Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Introduction / Alexandra Ganser and Vibha Arora
<1> At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. They all follow an ecocritical perspective on earth-as-lived and earth-as-imagined in order to examine definitions and representations of the environment; they critique relations between the human and the human-non-human worlds and raise questions about Western, ethnocentric assumptions on the nature-culture divide that determine our relations with the environment, men and women, human and non-human worlds. The five essays in the creative section highlight the subjective expression of activism and an ecocritical position, while the book reviews indicate the breadth and width of global environmental concerns. Our fruitful journey as co-editors in selecting, compiling, and publishing this visually rich collection has been creatively interspersed by disciplinary arguments and intercultural (mis)communication, given our different origins in the North and the South and our academic training in literary and culture studies and sociology/social anthropology, respectively. These differences are both reflected in and brought into dialogue by ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary and global discourse.
<2> For readers who may not be familiar with the term ecocriticism we would like to briefly define and recapitulate its history. With one foot in literature and one foot in nature, ecocriticism is primarily a study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, but its mandate also extends to environmental philosophy and bioethics, while as a theoretical discourse it negotiates between the human and the non-human worlds (cf. Glotfelty, xviii-xix). Fifteen years have passed since the official birth of ecocriticism as an institutionalized academic discourse in the United States during what is now regarded the legendary meeting of a group of scholars and graduate students at the Western Literature Association (WLA)'s annual conference in Reno, Nevada, in 1992 [1]. Of course, ecocritical discourse has been around much longer, with William Rueckert coining the field's name as early as 1978 in his essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticsm (republished in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology co-edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm). In 1992 an important step towards the institutionalization of ecocritical academic inquiry in the United States was taken with the establishment of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). As various sources about the genesis of the field reveal [2], the ecocritical project, from its very beginnings, has been united not only by a political commitment to 'green' issues, but also in its practice of academic interdisciplinarity. However, a survey of some recent publications in ecocriticism [3] indicates that the field tends to privilege its classical subjects of analysis, nature writing and poetry, plus, increasingly, other literary genres like drama and the novel.
<3> This issue of Reconstruction is not undermining ecocriticism's strength in literary studies, yet it aims to complement and supplement these publications by drawing attention to the diverse ways in which ideas of nature and culture, human and non-human interaction are represented and negotiated in other media and semiotic sites as well - in documentary film (cf. Chia-Ju Chang's and Lisa Uddin's essays), advertising (cf. Catherine Roach's contribution), and the arts (cf. essays by Amanda Boetzkes and Sabine Wilke), for instance, but also through historic sites and landscapes (cf. Brian Black's contribution) and theoretical-philosophical analysis (cf. essays by Chris Drinkwater and Stephanie Posthumus). EcoCultures highlights the crossbreeding of recent or newly emergent fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences such as gender studies (cf. the essays by Don Romesburg or Mary Newell) and sound studies (cf. Phylis Johnson's essay).
<4> Ecocriticism's political commitment has entailed, at least in one of its versions, looking at discourses of nature and the environment in order to make sense of the human-nature interaction and to shed light on ways in which, within that framework of interaction, visions of nature can emerge that are less destructive to our planet and - to a distinctly unequal extent - to human beings. Raymond Williams pointed out the inseparability of natural and social history in his seminal lecture " Ideas of Nature" (1980) in arguing that "once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic" (76). Williams' conclusion is that when nature is separated from human activities, "it even ceases to be nature, in any full and effective sense," as humans need the concept of nature in order to "come to project on to [it] their own unacknowledged activities and consequences" (81). Seeing ideas of nature as being deeply entangled with human history and social class, he adheres to one of ecocriticism's credos that 'everything is connected to everything else.' Without the concept of nature, no concept of culture as distinct from nature seems to have been possible, and vice versa - a classical dichotomous structure that has historically served as a powerful tool for the oppression of those 'closer to nature' (the 'lesser' pole of the binary) and for the justification of environmental destruction.
<5> Ecocritical discourse following Williams as well as deconstructionist work of the 1970s has helped to make this dichotomy and its effects visible, to reflect on and deconstruct it (which is not the same as to destroy, as certain anti-postmodernist ecocritics like to read it; de-con-struction is not destruction, as it always entails an element of construction). Emphasizing the very fact that nature and culture are inseparable, this strand of ecocritical thought is in tune with ecocriticism's basic insight of interconnection. On these grounds, a claim for an environmental ethics can be made that needs to care as much for social difference as for, say, animal rights, and indeed to see these issues as inseparable. Ecofeminism and studies of the relationship between 'race' and nature discourses such as Sylvia Mayer's edited volume on the African American environmental imagination (cf. Uwe Küchler's review in this issue) have drawn attention to the social categories blatantly missing in William's lecture (cf. also Jagtenberg and McKie's criticism of Williams, 7-8). Anthropological theories on the nature-culture dichotomy confirm that this binary is socially constructed in modern Eurocentric contexts (cf. Ingold).
<6> Williams was one of the few protagonists of the British Cultural Studies school who addressed nature explicitly and repeatedly (e.g. in his earlier monograph The Country and the City). Like most of culture studies', Williams' leanings reflected his legacy of post-Marxist thinking that is frequently seen as unrelated to ecocritical agendas (cf., for instance, Laurence Coupe's introduction to the Green Studies Reader, in which green thought is constructed as "a radical alternative to 'right' and 'left' political positions," 4). A survey of the field of ecocriticism shows an obvious divide, apparent almost from its beginnings, between a (post-) Marxist, postmodern, or poststructuralist branch (opposed by deep ecologists for what they see as anthropocentrism) and a deep-ecology, or biocentric branch. The field has thus been and continues to be a platform for articulating and negotiating tensions between these adversarial strands of nature philosophy. Efforts to think deep ecology and postmodernity together are important to Suellen Campbell, Kate Soper, Jonathan Levin, and many others (cf. also from Chris Drinkwater's essay). Although there have been many misunderstandings between these approaches, their dialogue has been vital for ecocritical reflection on our own situatedness within theoretical discourses and academic environments. While it might be true that ecocriticism, to a certain extent, developed partly as a counter-movement against postmodernism, poststructuralism, and their love for theoretical abstraction, ecocritics of all strands have increasingly realized the implication of their approaches in philosophical discourse and counter-discourse. That the field has become more inclusive, accommodating deep ecologists as well as "ecocultural postmodernists" (Tom Jagtenberg and David McKie's phrase, 63), is undoubtedly a result of the fruitful theoretical debates within the field. The perception that ecocriticism was under-theorized and over-personalized (or, variably, too political) - a reproach made against the field that we have often heard from non-ecocritics - can easily be countered with publications from The Green Studies Reader to Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy's Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, to name but a few.
<7> Raymond Williams' own stance in the nature/culture debate is summed up succinctly at the end of " Ideas of Nature":
In this actual world there is then not much point in counterpoising or restating the great abstractions of Man and Nature. We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out. Except that ... if we go on with the singular abstractions, we are spared the effort of looking, in any active way, at the whole complex of social and natural relationships which are at once our product and our activity.
William's culture studies perspective and continuing interest in ideas of nature have certainly helped to bring a concern for the environment into the larger field of culture studies, although the field is still far from having incorporated, as Jagtenberg and McKie have called for, ecology as a fourth dimension of cultural analysis in addition to race, class, and gender (cf. 258). Yet the publication of both Jagtenberg/McKie's monograph Eco-Impacts (1997) and Jhan Hochman's earlier Green Cultural Studies (1998) indicate a continuing effort to combine culture studies tenets, such as interdisciplinarity, a semiotic understanding of culture, a view of cultural texts as creative articulations and negotiations of social relations, or the integration of terms like ideology or hegemony into the reading of cultural texts, with a concern for nature and the environment. If EcoCultures contributes to this effort we have certainly achieved our goal.
<8> Global inequalities are of great concern in the current context and not merely for ecocriticism. The environmental justice movement, which looks at 'green' issues from a global and globalized perspective, is a good example of an ecocritical approach that highlights these inequalities (cf. Vibha Arora's, N. Kipgen's, and Laxman D. Satya's reviews of recently published books in the field). Our selection of essays thus responds to Ursula Heise's 1999 call for the internationalization of ecocriticism by considering representations of nature and environmental concerns in culturally diverse locations and contexts.
<9> To a large extent, ecocriticism has enjoyed greater academic visibility in the West, although research and writings from the developing world such as South Asia enrich this genre with a post-colonial ecocritical perspective (as evident in discussions on Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak, e.g. in Martindale's and Chang's articles). It is erroneous to regard ecocriticism as predominantly a white or a Euro-American academic field, although it undoubtedly enjoys an institutional base in the West. In the Indian context, for instance, Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy's globally acclaimed essay TheGreater Common Good (1999), published initially in Outlook (a popular English weekly magazine of India) on the Narmada Valley Hydroelectric project immediately springs to our attention (freely available at http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html). This essay was subsequently published in her book The Cost of Living (1999). More than anyone else, Ramachandra Guha's writings and comprehensive review of environmentalism in the North and the South indicates the close connections between literary writing about the environment and resource-related environmental struggles not only in India but in other developing contexts as well. It is nearly impossible to discuss ecocriticism, environmental history, and environmental ethics in developing countries without referring to Guha's impressive inter-disciplinary scholarship. (In our issue, Chang's essay testifies to the expansion of ecocriticism into other Asian contexts). If ethnographic voices from other parts of the world are missing, then perhaps this is because our call was not heard by scholars there - their absence should not imply that they do not exist. In sum, in this issue we aim to re-affirm the ecocritical mandate of inter-disciplinarity while broadening the regional breadth of eco-culture studies [4]. EcoCultures promotes global ecological citizenship and argues for an ecological inter-species and human/non-human communion.
<10> It is pertinent to acknowledge that culture studies have always valued the everyday, the openly subjective, the personal dimensions of culture. This is an integral component of environmental activism, feminism, culture studies, and ecocriticism. The ecocritical tradition of fusing the scholarly with the personal is also reflected in ASLE's legendary (and now contested) motto "I'd rather go hiking" [5]; our decision to include a creative writing section in this issue reflects this. As the contributions in the creative section show, one merit of ecocritical creative writing is that it strongly sustains the field's commitment to the political dimensions of personal experience and action: from storytelling (cf. Gayle Goldstick) and history-telling (Rosemarie Rowley's account on the early days of the Irish green movement) to writing on the reading experience (cf. Silodia on Ayn Rand) and travelogue (cf. Casey Clabough's essay and Rob Baum's poetic field notes). Written invariably from a first-person perspective, these contributions remind us that theoretical ecocritical reflection often comes from personal experiences of nature and the environment.
<11> With the publication of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment, we have strung together essays that contribute to ongoing debates in a field that has been exceptional for its liveliness, diversity, and openness towards new input. We are convinced that eco-culture studies should remain politically committed and academically engaged. In this manner, eco-cultural analysis will help us understand and make sense of cultural texts and products that have created nature "as varied and variable ..., as the changing conditions of a human world" (Williams, "Ideas" 85).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Reconstruction's managing editor Marc Ouellette and technical editor Justin Scott-Coe, who paired us together as a team and extended unfailing support at every level. We are indebted to the pioneering ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant for inspiration and encouragement and to Kylie Crane, a colleague at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg who pointed out two recently published books in the field that we had missed. We thank other referees of this issue who remain anonymous, our colleagues, the students who joined us in this engaging journey, and the contributing authors who have made this issue possible. Their support and enthusiasm for this project was a great encouragement.
Works Cited
Arnold, David, and Ramachandra Guha. ed. Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Bennett, Michael. "From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places: The Urban Challenge to Ecocriticism." The ISLE Reader. Ecocriticism, 1993-2003. Eds. Michael P. Branch, Scott Slovic. Athens, London: The University of Georgia P, 2003. 296-317.
Branch, Michael P., and Scott Slovic, "Introduction: Surveying the Emergence of Ecocriticism." The ISLE Reader. Ecocriticism, 1993-2003. Eds. Michael P. Branch, Scott Slovic. Athens, London: The University of Georgia P, 2003. xiii-xxiii.
Campbell, Suellen. "The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet." 1989. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, London: The University of Georgia P, 1995. 124-136.
Coupe, Laurence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.
Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana, Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998.
Glotfelty, Cheryll and Fromm, Harold. ed. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia, 1996.
---Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Guha, Ramachandra and J. Martinez-Alier, ed. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays, North and South. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Guha, Ramachandra, Environmentalism: A Global History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Heise, Ursula K. "Letter." PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1096-1097. Available online at http.//www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/pmla/heise.html (accessed May 8, 2007).
Hochman, Jhan. Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho P, 1998.
---. "Green Cultural Studies: An Introductory Critique of an Emerging Discipline." Mosaic 30:1 (1997): 81-96.
Jagtenberg, Tom, David McKie. Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity. New Maps for Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA et al.: Sage, 1997.
Levin, Jonathan. "Letter." PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1097-1098. Available online at http.//www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/pmla/levin.html (accessed May 8, 2007).
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill . London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Roy, Arundhuti. "The Greater Common Good." The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of the Imagination. Ed. A. Roy. London: Flamingo, 1999. 1-114.
Rueckert, William. "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism." 1978. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, London: The University of Georgia P, 1995. 105-123.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? London: Blackwell, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. "Ideas of Nature." Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980. 67-85.
---. The Country and the City. 1973. London: Hogarth P, 1985.
Notes
[1] Cf. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, "Introduction: Surveying the Emergence of Ecocriticism," xiv. [^]
[2] Many of the founding documents support this claim. A bulk of these is available at ASLE's highly informative "Introduction to Ecocriticism"-collection of documents at http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/intro.html. [^]
[3] Cf. for instance Tallmadge and Harrington's collection Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (2000), which almost exclusively focuses on literature and written texts, or Branch and Slovic's ISLE Reader (2003), which devotes one of three sections to "Other Disciplines" (i.e., disciplines other than literary studies). [^]
[4] The title of the recently published Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism indeed suggests a broader field of academic inquiry into human-nature relations might need a new name - Green Studies - in order to branch out into fields other than literary studies. Jhan Hochman has suggested "Green Cultural Studies"; "Eco-culture Studies" might be considered another such alternative, we suggest. [^]
[5] Not only was this motto criticized by Michael Bennett for its bias towards wilderness, the rural, and the (American) West, and therefore the field's unacknowledged exclusion of urban ecocriticism; the fusion of serious-academic rhetoric and personal, creative, even humorous writing has led to the criticism that the field is characterized by a lack of analytical depth and sharpness. [^]
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