There is not a single trace of ecocritical interest in my personal statement. My first-year essays were all focused on human behaviour, prosody or narratology. I even hated hiking as a little girl (which hasn’t changed) and if I’m quite honest, I still struggle to touch grass. However, it was an unexpected interest in Irish mythology that sharpened my eye to the depictions of nature and ecosystems in the literature I engage with every week. Trust, that is a lot of literature to dissect doing English at Oxford.
First of all, why must one be bothered with ecocriticism?
I find Timothy Clark an accessible entry into this approach. In The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, he characterises this field of study as liberated from the concept that language is ‘a self-enclosed system of cultural projections’ (p. 47). In other worlds, this field of study moves beyond the ‘narrow standard’ of ‘human consciousness’ and encourages a broader openness to ‘indicators, signs and communications’ of the natural world (pp. 53-4). I appreciate that this may sound abstract, too removed from our material reality, but I would like to draw your attention to his point that our societal projections onto nature, through politics for instance, gives our environment a cultural meaning that veils its intrinsic, nonhuman, apolitical importance – a projection that should not be unchallenged considering the close ties politics and culture have woven into nature.
Indeed, as he reminds us in The Value of Ecocriticism, literature can expose the immediate danger ‘oppressive systems […] and forms of social organization’ pose to ecosystems besides humans (p. 3). He argues that this recognition on behalf of readers, is beneficial if it leads to a reconsideration of the valuation of nature that is not so ‘contaminated’ by ‘deeply inherited modes of thinking and reading’ which involve, or encourage, destruction for human gain (pp. 14-5). Personally, I do share his concern over our troubling tendency to project, and get violent while doing so.
Andrew Marvell drew up a picture I am all too familiar with; the exploitative male gaze figuring Nature as the female body – a figure to be conquered, of course. In his satirical poem, The Last Instructions to a Painter, he describes the victorious Dutch navy officer, Michiel de Ruyter seeing the ‘naked’ England, ‘crystal streams and banks so green,’ a vision that ‘swells his old veins with fresh blood, fresh delight’ (ll. 525-32). As peculiar of a reaction as it may be, sexualisation of landscape need not be restricted to enemies of the English. H. Rider Haggard filled his King Solomon’s Mines with exoticized, racialised, and of course gendered imagery that he similarly projected onto South African landscapes. An awareness of such figurative language does of course, in turn, help to explore and articulate various forms of trauma resulting from conquest and forceful sexualisation women (especially women of colour from colonised lands) have experienced, and still experience today.
From another point of view, religious ideas may also bypass ecocentrism. I found it disturbing how John Milton’s Eden in his Paradise Lost is completely organised and sustained by God and introduces predation only after the Original Sin. Paradise, to begin with was, ‘by [God] in the east / Of Eden planted’ (ll. 4. 209-10) and its ecosystems relied solely on God’s order. As Satan quests through Paradise, Milton makes a point that he was not captured by the landscape, resembling the ‘fair field / Of Enna’ (ll. 4. 268-9) but pursued ‘two far nobler shape(s) erect and tall, / Godlike erect’ (ll. 4. 288-89) – Adam and Eve. Firstly, Milton completely distances human responsibility from the sustenance and protection of ecosystems and biodiversity, thus reinforcing the superiority of his human subjects.
Firstly, this brings to mind the – often unquestioned – privileging of human ambition and perceived sovereignty over the limited natural resources we have available. In a 2024 article of The Times, Mark Sellman and Adam Vaughan collaborated to explicate the effects of excessive water consumption of AI companies, as well as a consequent ‘clash between the government’s desire to use the [data] centres to drive economic growth and locals’ concerns about the environmental impact’ in Santiago, Chile. Finite natural resources that depend on intricate workings of nonhuman ecosystems cannot be subservient to restless human ambition without consequences – and I fear there is no guarantee that authorities will respond to such consequences. We cannot depend on a higher power supplying an endless abundance of Nature as Milton’s God has done in Paradise.
Additionally, as I suggested above, Adam was dismayed to see that ‘Beast now with beast gan war, and fowl with fowl / And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, / Devoured each other’ (10. 710-12). In Milton’s texts specifically (I wish not to generalise all Christian writers and readers – Paradise Lost was published in 1668 after all), predation is clearly not ordained by God, the moral compass the poem (largely) hinges on. Though less to do with politics and economics, this notion clearly condemns the violence of predation; although, for the record, Milton did not mind that when it happened in Ireland – he incited the violence if anything (refer to his Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels where he encouraged Oliver Cromwell’s reconquest of Ireland). However, the 2020s supply us with an alternative, nonhuman, ecocentric example contradicting Milton’s anthropocentric bias: Christine Peterson offers a detailed account of Yellowstone, where the reintroduction of the apex predator, grey wolves, saved the disrupted ecosystem.
Naturally, neither Marvell, nor Milton possess the authority they used to, but even today governments, communities, and individuals struggle appreciating not only the environment for its beauties, but also its limits. A nice contrast to this bias is Manchán Magan’s Listen to the Land Speak and his further books tracing etymologies, folklore, and climate change in Africa, Asia, Australia and Ireland. Furthermore, The Blindboy Podcast explores entertaining, informative, and accessible ecocentric readings of Irish mythology along with contemporary insights into biodiversity and climate change.
I am not a scientist, nor a politician, but I do believe transgressing our biases starts with the media we consume. Either way, the purpose of this article has been to outline an approach, a potential area of interest, an alternative way of engaging with subjects not strictly linked to the field of ecology, and I hope some of you found a bit of courage to branch outside of the box.