Scholars working in the field of ecocriticism in American literary studies have come to see that their most important task in the coming years is to take up and engage the cultural productions of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictional and nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Currently, the forebearers of ecocriticism?" the study of literature as if the environment mattered"(Mazel 1)? seem to be an unassailable who's who of American nature writing: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. To this pantheon I here would like to add a couple unlikely characters? WEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. For as Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster rightly point out, it now behooves literary critics to" question... why so few African American voices are recognized as part of nature writing and ecocriticism"(2). To ignore African Amer? ican voices is to risk the field's ultimate demise, as Paul Tidwell argues:

In short, ecocriticism was founded on a too limited canon of writings based on too narrow a definition of nature writing... Ecocritics who continue to resist or reject African American concepts as foreign to their concerns risk a hardening of their developing discourse into a reactionary and racist defense of an essentialized idea of nature.(" The Blackness of the Whale")