Contemporary Ecofiction

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Contemporary ecofiction
jonathan levin
Ecofiction is an elastic term, capacious enough to accommodate a variety of

fictional works that address the relationship between natural settings and
the human communities that dwell within them. The term emerged soon
after ecology took hold as a popular scientific paradigm and a broad cultural
attitude in the 1960s and 1970s.1 Two key events helped spark this new environ-
mental awareness: the controversy surrounding proposed dams on the
Colorado River that led ultimately to the construction of the Glen Canyon
Dam (begun in the mid-1950s and completed about ten years later), and the
1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s exposé of the environmental
impact of toxic pesticides like DDT. Both generated widespread media cover-
age, bringing complex and urgent environmental issues and the ecological
vocabularies that helped explain them into the American lexicon. Variations
on these themes would thread their way through much writing about the
environment for the next half-century. Before these controversies, few
Americans thought about the unintended consequences of “progress” on the
environment and its inhabitants. This innocence would be seriously challenged
in the aftermath of Glen Canyon, Silent Spring, and the many environmental
crises and controversies that followed.2
The 1960s and 1970s also saw a growing awareness and acceptance of
the new tools being used by scientists, journalists, and others to understand
the natural world. Ecology, which had first emerged among naturalists in
the late nineteenth century, became the default framework through which
many people would view the natural world. Grounded in evolutionary
theory, ecology came to stand for the biological framework that foregrounds
the interrelations among plants, animals, soil and other landforms, and climate
that constitute and sustain any natural community.3 This vision became linked
to the growing concern for the fragility of particular ecologies. The “age of
ecology” was also sometimes characterized by a utopian idealism, often
associated with new forms of communal experience (especially during the
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counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s). Scientific ecologists

often struggled against this association, mostly unsuccessfully because of
the widespread sense that a better understanding of the interrelatedness
of all life on the planet should be linked to a new consciousness about
humans’ place in the cosmic scheme of things. Several enduring ecological
slogans entered the public consciousness around this time, such as “Think
globally, act locally” and Barry Commoner’s “Everything is connected to
everything else.”4 With their emphasis on the powerful impact of even
small or invisible actions as they are amplified along a chain of connections,
these slogans helped make the ecological framework accessible and persua-
sive to many.
Variously influenced by these trends, contemporary ecofiction can be
divided into three broad categories: wilderness narratives; stewardship nar-
ratives that weave together the linked fates of human communities and the
land; and postnatural narratives that reject both wilderness and the land as
dominant tropes or structural frameworks, turning instead to urban, sub-
urban, and other postmodern landscapes to explore the complex and ambigu-
ous ecological contexts of contemporary life. Wilderness narratives reflect
popular mainstream environmental traditions, especially in their most clas-
sically preservationist mode. Stewardship narratives highlight the interaction
of human communities and the land, reflecting environmentalist traditions
that underscore the imperative of responsible stewardship. Postnatural
narratives challenge most environmentalist frameworks. While authors in
this group still highlight environmental destruction, they don’t look to the
“natural” setting – whether wilderness, agrarian landscape, or balanced
ecological community – for relief from contemporary industrial or post-
industrial trends. Nature, for many of these writers, has lost its status as
pure and pristine. These late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writers
instead view “nature” as itself a kind of unnatural artifact, a hybrid of nature,
engineering, and the media that invariably shape our perception of what
passes as “natural.”5
James Dickey’s 1970 novel Deliverance, structured around the classic antag-
onism between urban and rural worlds, exemplifies the wilderness ethos. The
narrative centers on a wild river that runs through a barely accessible stretch
of Georgia wilderness now threatened with extinction by an impending
dam project. Four mildly bored urbanites are looking to experience some of
the last remaining wild land in the region, and the river and its surrounding
woods are depicted as potentially redemptive for them. Lewis – an experi-
enced outdoorsman and amateur survivalist – suggests that in the event of a
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total collapse of our human systems, he would move to the hills through
which they are about to canoe: “You could make a kind of life that wasn’t out
of touch with everything . . . Where you could hunt as you needed to, and
maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You’d die early, and you’d
suffer, and your children would suffer, but you’d be in touch.” Lewis’s dream
is a classic projection of the romantic imagination. He rejects the dehuma-
nizing hollowness at the core of modern life in favor of experience in an
uncorrupted and inaccessible natural setting, leading potentially to the kind of
rebirth hinted at in the novel’s title.
But if Deliverance is shaped by these urban/suburban male fantasies of an
alternative social reality grounded in land depicted as “unvisited and free,” it
is also haunted by the truly alien otherness of the nature the trekkers encou-
nter and the terrible human depredation Dickey associates with that nature.
Dickey conveys this theme in many ways, including descriptive passages of
animals (for example, an owl that perches on the narrator’s tent as it hunts
through the evening), the river (especially during several dangerous rapid
runs), and, most dramatically, the assault by two local natives who brutally
rape one of the narrator’s group and threaten to rape and kill the narrator
himself. On one level, this scene – probably best remembered for the raw,
dehumanizing line from the film adaptation, “Squeal like a pig”6– suggests
that beautiful, uncorrupted nature may harbor unimaginable horrors. On
another level, these very horrors catalyze the narrator’s own self-realization.
One of the original group of four is killed during the journey, and the three
survivors are pushed to their physical, mental, and moral limits. For Dickey’s
narrator, the intensity of the experience in nature actually leads to a para-
doxical transcendence of that nature. By the novel’s end, the dam has obli-
terated this natural setting, but it survives as a more intense reality in the
narrator’s imagination: “In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky,
deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.”
Deliverance is framed by an awareness that the wilderness is disappearing,
and with it the only kind of space that could support such self-discovery.
The novel does not offer much commentary on the natural or social costs of
the rampant development exemplified by the dam. Lyrical as his descriptions
of threatened nature are, Dickey focuses primarily on the narrator’s inner
journey. By contrast, Edward Abbey’s classic 1975 wilderness novel, The
Monkey Wrench Gang, offers sustained commentary on the shortsightedness
and greed that drive humans’ urge to develop the earth. The Monkey Wrench
Gang is among the best-known and most beloved works of American environ-
mental fiction, in part because the novel’s environmental politics are so openly
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radical.a The novel follows four characters, all of them occupying different
margins of society, as they set out to commit acts of eco-sabotage that will,
they hope, reverse the trend of large-scale development in the region. They
dream of destroying Glen Canyon Dam, which symbolizes for them the
terrible destruction wrought throughout the American Southwest in the
name of progress. The characters fix on Glen Canyon Dam because several
of them fondly remember the canyons before they were submerged by the
massive lake formed by the dam. Indeed, their evocations of this lost wilder-
ness occasion some of the most lyrical writing in the novel.
Abbey’s deep passion for the American Southwest wilderness suffuses The
Monkey Wrench Gang. Almost everyone in the novel other than its four lead
characters is depicted as insensitive to the extraordinary beauty and haunting
mystery of the landscape. Some are driven by simple greed (the land is treated
as a resource to be mined, harvested, or otherwise made profitable) and
some by a shallow appreciation for nature shaped by what Abbey elsewhere
calls “industrial tourism.”7 For the novel’s ragtag band of eco-saboteurs, the
remaining wilderness calls our entire industrial civilization into question.
They adopt extreme measures because they despise the extreme measures
that have transformed their beloved wilderness. Abbey’s wilderness also
becomes a proxy for the radical individualism that the novel presents as the
only antidote to the bland uniformity rampant in contemporary American
culture.
Abbey’s radical environmental activism is best captured by the irreverent,
often exaggerated style of the novel. The land itself is beautiful yet harsh and
uninviting. The efforts of business and government to profit from its beauty
by making it less demanding, more accessible, even more familiar for tourists
strike the novel’s principal characters as insulting and absurd, and inspire
in them a series of exaggerated and comic anti-authoritarian gestures, from
the burning down of billboards to the destruction of bulldozers, bridges, and
(at least in their fantasies) dams. The novel’s motto from Whitman, “Resist
much. Obey little,” encapsulates its spirit of anarchic resistance. By novel’s
end, the characters have not succeeded in much beyond delaying and making
more expensive the various projects that they sabotage. But the spirit of
resistance lives in them, and though all but one of them have been caught
and chastened, the concluding scene makes clear that they have not lost their
a For a related reading of The Monkey Wrench Gang, see Cecelia Tichi’s essay in this
volume, “Novels of civic protest,” chapter 23, 400, 403.
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fight (a suspicion borne out by Abbey’s posthumously published sequel,

Hayduke Lives! [1990]).
Abbey’s fiction offers an extended gloss on Thoreau’s dictum from his essay
“Walking” (1862), “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” The allure of
the wild, a direct legacy of the Romantic tradition, is a frequent theme in
American environmental fiction. For Wallace Stegner, the wilderness narra-
tive begins to shade into the stewardship narrative, especially as Stegner
documents the taming of the West in his 1971 saga, Angle of Repose. Deeply
committed to the preservation of wilderness, Stegner focuses on the essential
connection between the great western wilderness and the people drawn to
it. Unlike other wilderness writers, who value the immediacy and radical
autonomy made possible by the setting, Stegner’s narrator, like the author
himself, values history, relationship, and connectedness, all of which he
regards as crucial to the growth of the American West.b Telling the story
of a family’s experience of the West in the last half of the nineteenth
century, the novel focuses on Susan Burling Ward, born into a genteel
Hudson Valley family and married to an engineer who seeks his fortune
primarily among the mines of the American West. The novel is narrated by
Ward’s grandson, Lyman Ward, a disabled historian who has retired to the
family home in Grass Valley, California to write the story of his grand-
parents as they struggled to establish themselves in a variety of small
mining towns and other potential “boom” towns in California, Colorado,
Mexico, and Idaho.
Angle of Repose captures the paradox at the heart of Stegner’s writing about
wilderness and the West: “We were in subtle ways subdued by what we
conquered.” The novel’s real focus is not the massive engineering project
that the American West has become by the last half of the nineteenth
century, but rather the process of character-building that takes place in this
boom-and-bust setting. As Stegner comments in his 1960 “Wilderness Letter,”
“While we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless
environment-busters in history, and slashing and burning and cutting our
way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us.”8
The massive effort to conquer the wilderness ironically, and often tragically,
taught many the values associated with the very wilderness that such efforts
were designed to tame.
b For a comprehensive account of the idea of the frontier in American literature, including
Stegner’s novel, see Stephanie LeMenager’s essay in this volume, “Imagining the
frontier,” chapter 31, esp. 515 for Stegner.
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Susan Burling Ward, the narrator’s grandmother in Angle, comes west

loaded with the characteristic assumptions and preoccupations of a cultivated
Easterner. Susan throws herself into her Western adventure, alternately
encouraging and belittling her husband, pushing him toward his dream of
making it big out west and condemning him for failing to secure for her the
high-style Eastern comforts she dreamed of transplanting to the western
territories. Like her husband, Susan learns humility through their failures –
both as entrepreneurs and as companions – and like him, she learns to identify
with the enduring values of the land, values that infuse spiritual depth into lives
that might otherwise be stunted by their constant toil for material progress.
This humility, framed by what Susan describes as “the West’s bigness and
impersonality,” ultimately saves the couple and gets passed on to the narrator.
Lyman’s own humility is framed by his strong sense of how human conflict
has shaped the history of his beloved West. By contrast, Lyman’s young
assistant Shelley Rasmussen toys with a more fashionable brand of utopian
ecology, but Lyman will have none of such “soft-headedness” that “ignores
both history and human nature.” This leads him to the critical distinction
between “civilization and the wild life”: “I want a society that will protect
the wild life without confusing itself with it.” For Lyman Ward – and one
suspects for Stegner himself – the ecological visionaries of the 1960s and early
1970s lack all depth of experience. They are right about nature, but wrong
about the ways of the world.9
Although humankind may seek to mine wilderness for valuable miner-
als, harvest its trees for profit, or contain its waterways and their valleys for
irrigation, energy, and recreation, wilderness remains completely indiffer-
ent to human aims and desires, and this indifference is at the heart of its
appeal to so many writers in the wilderness tradition. Stegner belongs to
this tradition, but his emphasis on the rise of a new Western culture deeply
interconnected with the natural resources that supported the flourishing
of that culture also points toward the stewardship tradition. For many,
however, the idea of wilderness is antithetical to the notion of an appro-
priately balanced relationship between human communities and the land
that supports the survival of those communities.10 Native American writer
Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, regards the land and all its diverse life
forms as existing on a continuum with human communities and their
history. For Silko, there is no genuinely individual encounter with the
land, and the illusion of such an encounter is itself a sign of a diminished
sense of history, community, and ecological relatedness. Humankind has
forged its relationship to the land and its inhabitants over time, and that
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relationship is remembered and preserved through a series of rituals and

stories that not only remind us of that relationship, but serve to restore us
to it, both physically and spiritually.c
In Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony, the protagonist’s early mental suffering is
echoed by a drought in the land. Tayo has returned from the Second World
War with a severe mental depression related to the Pacific island battle that
led to the death of his beloved brother Rocky. Through Silko’s technique of
juxtaposing past and present, the novel’s narrative suggests that, at least in
Tayo’s mind, the present-time drought in the American Southwest is related
to Tayo’s having prayed and chanted for the rain to stop years earlier, in the
jungle during the war. Tayo has lost his sense of connectedness to the land
and to the stories and rituals that bind the community to that land. He recalls
a time when he and his brother climbed Bone Mesa and he “had felt that the
sky was near and that he could have touched it.” Stories mediated this belief:
“Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were
not barriers . . . [I]t depended on whether you knew the story of how others
before you had gone.” Tayo has lost faith in these stories and rituals, and the
main action of the novel serves to remind him of their abiding power.11
For Silko, language and narrative traditions act as repositories of informa-
tion and as instruments of ritual ceremony that form the basis of communal
identity.d Silko never depicts the land Tayo traverses as an inaccessible wilder-
ness but rather suggests that through words, stories, images, and rituals, Tayo
and his community are intimately linked to this land. Tayo recovers the family
cattle while rediscovering his physical and spiritual connection to a sacred
mountain of his people. He then confronts his antagonists, members of the
local Laguna community, at the symbolically weighty site of an abandoned
Cebolleta land grant uranium mine, one of several in New Mexico that
supported the development and deployment of the atomic bomb. By the
end of the novel, Tayo confirms and completes his ritual healing by telling his
story to the tribal elders, adding his to the collection of stories that together
constitute the web of relations linking the human community with the land.
c In his discussion elsewhere in this volume of Silko’s 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead,
Ramón Saldívar similarly observes that for Silko, “altering the social relations we
create . . . will also alter our relations to the physical surroundings within which we
live” (“The American borderlands novel,” chapter 62, 1040). Saldívar’s discussion of the
heterogeneity of the “borderlands novel” is helpful in understanding the contributions of
Native American writers to contemporary traditions of literary ecology.
d For more on the social and political contexts that influenced Ceremony, see Sean
Kicummah Teuton’s essay in this volume, “The Native American tradition,” chapter
67, 1115.
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A similar pattern is evident in Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s 1995 novel

Solar Storms. Here again, a character loses all sense of connectedness to the
land by spending time in the dominant culture. Set within the far northern
waterways linking Minnesota and Canada, Solar Storms turns on the implied
connection between the seventeen-year-old protagonist’s personal trauma –
her disfigurement and abandonment at a very young age by her mother – and
the impending disaster to the waterfront community that is the anticipated
result of dam projects further north in Canada. Having been raised in a series
of foster homes outside her community, Angel initially feels no relationship
to the land, its inhabitants, or even her own family. The journey north to fight
the construction of the dam is also a journey back into Angel’s family and
tribal past that builds her confidence in her own identity and ambitions.
Resistance to the dam construction is successful, but Angel and her compa-
nions learn upon their return home that other related dam projects threaten
their village – and their traditional way of life – with flooding. Despite this
threat, Angel has discovered her sense of self through her deep-rooted con-
nection to the land, its waterways, and the community made possible by
them: “we’d thrown an anchor into the future and followed the rope to the
end of it, to where we would dream new dreams, new medicines, and one
day, once again, remember the sacredness of every living thing.” The means
to imagine a better future is confirmed, thanks to the sense of restoration
Angel has experienced through the course of the novel.
Native American writers are of course not alone in emphasizing the
integration of community and shared traditions with effective and sustain-
able stewardship. Other ecologically minded novelists emphasize the inter-
relationship among people, their communities, and the traditions that link
them to the land. Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000) invokes both
local, rural wisdom and principles of scientific ecology to frame broad
ecological issues and underscore the often delicate interconnectedness of
plant and animal species and the human communities that live alongside
them. Kingsolver provides substantial discursive exposition of ecological
principles, presented by characters who embody competing environmental
perspectives. For example, in telling her curmudgeonly neighbor why she
prefers organic methods of controlling insects to the pesticides he generously
applies to his garden, Nannie Rawley offers a concise and informed critique
of the use of pesticides like Sevin, which will, as she explains, ultimately serve
to increase the population of the pests by killing their predators at the same
time. Similar expositions accompany discussions of catastrophic tree infesta-
tions and the sexual lives of moths.
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By putting characters with competing environmental agendas into conflict

with each other, Kingsolver reflects on the challenges and opportunities faced
by rural people addressing an array of pressing environmental problems.
One character resists the conventional wisdom about best farming practices
espoused by her deceased husband’s relatives and devises a clever if much-
ridiculed plan to raise goats for non-Christian religious holidays. This plan
turns out to be both profitable and sustainable. Kingsolver also depicts an
ongoing debate between a male hunter from out of state and a female forest
ranger about the value of protecting predator species (in this case, coyotes). As
the two become lovers, their debate becomes an extension of the novel’s
ongoing reflection on the relationship between individuals and the commun-
ities that sustain them – both animal and human. The novel closes by adopting
the perspectives of the human hunter and the hunted coyote, suggesting
that the supposed isolation of hunter and hunted is an illusion: “Solitude is a
human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a
tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to
prey, a beginning or an end.” For Kingsolver, this infinite web of relations
is likewise the basis of community. Good stewardship of the land is based on
a thorough understanding of the threads in that web, from the physiology of
mating to the ecology of a garden, a family farm, or a national forest.
In contrast to Kingsolver’s hopeful adaptations of rural traditions and
ecological science, Don DeLillo’s postnatural evocations of pervasive ecolo-
gical anxiety suggest a community at severe risk. In White Noise (1985), which
is structured around an environmental disaster ominously labeled by the
media an “airborne toxic event,” DeLillo is especially attentive to the ways
in which language and visual media shape our awareness of environmental
issues and crises. For most environmental writers, nature provides a founda-
tion or refuge against which to measure the failures of our social institutions
and new technologies. For DeLillo, that nature is no longer directly accessible.
DeLillo’s natural world is itself a product of these institutions and techno-
logies, and our relationship to it is wholly shaped by our ways of talking
about the world and representing it in visual and other media. Like the “most
photographed barn in America” that the protagonist Jack Gladney and his
colleague Murray visit early in the novel, nature is displaced by representa-
tions of nature.e
e For a discussion of White Noise in the context of postmodernism, see Ursula Heise’s essay
“Postmodern novels,” chapter 58 in this volume, esp. 977–978. Heise usefully distin-
guishes DeLillo’s postmodern juxtaposition of “satirical elements” with the largely
“realist fashion” of DeLillo’s literary style.
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The “airborne toxic event” in the novel, though very real in the threat it
poses, is ultimately just as elusive as the “most photographed barn in America.”
The event, caused by a train-car spill of Nyodene D., or Nyodene Derivative,
forces a nine-day evacuation of many of the homes in the town of Blacksmith,
including the Gladneys’. Information about Nyodene D. dribbles out, but that
information is inconsistent and the reader is never entirely sure whether to
trust it. At first the event is described as a “feathery plume,” then as a “black
billowing cloud,” then an “airborne toxic event,” and eventually a “cloud of
deadly chemicals.” Similarly, the symptoms associated with exposure change.
The episode reveals a robust culture of expectation associated with environ-
mental disaster. One family encountered during the evacuation is “wrapped
completely in plastic, a single large sheet of transparent polyethylene.” Jack
eventually finds some official-looking tables and discovers that they are staffed
by representatives from SIMUVAC, which he learns stands for “simulated
evacuation.” It turns out SIMUVAC has decided to use the real event “in
order to rehearse the simulation.” Later, Jack thinks to himself, “We’d become
part of the public stuff of media disaster.”
Like the most photographed barn in America, the toxic event itself
becomes inseparable from its representation by radio and television reports,
along with the people’s desire to be reported on. Deprived of the oppor-
tunity to be intruded on, evacuees worry that their disaster doesn’t stack
up to those that do merit intrusive coverage. The conventions of environ-
mental disaster have effectively displaced the disaster itself. DeLillo can
take these conventions for granted in part because they had achieved such
widespread recognition, primarily through the media DeLillo invokes, in
the decades since the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring. White Noise is less
a call to environmental protection than a reflection on the ways in which
our understanding of both the natural world and environmental disasters is
now mediated by familiar narrative and visual conventions. The novel is
not at odds with organized environmental action, but it does not offer any
clear basis or framework for such action, either. Oddly, DeLillo’s protagonist
maintains a powerful feeling for the beauty of nature, even if the nature he
describes is artificially enhanced by the same toxins that may be killing him.
Other postnatural writers maintain a sense of concern for the environment,
but avoid the convention of lyrical description as a means of generating
environmental sympathy. Carl Hiaasen’s Florida-based crime novels provide
a good example. In Sick Puppy (1999), Hiaasen addresses runaway development
in Florida, a product of what he presents as the unholy alliance of corrupt
business and government interests. Like most of Hiaasen’s fiction, Sick Puppy is
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steeped in the political maneuverings of Florida’s legislators, business people,

and the lobbyists who join them together.12 The novel is populated with
characters whose insensitivity to the natural beauty of Florida underwrites
the relentless development that has so transformed the Florida landscape.
An investor is seeking to develop largely pristine Toad Island and is working
to pass legislation that will support the construction of a new bridge, which
in turn will constitute the first step towards the luxury golf community he
hopes to build. Island residents who resist development present themselves
as Thoreau-quoting environmentalists, but as Hiaasen’s narrator notes, they
do so only to raise the value of their property in hopes of making more money
from the eventual development of the island. Even the well-meaning scientist
hired to conduct an environmental survey of the island is forced to confess
that the survey is not driven by high ideals but is rather designed to make “us
appear responsible and concerned . . . to make sure the developers don’t run
into a snail-darter type of crisis.”13 As these examples suggest, Hiaasen finds
corruption at every point along the political spectrum. Though the bridge to
Toad Island is not built and the island remains undeveloped, Hiaasen includes
neither extended lyrical descriptions of the place nor any impassioned argu-
ments for its protection. The environmentalism that characterizes both the
main character,Twilly Spree (who takes it upon himself to confront, some-
times violently, every litterer he encounters on the highway), and the former
governor Clinton Tyree – a recurring character in Hiaasen’s novels – resembles
that of Abbey’s Hayduke of The Monkey Wrench Gang: a series of exaggerated
anti-authoritarian gestures aimed at the stupidity and greed that can think only
of turning such unspoiled nature to profit. Spree and Tyree, however, have
precious little left to protect: in Hiaasen’s postnatural Florida landscape, the
forces of development have proven hard to resist.
Moving far beyond Hiaasen’s familiar atmosphere of big-time real-estate
development, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson projects a possible
future in a world beset by climate change – induced by global warming – in
his “Science in the Capitol” trilogy (2004–2007). Most of the series is set in
Washington, DC, allowing Robinson to invoke familiar national landmarks to
underscore the extraordinary nature of the flooding unleashed in the disaster.
The series does include several interludes in classically “natural” settings: for
example, an urban park, seemingly returning, after the flood, to its premodern
condition; a Southeast Asian island-state that sinks due to the rising ocean
levels; and the drought-damaged Sierra mountains where several characters
go hiking. Even these scenes, however, underscore the extent to which nature
as we currently know it no longer exists.14
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Despite the devastation wrought by rising ocean levels and increased and
intensified storm activity, Robinson remains surprisingly sanguine about the
earth’s future. Unlike radical environmentalists who suggest that technology
and the worldview that supports it lie at the heart of our contemporary envi-
ronmental crisis, Robinson is committed to the idea that scientifically informed
ingenuity combined with a passion for the earth and its diverse inhabitants will
generate new solutions to human-generated climate change. This faith in the
human imagination hardly mitigates the destruction described throughout the
series, but it does point the way toward a more sustainable future. In a surprising
gesture toward the origins of a major line of thinking about nature in the United
States, Emerson and Thoreau emerge in the final volume as visionary influen-
ces. The series ends with the suggestion that while scientific ingenuity cannot
reverse the considerable damage already done, it can nevertheless propose new
strategies of adaptation.
This promise of a better future is fairly constant in American ecofiction,
though it is typically grounded in the return to relatively pristine places and
the traditions that encouraged either the preservation of untamed wilderness
or the stewardship of land respectfully adapted to human use. In Robinson’s
decidedly postnatural vision, the promise of a better future is less a function
of a nature that exists apart from human ends than of a nature that includes
the scientific and technological ingenuity that are sometimes regarded as the
cause of our alienation from nature. This recognition is perhaps best exem-
plified by DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), which highlights the link between the
booming post-World War II American economy and the waste that economic
engine generates. Underworld repeatedly invokes garbage, recycling, and the
art of turning late twentieth-century American junk into quasi-sacred objects.
Adopting an almost religious tone, DeLillo compares the massive Fresh Kills
landfill on Staten Island to the Great Pyramids of Giza.f DeLillo would seem
to be at once appalled by the extraordinary waste generated by contempo-
rary American society while still moved by the combination of technical
ingenuity and spiritual creativity applied to the problem. As the narrator
observes late in the novel, “Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the
redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard.” The reverence for
waste in DeLillo’s novels turns on the recognition that our excessive
consumption is fueled by a kind of quasi-spiritual seeking: a yearning for
f For a differently inflected reading of DeLillo’s fiction in a religious context, focusing on

DeLillo’s use of ritual language, see Amy Hungerford’s essay in this volume, “Religion
and the twentieth-century American novel,” chapter 44, 740–741.
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connection with family, friends, community, and with whatever higher

power is otherwise felt to be absent in our postmodern condition.
DeLillo and other postnatural writers significantly challenge the ecofiction
that celebrates nature, wilderness, or the sacred bonds between humans and
the land. The postnaturalists suggest that there is no such nature left to
celebrate. But they are not for this reason without hope about the human
future on the earth, since they recognize that without a model of pristine
nature to preserve or protect, humans must exercise their technical ingenuity
with even greater care and foresight. If this attitude leaves little basis for the
traditional forms of environmental activism, which have typically relied on
the idea of untainted nature to preserve, it nevertheless preserves the sense
that humans must bear responsibility for the damage they inflict on the environ-
ment. And clearly, this responsibility still begins in the sense of reverence and
wonder before the natural world, whether that world is regarded as a wilder-
ness, a farm, or a more elaborately engineered hybrid, like the coastal cities
that Robinson imagines will inevitably utilize all manner of ingenuity to stave
off rising ocean levels or the ingenious mountains of garbage described with
such awe by DeLillo.
Notes
1. For a concise overview of the history of the American environmental movement,
see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement,
1962–1992 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green
Fire: The American Environmental Movement (1993; Washington, DC: Island Press,
2003). Also of particular interest for the advanced reader with an interest in the
unfolding history of environmental science is Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown,
eds., Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentary (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991).
2. On Carson’s Silent Spring, see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature:
A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),
79–82. On Glen Canyon and other related dam projects, see Donald Worster, The
Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135–41, and Susan Zakin, Coyotes and
Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (1993; New York: Penguin,
1995), 135–185.
3. On the controversies surrounding scientific ecology, as well as on the critical
disputes among ecologists, see Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology:
Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4. “Think globally, act locally” is usually attributed to René Dubos, from a report
prepared by Dubos and Barbara Ward for the 1972 United Nations Conference on
1134

the Human Environment, “Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a
Small Planet.” The phrase is also sometimes attributed to others, including
David Brower, who has been credited with having used it in founding Friends
of the Earth in 1969. Barry Commoner’s slogan is from the first of his four laws
of ecology, first presented in The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology
(New York: Knopf, 1971).
5. Cynthia Deitering uses the term “postnatural” in her essay “The Postnatural
Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s,” in The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996). In developing the link between toxic con-
sciousness and the postnatural condition, Deitering cites Frederic Jameson’s 1984
essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left
Review 146 (July–August 1984): 59–92, and Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End
of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). Also influential in any formulation
of postnatural hybrids like those described here is Donna Haraway,“A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century,” published in her 1991 volume Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
6. Deliverance, DVD, directed by John Boorman (1972; Burbank, CA: Warner
Home Video, 2004).
7. See Edward Abbey, “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” in
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968; New York: Touchstone, 1990),
39–59.
8. Wallace Stegner, “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” in The Norton Book of Nature
Writing, ed. Robert Finch and John Elder (1990; New York: Norton, 2002), 516,
515. The letter was written to David. E. Pesonen, who was working on the
“wilderness portion” of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission
report.
9. Stegner’s emphatic insistence on the role of history in shaping nature anticipates
the important work of environmental historian William Cronon, especially in
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991). In his
essay in this volume, Timothy Sweet offers a useful history of the ways in which
depictions of the land in American fiction reflect the shifting social and cultural
preoccupations and anxieties out of which that fiction was written. Sweet
observes that in the novel’s narrative structure “lay the capacity to understand
any landscape as an embodiment of human history” (“American land, American
landscape, American novels,” chapter 5, 99).
10. There is a rich literature on wilderness and the idea of wilderness. See especially
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th edn. (1967; New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2001); Max Oelschlaegger, The Idea of Wilderness:
From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
and William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground:
Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996).
Also important to this history are Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American
1135

jonathan levin
West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950) and
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
11. Silko elsewhere describes the role of storytelling and other forms of visual and
oral culture in delineating “the complexities of the relationship which human
beings must maintain with the surrounding natural world if they hope to survive
in this place.” See Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo
Imagination,” in Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, 264–275.
12. Dana Phillips offers a suggestive reading of Hiaasen’s 1987 novel set in the world
of professional sport fishing, Double Whammy, in his essay “Is Nature Necessary?”
in Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, pp. 204–217. For a fascinating and
challenging account of contemporary ecocritical practice, see also Phillips’s The
Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
13. After the snail-darter, a tiny fish found only in Alabama and Tennessee, was listed
as an endangered species, the Supreme Court ruled that construction on the
Tellico Dam in Tennessee be halted. The dam was, however, eventually built,
thanks to congressional legislation exempting the project from the Endangered
Species Act and thereby allowing the dam’s completion.
14. There is an extensive literature on greenhouse gas emissions, their relationship
to climate change, and the current and potential impact of that climate change.
Two influential accounts are McKibben, The End of Nature and Elizabeth
Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2006).
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68

Ecoﬁction is an elastic term, capacious enough to accommodate a variety of

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counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s). Scientiﬁc ecologists

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

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ﬁght (a suspicion borne out by Abbey’s posthumously published sequel,

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Susan Burling Ward, the narrator’s grandmother in Angle, comes west

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relationship is remembered and preserved through a series of rituals and

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A similar pattern is evident in Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s 1995 novel

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By putting characters with competing environmental agendas into conﬂict

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

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steeped in the political maneuverings of Florida’s legislators, business people,

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f For a differently inflected reading of DeLillo’s fiction in a religious context, focusing on

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connection with family, friends, community, and with whatever higher

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

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