Concepts & Examples
Main Issues:
Negative consequences -the degradation of soil, air and water, the loss of biodiversity, global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, rising human population and consumption levels,
Capitalism:
Consumption -- Eating animals;
Production - subordinate humans and the earthExcept otherwise noted, the following notes are mainly based on the article
"Ecocriticism," by Kate Rigby in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002: 151-78.Nature vs. Culture
Nature's relationship with humans and religions
Ecological approach vs. poststructuralist approach
Nature-god-humans - language
The relationship between nature and culture is not one way. . . . Culture constructs the prism from which we know nature. We begin to internalize this prism from the moment we learn to speak; . . .
Nature . . . is indeed a cultural and, above all, a linguistic construct. The physical reality of air, water, fire, rock, plants, animals, soils ecosystems, solar systems etc., to which I speak of 'the natural world,' nonetheless precedes and exceeds whatever words might say about it. It is this insistence on the ultimate precedence of nature vis-a-vis culture, which signals the ecocritical move beyond the so-called 'linguistic turn' perpetuated within structuralism and poststructuralism. For some ecocritics, this precedence extends to a consideration of the ways in which human languages, cultures and textual constructs are themselves conditioned by the natural environment.( p.154)Nature vs. Culture
It might be countered that at a time when there is allegedly no place on earth that has not been affected in some way by humanity's alteration of the natural environment, the precedence of nature has now become questionable. It is, however, precisely the imperilment of the biosphere wrought by that alteration which impels the ecocritical reinstatement of the referent as a matter of legitimate concern.
. . . All human making, including the largely unintentional remaking (or rather, undoing) of the earth's ecosystems, remains dependent upon physical processes which precede and exceed human knowledge and power. All human being, meanwhile, remains interwoven, albeit often invisibly, with the life of countless non-human beings, who continue as best they can to pursue their own ends in the midst of an increasingly anthropocentric environment.
