-
tion has arrived on Pandora because by 2154 the Earth’s resources have been severely
depleted, presumably by precisely the kind of process going on in Avatar where

immense industrial machines and a variety of complex technologies are prepared to
denude the jungle and exterminate its Na’vi inhabitants in order to maintain the way
of life that has already been so disastrous on Earth.
Avatar seems wildly optimistic in its predictions, not only in that the Na’vi and
neighboring clans, led by Jake Sully, ultimately triumph on Pandora (thanks in large
measure to the pro-activeness of the planet’s animals who join the battle), but in Cam-
eron’s setting the action in 2154 – do we imagine that, at our present rate, it will take
145 more years to make our planet uninhabitable? However, the optimistic, pie-in-the-
sky fantasy of the film’s conclusion is embedded within a clear-eyed sense on Camer-
on’s part of precisely where he (and we) function within the Earth’s current realities.
Years ago, when I interviewed Godfrey Reggio about Koyaanisqatsi (1983), his critique
of modern technology’s impact on human life and society, I posed what I thought
was a clever question: “Do you see your position as filmmaker as ironic? You use the
highest level of cinematic technology to attack modern technology. Your enterprise in
making Koyaanisqatsi seems to be part of what you take a position against” (MacDon-
ald 1992, 390). Reggio’s answer is relevant to Avatar:
The film is using as high a base of technology as was possible at that time. In fact, that contradic-
tion lost me money, and got me accused of being hypocritical, confused. I don’t see it that way. If
I could have presented my point of view by just thinking about it, then I would have done so and
saved myself the effort. Obviously, that’s impossible: no Immaculate Conception is taking place
[…]. I saw myself […] as a Trojan horse, using the coinage of the time in order to raise a question
about that very coinage.”(MacDonald 1992, 390–391)
In making Avatar, Cameron’s position was analogous to Reggio’s in making Koyaanis-

qatsi.
It was evident even before Avatar opened in theaters that it would not only be
high-tech, in some ways the most breakthrough high-tech film to that moment in the
new millennium, but the quintessential cine-industrial project to that point: much
was made of the $300,000,000 cost of the film. That is, as fully as any film, Avatar was
the product of a traditional American industry and a corporate mode of production.
Cameron might not have required the clearing of a jungle and the destruction of a
culture in order to produce Avatar, but the carbon footprint of his project must have
been considerable. The world of the Resources Development Administration (RDA)
installation on Pandora is analogous to Avatar itself; the control room of the RDA is
full of presumably state-of-the-art imaging technologies, and the machines that clear
the jungle so that laborers can mine for unobtanium are as immense as the film’s
budget. Indeed, both the head of the corporation, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi)
and head of security Miles Quaritch are analogous to Cameron himself: Selfridge,
because he is the director of the RDA project, and Quaritch, because of his persistence
and dedication and because, like Quaritch, who can comfortably step into an AMP
(Amplified Mobility Platform) suit when he needs to work or do combat, Cameron is
626 Scott MacDonald
adept at extending his vision and goals via new developments in cine-technology as
well as in new technologies for exploration.
Avatar is alive with paradox. It is a film about returning to a more environmen-
tally respectful way of life made entirely within studio spaces and laboratories for
virtual imaging. It is the epitome of industrial filmmaking, and Cameron, the epitome
of the commercial Hollywood director. And it is an impassioned attack on industrial
production itself and its implications for our planet. That is, Jake Sully’s crossing from
wounded marine to reborn Na’vi is evocative of Cameron’s determination, in his most
expansive project to date, to use, in Reggio’s phrase, “the coinage of the time in order
to raise a question about that very coinage.” Avatar itself is the cine-Trojan Horse,
Cameron’s way of using the power of industrial Hollywood in order to attack what he
sees as the potential Earth-destroying excesses of capitalism: its mindless exploita-
tion of natural resources and destruction of ways of life that have much to offer on an
ever-more-endangered planet.
Of course, the paradoxical nature of Avatar is, finally, an emblem of the paradox-
ical nature of our lives, both as movie-goers and people outside the public or home
theater. Avatar is most powerful and most engaging as an IMAX experience, and in
order to access this experience, we need to find an urban area large enough to support
an IMAX theater and extend our technology of seeing with 3D glasses – or, failing a
decision to access the film in IMAX or even regular 3D – we need to use electronic
technology to buy a DVD or to download the film onto whatever viewing platform we
decide to use to see it. And after the film, we return to our daily lives where we cannot
escape the essential paradox that Avatar dramatizes.
My hope for this essay is that it might, in some small way, contribute to an eco-
cinematic sensibility: that is, that, in some small way, it might contribute to a deeper
awareness of environmental issues and a world more sensitive to those habits that
endanger our biosphere. However, I am using a modern industrial technology – my
computer – to write a contribution to this volume that will, in all likelihood, involve
the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment: the production of
paper for the book and the probably toxic ink needed to print these words. There is
no Immaculate Conception going on here in my workroom, but for all that, one can
hope, or at least imagine, that the experience of seeing, then thinking seriously about
Avatar might re-confirm our interest in crossing over into a more environmentally
conscious and respectful way of living.
2 P
olemic
The battle between cultures deeply embedded within the natural environment and
a corporate empire interested only in exploiting particular resources as a means of
satisfying investors and presumably enriching an already wealthy class for whom sat-
isfaction is ultimately unobtainable – despite what this exploitation means for the
lives of those who live within what is for them an earthly paradise – is presented as a
mythic futuristic fantasy in Avatar. But, of course, this battle is hardly fantasy in our
own time, and no one has made that more evident than Josh Fox in his now two-part
polemic against hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’): Gasland, released in 2010, a few
months after Avatar; and Gasland, Part II, released in 2013. Both films have garnered
substantial audiences: Gasland won a special jury prize at Sundance and was nomi-
nated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary; and Gasland, Part II premiered
on HBO. Both films are combinations of personal documentary and exposé and if
each feels a bit over-long, this is a function of polemical films in general, especially
films that confront movie-goers with information that frightens them and implicitly
demands their active commitment to an issue.
Before he became known as a filmmaker, Fox made a name for himself in exper-
imental theater: he is founder and artistic director of International Wow Company
(2015), which, according to its website, involves collaborating with actors and non-ac-
tors from around the world on work “that addresses current national and global social
and political crises.” International Wow Company has received many grants, includ-
ing five from the National Endowment for the Arts and five from the MAP Fund for
experimental performance. The two Gasland films are International Wow Company
productions.
Knowing Fox’s theatrical and performance background helps to bridge what can
seem a gap between the sophistication of Fox’s filmmaking and the Fox character in
the two Gasland films: the innocent young man from northern Pennsylvania woods
living just upstream from the Delaware River, who seems to have begun filmmaking
(and performing within his films) with virtually no training or professional back story.
The ‘Josh Fox’ character in the Gasland films evokes literary characters, most obvi-
ously Huck Finn: both Huck and Fox narrate their stories in unpretentious language.
In the case of the Gasland films, I mean ‘language’ both in the usual verbal sense, and
in the sense that, just as Mark Twain has Huck speak in the American Midwestern
vernacular, Fox often uses a hand-held camera, evoking family home movies, as well
as the personal cinema of Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. Further,
Fox’s dress, especially his college-boy cap with curved brim, makes him seem younger
than his years (Fox was 38 when Gasland was released). Fox’s considerable dexterity
with the banjo is seen and heard periodically throughout both films (and is central
within the film’s advertising), connecting the Gasland films not merely with the Amer-
ican literary past but with a range of traditional American musics.
The two Gasland films are presented in basically the same style and format;
Gasland, Part II seems to have been produced on the assumption that most viewers
will not be acquainted with Gasland: the first half of the later film is basically a review
of the original, though different footage is deployed in this review (sometimes of the
same places visited and individuals interviewed as in the original film). Both films
are relatively conventional: Fox’s voice-over is supplemented with candid interviews
628 Scott MacDonald
with a range of those whose lives have been affected by fracking, those who have
some expertise to share, and individuals who are in positions of responsibility for the
environment. The interviews are punctuated with road movie footage, generally of
areas where fracking is underway, presented in densely edited montages; these are
implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, juxtaposed with quite beautiful imagery of the
Fox homestead in the woods near Milanville, Pennsylvania: generally imagery of a
nearby creek and the Delaware River. This amalgam of approaches is introduced, in
both films, with background about Fox’s parents and siblings (in the form of home
movies and family photographs) and is punctuated by various educational sequences,
revealing how fracking works, what chemicals are in the pressurized fluid fed into
the underground layer being fracked, how many truck trips are necessary to insti-
gate and maintain the natural gas wells, and so forth. Both Gasland films use visual
text as implicit chapter introductions and to identify places and people – this use of
text reflects Fox’s admiration of Jean-Luc Godard’s later films and ties in with Fox’s
assessment (during a presentation at Hamilton College in October 2014) of Godard as
a significant influence on his own work.
The overall geographic trajectory of the two films echoes the expanding range
of fracking in the United States and abroad. In Gasland Fox begins locally, with the
introduction of fracking in rural Dimock Township just west of Milanville. Then in
order to decide whether what was happening in Dimock “was the exception or the
rule,” Fox travels to Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, then back to Pennsylva-
nia. The film’s focus is on the implications of fracking within the continental United
States.
Gasland, Part II expands the project’s scope, beginning again at the Fox home-
stead with Fox’s familial background, then draws our attention to the aftermath of
the BP oil spill (Fox includes footage of oil in the Gulf of Mexico not generally seen in
television coverage of the event: during the aftermath of the explosion, the press was
not allowed to fly low enough in the vicinity of Deepwater Horizon to record what was
happening in the water). After revisiting the various places and people introduced in
Gasland, Fox visits Queensland, Australia, then surveys the international resistance
to fracking in the UK, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Canada, and South Africa.
Both films conclude with Fox visiting Washington, DC: Gasland, with his record-
ing the Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals during their investigation of fracking
(those testifying seem to be several industry spokesmen and one man concerned
about fracking’s environmental impact); and Gasland, Part II, with Fox being refused
entry (apparently along with the rest of the Press) to a hearing by the House Commit-
tee on Science and Technology. When he refuses to accept his being banned from a
public hearing, Fox is arrested.
The temporal trajectory of the films follows a panoply of individuals over a period
of several years. Fox focuses on men and women in Dimock Township, Pennsylva-
nia; in Weld County, Colorado, in Pavilion, Wyoming, and in suburban Fort Worth,
Texas, who have been negatively affected by local fracking and who do not want to
move away from where they have made their lives. Because the oil industry denies
responsibility for anything these groups are going through, individuals in each locale
are working to be able to demonstrate scientifically that indeed it is the drilling that
has made their water undrinkable and their air toxic. In general, local governmental
officials, even Environmental Protection Agency personnel, seem asleep at the wheel,
or at least, uninterested in taking on the fracking industry. When Gasland, Part II
returns to these same people three years later, it is clear that their complaints and
the information they have gathered have had some impact: various studies in various
places have demonstrated that toxic chemicals are in the water and the air, and new
kinds of impact are becoming clear – the sudden rash of earthquakes in Arkansas in
the neighborhood of fracking installations, for example.
But momentary hope for a change in direction disappears in the wake of Barack
Obama’s reelection and his decision to commit to fracking as a major factor in the
development of American ‘energy independence.’ Fox reviews the smear campaigns
instigated by the oil industry (with the help of local media outlets) against the indi-
viduals who have made their struggles and the actual impact of the drilling known;
the way in which oil companies have agreed to buy out landowners only so long as
they sign nondisclosure agreements; and the apparent decision on the part of the
Obama administration to order the EPA to cease investigating the negative impacts
of fracking and to suppress the negative findings of independent scientists. Despite
a few voices from state and federal politicians, and despite the testimony of a variety
of distinguished scientists speaking to the dangers of fracking and the less dangerous
options, Gasland, Part II feels a bit like an elegy for both major swaths of the American
(and international) environment and for environmental consciousness itself within
an increasingly undemocratic nation.
Fox’s diptych on fracking is powerful enough to have confirmed the considerable
fears of those of us terrified of what not-sufficiently-regulated fracking could mean to
the natural environment here and abroad. However, all in all, the impact of polemic,
especially polemic created within an ongoing controversy, is usually mixed: if it tends
to confirm already existent fears and reenergize resistance, it also generates additional
attack, in this case, further investment by the oil industry in television commercials
singing the wonders of natural gas and further attempts to suggest that all resistance
to fracking is ill-informed and unpatriotic. There is also the film FrackNation (2013)
by Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda. The subtitle of the film
is “A Journalist’s Search for the Fracking Truth,” suggesting that this film has no axe
to grind, but it is quickly clear that FrackNation is meant as a response to Gasland – a
response that is a careful send-up of Josh Fox’s approach in the earlier film.
In Gasland, Part II Fox provides a split-screen conversation with Naomi Oreskes,
author of Merchants of Doubt, who comments,
630 Scott MacDonald
If we say, “Oh yes, oil and gas come out of taps naturally,” a lot of people just don’t know; they’ll
say, “Oh, is that true? Oh, well, I’ve heard people say that in Santa Barbara the tap water smells
bad, so maybe it’s true.” Okay, now we have a debate […]; the ordinary person doesn’t know what
to think, doesn’t need to think that I’m right; they just need to think there’s a debate, because
so long as there’s a debate, then there’s an argument for staving off regulation. (Gasland II 2013)
This conversation seems a kind of shot-countershot to FrackNation (released, like

Gasland, Part 11, in 2013). For example, FrackNation argues that methane has been
evident, and flammable, in some water supplies for decades (which, of course, does
not prove that recent fracking is not contaminating water supplies in the areas where
it has been introduced). And Phelim McAleer plays the role in FrackNation that Josh
Fox plays in Gasland: both as voice-over and as on-screen personality talking to
everyday people and carefully chosen experts. Like Fox, McAleer makes himself into a
character that serves his goal, which is to demonstrate that Gasland is neither honest
nor accurate.
The fact that in FrackNation the directors are careful not just to offer counters to
claims made in Gasland, but to mimick that earlier film’s methods, essentially sat-
irizing Fox’s approach, has a double effect. As Oreskes’ comments suggest, Frack-
Nation’s counter to Gasland creates doubt about claims made in the earlier film:
perhaps, one thinks, Fox has exaggerated the situation; perhaps there is adequate
regulation of fracking (Fox argues for EPA regulation of fracking nationally; McAleer
claims that the current regulation by individual states is adequate). At the same time,
FrackNation includes its own exaggerations: the suggestion, for example, that the
anti-fracking movement in the United States is underwritten by Russia, which does
not want competition from the United States and Europe in oil and gas sales, seems
far-fetched.
The other effect of FrackNation’s attack on Gasland is to demonstrate a funda-
mental weakness in polemical cinema in general. In response to the various experts
interviewed in Gasland, FrackNation provides interviews with its own experts (typi-
cally, as in Gasland, academics), who generally claim the opposite of what is said in
the earlier film. In response to individuals interviewed in Gasland who feel that their
way of life is (literally) being undermined by fracking in a most undemocratic way,
FrackNation includes interviews with several farming families in north Pennsylvania
who feel frustrated that resistance to fracking has damaged their ability to remain
farmers: they claim that leasing their land for fracking would keep them from going
bankrupt. Even the stress in FrackNation on the fact that the film was financed by
“3,305 Kickstarter backers,” all of whom seem to be listed at the end of the film –
implicitly an argument that this film is more democratic than Gasland, and was not
financed by the gas industry – comes to seem suspicious: one cannot help but wonder
who those Kickstarter backers actually are – were they recruited? Did they supply all
the funding for the film?
Ultimately, the process of producing any polemical film about an environmen-

tal issue is a matter of careful selection and organization. It is evident that both
the Gasland films and FrackNation were made by individuals who believe in their
viewpoints (Fox, that powerful industries need regulation; McAleer, that there is too
much environmental regulation) – this passion generates the energy necessary to
produce these films. Ultimately, viewers must decide whether or not to accept the
claims of the oil and gas industry that it is environmentally aware and trustworthy or
to assume that the lure of great wealth will, in this case as in so many others, trump
this industry’s commitment to the environment (as obviously happened with BP’s
Deepwater Horizon). The courage of Josh Fox in continuing to confront the nation’s
most powerful industry seems as self-evident as is the claim in FrackNation that there
is no industrial process that can produce the energy necessary for modern life that
does not exploit both the environment and the laborers involved in producing the
energy.
Three other recent films offer a broader perspective, both on the issue of frack-
ing and on polemical films. In Drill Baby Drill (2013), Holy Field Holy War (2013), and
Frack Democracy (2014) an American ex-patriot, Lech Kowalski, covers some of the
same ground as Josh Fox does in Gasland – but focuses on the resistance to fracking
in Poland (in Drill Baby Drill and Holy Field Holy War) and in Poland, Romania and
the UK (in Frack Democracy). Drill Baby Drill focuses on Żurawlów in eastern Poland
near the Ukrainian border, where citizen-farmers successfully resist the attempt by
Chevron to begin drilling an exploratory gas well. Because Chevron’s seismic testing
destroys some local water wells, what might have been complacency about fracking
is transformed into resistance, and when Chevron seems poised to begin construction
of a well, the farmers confront their government officials, demonstrate that Chevron
has knowingly broken a law, and bring Chevron’s efforts, at least in this one area, to a
halt. Kowalski does not turn himself into a character the way Fox and McLeer do,1 and
by keeping the focus on the farmers and recounting precisely how they make their
case, Kowalski provides a model of resistance.
If a polemic is to be effective, it must assist in energizing viewers to be involved in
the position it espouses. Gasland was effective in this regard, whereas Gasland Part II
can leave a viewer with a sense that resistance to the oil companies is fruitless, at least
in the United States – though during in-person presentations of his film Fox himself
is quick to argue that resistance remains absolutely crucial. For Kowalski the job has
been to celebrate resistance where resistance remains possible. In Drill Baby Drill, he
uses flashbacks to his visit to Pennsylvania (including to Dimock) where, it seems
clear, the battle to resist fracking has been lost, at least for the present. In 2013 Kowal-
1 Compared with Josh Fox, Kowalski is not a particularly effective voice-over – but his somewhat
awkward reading of the voice-over text ironically works to his advantage, at least in the sense that it
implicitly confirms the idea that he is not a performer, but a concerned filmmaker/citizen.
632 Scott MacDonald
ski toured New York State’s southern tier with Drill Baby Drill, working to sustain the
New York State moratorium on fracking. “Sometimes,” he suggests at the end of the
film, “the little guy can win.”2
Even more fully than Drill Baby Drill, Holy Field Holy War (2013) breaks with con-
ventional docu-polemic form. Holy Field Holy War begins with Kowalski being asked
to stop filming a gas well in eastern Poland (resistance on the part of gas companies
to being filmed is a motif in both Kowalski’s and Fox’s films), but broadens the issue
to the corporate take over of rural Poland by both industrial farming and shale oil
extraction. Kowalski is a character in Holy Field, but for the most part, he allows the
events he films to speak for themselves. He becomes familiar in the local community,
and in the final third of the film, records a community meeting between local farming
families concerned about the possibility of fracking close to their farms, two Chevron
representatives (the man in charge for Chevron does not speak Polish; the discussion
is conducted largely through translations by his second-in-command), and an assis-
tant to the regional governor.
This meeting encapsulates the inequities between small farmers and corpora-
tions, subtly and powerfully, revealing the difficulty of resisting the power of corpo-
rations that have the capital to instigate a legal structure they can take advantage of,
as well as to be able to defeat local resistance: what small farmer can afford to go to
court against Chevron’s or Exxon’s legal team? The meeting breaks down because it
is obvious to the farmers that the Chevron executive is ignoring the lived realities in
their community and is merely delivering the company line about being concerned
about people and the environment – so that he can say he has conferred with the
locals. Holy Field Holy War reflects Kowalski’s commitment to the farmers and the
pastoral landscape of eastern Poland: the film is virtually minimal, consistently low
key and ground level – the inverse of an oil company television commercial.
Frack Democracy is a 34-minute document of the resistance to fracking by the
Occupy Chevron movement in the area of Żurawlów, Poland; and by protestors (Kow-
alski calls them “protectors”) in Pungesti, Romania and in Balcolm in the UK; and of
the official response to this resistance, which reveals the degree to which the several
national governments have collaborated with energy corporations to ignore envi-
ronmental regulations and individual property rights. Frack Democracy begins with
information about the extent of the fracking industry (“1/3 of Poland, 2/3 of England
and 2/3 of Romania have been designated for shale gas mining”) and with a shale gas
conference at the European parliament. One irony that surfaces in Frack Democracy
is that while the energy companies have consistently refused to allow filming at their
work sites, they have begun to film protestors, presumably to help governments iden-
2 New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in December of 2014 that he would ban frack-
ing in New York State for the foreseeable future. Kowalski seems to have been right, at least for the
moment.
tify and punish them for their resistance. Kowalski’s trilogy concludes with the Roma-
nian protectors tearing down a fence that Chevron has built around a fracking site
in Pungesti – the resistance to fracking and to corporate undermining of democracy
continues. As of this writing (December, 2014), after more than 400 days of protests,
the Occupy Chevron protectors in Żurawlów have been successful in denying Chevron
a foothold in their neighborhood.3
A final documentary worth bringing into this discussion is Chasing Ice (2012),
Jeff Orlowski’s film about photographer James Balog’s documentations of the effects
of global warming on glaciers. Chasing Ice makes clear the issue it addresses in an
opening montage of television commentators and politicians announcing that global
warming is a hoax, then proceeds to document Balog’s development of the Extreme
Ice Survey: his photographic documentation of glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, and
the United States. Chasing Ice is fascinating on several different levels, each of which
confirms Orlowski’s polemical motives. Like the (also estimable) Rivers and Tides
(2001), Thomas Riedelsheimer’s homage to sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, Chasing
Ice records an accomplished artist at work, in this case developing and completing
his most elaborate project. Orlowski’s documentation of Balog provides a narrative
thrust to the film and creates suspense about what, in the end, this complex project
will in fact reveal.
Orlowski also enriches Chasing Ice by taking a cue from Balog’s brilliance as a
landscape photographer. Balog’s photographs of ice formations and arctic landscapes
are not merely interesting, but consistently gorgeous, and when the landscapes Balog
is recording are seen in Orlowski’s film in high-definition video, especially in a the-
atrical venue, they have considerable impact – one cannot help but think of Frederic
Church’s canonical painting, The Icebergs (1861).4 That is, in addition to Orlowski’s
depiction of an artist at work, Chasing Ice is a remarkable landscape film – one in
which the beauty depicted is endangered.5
The narrative excitement and visual pleasure of Chasing Ice are periodically inter-
rupted by sequences that review the scientific evidence of global warming and the
3 For further information about these recent events, see http://www.popularresistance.org/poland-

400-days-of-protest-stops-shale-gas-exploration/
4 When the Dallas Museum of Art bought The Icebergs in 1979, $2.5 million was to that date the
highest price ever paid for an American painting. The Icebergs not only resembles some of Balog’s
photographs, but seems a premonition of Balog’s and Orlowski’s message: in the foreground of the
landscape depicted in the painting, remnants of a destroyed ship are evident.
5 In Josh Fox’s films, the depictions of the Delaware River and its environs are often beautifully
filmed, an attempt of course to convince viewers of Fox’s love of this environment and the importance
of preserving it. When McAleer mimics this dimension of Fox’s films – for example, by showing a gas
well in Pennsylvania in a pristine woodland setting – it is obvious that he is downplaying the scope
of gas-drilling operations once they are fully developed, something quite clear in Josh Fox’s aerial
imagery of the immense gas-drilling fields in areas of the American west.
634 Scott MacDonald
considerable dangers it poses, but ultimately the function of all the elements I have
described is to deliver us to the climax of the film: to Balog’s conceptual deduction
and to Orlowski’s visual conclusion. Throughout Chasing Ice we see Balog and his
assistants placing cameras in locations where they can record glaciers over time;
and as they revisit the cameras to collect the images, we sometimes see individual
photographs and even several of the still photos in sequence. As his conclusion,
however, Orlowski presents Balog at public lectures where he presents his anima-
tions of the stills his cameras have recorded over the years. The animations take us
back to the early evolution of cinema, reminding us of cinema’s capacity for revealing
crucial dimensions of the world around us that can only be implied in essays or by
still photographs. The animations Balog shows his audiences, seen full-screen within
Orlowski’s film, leave absolutely no doubt: global warming is real; we can see the
glaciers melting.6
Polemical films do find their way to audiences, especially on television. Josh
Fox’s Gasland films have been broadcast and Gasland remains available on Netflix (as
is FrackNation). According to Kowalski, Drill Baby Drill played in the French senate,
also at the European parliament in Brussels twice. It was broadcast on Arte in France,
Germany, and Switzerland; and the Green Party in the UK organized a tour – though
“Polish TV would not and will not show it because officially the Polish government
is very pro shale gas; in fact, theaters in Poland were and are afraid to play the film
because they risk losing state funding.”7 Chasing Ice was widely seen theatrically and
is available on Netflix. Whatever audiences find their way to these films, however,
are dwarfed by the millions who experience, over and over, the ubiquitous (and often
maddeningly subtle) television commercials that endlessly sing the patriotism and
environmental responsibility of major oil corporations.
3 S
low Cinema
By the end of the 1960s, commercial advertising on American television had acceler-
ated: the typical ad was a montage of image and sound that modeled in its form the
expanded habit of consumption that the advertisements themselves promoted: the
6 Just before the conclusion of Chasing Ice, Orlowski includes an interview with Dr. Martin Sharp, a
glaciologist at the University of Alberta, who indicates that it is true that some glaciers do continue
to grow, which seems to fly in the fact of global warming, but that when he and his assistants studied
the glaciers in the Yukon Territory, they found that from 1958 to 2008, “of the 1400 glaciers that were
there in 1958, four got bigger; over 300 disappeared completely, and almost all of the rest got smaller.
Yes, there is a component of natural variability in the climate change we observe, but it’s not enough
to explain the full signal, so there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it.”
7 Email from Kowalski to the author (10 August 2014).
ads asked us to eat, drink, buy, use more and more of whatever products were being
sold and to habituate ourselves to processing more and more images per minute.
Not surprisingly, some filmmakers soon found this tendency problematic – at least
psychically, if not yet environmentally. The result was a series of attempts by inde-
pendent filmmakers to make films that worked against this tendency: that is, to slow
down the rate of image consumption. Bruce Baillie, Robert Nelson, Larry Gottheim,
J. J. Murphy, Robert Huot, Hollis Frampton and other filmmakers experimented with
single-shot films – often using the two standard lengths of rolls of 16mm film: 100
feet (a bit under three minutes), 400 feet (about eleven minutes) to determine the
duration of these films.
In other instances a series of shots of extended duration slowed the process of
image consumption: Peter Hutton’s Landscape (for Manon) (1987) is a signal instance.8
Landscape (for Manon) begins with a series of comparatively extended shots: the first
six last 27, 27, 11, 27, 18, and 27 seconds long. And then, the film slows down: midway
through, each shot is on-screen for nearly 50 seconds. Hutton’s decision to shoot in
black and white, to separate most successive shots with a moment of dark leader, and
to forego sound make the individual shots seem even more serene than their lengths
alone might suggest. Hutton has always focused on creating ‘a bit of a reprieve’ for
audiences – whether he has filmed rural environments as in Landscape and in the
more recent Skagafjörđur (2004) or in urban spaces, as he has done in his series of
New York Portraits.
By the 1990s James Benning and Sharon Lockhart were working to see how far
they could stretch viewer patience for contemplating urban and rural environments.
Each film in James Benning’s California Trilogy – El Valley Centro (1999), Los (2000),
and Sogobi (2001) – was made up of thirty-five 2 ½-minute shots; and at least at the
beginning Benning asked that all three films (which focused, respectively, on the agri-
cultural, the urban, and what was left of the wilderness dimensions of the Califor-
nia landscape – with an implicit emphasis on water issues) be presented on a single
day. In 1997 Sharon Lockhart completed Goshogaoka (1997): six 10-minute shots of
a Japanese basketball team doing exercise routines/choreography. Goshogaoka was
followed by her Teatro Amazonas (1999), a 40-minute, 35mm single shot of an audi-
ence in a theater in Manaus, Brazil; and by NŌ (2003), which created the illusion of a
8 The father of both these tendencies is, of course, Andy Warhol, whose early films not only tended
to use roll-long shots, but to assume that the resulting films would be projected not at 24 frames per
second, but at 16 frames per second. From the beginning, Hutton was committed to patient cinema.
And James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), 8 ½ x 11 (1974), and 11 x 14 (1976) show Ben-
ning working in a similar fashion at the same time: One Way Boogie Woogie is a series of one-minute
shots of an urban landscape in Milwaukee; 8 ½ x 11 and 11 x 14 are, respectively, half-hour and fea-
ture-length narratives using extended shots about several characters whose trajectories cross (in 8 ½
x 11) or separate (11 x 14) as the films develop. Hutton and Benning have been friends and admirers of
each other’s work for decades.
636 Scott MacDonald
single 32 ½-minute shot of two Japanese farmers working in a field (NŌ includes one
nearly invisible cut). Lockhart’s experiments with increased duration were having an
impact on Benning, who adopted the 10-minute shot for a remarkable diptych: 13
Lakes (2004), thirteen shots of thirteen American lakes; and Ten Skies (2004), ten
skyscapes filmed in the area around Benning’s home north of Los Angeles. Lockhart
returned to the 10-minute shot in 2007 for Pine Flat, twelve shots of children in the
rural environment of a small town in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I understand all of these films as attempts to use cinema as a form of perceptual
retraining – a retraining meant to model a resistance to the determination of modern
corporations to promote hysterical consumption of their products, a tendency that
has considerable environmental costs. Young people growing up in the new millen-
nium are immersed in a mediascape awash in advertising that urges them to eat more,
buy more, travel more, fill their lives with more things and activities – and to never
slow down to think about where they are and how their ways of thinking about their
lives and their habits of consumption are transforming the planet. I have worked with
many of these films in my teaching, and have found that once students have become
adjusted to the demands of these unusual viewing experiences, they are recognized
as a form of liberation from psychic overload.
The digital revolution has helped to accelerate daily life and to promote the habit
of multitasking, which usually means consuming images, data, energy resources at
ever-increasing rates, but it has also allowed filmmakers to expand on the possibili-
ties of slow cinema. Two notable instances are Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2009)
and James Benning’s BNSF (2012). For Double Tide (2009) Lockhart created an expe-
rience of two 45-minute shots of a woman (Jen Casad) clamming in Seal Cove, Maine,
during that rare double tide that allows for clamming at dawn and again at dusk.9
Double Tide was shot in 16mm (with the Aaton camera Robert Gardner used to shoot
Forest of Bliss) then transferred to high-definition digital video for distribution.
There have been other films made from single shots longer than the 45-minute
shots in Double Tide – Alexander Sokurov’s 96-minute Russian Ark (2002) is a notable
instance – but these other films usually involve either considerable action or sub-
stantial narrative development or both, whereas the action in Double Tide involves
Casad slowly working her way around the considerable space delimited by the film
frame, reaching, again and again, into the muck of Seal Cove to pull out clams. Casad
is consistently in long shot, so that the particulars of her labor are not visible – she is
not really a character in a narrative sense, just a laborer working at a distance from
us. The ‘action’ in Double Tide is the combination of Casad’s patient labors and the
gradual changes in the scene around her: for much of the first shot, there is consider-
able mist that at times obscures the details of the surrounding landscape and creates
9 Each of these two “shots” is, in fact, made up of several 16mm shots, but the transitions from one
shot to the next are for all practical purposes invisible.
subtle changes in light. In the second shot, taken in the evening from a slightly dif-
ferent position in Seal Cove, the gradual ending of day causes a different set of subtle
light variations and sometimes, in the far distance, one can make out other people,
presumably other clammers, or notice the bird that seems to be watching Casad. The
minimal visual action in Double Tide is contextualized by a variety of environmental
sounds, most of them off-screen.
The ‘labor’ of experiencing Double Tide – a labor for which Casad’s clamming is
a metaphor – has a number of rewards. For those viewers who can accept the film’s
challenge to their patience, the experience is serene and quite beautiful, in a most
classic sense. As she planned and shot the film, Lockhart was aware of the consid-
erable tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, and at various
moments Double Tide evokes Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Winslow Homer,
George Innis, Martin Johnson Heade, the Luminists and the Tonalists – painters many
of whom helped to inspire in an earlier generation an appreciation and concern for
the natural environment.10 All in all, Double Tide is a paean to a traditional form of
labor – a ‘slow’ form of food production – presented in a manner that simultaneously
evokes the first environmentally conscious movement in the American fine arts, while
offering a form of ‘slow’ contemplative cinema as a tonic for modern, media-over-
loaded viewers.
As filmmakers, Lockhart and Benning have been in dialogue for going on twenty
years, and Benning’s switch to digital filming after 2007 has allowed him to build on
Lockhart’s work in Double Tide by extending the possibilities of the single-shot film
well beyond her 45-minute continuous images. BNSF (the initials stand for the Burl-
ington Northern Santa Fe railroad corporation) is Benning’s most extreme durational
experiment to date: a continuous 194-minute single-shot experience.11 He recorded
the shot in mid-August, 2012, “about 8 miles west of Amboy, CA along old Route 66,
10 I asked Lockhart about this connection; Lockhart: “[Winslow] Homer, of course, is a constant pres-
ence in Maine, and the museums of New England are full of many of the painters you mentioned. I re-
searched many painters and read as much as I could about seascapes and fishing. However, it wasn’t
a particularly American perspective that inspired the film. There’s [Jean-François] Millet, [Édouard]
Manet, [J. M.W] Turner, and there was also this fantastic show of [Gustave] Courbet landscapes and
seascapes at the Getty not long before I left for the East coast” (MacDonald 2013, 34).
11 Actually, the first film Benning made after switching to digital, Ruhr (2009), concludes with a sin-
gle 60-minute shot of the coking tower in Duisberg at work: a coking tower is where coke is produced
from coal, and the Duisberg tower is, according to Benning, the world’s state-of-the-art facility: the
most efficient coking tower in the world (see http://twitchfilm.com/2010/03/darkest-americana-else-
where-ruhr-a-few-questions-for-james-benning.html). In 2012 Benning made Nightfall, a continuous
98-minute shot of a forest in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains at the end of a day. The long single
shot has remained Benning’s most characteristic stylistic gesture.
638 Scott MacDonald
which is just off frame – no cars passed by during the entire 3 plus hours,” from about
4:00 in the afternoon until 7:15 in the evening (“it was about 100 degrees”).12
Benning has always been fascinated with both the natural environment and with
industrial sites, including the immense railroad network that serves American indus-
try. Indeed, his fascination with railroads has grown during recent decades, even as
general societal consciousness of the railroad has diminished, at least in the United
States. Until BNSF, Benning’s most elaborate exploration of the railroad system was
the feature RR (2007): forty-three continuous shots of trains moving across the Amer-
ican landscape, each shot beginning at the moment when the train enters the image
and lasting until the moment when that train is no longer on-screen.
On one level, both RR and BNSF can be understood as implicit allusions to the
Lumière Brothers’ canonical L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), the (sin-
gle-shot) film that is often seen as an emblem of the arrival of the medium of cinema at
the end of the century that had produced the industrial revolution. RR’s conflation of
the duration of a shot and the presence of a train pays homage to the shared mechani-
cal and chemical technologies of the train and cinema: both involve movement along
tracks (train tracks, image and sound tracks), that are held stable by spikes/sprock-
ets; and both, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977) suggested half a century ago, are tech-
nologies of movement that create new ways of seeing the world. Presumably, Benning
knew RR was his last celluloid film (at least for the foreseeable future) and wanted to
say goodbye to what had long been his preferred medium.
Hollis Frampton’s description of how cinema, the “Last Machine,” functions
within culture provides a way of thinking about Benning’s switch to digital recording
soon after RR and his use of the new medium to recommit to extended duration (and
to trains as a subject):
As one era slowly dissolves into the next, some individuals metabolize the former means for
physical survival into new means of psychic survival. These latter we call art. They promote the
life of human consciousness by nourishing our affections, by reincarnating our perceptual sub-
stance, by affirming, imitating, reifying the process of consciousness. (Frampton 1993, 112)
BNSF’s widescreen image (approximately 16 x 7) reveals a dirt road and telephone

poles (it is not immediately clear that the road follows railroad tracks) and some desert
vegetation. In the background there are the distant ranges of the Bristol Mountains
at the southern edge of the Mohave National Preserve. The composition of the BNSF
12 Benning: “My camera can hold two S x S Cards [Sony 32GB memory cards], each can record about
58 minutes, so I had to reload the cards to get over 3 hours. I can exchange a card while the other
card is recording so that’s no problem. but my battery was getting low after about 2 hours so I had
to change batteries once, which meant a 10-second break which is hidden by a dissolve, so it’s tech-
nically two shots but there’s no need to admit to this for it’s negligible.” Email from Benning to the
author (19 August 2014).
image, like the imagery in Double Tide, is reminiscent of the tradition of landscape
painting – in BNSF the dirt road that winds gradually into the distance evokes Claude
Lorrain’s use of roads and paths to draw the eye into the deep space of painted land-
scapes, and the two nearest telephone poles echo the use of trees in many landscape
paintings as coulisses to frame extended vistas – devices that remained popular in
the landscapes in the Hudson River and the Rocky Mountain schools of American
landscape painting.
At first, BNSF seems to be simply a landscape film, until a distant train whistle
is heard, followed by a train’s entering the image from the left, moving slowly along
railroad tracks that lead the train down a gradual grade, first into the deep space of
the image, then moving horizontally to the right and out of the frame. During the
three-plus hours of BNSF thirteen trains pass by, five moving east and eight moving
west. It is obvious that this is an unusually busy length of track, according to Benning
one of the busiest tracks in America: an average of thirty-six trains pass by this spot
every day.13 The arrival of the trains into what otherwise seems a relatively unspoiled
landscape evokes particular nineteenth-century paintings – Thomas Cole’s River in
the Catskills (1843), for example14 – but also the history charted by Leo Marx’s canoni-
cal American studies book, The Machine in the Garden, which traces the arrival of the
industrial revolution within the American Eden as it is represented in American liter-
ature – for example in the regular appearance of the trains of the Fitchburg Railroad
that pass by Walden Pond in Thoreau’s Walden.
Three kinds of action are evident within BNSF. The most obvious is the movement
of the trains. The size of the trains and the kinds of cargo being hauled vary considera-
bly: there are many trains pulling single- and double-stack container cars; others pull
tanker cars and coal cars; and still others, autoracks. Particularly given the minimal-
ist nature of BNSF, the arrival of each train provides immediate suspense, since it is
unclear how long this train will be. In some instances trains are so lengthy that their
engines are exiting in the left foreground while cars are still entering from the distant
right, well over a mile away. A second form of action, the gradual transformation of
the natural landscape, is more subtle. The most obvious movement is the wind: we
can see the movement it creates in several bushes in the foreground of the image, as
well as in the gradual motion of the clouds. More intriguing are the subtle shifts in
shadow and light, visible on the distant mountains and along the plain between the
tracks and the mountains, caused by the movement of the sun behind the camera
and the varying densities of cloud that move across the sky. These shifts can seem
magical: a particular distant mountain will for a moment seem to be black (BNSF is in
13 Email from Benning to the author (19 August 2014).

14 In Cole’s painting a locomotive is just barely visible within a panoramic vista of the front range
of the Catskills; it seems quite at home in this landscape – likely an image of the healthy balance of
nature and culture Cole was hoping would continue to exist in the Hudson Valley.
640 Scott MacDonald
color), but a few seconds later will have disappeared into the range of hills it is part
of. A final form of ‘action’ involves the transitional moments between our scanning
of the landscape for movement and the arrivals and departures of trains; once a train
can be heard, then seen, its motion dominates our attention until it leaves the frame.
As we hear the train, no longer visible, moving into the distance, the sounds of the
landscape and various kinds of subtle motion within it reassert themselves, becom-
ing, once again, the foreground of our awareness.
As is true in Double Tide, the experience of BNSF can be read as a metaphor. In
the Lockhart film, our ‘labor’ in searching the image for something to look at is mir-
rored by Casad’s laborious search for clams. BNSF offers a different metaphor, one
that ultimately dramatizes a paradox of cinema itself, at least within a context of what
we are calling ecocinema. Benning, as he was making BNSF, and those audiences
that assemble to experience the film, are caught between two realities: on the one
hand, we work to respect Benning’s depiction of the natural landscape by fine-tuning
our seeing and hearing to catch the gradual changes that we know are always occur-
ring; but this challenge to our perceptual awareness is regularly interrupted by the
arrival/departure of the trains, which overwhelm the senses and cannot be ignored.
Of course, these trains are an essential part of the industry of consumption, and the
continual shifting of our attention between the demands of the (relatively) natural
landscape and the mechanism of industry is an emblem of our extra-cinematic expe-
rience of trying to live thoughtfully, with a sincere consciousness of our effects on the
environment, within a capitalist society that continually interrupts our best inten-
tions, forcing us to find our way back to awareness, over and over.
For a major show at the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria, in 2014, Benning
designed “RR/BNSF,” an installation that juxtaposed RR and BNSF. He contextualized
the two films with several quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, including these:
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the
scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard. […] Here come your groceries, country; your
rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay.
And here’s your pay for them! screams the countryman’s whistle; timber like long battering-rams
going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and
heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands
a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are
raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down
goes the woolen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. (Thoreau 2006
[1854], 124)
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no
longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,
my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant
highway. (Thoreau 2006, 132)
BNSF creates much the same experience that Thoreau describes.15

Benning’s cinema has often allowed viewers to retrain the level of alertness they
bring to the movie theater, to meditate and ruminate, to use cinema as a counter to the
assumption that our job is to consume. In the current moment, the most obvious new
forms of consumption involve the products of the digital revolution: laptops, tablets,
digital phones, iPods, have become ubiquitous, even in movie theaters; and these
new products, electronic rather than mechanical, represent a new form of industry
and an expansion in our potential for consumption: we have learned to multitask, to
consume in multiple ways at the same time. Benning’s move from celluloid to digital
cinema, reflects this development – indeed is part of it – but as he has always done,
he uses the options made available by the new digital cameras to, in Frampton’s
sense, reincarnate our perceptual substance and reify our process of consciousness.
That is, as is true in Avatar and in the work of most all of the filmmakers discussed
in this essay, digital filmmaking is Benning’s Trojan Horse, a way of using, to para-
phrase Godfrey Reggio, the coinage of the time in order to raise questions and expand
consciousness about that very coinage.
One final level of paradox, implicit in Benning’s work in general and in BNSF
in particular, is that cinema has never been an ecologically friendly medium. The
chemistry of photography and celluloid cinema has always involved considerable
environmental damage. This has been exacerbated by the fact that it has sometimes
been a matter of pride in the industry, and within the history of some forms of inde-
pendent film as well, that filmmakers might shoot a hundred hours of footage for a
two-hour finished film – waste and the inevitable environmental costs be damned.
And of course, even filmmakers like Benning and Lockhart who have shot with
more care and less waste, have created some of the same. The widespread switch to
digital, a change virtually necessitated by the film industry and its move to digital
production, distribution, and projection, has not meant that environmental damage
is no longer an issue. The new, digital regime of both industrial and more artisanal
forms of cinema, including even the most radical forms of ‘slow cinema,’ require new
high-definition digital projectors that involve substantial expenditures of electrical
energy. And surely, as time passes, we’ll learn, and will need to come to terms with,
the environmental damage our fascination with digital tools must be doing.
15 Benning’s Graz show also exhibited a version of Benning’s “Two Cabins” project, which is both
installation and feature film: it focuses on Thoreau and the cabin at Walden Pond, and on Theodore J.
Kaczynski, “The Unibomber,” and his cabin in Montana.
642 Scott MacDonald
What in an earlier generation was called ‘the population explosion’ remains the
central fact of our era. The population of the Earth passed seven billion in 2011 and
continues to grow. And this growing population is increasingly aware of what is avail-
able on this planet: most every individual has both needs and proliferating desires.
Short of a human holocaust that would be unimaginably larger than any that have
already occurred, this level of population is here to stay, and the myriad systems that
struggle to minister to its needs and desires will continue to be a fact of life. The best
we can do, and the best cinema can do, is to mediate in the direction of expanded
physical health (of people, of the environment that sustains us) and psychic aware-
ness of our responsibility to continue (patiently, persistently) to live and teach in the
interests of health and serenity. Cinema has given us a wide range of possibilities that
can assist us in this work; this is, of course, a cause for both celebration and our fun-
damental challenge as teachers, programmers, ‘experts’ in ecocinema studies.
4 B
ibliography
4.1 W
orks Cited
Frampton, Hollis. Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980. Rochester: Visual
Studies Workshop Press, 1983.
Josh Fox. “Josh Fox – Artistic Director.” http://www.internationalwow.com/newsite/josh.html.
(10 July 2015).
MacDonald, Scott. “Godfrey Reggio.” A Critical Cinema 2. Eds. Scott MacDonald. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992. 390–391.
MacDonald, Scott. “Cine-Surveillance: 3 Avant-Docs Interviews with Amie Siegel, Sharon Lockhart,
Jane Gillooly.” Film Quarterly 66.4 (2013): 28–40.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th
Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
4.2 F ilms
Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. 20th Century Fox, 2009.
BNSF. Dir. James Benning. 2012.
Chasing Ice. Dir. Jeff Orlowski. Exposure Labs, 2012.
Double Tide. Dir. Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart Studio, 2009.
Drill Baby Drill. Dir. Lech Kowalski. Revolt Cinema, 2013.
Frack Democracy. Dir. Lech Kowalski, Revolt Cinema, 2014.
FrackNation. Dir. Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, and Magdalena Segieda. Ann & Phelim Media,
2013.
Gasland, Dir. Josh Fox. HBO Documentary Films, 2010.
Gasland, Part II. Josh Fox. HBO Documentary Films, 2013.
Holy Field Holy War. Dir. Lech Kowalski. Revolt Cinema, 2013.
Landscape (for Manon). Dir. Peter Hutton. Peter Hutton, 1987.

Avatar. Official website. www.avatarmovie.com/index.html. (10 July 2015).
Guillen, Michael. “Darkest Americana & Elsewhere: Ruhr: A Few Questions For James Benning.”
twitch. http://twitchfilm.com/2010/03/darkest-americana-elsewhere-ruhr-a-few-questions-for-
james-benning.html. 2 March 2010 (10 July 2015).
“Pandorapedia.” Pandorapedia: The Official Field Guide. http://www.pandorapedia.com/. (10 July
2015).
Aaron S. Allen
33 Ecomusicology from Poetic to Practical
Abstract: Ecomusicology, or ‘ecocritical musicology,’ is a field that considers the
complex relationships between culture, nature, and music/sound. This chapter pro-
vides an overview of ecomusicology in four parts. First, I elaborate on that definition
and provide a brief intellectual history of the field, particularly in relation to ecocriti-
cism. Second, I develop an approach to the field that considers a range of approaches
from poetic to practical – that is, from reflective, aesthetic concerns to political, activ-
ist concerns. Third, in order to illustrate those poles and an in-between, I present
three examples from my own research: a poetic approach to pastoral symphonies,
a practical approach to sustainability and materials for musical instruments, and a
middle ground regarding a singer-songwriter. Finally, I provide a brief overview of
some implicitly and explicitly ecomusicological works on this continuum from poetic
to practical.
Key Terms: Music, sound, environmental arts, environmental humanities
Ecomusicology considers the complex relationships between culture, nature, and

music/sound, particularly after the widespread realization in the mid-twentieth
century that global environmental systems are in crisis due to the actions of humans.
By employing some of the most complex and contested terms in the English lan-
guage – music, culture, nature, environment, sustainability – ecomusicology can
have infuriatingly multivalent yet usefully complex meanings (as illustrated in the
“Ecomusicologies” conferences, www.ecomusicologies.org). As Jeff Todd Titon (2013,
8) advocates, ecomusicology “can work meaningfully towards sustaining music
within the soundscape of life on planet Earth.”
The first use of the term ‘ecomusicology’ was in a report about the music and
soundscape theories of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (Troup 1972), but
its concepts are long in historical duration and spread among global cultures. The
Ancient Greek “Harmony of the Spheres,” intricate writings that described harmo
nious musical proportions between the planets and how such relationships order
the universe, has been discussed for millennia (Godwin 1993); ecomusicology shares
such Greek ‘origins’ with ecocriticism’s pastoral. The Hindu Vedas also tell a crea-
tion story bathed in sound (Schneider 2004), and there are various non-Western and
non-Eastern acoustemologies (sonic ways of knowing the world, Feld 1993), such
as the dulugu ganalan (“lift-up-over sounding”) of the Kaluli people of Papua New
Guinea (Feld 2012). Gardiner’s (2009 [1832]) The Music of Nature is perhaps the first
book explicitly on music and nature, but a self-conscious ecomusicology has come
about only in the first decade of the twentieth century (despite some scattered uses in
the 1990s). There are many studies that are ecomusicological in scope but that do not
use the term (see Allen 2012b).
Irrespective of any self-conscious use of the term, the ideas that comprise ecomu-
sicology – human-nature relations as mediated by music/sound – are of broad inter-
est. Ecomusicology comes together from related but differentiated areas of academic
music study that draw on and connect with many other areas: environmental history,
human geography, the biological sciences (particularly soundscape ecology), envi-
ronmental studies, and especially literary ecocriticism. This wide diversity of influ-
ences from many fields is balanced by a potential usefulness and/or interest to them.
Such relevance for ecomusicology might be due to the great emotional pleasures and
diverse intellectual engagements that many experience with music; this relevance is
also due to the inherent multi-disciplinary aspect of music study and the ubiquity of
sound on Earth.
When the general public thinks of music in schools, it is bands, orchestras, and
other kinds of performance that usually come to mind. But music, particularly in
higher education, has a long history of involvement with scholarship as well – that is,
with music theory, music history, and the study of music-making all over the world.
These latter two subjects, musicology and ethnomusicology, are of primary relevance
to ecomusicology.
To oversimplify, musicology considers the history and social contexts of musical
works with methodologies similar to those of art history and literary scholarship.
As with music theorists, musicologists are primarily concerned with art music in
the Western concert tradition, although there are trends to include popular and
non-Western areas. Ethnomusicology has traditionally focused on indigenous tra-
ditions, non-Western classical music, and Western folk music; today, popular music
is included as well, although ethnomusicology may be better understood as an
approach to people making music of all kinds everywhere. Most ethnomusicologists
are trained in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork methods and treat music
and sound as process or experience, in contrast to the historical and literary methods
of musicologists that treat music as product or text. Since the cultural turn in music
scholarship of the 1980s, such distinctions are arbitrary, particularly with regard to
individual scholars. For example, I am trained as a musicologist (having written a
dissertation on the reception of Beethoven in nineteenth-century Italy), but I consider
sound and approaches to music as process as might an ethnomusicologist (yet I do
not do fieldwork, despite having a degree in environmental studies). Musicologists
and ethnomusicologists have, to date, been the primary participants in the burgeon-
ing field of ecomusicology, although theorists, composers, and performers have not
been absent. Related and often overlapping academic discourses in music studies
include acoustic ecology, biomusic, performance studies, soundscape studies, sound
studies, and zoomusicology.
A useful distinction in the short history of the modern field of ecomusicology is
between different interpretations of the prefix eco- as representing ecological or eco-
646 Aaron S. Allen
critical. While Troup (1972) and many others (Feld 1993; Harley 1995; Kaipainen 1997;
Torvinen 2009; Perlman 2012; Keogh 2013) employ, quite logically, ‘ecology’ in their
work and definitions of ecomusicology, Rehding (2002) is the first with an implicitly
ecocritical (and explicitly ecocritically informed) approach. Toliver (2004) drew on
ecocriticism for an article published in the premiere North American forum for musi-
cological research. While Toliver’s article was fundamental for institutionalizing eco-
musicology, he pointed out that there already was a scholarly ‘ecomusicology’ that
had for generations considered the pastoral, sublime, and impressionism, with even
a few explicit examples in recent years, notably Rehding (2002) and Morris (1998).
Guy (2009) published her ecomusicological article (drawing on Glotfelty 1996) in the
premiere North American forum for ethnomusicology, at the same time as another
article (Ramnarine 2009) called for an ‘environmental ethnomusicology.’ In my defi-
nition of ecomusicology (written in 2010, published in 2014) for the primary research
encyclopedia in music (The Grove Dictionary of American Music), I drew on ecocriti-
cism to help define the developing field. Ingram (2010) is an entire volume of ecocrit-
ical studies of post-1960s American music that does not use the term ecomusicology;
his special issue of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism is entitled “Eco-musicology”
(Ingram 2011). Ecomusicology has also engaged with sustainability studies (Titon
2009; Allen et al. 2014). In a volume that I co-edited with Kevin Dawe, we consider
ecomusicology to be a field, not a discipline, that is broadly interdisciplinary but that
nevertheless owes much to ecocriticism (Allen and Dawe 2016).
Glotfelty (1996, xviii) defined ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship
between literature and the physical environment.” Since then, debate, discussion,
and nuance have enlarged, enriched, and (re-)focused that definition, as this volume
illustrates. Ecocriticism is for the most part a text-based field, even as the definition
of text has broadened to include film, art, and musical works (cf. ↗V Genre and
Media Ecologies) – and even as the concept has broadened to include culture as a
text (especially for anthropologists and ethnomusicologists). But ecomusicology has
something more to offer in two connected ways. First, the concept of sound – which
is not just noise or non-music (in the Western classical sense), but also sonic events
created by non-human life and non-biotic nature – does not work well as a text (in a
narrow sense). While an author may be identifiable, a sign may be attributable, and a
message may be interpreted, sound moves in a liminal realm that opens up interpre-
tive possibilities and brings us closer to connecting with non-human life in a “rela-
tional epistemology of diversity, interconnectedness, and co-presence” (Titon 2013,
8). Second, while literature has been assumed to be a human-creation, much like
music, the concept of a three-way relationship (music-culture-nature) adds a useful
(if potentially confounding) element of complexity between the aesthetic object (i.e.,
sound, of which music is a type), the human culture that interprets and/or creates
it and the implicitly non-human environment. Discussions of ecomusicology have
not shied away from the complex, nuanced, and entangled meanings of the terms in
question, especially the much-problematized nature (see Allen et al. 2011; Allen and
Dawe 2016); at the same time, more needs to be done (see Titon 2013).
Terminological discussions and field-defining debates are of course familiar to
ecocriticism and many environmentally inflected fields. Scholars of music and sound
have internecine disagreements and debates over fundamental terms such as music
(to ethnomusicologists, music is often understood as a process, something people
do; for musicologists, the score or even a recording has sometimes become reified
as music). Rather than considering ecomusicology as providing something new, or
even just an approach different from ecocriticism, I would like to propose instead that
ecomusicology is a facet of the cultural study of the environmental crisis, one that
considers music and sound.
Ecomusicology matters, as I have argued elsewhere (Allen 2012c; Allen et al.
2011), because it can bridge the arts and sciences and can teach creative critical think-
ing; the environmental crisis is not just a crisis of science (failed engineering), but
also a crisis of culture (failed thinking), so we need to muster all possible human-
istic and scientific resources in order to imagine, understand, and confront it. This
argument builds on Donald Worster (see Allen et al. 2011, 414) and others who have
acknowledged the accomplishments of science in understanding the environmental
crisis and who have also acknowledged that scientists have failed to understand fully
those ‘why’ questions rooted in culture (Worster 1993). Music has been associated
with the sciences since medieval times; today, the roots of the German ‘Musikwis-
senschaft’ and the English ‘(ethno)musicology’ indicate that scientific basis. In that
sense, music and sound are particularly appropriate media for making truly trans-/
cross-/inter-disciplinary connections between the sciences, arts, and humanities in
rigorous ways that can open up intellectual understanding and aesthetic meaning
(i.e., ‘poetic’) and that can also be part of political realizations fueling an activist
agenda (i.e., ‘practical’). These reflective and applied approaches to ecomusicol-
ogy help achieve the goal of making studies in sound and music inclusive of all the
Earth – plants, animals, places, environmental crises, human creations, human ideas
of nature, as well as human-human concerns. Ecomusicology, as with ecocriticism,
contributes to understanding the cultural roots of the environmental crisis – and pro-
moting change.
1 From Poetic to Practical

There is a tension in the nascent field of ecomusicology, one no doubt familiar in
other fields and disciplines: a tension between those who view scholarship primarily
as objective and detached and those who view it as subjective and engaged. The sit-
uation on the ground is messier, of course, with many places in between these poles,
individuals doing both types of work, and scholarship that, as always, can be read
648 Aaron S. Allen
and used in different ways. My title (with a nod to Feld 1993) risks a binary, but I made
choices about two linguistic elements that signal, as in the ensuing discussion, a more
fluid concept. First is the prepositional construction ‘from… to’ indicating change and
movement along a continuum. Second is my avoidance of the definite articles ‘the’
indicating less fixity. My uses of poetic and practical can be understood as poles on
a continuum, overlapping circles of a Venn diagram, an attempt to navigate between
Scylla and Charybdis – not a rigid dichotomy, not an indication of teleology, and not
a promotion of either as ‘better.’
By poetic I denote a scholarly engagement with what is aesthetic and/or inter-
esting. By practical I denote a scholarly concern with what is activist and/or advocat-
ing. Both are intellectual approaches that involve field- and/or text-based research
in the service of crafting work that is intended to convince a reader of some points
or an argument; in that sense, they are, like most scholarship, activist (see Allen et
al. 2014). For much of their histories, ethnomusicology and musicology have sought
the poetic path, pursuing research that implies the detachment of the author and/or
demonstrates the reality of some issue. But by the late-twentieth century, attitudes
began to change. In the 1960s and 1970s, ethnomusicologists began a turn from sci-
entific to humanistic approaches; as Feld (1993) describes, they began reflecting crit-
ically on the colonial legacy of anthropology and wanted to open up more dialogic
relations with their field informants (see especially the second and later editions
of Feld 2012). Musicology experienced a cultural turn later (in the 1980s) due to the
eventual influence of literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and identity pol-
itics. These changes parallel the disruptions that resulted from the so-called science
wars, particularly regarding scientific and postmodern understandings of nature and
‘nature’ (Titon 2013; Allen et al. 2011).
Poetic approaches to ecomusicology are reflective in that they provide intellec-
tual understanding for human-nature relationships as mediated by sound and music.
The subject matter may be intellectually (un)interesting or aesthetically (dis)pleas-
ing, and metaphor is often important. These poetic approaches include ideas that
show music as reflective of nature, place influencing music, and composers engaging
the pastoral.
Practical approaches to ecomusicology are applied in that they provide political
understanding for sound and music in relation to environmental and sustainability
issues. The subject matter may be implicitly or explicitly activist or advocating of par-
ticular agendas, and the reality of the physical world is often important. These prac-
tical approaches pursue ideas that show the impacts of sound and music on nature/
environment and vice versa, and they may problematize the role of composer/authors
particularly in relation to nature, the pastoral, and place.
While these outlines may seem overly rigid and judgmental, I will share three case
studies of my own work to illustrate these two poles and a middle ground. I provide
these case studies because I want to dispel any sense of reprobation and because I
am able to make claims about the author’s intentions (because I am that author). I
believe in an open and inclusive diversity of ecomusicological pursuits, from poetic

to practical, and I have come to illustrate that in my own work. The remainder of
this chapter provides a conspectus of the field of ecomusicology, illustrating three
in-depth and then numerous cursory examples of recent ecomusicological work from
poetic to practical.
2 Poetic Ecomusicology: Symphonic Pastorals

As an example of poetic ecomusicology, I argued (Allen 2011) that symphonies could
relate ideas about nature particular to their historical contexts. A popular misunder-
standing of symphonies is that they are devoid of the meanings conveyed in texted
music such as songs and choruses; the symphony is claimed as ‘absolute music,’ that
is ‘abstract’ or ‘pure’ sound, music for its own sake. In considering three symphonies,
it is useful to employ Leo Marx’s theory of simple and complex pastorals.
Justin Heinrich Knecht’s Le Portrait Musical de la Nature (1785) (Allen 2011, 24–25)
is a symphony in five movements, which the composer described as follows:
I. A beautiful landscape where the sun shines, the gentle breezes blow, the brooks flow through
the valley; the birds warble, a purling stream descends from a height, the shepherd pipes, the
lambs frolic and the sweet voice of the shepherdess is heard.
II. The heavens darken and cloud over; every living thing is breathless and frightened. Black
clouds accumulate, winds whistle, the distant thunder rumbles and the storm slowly approaches.
III. With howling winds and driving rain, the storm breaks in full fury, the treetops groan, the
foaming waters rush with a dreadful noise.
IV. Gradually the storm subsides, the clouds disperse and the sky clears.
V. Nature, transported with joy, lifts its voice to heaven and gives thanks to the Creator in soft
and pleasant songs.
The main theme of the peaceful idyll of the first movement is built from a horn motive,
likely derived from the Swiss ranz des vaches that is evocative of home. After invok-
ing the mountains comes the second theme of the idyll and another common pasto-
ral trope: birdcalls. The middle three movements are an interruption: the approach
of a storm, the thunderstorm itself, and the calm afterward. Knecht’s finale is enti-
tled “Hymn with variations.” Portrait is a theatrical sort of pastoral, one staged for
public consumption; in a semi-dramatic move, Knecht even recalls the music of the
first movement at the end of the finale. After an interruption the pastoral idyll has
returned.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, Op. 68 (1808) (Allen 2011, 25–31), is
also in five movements, but his descriptive titles are pithier than Knecht’s:
650 Aaron S. Allen
I. The Awakening of Joyous Feelings on Getting Out into the Countryside

II. Scene by the Brook
III. Merry Gathering of Country People
IV. Thunderstorm
V. Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm
Beethoven went further by naming birds in the score of “Scene by the Brook.” He
revered nature and enjoyed his frequent trips out of Vienna and into the country-
side, and the general narrative and musical aspects of the Sixth reflect a “Memory of
Country Life.” As did Knecht, Beethoven interrupted the initial idyll with a storm; this
element of sublime tension leads to the “thankful feelings” of the finale.
Beethoven conveys pastoral character through mostly moderate tempos, a pre-
dilection for consonance, and slow harmonic changes. The pastoral feeling is seem-
ingly timeless, but the storm intrudes to remind us of reality. The return of the idyll is
an arrival on a higher appreciative plane of respect for creation, touching on the reli-
gious character of the work. The “Shepherd’s Song” intoned by the horn is a generic
ranz des vaches; its repetitions resemble a church hymn. Together with organ-like
sonorities, this finale is a song of praise – be it to the deity or to pastoral grace. The
parallel with the concluding “Hymn” of Knecht’s Portrait is clear, yet rather than a
public theatrical expression, Beethoven’s is more a personal paean to nature.
Both Knecht’s Portrait and Beethoven’s Sixth are what Marx called simple, sen-
timental, pastorals. Both works reflect felicity through images of natural, unspoiled,
rural landscapes. The Sixth is a journey away from the city and into the country. Gustav
Mahler’s symphonic output engages and struggles with the specter of Beethoven in
many ways, and he too sought to escape the city. But Mahler’s Third symphony (1893–
1896, revised 1906) illustrates Marx’s complex pastoral (Allen 2011, 35–36). Like the
Knecht and Beethoven, its six movements break from the symphonic norm of four.
But unlike the Knecht and Beethoven, it has no published programmatic text. In other
words, it is ostensibly ‘abstract,’ and each movement is indicated only by generic
tempo and character descriptions:
I. Strong, decisive
II. In the tempo of a minuet
III. Comfortably, like a scherzo
IV. Very slowly, mysteriously
V. Cheerful in tempo and bold in expression
VI. Slow, tranquil, deeply felt
Mahler had an abiding interest in nature: the pastoral is a common musical topos,
and he retreated to the Alps to compose. Mahler’s fraught relationship with the city
breaks into his music; he wanted a symphony to resemble the world and thus contain
both good and bad. The interruptions, distorted recollections, and unstable moments
in the third movement reflect a broken, or complex, pastoral. Mahler had an ambiv-
alent relationship with the very metropolis he needed for his career, from which he
longed to escape; we can understand the perpetual motions of this scherzo as worldly
bustle, which in turn triggers fleeting pastoral escapes and distorted recollections.
Beethoven wanted to escape Vienna for the countryside, but his response was one of
personal, quasi-religious reverence; Mahler found the stark contrast worthy of distor-
tion. Mahler’s pastoral evocations call into question, as Marx put it, the “illusion of
peace and harmony in a green pasture” (qtd. in Allen 2011, 31).
Despite the perception that symphonies are ‘abstract,’ their musical and contex-
tual features can convey ideas about nature, particularly as seen through the lens of
ecocriticism. R. Murray Schafer was an important early voice on ecomusicological
ideas; he observed that programme music is imitative of environment, while absolute
music allows composers to fashion ideal soundscapes of the mind. The highest forms
of absolute music, such as the symphony, are conceived for indoor performance and
thus disengaged from the environment (see Allen 2011, 36). While much music exists
to substantiate Schafer’s binary, some symphonic pastorals can complicate such
facile understandings.
My essay “Symphonic Pastorals” (Allen 2011) illustrates an effort that is intellec-
tual: it seeks greater understanding and an aesthetic appreciation of these sympho-
nies. It does not propose practical, activist, or political messages. Of course, one may
interpret Mahler’s perspective or my disagreement with Schafer as leading to advo-
cacy. In fact, Schafer’s work in soundscapes and acoustic ecology has been the basis
for activist work regarding noise pollution (cf. Järviluoma et al. 2009, which includes
original studies by Schafer). However, my engagement with Schafer was purely intel-
lectual, intended only to contextualize ideas about the symphony. If a reader can find
a way to use this article for political or activist ends, I am open to such an interpreta-
tion, but I believe it would be difficult.
3 P
ractical Ecomusicology: Preserving and
Destroying Forests
My example of practical ecomusicology (Allen 2012a) is based on the very instruments
used to play symphonies. The sound of Western art music relies on the instruments
of the violin family. This aural experience of elite music values quality instruments
for public performances and recordings. Highly trained musicians invest handsomely
in their tools, which are complex creations made of over seventy parts, two of which
are fundamental to tone quality and performability: soundboard and bow. The
soundboard is typically made of select quality spruce that has excellent properties of
sound transmission; this wood is called resonance wood, the most prized source of
which is from the Paneveggio Forest in northern Italy. Centuries ago, trial and error
demonstrated what today modern physics proved: that certain spruce trees have an
652 Aaron S. Allen
excellent physical make up for transmitting sound. These sound waves are created
by the strings, which the player vibrates by rubbing them with horse-hair strung on
a wooden bow.
The form of the bow determines how a player is able to use it, and the mate-
rial used to make the bow governs its form. For the bows that play violins, the most
sought-after material is a tropical hardwood from Brazil called pernambuco, or pau
brasil. The history of pernambuco is one of near extinction. Pernambuco is endemic
to Brazil’s Atlantic coastal forest, the rapidly disappearing Mata Atlântica; it cannot
grow wild anywhere else, and plantation-grown trees are insufficient for bows.
Together with the nearby Amazon, these forests, their indigenous peoples, and the
African slaves brought in to supplement them have been plundered and exploited for
centuries. European colonial powers fought wars with each other and with the indig-
enous peoples over pernambuco because of its capacity to create the red dyes that
colored the regal garments of European secular and spiritual rulers. The country we
now know as Brazil was named after, and because of, this tree, pau brasil.
Various woods have been used for violin bows, the top of which was convex due
in part to the wood. But after the mid-eighteenth century, and until today, pernam-
buco allowed for a concave bow that contributed to greater control when playing
violins. Rather than composites or other woods with approximate or lesser quali-
ties, professional string players demand high quality pernambuco bows. At the same
time, however, bow makers have recognized the precarious place of pernambuco.
Bow makers alone have not endangered the tree; threats also come from slash and
burn agriculture, cattle ranching, soybean monocultures, eucalyptus plantations,
and the explosive urban growth of two of the world’s largest cities, São Paolo and
Rio de Janeiro. Nevertheless, because bow makers are a significant public face of
pernambuco, they established the International Pernambuco Conservation Initia-
tive to address the threat. Still, lacking a quality replacement that meets performers’
demands, bow makers continue to rely on the increasingly rare resource. In response
to the threat facing the Mata Atlântica, in 2007 the United Nations developed trade
restrictions that included requiring musicians to register pernambuco bows with the
state – a law that, if enacted, would result in control tighter than that for hand guns in
the United States. But with ongoing conservation efforts, these restrictions are being
held at bay. Similar stories of exploitation could be told for other musical woods, such
as mahogany, rosewood, and ebony. (See Allen 2012a, 301–304).
Nevertheless, there are exceptions, as with the nearly millennium-long history of
sustainable spruce harvesting in the Paneveggio. The Italian Trentino region of Val di
Fiemme has the perfect conditions for the growth of spruce resonance wood. This area
of the Italian Alps, now part of the Parco Naturale Paneveggio/Pale di San Martino, is
known as la foresta dei violini, the forest of violins. The Italian red spruce, also known
as Norway spruce, is widely distributed, and it is by no means endangered; but reso-
nance wood requires a rare microclimate; still, wood for lutherie is a small percentage
of harvests. The Val di Fiemme has the optimal microclimate and cultural institutions
to produce many trees with resonance wood. Through the nearby capital of Trento,
the Fiemmesi could supply the Po Valley cities of Brescia and, particularly, Cremona,
home of famous luthiers such as Antonio Stradivari. Their skilled craftsmanship and
use of Paneveggian spruce provided the region’s moniker, the “forest of the violins.”
The luthiers of Cremona may not have made such remarkable instruments were it
not for the Fiemmesi foresters who, for centuries, practiced what would be called
today ‘sustainable forestry.’ Such responsible practices continued even as luthiers
required select wood, and even as another Fiemmesi neighbor, Venice, demanded
massive quantities of wood to build and maintain their city and navy. Similar to the
Mata Atlântica, the Paneveggio was also at risk of exploitation, but a combination
of unique geographical features and cultural institutions in the Fiemme served to
protect trees and traditions.
By the late twentieth century, the density of standing timber in the Fiemme was
more than double Italy’s mean; these forests add more wood than logging extracts. Of
that production, a minuscule fraction is suitable for lutherie. An Italian luthier will
often say her work is fatto di Fiemme, “made of Fiemme,” an expression of praise for
the rare Paneveggian material fundamental to the quality of her creation. The Strad-
ivari workshop used Paneveggian resonance wood for some instruments, known as
Strads. Today, musicians and popular tourist literature from and about the Paneveg-
gio emphasize – in mythologizing and often problematic ways – the fame and impor-
tance of the “forest of the violins” (see Allen 2012a, 304–313.) Recent auctions of Strad
violins have resulted in astounding figures: in 2011, the “Lady Blunt” sold for a record
shattering US $15.9 million.
But how do we really value a Strad? Money alone is an incomplete measure.
Rather, the value of a Strad is in its process of becoming, its life history: the instru-
ment is a cultural commodity that has histories from the forest to the stage; values
are created through processes of exchange. Values accorded a Strad contribute to
sustainability in the Paneveggio while similar values accorded a pernambuco bow to
play it contribute to destroying the Mata Atlântica. Just as exploitation in Brazil stems
from material greed, urban sprawl, monocultures, and violin bows, so too does con-
servation in the Fiemme stem from various sources: cultural institutions, geographic
location, climate, and violin soundboards (see Allen 2012a, 313–315.)
In my essay “‘Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s Violins and the Musical Trees of the
Paneveggio” (Allen 2012a) I argued that musical instruments contribute to both preserv-
ing and destroying far-flung forests. I thus engaged directly with the political nature
of environmental advocacy by pointing out destructive, counter-productive cultural
habits that should be stopped as well as positive systems that sustain traditions and
places – paradoxically, both are connected in the same dominant musical instrument.
Rather than a romanticized view of pastoral nature, the forests here are impacted by
cultural activities and changed significantly. There is no musical work or composer to
be discussed; rather, I show how cultural traditions impact the environment. One may
take this piece as a simple ‘objective’ description of the situation, but my intent was to
654 Aaron S. Allen
help consumers of music and musical instruments realize that the thing they love has
a complex role in the world: doing good (preserving forests, creating music) but also
causing harm (destroying forests). My hope is that such knowledge will lead to action.
(Trump 2013 showcases a similar approach regarding wood for guitars.)
4 B
etween Poetic and Practical Ecomusicology: The
Complex Cockburn
My third example, on the complex singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn (see Allen 2013),
illustrates a middle-ground between poetic and practical. Cockburn (“KOH-bern”)
has produced over thirty albums, twenty of which have gone gold or platinum. Hailed
as an acoustic guitar virtuoso, a short list of his honors includes thirteen Juno awards,
seven honorary doctorates, the Order of Canada, and induction into both the Cana-
dian Music and Broadcast Halls of Fame. Born in Ottawa and active since the late
1960s, Cockburn has come to be identified as quintessentially Canadian: he was even
‘stamped’ in 2011 in Canada Post’s Canadian Recording Artists series. Yet Cockburn
is not nationalistic; as he said, “I’m a Canadian, true, but in a sense it’s more or less
by default… I’m not really into nationalism – I prefer to think of myself as being a
member of the world” (qtd. in Allen 2013, 67). Cockburn’s music draws on Canadian
styles and themes as well as many other national and international influences. Sim-
ilarly, despite Cockburn’s openness about his Christianity and its influences in his
music (unusual for a non-‘Christian Rock’ musician), his spirituality is continually
evolving and draws on Eastern religious practices, such as Buddhism. He proclaimed
his beliefs in the early 1970s in “All the Diamonds,” which Cockburn said he wrote,
“the day after I actually took a look at myself and realized that I was a Christian” (qtd.
in Allen 2013, 74).
However, it is a third facet of this complex musician that is most relevant to an
ecomusicological approach: Cockburn’s inspiration from, concern for, and advocacy
on behalf of the environment. In 2010, Cockburn received Earth Day Canada’s Out-
standing Commitment to the Environment Award in recognition for his decades of
working for and singing about the natural world. Since the 1980s he has participated
in, protested, sung about, and donated time and money to numerous environmental
causes. In the mid-1990s, he was honorary chairperson of Friends of the Earth Canada;
in Dart to the Heart (1994) he included the following appeal in the liner notes:
The ozone layer is being depleted. UV-B radiation is on the increase. The threat to our food
supply, to animals, to our health, becomes more ominous by the minute. If this scares you as
much as it does me, you might consider contacting: Friends of the Earth, we are an international
organization working hard on ozone protection, as well as other environmental issues. (qtd. in
Allen 2013, 81)
In his 1997 acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate at the Berklee College of
Music, Cockburn cited various issues he wanted students to address: “Land mines,
the quality of life for inner city folks, loss of the ozone layer, the treatment of migrant
workers, the depletion of the Earth’s resources, social atrocities like the School of the
Americas – it’s an endless list. Endless but not overwhelming. Just pick one you relate
to and kick ass” (qtd. in Allen 2013, 81).
The pastoral is a useful frame for understanding Cockburn. His song texts and
musical materials often provide urban-rural contrasts. Cockburn initially moved from
the city to the country but later returned the city (Toronto, Montreal), yet he contin-
ued to visit the country in person and song. Cockburn’s audiences have interpreted
him as a pastor, that shepherd who is God’s messenger.
Buell, Marx, and Ingram offer four perspectives on the pastoral that help under-
stand Cockburn’s work and career. Marx’s simple pastoral is most evident in the
imagery of songs that show Cockburn as a keen observer of nature, while Buell’s
national pastorals are evident in his homage to Canadian landscapes. Buell’s pas-
toral outrage and Marx’s complex pastoral find outlets in numerous songs: “Radium
Rain” laments the Chernobyl disaster; “The Embers of Eden” references burning rain-
forests; “Down where the Death Squad Lives” compared deforestation to senseless
murder; Cockburn even associated the purely instrumental “The End of All Rivers”
with the sea (at a 2006 concert, he wondered “is a river still a river if there is nothing
to swim in it?”).
Cockburn performed “If a Tree Falls” (1988) at the 2005 United Nations Summit
for Climate Control in Montreal, and it was featured on Playlist for the Planet (2011),
a celebration and fundraiser for Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. “If a Tree
Falls” is perhaps Cockburn’s most popular environmental song. The video begins
with a ‘whole Earth’ shot of the planet and zooms in to the upper Amazon; it presents
scenes of pristine forest and native peoples contrasted with logging and deforesta-
tion. Cockburn speaks the verses, describing global forests as important for climate
control but facing a lobotomy and a corporate “parasitic greedhead scam”; he criti-
cizes the clear-cutting to make hamburgers and revels in the mystery of forest crea-
tion. But the philosopher comes through in the sung chorus (when in the video he is
finally visible in black leather with an electric guitar): “If a tree falls in the forest does
anybody hear? Anybody hear the forest fall?”
“Wise Users” appeared on the compilation album Honor: Benefit for the Honor
Earth Campaign (1996). The five verses are separated with the chorus: “Use it wisely …
go on / Reap your harvest, Wise Users / ‘Til everything is gone.” He calls out his oppo-
sition, the “business blackmailers,” who make him feel as if he were a man looking
at “his murdered child.” Cockburn is angry about killing tigers, “So some prick can
stand tall in Taiwan,” and lets us know it – even going so far as to suggest wise users
commit suicide by playing Russian roulette. Unusual for Cockburn-the-optimist, res-
olute anger continues in the final verse: despite believing in beauty and truth, he also
knows that humans are good at destroying both.
656 Aaron S. Allen
Ingram (2010) shows that popular music can express the complex pastoral,
a point Cockburn illustrates well. The complex pastoral also describes Cockburn’s
career as a whole: beautiful, spiritual music, tinged with anger and outrage at the
injustices of the world. Cockburn’s passions go beyond conservation and Christian-
ity, and he is more than just a Canadian artist. His words and deeds plead for love
and human rights and against militarism and corporate greed. Cockburn brings audi-
ences complex positions, going beyond simplistic pop-music messaging and instead
increasing awareness. Rather than preaching about the problems and insisting we do
something, he affects listeners while encouraging us to believe in a better world, raise
our voices individually and collectively, and ask for change.
While this essay, “Bruce Cockburn: Canadian, Christian, Conservationist” (Allen
2013), engages with non-explicitly environmental issues, such as nationalism and
religion, they ultimately connect with social justice and sustainability. Cockburn
is an activist musician, and he uses his position to advocate political and environ-
mental stances. While my essay is not explicitly activist, the message of the subject
is; moreover, in telling Cockburn’s story, I encourage others to learn from it. While I
intended this essay to represent Cockburn’s music and positions, especially his inspi-
ration from and engagement with nature, I also wanted to show an activist musician
in action. I see this example, then, as an ecomusicological contribution occupying a
middle ground between poetic and practical.
5 Ecomusicology on a Continuum
It would be a safer move intellectually, perhaps, to place most ecomusicology studies
in the middle ground, but doing so would obscure the trends and tensions in the
field. Some authors may want or may seek to disavow associations with environmen-
tal studies, political ecology, or social activism, regardless of whether their materials
do or do not lend themselves to such arenas. Recognizing and accepting a diversity
of approaches, however, is healthy for any field. In the following, after discussing
a brief review of the literature (practical and poetic and in-between), I provide an
overview of a few multi-author collections, which run the gamut of ecomusicologi-
cal approaches. The breadth of ecomusicological writing – both that which identifies
explicitly with this new field and that which does not – is vast, and I make no claims
to cover all themes and issues (for more on bibliographic resources in ecomusicology,
see Allen and Freeman 2012).
Poetic approaches often engage with birds, an oft-discussed thematic area in eco-
musicology but also in music and acoustic pursuits in general (from anthropological
and historical to biological and ecological). Feld (2012) is a ‘classic’ ecomusicolog-
ical study considering birds and the complex aesthetics of the Kaluli. Fallon (2007)
illustrates Oliver Messiaen’s aesthetic of representation in the French composer’s
transcriptions of birdsongs; while Messiaen was mostly accurate, his music is more
useful in understanding this devout Catholic’s approach to knowing God through
nature. Leach (2007) explores the complex medieval ontologies of music and nature
through understandings of birdsong, arguing that the rational approach of music at
the time excluded bird calls from being considered music. Taylor (2011) surveys twen-
tieth-century Australian composers who rely on the pied butcherbird. Cohen (1983)
finds that aspects of birdcalls parallel aspects of sixteenth-century counterpoint.
Martinelli (2009) analyzes birds, and other animals, as sound communicators, while
Rothenberg (2005) contemplates his communication with them as musicians. Mundy
(2009) tells the story of how visual representations of birdsong became an objective
tool for science. Marler and Slabbekoorn (2004) provide the standard introduction to
the science of birdsong.
Also poetic in scope was Toliver’s (2004) “Eco-ing in the Canyon.” While Von
Glahn (2003) explored the concert music of Ferde Grofé in relation to iconic American
nature, Toliver connected his Grand Canyon Suite to early twentieth-century notions
of preservation and conservation. Toliver’s ecocritical interpretation hears Grofé rep-
resenting the celebration and the conquest of the Grand Canyon. Another milestone
article in ecomusicology is Guy’s (2009) “Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River.” Her
study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Taiwanese popular songs about Taipei’s
Tamsui River charts a three-fold history of pastoral interest, neglect, and environmen-
tal concern that reflects the rural situation, industrial boom, and environmentalism
that characterized general concerns about the Tamsui.
Both Toliver and Guy approach their subject in the poetic vein by seeking out
interesting intellectual connections historically and new aesthetic readings contem-
porarily. But both have practical frames in disciplinary contexts. Toliver is clearing
ground for ecocritical work in musicology; Guy exhorts ethnomusicologists to con-
sider environmental issues in their work. (Furthermore, Feld 2012 is poetic in my anal-
ysis, but he later did advocacy work for the Kaluli.) Thus depending on how one reads
Toliver and Guy (for their content or for their larger disciplinary conversations), one
may decide they are either more poetic or practical. Rather than showing an inher-
ent flaw in my approach, I would like to reiterate instead that poetic and practical
approaches are fluid, on a continuum, constantly circling together with each other;
and readers interpret and use their sources in different and often contrasting ways.
Teasing apart such approaches is an artificial but useful exercise in understanding
the field.
A further middle ground is Fallon’s (2009) “Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messi-
aen’s Cold War Mass.” While Messiaen is widely known for using bird song (which
brought him closer to God) and for being detached from politics, Fallon argues instead
that Messe de la Pentecôte (1950) has a subtext of social commentary by engaging with
the threat of nuclear apocalypse. In it, his bird-style represents the contrast of peace
and freedom. While Fallon would most likely not consider this article to be practical
or activist, it does present a composer and work going beyond poetic. Perlman (2012,
658 Aaron S. Allen
1) discussed links between ecological and musical studies; his “intentions are primar-
ily descriptive,” and his “focus is on the state of existing scholarship,” indicating a
reflective (poetic) approach. Nevertheless, he discusses parallels between conserving
nature and conserving cultural traditions, and between music scholarship and envi-
ronmental activism, bringing his article towards the practical.
Practical approaches were particularly evident at the 2014 Ecomusicologies con-
ference (see www.ecomusicologies.org), but a few examples must suffice here. Key-
notes Mark Pedelty and David Rothenberg shared a stage (all keynotes were joint)
but discussed different ways of musicking: Rothenberg with non-human animals
(and the particular problems and possibilities that arise), and Pedelty with human
ones (particularly pop musicians who have also been successful environmentalists).
Pedelty (2012) is a landmark study of the often problematic promotion of sustainabil-
ity in local music making in contrast to the even more problematic impacts of global
pop. As a significant influence on Rothenberg’s career (see Rothenberg 2005; Roth-
enberg and Ulvaeus 2001), Rothenberg cited Paul Winter, who performed but also
spoke informally at Ecomusicologies 2014. Winter cited folk musician Pete Seeger (see
Ingram 2008, Pedelty 2009), cetologist Roger Payne (who first studied and dissemi-
nated recordings of whale song), and environmentalist Stuart Brand (of the Whole
Earth Catalog) as his influences for seeking out productive ways to make (political)
statements with instrumental music. Travis Stimeling (2012) led a unique plenary
with social activists and musicians around issues of coal in Appalachia. And there
were interesting performances (e.g. The Crossroads Project’s “Rising Tide”) and lively
discussions (especially before and after a screening of Trump 2013).
The practical approach has also been the subject of publications in environmen-
tal education. Ramsey (2002) used music and lyrics related to the North Atlantic cod
fishery and the Dust Bowl. Impey (2006) drew on local musical traditions, sense of
place, cultural heritage, and environmental knowledge in order to engage high school
students in South Africa. Turner and Freedman (2004) discussed historical and con-
temporary music and sounds to enhance environmental education; they relied pri-
marily on (the poetic approaches in) Clark and Rehding (2001), although they could
have also drawn on the engaging applied work of Bernie Krause (2002). Krause is
both musician and scientist, and he writes about their intersections; he has also been
central to biomusic (Gray et al. 2001) and soundscape ecology (Pijanowski et al. 2011).
Jeff Titon is a leading thinker in American studies, ethnomusicology, and eco-
musicology. His longstanding interests in applied ethnomusicology, ecocriticism and
sustainability have informed his contributions to an applied sense of ecomusicol-
ogy. Music and Sustainability (Titon 2009) outlined sustainable music, although the
connection to environmental issues is by analogy only. Titon’s (2013) “The Nature of
Ecomusicology” argued for an applied approach, especially regarding how ecomu-
sicology engages with the concept of nature. His “A Sound Commons for All Living
Creatures” (Titon 2012) is an ethical approach to ecomusicology; he promotes the nec-
essary mutual relationship between cultural stewardship and (environmental) sus-
tainability through the concept of the sound commons: “A sound commons, where
all living beings enjoy a commonwealth of sound, embodies the principle of sound
equity, encouraging free and open sound communication, and playing its important
part in environmental, musical, and cultural sustainability” (Titon 2012). (See also
Titon’s remarks in Allen et al. 2014, and his research blog cited therein.)
As of 2014 there is no major edited volume dedicated to ecomusicology (this
lacuna will be filled by Allen and Dawe 2016), but three special editions of journals
fulfill a similar role. Kinnear (2014) curated four essays in Music and Politics. His
introduction asserts that, “(Ethno)musicology, acoustic ecology, and sound studies
play important roles in addressing the impact of the global economy by aspiring to
understand and raise awareness of the interconnections between humans and the
environment” (Kinnear 2014, 2). Despite diverse methodologies, the four articles are
linked through examining politically charged contexts where music and the environ-
ment come together. For ignoring globalization and promoting romanticized notions
of the place of the American South, Stimeling critiques oil company BP and the local
tourism industry’s music and culture festivals on the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater
Horizon disaster. Farrugia and Hay examine the efforts of a female rap collective in
Detroit to fight against blight and pollution and for more sustainable communities.
Epstein interprets Darius Milhaud’s Machines agricoles as post-pastoral in that it cri-
tiques the pastoral tradition and engages in political discourses regarding the social
and environmental challenges of post-WWI rural France. An unusual essay in the
Kinnear (2014) collection was the ‘trialogue’ (Allen et al. 2014) from the introductory
talk, individual presentations, and subsequent discussion (elaborated in print with
citations and editing) at the 2013 conference of the Association for the Advancement
of Sustainability in Higher Education; the contribution explores the relevance of con-
sidering studies of music and sound in the context of sustainability on campus (in
academics and operations) and in the public arena beyond (↗26 Cultural Ecology and
the Teaching of Literature).
A special issue, entitled “Eco-musicology” (Ingram 2011), of an ecocriticism
journal included essays that ran the gamut from poetic to practical. Above, I described
my poetic contribution (Allen 2011). Toliver’s contribution provided a middle ground in
the situation of another ostensibly ‘abstract’ symphony (Richard Strauss’s Alpine sym-
phony) that he contextualized in Nietzsche’s environmental thought and the dawning
environmental movement in Germany. Clements’s poetic contribution described the
musical metaphors of biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Echard, Parham, and Edwards’s
three contributions were practical. Echard considered psychedelic music in relation
to space, place, and ethics. Parham found issues of environmental justice in punk
music. Edwards situated Japanese noise compositions between Western and Eastern
aesthetics, with a particular example of a noise composition based on dolphin sonar
that critiques a controversial fishing technique.
A small collection of essays appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological
Society, the leading forum for musicological research in North America (Allen et al.
660 Aaron S. Allen
2011). After I introduced the colloquy and provided an overview of ecomusicology, four
other authors and I provided short essays. Grimley’s contribution focuses on an eco-
musicological reading of Jean Sibelius’s tone poem Tapiola; he does so in the context
of an interdisciplinary conversation between musicology, ecocriticism, cultural geog-
raphy, and landscape studies. His reading is fundamentally practical because he is
seeking “to unpack narratives […] of power relations, domination, and ownership […]
and expose the ideological basis, through historical study and analysis, upon which
such conventional ideas of music and landscape are built” (Grimley 2011, 395). This
work builds on Grimley’s (2006) Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity,
which connects landscape and the music of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, and it
continues in his series of conferences dedicated to “Hearing Landscape Critically.” Von
Glahn’s contribution approaches ecomusicology in the context of the power dynam-
ics that have characterized the construction of American narratives. Doing so gives
a practical element to her otherwise poetic readings of women composers’ relation-
ships with nature. Von Glahn (2013) subsequently elaborated on these ideas, showing
a diversity of connections between art, gender, institutions, and the environment,
particularly in how American women have composed small and large conceptions
of nature. Previously she (Von Glahn 2003) showed how American (male) compos-
ers drew poetic inspirations from place. Watkins’s contribution examined how music
intermeshes with imagination and place, resulting in a fundamentally ecological
understanding (she finds ‘musical ecology’ to encapsulate a wide diversity of research
on music and place and on music and perception, encompassing mostly poetic but
occasionally political elements as well). Her “The Pastoral After Environmentalism”
(Watkins 2007) took a practical approach to Stephen Albert’s 1984 Symphony: River-
Run, arguing it is post-pastoralist in that it acknowledges its own participation in dis-
course about culture (neo-Romanticism) and nature (American environmentalism).
Rehding’s contribution advocates ecomusicology’s use of nostalgia rather than crisis,
the typical approach of environmental studies. In this sense, he is advocating more
the poetic than the practical, all the while acknowledging the importance of the latter.
Clark and Rehding (2001) co-edited a collection of essays that explore (from a poetic
ecomusicological orientation) the use of nature by various music theorists. Finally, my
contribution (in Allen et al. 2011) was practical in advocating various ways for ecomu-
sicology to confront the cultural problem of the environmental crisis.
In no way could this conspectus of the ecomusicological literature be considered
complete. Nor could I imagine that my analysis of poetic and practical poles is the
only analysis; other, better ones will surely follow. My goal has been to show some
diversity within a set of general approaches that may allow ecomusicology to resonate
with ecocriticism.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful for conversations with Kevin Dawe, Robert Fallon,

Tyler Kinnear, Mark Pedelty, Jennifer Post, Kailan Rubinoff, Jeff Todd Titon, and
Denise Von Glahn.
6 B
ibliography
6.1 W
orks Cited
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Allen, Aaron S. “‘Fatto Di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s Violins and the Musical Trees of the Paneveggio.”
Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660–1830. Eds. Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn
Cook, and Giulia Pacini. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012a. 301–315.
Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature… and Change in Environmental Studies?”
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 2.2 (2012b): 192–201.
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Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology.” The Grove Dictionary of American Music. New York: Oxford
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Allen, Aaron S., and Miranda S. Freeman. “The Ecomusicology Bibliography via Zotero: A Dynamic
and Emerging Scholarly Resource.” Ecomusicology Newsletter 1.1 (2012): 6–9.
Allen, Aaron S., Daniel M. Grimley, Alexander Rehding, Denise Von Glahn, and Holly Watkins.
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Suzaan Boettger
34 W
ithin and Beyond the Art World:
Environmentalist Criticism of Visual Art
Abstract: In relation to literary ecocriticism, ecocritical analysis of visual art is in
a nascent stage. Despite, or perhaps due to, the centrality of idealized representa-
tions of nature in the history of art, and also because of the dominance of the gallery
mercantile system as the chief means of display and dissemination of works of art,
researched and documentary projects on ecosystems and vulnerable cultures and
biotic matter, public art performing sustainability, and photographs as critical land-
scapes, have been slow to gain attention. A genealogy of significant group exhibitions
in museums is followed by focus on current approaches. Visual art is often called
upon to effect political change; reified categories of political engagement and aes-
thetic autonomy are dissolving in more nuanced conceptions of art’s social position
and contributions. Issues of agency and materiality are becoming central, as well as
environmental justice. The work of critical art historians Malcolm Miles, T. J. Demos,
and Emily Eliza Scott are featured.
Key Terms: Art, environmental, eco-art, photography, aesthetics, Demos
Fig. 1: Richard Misrach. Trees,

Hazardous Waste Site, Dow
Chemical Corporation,
Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998,
detail. Courtesy Richard
Misrach.
34 Within and Beyond the Art World: Environmentalist Criticism of Visual Art 665
1 W
ithin and Beyond the Art World: Environmentalist
Criticism of Visual Art
If aesthetics, or the arts, have agency in relation to climate change, it is probably in critical acts of
re-distribution and re-identification within but beyond the regime of the art-world. (Miles 2014, 70)
In comparison to the vigorous production of both direct literary ecocriticism and

meta-criticism of its interpretive strategies evident in previous chapters, by the middle
of the second decade of the twenty-first century commensurate ecologically-engaged
criticism of visual art is sparse. In relation to the study of what is frequently termed
‘eco art,’ the discipline of the history of art has not produced a professional organiza-
tion and journal addressing artistic environmentalism; those writing about such work
under the banner of ‘ecocriticism’ are a micro-minority. There is no articulated, even
semi-consensual ecocritical methodology as applied to visual art. Given the prom-
inence of art in current culture – evident in museum attendance, websites as both
sources of information and sharing of ideas about art, auction activity, and the focus
on artists’ biographies and the art world in films and novels – as well as the increas-
ing presence of climate change in media discourse, the slight connection between
environmentalism and art criticism/scholarship is paradoxical. And that is especially
so because of the history of art’s longstanding centrality of depictions of nature – as
animals, ‘Mother Nature’ idols, property, terrain and the settings for emotional and
aesthetic ‘primitivism.’ Yet here and there curators and art writers have been drawn to
promoting art addressing environmental threats in exhibitions, catalogue essays and
reviews. A few scholars are devoting sustained attention to that work, considerably
enriching our understanding of visual art’s participation in the conversation about
our relation to the material and social world and its actants, taken in the widest sense.
These developments are best introduced in relation to two factors: the ecosystem of
the art world and its precedent acculturations of nature.
In the middle of a serious conversation about producing the currently most
substantial and ambitious exhibition and catalogue on art about sustainability, the
German Federal Cultural Foundation’s Examples to Follow! Expeditions in Aesthetics
and Sustainability, curator and editor Adrienne Goehler exclaimed about a contrary
attitude: “Today, the art market is god” (Gersmann and Willms 2010, 8). Much more
than in the field of literature, an impediment to a public presence of works addressing
environmental concerns is that support for artists’ production of, as well as viewers’
accessibility to, visual art is profoundly entwined with international systems of mone-
tizing art: displaying portable and saleable objects, merchandising, distributing, mar-
keting, and consumerism, AKA ‘collecting.’ Western society is pervasively “ocularcen-
tric,” declared intellectual historian Martin Jay (1988, 3) precedently, even prior to our
present image saturation via social media and iPhone, describing “the ubiquity of
vision as the master sense of the modern era.” Combined with Guy Debord’s famously
666 Suzaan Boettger
acute 1967 designation of our era as a “society of the spectacle,” over the past roughly
40 years, this orientation has increasingly privileged art of instantaneous perception
and ephemeral sensory snap such as Jeff Koons’ gleaming monumentalizations of
twisted balloon doggies – simultaneously Pop and luxe. Literary critics could dismiss
this populist, albeit high-end, work as they would flashy down-market-driven thrill-
ers reaping million dollar advances, but visual art is much more dependent than the
literary field on the commerce of its art to provide viewers’ necessary direct experi-
ence of the work. And in contrast to literature disseminated and read in editions and
despite plentiful illustrations of art not to scale and in altered color on screens or in
printed reproductions, sensory perception ‘in the flesh – that of the viewer’s and the
work of art’s – is essential to comprehending it. (This is aside from the fraught issue of
an ‘original.’ Like printed publications, photographs and other kinds of prints do not
have an original distinct within an edition, but the artist’s manipulation of vagaries
of the printing process and choice of scale of prints and format of presentation also
make direct viewing in person essential for comprehension.) Galleries, commercial,
marginal, and nonprofit, are in turn the fundamental source of promotion and distri-
bution – ‘marketing’ – to museum curators and art critics/scholars as well as poten-
tial buyers. Exhibitions are not only necessary for an artist’s exposure to audiences,
they are the main stimulus to curators’ and critics’ research and writing about them,
as are the latter’s ensuing publications, keeping the career cycle moving.
At the same time, other than photographers, few producing eco, ecological,
environmental, or environmentalist art – the designations themselves are as unsta-
ble as that of ‘ecocriticism’ – produce portable works easily sold and domesticated.
They tacitly perform per Third Text editor Rasheed Araeen’s (2009, 681) admonition,
in “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century” that “Art must now go
beyond the making of mere objects meant for art museums and/or to be sold as pre-
cious commodities in the art market. Only then can it enter the world of everyday life
and the collective energy which is struggling not only to improve life itself but to save
this planet from total destruction.” They aim to unsettle the broader political ecology
either by projects that directly restore natural resources or interdisciplinary research
projects about disrupted natural ecologies and societies, which appear in exhibitions
rarely, represented in documentary pictures, videos and printed matter.
Another reason for the slight presence of environmentalist art in exhibitions is
related to the compartmentalization of nature and culture. Dialogue in the art world,
explained German cultural historian Hildegard Kurt (2004, 239), has been “often hin-
dered by the error of seeing sustainability only as an ‘environmental subject’ and not
a genuinely cultural challenge.” Similiarly, Goehler noted that in governmental and
NGO environmentalist “manifestos […] mention is made of […] three dimensions of
sustainability, the social, the ecological but also the economic. But there is no prac-
tical action following on this insight. The fourth dimension, the cultural, is always
forgotten. […] The suspicion is that it’s eco art, social art, or political art. The fear
of being used by parties or political currents is great” (Gersmann and Willms 2010,
8). The deplorable politicization of climate change in the United States – delaying
the government’s participation in emissions limitation protocols and necessary tran-
sitions to renewable sources of energy – is undoubtedly a significant source of its
few group exhibitions of environmentally-engaged art, none of them in main urban
museums. In the past 15 years or so, large group exhibitions have originated in major
German cities, in London, and in culturally marginal cities in the United States,
dotting the museological landscape: one each in Aachen, Berkeley, Boulder (Colo-
rado), Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Sydney and Turin and two each in London
and Cincinnati (none in New York or Los Angeles). Germany’s Examples to Follow!
opened at Berlin in 2010 and traveled to six German cities and Addis Abba, Beijing,
Lima, Mumbai, Puebla (Mexico), and São Paulo. The presentation of that exhibition is
exemplary not only for its wide-ranging educative essays on aspects of sustainability
by progressive scholars and the diversity of art shown, but by the fact – enviable by
this American – that the government originated it as public education.
A more provocative source of the late and marginal interest in both eco art and
ecocriticism is, ironically – and perhaps counter-intuitively – the very long-standing
presence of representations of nature, embedded in the history of art as landscape
painting. Switching from interpretive microscope to telescope reveals the history of
both artistic representations of the natural environment and discussion about them
as long. In Chinese art history, landscape painting was established as an independent
genre by the fifth century with shan shui-pictures of mountain and water as rivers,
lakes, falls, which were discussed as the yin/yang of female malleability – the liquid
could fill any void, and shape shift from vapor to ice – and masculine indomitabil-
ity (which, however, could be altered by an incessant waterfall). In the west, synec-
doches of nature such as bison and fertility goddesses preceded frescos of Roman
gardens and Biblical narratives of Edenic meadows and the Flight into Egypt situated
in wooded groves. With the construction of safe roads between villages and the rise of
cities, medieval fears of wild spaces between them – ‘wilderness’ – images of unde-
veloped (natural) terrain became instead idealized spaces of primal refuge and har-
monious respite alongside sheep. Nature became a prompt for a withdrawal into the
self and an emphasis on feeling, characteristics of the Romantic spirit as epitomized
by Caspar David Friedrich’s motionless figures deep in moonlit reveries, seen from the
back, serving as surrogates for the viewer standing parallel before them, facilitating
calming contemplation or melancholic musing. ‘Nature’ became a vehicle for expe-
riencing both overwhelming feeling of the “sublime” prompted by both its vast scale
and violent ferocity and the felicitous “beauty” of a pastoral meadow. The economic
worth of forested property – not only as lumber for construction but as firewood, a
main source of heating metals, foods, and homes – also contributed to the status of
paintings that depicted privately owned groves. When the discipline of art history
was formalized in the nineteenth century, this reverential attitude toward nature was
already officially sanctioned by professional academies as the Salon-worthy genre
‘Landscape.’
668 Suzaan Boettger
Nineteenth century landscape painting was the impetus to both of the rare book-
length monographs on artists written from perspectives that could be considered
tacitly or proto ecocritical. Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology: The English
Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (1986) contextualizes Romantic landscape painting
within the governmentally sanctioned accelerated enclosures for private cultivation
of countryside land once held in common or thought unsuitable for agriculture. This,
intensified by John Constable’s identification with the agrarian countryside of his
birth, Bermingham convincingly argues, led to his development beyond the pictur-
esque form’s classically harmonious order. Instead Constable’s naturalism sought to
animate the landscape tradition by conveying’s nature’s ‘primitivism’ (Bermingham
1986, 153). “Considering that nature for Constable had a double significance [as] both
landscape and self,” his rough, penumbral scenes expressionistically “inscribe the
loss they are meant to recover” (151, 11).
Similarly, Greg Thomas (2000) sensitively attends to material conditions – both
geographical and on canvas – in his boldly titled Art and Ecology in Nineteenth Century
France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau. Thomas also emphasizes the artist’s
personal connection to a locale and asserts that Rousseau’s richly verdant paint-
ings of the wildness of the Forest of Fontainebleau implicitly “embody an ecological
mode of vision.” Generally “without [the depiction of] an intervening human agent,”
Rousseau’s paintings “force us to attend to the connective tissue [and] organic inter-
relationships of its constituent parts” (Thomas 2000, 198). Rousseau’s appreciation
for the ancient woods near the village of Barbizon extended to the artist’s “arguing
successfully for the establishment of land preserves in 1853; politically, he became
perhaps the world first conservationist” (2000, 2).
The development of ecocriticism of visual art is belated, in that it both parallels
and follows the trajectory of the onset of literary ecocriticism, which itself has been
described as tardy. Reflecting on what she identified as literary criticism’s delayed
engagement with growing concerns with nuclear, ecological, and environmental
threats, Ursula Heise (2006, 505) has noted, “most of the important social movements
of the 1960s and ‘70s left their marks on literary criticism long before environmental-
ism did, even though environmentalism succeeded in establishing a lasting presence
in the political sphere.” She plausibly ascribes it to literary theory’s emphasis on lan-
guage, semiotics and denaturalization, issues of deconstructive interpretation that
also applies to the discipline of art history. In contrast, when art historians moved
away from French critical theory, focus shifted to social constructions of identity, par-
ticularly those affected by race, gender and sexual orientation, and in United States,
to ‘culture wars’ with repressive politicians during the early confusing years of the
onset of the HIV infection, initially strongly associated with gay men and practition-
ers of culture.
And yet, contemporary with the development of literary ecocriticism, two major
exhibitions of American historical painting examined representations of the social
and natural landscape of the West in relation to political ideologies. In 1991 The
National Museum of American Art/Smithsonian Institution’s The West as America:

Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 controversially represented – and
within the precinct of the United States capital – western terrains as a theater for
exploitation of Native Americans. The next year the revisions expanded to outright
recognition that nature, in landscape painting, was a site of Discovered Lands,
Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, (Thomas Gilcrease Insti-
tute of American History and Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Yale University Art Gallery).
The latter included historian William Cronon’s (1992, 78) “counternarrative in which
what we sacrifice to progress is at least as valuable as what we gain” – a model for
environmentalist attention to visual art.
A broader source of resistance by intellectually ambitious art professionals to
considering landscape as a site of politicized social constructions was the historical
association of the genre with the regressive romance of nature. This view was artic-
ulated in 1966 by Robert Smithson, the influential conceptualizer of Earthworks –
expansive earthen sculptural environments in remote desolate terrains – who,
seeking to distinguish his work from a counterculture back-to-nature movement with
which critics wanted to affiliate it, noted, “Deliverance from the confines of the studio
frees the artist to a degree from the snares of craft and the bondage of creativity. Such
a condition exists without any appeal to ʻnatureʼ” (Smithson 1996a [1968], 107). He
objected to the “wishy-washy transcendentalism” of the “mediocre impressionist
[style] painter” Allan Gussow, who wrote in a book published by Friends of the Earth
that artists should be like “lyric poets […] celebrating” American land (Smithson
1996b [1973], 163). It was not chic for a vanguard artist – or art historian/critic utilizing
continental theory – to join the ranks of what the “international left […] caricatured,”
as Rob Nixon (2010, 253) put it, “as a […] hippy-dippy-tree-hugging dopehead deep
ecologist […].” Rather than falsely idealized locales, the sites Smithson chose to work
in were geographically marginal and ideologically complex, “between the sylvan and
the industrial.” “Dialectics of this type are a way of seeing things in a manifold of
relations, not as isolated object” (Smithson 1996b, 162, 160). Smithson’s death in 1973,
at 35, prevented him from investigating these entwined relations, taken up decades
later by artists engaged in politicized ecologies. A concurrent lineage of artists, affil-
iated with post-Rachel Carson environmentalism, was drawn toward environments
that were not only spatially environmental but that united what Gyorgy Kepes (1972,
9, 6) described as “artistic and poetic sensibility and ethical conscience.” “Instead of
further probing into matters of form [typical of the Earthworkers’ and Land Artists’
large scale troughs, marks and mounds], artists today are asking fundamental ques-
tions about the role and purpose of art […] to provide a format for the emerging eco-
logical consciousness.” Over the next decade, a new genre of ecologically-sensitive
environmental art developed that deliberately brought viewers close to experiencing
soil, foliage, water, astronomy – sculptural observatories were big in the 1970s – and
which often directly rehabilitated degraded local habitats and ecological systems.
670 Suzaan Boettger
The art terms ‘environmental’ and ‘ecological’ – still today equivocal and fre-
quently used interchangeably – began to be disambiguated in the first major museum
exhibition to survey contemporary artists’ projects responding to nature perceived as
threatened. In 1992, notably the same year as the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio
and the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, The
Queens Museum, NYC, organized “Fragile Ecologies, Contemporary Artists’ Interpre-
tations and Solutions.” The title distinctly signals the application of what Kepes (1972,
9) called “moral intelligence” in an activist stance of taking responsibility for problems
and attempting to combat them. Curator Barbara Matilsky’s (1992, 38) discussion of
artists’ projects of the previous two decades emphasized early environmental art that
“visualized the forces, processes, and phenomena of nature: organic growth, light,
water, crystals, etc.” These works were neither spatially environmental – viewers
didn’t necessarily move within a work – nor overtly politically environmentalist, but
were more about bringing viewers’ attention to phenomena, prior to the ecocritical
attention to both humans and matter having interacting generative agency. Many
artists were drawn to the ravages of mining. On a 15-acre site near Scranton, Pennsyl-
vania scarred by strip mining activities Harriet Feigenbaum encircled a pond formed
from coal-dust runoff with rings of trees, facilitating a restoration maintained as part
of a wetlands preserve (Willow Rings, 1985) (Matilsky 1992, 45–46). Robert Morris,
who dotted a terraced former gravel pit with tree stumps (Johnson Pit #20, 1979, Kent,
Washington) famously declared in a symposium and article that artists’ land reclama-
tion should not be “used to wipe away technological guilt” (qtd. in Matilsky 1992, 47).
Other projects presented models of growing plants for food (the early eco artists
Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison’s Survival Series, from 1971; Bonnie Sherk, Cross-
roads Community/The Farm, 1974–1980, San Francisco; Agnes Denes, Wheatfield,
Battery Park City, NYC, 1982). But the catalogue offered little social/historical contex-
tualization regarding postwar anxieties about population growth, world food produc-
tion and famine, despite the controversy prompted by Paul Ehrlich’s publication of
The Population Bomb in 1968 and Barry Commoner’s more optimistic response in his
1971 The Closing Circle. It was too early for the concept of ‘nature’ to be questioned;
neither are the works closely read as aesthetic objects creatively materialized. Rather,
particularly in the final chapter’s designation of some works as “ecological,” discus-
sion of subject matter dominates, and the goal is pragmatic, to provide local, spe-
cific “solutions to deteriorating natural and urban ecosystems” (Matilsky 1992, 56).
Often cited as exemplary among this first phase of eco art, restoration of nature as
damaged environments and its restitution as public park, is Patricia Johanson’s Fair
Park Lagoon (1981–1986) in downtown Dallas. This large pond had become a polluted
black hole surrounded by museums. The New York artist worked with a local marine
biologist in the botanical design. To both bring viewers close to marine life and to
feature a local plant, she used specific root structures for the design of serpentine
walkways in cast concrete projecting atop areas of the water. The “Fragile Ecologies”
catalogue, as an inaugural survey of art addressing vulnerable natural resources, use-

fully documents the period’s art and curatorial thinking.
At the end of the millennium, an ambitious exhibition and catalogue at the
Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany, Natural Reality: Artistic Posi-
tions Between Nature and Culture, shifted the discourse. In her introduction, guest
curator Heike Strelow (presently owner of the eponymous gallery in Frankfurt) both
displayed attitudes that sound like Deep Ecology – “man and his culture are a part of
nature”– typical of eco art identity of the time, and, demonstrating ideas in transition,
also declared “nature [as] the origin, condition, and result of human experience,” an
early description within the art world of nature as cultured (Strelow 1999a, 19). The
latter paralleled what Lawrence Buell (2011, 90) has described as an aspect of first
wave literary ecocriticism, “the meaning of existential contact with the environment
today now tends to be more self-consciously framed as socially mediated, […] framed
accordingly as a product of historical circumstances of acculturation.” The “occupa-
tions” of Strelow’s (1999b, 97) “artist-explorers […] take place beyond mimesis and
super-elevation of nature,” in favor of an alternate “concrete ‘natural reality.’” For
example, artist Igor Sacharow-Ross draws upon scientific training and technology to
present an ongoing laboratory as a luminous column aquarium containing algae in
danger of extinction, subjected to experiments.
Further extending the constructive aspect of the artist’s role in society, Strelow
(1999a, 19) also emphasized the utility of art as beyond the popular eco art focus of
instrumental material healing of natural environments: “The environmental crisis
is therefore also a crisis in our social, cultural and intellectual environment, and
grappling with it cannot be limited to the recultivation of waste dumps.” In a sub-
sequent large format anthology Strelow (2004) edited, Ecological Aesthetics, Art in
Environmental Design: Theory and Practice, she advocated “transdisciplinary think-
ing and acting – connecting things spatially and intellectually.” Aesthetics is not only
“the ancient idea of teaching perception and cognition [but] aligning aesthetics in
the sense of a wholistic perception with an integrative understanding of nature and
culture” (2004, 12, 10). The object of attention was environments, but the artist’s role
being promoted was that of a public intellectual addressing more than the condition
of botanical, agricultural or architectural/urban environments. In that volume, Hilde-
gard Kurt was again a strong conceptualizer with a wide cultural purview, declaring
that
Sustainability or future viability intends to achieve nothing less than the humanization of indus-
trial Modernism. […] All in all, a constructive dialogue beneficial both to art and to sustaina-
bility can take place only when it is accepted that art has, ever since the start of Modernism,
increasingly become a form of knowledge. Far from restricting itself to designing surfaces, art is
involved in designing values, and increasingly become a medium for exploration, cognition and
for changing the world. (Kurt 2004, 239)
672 Suzaan Boettger
The goal recalls Hubert Zapf’s (2008, 852–853) assertion that “Literature […] acts
like an ecological force within language and the larger system of cultural discourses,
transforming logocentric structures into energetic processes, and opening up the
logical space of linear conceptual thought into the ‘ecological space’ of nonlinear
complex feedback relationships.” This is certainly the social impact that visual artists
aspire to, and if their research, projects, environments, and pictures transfer well to
the two-dimensional image form of the internet (and especially if those works then,
preferably, stimulate direct viewing), they may have an impact even greater than
novels’ innumerable and dispersed readers. The avant guardians, as adventuresome
environmentalist artists are sometimes called, employ new strategies to change the
conversation. That is the thrust of Malcolm Miles’ argument as an Ecological Aesthet-
ics of ‘engagement.’
Environmentalist art goes beyond the position taken by [Herbert] Marcuse in The Aesthetic
Dimension that ‘… miserable reality can be changed only through radical political praxis,’ while
art offers ‘… retreat into a world of fiction where existing conditions are changed and overcome
only in the realm of the imagination.‘ But in dark times art is what we have, a means to interrupt
the codes of perception of the dominant order. Environmental art not only interrupts, but also
creates alternative models. (Miles 2004, 202)
Exemplifying that, Miles, a British cultural theorist, describes the London group
PLATFORM, which for a pilot project in the 1990s of a “real possibility,” used a turbine
to generate renewable energy from London’s Wandle River for the music room of a
local school (cf. Miles 2004, 204). Similarly, in an article pointedly titled “Aesthetics
in a Time of Emergency,” (adopting Walter Benjamin’s phrase from “Theses on the
Philosophy of History”) Miles (2009, 423) described the Argentine group Ala Plástica’s
work with a botanist to devise a propagation system of reeds to aid the restoration of a
coastal area to, as Alejandro Meitin and Silvina Babich describe, “sustain socio-natu-
ral systems […] connected to cultural and biophysical ecology of the area.”
Notably, Miles (2001, 71) seems to have been the first to methodically refer to the
art form as not “eco art” or “ecological” but “environmentalist art.” To those attuned to
history, “Ecologic Art” – the first exhibition on that theme, at the John Gibson Gallery
in New York, 1969, or “eco art,” carry loose associations from the 1970s for forms of
earthen art that weren’t ecological in manner, or alternatively, per Johanson, above, to
art that is literally ecological in process or materials (cf. Boettger 2002, 218 and 2010,
3–5). But neither of those may pertain to photographic media or subjects such as cor-
porate greenwashing, only tangentially about ecology. Also, Buell’s (2005, 12) dissat-
isfaction with the term ‘ecocriticism’ applies here, “because it implies a non-existent
methodological holism.” Gisela Parak, editor of and contributor to Eco-Images, His-
torical Views and Political Strategies, published by the Rachel Carson Center, Munich,
likes the term “eco-images [because they are] informed by a decisively environmental
agenda […]. This formative intention,” Parak singularly (2013, 5), among the publi-
cations referred to here, asserts, “is not necessarily provided by the producer of the
image; it may also be created by the author of the narrative of the images’ dissemina-
tion” thereby acknowledging both that artists may refuse the personal identification
as ‘environmentalist’ as confining, yet a critic can convincingly interpret the work as
such. Jane Bennett (2010, 111) objects to terming a discursive approach ‘environmen-
talism’ because it could imply a false ontological distinction between humans and
their milieus and correspondingly, construe nonhumans, things, or contexts as inert
or passive – “A more materialist public would need to include more earthlings in the
swarm of actants.” True, but that literal reading of ‘environment’ does not recognize
environmentalism’s source in ecological thinking, defined by Commoner (1971) as
everything being connected to everything else. Expansive reconceptualizations like
Bennett’s will encourage more overt articulations of environmentalism’s holistic eco-
logical basis while the term’s implications of political engagement when applied to
art forms also indicate intentions beyond aesthetic investigations.
Like Kepes, firm in the need for substantial social change and the potential of
works of art toward producing it, Miles is yet more outspoken against capitalism
(without elaboration) as a relentless promulgator of environmental devastation. (In
her provocative book reductively dramatized as This Changes Everything: Capitalism
vs. The Climate Naomi Klein [2014, 21] forcefully articulates the more persuasive claim
commonly heard among present day environmentalists that it is actually the deregu-
lated capitalism of neoliberalism that makes “our economic system and our planetary
system […] now at war.”) Displaying what Greg Garrard (2004, 3) generalized as eco-
criticism’s “avowedly political mode of analysis,” regarding the environment, Miles’
Eco-Aesthetics is if not in nominal intention, then in practice, a strong exemplar of
that in visual art scholarship.
Similarly, the introduction to the first anthology of texts by art historians, literary
scholars and historians deliberately applying ‘ecocriticism,’ A Keener Perception, Eco-
critical Studies in American Art History (2009), edited by art historian Alan C. Brad-
dock and literary scholar Christoph Irmscher, is also notable for its polemical claim
not about the revelations therein about the art and artists – which are plentiful – but
the urgency of climate change, which they didactically recount, and their declara-
tion of an “‘environmental turn’ in cultural interpretation” (Braddock and Irmscher
2009, 3). The methodology of many of the contributions, almost entirely analyzing
historical art, is akin to that of first wave literary ecocriticism’s contextualization of
works of art within environmental history, both overtly environmentalist images such
as Alexandre Hogue’s The Crucified Land (1939), a desiccated and desolate field dram-
atizing the devastating midwestern drought in the 1930s, and latent references as in
Thomas Eakins’ to industrialization in William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure
of the Schuykill River (1877). Several would serve as informative parallel studies for
literary scholars (and a third are written by them), while demonstrating to literati
how those trained in visual analysis perceive ecological aesthetics not just as political
subject matter or biographical expressions but conscious manipulations of materi-
ality, technique, and art historically informed style. Activist author Rebecca Solnit is
674 Suzaan Boettger
perceptive in her comparison of Ansel Adams’ pristine black-and-white long shots of

majestic panoramas and Eliot Porter’s innovative adoption of color in sharply delin-
eated close-ups, encouraging a more intimate absorption. Both photographers were
ardent environmentalists; the Sierra Club published Adams’ grandly nationalistic
This is the American Earth in 1960 and Porter’s more aesthetically oriented In Wild-
ness is the Preservation of the World in 1962 just two months after Silent Spring. The
enormous popularity of both served as drivers of populist environmentalism.
More recently, Adams’ and Porter’s isolated vistas’ absence of either humans
or signs of their use/abuse of land as resources for them, and thus the landscapes’
idealist faux purity “fixed in an ideal state, qualities that nature as ecology never
possesses,” per art historian Robin Kelsey (2014, 11), have become a popular aca-
demic theme of disparagement. Those gloriously unpeopled national parks and
landscapes – in the twenty-first century, only a fantasy experience – could appear
to be representing nature as an autonomous entity, what Yates McKee (2007, 541) has
described, in an often-quoted statement from a rare historical account of environ-
mentalist thinking in the visual arts, as “the environment as a determinate thing to be
represented, protected and defended by experts, rather than conceiving it as a figure
that mediates a network of sociopolitical, economic and natural forces in which all
citizens [or more currently, instances of vital matter?] have a stake.”
Yet ironically, those photographers’ intense focus on the forms of nature in land-
scapes – soaring ridged mountain rock in Adams black-and-white scrutiny and in Por-
ter’s, verdant hues of mottled and mossy rock – conveys natural “matter’s ‘expressive’
dimension,” per Serpil Oppermann (↗14 From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism).
They convey the intensely material vitality that Bennett advocates attention to, such
that these encompassing vistas and graphic textures were undoubtedly attractions
engendering viewers’ vicarious intimacies, manifested in the ballooned member-
ship enrollments in protective/activist organizations such as Environmental Defense
Fund, founded in 1967 (Oppermann 2014, 25; Bennett 2010).
More topically, the current critical focus on eliding human/non-human dis-
tinctions in which all living things can be taken to be stakeholders finds a frequent
artistic subject in the Indian-American photographer Subhankar Banerjee’s dramatic
illustrations of the Arctic as a focal point of global warming, toxic migration of birds
and caribous and resource wars. Major Arctic river deltas lie atop vast amount of oil
and natural gas reserves and are politically vulnerable to potential resource extrac-
tion. Industrial development would disturb the coastal plain that is the main calving
area of the Porcupine River caribou herd. In Banerjee’s Caribou Migration, Oil and the
Caribou, the abstract beauty of tiny specs of caribou, seen from the air, as they migrate
over icy aquamarine veins on white expanses, his most widely-reproduced image, is
a persuasive document for caribou protection. So it’s a twist to see in another of his
photographs an immediate close-up of Gwinch’n Nation men from NE Alaska and NW
Canada, Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, slaughtering caribou. In highlighting this
mixed-species rights issue – competing claims for environmental justice – and the
interconnectedness of resource needs Banerjee’s photographs serve a politically pro-

gressive aim that McKee attributes to environmentalist artists. That is, to “unsettle
the self-evidence of ‘environment’ itself, addressing it as a contingent assemblage of
biological, technological, economic and governmental concerns whose boundaries
and agencies are perpetually exposed to conflicts” (McKee 2007, 557).
This is the complex imbrication of visual, rhetorical, environmental and political
realms within which American art historian T. J. Demos (2009, 17) also works, moving
the environmentalist discourse of art forward from consciousness raising about
endangered natural resources and environments – “being accomplished by the mass
media and culture industry” – to more direct political responsiveness often address-
ing corporate monetization of nature. In a historical overview for another important
exhibition catalogue, Radical Nature, Demos (2009, 18) wrote, “When confronting the
claims of sustainability, one needs to ask what sustainability means, whose interests
it promotes, and whose are left out?” This theme of nature, and sustainability of it, as
not being value-neutral entities was elaborated in the January 2013 issue of Third Text
Demos (2013a, 1) edited devoted to “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology”
which “investigates the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, envi-
ronmental activism, and postcolonial globalism.”
Demos’ scholarship is distinctive for two sorts of contributions to dialogues of
environmentalist criticism. In acknowledging sources of the idea of political ecology –
“an eco-aesthetic rethinking of politics as much as a politicization of art’s relation
to the biosphere and of nature’s inextricable links to the human world of econom-
ics, technology, culture, and law,” he identifies Bruno Latour’s call to set aside the
concept of an autonomous ‘nature,’ “given its ideological function that sanctions a
‘factual’ and depoliticizing scientific discourse” and doesn’t recognize the extent to
which nature is an entity both linguistically and materially determined by human
thought and actions (Demos 2013a, 3). (Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett and many
others have of course also significantly contributed to that expanded conception of
the collective, the mesh, of vital matter.) Yet he is also sympathetic to the more funda-
mentalist notion of the ‘rights of nature’ held by agriculturally-based peoples in the
global South, which implies a bound and stable definition and a traditionally under-
stood discrete entity to be protected, especially against territorialism by global state-
like corporations in deregulated economies. The latter seek to patent native seeds
and to hybridize them so they expire before reproducing, what Indian environmen-
tal activist Vandana Shiva, speaking on behalf of indigenous agriculture, has termed
‘bio-piracy.’ In 2010 Ecuador put the rights of nature in its constitution and in 2011
Bolivia established a ‘Law of Mother Earth.’ Demos is rare in visual environmentalist
discourse for addressing these seemingly contradictory ‘post-natural’ and ‘rights of
nature’ attitudes. He reconciles them by highlighting underlying affinities committed
“to inventing a new ecology of politics that would redistribute agency, rights and rep-
resentation so that environmental decisions are made by a more inclusive, egalitarian
collective” (Demos 2013a, 5). Secondly, in addressing the above, Demos’ work both as
676 Suzaan Boettger
editor of the Third Text issue and his book The Migrant Image, The Art and Politics of
Documentary During Global Crisis, about artists’ films, videos and photographs, gives
rare exposure outside of international biennial-or-so exhibitions to environmentalist
artists and writers in the global South and the crucial issue of climate justice.
Australian curator Rachel Kent introduced the large group exhibition in Sydney,
In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, with the assertion that “Above all, the artists
in this exhibition demonstrate that to make art is to participate, through conversation
and debate, about how best to live today” (Kent 2010, 5). (This project was unusually
responsible in its self-reflexivity, as artist Lucas Ihlein displayed his environmental
audit of the Museum’s paper and power usage, air transport for the freight of art-
works, and other aspects of its administrative and public operations.) While this sort
of social relevancy has always been an implicit expectation – by artists and ‘consum-
ers’ – of works of culture, as climate change exacerbates, the call for social function-
alism is increasingly pressed upon environmentalist art, more so than of literature.
Those speaking from political and activist orientations seek art fulfilling an instru-
mentalist purpose. Nato Thompson (2005), a prominent New York activist curator
bluntly declared, “Instead of discussing whether aesthetics are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we can
critique projects based on their position and reception. What type of transformative
effect do these projects have? The question is not ‘is it art’ but more importantly, ‘what
does it do?’”
One useful behaviorist analysis is in an online contribution to Demos’ Third Text
issue. American art historian Emily Eliza Scott (2013, 1) addresses environmentalist
art as operating in an investigatory mode, demonstrating an “‘educational turn,’ in
the art world” in which the art work results from research in diverse subjects. She
analyzes “Artists’ Platforms for New Ecologies” that serve as springboards for inves-
tigations by groups of artists united either by shared regional ecologies or critical
practices dispersed over the globe. Some include elements to spur active engagement,
such as Matthew Friday’s A Map Lacking Boundaries (2009–). Tracking a “new eco-
system” ensuing from bacteria accelerating toxic acid mine drainage into regional
watersheds in southern Ohio, Friday sent subscribers of the commissioning artists’
group, Regional Relationships, a do-it-yourself package including an ecological flow
chart of chemical and institutional agents, a tube of iron oxide pigment distilled from
mine drainage, a paintbrush, and an invitation to produce a diagram about one’s own
local ecosystem and potential collectives (Scott 2013, 6). Another group, the Arctic
Perspective Initiative (API) “aspires to redirect technology to socially and politically
emancipatory ends” by “quite literally” designing structures such as mobile live-work
field stations for extreme Arctic conditions for users ranging from “film makers to
subsistence hunters” (7).
The extensive interdisciplinary and socially responsive qualities of these prag-
matic projects present art, as Scott (2013, 9) points out, as a boundless, “interconnected
system.” The identity and function of these works are “based on social exchange – on
common knowledge and knowledge commons – [and] represent a potent alternative
to [customary artistic practices] under capitalism” (2). They are not making discrete
objects which could easily move through marketplaces. Pertaining to the group World
of Matter, represented in the Third Text issue, Scott (2015, 175) describes the contents
of a book by and about them as “a collection of images and reflections on primary
materials and the complex ‘ecologies’ – social, economic, political, discursive and
Earth systems – with which they are entangled.” Inspired by the new materialist ori-
entation, the work of art is viewed as a nexus of networks, operating ecologically.
When presented in a gallery, as in a World of Matter exhibition at the James Gallery,
The Graduate Center of City University of New York, Fall 2014, the objects consisted
of rather straightforward documentation in the form of videos projected on monitors
and screens, headphones, a water laboratory, maps, texts, photographs, and archi-
val materials in glass cases. The work is about an ecological attention to matter, but
function as educative vehicles – a “‘critical documentary’ form of image making” –
speaking to cognition rather than requiring on the part of the viewer a developed
sensitivity to what Bennett calls “sensory attentiveness to the qualitative singularities
of the object” (Scott 2015, 4–5; Bennett 2010, 15).
Thus the issue of ‘matter’ presents an ironic inversion in expectations by appre-
ciators of literature and of visual art. Politically engaged artists and critics display
skepticism about the efficacy of art as expressive and productively ambiguous object,
particularly that which uses traditional artistic materials such as the oils and min-
erals purposefully brushed onto woven fibers stretched around a rectangle found in
what could be called the “world of matter” that is an art museum. But practitioners of
literary material ecocriticism intently attend to matter’s agential resonances, assimi-
lating the traditional sensitivities of artists, who profoundly experience matter speak-
ing to them and through them as agents of creativity. In a procedural reversal, it is
the materialist literary critics who more directly espouse the approach Susan Sontag
(1969, 30) advocated in her 1961 assertion that “A work of art is a thing in the world,
not just a text or commentary on the world” (emphasis in the original).
Addressing the dilemma of how art should respond in relation to a social crisis,
the climate change journalist and activist Bill McKibben (2005) referred to the need to
“unsettle the audience,” and urged, “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet
art.” “We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments,
but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”
(2005). This is the familiar pathway for the power of art, not to change structures
directly – legislators, administrators and construction workers are better at that – but
to alter ways of thinking in individuals who then manifest that in personal decisions
and political actions.
Malcolm Miles is one who has wrestled with ecological art’s function in relation
to ecological problems. While aligning himself with Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse
and maintaining that “aestheticism remains a form of resistance,” Miles (2014, 67)
acknowledges that art’s criticality no longer derives solely from its ontological auton-
omy. The explicit political position, yet the meta-analysis of the “critical function” of
678 Suzaan Boettger
artists, collectives, and projects working in “a space between aesthetics and politics”
makes his stance distinct among more recent criticism of environmentalist art, which
as noted generally ignores art works’ aesthetic or formal qualities in favor of attend-
ing to the political dimensions of the subject matter and the way the art operates
across several disciplinary domains (Miles 2009, 422). Artists wringing their hands
over the intersection of art and activism – aesthetic vs. political ‘engagement’ – a
conflict frequently voiced even in New York’s commerce-driven art world despite its
reputation as a bastion of political progressivism – could note his remark that for art
that “crosses boundaries between art, social research and environmentalism […] it no
longer matters whether it is art or something else” and move on (Miles 2004, 202). If
that’s too simple, Miles (2009, 431–432) elaborates on Jacques Rancière’s conceptu-
alization in Politics of Aesthetics that art “intervenes ‘between the readability of the
message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanni-
ness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.”
The most productive of these thinkers/observers of art/writer/scholars all recog-
nize that categorical imperatives – between agency and materiality, actant and envi-
ronment, art and politics – have dissolved. How is art to be effective toward social
change? Demos (2013b, 91) boldly declares that it is not through “the instrumentaliza-
tion of form and submission of art to sociological assessment […] which are less than
compelling when they curtail art’s formal creativity, theoretical complexity, indeter-
minate and potentially contradictory meanings, and contemplative possibilities.”
And in this time of dangers, political and ecological, he “would argue that the act of
criticism must therefore grapple with the paradox of political art […]. It is contingent
upon viewers and readers to stake a claim and to argue for the validity of a particular
formulation of the politics of aesthetics, to invest this otherwise potentially empty
formulation with meaning in relation to the singular expressions of specific artworks”
(92).
The title of Demos’ Migrant Image, from which the above is quoted, can then be
understood as a pun not only of images addressing situations of impoverished itiner-
ants but about the potential richness of a mobile and evolving fusion in which images
serve both political/instrumental and aesthetic/expressive aims. That orientation is
also actualized in an incisive analysis by Scott of a 24-minute video by the Puerto
Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Caldazilla. Raptor’s Rapture features
the dramatically darkened, spotlit, interaction of a griffon vulture and a musician,
female, who explores and plays a flute made 35,000 years ago from the wing bone of
a griffon vulture. Scott (2014, 15) delineates this work as exemplifying art that “moves
beyond the purely human-focused to […] illuminate entanglements between the
human and the nonhuman as they unfold in time, signaling the rethinking of humans
as natural – one among other species and surroundings – and nature as historical.”
Her account of the communication through the primal forms of music and corporeal
movement is both about, and enacts, work that “trades a topical approach for one
that operates in the realm of affect, or even the existential.” And Scott’s eloquent
evocation of an encounter across multiple registers of species, matter, sound, time,

and imagery exemplifies a topically current way artists and art historians are looking
at, tussling with, performing, and thereby bringing us within our complex and vul-
nerable ecologies.
2 B
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Scott, Emily Eliza, and Kirsten J. Swenson, eds. Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 2015.
Index of Subjects
Aadivaasi Vikasana Pravarthaka Samithi 445 Amazon 17, 405, 414, 652, 655
abduction 19, 26–27, 29–31, 33, 40, 48, 58, 461 ––region 17
––abductive 19, 26–27, 29–32, 41, 144 American
––as play 26, 29, 31 ––literature 117, 143–144, 147, 174–184, 317,
acoustic ecology 645, 651, 659 324, 507, 542, 606, 609–610, 627, 639
actor-network theory 215 ––South 556, 659
Adam’s fall 20, 50 ––Southwestern literature 323, 542
Adivasi 203, 438, 442–449, 452–453 Americas 343, 375, 427, 655
Adiyar community 444, 447 Ancona 351
adventure novel 593–594, 601 animal
aesthetics 4, 8–10, 49, 115, 123–136, 139, ––becoming animal 254
141, 194, 203, 256, 285, 316, 358–359, ––representation 252, 256, 258, 260, 269
389–390, 483–484, 486–490, 519, 537, ––rights 253
556, 611, 656, 659, 664–665, 671–673, ––studies 8–10, 226, 249–272, 387, 500, 523
676, 678 animality 131, 249–250, 252, 254, 263–265,
––environmental 92, 326, 390, 486–487, 267–268, 401, 524
489–490, 520 animist 90, 446
aesthetic ecocriticism 481–482, 492 anotherness 135
affect (noun), 32, 52, 61, 268, 498, 535–537, ––another (Bakhtin), 591
547, 555–556, 560, 575, 678 Anthropocene 93, 147, 278, 309–311, 320, 373,
––studies 537, 547 494–495, 500–501, 503, 505, 521
affective 52, 61, 92, 101, 130, 132, 139, 228, anthropocentrism 106, 139, 195–196, 198, 268,
233, 265, 302, 499, 501–503, 507, 515, 518, 326, 527, 554
535–537, 539–540, 542, 547, 555–556, 560, ––anthropocentric 6, 51, 108, 120, 135, 139, 141,
564 146, 477, 486–487, 524–525, 555–556,
––narratology 535, 538–541 559–560, 564–565, 576, 579, 581–582,
––science 534–535, 537–538, 547 590–591, 600–601
affectus 537 anthropogenic 278, 282, 289, 328, 370, 379,
Africa 8–9, 194, 201, 234, 250, 255, 267, 324, 495, 497, 504–505
336, 357, 369, 372, 375, 387, 389, 404, anthropomorphism 249, 253, 256–258, 465,
439–440, 459–480, 628, 652, 658 524
African American 188–191, 344, 556 anticipation 501–506, 432
agency 7, 22, 28, 30, 45, 48, 50, 57–58, 72–73, antiquity 6, 573
93, 112, 135, 138, 141, 143, 162, 196, ape 250, 253, 255, 258–260, 266–269
214–219, 221–222, 245, 249, 252–253, apocalypse 324, 461, 469, 498–499, 522, 622,
256–257, 265, 268, 275–276, 278, 657
281–284, 286, 288, 309, 359, 375, 377, aporia 110, 200
428, 529, 543–544, 579–580, 582–584, Aranyakas 442–443
586, 664–665, 670, 675, 678 Aranya samskriti 443
Al Tafar 585–587 archaeology 78, 581, 585
alignment 113, 237, 282, 336, 386, 534, 546 archetypes 73, 119, 363
alienation 49, 97, 124–126, 131, 158, 164, 168, art 1, 4, 9, 22, 26, 29–31, 45, 49, 55, 57–58,
211, 229–231, 249, 261, 266, 268–269, 61, 65–66, 69–70, 84, 96, 98, 114–117,
440, 521 119, 123–133, 137, 140, 142–143, 146–149,
allegiance 518, 546 177–178, 182, 184–185, 202, 252–253, 262,
allegory 166, 189, 202, 266–267 264–265, 267, 269, 299–301, 315–316,
alternative futures 515 325, 327, 329–330, 334, 340, 358, 360,
684 Index of Subjects
363, 369, 390, 393–396, 409, 414, biopolitical forces 289

416, 418–419, 459–461, 463–466, 468, bioregionalism 209, 417, 438, 441, 446,
471–472, 474, 477, 481, 486–487, 492, 572–573
499, 502, 515, 519, 529, 540, 552, 561, 565, biosemiotics 8–10, 19–41, 45–61, 65–67,
570, 573, 577, 592, 594, 607, 610, 637–638, 71–74, 137, 143
644–647, 651, 660, 664–679 biosphere 46–47, 56, 65, 80, 93, 100, 106, 128,
––artist 26, 29, 33, 34, 39–40, 58, 98, 126–127, 198, 273, 277, 283, 330, 340–341, 346,
130, 185, 256, 260, 262, 264, 266–267, 483, 513, 518, 626, 675
329–330, 338, 359, 392–394, 419, 460, bird 21–22, 29, 45, 53, 59–61, 77, 146, 168, 170,
488, 569–570, 610, 621, 633, 654, 656, 187–190, 242, 250, 260, 281, 288–289,
665–666, 668–673, 675–679 298, 301, 337, 338–339, 341–342, 359,
artistic creation 57–58, 124, 392–396 380, 402, 422, 469, 474–476, 491,
asceticism 262 544, 561, 565, 569, 585, 587, 624, 637,
Asia 8, 334, 336–337, 343, 345, 439, 528 649–650, 656–657, 674
assemblage 2, 6, 88–90, 92, 95–98, 216, body 21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40, 46,
218–219, 281, 286, 370, 375, 557, 675 67–68, 73–74, 79, 90–91, 107, 123, 126,
Assyrian 75 129, 130–133, 137, 140–141, 180, 187,
atmosphere 74, 92, 100, 102, 123, 125–126, 208–209, 211–212, 217–218, 221–222,
130, 132–133, 286–288, 297, 327, 354, 359, 242, 254, 261–262, 264, 267, 278,
365, 459–460, 500, 621 283–284, 324–325, 353, 357–363, 375,
Australia 205, 253, 324, 326, 343, 345, 375, 392–394, 399, 401–403, 405, 407,
628, 657, 676 439–440, 450, 461, 468–469, 488, 491,
authenticity 19, 111, 157, 413, 417, 432–434, 577 524, 536–540, 553–556, 558–559, 561,
authorial strategic empathizing 540 564, 584–587, 607
autobiographical literary criticism 315, 318 bog 41, 65, 78–79, 401, 489
autopoiesis 45, 109, 114, 219 Bolivia 416, 675
avant-garde nostalgia 157, 164 bonded labour system 449
bourgeois 125, 133, 266, 335, 593
Babylon 74–75 Boyne Valley 80
Battle of Malden 80 Brandt’s Line 439
Beijing 342, 667 Brazil 623, 635, 652–653, 345, 414
Belluno 362 Brehm’s Tierleben 259
Bhopal 205, 351, 356, 362–363, 365, 496, 572 British Columbia 344–345
Bildung 527–528 Buchenwald 574
Bildungsroman 594 bucolic 467, 472, 521, 415
biocentric 117, 141, 147, 149, 218, 263–266, 326 buen vivir 416–417, 434
––writing 263–264 buffalo 181, 581, 584
biocentrism 107, 326
bioculturalism 8–9, 73, 226, 228, 535, 537–538 Canada 345, 628, 654, 647
biodiversity loss 516, 525 capitalism 147, 158, 194, 198–199, 210–211,
biology 21, 27, 35, 37–39, 47, 56, 65–67, 71–72, 254, 297, 355, 372, 406, 415, 423, 426, 441,
89, 96, 112, 140, 167, 215, 252, 285, 289, 459–460, 462, 466, 624, 626, 673, 677
318, 337, 344, 357, 359, 380, 396, 486 Carnival 191–192, 363, 591
––evolutionary 37, 65–67, 140 ––carnivalesque 590–591
biomusic 645, 658 Castiglioncello 363
biophilic 149, 364, 579 categorical imperative 20, 678
biophobic 149 cattle 181, 469, 580, 582, 652
biophysical systems 275 Center for Visual Anthropology 624
biopiracy 198–199
chance 26, 28–29, 31, 33, 39, 84, 100–101, 167, cognitive 36, 40, 53–54, 73, 86, 110, 117, 146,
178, 361, 491, 496, 611 227–228, 233–234, 245–246, 280, 298,
Chernobyl 496, 572, 655 302, 307, 317, 327, 357, 359, 361, 401,
Chevron 199, 631–633 496–499, 501, 503, 507, 518–519, 522,
ch’i 484–485, 488 524–527, 535–537, 540, 542, 547, 563–564,
Chief Seattle’s speech 453 566, 573, 575
childhood 76, 231, 401, 445–446, 459–460, ––biophilia 147
472, 475–477, 522, 553, 563, 575, 586 ––justice 349, 359–360, 362, 364–365
children’s ––literary studies 539–540
––books 251–252, 258, 261, 269, 524 ––niche 233
––literature 513, 524–525 ––science 275, 534, 537–538, 545, 547
China 180, 325, 336, 340, 441, 482, 486, 491 collective 30, 59, 73, 118, 160, 164, 175,
Chinese 8–10, 49, 94, 226, 325, 334, 336, 185, 191–192, 286, 329–330, 338, 352,
338–340, 342–343, 388, 481–485, 358–359, 362, 423, 427–428, 430–431,
488–491, 667 433, 499, 501–502, 505, 558, 570–571,
––garden culture 334, 340 574–576, 578–579, 582, 590, 592–594,
Chipko movement 444 603, 659, 666, 675
Chisso factory 441 colonial 182, 194, 196, 198–199, 202–203, 205,
Christian 20, 50, 212, 266, 307, 406, 527, 654, 220, 256–266, 369, 376, 387, 408, 416,
656 418, 421, 427, 440, 443–444, 449, 453,
chronotope 142, 590–603 460, 462, 466, 468–469, 496, 648, 652
––chronotopic 593–594, 596–597, 599, 601 ––subject 169
Celtic 75–76, 79 Collège de France 67
––Celts 78 Committee on Science and Technology 628
––folklore 75 communication 9, 36, 46–50, 52, 61, 70–71,
––otherworld 75 73, 105, 107–110, 113–116, 119, 137, 140,
city 76, 101, 164, 184–185, 187–192, 230–231, 142–143, 147, 161, 186, 238–240, 265, 269,
249, 344, 350–355, 358–361, 364, 298, 300, 302, 305, 315–317, 319, 433,
378–380, 396, 403, 421, 450, 454, 464, 495, 499, 501–502, 507, 523, 577–578,
470, 551, 553–554, 559, 561, 585, 587, 640, 608, 657, 659, 678
650, 653, 655 community 5, 31, 40, 54, 66, 77, 117, 126, 163,
civil 78, 176–177, 188, 341, 344, 362–363, 418, 166, 175, 187–188, 199–200, 202, 205,
423, 447, 453, 463, 466, 528, 605–606, 209, 227–231, 236, 240–242, 245, 255,
608–613, 615 262, 267, 304, 307, 309, 336, 338–340,
––disobedience 341 343, 345, 360, 379, 394, 423, 426, 432,
––government 177 440, 444, 446–447, 450–451, 454, 465,
––Rights Movement 344 467, 469–471, 473, 476, 481–484, 488,
civilization 249, 264, 267 499, 525, 584, 587, 632, 670
climate 22, 278, 295–311, 327–328, 364–365, comparative approach 386–389
368, 386–387, 504–508, 521, 569, 653, compassion 161, 222, 244, 304, 308, 481–484,
655, 673, 676 488
––change 6, 8, 10, 66, 93, 234, 274, 286, 290, competence 453, 513, 517, 526–528
295–311, 328, 345, 350–351, 359, 409, 467, consciousness 28, 30–31, 34–35, 37, 48, 55,
477, 494–495, 498, 504–508, 516, 521, 57–58, 65, 73, 91–93, 98, 109, 111, 113–114,
523, 525, 634, 665, 667, 673, 676–677 118, 132, 140–141, 147, 149, 161–162, 164,
––change novel 505–507 226, 232, 245–246, 250, 253–255, 264,
coal 308, 637, 639, 658, 670 302, 329, 344, 413, 420, 426, 428, 430,
cognition 29, 46, 50, 93, 115, 162, 227, 322, 432, 439, 441, 453, 459, 467, 469, 472,
362, 518, 536–537, 592, 671, 677 477, 489–490, 513–515, 523, 535, 539, 541,
544, 547, 551, 559, 562–564, 570, 574, 582, ––revolution 165, 171, 342
601, 629, 638, 640–641, 669, 675 ––studies 1, 3, 5, 48, 136, 249, 252, 256,
––attribution 539, 541 315, 391, 465, 477, 494–495, 499, 502,
––enactment 539, 541 520–521, 571, 578, 591
Confucianism 481–482, 485, 490 ––consumer 165, 170
consilience 295, 299 ––indigenous 197, 221, 413, 417, 422, 427, 433,
constructivism 136, 138, 157, 571 440, 469, 623–624
––constructivist 3, 5, 90, 136, 157–159, 227, ––Mesopotamian 65
592–593 culture-critical metadiscourse 135, 141, 147
––social 214, 571 cybernetic 28, 34, 277
consumption 157, 160, 163–164, 166–167,
169–171, 295, 329, 361, 377, 379, 470, 514, Dandi march 450
621, 634–636, 640–641, 649 Daoism 334, 337–338, 342–343
––consumerist 163–165, 167, 169–170 deconstructivism 599–600
contingency 3, 107, 112, 368, 372, 374 ––deconstructivist 599
continuity of being 481–482, 484, 488 deep ecology 105, 117, 159, 326, 337, 340,
corporeality 60, 145, 208–209, 218, 220, 273, 343–344, 482, 671
555, 563–564 Deepwater Horizon disaster 628, 631, 659
––trans-corporeality 216, 218, 274 delta 200, 317, 370, 461, 470–476, 674
creating life 481–483, 485–486, 488 democracy 162, 174–176, 178–179, 184, 192,
creative materiality 274 202, 210, 213, 219, 227, 378, 415, 424, 454,
creativity 4, 22, 26–27, 31, 38, 46, 57–58, 95, 462, 464, 631–633
97, 135, 137, 142–143, 146, 149, 261, 281, ––democratic 54, 133, 161, 175–177, 179,
287, 466, 515, 553–555, 566, 599, 669, 182–183, 187–188, 201–202, 204, 296,
677–678 305, 418, 455, 514, 629–630
––as evolutionary 31 Denmark 72, 79, 335
––as openness 22, 26–27, 31 denotified tribes 449
––as play 26, 29, 31–33, 35, 37–38, 41 denouement 596
critique 54, 87, 107, 113, 115, 117–118, 123, determinism 30, 208, 213, 217, 227
126, 129, 131, 137, 141–142, 161–162, 166, deterritorialisation 97, 227, 229, 254, 498, 501,
168–169, 171, 177, 181–182, 184–185, 194, 503, 505
196, 198–200, 202, 204–205, 209–210, development
212–214, 254, 265–268, 276, 283, 318, ––over-, 165, 169
327, 393, 405–406, 413, 415, 428, 433, ––under-, 169
439, 440–441, 448, 451–452, 455, 487, developmentalism 199
515, 537, 554, 557, 561–562, 591–592, 621, dialectics 165–171, 454, 462, 477, 669
625, 659, 676 ––hedonist dialectic 157
critical theory 6, 136–137, 139, 513, 668 dialogic 24, 38, 53, 144, 269, 562, 590–591,
cultural ecology 3–5, 8–10, 116, 135–149, 249, 595, 648
252, 269, 336–337, 363–364, 459, 467, ––dialogism 210, 591–592
477, 513–529, 570, 576, 578, 591, 605–615 ––dialogicity 595
cultural différance 109
––authority 605–611, 615 Dionysos 75
––context 320, 370, 386, 388, 477, 521, 552, ––Dionysian 66, 76, 137, 250
578, 605–606 disaster risk reduction 516
––difference 263, 308, 389, 408, 416–417, 421, discourse 49, 84, 86, 98, 105, 107–108, 116,
428, 432–434, 605 127, 133, 135, 137–141, 143, 147–149, 158,
––evils 481, 483, 486, 490 160–162, 175, 178, 182, 185–186, 199–200,
––memory 9, 73, 569–587 204, 208–209, 214–217, 252, 265, 269,
273–276, 286–287, 302–303, 315–317, ecofeminism 6, 135, 198, 208–223, 551, 554,
323–326, 329–330, 351, 359–360, 557
364–365, 368, 370, 376, 389, 413–418, ––ecofeminist 8–10, 198, 208–215, 217–220,
420, 422–428, 430–433, 438, 445, 223, 306, 334, 341, 553–555, 557, 559
448, 453, 460, 494–496, 499, 502, 507, ––spirituality 209, 212, 220–221
516–517, 519–520, 525–526, 571, 577–578, ecoglobalism 8, 334, 494–508
606, 610, 612–613, 623, 645, 659–660, eco-inertia 459, 477
665, 671–672, 675 ecological
––of the secluded 445 ––aesthetics 10, 123, 130, 132, 390, 481,
dismal swamp 182–184 486–487, 671–673
displacement 80, 230, 237, 264, 440, ––awareness 135, 204, 226, 327, 393, 487,
443–444, 447, 449, 459, 461, 470, 506 489–490, 525
DNA 24, 39, 72, 275, 287–288, 344 ––codes 73
documentary film 101, 281, 368, 373, 377, 413, ––ecologically noble savages 417, 423,
417–418, 623 426–427, 431, 433
dog 49, 53, 79, 216, 218, 242, 245, 250, 252, ––force 135, 140–141, 147, 149, 577–578, 587,
257, 259–260, 265–266, 323–324, 339, 672
395, 404, 623, 666 ––native 413, 417, 431–433
domestication 146, 180, 182, 580 ––restoration 439–400, 471
dream 20, 31, 58, 65, 68–69, 74–76, 79–80, ––unconscious 135, 147
98, 118, 184–186, 188, 191, 222, 237–238, ecologies 25, 97, 101, 142, 196, 199, 273, 279,
249, 258–259, 261, 283, 289, 317, 324, 286, 335, 349, 408, 414, 537, 557, 666,
328, 350, 352, 358, 375, 407, 506, 584–585 669–670, 676–677, 679
Du Fu 491 ecology
dualism 19, 21, 50, 70, 101, 139, 141, 214, 222, ––political 94, 174–192
256, 276, 306, 423, 528, 560, 592 ecomusicology 644–660
dwelling 60, 168, 180, 197, 223, 229, 234, 236, ––poetic 649–651, 660
285–286, 398–402, 408, 423, 426, 444, ––practical 651–654
504, 507, 527 econarratology 534–535, 538, 547
economic growth 163, 600
Earth First! 117, 209 ecopoetics 45, 61, 385–386, 389, 391
Earth Summit 345, 516, 670 ––écopoétique 389–391, 408
eco-art 474, 664 ecopoiesis 142
ecoaesthetics 137, 481–492, 666 ecoprimitivism 197, 203
ecoambiguity 451 ecopsychology 6, 135, 557, 606
ecocentric 138–139 ecosemiotics 45, 48, 58
eco-cosmopolitanism 345, 499–500, 503 ––ecosemiotic 60, 148
ecocritical pedagogy 514–515, 518, 528 ecosophy 48, 94, 96–97, 101, 388, 481–492
ecocriticism ecosystem 4, 65, 72–73, 78–80, 96, 138, 140,
––Chinese 481–492 142–143, 146, 197, 201, 269, 280–281,
––material 3, 6, 10, 138, 215, 273–275, 284, 289, 350–352, 369, 371, 420, 439,
282–283, 285–286, 349–365, 373, 377, 461, 468, 472, 482–483, 500, 504, 506,
481–482, 677 519, 570, 576–578, 582, 587, 592, 600,
––mediterranean 368–381 606, 664–665, 670, 676
––oceanic 376 ecotheory 138
––postcolonial 10, 194–205, 499–500, 603 Ecuador 416, 675
––posthuman 213, 273–290 Eden 190, 415, 462, 475–476, 639, 655, 667
––third wave 8, 438 Education for Sustainable Development (ESD),
écocritique 385–389, 391–392, 407–408 513, 516–517, 529
egg 61, 475 ––justice 6, 10, 107, 135, 200, 202, 204–205,
elegy 250, 602, 629 209, 220, 226, 414–415, 417, 438, 445,
embodied 32, 49, 53–54, 56, 58, 65, 71, 73, 91, 469, 499–500, 659, 664, 674
100, 141, 175, 185, 212, 214, 218, 274, 276, ––movement 105, 108, 110, 117, 337, 340, 393,
278, 282–283, 308, 325, 329, 335, 349, 431, 535, 659
373, 405, 483, 519, 536–540, 542, 545, 547, ––narrative 503, 534–547
554–555, 557–559, 562–565 ––pollution 473, 572
––simulation 534, 539, 542, 545, 547 ––psychology 226, 228
embodiment 78, 98, 178, 180, 214, 217, 235, ––toxicity 440
269, 274, 277, 288, 503, 534–547, 551, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 222,
558–559, 562, 564 629–630
emergence 1, 5–6, 9, 46, 49, 55, 57, 67, 72–73, environmentalism 105, 208, 219, 253, 281, 324,
89, 105, 116, 140, 195, 200–201, 249, 387, 409, 414–416, 422, 426–428, 433,
252, 265, 276, 302, 318, 408, 414, 445, 438–439, 441–442, 451–452, 455, 465,
494–496, 502, 515, 521, 571, 596, 607 467, 472, 572, 657, 660, 665, 668–669,
emotions 9, 259, 269, 297, 487, 518, 524, 673–674, 678
534–547, 575 ––of the poor 324, 415, 438–439, 455, 572
––direct 534, 536, 541, 543 epic (genre), 61, 65, 74, 94, 141, 580, 594, 610,
––empathetic 534–535 623
emotionalizing techniques 535 epistemology 2, 4–5, 92, 106, 136, 138,
empathy 61, 139, 251, 483, 487–489, 534, 174, 192, 264, 268, 306, 484, 556, 558,
538–540, 542, 546–547 564–565, 592, 597, 646
empirical study of narrative 547 equality 20, 174–175, 177, 218, 416, 502, 519,
enactment 77, 269, 279, 282, 287, 539–541, 529
545, 555, 561, 564 Estonia 47, 72–73
engagement 6, 9, 24, 61, 70, 74, 93, 96, 116, ethics 54, 85–87, 92, 94, 96, 102, 113, 160, 253,
127, 157–158, 170–171, 263, 268, 290, 315, 341, 361, 387, 416, 459, 483–484, 487,
319, 325–326, 329, 344, 390, 407, 454, 489, 498, 534, 554, 591, 615, 659
463–464, 471, 487–488, 498, 504, 515, ––ethical 2, 5, 45, 49, 53, 60–61, 96, 120, 135,
521, 534–535, 537–540, 645, 648, 651, 145, 148, 176, 179, 181, 185, 208–209, 215,
656, 664, 668, 672–673, 676, 678 218–219, 220–221, 226, 229, 258, 283,
England 47, 77, 79, 235, 402, 609, 632 285–286, 289, 327, 330, 336, 361, 364,
Enlightenment 20, 51–52, 98, 101, 130–132, 371, 373, 381, 388, 428, 432–433, 441,
136–137, 157, 162, 187, 210, 267, 276, 416, 464, 466, 477, 499, 503, 513, 518, 537, 547,
527 551–552, 554, 563, 572, 575, 585, 591–592,
environmental 594–595, 599, 605, 615, 658, 669
––activism 5, 195, 334, 515, 658, 675 ––of proximity 518
––awareness 289, 441, 467, 472, 520, 522–524, ethnicity 427, 430–431, 439
572 ethnocentrism 222
––arts 299, 327, 669–670, 672 ethnomusicology 645–646, 648, 658
––crisis 300, 379, 389, 392, 463, 470, 494, 504, ––applied 658
515, 517, 595, 647, 660, 671 eugenics 23, 344
––fiction 300, 535, 537, 541 eurocentrism 200
––history 391, 422, 572, 581, 645, 673 evidence-action gap 298
––humanities 1, 48, 108, 285, 341, 500, 507, evolution 4–6, 19, 21–29, 31–37, 39, 49, 55, 57,
535, 572, 590, 644 65–67, 69, 71, 74, 88–89, 95, 98–99, 107,
––imagination 213, 275, 316–317, 324, 370, 110, 112–113, 124, 136–137, 139–143, 147,
388, 391, 415, 433, 461, 494, 515, 534 149, 162, 164–165, 171, 216–218, 226–228,
230–235, 249–250, 267, 276, 278,
281–283, 285–286, 289, 327–328, 330, Frankfurt School 137, 164, 591
334, 336–337, 342, 344–345, 351, 434, Fraser River 344
486, 519, 538, 576, 622, 634, 636, 638 freedom 57–58, 97, 109, 118–120, 162,
extinction 66, 93, 223, 234, 252, 269, 176–181, 231, 234, 259, 306, 464, 496,
305–306, 308, 310, 324, 327–328, 464, 522, 528, 592, 657
499, 504, 506, 652, 671 free time 163
French 33, 78, 84, 124, 174–175, 181, 254, 353,
fairies 75–77 374, 385–412, 574, 634, 656, 668
fairy tale 119, 140, 258, 468, 523 Freudian 161, 562
familiarity bias 546 Fukushima 572
fantasy 68, 88, 175–176, 183, 186, 261, 364, functional differentiation 105, 110–112, 141
400, 522–523, 614, 625, 627, 674
farming 316, 446, 467, 543, 581, 630, 632 Gaia hypothesis 93
feminism 6, 208, 210–211, 213, 274 gathering 45, 145, 241, 296, 340, 650
––feminist 181, 208–213, 217, 219, 226, 254, Gela 373, 375–376, 378–380
269, 306, 315, 318, 320, 416, 553, 591 gender 107, 135, 148, 158, 162–163, 181, 198,
ferality 269 208–210, 212–214, 217, 252, 283, 308, 318,
festival seasons 459 386–387, 439, 460, 464, 514, 551, 554,
fiction 20, 23–25, 39, 61, 66, 69, 131, 141, 157, 575, 605, 648, 660, 668
170–171, 187, 191, 199, 201–203, 205, genomics 71–72
235, 244, 250, 269, 285, 289, 290, 298, genre 6, 8–9, 88, 98, 118–119, 138, 140, 175,
300–302, 310–311, 342, 393, 396–397, 186, 194, 201–202, 204, 258, 289, 298,
399, 405, 414–415, 419, 441–442, 449, 300, 334, 342, 374, 390, 418–419, 426,
452, 455, 486, 495, 501, 503, 507–508, 452, 465, 468, 474, 499, 502, 505, 507,
522–525, 535, 537, 540–541, 547, 553, 595, 521–523, 525, 535, 543, 590, 593–595, 598,
672 600–602, 619, 667, 669
––climate 290, 295, 300–302, 507 ––literary 119, 389, 393, 395–396, 398, 522,
First Nations 344–345 556, 594
fish 27, 29, 34, 96, 109, 220, 278, 280, 321, generic 227, 253, 259, 265–266, 300, 503, 591,
339, 344, 352–353, 364, 369, 375, 377, 593–595, 597–598, 650
379–381, 424, 472, 483–484, 641 genteel thinkers 605–611, 615
flesh of the world 65–68, 563 geocriticism 385–386, 392–393, 395–396, 399
focalization 395, 399, 408 ––géocritique 392–393, 408
folk tale 251, 258, 261, 268, 594, 601 geography 70, 196, 210, 228, 323–324,
folklore 75–76, 323, 472, 596 385–386, 388, 394–396, 398, 400, 452,
––folkloric 598 460, 465, 471–472, 580, 583, 593, 660
food 27–28, 53, 61, 146, 185, 227, 324, 358, ––human 226, 228–229, 395, 536, 645
360, 364–365, 448–449, 453, 455, 464, ––phenomenological 226, 229–230
470, 529, 584, 637, 654, 667, 670 geopoetics 385–386, 392–397, 408
forest 74, 77, 177, 179–180, 182, 187, 199, 228, ––géopoétique 385, 392, 394, 396, 408
234, 260, 284, 303–304, 307–308, 317, Germany 2, 54, 79, 113–114, 132, 136, 250, 344,
342–343, 345, 352, 370, 396, 398–399, 373, 515–516, 634, 659, 667, 671
420, 438–455, 459, 461, 464, 466–467, ––German Idealism 136
469, 472–473, 476, 569, 579, 623–624, global 2–8, 53, 73, 147, 158, 163, 195, 197, 200,
636–637, 651–655, 667–668 209, 227, 277–278, 289, 295–298, 300,
Forest Rights Act 206, 444 308–309, 313, 315–316, 324–325, 327,
forest satyagraha 443 336, 363, 370, 372–373, 375, 377, 381,
fracking 279, 621, 627–633 387, 389, 391, 398, 407–409, 413–417,
francophone 8, 47, 385–409 426, 431–433, 439–441, 460–462, 464,
482–483, 487, 490, 494–495, 497–498, ––natural 38, 46, 118, 136, 139, 257, 259,
500–501, 504–508, 513, 516–519, 521, 525, 288–289, 341, 507
528, 621, 624, 627, 644, 655, 658–659, ––prehistory 45, 77, 112
675–676 Hittites 75
––change 516–517 holism 84, 88–94, 98, 102, 105, 107, 672
––globality 494, 498, 501 Holocaust 249, 264, 571, 642
––mean temperature trend 296–297 home 88, 92, 187–189, 191, 197, 202, 228,
––Global South 196, 415, 438–458, 675–676 230–232, 235–244, 259, 298, 303, 320,
––warming 85, 171, 215, 297–298, 302, 322, 328, 330, 336, 338–339, 340, 375,
327–328, 467–477, 495, 497, 504–506, 385–386, 389, 392, 401, 408, 419, 438,
633–634, 674 445, 448, 455, 469–472, 475, 491, 505,
Global Action Programme (GAP), 517 518, 544, 559–560, 580, 583, 585–586,
globalization 1, 97, 142, 163–164, 374, 381, 613, 626–628, 636, 639, 649, 653, 667
406, 414, 416–417, 441, 496, 498, 500, household 110–111, 189, 239, 243–244, 251,
522, 659 295, 368, 471, 482
God 20, 50–52, 54–55, 74–75, 88, 100, 112, Huizi 484
118–119, 201–203, 212, 304, 306, 466, human-animal dance 141
468, 474, 521, 561, 655, 657, 665 Human Genome Project 39
––Goddess (worship), 88, 93, 101, 212, 667 humanism 50, 106, 139, 163, 269, 274–277,
––Transcendent 20 286, 527
Grado 351 ––human exceptionalism 49, 161–162, 252, 275
Great Acceleration 500 ––human flourishing 160, 163
Great Ape Project 253 humanities 1, 4, 22, 31, 48, 106, 108, 136, 157,
Great Pacific Plastic Patch 280, 365 165–166, 194, 200, 202–203, 246, 252,
Great Salt Lake 341 285, 297, 299, 315–316, 319, 341, 364, 371,
Greece 66, 76, 352, 445 463, 500, 507, 517, 528, 535, 538, 572, 590,
––Greek mystery plays 66 644, 647
greenhouse gases 297, 327 human-nature relationships 538, 547, 648
Greenstream pipeline 378 human rights 20, 108, 163, 200, 415, 428, 464,
gridiron 186 656
grotesque 140, 146, 204, 242, 249, 258, 354 humor 87, 238, 243, 320, 607–609
hunting 234, 251, 260, 267–268, 324, 344,
habit 22, 28–29, 31, 98–99, 180–182, 373, 516, 449, 468
594, 626, 634, 636, 653 hybridity 273–294, 349–351, 354, 371, 376, 379
Haida Gwaii 345 ––hybrids 250, 276, 283, 285, 289
happenstance 31, 35
Harmony of the Spheres 644 iCHELL 285, 287
hedonism 184 identity 76, 88, 92, 111, 123, 220, 229,
––alternative hedonism 164 231–232, 235–236, 238, 240, 243–244,
Himalayas 334, 342–343, 444 258, 275–276, 283, 289, 386, 396, 404,
Hindu 413, 421, 423–224, 426–433, 439–441,
––scriptures 337 447, 449, 460–461, 470–471, 520, 522,
––Vedas 644 557, 571, 578, 584, 586, 648, 660, 668,
historical materialism 595, 599 671, 676
historiography 196, 419, 571, 576 ––ethnic 420, 428, 434
history ––formation 497, 506, 578
––cultural 66, 70, 140, 142, 191, 253, 257, 388 ––human 214, 249, 252 ,254, 256 ,268 .275,
––deep 65, 77 289, 558
––indigenous 413, 421, 428, 431–433, 440
––self-identity 111, 226, 230–231, 235–236, Innenwelt 32, 34, 48, 140, 143
239, 249, 575 insect 21, 260–261, 306–308, 310, 489, 524
idyll 423, 425–426, 460, 552, 563, 593, interdiscourse 116, 135, 141, 148, 516
598–601, 649–650 interdisciplinary 1–2, 7–8, 226–228, 230,
––idyllic 598–599, 601–602 246, 252, 300, 388–390, 463, 481–482,
imaginary 24, 65–66, 68–69, 73, 77, 116, 141, 494–495, 498–500, 508, 569–570,
163, 183–184, 188, 203, 250, 263–264, 572–573, 590, 646, 660, 666, 676
277, 279, 283, 305, 308, 327, 330, 391, International Pernambuco Conservation
536, 547, 580, 586 Initiative 652
––eco-literary 37, 57, 65–83 International Wow Company 627
––ecological 61, 65, 73–74, 77, 79–80, 141, 432 interpretant 21–23
imagination 57, 68–69, 74, 77, 79, 136, 140, interpretation 7, 10, 19, 21, 26, 36, 38–39, 61,
144, 146, 161, 163, 168, 171, 202, 235, 252, 140, 143, 157–158, 223, 226, 228, 251,
261, 263, 268–269, 281–282, 286, 290, 258–259, 262–263, 265–266, 269, 282,
310, 323–324, 330, 341, 359, 361, 371, 320, 335, 337, 349–367, 377, 379, 388,
373, 375, 393, 398, 400, 416–417, 423, 396, 398, 416, 419, 427, 488, 514, 520,
426, 433, 439, 487, 495, 501, 513, 515–516, 522, 525, 537, 570–571, 579, 581, 645, 651,
523, 527, 537, 539, 551, 554, 560, 572–574, 657, 668, 670, 673
577–578, 581–582, 585–587, 610, 615, 660, intersubjectivity 24, 71, 484
672, 677 ––intersubjective 23–25, 29–30, 66, 74
––collective 423, 590, 592–594, 603 intertextuality 9, 395–396, 579, 599
––ecological 414, 417 intra-activity 208, 216–217, 219–220
––environmental 213, 275, 316–317, 324, 370, invisible 65–69, 71, 110, 245, 265, 310, 323,
388, 391, 415–416, 433, 461, 494, 515, 534 354, 360, 376, 402, 504–505, 636
––imaginative counter-discourse 135, 141, 148, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
516 Change), 295, 299–300, 302, 305, 310, 504
––literary 136, 201, 365, 515 Iraq 74, 585–587
IMAX 621–622, 626 Ireland 41, 65, 78–80, 169, 235–237
immanence 84–104 ––Neolithic 78
impressionism 124, 646 ––Northern 78
India 9, 194, 197–198, 201–202, 205, 362, Iron Age 78
441–445, 448–450, 452, 455 irony 99, 257, 266–267, 279, 474, 506, 632
––Indian 197–198, 201–204, 404, 407, 427, island 50, 56, 204, 209, 281, 323, 328, 345,
438, 440–444, 448, 450–452, 528, 350–352, 369, 374–376, 385–386,
580–581, 583–585, 640, 675 298–407, 439–440, 496, 569, 622
––Indian-American 674 Italy 320, 354–356, 364–365, 370, 372–378,
––Indian Forest Acts 443 381, 392, 609, 611, 614, 645, 651, 653
––Indian philosophy 337
––hyperreal Indian 417, 432–433 Jew 50, 52, 249, 251, 258, 260, 262–263, 266
indigenous 80, 159, 169, 182, 197, 199–200, justice 160–161, 163–164, 209, 219, 227, 268,
202–205, 210, 212, 220–221, 223, 337, 351, 357–358, 364, 378, 401–402, 407,
342–346, 413, 416–428, 430–434, 418, 428, 441, 454, 542, 583–584, 656,
440–441, 443, 445, 453–454, 468–471, 676
475, 477, 514, 623–624, 645, 652, 675 ––cognitive 349, 359–360, 362, 364–365
––identity 413, 421, 427–428, 431–433, 440 ––environmental 3, 6, 10, 107, 135, 200, 202,
––lives 204, 334, 343, 345, 623 204–205, 209, 220, 226, 414–415, 417,
––rights 194, 414, 422, 431 438, 445, 454, 469, 499, 500, 659, 664,
––transindigenous 343, 345 674
Industrial Revolution 521, 600, 638–639
King Kong 267, 623 law 20, 27, 37, 39, 52, 66, 69, 75, 98, 108, 110,
knowledge,1, 2, 4, 6, 19–20, 22–24, 33, 35, 40, 113, 140, 159, 176, 179, 181, 183, 186, 188,
49, 57, 79, 87, 98–99, 110, 138, 141–142, 211, 340, 365, 442, 445, 447, 449–451,
145, 148, 197–198, 217–218, 233, 240–241, 464, 466, 519, 528, 538, 583–584, 607,
245, 259, 265, 280, 295, 297, 299, 301, 631, 652, 675
303, 305–306, 308, 335–336, 338, 395, Lebenswelt 68, 71, 527
414, 423, 426, 433, 443–444, 446, 464, liberalism 199, 210–211, 427–428, 522, 673
468, 486, 502, 507, 513, 517–520, 522–523, liberated embodied simulation 539, 547
526–527, 529, 536–537, 543, 554–557, 562, Libya 356, 375, 378, 381
564–566, 571–573, 575, 654, 658, 671, 676 lieux de mémoire 574, 578, 580
––cultural 30, 139, 584 life
––ecological 4–6, 9, 144, 440, 486, 515 ––bare 260
––knowledge seeking humans 227, 233 ––writing 334–348
––local 415, 423, 438, 441 literature
––indigenous 204, 416, 443 ––African 459–461, 464–466, 472, 474, 477
––scientific 85, 124, 218, 305, 426, 489, 497, ––American 143–144, 147, 175, 182, 317,
506 323–324, 542, 606, 609–610, 639
Kyoto Convention 345 ––Chinese 339
––climate change 298, 505
Lacanian 189, 264, 562–563 ––English 45, 77, 434, 614
land 76–77, 79, 99–100, 127, 180, 182, 186, ––environmental 7, 325, 327–328, 385, 388,
194, 196–203, 210, 220–223, 235, 279, 460, 471, 518
284, 323–324, 339–341, 350–356, ––imaginative 135, 137, 139, 302, 570–571,
361, 364, 368–371, 375, 381, 390, 396, 577–579
400–401, 403, 406, 414, 420, 422, 424, ––modernist 358, 551–552, 554, 566
430–431, 438–455, 459–461, 468–472, ––Native American 219
476, 483, 528, 543, 552, 562, 578–586, ––postcolonial 194, 196, 201, 622
602, 630, 668–670, 673–674 ––romantic 45, 136–137, 599
landscape 4, 67, 77–78, 80, 87, 98–100, 124, ––trauma 9, 551–568
126–128, 132, 159, 165, 169, 180, 182–183, Little Ice Age 76
186–187, 189, 191, 210, 231, 235, 242, local 6, 8, 35, 77–78, 209, 227, 229, 231,
277–278, 280–281, 303, 317, 319–321, 284, 298, 307, 313, 323–324, 336, 342,
323, 339–340, 343, 349–350, 354, 350, 254, 379, 409, 413–417, 420, 423,
356, 359, 363, 369–374, 377, 379–380, 426–429, 432–433, 438–444, 447,
385–387, 391, 394, 396–397, 399–403, 449–450, 453, 465, 468–470, 498, 500,
405–406, 408, 440–442, 447, 454–455, 505, 513, 517–518, 525, 573, 583, 607–608,
460, 462–463, 465, 468, 471–472, 475, 622, 628–629, 631–632, 658–659,
489, 520–521, 541–543, 551–552, 556, 558, 669–670, 672, 676
569–570, 574–575, 577, 580, 582, 586, 614, loci memoriae 9, 573
632–633, 635–640, 649–650, 655, 660, logos 47, 66, 68
664, 667–669, 674 Luminists 637
––garden 123, 130
––literary 397, 551 machines 33–34, 36, 99, 162, 177, 253–254,
––landscapes of violence 551, 557, 577, 587 266, 276–277, 283, 286, 288, 625, 659
––of the mind 140, 269 Malawi 474
Laozi 385 Mao 342, 440, 444
Latin 76, 78, 351, 376, 537, 607 Maori literature 204–205
––America 8, 413–437 map 99, 282, 286, 300, 323, 396–400, 441,
450, 477, 573, 581, 676–677
Marxism 210, 595 metanarrative 276, 301–302, 305, 307, 361,

––Marxian 161 363
––Marxist 201, 212, 214, 416, 445 metaphor 5, 7–9, 21–23, 26–30, 32–34, 37, 39,
masculinity 119, 262, 306 58, 60 73, 109, 135, 142–143, 147, 176–177,
Mata Atlântica 652–653 188, 196, 233, 356, 262, 265–266, 278,
material 296, 334–335, 351, 357, 394, 402, 405,
––materialism 30–31, 90, 137, 182, 210, 274, 408, 439–440, 461, 469, 472–475,
281, 514, 595 557–560, 565–566, 574, 579, 590, 599,
––materiality 6, 45, 126, 138, 214–215, 217–218, 602, 610, 637, 640, 648, 659
220–221, 273–274, 278–279, 281, 283, ––metaphoric 8, 29, 86–87, 166, 177, 185, 196,
288–289, 349, 360–361, 380–381, 401, 285, 374, 380, 467, 519, 551–552, 554–556,
501, 554–555, 561, 564, 566, 664, 673, 678 573, 576–577, 582–583, 596, 599, 610, 614
––narrative 349–350 Mexico 413, 429, 580, 582, 628, 667
––new materialism 208–209, 214–217, 219, Miao 342
273–274 microhistories of the social 537
––textuality 350, 354, 356, 358, 364 Midsummer practices 77
––turn 213–214, 217, 377 migration 27–28, 181, 188–189, 306, 372,
mathematics 27, 52, 68, 70, 84, 87, 197, 397, 374–375, 377, 439, 504, 518, 529, 674
528, 593 mimesis 98, 128–129, 390, 578, 671
matter mimicry 22, 71, 257, 360
––narratives of 438 Minamata disease 414
––vitality of 216 mind 24–25, 27, 30–35, 39–40, 50–51, 54,
Maying rituals 76 57–60, 70–72, 77, 79–80, 88, 90–91,
Maenads 75 99–100, 102, 105, 108, 136–141, 144, 147,
meaning 19–23, 26–28, 30, 34–37, 39–40, 48, 162, 168, 228, 245, 251, 259, 264, 269,
57, 60, 66, 68–71, 77, 80, 98, 110, 115, 119, 299, 323, 328–329, 335, 341, 392–394,
131, 145–147, 177, 183, 185–186, 190, 196, 414, 448, 468, 488, 537–540, 544,
214, 217, 220, 227–232, 237, 251, 253, 256, 546–547, 554, 558–562, 565, 575, 584,
258, 260–261, 265, 267, 277, 281–282, 586–587, 605, 608, 651
285, 285, 299, 301, 307–310, 315, 321–323, ––embodied 58, 91, 141, 539, 547
329, 350, 363, 370, 377, 381, 397, 401, ––human 23, 41, 55, 90, 100, 137, 211, 299, 329,
407, 416, 423, 428, 438, 449, 455, 474, 330, 521, 537, 555, 559–560
482–483, 496–497, 499, 503, 521, 524, mind-body dualism 19, 30, 90, 141
542–543, 551–553, 555, 557–558, 562–564, Ming Dynasty 334, 340
570–571, 574–575, 577–579, 598, 608, mirror neuron system 539
644, 646–647, 649, 671, 678 modernism 268, 337, 551, 553, 564, 671
––meaning-making 21, 143, 585 modernity 19–20, 38, 68, 105–107, 110–111,
Mediterranean Sea 357, 368, 370, 372, 377, 379 113, 116–118, 124, 164–166, 169, 184,
memory 31, 37, 40, 66, 70–71, 73–74, 95, 199, 220–223, 267–268, 302, 324, 335,
149, 164, 188, 191, 217, 238, 330, 357, 415–417, 423, 434, 451, 454, 476, 496–497,
360, 362–363, 379, 401, 460, 472, 552, 500, 514–515, 525, 527, 552, 562, 566
554–555, 557, 561, 562, 569–580, 582, ––crisis of 66
585–587, 650 ––modernization 141, 147, 165, 169, 199, 229,
––collective 575–576 414–415, 431, 453, 469, 495, 497, 606
––cultural 9, 73, 569–589 ––reflexive 302, 495, 497
––memory wound 570 monarch butterflies 302–303, 306, 309
mental simulation 544 monotheistic religions 20
Mesopotamia 65–66, 74 monument 187, 569–570, 574–575, 587
Mestre 362 moral allegiance 546
Mormons 341 natural

mortals 398, 466 ––beauty 123–125, 132, 169, 310, 444
motif 141–142, 261, 319, 324, 388, 391, 484, ––rights 175, 177
521, 551, 559, 583, 590, 593–597, 632 nature
––motivic 591, 595 ––alienation from 126, 131, 521
motor imagery 539, 542, 545–547 ––alliance 128–130
movement 22–23, 26–29, 39–40, 46, 56, 97, ––as subject 128–129, 422
106–107, 143, 145–146, 164, 177, 190–191, ––as tinkerer and bricoleur 32–33
194, 200, 202, 227, 232, 241, 243, 245, ––constructivist views of 90, 136, 157–159
253–254, 266, 325, 340, 343–344, 378, ––culture 29, 34, 168, 190, 345, 350, 388, 453,
380 , 393–394, 397–398, 413, 423, 427, 554, 600
431, 433, 441, 443–444, 470–471, 535, ––endorsement of 168
540, 542–543, 546, 553, 558, 564, 571, ––immersion in 168–169
581, 611, 613, 615, 630, 632, 637–640, ––intelligent 37, 40
648–650, 659, 669, 678 ––Nature Lectures 71
––environmental 105, 108, 110, 117, 337, 340, ––realist approaches to 159
393, 431 ––skepticism of 309
––feminist 209–213 ––silence of 446
––political 174, 390, 438 ––writing 1, 5–6, 98, 118, 157, 168, 318–320,
––social 105, 413, 416–419, 423, 427–431, 668 339, 370, 388, 390, 396, 438, 534, 541,
Mt. Ste. Victoire 69 553, 586
multicultural 315, 318, 441, 591 naturalcultural 280–281
multiplicity 9, 84–85, 89, 94–96, 101–102, 182, Natursprache 46
202–203, 379, 496, 503 Naturphilosophie 47, 94, 136–137
music 22, 27, 38, 46, 69, 71, 74, 170, 189, 322, Nazism 296
324, 340, 394, 424, 556, 627, 644–663, need
672, 678 ––politics of 166
musicology 9, 644–663 ––‘true’ need 167
Muthanga agitation 445 Neo-Darwinism 39
myth 70, 107, 111, 118, 129, 140, 143, 148, 171, ––Neo-Darwinian 23, 28, 35, 39
188–189, 197, 220–223, 236, 254, 258, ––Neo-Darwinist 35, 72
261, 268, 275, 296, 317, 361, 375–376, 404, neozapatismo 418–419, 427–428
407–408, 440, 443, 453, 468, 579–580, Netherlands The 79, 353
584, 627 neuroscience 228, 231, 573
mythical method 602 Nevada 341, 636–637
mythology 45, 54, 80, 93, 220, 223, 296, 376, New Criticism 115, 146, 318, 519
407, 653 New Economic Foundation 295
new forest texts 438–458
Napoleonic 77 New Orleans 351, 357–358, 365
narrative Newtonian 72
––agency 283, 579–580 Nietzschean 161
––environment 539, 541–542, 544, 546 Nigeria 194, 199–200, 440, 461, 463, 470–475
––perspective 539, 541, 546, 559, 562 nihilism 54, 249
––scholarship 315–333 noise pollution 651
––theory 545 nomadic 254, 343, 352, 377, 433
narratology 534–535, 538, 540 nominalism 19–20
National Socialism 132 non-anthropocentric humanism 139, 274
Native American 144, 197–198, 208, 219, 336, nonhuman 19, 21–22, 25, 27, 29, 93, 98,
340–341, 423, 623, 669 135–137, 139–141, 146, 148–149, 218, 232,
235–236, 240, 245, 250, 273, 276–284, paradox 67, 93, 105–120, 162, 245, 310, 626,
286–290, 309, 250, 352, 361, 368, 370, 640–641
373–375, 377–379, 381, 468, 499, 525, parody 266
534–535, 559, 562, 673, 678 pastoralism 164, 174, 183–184, 186, 442
––world 226, 228, 231–232, 235, 336, 377–378, ––pastoral 60–61, 75, 140, 171, 183, 185–186,
414, 461–462, 464, 500 190–191, 196, 316, 317, 324, 422–423, 426,
Nonhuman Rights project 253 459–461, 468, 475, 499–500, 503, 521,
Norman 78 552, 632, 644, 646, 648–660, 667
North Dakota 583 patterns 27, 34, 40
Norway 569, 652 Pearl Harbor 344
nuclear 202, 204–205, 209, 341, 344, 440, peasant struggles 443
464, 394–497, 499, 657, 668 perception 20–21, 27, 40, 47–61, 66–78, 100,
102, 114–115, 132, 159, 230–232, 237,
object 252–258, 269, 280, 286, 299–300, 328,
––cultural 70, 73, 146, 607 394–398, 402, 407, 414–415, 428, 433,
––material 24, 60, 138, 214 489, 495, 499–508, 535–537, 544–546,
––semiotic 21–22, 27, 32, 282 556–558, 562–564, 572–578, 584–587,
objective being 19 590–593, 597, 600–602, 652, 660, 666,
Occupy Chevron 632–633 671–673
oikeion 444–445, 448 performance 267, 340, 343, 390, 408, 428,
oikos 92, 368, 398, 438 539, 627
oil 100, 171, 199–200, 374, 376, 378–381, pernambuco (pau brasil) 652–653
429, 459, 461, 463, 470–474, 580–582, perspectivism 137
628–632, 659, 674, 677 pet 252, 256, 263
ontology 24, 37, 66, 92, 110–111, 162, 216, 276, petrochemical industry 376, 378, 381
326, 387, 484 petroleum 280–281, 361, 365, 368, 373–374,
––chiasmic 24, 67 377–383
orality 421 phenomenology 8–10, 61, 66, 70, 78, 137–138,
organic 39, 54–55, 65, 70–71, 77, 89–91, 99, 227, 545
124, 136, 158, 187, 191, 215, 257, 265, photography 394, 396, 641, 664
273–274,287, 289, 316, 329, 324, 334, physics 38–39, 84, 86–87, 92, 94, 215, 307,
338, 341–346, 363, 372, 402, 465, 482, 528, 593, 651
484, 519, 523, 551–565, 599, 668, 670 Piombino 363
Other (the), 129, 135, 142, 168, 176, 211, 254, place
268, 277, 289, 310, 371, 381, 393, 407, ––attachment 226–234, 246, 536, 575
442–443, 454, 461, 468, 490, 498–500, ––literary 360, 569–587
516, 524 ––place-in-process 226–235, 240–246
ozone 286, 654–655 ––placelessness 230–231, 237, 244
––relativity 230, 237, 244
Pacific 100, 204–205, 279–281, 365, 400, 440 ––studies 226–246, 447, 535–536, 572
painting 22, 33, 69, 71, 74, 124, 186, 235, 340, ––unity of 598
394, 396, 593, 633, 637, 639, 667–669 plague 76
––cave 65 planetary 6, 117, 158, 200, 289, 328, 330, 337,
––tonalist 637 344–346, 351, 389, 408–409, 415, 440,
Paneveggio 651–653 494, 498–500, 516, 673
Papua New Guinea 345, 644 Planet Earth 195, 340, 345–346, 387, 408, 461,
parable 258, 262, 296, 507 483, 488, 644
paradise tourism 441 plastic 29, 85, 91, 130, 185, 280–281, 329, 349,
356–357, 362, 365, 380–381
play of musement 32 Qing 342

poetry 1, 19, 37–40, 45, 50, 61, 66, 69–70,
78, 80, 97, 124, 126, 137, 140, 144, 168, Rabelaisian 595, 598
177, 180, 250, 319–320, 324, 334, 340, rain 87–88, 288, 307, 322, 340, 377, 381, 446,
393–394, 396, 398, 408, 441, 465, 467, 471–472, 506, 542, 552, 624, 649, 655
468–469, 472, 474–475, 491, 518, 521, ––forest 345, 623–624, 655
590–591, 595, 600, 602, 609, 614 rational thinking 186, 267
political philosophy 537 rationality 108, 132, 186–187, 210, 249–250,
politikon 444–449 264, 302, 514, 519, 554, 599, 608
pollution 100, 278, 280, 283, 328, 356, 358, reading experience 543, 547
361, 365, 380, 464, 467, 473, 490, 499, realism 19, 21, 38, 90, 138, 185, 235, 237,
506, 571–572, 651, 659 264–265, 274, 543, 602
Porto Marghera 349–365, 378–380 ––realist 5, 19–23, 38, 144, 159, 249, 251, 264,
postcolonial 300–301, 506, 566, 594–595
––postcolonial ecocriticism 10, 194, 196, ––realist novel 301, 543, 594–595
200–201, 204–205, 499–500, 603 reason 20, 25, 48–52, 57, 67, 97, 136–137, 161,
––postcolonialism 6, 194–196, 198, 202, 210, 167, 253, 264, 267–268, 277, 306, 614
415 reasoning 20, 24, 33, 503, 547, 566
post-Enlightenment 20 redemptive therio-primitivism 250
––thought 136 reformation 19–20
posthumanism 157, 162, 208, 213, 255, 269, reform movement 611, 613, 615
273–280, 285, 287, 371 regeneration 79, 96, 182–186, 336, 472, 519,
postmodernism 111, 137–138, 210, 275–276, 284–585
286 reintegrative interdiscourse 135, 141, 148, 516
poststructuralism 5, 137–138, 208, 210, relation/ship 315–316, 318, 323–330
213–214 religion 19–20, 249, 258, 315, 343, 402, 464,
pragmaticism 22 466, 483–484, 528, 584, 656
pragmatism 22 renaissance 6, 50, 55, 266
primal 45, 50, 53–55, 119, 268, 485, 667, 678 ––American 174–175
processual 19, 23, 97 representamen 21–22
progress 158, 160, 164–170 representations 21, 123, 169, 208, 215, 221,
property 45, 157, 180, 216, 421–422, 470, 665, 255, 287, 335, 350, 385, 387, 390, 393,
667 395–396, 399, 417–418, 460, 477, 507, 521,
––rights 179–181, 632 535, 554, 556, 558, 592–593, 597, 657, 664,
prosperity 376–377, 528, 612–613, 615 667–668
––politics of 137–139, 157–171 reservation 454, 583–584, 623
protestant 20, 145, 406 Richmond VA 586
provence 78 Rio de Janeiro 345, 516, 652
provincial novel 598, 600–601 risk
psychoanalysis 91, 97, 574 ––assessment 495, 499, 502
psychoanalytic theory 537 ––awareness 302, 495
psychology 6, 73, 128, 228, 231–232, 234, 246, ––communication 495, 499, 502, 507
326, 337, 496, 498–499, 536, 557, 574 ––discourse 494–495, 502, 507
––environmental 226, 228 ––management 496–497, 499
––evolutionary 226–227 ––narrative 417, 494, 495, 502–507
––of fiction 535 ––perception 299, 300, 495, 499, 502, 506
––scenario 498–500, 502–503, 506, 537, 572
qualia 538, 541, 544–545 river 76, 80, 119, 127, 177, 180, 191, 278, 281,
Queer Studies 6, 386–387 325, 328–329, 34142, 344, 351–352, 364,
379, 398, 424, 450, 468–476, 484, 491, site 22, 98, 136, 140, 142, 158, 181, 196,
551, 581, 585–586, 597, 624, 627–628, 210, 218, 231, 264, 274, 287, 289, 336,
633, 639, 655, 657, 660, 667, 672–674 341, 351–352, 356, 362, 373, 377, 380,
riverine 475–476 394, 466–467, 498, 503, 556–557,
road 77, 148, 190, 236, 241, 284–285, 569–570–579, 587, 595, 632–633, 638,
303–304, 354, 373–380, 593, 596–597, 664, 669–670
638–639, 667 skepticism 275, 300, 677
––movie 374, 597, 628 ––climate 309
––novel 596–597 slavery 148, 175, 178–179, 181–183, 188, 253,
rodent 260 450, 556, 582
Romanticism 6, 9, 38, 45, 51–52, 59, 94, 130, slow cinema 621, 634–642
136–137, 140, 157, 168–169, 182, 338, 461, social movement 105, 413, 416–419, 423,
468, 474, 521, 599, 602, 660 427–431, 668
––romantic 1, 38, 45–61, 111, 115, 118, 124, Sophist 129, 593
136–137, 165, 169, 182, 184–185, 187, Sørbråten 569
334–339, 461, 475, 521, 551, 599–600, sound 28, 46, 52, 59, 68, 99, 148, 161, 170, 181,
622, 667–668 237, 321–322, 327–328, 374–375, 377, 390,
401–402, 475, 563, 565, 584, 634–642,
sacrifice 76, 221, 261–262, 267, 296, 669 644–660, 679
salvage ethnography 624 ––studies 645, 659
satire 257, 266 soundscape 148, 402, 644–645, 651, 658
scientist 21, 29, 33–34, 39, 48, 72, 84, 86, 88, ––ecology 645, 658
99, 176, 231, 285, 288, 297, 301, 304–308, South
327, 344, 387, 394, 506, 538–539, 629, ––Africa 255, 324, 440, 475, 628, 658
647, 658 ––America 336
Scotland 79, 392 Soviet Union 439, 571
Second World War 171, 249, 295, 296, 495, 571 space
sedimentation 37, 65–80 ––natural 123, 128, 211, 565, 571, 581, 587, 602
semiotics 8–10, 19–41, 45–61, 65–80, 131, 137, ––urban 187, 191, 396, 408, 635
143, 253, 668 species extinction 499, 504, 506
––processual 19, 23 speciesism 252, 253, 267
––semiosis 45–61, 64–80, 137, 143 speranza 400, 405
––semiotic co-option 22 spillage 459, 463, 470
––semiotic freedom 25, 29–30, 48–49, 57 spruce 651–653
––semiotic scaffolding 19, 36–37, 65, 72 stewardship ethic 440
––semiotic selection 22 Stiftung 68
sensation 33, 47, 54, 132, 327, 539, 564 storied matter 273–274, 282–285, 349–350
sense of place 226, 323–324, 441, 494, story
498–499, 503, 518, 573, 575, 658 ––telling 140, 143, 148, 189, 315–322, 468, 569,
sensual imagery 542, 545 577, 579, 583
sensorimotor simulation 545 ––world 302–305, 311, 534–538, 547
sensual experience 131, 538, 553 strategic essentialism 432, 540
sensuousness 52, 123, 131–132 structural coupling 85, 109
shape-shifting 261 subjective being 24, 30–31
Sichuan 342–343 subjectivity 24, 30, 38, 46, 70–71, 97, 111, 118,
sign relation 21, 26, 32, 35–36, 47–51, 60–61 158, 162, 218, 251, 253–254, 266, 275, 318,
signification 24, 71, 126, 137, 142, 467, 469, 326, 396, 484, 574, 600
563, 600 sublime 60, 125, 147, 180, 359, 521, 552, 646,
simulation 185, 233, 277, 534–535, 538–547 650, 667
supernatural 31, 75, 80, 459, 465–466, 471 Transindigenous Environmental

superorganism 112 Alliance 343–346
survival economy 438, 447 translation 9, 47, 71, 75, 136, 194, 325, 389,
sustainability 3, 160, 364, 423, 513–517, 644, 421, 460, 485, 605–615, 632
646, 648, 653, 656, 658–659, 664–667, Transmed Pipeline 379
671, 675 transnational 1–8, 53, 194, 198, 285, 334–346,
––sustainable 1, 4, 142, 149, 160, 209, 283, 370, 378, 381, 389, 413, 427–428,
344, 353–354, 413, 416, 421, 423, 427, 431–432, 434, 464, 467, 497–498, 505,
434, 439–440, 443, 513, 516–519, 529, 591
590–591, 652–653, 658–659 trans-scalar 329–330
Sutra 343 trauma 9, 135, 148, 188, 196, 537, 551–566,
swamp 77, 174, 182–187, 220–221, 401–402 569, 570, 572, 582–587
symbol 23, 49, 146, 181, 260, 302, 309, 356, ––studies 537, 551–552, 557, 565
400, 440, 448, 482, 584 triadic 21, 72, 135, 141, 147–149, 579, 605–606
sympathy 161, 244, 306, 487, 540
symphony 322, 649–651, 659–660 Umwelt 19, 21–23, 25, 28–34, 45, 47–48,
synthetic cell 285 56–61, 65, 68, 71–72, 74, 113, 140, 143
unconscious 38, 45, 57–58, 73, 78, 91, 135, 147,
Taoism 484 249, 259, 264, 288, 351, 445
technosphere 277, 283 unfinalizability 591
teleology 19, 30, 92, 277, 648 United Nations 100, 652, 655, 670
temporality 168, 195, 295, 598–599, 301 uprootedness 231–232, 244
––climate 295–297 Ur-Arche 70
The Great Pacific Plastic Patch 280 urbanization 131, 189, 462
The Majestic Plastic Bag 280 ––urbanity 266, 581
theory of mind 539 Urhistorie 70
theory of relativity 592 Utah 117, 341
therianthropy 261 Utøya 569
Texas 580–582, 628
Tibetan 343 Val di Fiemme 652
––villages 334, 343 Vedas 442, 644
Tigris 100, 585, 587 vegetarianism 262
tiller 181, 444 vegetation 351, 403, 405, 442, 472, 581, 638
totemism 258 Venetian Lagoon 351–352
toxic Venice 9, 282, 349, 351–365, 380, 653
––discourse 204, 422, 426, 431 vermin 259–262, 405
––Gothicism 204–205 victim 79, 148, 203–205, 263, 267–268, 448
––waste 210, 284, 356, 364, 372–373 Viking 80
toxicity 204, 208, 356–357, 379, 440, 495 violence 70, 164, 192, 196, 199, 200–201,
tradition 160, 164, 166 250 ,254, 263, 266, 360, 439, 441, 445,
Transcendentalism 88, 182, 336, 669 450–451, 459, 463, 470, 522, 529, 551–552,
––transcendental 23, 55–57, 70, 88, 94, 145, 556–557, 559, 561, 565, 581–587
184, 186, 337, 592–593 violin 651–653
––transcendentalist (school) 184, 186, 340, 600 ––bow 652–653
transcultural 4, 334–346, 389 ––soundboard 653
transdisciplinary 4, 6, 8, 10, 139, 301, 394, virtual environment 534, 536, 539–541
396, 671 visible 66–69, 71
transhistorical 141 vivacity 540–541
vulture 118, 242, 245, 319, 475, 678
warming 85, 171, 215, 295, 297–298, 302, 388, 391, 405, 440, 454, 459, 467,
326–328, 467, 477, 495, 504–506, 621, 476–477, 488, 490, 527, 535, 551–552, 559,
633–634, 674, 677 569–570, 654
Warwickshire 75 ––non-human 118, 120, 255, 257, 404–407, 459,
water 40, 75, 79, 97, 109, 148, 167, 220–221, 461, 464, 466, 474, 515, 521, 555, 571, 573,
233, 239, 241, 245, 279, 284, 288, 578, 580, 586, 591, 598
321–322, 328–329, 340–341, 350–359, ––real 87, 318, 385, 387, 399, 404, 406, 408,
364, 370–381, 399–401, 420–425, 523, 538, 547
429–430, 438, 441, 445–447, 452, world risk society 302, 494–508
459–461, 465, 470–475, 483, 505, worlding 280
529, 538, 553, 558, 562, 569, 581–582, world-modelling 25
586–587, 614–615, 628–631, 635, 649,
659, 667, 669–670, 676–677 Yangtze River 342
wayfinding 226–227, 233 Yanomami 624
West (the), 49, 163, 174, 181–182, 405, 466, 477, Yi 232, 342, 536
485–486, 581, 667–669 young adult dystopia 522
wilderness 1, 5, 79, 106–107, 117–118, 146, 159,
169, 175, 180, 183, 197, 342, 370, 442, 446, zoo
448, 451, 454, 520–521, 550, 560, 580, ––morphism 268–270
635, 667 ––ontology 249, 252, 263–265
wildness 77, 176–177, 180, 182, 250, 668, 674 ––poetics 249, 252, 257–260
world ––semiotics 47, 72
––natural 49, 51, 55, 66, 68, 74, 92, 106, 112, zoomusicology 645
118, 129–131, 157, 168, 226, 228, 231–232, Zhuangzi 483–484
235, 245, 269, 278, 308, 319, 321, 385,
Index of Names
Abbey, Edward 105–122, 318, 324, 329 Bachelard, Gaston 279
Abram, David 138, 274, 282– 283, 405, Bacon, Francis 20
527–528 Baer, Karl Ernst von 47
Abulafia, David 369, 370, 372 Baillie, Bruce 635
Achebe, Chinua 466–467, 477 Baker, Steve 26
Ackroyd, Peter 75–76 Bakhtin, Mikhail 192, 203, 210, 590–604
Adorno, Theodor W. 123–134, 137, 141, Balog, James 633–634
164–165, 390, 416, 677 ––Extreme Ice Survey 633–634
Agamben, Giorgio 254, 260, 264, 362, 375 Balor 80
Agnew, John 575 Banerjee, Subhankar 674–675
Agnihotri, Anita 436, 442, 452–455 Barad, Karen 92, 138, 214, 216–219, 221, 273,
––Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and 282, 289
Fiction 442, 452–454 Barber, C.L. 75–76
––Mahuldiha Days 453–454 Barron, Patrick 360, 370
Ahmed, Sara 537 Bataille, Georges 254
Alaimo, Stacy 138, 208, 215–220, 273–274, Bate, Jonathan 168, 389–390, 459
278, 289, 320, 324, 359, 364, 370, 376, Bateson, Gregory 4, 22, 27, 47, 84, 96, 135,
380, 554, 557 139–140, 142–143, 148, 576, 591, 600
Albee, Edward 255 ––Steps to an Ecology of Mind 22, 27, 139
Albert, Stephen 660 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 132, 141
Allora, Jennifer 678 Beck, Ulrich 108, 302, 494–509
Altieri, Charles 537 Beckett, Samuel 170, 255
Altman, Irwin 228–229, 237, 575 Beethoven, Ludwig van 645, 649, 650–651
Antaeus 80 Beinhart, William 443
Anzaldúa, Gloria 282 Belli, Gioconda 415
Ao, Temsula 441 Benjamin, Walter 553–554, 672, 677
Appleton, Jay 233 Benn, Gottfried 250
Apuleius 596 Bennet, Michael 438–439
Araeen, Rasheed 666 Bennett, Jane 92, 138, 177, 180, 215–218, 276,
Arasanayagam, Jean 441 279, 281, 283, 673–675, 677
Archimedes 37 Benning, James 635–642
Aridjis, Homero 415 ––11 x 14 635
Aristotle 28, 51, 254, 393 ––13 Lakes 636
Armbruster, Karla 158, 210, 572 ––8 ½ x 11 635
Armstrong, Nancy 191 ––BNSF 636–641
Arnold, Matthew 318, 514 ––“California Trilogy” 635
Åsberg, Cecilia 278 ––“RR/BNSF” 640
Asch, Timothy 624 ––One Way Boogie Woogie 635
Assmann, Aleida 575, 577 ––El Valley Centro 635
Assmann, Jan 575 ––Los 635
Atrahasis 75 ––Nightfall 637
Atwood, Margaret 171, 255, 289 ––RR 638
Audubon Society 298, 301 ––Ruhr 637
Augustine of Hippo 20, 24, 37, 51, 53, 254, 335 ––SOGOBI 635
––Confessions 335 ––Ten Skies 636
Austin, Mary 340 Bentham, Jeremy 253
––The Land of Little Rain 340 Berger, John 256–257
702 Index of Names
Bergson, Henri 274, 487, 574 ––The Environmental Imagination 115, 227,
Bergthaller, Hannes 219 316–317, 336, 387–388, 390, 461, 513, 515,
Berlant, Lauren 537 520–521, 534
Berleant, Arnold 487–488 ––The Future of Environmental Criticism 5,7, 107,
Berlusconi, Silvio 378–379 324, 327, 529, 557, 578, 672
Bermingham, Ann 668 Burnside, John 284
Berry, Wendell 328 ––The Glister 284–285
Bettin, Gianfranco 357 Buttimer, Ann 228
Bevilacqua, Piero 351, 353, 356, 376
Bhaskaran 445–449, 455 Cage, John 98
––Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of Caldazilla, Guillermo 678
C.K.Janu 442, 444–449 Callicott, J. Baird 489
Bleich, David 318–319 Calloway, Ewan 73
Bloch, Ernst 129–130 Calvino, Italo 350–351, 354, 380
Bloch, Marc 574 Cameron, James 621–627,
Bloom, Harold 599 ––Avatar 88, 93, 98, 621–627, 641
Blumenberg, Hans 28, 30, 51–52 Cameron, Laura 536
Bohannan, Brendan J.M. 288 Canaletto 359
Böhme, Gernot 49, 125, 130 Capelle, Birgit 337
Böhme, Jakob 50–51, 55 Caracciolo, Marco 539, 541
Bondi, Liz 536 Carlson, Allen 490
Bonsels, Waldemar 258 Carlyle, Thomas 177–179, 318, 609
Book of Changes, The 482, 485, 490–491 Carson, Rachel 253, 495, 514, 534–535
Bookchin, Murray 212 ––Silent Spring 253, 495, 514, 534–535
Boorman, John 623 Carter, Erica 575
––The Emerald Forest 623 Caruth, Cathy 555, 556, 563
Borges, Jorge Luis 352 Casey, Edward 575
Bouchard, Norma 372 Cassano, Franco 370, 371–372, 379, 381,
Bouvet, Rachel 385–386, 392, 394, 396–397 Casson, Felice 354, 357
Bozak, Nadia 378 Castilo, Ana 440
Braddock, Alan C. 673 Cavell, Stanley 163
Braidotti, Rosi 160–161, 277–279, 289, 368, Cézanne, Paul 69
372–373, 379 Chagnon, Napoleon 624
Brakhage, Stan 627 Chaisson, Eric 290
Brand, Stuart 658 Chandler, Daniel 190
Braudel, Fernand 369 Cheng Hao 483, 486, 490–491
Breivik, Anders 569 Chevron 199, 631–633
Briggs, K. M. 75–76 Chopin, Kate 148
Bryant, Levi R. 287 ––The Awakening 148
Brythnoth 80 Church, Frederic 633, 637
Buddha 337 ––The Icebergs 633
Buell, Frederick 379, 498, 504 Churchill, Winston 296
Buell, Lawrence 5, 7, 107, 115, 204, 226–228, Clare, John 46, 50, 60–61
316–318, 324, 327, 329, 336, 386–388. Clark-Bekederemo J. P. 471
390, 409, 422–423, 461, 492, 494, 498, Club of Rome, The 495
513, 515, 520–522, 529, 534–535, 557, 575, Cockburn, Bruce 654–656
578, 655, 671–672 Coetzee, J.M. 252, 255, 266
Cohen, Felix S. 583
Cohen, Jeffrey J. 282, 285, 286, 361
Index of Names 703
Cole, Thomas 637, 639 Descartes, René 20, 68, 70, 131, 186, 253, 254,
––River in the Catskills 639 266, 306
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 58–59, 136, 280 Devi, Mahasweta 438, 441, 442, 449–452, 455
Collu, Gabrielle 442 ––“Dhowli” 455
Commoner, Barry 365, 670, 673 ––“Doulati the Bountiful” 455
Confucius 485 ––“Draupadi” 455
Constable, John 668 ––“Salt” 442, 449–452, 455
Coole, Diana 215, 217, 274 ––“The Hunt” 455
Cooper, Merian C. 623 DeVore, Irven 233
Cooper/Schoedsack 623 Dewey, John 488, 22
––King Kong 623, 267 Dianese, Maurizio 357
––Grass (Cooper/Schoedsack) 623 Dickens, Charles 279, 309
Coppola, Francis Ford 622 ––A Tale of Two Cities 279
––Apocalypse Now 622 Dickinson, Adam 280, 281
Costner, Kevin 623 ––The Polymers 281
––Dances with Wolves 623 Dickinson, Emily 135, 144–145
Crichton, Michael 289, 528 Dillard, Annie 94, 288, 321, 328
Cristoforetti, Antonio 230–231, 232, 244 ––Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 94, 321, 328
Crutzen, Paul J. 500 Djikic, Maja 537–538
Cummings, E.E. 255 Dodds, E.R. 75
Currie, Gregory 542 Donald, James 575
Dos Passos, John 188
Dahlberg, Jonas 569–570 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 262
Dai, Mamang 441 Douglas, Mary 371, 495–496, 498–499
Dalley, Stephanie 74–75 Duchamp, Marcel 87, 97
Damasio, Antonio 231, 536 ––“Unhappy Readymade” 87
Danby, John 166 Duckert, Lowell 286–287
Dante Alighieri 606, 607, 609–611, 615 Dufourcq, Annabelle 65–66, 69, 77
Darwin, Charles 32, 33, 47, 67, 91,112, 249, Durkheim, Emile 574
263, 264, 336, 337, 486
––The Descent of Man 67, 249 Easterlin, Nancy 534, 535, 536–537, 543
Daunou, Pierre 37, 40 Egan, Gabriel 166
Davidson, Joyce 536 Ehrlich, Paul 327–328, 329, 330, 670
Davidson, Tonya K. 537 Einstein, Albert 592–593
Dawkins, Richard 72 Elder, John 319–320, 322, 325, 329
De Jong, Joop T.V.M. 557 Eliot, George 38
De Lucia, Vezio 353, 354 Eliot, T. S. 601–602
Deacon, Terrence W. 28 Elizabeth Tudor 78
DeBord, Guy 665–666 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 280
Deely, John 21, 23–24 Ellul, Jacques 25
DeLanda, Manuel 287 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 111, 118, 136, 180,
Deleuze, Gilles 7–8, 9, 84–86, 90, 94, 96, 99, 183–185
161, 216, 252, 253–254, 407, 455, 537, 557, Enkidu 74–75
565–566 ENI (Italian National Hydrocarbon
Deming, Alison 330, 557 Authority) 374, 377, 378
Demos, T.J. 664, 675–676, 678 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA,
Denes, Agnes 670 USA) 222, 629, 630
Derrida, Jacques 23, 50, 109–110, 137–138, Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 127
252, 254–255, 264 Epictetus 605, 606, 612–613, 615
704 Index of Names
Erdrich, Louise 440, 582–584 Garrard, Greg 157, 195, 197, 253, 268, 269, 498,
Ernst, Max 264 513, 515, 519, 520, 523, 524, 673
Escobar, Arturo 452 Geethanandan, M. 448
Ette, Ottmar 141 ––“The Return to Muthanga” 448
Euclid 87, 599–600 Gennai, Francesca 230–232
Euripides 75 Gerrig, Richard 539
––The Bacchae 75 Gesell, Arnold 71
Gessner, David 324
Fabbri, Fabrizio 351, 353–356 Ghosh, Amitav 451–452
Faulkner, William 317, 551 ––The Hungry Tide 451–452
––“The Bear” 317 Gibson, J.J. 536
Feder, Helena 277 Giddens, Anthony 495, 497
Feigenbaum, Harriet 670 Gifford, Terry 322–324
Feld, Steven 644, 646, 648, 656, 657 Gilbert, Jeremy 161, 162
Felman, Shoshona 551, 552, 555, 556, 565 Gilgamesh 74–75
Ferguson, James 381 Ginsborg, Paul 374
Ferme, Valerio 372–373 Giscombe, Cecil S. 189
Finke, Peter 4, 135, 140, 142, 576–577, 587 Glob, P. V. 79
Fisko, Janet 227 ––The Bog People 79
Flaherty, Robert 623 Glotfelty, Cheryll 337, 370, 391, 463, 514, 572,
––Nanook of the North 623 646
Foerster, Heinz von 93, 101–102 Godard, Jean-Luc 628
Ford, John 623 Godkin, Michael A. 231–232
––Fort Apache 623 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 45, 47, 54, 55, 61,
Fox, Josh 627–631, 633, 634 136, 335, 352–353, 606, 607, 610
––Gasland/Gasland, Part II 627–631, 634 ––Dichtung und Wahrheit 335
Frampton, Hollis 635, 638, 641 Gogol, Nikolai 596
Franklin, Benjamin 335, 613 Goldberg, Sylvan 537
––Autobiography 335 Goldsworthy, Andy 633
Franzen, Jonathan 298–299, 301 Goodbody, Axel 3, 50, 51, 136, 391, 529, 572
Freud, Sigmund 57, 249, 259, 556, 562, 574 Gore, Al 296
Fricke, Ron 623 Gott, Michael 374
––Baraka 623 Gottheim, Larry 635
Friday 399, 403–407 Gould, Stephen Jay 112
Frost, Samantha 215, 274 Grace, Patricia 205, 440
Frye, Northrop 76 Grahame, Kenneth 258
Gray, Thomas 602
Gaard, Greta 6, 208–209, 210, 212, 320, 454 Green, Jessica L. 288
Gaddafi, Muammar 378–379 Greenough, Paul 448
Gadgil, Madhav 443 Grewe-Volpp, Christa 546
Galeano, Eduardo 414 Grieg, Edvard 660
Gallese, Vittorio 539–540 Griffith, D. W. 623
Gandhi, M.K. 93, 443–444, 450 ––The Birth of a Nation 623
Gao, Xingjiang 334, 342–343 Guattari, Félix 7–8, 9, 84, 88, 94, 95–97,
––Sole Mountain 334, 342–343 100–102, 144, 216, 252–254, 388, 455,
Gardner, Robert 624, 636 557, 565
––Dead Birds 624 Guercino 359
––Rivers of Sand 624 Guha, Ramachandra 387, 439, 443, 448
Guy, Nancy 646, 657
Index of Names 705
Habermas, Jürgen 108 ––Biosemiotics: The Signs of Life and the Life of
Hadamard, Jacques 27, 37 Signs 67, 72
Haeckel, Ernst 84, 254, 337 Hogan, Linda 208–209, 219–223, 440
Halbwachs, Maurice 574 Hogan, Patrick Colm 536, 540, 546
Hamann, J. G. 51–52 Holdstein, Deborah H. 318-319
Hamilton, Clive 296–297 Homer 74, 610
Haraway, Donna 158, 208, 214–218, 254–255, ––The Odyssey 74, 610, 622
277–278, 281, 323, 350, 372 ––The Iliad 610, 622
Hardin, Garrett 113 Homer, Winslow 185, 637
Harjo, Joy 144, 440 Houellebecq, Michel 157, 170–171
Harris, Wilson 602 Houser, Heather 537
Harrison, Newton 670 Huggan, Graham 196, 199, 201–205, 439
Harte, Liam 235–236 Hughes, Lotte 443
Harvey, David 575 Hughes, Ted 255, 278–279
Hassan, Ihab 335 ––Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 147–148, 175, 187 River 278–279
––The Scarlet Letter 147–148, 187 Hulme, Keri 440
Hayles, Katherine N. 138, 208, 214–215, 217, Hulme, Mike 296, 299, 305
275-277, 287 Humbaba 74
Hazare, Annasaheb 452 Hummon, David 229, 231, 242
Heade, Martin Johnson 637 Huot, Robert 635
Heaney, Seamus 33, 40–41, 65–66, 78–80, 255 Hussein, Ameena 441
––“Hercules and Antaeus” 80 Husserl, Edmund 68–70
––“Kinship” 79 ––The Crisis of European Sciences and
––North 78-80 Transcendental Phenomenology 70
Heerwagen, Judith 233 ––“The Origin of Geometry” 70
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 53, 112, ––“The Vienna Lecture” 70
123–125, 487, 527 Hutton, Peter 635
Heidegger, Martin 168, 227, 230, 254, 398, ––Landscape (for Manon) 635
402, 527 ––Skagafjörđur 635
Heise, Ursula 6, 195–196, 226–227, 229,
276, 289–290, 299–300, 309, 324, 345, Ickstadt, Heinz 188
398, 409, 415, 441, 494, 496, 498–500, Ingram, David 646, 655–656, 658–659
502–504, 518, 525, 535, 603, 668 Innis, George 637
Hekman, Susan 217, 219, 273, 289 Iovino, Serenella 3, 138–139, 217, 274,
Helmreich, Stefan 273, 277–278, 281, 285, 287, 281–282, 286, 370–373, 377
290 Iralu, Easterine 441
Hemingway, Ernest 237, 250, 255, 268, 551 Irmscher, Christoph 673
Herbrechter, Stefan 276, 286 Irons, Jeremy 280
Hercules 80 Iser, Wolfgang 135, 141
Herder, J. G. 51–56, 60–61 Ivens, Joris 374–376, 378, 381
Herman, David 538–541
Heyerdahl, Thor 100–101 Jacob, François 32–33
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 605–606, Jacobson, David 187
611–615 Jakobson, Roman 115
Hird, Myra J. 281 James, Erin 534–535, 538–539, 543
Hoffmeyer, Jesper 19, 21, 25, 29, 32–33, 35–36, James, William 22
39, 46–47, 57, 66–67, 72–73 Jameson, Fredric 147
Janet, Pierre 554
706 Index of Names
Janu, C.K. 438, 442, 444–448, 454 ––Holy Field Holy War 631–632
––C.K. Januvinte Jeevitha Katha 445 Kracauer, Siegfried 102
Jay, Martin 665 Kruse, Jamie 280
Jeffers, Robinson 250 Küchler, Uwe 518, 521–522
Jefferson, Thomas 183, 186–187, 227 Kuhn, Bernard 337–338
Jeffrey, Roger 453 Kuiken, Don 543
Jentzsch, Bernd 126 Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina 524
Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy 440 Kurosawa, Akira 623
Johanson, Patricia 670, 672 ––Rashomon 623
Johns-Putra, Adeline 298, 300, 505 Kurt, Hildegard 666, 671
Jordan, Chris 281, 329–330 Kuzmičová, Anežka 545–546
––“Plastic Bottles, 2007” 329 Kwinter, Sanford 191
Joy, Eileen 275, 281
Joyce, James 169, 551 Lacan, Jacques 189, 264, 555, 562–563
Jung, Carl Gustav 73–74, 335 Lane, David 450
Larkin, Philip 255
Kafka, Franz 249–269 Latour, Bruno 84–86, 138, 174–176, 183, 192,
Kak, Subhash 36 215–217, 276, 282–284, 286, 350, 388, 675
Kant, Immanuel 20, 48, 55, 118, 124, 131–132, Lawrence, D.H. 250, 255, 264, 268
136, 141, 267, 365, 416, 592 Lawrence, Elizabeth 147
Kaplan, Rachel 232 Lehtimäki, Markku 534–535
Kaplan, Stephen 232–233 LeMenager, Stephanie 380
Keats, John 168, 461, 475, 600 Lenhert, Herbert 358
Keen, Suzanne 540, 546–547 Leopold, Aldo 226, 229–230, 370, 483,
Kelsey, Robin 674 534–535
Kepes, Gyorgy 669–670, 673 ––A Sand County Almanac 534–535
Kerouac, Jack 596–597 Levin, Janet 538
Kerridge, Richard 168, 298, 300–301, 463, 514 Lewicka, Monica 228–230, 237
Khan, Uzma Aslam 441 Lewontin, Richard 30–31, 72–73
Kiberd, Declan 169 Linklater, Andro 187
Kielmeyer, Karl Friedrich 57 Lioi, Anthony 371
Killingsworth, Jimmie M. 324, Lloyd, David 79
Kime Scott, Bonnie 551, 553, 554, 557 Llywelyn, Morgan 279, 287
King, Russel 369, 375 ––The Elementals 279, 287–288
King, Ynestra 211–213 Locke, John 177–178
Kingsolver, Barbara 506, 296–311 Lockhart, Sharon 635–637, 641
––Flight Behavior 506, 296–311 ––Double Tide 636–637, 639–640
Kirby, Vicki 276, ––Goshogaoka 635
Klein, Naomi 571, 673 ––NŌ 635–636
Kleisner, Karel 22 ––Pine Flat 636
Knecht, Justin Heinrich 649–650 ––Teatro Amazonas 635
Knott, Catherine Henshaw 446 Lockwood, Alex 537
Kojève, Alexandre 254 Lokuge, Chandani 441
Kolk, Bessel van der 555 London, Jack 251
Kolodny, Annette 198, 210 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 606–611, 615
Kothari, Smithu 442 Lopez, Barry 98–100, 328
Kowalski, Lech 631–634 ––Arctic Dreams 98, 328
––Frack Democracy 631–632 Lorenz, Konrad 71
––Drill Baby Drill 631–632, 634 Lorrain, Claude 639
Index of Names 707
Love, Glen A. 318, 349 Massumi, Brian 537

Lovelock, James 93 Maathia, Wangari 477
Low, Setha 228–229, 237, 575 Matilsky, Barbara 670
Loyola Brandão, Ignácio de 415 Mattei, Enrico 374, 377, 379
Luckhurst, Roger 565 Matthewman, Sasha 514, 521, 526
Lucretius 94, 101 Maturana, Humberto 85, 109
––De Rerum Naturae 94 Mayer Harrison, Helen 670
Luhmann, Niklas 4, 105, 107–117 McAleer, Philem 629–631, 633
Lukács, George 106 ––FrackNation 629–631, 634
Lukas, Caroline 296 McCarthy, Cormac 148
Lumiére Brothers 638 ––The Road 148
––L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat 638 McConnell, Amanda 343–344
Lutgendorf, Philip 442–443 McElhinney, Ann 629
Lynch, Tom 323, 572 McEwan, Ian 301, 506
Lyotard, Jean-François 137, 445 McGahern, John 169–170, 235
McGann, Jerome 168
Magona, Sindiwe 440 McKee, Yates 674–675
Mahabharata 442–443 McKibben, Bill 329, 677
Mahler, Gustav 650–651 Mda, Zakes 469
Mahon, Derek 161, 170 Medici, Antonio 378
Major, William 323, 515 Meeker, Joseph 486
Man, Paul de 599 Mekas, Jonas 627
Manes, Christopher 106, 446 Melville, Herman 147, 175, 187–188
Mann, Michael 297, 623 ––“Bartleby the Scrivener” 147-148, 187
––The Last of the Mohicans 623 ––Moby Dick 148, 175, 255
Mann, Thomas 255, 349–365 Menken, Marie 627
Mapanje, Jack 474–475 Merchant, Carolyn 210–211, 213
Mar, Raymond 537–538, 546 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 24, 37, 47, 57, 61,
Maran, Timo 22, 56, 73 65–81, 137, 563
Marchesini, Roberto 372 ––Phenomenology of Perception 66, 78
Marchiori, Fernando 354, 362–363 ––“The Concept of Nature” 69
Marcuse, Herbert 129, 165, 672, 677 ––The Visible and the Invisible 67, 69
Margulis, Lynn 93, 101 Messiaen, Oliver 656–657
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 355, 358 Meyer, Philipp 569, 580–582
Marshall, Ian 320–322 Miah, Andy V. 274
Marshall, John 623–624 Miall, David 543
––A Kalahari Family 624 Michiko, Ishimure 324, 440
––N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman 624 Midway 281
––The Hunters 623 Miles, Malcolm 664–665, 672–673, 677–678
––Bitter Melons 624 Milhaud, Darius 659
Marshall, Rick 542–543 Miller, Perry 182
Martel, Yann 255 Miller, Ronald 77
Martin, Daniel J. 556 Milton, Kay 536
Martin, Jay 186 Montaigne, Michel de 50
Martinez Alier, Joan 387, 415, 439 Moore, Marianne 143, 255
Marx, Karl 132 Morris, Robert 126–127, 670
Marx, Leo 316, 639, 649–651, 655 Morrison, Toni 148, 174–175, 186–192
––The Machine in the Garden 316, 639 Morton, Timothy 92, 138, 147, 162, 216, 219,
Maslow, Abraham 321–322 276, 290, 326–327, 390, 675
708 Index of Names
Mote, F. W. 484 Ovid 75–76, 468

Muir, John 84, 96, 323–324, 370, 396, 534 ––Metamorphoses 75–76, 468
Mukherjee, Pablo Upamanyu 204–205, 450
Müller, Timo 139 Palmer, Roy 75
Murphy, Andrew 80 Paolini, Marco 349–350, 360, 362–363
Murphy, J. J. 635 Paracelsus 50–51
Murphy, Patrick 6,10, 135, 210, 302, 591–592 Parak, Gisela 672
Mussolini 355 Parisi, Luciana 275, 283, 285
Park, Ondine 537
Naess, Arne 84, 218, 481–482 Pascal, Roy 335
Nagel, Thomas 28, 30, 72, 538 Paul, Janice 553
Napoleon 353 Payne, Roger 658
Nayar, Pramod K. 275, 278 Pedelty, Mark 658, 660
Nelson, Richard K. 328 Peirce, Charles Sanders 19, 21–23, 26, 28–33,
Nelson, Robert 635 46–48, 58, 72, 143–144
Neufeld, Christine M. 275 Pentheus 75
Newton, Isaac 37, 70 Petrarch 605–607, 611–615
Ngai, Sianne 537 Phillips, Dana 320, 327, 350, 515
Nietzsche, Friedrich 137, 249–250, 264, 416, Pirazzoli, Paolo 353
659 Plato 20, 129, 486
Nigam, Sanjay 443 Plumwood, Val 49, 208, 213–215, 277, 306, 308
Nixon, Rob 200–201, 205, 285, 324–325, 439, Poe, Edgar Allen 255
450, 463, 470–471, 505, 572, 669 Poinsot, John 21, 23–24
––Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Polanyi, Michael 34, 36
Poor 324, 439, 572 Polo, Marco 350
Noble, Denis 29, 32 Portmann, Adolf 71
Nolan, Emer 169 Potteiger, Matthew 285
Nora, Pierre 574 Powell, John Wesley 119
Nordon, Christopher 440 Powers, Kevin 569, 585–587
Norris, Margot 252, 262–267 Powers, Richard 284
Norton, Charles Eliot 606–615 Proust, Marcel 69
Novalis 45, 51 ––Search for Lost Time 69
Nussbaum, Martha 503, 546 Puck 76
Pughe, Thomas 388–391
Oatley, Keith 537–538, 546 Purinton, Jamie 285
Obama, Barack 629
Oberon 76 Quick, Deren 285
Ogbowei 474
Ojaide, Tanure 459–460, 471–477 Rabelais, François 596
Okara, Gabriel 471 Rabitti, Paolo 357
Oppermann, Serpil 3, 6-8, 138, 213, 217, 350, Rajamani, Lavanya 444
417, 543, 674 Raleigh, Walter 78
Oreskes, Naomi 629–630 Ramayana 442– 443
Orians, Gordon 233 Ramirez-Goicoecha, Eugenia 72–73
Orlowski, Jeff 633–634 Rancière, Jacques 678
––Chasing Ice 633–634 Reggio, Godfrey 625–626, 641
Ornstein, Robert 327–328, 330 ––Koyaanisqatsi 625
Osundare, Niyi 472 Rehding, Alexander 646, 658, 660
Otobotekere, Christian 475–476 Rich, Nathaniel 289, 301
Index of Names 709
Ricoeur, Paul 27, 578 Sebeok, Thomas A. 21, 47–48, 72, 74

Riedelsheimer, Thomas 633 Seeger, Pete 658
––Rivers and Tides 633 Segieda, Magdalena 629
Rigby, Kate 3, 37, 137, 391 Serres, Michel 84, 94– 96, 285, 388, 405,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 250, 254–255 407–408
Ritvo, Harriet 253 Seton, Ernest Thompson 251
Roberts, David 298–299 Shakespeare, William 27, 54, 66, 75–77, 157,
Robinson 255, 399–409 166–167, 562, 607
Robinson, Marilynne 25, 30 ––A Midsummer Night’s Dream 75–77
Robson, Justina 288–289 ––King Lear 157, 166–167
––Natural History 288–289 Shankar, Ravi 445
Rodeschini, Giulia 231–232 Shapiro, Alan 80
Ronald, Ann 318, 320 Shapiro, James A. 39, 72
Rose, Deborah Bird 289–290, 324 Sherk, Bonnie 670
Rose, Steven 72 Sherry, Vincent 556, 566
Rothenberg, David 657, 658 Shields, Rob 537
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 249, 423 Shiva, Vandana 198, 210, 440, 443, 447, 675
Rousseau, Theodore 668 Shookman, Ellis 358
Rowe, John Carlos 185 Shulman, George 175
Rowland, Susan 555 Sibelius, Jean 660
Roy, Arundhati 194, 201–205, 441, 445 Sidney, Sir Philip 40
Rueckert, William 149, 492, 513 ––The Defence of Poesy 40
Ryan, Marie-Laure 540, 547 Simms, Andrew 295–296
Ryden, Kent C. 320, 323 Simondon, Gilbert 84, 89–90, 95, 97
Ryle, Martin 164, 170–171 Simonides of Cheos 573
Simpson, Helen 301
Sagan, Dorion 113, 278, 282 Sinclair, Upton 255
Saito, Yuriko 489 Singer, Peter 253, 255
Saitta, Pietro 379 Sitting Bull 80
Sale, Kirkpatrick 446 Skinner, B.F. 340
Salzano, Edoardo 353 ––Walden Two 340
Sample, Ian 286 Slaymaker, William 459–460, 463
Sanders, Scott Russell 329 Slicer, Deborah 210, 217
Sandilands, Catriona 138, 210, 219 Slovic, Paul 495, 502
Saro-Wiwa, Ken 194, 199–202, 471–472 Slovic, Scott 5–7, 319, 350, 415, 439
Sauter, Michael 139 Smith, Ali 157, 171
Scarry, Elaine 540 Smith, Mick 536
Schafer, R. Murray 644, 651 Smith, Stevie 255
Schede, Hans-Georg 358 Smithson, Robert 669
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 45, 47, Smut, Jan C. 84, 88–93, 95, 98–100
55–58, 60, 130, 136 Snyder, Gary 143, 169, 255, 326
Schilt, Thibaut 374 Sokurov, Alexander 636
Schisler, Rebecca D. 557 ––Russian Ark 636
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 638 Somma, Paola 353
Schlegel, Friedrich 37–38, 45–46, 55, 57, 136 Soper, Kate 137, 160, 164, 168–169
Schliephake, Christopher 572, 577–578 Sowers, Jacob 228
Schoedsack, Ernest B. 623 Spencer, Herbert 112, 337
Schoentjes, Pierre 385, 390–392 Spenser, Edmund 78
Scott, Emily Eliza 664, 676– 678
710 Index of Names
Spinoza, Baruch 52, 54–55, 59, 93, 157, 160, Thoreau, Henry David 118, 174–185, 190,
537 195, 316, 334–342, 370, 396, 407, 534,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 449, 540 639–641
Spretnak, Charlene 211–212 ––Walden: or, Life in the Woods 118, 334–340,
Squires, Judith 575 534, 639, 640–641
Starhawk 212 Thornber, Karen 409, 451
Stegner, Wallace 324, 574 Tiffin, Helen 196, 199, 201–205, 421, 439
Stein, Gertrude 553 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 71
Steinbeck, John 534, 536, 541–544, 546, Titania 76
596–597 Titon, Jeff Todd 644, 646–648, 658–659, 660
––The Grapes of Wrath 541–544, 546, 596 Tobar, Hector 304–305
Sterelny, Kim 234–235, 241 Tóibín, Colm 226–248
Stern, Daniel N. 231 Toliver, Brooks 646, 657, 659
Sterne, Laurence 38 Tønnessen, Morten 29
––The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Tooby, John 233
Gentleman 38 Tournier, Michel 385–386, 399–408
Stevens, Wallace 135, 144–147 Trask, Huanani-Kay 440
––“Anecdote of the Jar” 144–147 Tu Weiming 484–485
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 183 Tuan, Yi Fu 231–232, 536
Stradivari, Antonio 653 Tuana, Nancy 357
Strauss, Richard 659 Tuatha Dé Danann 80
Strelow, Heike 671 Turgenev, Ivan 255
Sturgeon, Noël 209 Turner, Elen 445
Suberchicot, Alain 385, 388, 392, 408 Twain, Mark 119, 627
Sullivan, Heather 215, 350
Sultzbach, Kelly 554–555, 563 Uexküll, Jakob von 21, 25, 45, 47–48, 56–57,
Suzuki, David 334, 343–345, 655 68, 71–72, 74, 113, 140, 143, 254, 659
––Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life 344–345
––The Autobiography of David Suzuki 344–345 Venter, Craig 285–286
––The Nature of Things 345 Vicari, Daniele 368, 373–374, 376, 378, 381
Swanson, Diana L. 554 Viramontes, Helena Maria 440, 534, 536, 541,
Swift, Graham 596–597 544–546
Swithin, Lucy 77 ––Under the Feet of Jesus 534, 536, 541,
544–546
Taboada Tabone, Francesco 413, 417–420, 423, Volpi, Giuseppe 355
427– 429, 432, 434 Von Glahn, Denise 657, 660
Tacitus 79–80 Vonnegut, Kurt 255
Tagore, Rabindranath 443
Taine, Hippolyte 37 Waller, L. Elizabeth 555
Tao Qian 334, 338–339 Walls, Laura Dassow 176
Teaiwa, Teresia 440 Warhol, Andy 635
Tearne, Roma 441 Wei, Qingqi 325
Thomas, Greg 668 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 502, 507
Thomas, Keith 253 Wenders, Wim 579
Thomashow, Mitchell 330, 518 Wenzel, Jennifer 443
Thompson, Hunter S. 596 Wessel, Eva 358
Thon, Jan-Noël 547 West, Nathanael 174–175, 182–186, 188
Westling, Louise 2–3, 6–7, 23–24, 37, 47, 61,
71, 74–75, 77, 141, 534, 535
Index of Names 711
Westphal, Bertrand 370, 385, 393, 395–396, ––Between the Acts 65, 77–78
407 ––Mrs Dalloway 555, 558–562, 564
Wheeler, John A. 274 ––The Waves 558, 562–565,
Wheeler, Wendy 20, 25–26, 29– 31, 36, 38, 46, Wordsworth, William 58–60, 168, 195, 461, 475
48, 58, 61, 72, 137, 142–143, 282, 357 Worster, Donald 316, 647
White, Kenneth 385, 392–396, 408 Wulfman, Clifford 558
Whitman, Walt 143, 176, 183–184, 322, 396
Wilden, Anthony 25, 86 Xiaoqiong, Zheng 441
Wilke, Sabine 136
Williams, Raymond 137, 164, 166, 438, 551 Yamashita, Karen 440
Williams, Terry Tempest 329, 334, 341–342 Yanomami 624
––Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Yates, Frances A. 573
Place 334, 341–342 Yeibo 459, 474
Williamson, Henry 251
Williamson, Jack H. 186 Zhang, Longxi 337– 340
Winter, Paul 658 Zanzotto, Andrea 349– 352, 360–363
Wirth, Louis 229 Zapf, Hubert 3, 140, 147–149, 201, 269,
Wizard of Oz, The 622 336–337, 364–365, 467, 515, 518–521, 565,
Wojciehowski, Hannah 539–540 576– 579, 587, 591, 602, 604–606, 610,
Wolfe, Cary 108, 158, 254, 256, 275– 278 671
Womack, Ann M. 288 Zehle, Soenke 454
Woodward, Jamie 369 Zukofsky, Louis 326
Woolf, Virginia 65–66, 77–78, 141, 255,
551–566
List of Contributors
Aaron S. Allan co-edited Current Directions in Ecomusicology (Routledge 2016) and is Associate
Professor of Music and Director of the Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.
Mita Banerjee is Professor and Chair of American Studies and Co-Director of the Graduate College
Life Sciences / Life Writing at the University of Mainz, Germany.
Hannes Bergthaller is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan.
Hanjo Berressem is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the University of Cologne,
Germany.
Suzaan Boettger, a scholar of environmental and environmentalist art, is Professor of the History
of Art at Bergen Community College, New Jersey, and an art critic and lecturer in New York City,
USA.
Gernot Böhme is Professor em. of Philosophy, Technical University of Darmstadt, Director of the
Institute for Practising Philosophy e. V., IPPh, and Chair of Goethe-Association, Darmstadt,
Germany.
Rachel Bouvet is Professor of Literary Studies at UQAM (Université du Quebec à Montréal), Canada.
Katharina Donn is postdoc scholar in American Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Nancy Easterlin is Research Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at
the University of New Orleans, USA.
Greg Garrard is Associate Professor, Sustainability, in the Department of Critical Studies at UBC
Okanagan, Canada.
Catrin Gersdorf is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany.
Axel Goodbody is Professor of German and European Culture at the University of Bath, UK, and
Co-Editor of the journal Ecozon@ and the book series Nature, Culture & Literature.
Christa Grewe-Volpp is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Mannheim,
Germany.
Sieglinde Grimm is Professor of Literature and Literary Pedagogy at the University of Cologne,
Germany.
Alfred Hornung is Research Professor in the Institute for Transnational American Studies at the
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and Vice President of the World Ecological
Organization (Beijing).
714 List of Contributors
Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin, Italy, and a Senior
Research Fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung.
Scott MacDonald is author of A Critical Cinema (five volumes), The Garden in the Machine, and ten
other books. Named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences in 2011,
he teaches at Hamilton College, USA.
Sylvia Mayer is Professor and Chair of American Studies and Sylvia Mayer is Professor and Chair
of American Studies at the University of Bayreuth and Director of the Bayreuth Institute for
American Studies (BIFAS), Germany.
Timo Müller is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Ogaga Okuyade is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English and Literary Studies, Niger
Delta University, Nigeria. His edited books include Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African
Landscapes (2013) and Between the Crown and the Muse: Poetry, Politics and Environmentalism
of Christian Otobotekere (2015).
Serpil Oppermann is Professor of English Literature at Hacettepe University Ankara, Turkey, and Vice
President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment
(EASLCE)
Elena Past is Associate Professor of Italian and Associate Chair of Classical and Modern Languages,
Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Stéphanie Posthumus is Assistant Professor Posthumus is Assistant Professor of Animal Studies,

Ecocriticism, Critical Theory, and European Literatures at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India.
Erik Redling is Professor of American Studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and Managing
Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies, Germany.
Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, UK, Fellow of Freiburg
Research Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, and Adjunct Professor of
Environmental Humanities at Monash University, Australia.
Christopher Schliephake is lecturer and postdoc scholar in Ancient History at the University of
Augsburg, Germany.
Elmar Schmidt teaches Spanish and Latin American literature and culture studies at Bonn University,
Germany.
Scott Slovic is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Idaho, USA.
Kate Soper is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and former researcher in the Institute for the Study of
European Transformations at London Metropolitan University, UK.
List of Contributors 715
Berbeli Wanning is Wanning is professor and chair of German Literature and its Teaching
Methodology and Director of the ‘Forschungsstelle Kulturökologie und Literaturdidaktik’ at the
University of Siegen, Germany.
Alexa Weik von Mossner is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt,
Austria.
Louise Westling is Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at the University of
Oregon, USA, author of The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language
(2013) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2014).
Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emerita of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London
Metropolitan University, UK. She is also Visiting Professor at Goldsmith’s, University of London
and RMIT University in Melbourne.
Cheng Xiangzhan is a Professor of Aesthetics and a deputy director of Shandong University Research
Center for Literary Theory and Aesthetics, China, and the executive editor in chief of Newsletter
on Ecoaesthetics and Ecocriticism and of Studies of Literary Theory and Aesthetics, and a
member of International Advisory Board of Contemporary Aesthetics.
Hubert Zapf is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and
co-editor of Anglia. Journal of English Philology

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Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series typically provide:

Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and

The first volumes include:

Part I Ecocritical Theories of Culture and Literature

Part II Issues and Directions of Contemporary Ecocriticism

Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus

Part IV Ecologies of Literary Communication

Sieglinde Grimm and Berbeli Wanning

Alexa Weik von Mossner

Part V Genre and Media Ecologies

Index of Subjects 683

Index of Names 701

List of Contributors 713

1 Aims and Scope of the Handbook

justice forms of ecocriticism. This difference is a question of emphasis rather than

2 Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

a non-hierarchical web of multiple, distinct, but interrelated agencies: “As a network

4 Structure of the Handbook

5.2 F urther Reading

Key Terms: Biosemiotics, meaning, teleology, poetry, abduction, semiotic scaffold-

Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century recognition that “concepts (both perceptual and

Sometimes, abductive inferences may be achieved simply in the uninhibited reaching

knowledge, meaning, intentionality, purpose – in new ways. In fact this is already

6 See for example Roth and Dicke 2013.

5 Intelligent Nature: Biosemiosis as Natural Poetry

Similarly, in a newspaper article entitled “DNA as Poetry: Multiple Messages in a

The abductive experience, a guess made of feelings, intuitions and inclinations, is

7.2 F urther Reading

Key Terms: Biosemiotics, Romanticism, Goethe, Schelling, Clare

Biosemiotics proper, as Hoffmeyer observes, was invented independently several

Von Uexküll’s research into the perceptual worlds of other-than-human animals

medicine, or the utter denudation and consequent socio-ecological collapse of Easter

in understanding and accomplishments by respectfully learning from one another

3 Ecosemiotics in English Romantic Verse

mental nourishment, namely by means of those other-than-human utterances that

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The birds around me hopped and played,

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

As Marjorie Levinson (2007) has observed, Wordsworth’s verbal constructions imply

Herderian cast of Wordsworth’s neo-Spinozism. This is perhaps most evident in his

[…] the sense sublime

This divine “something” is no longer a static substance, but an indwelling propul-

Five eggs, pen-scribbled o’er with ink their shells

By attributing the recognition of resemblances between egg-shell markings and

4.2 F urther Reading

Key Terms: Ecological imaginary, sedimentation, biosemiotics, semiotic scaffolding,

Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension

concept of the imaginary which Annabelle Dufourcq has defined in Merleau-Ponty’s

1 Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasmic Ontology

2 The Imaginary and the Invisible

in understanding genetic behavior, Ramirez-Goicoechea believes that semiotic and

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

dreds of years afterward. Shakespeare deploys an ecological imaginary that revives

the erotic mayflowers

I step through origins

the bog floor shakes,

Mosses come to a head,

I grew out of all this

1 Aims and Scope of the Handbook

2 Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

4 Structure of the Handbook

5.2 F urther Reading

5 Intelligent Nature: Biosemiosis as Natural Poetry

7.2 F urther Reading

3 Ecosemiotics in English Romantic Verse

4.2 F urther Reading

1 Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasmic Ontology

2 The Imaginary and the Invisible

6.2 F urther Reading

1 Introduction: ‘All Things Considered’

2 Exposition of Theoretical Premises

3 Relevant Contexts of Research

5 Conclusion: ‘All is Light’

7.2 F urther Reading

2 Communication, Contingency, Co-evolution

3 Social Systems Theory and (Text-) Art

5.2 F urther Reading

1 Rehabilitating an Aesthetics of Nature

2 Aesthetics and the Environmental Problem

4 Aesthetics of the Body and the Atmosphere

5.2 F urther Reading

1 The Place of Cultural Ecology in Ecocriticism

3 Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity

4 L iterature as Cultural Ecology in Poems by Emily

6.2 F urther Reading

hakespeare, King Lear

4 Romanticism and the Hedonist Dialectic

6.2 F urther Reading

4.2 F urther Reading