Foreword Chapter 1 the Commitments of Ecocriticism
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Notes Foreword 1. “Destroying the world in order to save it,” CNN, May 31, 2004, Ͻhttp://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/31/film.day.after. tomorrow.ap/Ͼ (Accessed June 25, 2004). Sources for the epigraphs are as follows: William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” Iowa Review, 9 no. 1 (Winter 1978): 121; and Raymond Williams, What I Came to Say (London: Radius, 1989), 76, 81. 2. “Global warming is real and underway,” Union of Concerned Scientists, n. d., Ͻhttp://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/index.cfmϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). “Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica,” National Snow and Ice Data Center, n. d., Ͻhttp://nsidc.org/iceshelves/ larsenb2002/Ͼ (Accessed June 25, 2004). Vandana Shiva, Water Wars (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), 98–99. 3. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Projections of Future Climate Change,” in Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Ͻhttp://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/339.htmϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). Shiva, Water Wars, 1. 4. Greg Palast, “Bush Energy Plan: Policy or Payback?” BBC News, May 18, 2001, Ͻhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1336960.stmϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: Climate Change will Destroy Us,” The Observer, February 22, 2004, Ͻhttp://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00. htmlϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). 5. Paul Brown, “Uranium Hazard Prompts Cancer Check on Troops,” The Guardian, April 25, 2003, Ͻhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uranium/story/ 0,7369,943340,00.htmlϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “Radioactive War,” Counterpunch, February 5, 2001, Ͻhttp://www.counterpunch.org/ du.htmlϾ (Accessed June 25, 2004). 6. Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 304. Chapter 1 The Commitments of Ecocriticism 1. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 68, 49. Three valuable histories of the American environmental movement are Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 214 / notes Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003). 2. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), xxi. William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” Iowa Review, 9, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 72–73. 3. Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 72–73, 86. Although the term “ecocriti- cism” came into common use in the 1990s, there is a large body of older work, from a number of disciplines, that has been adopted as a kind of canon of scholarship. Perhaps the earliest attempt to demonstrate the redemptive potential of nature writing is the long introduction to Joseph Wood Krutch, Great American Nature Writing (New York: William Sloane, 1950). Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribner, 1974) anticipates almost the whole of the ecocritical project, but because he focuses on what he sees as the ecologism of the tradition of dra- matic comedy rather than on nonfiction nature writing, he has received very little attention. For a handy collection of major statements and precursor texts, see David Mazel, ed., A Century of Early Ecocriticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). 4. William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 69. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 430n. Lawrence Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” New Literary History, 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 699–700. 5. Michael Branch, “Ecocriticism: Surviving Institutionalization in the Academic Environment,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 2, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 98. Jonathon Bate quoted in Jennifer Wallace, “Swampy’s Smart Set,” Times Higher Education Supplement, July 4, 1997, 4. 6. Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in Ecocriticism Reader, xxi. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2–3. Glen A. Love, “Revaluing Nature: Towards an Ecological Criticism,” Western American Literature, 25, no. 3 (November 1990): 213. Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 169. 7. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2, 4. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1204–1205. Love, “Revaluing Nature,” 203. For another influential early version of the ecocritical argument about the power of ideas, see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Brazillier, 1972). For ecocritical histories of the idea of nature in Euro-American culture, see Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, notes / 215 1991), and Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 8. Jonathon Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 245–247. James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 11, 228. Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). A history that parallels Philippon’s, though with an earlier starting point, is Daniel G. Payne, Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996). 9. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985), 8. Charles S. Brown, “Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: The Quest for a New World View,” Midwest Quarterly, 36, no. 2 (January 1995): 191–202. Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 28. 10. John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 1. Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 73. Thomas J. Lyon, ed., This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 7. 11. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 77–82. Slovic, Seeking Awareness, 18. For systematic expositions of deep ecological ideas, see David Oates, Earth Rising: Ecological Belief in an Age of Science (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1989), and Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 12. Perry Miller, Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 181–182n. See Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986) and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) for general accounts of the nationalistic impulses behind the formation of the canon of American Literature. Wendell Glick, The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) and Gary Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993) trace the history of Thoreau’s political and literary reputation inside the academy. 13. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 84–95. R.W.B. Lewis, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 1. Nash’s reading of Thoreau developed a thesis first proposed in Krutch, Great American Nature Writing, 3–4. Perhaps the most direct narrative of the development of nonfiction nature writing from Thoreau to Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard is Don Scheese, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New York: Routledge, 1995). Michael P. Branch, 216 / notes Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004) documents the rich prehistory of envi- ronmental literature. 14. Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 82. Don Scheese, “Thoreau’s Journal: The Creation of a Sacred Space,” in Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, eds., Mapping American Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 140, 147. Slovic, Seeking Awareness, 15. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 23, 139. For an additional examples of the ecocritical argument about Thoreau’s ecocentricity, see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 36–38. Robert Kuhn McGregor, Henry Thoreau’s Study of Nature: A Wider View of the Universe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) is dedicated in its entirety to the demonstration of this claim. 15. Jay Parini “Greening of the Humanities,” New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1995, 52. Glotfelty,