Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World by Christine L. Marran (review)

Christine Marran's Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World is an absorbing, timely intervention into scholarship on literature/film and environment. Decentering questions of culture to highlight the materiality of poetry, film, and prose fiction, this slim volume introduces the concept of biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to deepen understandings of how and why the material world has been used to signify culture. As Marran explains, biotropes enable us "to navigate the broader question of how the material world has proven to be such an effective medium for representing human culture" (p. 11). And as she notes in the final chapter,

The present book introduced the concept of the biotrope in part to address the ways in which matter can often be eclipsed by cultural humanistic claims. The concept of the biotrope … encourages us to consider the various literary and filmic representations of our lively world in ways that do not simply replicate cultural constructs and humanistic universals.

(p. 117)

Ecology without Culture also introduces the concept of ethnic environmentalism, which "attempts to solve environmental problems through the suggestive force of ethnic belonging and ethnic histories without addressing capitalist modernity" (p. 13). Marran critiques the ambiguous claims of cultural difference that defy contemporary realities and deny responsibility for environmental degradation.

Ecology without Culture—its title a riff on Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature (2007)—argues that scholarship on creative production and environment must engage culture without making the perpetuation of ethnos and anthropos the endgame of ecopolitics. And the book demonstrates how the primary stumbling block to ecological thinking is not the image of nature but the image of culture. The visual and written texts examined "affirm life against the grain of cultural and human exceptionalism. They are mythical and metaphorical, biographical and historical. Most importantly, they are never skeptical, but rather create expansive ecological imaginaries that break the spell of civilizations" (p. 25).

Marran divides the book into an introduction and four chapters. The introduction, "Ecology without Culture," explains how Ecology without Culture discusses texts that "develop expansive ecological imaginaries that resist or explicitly dismiss exceptionalist claims made at the level of ethnicity, culture, and species in their critiques of industrial modernity" (p. 3). The book, she argues, "examines ways in which cultural claims impede ecological thinking" (p. 5). It does so by focusing on stories and films that represent the experiences of individuals and communities adversely impacted by the excesses of industrial modernity. In particular, Ecology without Culture discusses a range of texts "that address environmental health and depict affiliations among species and land," affiliations often "created through the excesses of industrialism and the release of toxins by industry" (p. 5). These toxins impact both human and nonhuman, and they especially target the already disenfranchised.

The first chapter introduces the concept of "Obligate Storytelling," a mode of sharing stories "that foregrounds material relations as fundamental to narrative. … [This is] a kind of storytelling that emphasizes the bond … of one being to another at the level of care and substance, of thought and matter" (p. 27). Obligate storytelling "produces a deep sense of relation among its diverse subjects" (p. 27). Moreover, it "addresses the conditions of existence for beings and matter in an aesthetic ontology that refuses humanist writing traditions, eschews authorial flourish, and rejects institutionally privileged language to attend to relations that pertain at a transcorporeal level. Fundamentally, … [it] depicts relations among diverse bodies and forms without privileging humanistic endeavor" (pp. 27–28). Perhaps out of necessity, much of the language used in Ecology without Culture is by any measure "institutionally privileged"; even as Marran's book provides a solid foundation for future scholarship, going forward, writings in the field will need to embrace more accessible discourse.

The second chapter, "Slow Violence in Film," introduces several films—Todd Haynes's Safe (1995), Kamanaka Hitomi's Hibakusha: sekai no owari ni (Hibakusha...