Different Shades of Green

The first wave of ecological cultural criticism crashed onto these shores in the 1970s and 1980s. The genesis of this wave and its subsequent diffusion into the mainstream during the 1990s is charted in Cheryl Glotfelty's introduction to the highly influential Ecocriticism Reader. As Glotfelty notes, the presiding spirit of this first wave of ecocriticism was the theory known as deep ecology, with its "radical critique of anthropocentrism" (1996, xxiv). Two books named "deep ecology," one edited by Michael Tobias (1985) and the other written by Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985), outline the basic principles of this theory. Each collection traces the beginnings of deep ecology to the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Devall and Sessions point to Naess's "ultimate norms"—self-realization and biocentric equality—as the sine qua non of deep ecology. Naess himself contributes an essay to Tobias's collection that makes a series of contrasts between "Shallow Ecology" and "Deep Ecology," which essentially come down to androcentrism (nature has value for humans) versus biocentrism (nature has intrinsic value). Based on this model, the first wave of ecocriticism valorized those critics, texts, and traditions that are thought to be more earth-centered than human-centered—the highest approbation is saved for the deepest shade of green.

Thus, the first wave of ecocriticism embraced those environments at furthest remove from human habitation—the pastoral and the wild—as represented by a narrowly defined genre of nature writing. In contrast, 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. In other words, this wave of ecocriticism is concerned less with proving itself to be a deep shade of green than with trying to reflect the different shades of green that make up the contemporary environmental movement. Rather than taking deep ecology as their main theoretical investment, these works are more influenced by social ecology, urban environmentalism, and the environmental justice movement. To a greater or lesser extent, each of the three works under review is part of this new wave of ecocriticism.

The focus of David Gilcrest's Greening the Lyre on contemporary nature poetry and the presiding sprit of Robert Frost connects it to the first wave of ecocriticism. However, drawing on the pragmatist hermeneutics of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, Gilcrest's analysis, in each of his book's five chapters, of the epistemology, poetics, and ethics of environmental poetry also challenges many of the central tenets of green criticism. In the first half of Greening the Lyre, Gilcrest carefully questions the undue self-confidence of those ecopoets and ecocritics who seem to believe that they can speak for nature. Though he welcomes normative ecology's "productive critique of homocentric values" (2002, 5), Gilcrest suggests that it is an epistemological impossibility and an aesthetic error to claim certainty about what a biocentric perspective exactly entails. How, for instance, would one judge between two competing biocentric claims? Ask the earth? Hardly. As Gilcrest explains in the second chapter, the very "trope of speaking nature" (38) is suspect. In fact, Gilcrest refers to the notion that a poet or critic can speak for nature as a "colonizing move that remains susceptible to serious epistemological and ethical critique" (6). Despite ecocriticism's laudable motivation for extending language and agency to nonhuman subjects, Gilcrest suggests, instead, that it should focus on the radical democratic possibility of recognizing "alinguistic agents" (58) without trying to make them just like us.

In the...