Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World by Christine L. Marran (review)

Though ecocriticism seems to thrive on contemplating the nature–culture relationship, it was only since the opening of the new century that it has begun to interrogate the long-standing ontological divide between Nature and Culture in human imagination of the world and in literature in particular. Christine L. Marran’s new publication Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World joins in the dialogue opened up by, for instance, Donna Haraway’s concept of “natureculture,” Elizabeth Grosz’s view of nature as the matter of the cultural, and Timothy Morton’s proposal for a really deep ecology without the idea of Nature. It also responds to material ecocriticism in general for the whole trend is basically an attempt to disrupt the nature– culture division. It is plausible, I think, to view Ecology without Culture as part of “the four wave of ecocriticism which recognizes material agencies in a universe of things by rebutting the centrality of humanism that underestimates the nonhuman others” (Tsai 273).

As Marran admits in the introduction, and as the book’s title shows, she was having Morton’s Ecology without Nature more than any other works in her mind when trying to sum up her general position in terms of nature–culture relationship. While Morton holds that the chief stumbling block to ecological thinking is the image of nature, Marran insists that it is the image of culture. But rather than forming contrastive views, which the two books’ titles seem to suggest, they actually agree with each other more than disagree. Both attack cultural humanism’s attempt to maintain “the rift between humanity and everything else” (Marran 5) or “the habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves” (Morton 64). Both hold on to the basic tenet of environmental justice, as both emphasize the need of acknowledging otherness and that of establishing new affinities among humans, animals, and their environment. But the two might differ in their view of culture, particularly what counts as “a properly ecological form of culture” (Marran 3). Morton’s celebration of certain indigenous cultures for their practice of animism, which, unlike nature worship, is seen to be “much closer to ecology without nature than conventional eco-criticism” (180), could have been criticized by Marran for being a kind of romanticization, or a form of “cultural exceptionalism” (Marran 6). Besides, drawing on Timothy Clark and Claire Jean Kim’s insights into the complex workings of culture to reduce environmental injustice to merely racial and ethnic prejudices, Marran is explicitly critical of the “single-optic vision” taken in some cultural and justice claims, and proposed a “multi-optic vision” for ecological justice that must include the other-than-humans (Marran 4–5).

The undeniable contribution made by Ecology without Culture to eco-criticism lies in its innovative investigation into the ways that readings of the material world in literature or culture in general, including ecocritical readings, insist on treating it as mere representation of ethnos and anthropos, and into the attempts made in literature to release the material world from the burden of making cultural claims. Marran coins the term “ethnic environmentalism” for one of these claims made in Japan, which “attempts to solve environmental problems through the suggestive force of ethnic belonging and ethnic histories without addressing capitalist modernity” (13). To Marran, the problem with this kind of claim lies in its presupposed connection between the old communal values of the premodern society and an environmentally sustainable way of life, as well as in hinted dichotomies between the West and the Rest, inside and outside, us and them, and so on. Ethnic environmentalism like this is obviously ethnic or national community-oriented more than environment-oriented. Biotropes, a concept introduced by Marran, are often tools of making claims of ethnic environmentalism. In Marran’s view, biotropes such as amber waves of grain, cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, and the whale pack all carry with them such heavy loads of cultural and political significance that the...