Bridging the Great Divide: Ecocritical Theory and the Great Unwashed

Abstract

Bridging the Great Divide:Ecocritical Theory and the Great Unwashed Simon C. Estok (bio) For all of our good words, good works, and best intentions, what ecocritical scholars value seems radically at odds with what policy-makers seem to value, and we've got to wonder at some point if we are really making a whit of difference. We realize the relative value of ourselves as scholars when a person like George W. Bush can have such a potentially devastating effect on the environment by pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto Accord and, despite repeated rejections from the U.S. Senate, announcing in early February 2004 that he will pressure the U.S. Congress to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife refuge to drilling by oil companies. Moreover, we realize that if ecocriticism is to have any effect outside of the narrow confines of academia, then it must not only define itself but also address the issue of values in ways that connect meaningfully with the non-academic world. In terms of theory, it is going to have to stop running and hiding for fear of being rendered hopeless as a political engine. [End Page 197] Since 1996, ecocriticism has burgeoned into a huge discipline with many practitioners and followers. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) began in 1992 in the U.S. under the founding principle of inclusivity, and the association has since expanded to include branches in the UK, Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. Canada, too, recently joined the club with its version of ASLE called ALECC (The Association for Literature, the Environment, and Culture in Canada / Association pour la littérature, l'environnement, et la culture au Canada). Embracing inclusivity, ASLE seeks all possible connections, as does ecocriticism, so much so, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to tell where ecocriticism ends and nature studies begins. However, the two disciplines do differ in their commitment to praxis. As I have stated elsewhere (see my "Report Card"), ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, first by its ethical stance of commitment to the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections. Ecocriticism may be many other things besides, but it is always at least these two. Like the feminist criticism with which it is often allied, ecocriticism maintains an ethical commitment that also implies a commitment to praxis and to direct effects upon the material world. Unlike feminist criticism, however, ecocriticism has not been adequately theorized; as Lawrence Buell claimed in 1999, "ecocriticism still lacks a paradigm-inaugurating statement like Edward Said's Orientalism (for colonial discourse studies) or Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (for new historicism)" ("Letter" 1091). While Buell sees this as a potential strength, perhaps what we might call the strategic intangibility that defined and bolstered ecocriticism's inclusivity principle in the late 1990s is counterproductive now and actually threatens to undo ecocriticism. We still seem to be in this phase of strategic intangibility, and perhaps it is time to get beyond it. Possibly one way of doing this is by drawing some distinctions between feminist ecocriticism and ecofeminism and by resisting wholesale inclusion under the sign of ecocriticism. One of the dangers, of course, is that we will start "spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy" (Tallmadge et al. xv) or that we will fall under a spell of "mesmerization by literary theory" (Buell, Environmental Imagination 111). Canada, despite lacking a long ASLE history, has been especially prolific in the area of a clearly feminist ecocriticism, with women such as Pamela Banting, Catriona Sandilands, and Diana Relke perhaps its best representatives. Still, even among the foremost scholars in the field, whether [End Page 198] American or Canadian, though there is a clearly implied intuitive recognition of Ynestra King's claim that "the hatred of women and the hatred of nature are intimately connected and mutually reinforcing" ("Toward" 118), there is little theoretical distinction between ecofeminism and feminist ecocriticism; yet, the two fields each have a very different focus. Granting that there are ecofeminisms and ecocriticisms, we might venture some broad...