Why Eco-Criticism?
A brief explanation and defense of Eco-Criticism as an approach to literary studies in the English classroom
Eco-criticism is a school of literary theory that aims to foster an awareness of how individuals and communities are influenced by the environment and how they in turn also influence the environment. A central goal of eco-criticism is to examine the ways that literature communicates the values that animate this relationship.
Literary studies may not seem to be a likely area for discussions of environmental ideas, but literature is actually well-suited to discussions on the ways in which environment is conceptualized.
Writers and professors like Corey Lee Lewis have made this point convincingly, arguing that in addressing climate change “[t]he role of humanities […] is crucial because the social attitudes and religious beliefs of a people are recorded and represented most exhaustively and accurately in their literature” (Reading the Trail 37).
The humanities are uniquely situated to do the work of helping students develop what David Orr calls “ecological competence” wherein they are capable of recognizing not only how their communities and identities are shaped by the environment but also of seeing their own role in shaping the environment.
Seen in this light, the English classroom offers a key opportunity to succeed where, as Lewis puts it, “environmental education often fails to achieve its goal of reeducating students with regard to their relationship to the natural environment because its scientific focus neglects important issues of environmental values, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, aesthetics and ethics” (37).
Analyzing literature is always a way of analyzing the culture’s ideology. We just don’t always look specifically at how the environment fits into that ideology. But maybe we should.
Points of Comparison
While at first blush eco-criticism may appear to be an overly programmatic mode of analyzing texts, it is not very different than other established and popular schools of critical theory such as postcolonial theory and feminist critical theory. The essential goals and practices are the same. By applying an intentional lens to discussions of a given text, the theory treats the text as an opportunity to investigate values, biases, and cultural beliefs presented in literature. The text becomes a zone of discourse that is directly connected to questions of how we conceptualize women in our society in the case of feminist critical theory and pursues the implications of that conceptualization. For eco-criticism, the text becomes a zone of discussion for ways that we conceptualize the environment.
Eco-criticism is similar to these other politically-inflected critical schools in another way as well. There is a hope in eco-criticism to affect behavior by generating a critical consciousness regarding our conceptualizations of the environment. This hope is aimed particularly at students. If eco-criticism is applied in the classroom, the thinking goes, students may attain a specific awareness of their own relationship to the landscape and the ecology of the world around them.
Scholars have pointed to the imperative nature of much our environmental discourse (Zapf), acknowledging the tendency to attach ecological ideas to second person verb phrases (Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.). So there is reason to be cautious of uncritical moralizing, however well-meaning, when we invite students to engage in eco-criticism in the English classroom. To avoid this outcome and to also steer clear of generating artificial/superficial readings of literary texts, one sensible approach is to target an area of environmental thinking that presupposes the political and ecological mandates that form our discourse on climate change — the relationship between environment and identity.
For instructors interested in putting some of these ideas into action, I’ve created some classroom materials applying eco-criticism and directly engaging students in the complex debates around climate change.
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