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university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 Review Environmental Concerns: Ecocritical Landmarks, Textmarks, Benchmarks robert morrison James C. McKusick. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology New York: St Martin=s Press 2000 Lawrence Buell. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2001 Jonathan Bate. The Song of the Earth Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2000 Famously, W.H. Auden observed in his elegy >In Memory of W.B. Yeats= that >poetry makes nothing happen.= Ecocriticism believes otherwise, and stands much closer to Percy Shelley, who in the final line of his >Defence of Poetry= declared that >Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.= In these new books, James McKusick, Lawrence Buell, and Jonathan Bate make the case that poetry matters. McKusick is concerned with English Romanticism=s inauguration of >a radically new conception of humankind=s relationship to the natural world.= Buell explores how >acts of environmental imagination, whatever anyone thinks to the contrary, potentially register and energize at least four kinds of engagement with the world.= Bate is >interested in the way in which an imaginative entry into ... fictive worlds ... may serve as an analogy for the human capacity, in Thoreau=s phrase with regard to his time in Walden woods, Ato live deliberately.@= The books chart ecocriticism=s past, situate its claims against antagonistic positions from Descartes to Derrida, and explore a series of large and topical questions, from the relationship between mind and nature to environmental determinism, ecological embodiment, and moral extensionism. In Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology, McKusick ranges from the myth of the American Wilderness and the Clean Water Act to Supermice and Terminator Seeds. Major Romantics appear as prophets. Blake=s >visionary protest against the Industrial Revolution offers informative parallels= to our own ecological anxieties, 812 robert morrison university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 while >Wordsworth was truly ahead of his time, and radically innovative in his concern for the preservation of traditional rural ways of life.= In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley >foreshadows the nightmare potentiality of genetic engineering,= while in The Last Man she describes conditions that presage >modern anxiety about global warming.= Thoreau is a >pioneer of the organic farming movement in America,= and >one of the earliest American writers to conceive the possibility of national parks whose main purpose is Ainspiration and our own true re-creation.@= >The English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists,= McKusick concludes, >were engaged in lifelong scrutiny of the same fundamental questions as today=s most advanced ecologists, but they posed these questions in different terms, and they looked elsewhere for the answers.= Buell=s Writing for an Endangered World is a compelling and remarkably learned book that considers everything from the environmental justice movement and the International Whaling Commission to >the interdependence between urban and outback landscapes,= AIDS, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, watershed aesthetics, and ecological ethics: >What values to assign to the welfare of endangered people as against the welfare of endangered nonhumans and/or bioregions? Shrinking elephant herds versus famine-threatened villagers? Loggers versus spotted owls, rainforest biodiversity versus urban public health?= In several sections Buell makes his point through the comparing and contrasting of different pairs of writers: Jeremy Bentham and Charles Darwin, Jane Addams and John Muir, Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahasweta Devi and Barbara Gowdy. He draws on canonical texts such as Blake=s Jerusalem, Dickens=s Dombey and Son, Sinclair=s The Jungle, Joyce=s Ulysses, and Carlos Williams=s Paterson, as well as on contemporary fiction, including John Edgar Wideman=s Homewood trilogy, Don DeLillo=s White Noise, and Richard Powers=s Gain. But Buell=s discussion also moves beyond the literary to draw on anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, public policy, and film, from Bambi (>the twentieth-century breakthrough artistic work of environmental ethics par excellence=) to more recent work such as Free Willy, Refuge, and Safe. Throughout he is concerned with how acts of the imagination help us contend against not only the grosser forms of environmental abuse, but also what he calls >sublimated propertarianism: this is my trophy, my playmate...

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