1 Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare: an Introduction 1

Notes 1 Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare: An Introduction 1. Since 1998, when the first published instance where the words “Shakespeare” and “ecocriticism” appeared together (see Estok, “Environmental Implications,” Shakespeare Review 33, p.135, n.39), the field of “Shakespeare and ecocriticism” has become flooded with scholar- ship. To date, there have been two books published that apply ecocriticism to Shakespeare: Robert Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance and Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. Articles (now too many to number) and special issues (notably, the “Shakespeare and ecocriticism” special cluster of ISLE in the summer of 2005) have been increasingly appearing. Palgrave Macmillan published a collection entitled Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (Ed. Ivo Kamps, Thomas Hallock, and Karen Raber) in December 2008, and there is another collection forthcoming through Ashgate entitled Ecocritical Shakespeare (Ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton) in 2011, as well as a full monograph by Todd Borlik entitled Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature set to come out through Routledge as this book goes to press. There have been several conference panel sessions over the past several years: the 2008 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) held a session entitled “Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis” and a seminar in 2006 on “Nature and Environment in Early Modern English Drama.” The 2006 World Shakespeare Congress (WSC) held a panel session organized by Simon Estok entitled “Ecocriticism and the World of Shakespeare,” while the 2011 WSC has one organized by Vin Nardizzi and Jennifer Munroe entitled “Plants and Gender in Early Modern Literature.” The British Shakespeare Association held a “Shakespeare and Ecology” seminar organized by Gabriel Egan and Kevin de Ornellas at the 2005 Biennial Conference, and the 2001 Ohio Shakespeare Conference entitled “The Nature of Shakespeare” sponsored several ecocritical sessions. There was a session at the 2008 MLA entitled “Ecosystemic Shakespeares,” and panel organized by Sharon O’Dair at the 2009 ASLE Conference (“Island Time: The Fate of Place in a Wired, Warming World”) held in Victoria, BC, entitled “Early Modern Ecocriticism—Three Ways,” and a 128 Notes Symposium organized by Scott Newstok entitled “Green Shakespeare: Environmental Criticism and the Bard” at Rhodes College, Memphis, in March 2010. 2. See Stolz (http://achangeinthewind.typepad.com/achangeinthewind/ 2005/11/ecophobia_a_par.html). It is one of the aims of my book to offer and extensively define the term “ecophobia.” For the time being, we might define ecophobia as a pathological aversion toward nature, an aggravated form of anthropocentrism expressed variously as fear of, hatred of, or hostility toward nature at least in part motivated by a sense of nature’s imagined unpredictability. A more detailed definition of the parameters and implications of ecophobia begins on the following pages and continues throughout the book with readings that will add more flesh to what must here seem skeletal. 3. This is not to imply, however, that membership in one category means membership in all or that being African American means necessarily being antihomophobic or that all vegetarians are necessarily antiracist. Indeed, as Sharon O’Dair has observed, “people can suffer injustice themselves and impose it on others—other people or other species” (Personal correspondence, “Notes” November 10, 2008). My point is that conservatism tends to go across the board (as does radicalism), that we tend to find ideologies huddling together, that “rednecks” who drive pick- up trucks with offensively conservative opinions about women tend also to have offensively conservative opinions about sexuality, race, environment, and so on. While there are obviously exceptions—for instance, gay cowboys, classist African Americans, conservative lesbians, and homophobic vegetarians—much is to be gained from discussing confluences. 4. Portions of this paragraph have appeared in earlier forms in “An Introduction to Shakespeare and Ecocriticism” ISLE (12.2), 112–13; “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism” AUMLA (103): 17–19; “Ecocritical Theory and Pedagogy for Shakespeare: Teaching the Environment of The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (2003): 196, n5; and “Conceptualizing the Other in Hostile Early Modern Geographies” Journal of English Language and Literature (45): 878–90. Many of the ideas here also found expression in “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness” ISLE (16.2): 203–25. 5. Dates here are important. My PhD dissertation was accepted and dated in the Spring of 1996. I wrote the first draft of the final chapter of my dissertation in the early summer of 1995 and submitted it to Linda Woodbridge—my supervisor—on August 9, 1995. Several months later, by which time the dissertation had already gone to my committee for approval, David Sobel’s “Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education” came out in Orion (though it was not until shortly before the ASLE 2009 meeting in Victoria—about a month after my own article on ecophobia came out that Sobel’s article came to my attention. The fact that Sobel and I clearly coined the same term at roughly the same Notes 129 time and clearly independently is perhaps more than simply coincidental, perhaps indicating a felt need for a viable ecocritical terminology, as early as 1995. 6. Much of my thinking about ecophobia grows out of foundational works of early ecofeminists, particularly as Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Insider Her (1978), Greta Gaard’s collection entitled Ecofeminism: Animals, Women, and Nature (1993), and Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein’s Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990). 7. A reader for an earlier version of this book has complained to me that rape is not always about misogyny. Fair enough, but I doubt that any sane person will argue against the idea that rape often implies misogyny. 8. Although the contempt and fear, which I am calling ecophobia (and expand on below), does not represent the sole trait that characterizes our relationship with the natural world, it is as yet a remarkably unattended one. Its opposite would, to some extent, be the biophilia Edward O. Wilson defines as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” (31). Certainly Scott Slovic is accurate to note that “ecocriticism is actually motivated by biophilia” (Personal correspondence, “Re: LIKELY SPAM” September 16, 2008). Admittedly, biophilia indeed seems to be the motivation but not the object of ecocritical inquiry. The object of such inquiry certainly must centrally include ecophobia and how it patterns our relationship with nature. We can clearly see that ecophobia is winning out over biophilia. The “rapid disappearance” (Wilson 40) of species of which Wilson speaks so eloquently and persuasively has a cause: it is ecophobia, surely, not biophilia. 9. As I have mentioned in ISLE 16.2, the topic has become an increasingly marketable one, with the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel’s joint production of the CGI series The Future Is Wild (2003), Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World without Us, the History Channel’s Life after People (January 2008), and the National Geographic Channel’s Aftermath: Population Zero (March 2008), each, in their own way, move beyond mere ecological humility, tacitly presenting an implicitly ecophobic vision of a Nature that will finally conquer humanity, will reclaim all of the world, and will remain long after we are gone. Tom J. Hillard, in a productive response to my comments in ISLE 16.2, has added that Anyone who has paid any attention to popular culture in the past decade or so has no doubt witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of such stories. For instance, the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow presented an astonishing, special effects- laden vision of the world during an apocalypse brought about by global warming and climate change, a vision of disaster terrify- ing in its implications (even if, at times, laughable on screen). This film is just one in a long line of natural disaster movies that 130 Notes flooded theaters in the late 1990s, including the likes of Twister (1996), Volcano (1997), Dante’s Peak (1997), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), and many others. More recently is Open Water (2003), based on a true story of two scuba divers left behind by their charter boat and eventually eaten by sharks, as well as Grizzly Man (2005), a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who, after thirteen summers of living with grizzly bears in Alaska, was eventually mauled and eaten by one of them in 2003. (187) 10. In work that predates ecocriticism, several capable scholars have, in fact, discussed precisely the topic “the domination of Nature” (see, e.g., Leiss, Evernden, and Roszak). 11. The most recent and perhaps most disturbing manifestation of this resistance to theory comes from within the ecocritical community itself. Scott Slovic’s decision to publish (in ISLE 16.4) an incendiary and divi- sive rant against my “ecophobia” article has put my call for theorization at the center of a growing debate about the place of theory in ecocriticism. In turn, responses to ISLE 16.4 itself have been so intense that by December 2009, Scott Slovic had felt compelled to consider “issu- ing a call for submissions to a special forum on the broader topic of

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