The Big Names in Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism is a theory still in diapers. It didn't officially get going until 1994 or so. Which means that most of the big players in Ecocriticism aren't actually literary critics (yet)—like Thoreau, they're just people who think a lot about the ways humans interact with nature.
And long before 1994, the world witnessed an eccentric cast of gnarly characters who wrote about how and why humans need to go green. So now we'll discuss some of those dudes and dudettes who've argued that we need to alter our relationship to nature, and the stories we tell about it.
Henry David Thoreau, king of the neck beard and all-around weirdo, is the designated grand pappy of Ecocriticism. Back in 1859 (which, if you haven't checked your calendar recently, came well before 1994), he wrote Walden, which describes living in a simply-built cabin, fishing, going on walks, raising and selling beans, and then not paying his taxes as an act of civil disobedience (to indicate his disapproval of the Mexican-American War and slavery).
Thoreau's work has inspired some of the world's most influential people, from John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, and even Gandhi. His humble, no-frills, "authentic" life has had a big impact on a lot of people all over the world. He was kind of like the world's first treehugger, you know?
Plus, when he hugged a tree in the forest, he made a lot of sounds (and wrote a lot of essays) about it. And people listened.
So, who was that John Muir guy anyway? Well, we like to think of him as the Forrest Gump of his day. He didn't run coast to coast, but he sure did walk from Wisconsin to Florida—yep, you read that right—and then all over California and into Yosemite Valley.
California was truly his box of chocolates, and he invited as many powerful people as he could to come be converted to his religion of wilderness-reverence and -conservation. His writings and public talks inspired the creation of the National Park System… as well as many family summer vacations and great American road trips forevermore.
The First Summer in the Sierra, published in 1911, has become a Bible for nature writers, vacationers, and hikers alike. Muir became a kind of Forest Monk, actually—teehee—you know, a preacher for Nature with a capital N and all those bi-pedal outdoor activities.
Some years later, a dude named Aldo Leopold came on the scene to impress us all with some different land-focused philosophies. See, he wanted a relationship with the land, and not just a one-night stand, but a serious relationship.
In 1949, Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac. In it, he developed the concept of the land ethic: the idea that you should treat the land as kindly as you'd treat Grandpa or your Aunt Suzie. Kind of sweet, when you think about it.
With Leopold's ideas, the land was no longer just some pretty thing to go tromping through with Mr. Muir, or to visit on weekends, or to write essays about with Sir Thoreau. The land became man's spouse, woman's ward; you gotta live with it and care for it, you hear?
After these white guys rule the nature-writing scene for a while, a female author soon steps into the spotlight. Enter Rachel Carson, who comes along in 1962. She points out that if we are in a human-like relationship with land, then it's an abusive relationship.
In Silent Spring, Carson exposes the damage being done to animals and the environment by dangerous pesticides. DDT, for example, has caused many bird species to lay eggs with thin, weak shells. So when the use of DDT was banned, you know who was largely responsible for that? You've got it: Miz Carson.
She's kind of a big deal. Truly, she was one of the first people to usher in the era of environmental activism. Her work has changed how humans view their relationship with natural systems, so as to make them a bit more... well… functional.
But before you start thinking "ugh, environmental writing is so nice, and nice is boring," let us introduce you to Edward Abbey. He's like the grumpy old man next door who's always yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. Wilderness takes center stage in his masterpiece Desert Solitaire, written in 1968. In it, Abbey gives people this no-punches-pulled advice: if you want to experience nature, just get off your butts and walk into it.
Getting out into the wild, he says, isn't about roads, shuttle buses, or the fossil fuels that tote overweight vacationers and their bratty kids to Yosemite every year. If you want real wilderness, you're going to have to work for it. Because of his heated language and anarchist tendencies, Abbey has been called the "Thoreau of the American West."
And yes: he, too, had a gnarly beard. Plus, he detested anthropocentrism, and much of his radical rhetoric has been incorporated into Ecocriticism—in addition to most other types of environmental activism.
Abbey's polar opposite just might be Lawrence Buell. (It's good to have an assortment of personalities in your movement, right?) Buell's a nice guy. He dresses well. He's Princeton educated, a Harvard professor, and clean-shaven to boot—the perfect dude for the budding environmentalist to take home to Mom and Dad.
You can think of Buell as one of the first true ecocritics. Wielding that weighty academic prowess, he took the ideas of nature writers from the previous hundred and fifty years and applied them to the analysis of language and literature. In 1996, he wrote the seminal work of the whole Ecocriticism shebang: The Environmental Imagination. And lit critics' imaginations ran wild.