What Is Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism: a Survey
Abstract
Ecocriticism is a literary critical branch emerging in the late 1970s attempted to explore the relationship between literature and environment. It attempts to reread major canonical literature by applying ecocentric and ecosystem related concepts to the same. The basic approach is to try to read literary works from the perspective of nature. It analyses human culture by positing it in comparison to the history of the natural world. The ecocritics are enthusiastically concerned over certain issues, such as: the role of the physical setting of a literary work; the metaphor of land or place; the connection between ecosystem and ecological literature. They prioritize the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists.

Yet we are hardly serious in perceiving the irreversible and impending doom to be brought about by a fatal ecological disorder. Apart from occasional buzz, no global and fitting response has emanated to counter the aggravated situation of environmental crisis. Despite our eco-social indifference the problems are many, ever-growing and aporetic: the discourse over the conflicting issues regarding climate change, pollution, global warming, over-population has become stale and exhausted in academia and equally futile and ineffective when it comes to offer any drastic resolution in the public domain. Yet we cannot gainsay that all these are the genuine outcome of man’s ironical tendency to possess and preside over the planet. We have taken so much liberty in ‘depth and destructiveness’ (Clark 1) that to become oblivious of our ‘roots of being in the earth’ (Fromm 35), the ecological balance is dangerously precarious. ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ (Barry Commoner’s phrase qtd. in Glotfelty xix), that is, they exist in ‘interdependence’ (ASLE web); if man inflicts painful alterations in the non-human world nature is sure to retaliate. Richard Llewellyn in How Green Was My Valley (1939) beautifully summarizes the extant of man’s rootedness to earth:
There is patience in the Earth to allow us to go into her, and dig, and hurt with tunnels and shafts, and if we put back the flesh we have torn from her and so make good what we have

. . she has a soreness and an anger . . . So she waits for us, and finding us, bears down, makes us part of her, flesh of her flesh, with our clay in place of the clap we thoughtlessly have smelled away. (445) Indeed, the falsity of man’s approach to nature, effected by exploitation, consumerism and capitalism and the notion of mindless progress, are at the base of all environmental hazards. Nature has given man liberal space, man misappropriated it; nature offered livelihood, man reduced it as mere resource; the earth asserted ‘interdependent community’ (Glotfelty xx), man wanted ‘dominion’ (Lynn White Jr’s term, qtd in Clark 1); the result is unbridgeable rupture and fractured bonding. The situation is made further antagonistic by modern science which at the sametime distances man from the outside world and disturbs the ‘pre-existing web of relations’ (143) in nature; Jane Bennet mourns this authoritative stance of human science: “. . . this pre-modern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism,