Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment by Glen A. Love (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 4 6 1 it captures some of the ritualized emotional intensity of classical drama. Genre aside, what principally distinguishes Riggs’s plays from the roman­ tic westemisms of his time is this undercurrent of implacable fate, primordial human drives, and barely suppressed violence. Nor are his plots formulaic— none of these three plays resolves in any conventional way. Curley is given one night with his new wife before he is to be arrested for murder, and Jeff announces his intention to ride to town and turn himself and his brothers in. Complex and multilayered, The Cherokee Night ends with the earliest of seven nonchronological scenes, which as a whole, impressionistically sketch three generations of intratribal conflict and connections. Something profoundly ancient pervades this play, with the fall of a great house, songs like chanted choral odes, and violence mostly verbal or narrated secondhand. Riggs embeds the dialogue into a soundtrack of powwow drumming, folk music, and funda­ mentalist preaching, so it becomes a ritualistic exploration of tum-of-the-century Cherokee psychology, as the characters come to terms with history, race, and culture. As with any important dramatist, “It was interiority that interested him,” writes Jace Weaver in his foreword, “stories of flawed human beings and their relationship to place” (xii). Green Grow theLilacs has intermittently thrived as a community theater chestnut, but it is the other two plays in this collection, especially The Cherokee Night, that most deserve modem productions, whether on stage or screen. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. By Glen A. Love. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 224 pages, $49.50/$ 17.50. Reviewed by David Mazel Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado Glen Love’s pioneering essays on literature and the environment—many of which first appeared in the pages of Western American Literature—helped define and legitimize the field of ecocriticism. In this book, citing such figures as Steven Pinker, Joseph Carroll, and E. O. Wilson, Love urges ecocritics to ally themselves more closely with the biological sciences—particularly evolutionary psychology, which, in his view, can ground literary analysis in a genuinely scien­ tific understanding of human nature and thereby make ecocriticism consistent with the natural sciences. The potential of such an evolutionary approach is demonstrated through readings of pastoral works by Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, and Ernest Hemingway. Of special interest to readers of Western American Literature will be Love’s analysis of The Professor’s House, which focuses on Cather’s “treatment of human nature and embodied place” and thereby “reveals something of her keenly archetypal and place-centered imagination” (98). Central to this reading is “Tom Outland’s Story,” analyzed by Love as “a 4 6 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 particularly packed meditation on biological-cultural coevolution” (105). Practicing ecocritics will likely find this book’s readings of less interest than its vigorous intervention into the theoretical debate between the post­ modern “nature skeptics” and the scientifically grounded “nature endorsers.” Love concedes that “‘Nature’ is an abstraction” and that “we humans affect and interpret—‘construct’—our earthly environment, inevitably mediating to some degree—culturally and textually—between ourselves and the world” (26). But beyond that he has little use for nature skepticism, upon whose door­ step he lays any number of critical and environmental sins, from “disparag[ing] science” to aiding and abetting “the Wise Use movement favored by industry and development interests” (38). Because “the postmodernist skeptics hold that nature constantly changes, that it has changed to the point where there is nothing ‘natural’ left,” they must answer for the “spoken or unspoken con­ clusion,” namely, that “there is no reason to consider nature as anything but another venue for doing what we do: control it, change it, use it up. Thus, a cultural-constructionist position—in addition to ignoring biology—plays into the hands of the destroyers” (21). The confidence ofLove’s attack on nature skepticism stands in contrast to the hesitancy with which he sometimes...