Ecocriticism’s Hard Problems (Its Ironies, Too)

Ecocriticisms Hard Problems (Its Ironies, Too)Dana Phillips

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Ecocriticisms Hard Problems(Its Ironies, Too)Dana Phillips*

The growth of ecocriticism since the early 1990s is dizzying.

For at least a decade, ecocriticism was regarded as marginal, if not

avocational, and ecocritics struggled to secure beachheads in

English departments and the academic job market. Now, some

1,300 of them hailing from across the liberal artsand all around

the globebelong to the Association for the Study of Literature and

Environment, or ASLE. (First irony: the population of ecocritics has

exploded, though the means of their reproduction has not been the

one Thomas Robert Malthus had in mind. It has instead been viral.)

Of course, the most important measure of ecocriticisms success is

the scholarship it has produced. Thanks in no small part to ASLEs

organization and promotion of ecocriticism, anyone interested in the

field can ponder hundreds of articles, many of them published in

dedicated journals; multiple clutches of special issues, conference

proceedings, and edited volumes; a few score monographs; and

many dissertations, along with a sprinkling of blogs and websites.

(Second irony: forests have been felled and cheap labor sweated by

multinational corporations to help make ecocriticism possible.

Ecocriticism, an indictment of modernity and globalization, is one

of their offspring, too. Its carbon footprint must be enormous.)

Against this backdrop of rapid development, territorial expan-

sion, and escalated productivity, I would like to review the progress

ecocriticism has made to date on what I will call its hard prob-

lems. The hard problem in philosophy involves coming to terms

with the experience of consciousness. Pondering the hard problem

has traditionally meant an appeal to something incalculable, super-

erogatory, and transcendental, such as the soul, the spirit, the cogito,

and the ghost in the machine (Ryle 1516), or evenas potent

*Dana Phillips is an associate professor of English at Towson University and

Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University in South Africa. He has recently

written about depictions of animal and human consciousness, food, and the global

sanitation crisis.

American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 455467doi:10.1093/alh/ajt017Advance Access publication March 29, 2013# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

The Meaning of Rivers:

Flow and Reflection in

American Literature,

T. S. McMillin.

University of Iowa Press,

2011.

The Ecstatic Nation: The

American Landscape and

the Aesthetics of

Patriotism, Terre Ryan.

University of

Massachusetts Press,

2011.

counterexampleszombies and bats. At the heart of the hard

problem is the concept of mind, or the lack thereof, which philoso-

phers have fretted about while spending several millennia in fruitless

introspection as they attempted to turn the concept into a percept.

However compelling philosophers have found it, the hard problem

holds no appeal whatsoever to neuroscience, where genuine advances

in the understanding of conscious have been made in the last 50 years.

Consciousness is beginning to be explained, as Daniel Dennett (Sweet

Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

[2005]) has suggested and as the work of Antonio Damasio

(Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain [2005]),

like that of other neuroscientists, illustrates. This explanation, as is

usual in science, has been piecemeal, a matter of benchwork.

Neuroscientists have mapped the different regions of the brain and

stimulated them by electronic or other means, so that the extensive

roster of functions these regions perform while generating con-

sciousness, along with many other neurological phenomena, can be

filled in. The brain is not a meat puppet for the mind; plug it into the

nervous system, supply it with oxygen, bathe it in the right chemi-

cals, and it will pull its own strings.

I think it is obvious that ecocriticism does not and should not

have the opportunities and resources available to neuroscience: for

instance, granting ecocritics direct access to brains, so that they

might explore the material origins of ecological consciousness, is

clearly out of the question. Ecocriticism is therefore unlikely to

make dramatic progress on solving its own hard problems, and in

mapping the terrain of its concerns with an eye to the functionality

of this terrains many and diverse regions. (Third irony: one of ecoc-

riticisms hard problems is rhetorical, as you may have surmised,

and results from the temptation ecocritics feel when they meet with

metaphors like the geographical, topographical, and cartographical

onesexplore, mapping, terrain, regionsI have just used. The

temptation needs to be resisted, since it is not merely stylistic; it is

also discursive, even cognitive. One might well call it theoretical.

More about this later.) I doubt that additional cash and better meth-

odologies will alleviate ecocriticisms difficulties in this regard. As

for cash, ecocritics draw theirs from the same wells as other human-

ists, and those wells are relatively shallowand running dry. As for

its methodologies, while ecocriticism may rely on an interdisciplinary

archive (though the extent to which it does so has been overstated), its

techniques are the basic ones traditional to the humanities: reading

and writing, listening and lecturing. This circumstance is unlikely to

change regardless of how many excursions into the wild ecocritics

take, since the issue at stake here is not the validity of personal experi-

ence, no matter how vitalizing and transformative. Nor is it so-called

456 Ecocriticisms Hard Problems

environmental literacy, but authority of the very peculiar scholarly

and academic kind, which is impersonal and institutional. Which is

to say: it is only invested in individuals as a professional courtesy.

(Fourth irony: American ecocritics have found this impersonal ap-

proach to scholarshipand scholarshard to accept, which reflects

the evangelical tenor of popular environmentalism in the US and its

roots in the cult of rugged individualism.)

In the remainder of this essay, I discuss recent work in ecocriti-

cism that, in my view, illustrates the persistence of its hard prob-

lems, before turning to a more general consideration of these

problems. As for their outright solution, I am something of a pessi-

mist: my only hope is that, as in philosophy of mind, some of them

turn out to be pseudoproblems. I also am betting that if ecocritics

cannot articulate just how things stand between humanity and the

natural world and the humanities and the natural sciences, then they

can at least gain greater clarity about the limitations of ecocriticism

itself, along with those of environmental literature, culture, and poli-

tics. This delimitation of its purview may be what ecocriticism can

do best and most profitably, much like any other form of criticism

still in its salad years and, um, green in judgment. The trick will be

to pull off this delimitation while avoiding the vulgar error of

Balkanization, which might pit deep ecological against environmen-

tal justice ecocritics, or the vegan bloc against the new agrarians.1

To save time and space, and impose some limits on myself, I am

going to suggest that all the hard problems ecocriticism faces can be

rolled into one, that of representation, in both the broad and the

narrow sense, of environment. To this suggestion, I must add a rider:

environment is also a notion about which there is no consensus

among ecocritics or, for that matter, environmentalists and ecolo-

gists (more about this later, too).

1

Representation would seem to be a tiresome hard problem for

ecocriticism to have had. The long discussion about the arbitrariness

of the signifier that began in the 1960s, to grossly oversimplify

decades of talk about literary theory, had become much less conten-

tious by the early 1990s. Essays with titles like Against Theory

(Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 1982) had begun to

appear 10 years earlier; the best of these essays, naturally enough,

were written by scholars fully informed about theoretical debates

an incongruity, perhaps, but one illustrating the degree to which

theory already had been assimilated and normalized. It is now part

of the woodwork in departments of English and comparative

[I]f ecocritics cannot

articulate just how things

stand between humanity

and the natural world and

the humanities and the

natural sciences, then

they can at least gain

greater clarity about the

limitations of ecocriticism

itself, along with those of

environmental literature,

culture, and politics.

American Literary History 457

literature, where it is essential to the training doctoral students

receive. Polemics aside, you can no more be against theory these

days than you can be for it.

Yet in the US especially, many ecocritics are still spooked by

literary theory and continue to resist the challenges it poses to the

naive forms of realism central to the American nature writing tradi-

tion. A significant number of them have refused to acknowledge

theorys importance outright, insisting that ecocritics need to set

aside representations, especially theoretical ones: retreat from the

quadrangle to the backcountry; put boots on the ground; and get real

by, well, getting real and becoming more aware of the natural

world.2 That sounds like fun, but it means whistling by the grave-

yard where all of ecocriticisms hard problems get buried on the

way to the trailhead. It also means, or should mean, giving up on

ecocriticism, which is as dependent on its hard problemsand on

representationsas it is frustrated by them. For consistencys sake,

as trail-bound erstwhile ecocritics vacate the premises they should

probably cease to read American nature writing, too.

Despite its inconsistencies, a number of publications have

resulted from this antinomian strategy, which reflects ASLEs semi-

official motto Id rather be hiking. (At one point, these words

were printed on tee shirts worn to the associations biennial con-

ference by some of its members, who were apparently indifferent

to the performative contradiction their sportswear voiced.) The

publications the motto has inspired can be desultory and serendipi-

tous, since they tend to originate in and privilege chance meetings

along the trail. Terre Ryans This Ecstatic Nation: The American

Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism (2011), because it fore-

grounds Ryans serendipitous personal experiences yet is less desul-

tory than other books in the same vein, is a good example of

so-called narrative ecocriticism, one of the fields most tried and

true yet most problematic forms of self-expression.3 Early on, Ryan

calls her book an ecocritical memoir (4). (Fifth irony: one of the

organizing anecdotes of ecocriticism in its early days was the one

about editors complaining when a book had too many trees in it. It

now appears that editors might start complaining because some

books have too many ecocritics in them.) In her book, Ryan reports

on the visits she made to three of the American Wests most devas-

tated landscapes: the Nevada Test Site, clearcut Oregon forests, and

the Wyoming oil, natural gas, and coal ranges. As her story devel-

ops, it becomes clear to the reader that this ecocritical memoir is

less about Ryans scholarly engagement with ecocriticism as such

she devotes a comparatively negligible amount of space, only a few

lines here and there, to literary textsand more about her gradual

disillusionment with the picture-postcard and silver-screen


American West so often and so tediously depicted as sublime. In

other words, the risk Ryan takes is that the scholarship she relies on,

little of which is her own (and most of that is relegated to a summary

discussion in her first chapter), will seem to be deployed in service of

her narrative of personal development, and not in service of increas-

ing her readers understanding of nuclear weaponry, logging, and

fossil fuels extraction, and of the assumptions about natural resources

informing the culture dependent on these things.

This is a delicate matter, but one has to question not so much

the letter of Ryans text as the circumstances in which it appears to

have been written. Ryan leaves the library and takes ecocriticism for

a ride, out into the streets and on the road. Among other things, she

tells her reader about her move from New York City to Montana

(22); about how stunned she was to find evidence of barbed wire

having been used in a Japanese internment camp in California, even

though the rangers at this historic site told her the barbed wire was

either strung up by an internee to protect a vegetable garden or dates

from an earlier era, when the site used to be a ranch (48); and about

her struggle to open her senses at the behest of the philosopher

and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore during a guided hike

through an Oregon forest (62). Ryan writes that she felt bad when

Moores vague directive proved difficult to follow, but does not note

how thoroughly the moment is shaped by American nature writings

most time-honored trope, the sensual experience that blossoms into

a full-blown epiphany.4 This omission reveals one of the pitfalls and

hard problems of the ecocritic-as-Candide strategy and the ecocriti-

cal memoir (and narrative ecocriticism in general) as a form. The

interest of the narrativeits affect, you might sayturns on the

innocence of the narrator. As a critical stance, innocence wears thin:

all it can register are big surprises and bitter disenchantments.

For example, Ryan reports that a Colorado partnership, the

Sand Creek Joint Venture, is planning to resume uranium mining in

eastern Wyoming, at a location near the town of Shawnee: the rhet-

oric, she writes, hits me in the gut (118). Shawnee obviously

takes its name from the loose confederation of tribes once widely

dispersed throughout the mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Midwest.

Many other towns and locations in the US (and not a few people)

have borrowed the name, too. Its familiarity surely makes the rhet-

oric of Shawnee, Wyoming less than gut-wrenching. Ryan tries to

amp up its shock value by quoting a line from Mary Olivers poem

Tecumseh: Where are the Shawnee now? (118). Oliver has been

a favorite poet among American ecocritics. I suppose her question is

meant to be haunting, but rhetorically it is flatfooted and has a pain-

fully evident answer: the Shawnee are either dead and buried, like

Tecumseh, or (comparatively) alive and wellmostly in Oklahoma.


Ryan is right to note that Sand Creek was the site of an 1864

massacre of two hundred peaceful Cheyenne (118). However, the

Sand Creek where the massacre took place is in southeastern

Colorado, and drains into the Arkansas River, while the joint venture

is interested in another Sand Creek 400 miles away in Wyoming,

which drains into the North Platte River by way of the Laramie. Sand

Creek, like Shawnee, is a very common place name in the USand

not just out West, where waterways can run dry much of the year.

Thus the location of Sand Creek Joint Ventures proposed uranium

mine near Shawnee, Wyoming is a mere coincidence of geography

and American history. If there is any rhetoric to find objectionable

here, it is Ryans, not the joint ventures. (Sixth irony: their desire to

forge an interdisciplinary connection with environmental and US

history, and their habit of invoking the legacies of conquest and domi-

nation these histories record, sometimes lead ecocritics to forget the

fundamentals of their home discipline.)

Ryans book exemplifies the approach taken by traditional

ecocriticism, which, as Katrina Dodson puts it, says we should

come to read and appreciate nature firsthand by rushing out into a

rainstorm or learning to identify all the wildflowers in a meadow

(7). Less traditional and more circumspect ecocritics realize that

rushing out into a rainstorm only gets you wet, while identifying all

the wildflowers in a meadow might be a lifetimes work. They have

preferred to focus less on place per se, as Ryan does, and more on

writing about place, especially on the testimony provided by gifted

observers knowledgeable about and (therefore) in tune with local

environments. T. S. McMillins The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and

Reflection in American Literature (2011) is written in the latter vein.

The book nevertheless offers its reader something of a flashback to

ecocriticisms early days: its author cites only a small handful of

ecocritical sources, only a couple of them published since 2000.

Neither of these more recent sources can be called second-wave or

revisionist and theoretical.5 Since The Meaning of Rivers is billed

by its publisher as part literary theory, McMillins lack of engage-

ment with attempts to rethink ecocriticisms assumptions is worri-

some. (Seventh irony: ecocritical revisionists and would-be theorists

have been tryingand failingto get first-wave ecocritics to under-

stand why what they have been doing does not amount to environ-

mental criticism, but is instead diluted nature writing, especially

when it takes a narrative form or indulges in soft-soap ecopoetics.

So the first wave of ecocriticism runs concurrent but at cross seas

with the second, which makes for rough sailingand poor progress

in dealing with hard problems.)

The publisher of The Meaning of Rivers also bills the book as

part field trip. Thus it might appear to be another example of


narrative ecocriticism. Unlike Ryan, however, McMillin reports his

personal experiences as he traveled to and canoed down many of the

rivers he writes about only in abbreviated, anecdotal form. He

mainly relies on the narrative depiction of rivers by other writers

Captain John Smith, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Ernest

Hemingway, Ed Abbey, and Ann Zwinger, among othersto guide

him in his exploration of the meaning of rivers; as well he should,

given his books subtitle. However, as first-wave ecocritics are wont

to do (eighth irony), he treats the literary texts he reads as if they

were continuous with a natural world they do not so much represent

as transcribe, or even channelas if the rivers flowed seamlessly

into and informed these texts before mingling their waters with the

sea. McMillin insists that rivers are loaded not only with sediment

but also with meanings that writers, like farmers irrigating their

fields, need only divert into their narratives, and without having to

interpret those meanings in literary terms. Were that the case, ecoc-

riticism would be rendered literally superfluous. At best, it could be

no more than merely appreciative (which it often has been).

In his introduction, McMillin asks, What do rivers mean?

(xi; emphasis original). He writes that this is a smaller question in

comparison to questions about the meaning of life (xi). Yet the

question McMillins book repeatedly raises is that of meaning itself,

which he managesinadvertentlyto turn into a very hard problem

indeed. He suggests that the problem of meaning can be addressed

by thinking of it as involving both matter and energy, treating it as a

fluid, as something that flows, rather than as a stable solid to be

extracted or fabricated, and that thinking about meaning can be

aided by referring to rivers (xii). McMillins fluid compound of

matter and energy is just the kind of highly original meaning that

philosophers tap when they want to prime what Dennett calls an

intuition pump (282). Intuition pumps are specialized heuristic

devicesspecialized, in that they are imaginarywhich can be used

to drive the turbines of circular, loopy reasoning. This sort of reason-

ing turns on the feedback generated by an input (thinking of and treat-

ing meaning as a fluid) that one immediatelyand intuitivelytakes

for an output self-generated by the system one is monitoring. As

when, for example, one refers to rivers for insights about meaning,

but only after pumping oneself full of some quite peculiar assump-

tions about meaning (that it is a fluid, for example). It therefore

appears to be a mistake (of the kind philosophers like Dennett warn

us not to make) to apply the core concept of semantics to a river,

which does not signify even if the river does supply anyone who cares

to study it with superabundant information. Thus to say a river is

meaningful might well be as nonsensical as to say it is meaningless.

Meaning, especially meaning of the sort that most interests the


literary critic and scholar, does not appear to be a feature of rivers as

such. So I am tempted to declare a river does not mean but be. For it

to be either meaningful or meaningless, a river would have to be a

representation, and it is not.

McMillin has been led astray by the fact that rivers can be

read, and treats the authors he discusses as if they, too, were reading

rivers and not writing (about) them. He is aware that reading a river

does not involve connecting signifiers to signifieds, since the

meaning it gleans is a function of cause and effect (19).

Meaning is clearly the wrong word to use here. So is function. In

the passage from Life on the Mississippi (1883) that McMillin quotes

to support his point about meaning as a function of cause and

effect, Twain is careful to italicize means and refers in his discussion

of piloting, since he is aware that these words are metaphors or

stretchers (as Huck Finn might put it). Yet the realist Twain is also a

sentimentalist and a romantic, despite his protests to the contrary. He

wants more from the Mississippi than reading it in the manner of a

pilot will yield, which presumably is why he has taken the trouble to

write a book about it. The meaning Twain fashions while steam-

boating up and down the Mississippi decades after his abortive pilot-

ing career ended is a function, or, more correctly, an expression of

an imagination tinged with nostalgia.

McMillins acknowledgment that reading a river means detect-

ing relationships of cause and effect makes his oversights in the rest

of his book puzzling. Acknowledging that Twain is using a figure of

speech, he writes: The trope of reading the river may be familiar

to boaters and fishermen, but again Twain extends the concept

beyond common usage. By plumbing the depths of Bixbys figure of

speechin a passage McMillin has just quoted, Bixby tells Twain

he has to know the river just like A B CTwain compels readers

to consider just how rivers and the alphabet are alike and what we

should do with that information (14). As often happens in The

Meaning of Rivers, the nature of the thing being written about is

conflated with the surface rhetoric of the writing itself, and vice

versa. Twain cannot plumb the depths of Bixbys figure of speech.

It does not have depths. Nor does it need any: there is no reason for

the river pilots language to be riverine and murky just because he

has to be able to conduct a steamboat up and down the muddy

Mississippi. Bixbys expression is banal because it is idiomatic. All

Bixby intends for the young Sam Clemens to understand is that he

needs to learn the river by rote, in the same way he once learned the

alphabet. It is the learning that is abecedarian, and not the river

itself; that is why six-year-old and newly lettered boys did not train

as river pilots.


The much older Twain does not follow the logic of Bixbys

analogy, and neither does McMillin. Twain refers to the Mississippi

as a book, as if books were something one learns as opposed to

something one merely reads: as if the frontier expression book

learnin were to be taken literally. McMillin goes Twain one better;

he both sets up and derails his discussion of reading rivers by

referring to the textual nature of rivers (14). If that reference had a

referent, all the problems of representation that ecocriticism faces

might be solved immediately, but the world would be a much simpler

and less interesting place (tenth irony). Anyone who has paddled a

canoe or handled a fly rod knows reading a river is not in the least like

reading a book. Rivers can come at you all at once, especially if you

are wading in them and upstream, as those who fly fish usually do.

Books always come at you line by line and page by page, even if it is

true that sometimes you have to wade through them.

2

I now would like to address, in more general terms than I have

used so far, the knottier aspects of the hard problem ecocriticism

faces when it comes to the representation of particular environ-

ments, places, and natural phenomena, as well as the representation

more broadly of the global biosphere and environmental crisis.

Boiled down to its essentials, ecocriticisms hardest problem is this:

at whatever scale you take them, natural phenomena and environ-

ments do not lend themselves very well to the kinds of representa-

tion of which literary texts are capable. For a variety of reasons,

analogies, metaphors, thick descriptions, and narratives prove unsat-

isfactory: just try bird-watching with only a prose account of the

confusing fall warblers to guide you. As for visual texts, paintings

and photographs are limited to two dimensions, which means they

are reductive, or at best natural historical rather than ecological and

environmental. (The diagrams, flow charts, graphs, statistical tables,

and computer models preferred by scientists have their shortcom-

ings, too.) You might assume that plant and animal taxonomies, at

least, have been sorted out, and thus are available for writers and

other artists to deploy uncontroversially. You would be wrong, since

the identity of many species is furrowed and blurred by geographic

variations among the rank and file. A Montana grizzly both is and is

not the same kind of bear as an Alaskan brown. Conversely, mallard

and black ducks are a separate species, but the more numerous mal-

lards freely interbreed with the blacks in the wild to such an extent

that populations of the latter appear to be dwindling. (Be warned:

this little narrative oversimplifies an extremely complicated puzzle


in field biology.) The upshot of taxonomic uncertainty is that what

you see in the natural world is often not the same as what you get

once you are back in the lab: one bull trout looks much like another,

but wildlife biologists have to take DNA samples to relocate bull

trout in their home drainages when spawning runs of this endan-

gered species are blocked by dams.

Another aspect of the hard problem of representation needs to

be mentioned here: that our perception of environment is limited is

true by definition, and irrespective of what kind of creatures we

happen to be. As it happens, we are a species with only middling

abilities when it comes to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and

touching. This makes the traditional ecocritical worry about increas-

ing awarenessand turning the concept of environment into a

perceptseem like a good example of a hard problem that is best

regarded as a pseudoproblem. An environment cannot be perceived

because it is not a thing. It follows that definitions of environment

must be loose and baggy: for instance, whatever surrounds an

organism, which is comprehensive at the cost of being altogether

relativistic. No wonder some scientists have contested whether envi-

ronment is truly a concept at all, which does not mean these scien-

tists are deniers of, say, climate change. Categoricallyand

therefore reductively, which seems to be the only way scientists

have found to parse itenvironment entails a welter of data about

flora, fauna, soils, weather, climate, geography, geology, and evolu-

tionary history, to name just a few. These data, moreover, are super-

abundant, orders of magnitude greater than any one personor any

one computercan process. So even with the aid of sophisticated

theories (such as the ecosystem theory first broached around the

time of World War II) and advanced technologies (such as the

remote sensors on which many earth scientists now rely), attempts

to understand the natural environment are frustrated much of the

time. You might even say that this frustration is what makes such an

environment worthy of its name: if its every facet is known, then it

cannot possibly be a natural environment, and it is just, for instance,

a habitat or a landscape, though those are also neither mere things

nor easy to know. Environmentally, thats how it goes: complexity

piles upon complexity all the way down.6

The holism indelibly (and problematically) associated with the

notion of the natural environment always lies beyond the reach of

our most sensitive perceptions and our cleverest representations, no

matter how talented we may be, and even if we have hiked our way

through an Appalachian Trails worth of hardwood forests and

grassy balds, our senses sharpened to a knifes edge and notebooks

in hand. A more elaborate strategy is needed, so a wide range of sci-

ences organized under the loose heading of ecology has arisen to try


to affect the comprehension of the natural environment collectively

and cumulatively. Ecology is (therefore) also not a thing. Nor is it a

particular discipline. Ecology is of diverse kinds, and an ecologist is

always a member of an ensemble, never a soloist. Given the different

methodologies and theories the various natural sciences employ,

and reflecting the competitive nature of scientific funding, the

ensemble rarely plays from the same score or on the same scale.

Competing methods, theories, and the claims they generate create a

cacophony. This cacophony is music to the ears of environmental

skeptics and deniers of evolutionary history and climate change, but

business as usual or normal science to biologists. The unsure nature

of our knowledge of the environment (one might say: of our knowl-

edge full stop) also makes it difficult to see how environmentalism

and ecological science might serve as foundations or sanctions for

literary and cultural criticism. So we need not have made words like

environment and ecology into the shibboleths they have become.

Twenty years ago, it seemed to me that ecocriticism might avoid

this error of the popular imagination. It has not.

While reading this essay, especially in its more recent para-

graphs, you may have noticed that I have been courting a contradic-

tion of my own words, especially the two named as shibboleths in

the paragraph above. That is, I have been writing about, first, envi-

ronment and then ecology, and about representations of the same, as

if I knew what they were not, which is, arguably, tantamount to

writing about them as if I knew what they were. Yet by my own tes-

timony, I do not and cannot know that. My only defense is a poor

one: I have been trying, all along, to describe the rough shape of our

present ignorance of our environment so that I might show how diffi-

cult the task of knowing it, or rather representing it better, is going

to be. This is a Rumsfeldian enterprise, since it privileges the

known unknownsand still more perversely, the unknown

unknownsover the known knowns, and it surpasses Rumsfeld

by calling even the latter into question. This approachwhich fore-

grounds ideology, that comprehensive representation and master

narrative that underwrites all other representations and master

narratives ( just as theory has taught us)is what makes the sort of

philosophical review of ecocriticisms premises that I am offering

here seem like a spineless evasion of the matter at hand to traditional

and first-wave ecocritics, not to mention the renegades who are

eager to shut up, gear up, and move out. Yet more than 15 years

since Cheryll Glotfeltys tentative but widely cited description of

ecocriticism as the study of the relationship between literature and

the physical environment (xviii), whether there is any such rela-

tionship to be studied is a question that still goes begging (eleventh

irony). As I have suggested, what ecocritics have to contend with is


not a relationship but many representations, none of which are likely

to prove equal to the daunting task ecocritics would like them to

perform: to save the earth (Garrard 48).

The umpteen ironies (a couple more are yet to come) that I

have noted parenthetically in this essay are not simple matters.

While some of them surely cash out as flat contradictions and cause

cracks in ecocriticisms walls, others are structural, maybe even

foundational. They lend shape to ecocriticism by suggesting the out-

lines of its enabling conditions (the vast number of representations

of the natural world in a variety of media) as well as its debilities

and limitations (see previous parenthesis), all of which is rightly

debatable. Yet one of ecocriticisms debilities and limitations

cannot be gainsaid: it has begun to flourish at precisely the moment

when there is a general recognition of, and spreading panic about,

the waning importance of the humanities (twelfth irony). Ecocritics

would do well, then, to remember that, like environment and

ecology, literature and culture are also not things. We do not and

cannot provide an understanding of them to our students on a cash

and carry basis, no more than we are able to assure them they will

get jobs after graduation. On the other hand, ecocritics can take cold

comfort in the knowledge that the global environmental crisis which

is now upon us is going to continue for a very long time, and will

eventually reveal our much more local crisis of the humanities today

as trivial. Ecocritics are more likely to run out of fuel, food, and

water long before they run out of topics. The hardest problem and

ultimate irony (the thirteenth, as luck would have it) is that ecocriti-

cism has flourished only at the midnight hour, just before the natural

world it rightly treasures is about to be severely damaged and dimin-

ished, if not swept away.

Notes

1. For an essay that courts this vulgar error, and comes uncomfortably close to

calling for a purge of the ASLE ranks, see Simon Estok, Theorizing in a Space of

Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia, ISLE 16.2 (2009): 20325.

2. For an extreme example, see Kip Robisch, The Woodshed: A Response to

Ecocriticism and Ecophobia, ISLE 16.4 (2009): 697708.

3. On its virtues, see Scott Slovic, Ecocriticism with or without Narrative: The

Language of Conscious Experience versus the Language of Freefall, Narrative

Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism. Ecocritical Library. ASLE.org. 1995.

Web.

4. See the fifth chapter of my book, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and

Literature in America (2003), entitled What Do Nature Writers Want?


5. On the two waves, see Lawrence Buell, Ecocriticism: Some Emerging

Trends, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19.2 (2011): 87115.

6. See chapter 2 of The Truth of Ecology, Ecology Then and Now.

Works Cited

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness

Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and

Co., 1991.

Dodson, Katrina. Introduction: Eco/

Critical Entanglements. Qui Parle:

Critical Humanities and Social

Sciences 19.2 (2011): 521.

Garrard, Greg. What Powers Have

Words? Science 326.5949 (2009): 48.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. Introduction:

Literary Studies in an Age of

Environmental Crisis. The

Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in

Literary Ecology. Ed.

Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm.

Athens: U Georgia P, 1996. xvxxxvii.

Knapp, Steven and

Benn Michaels Walter. Against

Theory. Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982):

72342.

McMillin, T. S. The Meaning of Rivers:

Flow and Reflection in American

Literature. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2011.

Ryan, Terre. This Ecstatic Nation: The

American Landscape and the Aesthetics

of Patriotism. Amherst: U

Massachusetts P, 2011.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind.

1949. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2000.

Print.


Ecocriticism’s Hard Problems (Its Ironies, Too)

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