Chief Seattle

The term ecocriticism was first used by William Rueckert in his essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism in 1978. Here he focuses on the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature. Yet the term remained obscure until the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s namely: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Formm, and Lawrence Buell’s The Environment Imagination. Cheryll defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings as awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-cantered approach to literary studies.” Thus it studies literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view.

It takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artefacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on earth; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman. Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Glotfelty then goes on to specify some of the questions ecocritics ask, rang...

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...s the Authorities for disturbing Nature’s balance by cutting forests and killing wild animals in order to build big cities. These days we speak of living with Nature and the need to maintain a natural balance almost as though these were ideas. The truth is that in bygone days humans did know how to utilize the wealth of the earth without destroying the earth itself. Nothing illustrates this fact better than this letter. It is unfortunate that the lesson has still not been learnt yet. Chief’s letter can be read as a plea of an environmentalist and we can have hope for a better future.

Works Cited

Contemporary English: An Anthology for Udergraduates-1, Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2011,pp 109

Garrad Greg, Ecocriticism, Routledge, New York, 2004

Goltfelty Cheryll, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Georgia University Press, USA, xix, 1995