From: Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2004.

It is generally agreed that modern environmentalism begins with 'A Fable for Tomorrow', in
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962).

Carson's fairy tale opens with the words, 'There was once a town in the heart of America
where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings' and, invoking the ancient
tradition of the pastoral, goes on to paint a picture of 'prosperous farms', 'green fields', foxes
barking in the hills, silent deer, ferns and wildflowers, 'countless birds' and trout lying in
clear, cold streams, all delighted in by those who pass through the town (1999:21).

Concentrating on images of natural beauty and emphasising the 'harmony' of humanity and
nature that 'once' existed, the fable at first presents us with a picture of essential
changelessness, which human activity scarcely disturbs, and which the annual round of
seasons only reinforces. However, pastoral peace rapidly gives way to catastrophic
destruction:

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the
community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died.
Everywhere was a shadow of death.

In the ensuing paragraphs, every element of the rural idyll is torn apart by some agent of
change, the mystery of which is emphasised by the use of both natural and supernatural
terminology of 'malady' and 'spell'.

The most impassioned passage concerns the collapse in bird populations: 'On the mornings
that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and
scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods
and marsh'.

The 'silent spring' of the title alludes, on one level, to this loss of birdsong, although it also
comes to function as a synecdoche for a more general environmental apocalypse.

So, the founding text of modern environmentalism not only begins with a decidedly poetic
parable, but also relies on the literary genres of pastoral and apocalypse, pre-existing ways of
imagining the place of humans in nature that may be traced back to such sources as Genesis
and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible.
Silent Spring initially suggests that the mythical eco-catastrophe of the fable might be
supernatural, and emphasises this by including an epigram from Keats' poem 'La Belle Dame
Sans Merci', in which the magical power of a beautiful woman blights the environment: 'The
sedge is wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing.' But then the fable concludes: 'No
witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world.

The people had done it themselves.' The rest of the book sets out to prove that such an
apocalypse was already going on in a fragmentary way all over America, so that the doom
befalling this mythical town of the future could be seen as a composite of lesser tragedies
already known, and scientifically validated, in 1962.

The real culprits, according to Carson, were the new organic pesticides such as DDT, aldrin
and dieldrin that had been introduced after the Second World War and had already proven
highly successful in controlling pest insects.

Silent Spring marshalled an impressive array of scientific evidence to show that this very
success constituted a serious threat both to wildlife and to human health, confronting the
utopian claims of agricultural scientists on their own ground.

Carson's scientific claims have since been largely confirmed (although there is still no
evidence that DDT is harmful to humans), leading to increased public awareness of pesticide
pollution, firmer state regulation and development of less persistent agricultural chemicals.

Environmentalist claims like these make crucial contributions to modern politics and culture,
and many of us respond to them to some degree, yet for the student of the humanities they can
be difficult to assess on their own terms.

Academia has been organised into relatively autonomous 'disciplines' and scientific problems
seem to require scientific expertise.

Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategies, use of pastoral and apocalyptic imagery and literary
allusions with which Carson shapes her scientific material may well be amenable to a more
'literary' or 'cultural' analysis. Such analysis is what we will call 'ecocriticism'. […]
Let us look, then, at some provisional definitions of the subject. The first is from the
'Introduction' to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), an important anthology of American
ecocriticism:

What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the
physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious
perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading
of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies. (Glotfelty 1996: xix)

Glotfelty goes on to specify some of the questions ecocritics ask, ranging from 'How is nature
represented in this sonnet?' through 'How has the concept of wilderness changed over time?'
to 'How is science itself open to literary analysis?' and finally 'What cross-fertilization is
possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as
history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?'

Ecocriticism is, then, an avowedly political mode of analysis, as the comparison with
feminism and Marxism suggests. Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a
'green' moral and political agenda.

In this respect, ecocriticism is closely related to environmentally oriented developments in

philosophy and political theory.

Developing the insights of earlier critical movements, ecofeminists, social ecologists and
environmental justice advocates seek a synthesis of environmental and social concerns.

It is worth noting also that the questions posed by ecocriticism in Glotfelty's account follow a
clear trajectory: the first question, for example, is very narrow and literary, tending to favour
the student of Romantic verse.

Thus, two of the most important works of ecocriticism in the 1990s were studies of
Wordsworth and Shelley (Bate 1991 and Kroeber 1994).

The questions grow in scope as the list continues, with several of the later ones suggesting
gargantuan interdisciplinary studies such as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995).
Richard Kerridge's definition in the mainly British Writing the Environment (1998) suggests,
like Glotfelty's, a broad cultural ecocriticism:

The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a
debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all,
ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to
environmental crisis. (1998:5)

We will have reason to question the monolithic conception of 'environmental crisis' implied
here, and perhaps to resist the evaluation of 'texts and ideas' against a seemingly secure
ecological yardstick: both as a science and as a socio-political movement, 'ecology' itself is
shifting and contested.

However, the emphasis on the moral and political orientation of the ecocritic and the broad
specification of the field of study are essential.

From the point of view of academics, ecocriticism is dominated by the Association for the
Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), a professional association that started in
America but now has significant branches in the UK and Japan.

It organises regular conferences and publishes a journal that includes literary analysis,
creative writing and articles on environmental education and activism.

Many early works of ecocriticism were characterised by an exclusive interest in Romantic

poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, but in the last few years ASLE has turned
towards a more general cultural ecocriticism, with studies of popular scientific writing, film,
TV, art, architecture and other cultural artefacts such as theme parks, zoos and shopping
malls.

As ecocritics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to analyse and

criticise the world in which we live, attention is increasingly given to the broad range of
cultural processes and products in which, and through which, the complex negotiations of
nature and culture take place.

Indeed, the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism is the study of the relationship of
the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical
analysis of the term 'human' itself. […]
Ecocriticism is unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories because of its
close relationship with the science of ecology.

Ecocritics may not be qualified to contribute to debates about problems in ecology, but they
must nevertheless transgress disciplinary boundaries and develop their own 'ecological
literacy' as far as possible. […]

It may seem obvious that ecological problems are scientific problems rather than objects of
cultural analysis.

Indeed, when Silent Spring was published the agro-chemical industry reacted by criticising
the book for its literary qualities, which, they implied, could not coexist with the appropriate
scientific rigour.

Would we not be recapitulating the propaganda published by the pesticide producers if we

read Carson's book using literary-critical tools? John Passmore has proposed a distinction that
may help to negotiate the problem.

'Problems in ecology', he maintains, are properly scientific issues, to be resolved by the

formulation and testing of hypotheses in ecological experiments, while 'ecological problems'
are 'features of our society, arising out of our dealings with nature, from which we should like
to free ourselves, and which we do not regard as inevitable consequences of what is good in
that society' (1974:44).

To describe something as an ecological problem is to make a normative claim about how we

would wish things to be, and while this arises out of the claims of ecological scientists, it is
not defined by them.

A 'weed' is not a kind of plant, only the wrong kind in the wrong place.

Eliminating weeds is obviously a 'problem in gardening', but defining weeds in the first place
requires a cultural, not horticultural, analysis.

Likewise 'pollution' is an ecological problem because it does not name a substance or class of
substances, but rather represents an implicit normative claim that too much of something is
present in the environment, usually in the wrong place.
Carson had to investigate a problem in ecology, with the help of wildlife biologists and
environmental toxicologists, in order to show that DDT was present in the environment in
amounts toxic to wildlife, but Silent Spring undertook cultural not scientific work when it
strove to argue the moral case that it ought not to be.

The great achievement of the book was to turn a (scientific) problem in ecology into a widely
perceived ecological problem that was then contested politically, legally and in the media and
popular culture.

Thus ecocriticism cannot contribute much to debates about problems in ecology, but it can
help to define, explore and even resolve ecological problems in this wider sense.