Introduction to Focus: Environmental Humanities

From pollution and nuclear energy to deforestation and global warming, environmental issues play an ever more dominant role in our daily news cycles. The conflicts these issues generate at times revolve around the familiar lines of wilderness conservation, social justice, and economic growth that environmentalist thought has foregrounded for decades. The spring 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform—and the discourse the spill has fueled—pits a transnational corporation against local residents and a delicate marine ecosystem with complex and devastating consequences: a scenario well-known not only from other oil disasters such as the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the Prestige off the Galician coast, or the multiple large-scale spills in the Niger Delta, but also from other industrial accidents and catastrophes ranging from Minamata, Seveso, and Love Canal to Bhopal, Times Beach, and Chernobyl. But other conflicts over natural resources, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture unsettle the very meaning and aims of environmentalism. The contested construction of a major solar energy facility in California's Panoche Valley, for example, is difficult to parse in terms of environmentalist and anti-environmentalist projects. In this somewhat remote but by no means pristine valley—which has served as ranchland for decades and is home to a grassland ecosystem but also oil fields and a large asbestos-contaminated site—the company Solargen plans to build a facility comprised of 1.2 million solar panels that would provide more than 300,000 homes with renewable energy. The proposal responds to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's mandate that California derive 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and given the urgency to shift away from coal and oil power due to their impact on climate change, Solargen's ambitious plan would seem like one environmentalists would find hard to resist. But local farmers as well as conservationists from organizations like the Audubon Society are protesting the solar facility, voicing concerns over increased traffic and pollution, the development of open land, and the alteration of animal habitats that might endanger rare species. While these concerns are all in themselves classic environmentalist ones, the central conflict here emerges not from the clash between industry and nature lovers, between economic and ecological values, or between exploitation and conservation, but from rifts over how to prioritize goals that are all, at bottom, environmentalist.

Recent work in the Environmental Humanities—in such fields as environmental history, ecocriticism, and environmental philosophy—engages with this thorny sociopolitical, legal, and cultural landscape in which the old environmentalist struggles rage on even as new ones arise from the combined impact of greater public awareness, the diversification of the environmentalist movement itself, and the global reach of environmental problems. Environmentally oriented research in the Humanities, a selection of which we are reviewing here, has long functioned as complement to and critique of the political rhetoric of environmentalism. Scholars who undertake this research are often themselves impassioned conservationists committed to finding sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment and interacting with the natural world; yet these same scholars are just as often skeptical vis-à-vis the narratives, metaphors, and dichotomies that have structured much environmentalist thought since the 1960s. Environmental historians such as Donald Worster, William Cronon, and Richard White, for example, have emphasized that the conservationist commitment to purportedly untouched landscapes ignores long histories of human inhabitation as well as the oppressive political ideologies that enabled the removal of indigenous populations and attendant myth of "pristine wilderness." Ecofeminists such as Annette Kolodny, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, and Stacy Alaimo have highlighted how Western environmentalism, by representing the typical encounter with nature as that of a lone male surviving in the wilderness, has perpetuated patriarchal ideologies. Literary ecocritics have interrogated the environmentalist use of genres such as pastoral and apocalypse to structure verbal as well as visual stories about the decline of nature under the impact of human—and particularly modern—society. The Environmental Humanities, then, are situated at a site of double struggle—against the concepts and stories that have enabled environmental degradation in...