Chapter 20 - The future of ecocriticism

Summary

Since it emerged as a self-conscious movement in the 1990s, ecocriticism has transformed itself from a relatively minor body of work characterised mainly by a close relationship to environmental non-fiction, into a plural school with practitioners across the world, both vastly extending its scope and reconsidering its basic concepts.

Looking over the body of environmental literary criticism as a whole, it is still hard to see any specific ‘ecocritical’ method emerging. Instead, the issues are taking the more challenging form of a general uncertainty and revision of intellectual boundaries. The limitations as well as the excitement of ecocritical work to date may reflect the fact that environmental questions are not just a matter of aesthetics, politics, poetics or ethics, but can affect certain ground rules as to what these things mean. Who would have thought, even recently, that flicking off a light switch could become part of a new virtue ethic?

Above all, the crucial term nature is being questioned in some senses and reaffirmed in others. Nature and the natural cannot now convincingly function as self-validating norms underwriting a romantic, anti-modern politics or as the self-evidently desirable other of the artificial or the cultural. Instead, environmental criticism is increasingly coming to affirm a more explicitly amoral ‘nature’, in the sense of the wild, physis, coyote, that which is not a matter of human control or calculation.