Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
There's really just one debate in Ecocriticism today. It centers around this question: What is nature? But what does this philosophical-sounding debate have to do with the study of literature?
Well, well, well, Shmoopers. Today's ecocritic will tell you that how you define nature will determine how you understand it. And, therefore, how you write about it. But that's not all. The implications of defining the bounds of nature are more far-reaching than that.
How a society thinks and writes about the natural world very much molds how people treat the environment. What their relationships are to it—like, are we the parents of this great globe? Is Mother Nature really our mother? Are we supposed to simply serve as stewards of this incredible set of ecosystems?
These are tough questions, because how we define ourselves in relation to nature lays the foundation for how we want to define ourselves in general. Like, a civilization thinks Nature = God will look vastly different from one that thinks Nature = humanity's victim.
And as you might have noticed, there's a heavy dosage of environmental activism in this style of literary analysis, no matter how we answer these questions. So grab your hiking shoes and your most reliable compasses, kiddos; things just might get a little rowdy.
"What is nature?" Answer A: Nature is God.
God, American, and Monday are all capitalized in English. Why? The answer isn't so simple as "because our English teacher tells us so."
No, we capitalize certain nouns because we want to emphasize them. To make them seem more important than just any old, not-"proper noun." So when some Ecocritics want to write nature with a capital N, well—in many ways, they're equating the Natural world with Godliness.
Sometimes, even, with God himself. Or herself. Or itself. You get the picture.
The American Transcendentalists were a bunch of white dudes (no, really, most of them were white dudes) that wrote about nature and self-cultivation. Ecocritics would later link these spiritual and societal philosophies to textual analysis. But we mention this all because the ATs are famous for deifying Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that Nature helped guys like him get away from corrupt human society and grow closer to God. Romantic Literature treated Nature in much the same way. In that tradition, Nature is God, and people are small and insignificant and only mess things up.
Look what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, say the authors of Romantic Literature. (Actually Eve was the one who really screwed it all up, but that's a whole other story that Ecofeminism addresses. We'll get to that later.)
Even John Muir, that famous "Go West, Young Son" nature-writer and instigator-of-the-National-Parks-System, believed that Yosemite was a type of church. Every cliff was a cathedral, every cloud a choir of angels, every flower a prayer.
But many Ecocritics and environmentalists oppose the idolization (and idealization) of the natural world. Why? Lots of reasons. For one, the science of trees and birds and all o' that is often far richer than what's implied by this human-desire-centric view of nature. Nature's got a lot of its own purposes, you know—it's not just around to serve as our guiding light.
But what are those purposes? And if Nature is so high-and-mighty, how come it's so fallible? How are us humans even able to muck it up so badly? Debates surrounding these questions rage on today. And they're interesting to us because they raise fundamental questions about the human condition.
If you think about it, the choice to position nature as our God or as our ward says a lot about who we are.
"What is nature?" Answer B: Nature is a victim.
Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold uncovered all the ways men and women are disconnected from nature. And how that lack of intimacy between us and our environment leads people to abuse the bejesus out of nature.
In the same vein as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Carson's Silent Spring and Leopold's A Sand County Almanac both show how literature can be a tool to critique the harmful practices of human society—only the latter two works focus on the brokenness of the human-nature relationship.
And so these writers pushed back against the idea of nature as a pristine religious experience (I will bless you, tiny human, with my awesome rainbow) by emphasizing how nature is a victim of our horrible practices.
Instead of being there for man to worship, nature is there to be abused. And now that nature can't take it anymore, humans have got to step in and save it. Weird relationship, right? (I abuse you, then I save you. I abuse you, then I save you.)
In addition to being yet another site for reflection on the fundamental nature of humans, this element of the great "What is nature?" debate raises a lot of questions about how invasive our "green," nature-savin' practices should be. Are we supposed to arrange our lives so as to impact the natural world less? Or do we have to get out there and plant some trees?
"What is nature?" Answer C: Nature is a wild place for people to discover themselves.
You want enlightenment in your life, kid? Then you gotta get out of the city. Our resident Eco-curmudgeon, Edward Abbey, barked loudly about how awful human habitats are. According to him, people are corrupt, and we corrupt the world we live in.
So, he believed that true nature is only found out in the wilderness, and that traveling into said wilderness was the only way we can discover who we truly are, Transcendentalist-style.
The wild wilderness adventures of the British and American male have been well-catalogued in The Canon—consider Moby-Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, and Heart of Darkness. In each of these tales, a man gets out of Dodge, discovers himself, conquers death (or not), has profound visions (or not), and returns to society changed. He then shares the secrets of the universe with his poor and limited society (or not).
Or these guys just continue to make themselves rich and only return to wilderness on expensive vacations. "Spoken ideal" and "lived practice" can be different things.
In any case, this Eco-school-of-thought positions Nature not as God, exactly, but as a place to discover God in one's self. Some people think that's a pretty self-centered and anthropocentric notion. Some people think it's pretty rad. You decide.
"What is nature?" Answer D: Literally everything.
Unlike prior thinkers, the newest ecocritics like to argue that there's as much nature in a National Park as there is in a shopping mall. Say what? Ecocritics like Lawrence Buell, Serpil Oppermann and Dana Phillips are now actively moving away from the debate over what is "natural" and what is "unnatural" or man-made.
These guys and gal think human habitats can get pretty wild—anybody been to New York City lately? So cities can be counted as wildernesses. And there's little nature out there that's truly untouched by human hands at this point. Except a lot of the ocean bottom.
So while today's ecocritics love them some Abbey and Muir and Thoreau, they think that in order to move environmental thought forward, we have to embrace action that cleans up our cities, too.
And we know how you like the "All of the above" answer on multiple-choice tests, anyway, Shmoopers. And that's basically what those ecocritics are saying these days. Not A or B or C, but: all of the above… and more.
As it turns out, the answer to that "What is nature?" debate might not be an answer it all—it might be a new set of questions. Like, you know, most important mysteries of literature and human behavior. Go figure.