Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Age of Exploration to the Age of Ecology, and: This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (review)

Ecocriticism has evolved beyond nature writing in recent years to explore a wider range of texts, genres, and critical perspectives. That diversity is evident in these two very different books. Michael Bryson's Visions of the Land is the more straightforwardly "ecocritical" of the two, using the methods of literary criticism and the moral yardstick of environmentalism to analyze selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. Expanding the ecocritical archive to include exploration narratives, science writing, and utopian fiction as well as nature writing, Bryson seeks to develop "a keen and historically informed sense of how we conceptualize both nature and science," and to consider how we might "us[e] science to live well within nature" (ix). In contrast, Jed Rasula's This Compost approaches ecocritical questions through the critiques of anthropocentrism he finds in various strains of American poetry, particularly those that anticipate or build on the process-oriented poetics of the Black Mountain school. Poetic and philosophical rather than historical in orientation, This Compost foregrounds the question of how poetry, rather than science, can serve as "a resource of ecological understanding" (3).

Bryson's focus on the intersections of literature, nature, and science is timely, anticipating recent calls for a more fully interdisciplinary ecocritical practice. But rather than addressing current debates in science studies or evolutionary biology, as Dana Phillips and Glen Love have proposed, Visions of the Land offers a historical account of a "defining tension" in cultural representations of nature and science. Science has offered the tools, on one hand, "to modify, dominate, and possibly destroy nature" and, on the other, "to cultivate a rich and rewarding knowledge of the world and to foster a responsible environmental ethic" (x). The book provides a useful overview of historical changes in American conceptions of nature and science and makes intriguing connections between such disparate texts as John Wesley Powell's proposals for irrigating the arid West and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novel Herland.

However, Bryson is curiously silent on the development of twentieth-century ecology, either as a science or as a popular political movement. The book offers little support for his assumption that "twentieth-century ecology" grew out of nineteenth-century natural history, and his argument that Rachel Carson and Loren Eiseley "revitalize the naturalist's persona in an age of scientific specialization" includes surprisingly little discussion of the specific sciences (ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology) that shaped their environmental thinking. As a result, what begins as a more nuanced exploration of tensions within and among scientific practices gives way to a familiar ecocritical argument that "science" (now imagined in general rather than specific terms) is too abstract, laboratory-bound, and instrumental and needs to be tempered by the nature writer's emphasis on personal engagement and ethical commitment to nonhuman nature. This may be true, but Bryson's commendable effort to explore "the possibility of using science to live well within nature" would benefit from a more rigorous and fully developed account of such key terms as nature, science, and especially ecology.

If Bryson's book is explicitly interdisciplinary, Rasula's is exuberantly "disciplinary" in its insistence that poetry is a vital resource for understanding our human participation in terrestrial life. Yet This Compost is also "a meeting of communities," incorporating insights from systems theory and archetypal psychology as well as philosophy, poststructuralist theory, and Rasula's "ongoing participation in an extensive network of poets" (xiii). Rather than a conventional scholarly argument, Rasula offers a richly textured arrangement of allusions, reflections, and collaged quotations from a diverse array...