Does anyone still read this stuff?
Ecocriticism can seem like it's all over the planet—er, we mean, all over the place. And it's true; the theory has got some issues with focusing its attention on a particular topic, or moving in one steady direction. We guess that's what happens when your movement attempts to analyze the nature of, well, nature itself (which ultimately includes human nature and literature).
It's also a really new branch of lit crit.
But that doesn't mean that Ecocriticism is an anything-goes kind of theory. Today's ecocritics are interested in both analyzing how literature is a part of the problem—the way we portray nature in books reflects our problematic relationship to it—and part of the solution—the text can be an activist tool for helping people to take better care of the environment.
So from the intellectual fray, two distinct groups of thinkers have emerged: the New Materialists and the Ecofeminists. And these two groups offer disparate approaches to trying to save the environment slash the world.
New Materialism or Material Ecocriticism
This crew believes that by paying attention to the physical details of our natural world, we will be better analysts of the text. And of people and life and the great everything. Hungry for an example? We've got you covered.
Consider Watership Down. Why would author Richard Adams use rabbits as the primary characters in his story? Well, here's a fun, kind of gross scientific fact about rabbits: they feast on their own feces.
Yes, that's right—they eat their own poop. Which means that they actually recycle their own waste. Rabbits are their own little reduce-reuse-recycle machines. Cool, right?
The material rabbit stands in sharp contrast to the humans in the novel, who do great damage to the environment. So, while rabbits symbolize innocence and fertility and peaceful community living in Watership Down, Ecocriticism teaches us that there's more to it than that.
The facts of bunny biology enrich the social message of the novel; not only are rabbits good personality-models for humans, they're great models for our interactions with the environment—they're the ultimate recyclers.
Serpil Oppermann's the gal who's most famous for this material approach to analyzing nature-focused prose. She calls this splinter of the movement material Ecocriticism, but po-TEY-to, po-TAH-to.
The important point is this: this branch of Ecocriticism uses biology and other natural sciences to inform how we understand the relations between people and nature—both in great texts, and in the world at large.
Ecofeminism
We now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to remind you of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; trust us, it's crucial to understanding Ecofeminism. So, Eve ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, after she was told not to. This little mishap—often dubbed the OS or Original Sin—got her and her man kicked out of Eden. And, as many Christian religions tell it, we've been trying to find our way back ever since.
Nice job, Eve. You totes got all of humanity in trouble forevermore, you jerk, you might say. But ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva, Greta Gaard, and Catriona Sandilands have a few things to say about this Original Sin business, and similar male-female dynamics that show up all over nature writing.
They want us to re-evaluate how we study science and how we tell stories about the natural world through a feminist lens. That is, these tree-huggin' activists want us to analyze how notions of masculinity shape how we view nature—in lit and in life.
Ecofeminists claim that men like John Muir love to make rules and draw lines. As in, let's draw this line around this pretty piece of land and call it a National Park and here are the rules for this park: You pay to go in. No one can live there. The animals can't leave. The people running the place will wear snappy uniforms that will look like they're in the military.
But that's not what nature is all about; that's what men in a sexist, heterosexist culture are often all about. So we find the influences of these oppressions all over our favorite nature-focused texts. Like how the whale from Moby-Dick is just a bit too big. See, sperm whales never grow to the size described in the novel.
Why exaggerate the point, Mr. Melville? Hm. We hear that men with little… you know… hunt for the biggest whales. They go a-hunting in the great beyond in order to inflate their egos—to prove their manly-manness—rather than just to bring home a few fish for dinner.
Quoth the ecofeminists: the depiction of nature in literature to date has mostly been an exaggerated male project. Men's "whales" are always bigger in a story than they are In Real Life.