Literary Latitude

Reading a literary text through the lens of Environmental Humanities is not a single, uniform act but a layered, interdisciplinary process that draws simultaneously from ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, material feminism, posthumanism, and the environmental sciences to illuminate how literature encodes, contests, and reshapes humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The Environmental Humanities, as a field, refuses to treat nature as a static backdrop to human action and insists, following the foundational arguments of Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination (1995) and later in The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), that texts are not merely representations of nature but active participants in the cultural construction and, crucially, the destruction of ecosystems. Buell proposed four criteria for what constitutes an “environmental text”: whether the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence suggesting that human history is implicated in natural history; whether human interest is not treated as the only legitimate interest; whether human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation; and whether the text registers some sense of the environment as process rather than constant or given. These criteria, though refined and contested by subsequent scholarship, remain a productive starting point for the first step of any Environmental Humanities reading, which is to identify the ontological status of the nonhuman within the text.

The first step in constructing a rigorous Environmental Humanities reading, therefore, is what one might call the process of ecological situating, which requires the reader to historicise the text not merely in its social or political context but in its material and ecological one. Cheryll Glotfelty, in her programmatic introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), co-edited with Harold Fromm, defined ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” a deceptively simple formulation that nonetheless opens onto enormous complexity. To ecologically situate a text is to ask: in what biome (a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna) or ecosystem does the text’s world exist; what historical moment of ecological transformation does it inhabit; and what dominant ideologies of land use, species hierarchy, and resource extraction shaped the moment of the text’s production. Amitav Ghosh’s extended meditation in The Great Derangement: Climate and the Unthinkable (2016) is instructive here, as he argues that the realist novel as a form is complicit in the very epistemic (relating to knowledge and its construction) frameworks that have made the climate crisis difficult to narrate and imagine, because the novel’s privileging of the individual human subject and its preference for the probable over the catastrophic have systematically excluded the geological and climatic scale at which environmental crisis operates. Reading a text ecologically, then, is also reading its formal choices as ideological choices about what nature can be.

The second step involves the systematic interrogation of the nature-culture binary (the philosophical and cultural division that separates “nature” as a realm of the nonhuman from “culture” as the exclusively human domain), which Kate Soper in What Is Nature? (1995) identified as one of the most consequential and most ideologically loaded distinctions in Western thought. Almost every significant strand of Environmental Humanities scholarship converges on this binary as the foundational problem. Val Plumwood, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and later in Environmental Culture (2002), argued with great persuasiveness that the logic of dualism, which she traced through rationalism, anthropocentrism (the view that human beings are the central or most significant species), androcentrism (male-centredness), and colonialism, is structured by the same hierarchical oppositional logic, so that the domination of nature, of women, and of colonised peoples are not separate phenomena but expressions of a single master logic. A reader trained in Environmental Humanities will therefore look carefully at how a text mobilises or disrupts dualisms: human/animal, civilisation/wilderness, culture/nature, reason/instinct, active/passive. In a canonical text such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), for instance, the notorious conflation of African landscape with moral darkness, and the rendering of the Congo River as a space of primordial, non-human otherness, enacts precisely the ideological work that Plumwood and, later, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010) have identified as constitutive of colonial environmental discourse: nature is rendered savage, feminine, and available for appropriation, in a gesture that simultaneously legitimises imperial extraction and enforces the nature-culture hierarchy.

The third step, closely related, involves a careful reading of place and landscape, attentive to what Ursula Heise in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) calls the tension between the “eco-local” (attachment to a specific, bounded locale or bioregion) and the “eco-cosmopolitan” (a planetary environmental awareness). The concept of bioregionalism (a political, cultural, and ecological framework that aligns human communities with the geographical and ecological boundaries of their bioregion rather than with arbitrary political ones) has been central to ecocriticism since Peter Berg popularised it in the 1970s, and a close reading of landscape in a literary text must attend to whether the text’s geographical imagination is rooted, deterritorialised, or deliberately planetary in scale. Glen A. Love’s Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (2003) made the important argument that human beings’ evolved biological relationship to particular kinds of environments, what E. O. Wilson (the biologist and naturalist) called “biophilia” (the innate human affinity for other living systems), is registered in literary texts at levels that exceed authorial intention, so that the landscape of a novel or poem may be read as encoding deep evolutionary orientations to place, shelter, water, and habitat. In reading for place, the Environmental Humanities reader asks: how does this text spatialise the relationship between human communities and their environments; whose land is it; what histories of displacement, enclosure, or ecological violence have produced the landscape as it appears; and does the text register or suppress those histories?

The fourth step requires the reader to apply what Rob Nixon, in his landmark Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), theorised as the problem of “slow violence”, violence that is gradual, dispersed in time, and therefore largely invisible to media spectacle and dominant cultural representation. Nixon’s argument, enormously influential across Environmental Humanities, is that environmental degradation, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, chemical contamination, climate change, operates through a temporality (the relation to time) that is fundamentally incompatible with the temporal logic of narrative crisis, which demands dramatic immediacy and visible spectacle. Reading for slow violence means attending to what a text does not or cannot show, to the gradual, cumulative, and racialised forms of environmental harm that are systematically underrepresented in literary culture, and to the formal strategies, the “environmentalism of the poor,” the vernacular knowledges of marginalised communities, through which such violence might nonetheless be made legible. Nixon’s framework, which is deeply informed by postcolonial theory as well as environmental justice advocacy, insists that the reader historicise environmental harm within structures of global capitalism and racial inequity, so that the Environmental Humanities reading cannot be politically innocent.

The fifth step draws upon material ecocriticism (an approach that combines the insights of new materialism, the philosophical position that matter is active, self-organising, and vibrant, with literary and cultural analysis of the environment) and the concept of “transcorporeality” developed by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). Alaimo argues that human bodies are not bounded, sovereign entities cleanly separate from the environment but are perpetually inter-penetrated by flows of toxins, chemicals, nutrients, microbes, and other material agencies that cross the supposed border between body and world. Transcorporeality, then, names the condition in which “the human is always already interchanging with the environment,” a condition that has profound consequences for how literary texts represent subjectivity, disease, sexuality, and embodiment. A reader employing this framework will ask how a text figures the permeability of bodies to their environments, how toxicity or contamination unsettles the nature-culture divide, and how the text’s language of interiority and exteriority might register the ongoing material traffic between the human body and its ecological surround. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, in their edited volume Material Ecocriticism (2014), extended this framework by proposing that matter itself is “storied”, that landscapes, soils, waters, and bodies carry and express histories that literary reading must learn to decipher, and this notion of “storied matter” represents a significant methodological advance for Environmental Humanities reading practice.

The sixth step involves posthumanist reading (posthumanism is the theoretical position that critiques and decentralises the liberal humanist subject, the rational, autonomous, bounded human individual, as the primary unit of meaning, agency, and ethical concern), which draws significantly on the work of Donna Haraway. In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and more fully in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway developed what she calls “thinking-with” multispecies others (organisms of other species encountered as genuine partners in thought and world-making rather than mere objects), insisting that the human is constituted through its entanglements with other species rather than prior to or independent of them. The posthumanist reader of literary texts will therefore attend to how animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and other nonhuman organisms are represented: are they granted interiority, agency, or desire; are they treated as ends in themselves or as instruments of human narrative; and does the text’s grammar and syntax, its very linguistic structure, reinforce the primacy of the human subject over the nonhuman object? Timothy Morton’s influential theorisation, in Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010), of what he calls “the mesh” (the radical interconnectedness of all living and nonhuman things, in which no entity is truly isolated or self-sufficient) and “dark ecology” (an ecological thinking that refuses consoling, harmonious, or aesthetically beautiful conceptions of nature and instead confronts the uncanny, strange, and disruptive aspects of ecological interconnection) pushed posthumanist ecocriticism in a more philosophically radical and formally disruptive direction, challenging the reader to resist pastoral idealisation (the literary mode that projects human desires for harmony, simplicity, and refuge onto the natural world) and to confront instead the indifferent, entangled, and fundamentally “weird” character of ecological existence.

The seventh step is the frame of the Anthropocene (the proposed new geological epoch defined by the extent to which human activity has become the dominant force shaping Earth’s geology, climate, and biosphere), which has become one of the most contested and productive concepts in contemporary Environmental Humanities. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his epoch-defining essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (published in Critical Inquiry in 2009), argued that climate change forces a fundamental rupture in the methodology of history and of humanistic inquiry more broadly, because it collapses the Enlightenment distinction between natural history (operating on deep geological time) and human history (operating on the scale of centuries and decades), and because it transforms the human species itself, for the first time, into a geological agent. For the literary reader, the Anthropocene frame raises the question of what temporal scales and what nonhuman agents a text can accommodate: can it think on the scale of deep time; can it represent species as agents; and can it register the feedback loops and tipping points (thresholds beyond which environmental systems shift irreversibly) that characterise the current ecological emergency? Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) offers a remarkable model of multispecies Anthropocene thinking through its ethnographic and ecological meditation on the matsutake mushroom, and its concept of “collaborative survival” in the ruins of capitalist modernity has important implications for literary reading: it suggests attending to the forms of human-nonhuman entanglement and improvisation that persist in damaged landscapes.

The eighth and final step in this framework is the application of postcolonial ecocriticism (an approach that synthesises postcolonial theory, the critical analysis of the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, with ecocriticism, attending specifically to how colonial and neo-colonial power relations structure the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms), which Huggan and Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010) have done much to consolidate as a distinct sub-field. Mukherjee’s argument that environmental writing from the formerly colonised world is inseparable from the political economies of extraction, monoculture, plantation, and dispossession that colonialism installed, and from the epistemic violence (the destruction of indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems and ways of relating to the natural world) that accompanied it, demands that the Environmental Humanities reader situate every literary text within the global and historical structures of power that determine whose environments are protected, whose are exploited, and whose ecological knowledges are recognised as legitimate. Ramachandra Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History (2000) demonstrated that environmentalism itself is not a universal movement but is shaped by highly particular configurations of class, nation, and empire, and this lesson must inform the reader’s approach to how a text constructs the figure of the environmentalist, the indigenous land protector, or the ecological refugee. Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018), published by Cambridge University Press, demonstrated with great sophistication how African literary texts engage the problem of ecological violence not as a deviation from a harmonious natural order but as the continuation of colonial and extractive regimes into the postcolonial present, offering a model of politically grounded Environmental Humanities reading that refuses both primitivism (the colonial fantasy that non-Western peoples are “closer to nature”) and liberal environmentalism’s tendency to bracket the political economy of environmental harm.

What this framework, taken as a whole, demands of the reader is a radically relational mode of attention, one that refuses to separate the aesthetic from the ecological, the formal from the political, or the human from the more-than-human. The Environmental Humanities reading does not reduce literary texts to environmental documents or to moral arguments about conservation, but recognises that the formal choices of literature, its metaphors, its genres, its temporal structures, its figurations of agency and voice, are themselves sites at which the human-nature relationship is negotiated, contested, and potentially reimagined. Scott Slovic’s work, particularly his editing of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, has consistently advocated for an ecocritical practice that is both rigorously attentive to literary form and open to the affective, experiential, and political dimensions of environmental writing, and this dual attentiveness, to the literary and to the ecological, to the aesthetic and to the ethical, is the hallmark of the Environmental Humanities as both a scholarly field and a reading practice.

References:

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination (1995)

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005)

Glotfelty, Cheryll. The Ecocriticism Reader (1996)

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate and the Unthinkable (2016)

Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? (1995)

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993)

Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture (2002)

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1899)

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010)

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008)

Love, Glen A.. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (2003)

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010)

Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. Material Ecocriticism (2014)

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto (2003)

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature (2007)

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought (2010)

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (published in Critical Inquiry in 2009)

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015)

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010)

Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History (2000)

Iheka, Cajetan. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018)

Slovic, Scott (ed). ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (journal)