Reweaving Nature and Culture: Reading Ecocritically

Abstract

One of the more extreme polarities of utopian and dystopian representation appears in the relationship between nature and culture in depictions and interpretations of ‘natural’ environments. This is not a concern which in itself emerges as a consequence of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’, but the range of discourses falling under the broad titles of ecopoiesis and ecocriticism emerged slowly and sporadically in the last quarter of the twentieth century from even broader discourses about ‘the (natural world) environment’ or simply ‘nature writing’. There were, however, some significant confluences. As an analytical discourse, ecocriticism became identified as a distinctive — albeit loosely defined — field in the first half of the 1990s. The collapse of the East-West binary also coincided with a growing acceptance across the world that global warming was a fact, not a theory. Hence, the coincidence of an identifiable critical discourse emerging at the same time as major changes in global political structures resulted in a palpable shift of emphasis, and for almost a decade until the advent of the ‘war on terror’ environmental issues, especially global warming, were widely perceived as the greatest threat to the continued survival of human beings. Environmental issues — habitat protection (and celebration of wilderness), ecosystem conservation, pollution prevention, resource depletion, and advocacy of harmonic balance between human subjects and natural environments (as opposed to an anthropocentric hierarchy of humans and nature) — became major social concerns.

Ecocriticism is essentially about the demarcation between nature and culture, its construction and reconstruction.

Garrard, Ecocriticism, 2004, p. 179

It’s human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys… If we are really to protect the good earth we must first cleanse it of human beings.

Reeve, A Darkling Plain, 2006, p. 504