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c h a p t e r t h r e e Minding Ecocriticism Human Wayfinders and Natural Places For the old woodlanders, there is no division between human intercourse and local environment. The presence of memory means that the countryside is inhabited rather than viewed aesthetically. The condition of the modern man, with his mobility and his displaced knowledge, is never to be able to share this sense of belonging . He will always be an outsider; his return to nature will always be partial, touristic, and semi-detached. Jonathan Bate Mental Maps for Critical Footpaths Although ecocriticism only began to develop seriously as a subdiscipline of literary studies in the 1990s, it is inspired by the spirit of activism that spurred the development of numerous literary approaches two decades earlier. Feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial theories, for example, all highlight aspects of sexual, racial, and economic inequality and explore the various ways that these are represented , revealed, or suppressed in literary works. Similarly identified by a set of political commitments, ecocriticism (or studies in literature and the environment , as it is sometimes called) is nevertheless fundamentally different from these other activist-inspired schools in that its central focus has been on nonhuman nature rather than on human beings. Thus, while ecocriticism exhibits, in my view, the same sort of unacknowledged conflict between activist values and intellectual prerogatives apparent in several other recent schools, it also faces a special challenge whose source is nothing less than its purported object of study. The difficulty of explaining the relevance of that object, the environment, to literature departments is in no wise simplified by the constructed nature of the object, amply attested by its rate of mutation in ecocritical practice over the past fifteen years. If, writes Michael Bennett, “the first wave of ecocriticism embraced those environments at furthest remove from human habitation—the pastoral and Minding Ecocriticism 91 the wild—as represented by a narrowly defined genre of nature writing . . . the new wave of ecocriticism is interested in the interconnections between urban and non-urban space, humans and nonhumans, traditional and experimental genres, as well as the impact of race, class, gender, and sexuality on how we use and abuse nature.”1 Whereas in the early 1990s many within the fold believed that the subdiscipline would become more centrally based in an informal knowledge of the natural world and the natural sciences, the field has not thus crystallized. Also writing about five years after the emergence of this second wave and its implicit reconstruction of the object of study, Ian Marshall offers this assessment: “It seems that ecocriticism is not so much continuing along its path in the woods, traveling onward in a consistent direction (towards the natural sciences?), as it is constructing a web, with threads radiating in all directions from a common center, the whole thing held together by the numerous points where the threads intersect.”2 While it is standard form today for ecocritics to celebrate this diversity of projects, Marshall’s web metaphor is not particularly encouraging, not least because this same metaphor has served as a conceptual barrier rather than a tool in scientific ecology, as Dana Phillips explains. A scientist like Paul Colinvaux finds the information-theory concept of the food web, which transforms limited material resources into timeless essences and thus wishes away consumption and competition, “not only unreal, but absurd.”3 So, too, the idea of the “web of life, which has become one of the pet notions of environmentalism and popular ecology ,” poses serious conceptual problems: in attempting to describe the web, writes Phillips, “one becomes preoccupied with discovering and describing the various interstices of the web in the absence of any concrete evidence of the existence of the web as a whole, and still worse, in the absence of any concrete evidence that the web is a whole” (75). In other words, the web metaphor has provided not only a weak but probably misguided characterization of both specific biological processes and the general organization of organic life. Although academic research programs such as the study of literature and the environment are in many respects very different from biological systems, both exhibit a dynamism that is illserved by the ultimately static web metaphor, and literary studies might well heed Phillips’s suggestion that ecology has been hampered by the poor fit between metaphorical construct and natural phenomena.4 Given this state of affairs, according to which ambiguity about the object or objects of study...

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