First Wave Ecocriticism In Literature

For years, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing. Greenhouse gases, increasing levels of carbon dioxide and air pollution, clearing of rain forests and increasing number of dams have caused remarkable changes in climate. Especially, 1980s witnessed abrupt rising of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, in the following years, the effects could be seen directly: strong floods and droughts, loss of biodiversity and extinction of some species. The first examples of climate change novels were written in 1980s. However, as Robert Macfarlane pointed out in his article in the Guardian in 2005, novelists were late to the issue,

There is nothing like this intensity of literary engagement with climate change. Climate change still exists principally as what Ballard has called ‘invisible literature’: that is, the data buried in ‘company reports specialist journals, technical manuals, newsletters, market research reports, important memoranda.’ It exists as paper trail, as data stream. It also exists, of course, as journalism, as conversation, and as behavior. But it does not yet, with a few exceptions, exist as art. Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the

For a better understanding of waves of ecocriticism, I turn to Lawrance Buell. In his article, “The Future of Environmental Criticism” (2005), Lawrence Buell states that “first-wave” ecocriticism emerged as a reaction against the structuralist and poststructuralist movement which was dominant in 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Structuralism supported that language creates reality, however, first-wave ecocritics believed that there is a natural world beyond the language. That’s why, representations of nature in texts such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) show the importance of natural world which exists beyond the