The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America, and: Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature (review)

Ecocriticism, according to Dana Phillips, is long overdue for an intellectual whipping. With a dismissive tone and a caustic approach to this growing field, Phillips's new book, The Truth of Ecology, relishes the condescending wisecrack: "Good intentions and a receptive attitude while out hiking or canoeing won't make you an ecologist"; and "enjoying a good book about hiking or canoeing won't make you an ecocritic" (143). The publication of Phillips's first book coincides with the publication of Reader of the Purple Sage, a collection of essays by Ann Ronald, one of ecocriticism's founding figures. Together, these books raise significant questions about ecocriticism's perhaps precarious position in the academy, after a dozen years or so of institutionalization. While Phillips's correctives may certainly apply to a few reactionaries, his insistence that all ecocritics are ignorant of decades of literary theory is likely only to feed a misguided suspicion of the field among a number of literary and cultural critics.

The distance from Ann Ronald to Dana Phillips is considerable, and indicative of the arc traveled by ecocriticism since its formative years: from Reno to Philadelphia, from the University of Nevada Press to Oxford University Press, from the study of Western literature to neopragmatist literary criticism. Many of these distances would have been impossible to traverse without leaders like Ronald, particularly in her role of helping establish the first graduate program in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. Reader of the Purple Sage tracks Ronald's scholarship from 1977 to 1999, including her publications in Western American Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, Halcyon, and the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly as well as her introductions to novels by Mildred Walker and Archie Binns and, ultimately, her rather arrogant gestures toward her own meditations on Western landscapes. Ronald's subjects range from Walter Van Tilburg Clark to Edward Abbey, from Reno to Glen Canyon, from genteel ladies in Nevada boomtowns to rugged Westerners in Shane, Pale Rider, and Lonesome Dove. Her best work is an article on Wallace Stegner's construction of stewardship as an environmentalist ethic, despite what might seem to be contrary impulses in his lesser-known work. But for the most part, Ronald's methodology in these selections reflects little effort to engage with contemporary literary theory or the political implications of historicized cultural studies. Instead, much of the critical work seems to come in the form of a litmus test about whether a given writer suggests an appropriate way to interact with "the natural world," or whether a given text "tells the truth" about the West.

While not specifically analyzed by Dana Phillips, Ronald certainly suggests the type of ecocritic and nature writer that takes a beating in The Truth of Ecology. According to Phillips, ecocriticism "needs to involve both vigorous internal debate and the painstaking working out of new insights that might make ecocriticism's argument more persuasive to outsiders and to insiders, too, than it has been thus far" (41). But in the end, it remains unclear whether Phillips's debunking actually achieves the goal of reaching "outsiders," and it remains apparent that what Phillips identifies as "ecocriticism's argument" is actually based on selective examples and rather reductive generalizations. What differentiates Phillips's litmus test from Ronald's is that Phillips cares deeply whether writers and critics get their ecology right. The title of Phillips's book, taken from Umberto Eco's question in Travels in Hyperreality—"Where does the truth of ecology lie?"—is meant to highlight the ways many ecocritics misrepresent the science of ecology. But it...