K Rigby

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknowledge that an understanding of the environmental crisis must include insights from the humanities and social sciences. In order to realize this potential, scholars in the environmental humanities need to map the common ground on which close interdisciplinary cooperation will be possible. This essay takes up this task with regard to two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour, namely ecocriticism and environmental history. After outlining an ideal of slow scholarship which cultivates thinking across different spatiotemporal scales and seeks to sustain meaningful public debate, the essay argues that both ecocriticism and environmental history are concerned with practices of environing: each studies the material and symbolic transformations by which “the environment” is configured as a space for human action. Three areas of research are singled out as offering promising models for cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental history: eco-historicism, environmental justice, and new materialism. Bringing the fruits of such efforts to a wider audience will require environmental humanities scholars to experiment with new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

Women and Nature Revisited: Ecofeminist Reconfigurations of an Old Association

The term ecofeminisme is said to have been first coined in 1974 by radical French feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne. Identifying the underlying cause for the twin crises of overpopulation and overproduction—somewhat reductively—in the age-old patriarchal domination of women, d’Eaubonne called upon feminists to wed their cause to that of the environment and lead the way into a postpatriarchal, genuinely ‘humanist’, and ecologically sustainable future (d’Eaubonne, Le Feminisme ou la mort, Pierre Horay, 1974: 213–252). Since the publication of Le Feminisme ou Le Mort the connections between the position of women and the fate of the earth have been explored in a number of theoretical directions and arenas of action. As the three books under discussion here amply demonstrate (Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment, Routledge, 1996; Mellor, Feminism and Ecology, Polity Press, 1997; Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Zed Books, 1997), by the mid-1990s, ecofeminism had truly come of age, both as a theoretically sophisticated form of critique and as a global movement of resistance and renovation, linking struggles against environmental degradation with the endeavour to overcome social domination, above all on the basis of sex/gender, but also increasingly in terms of ‘race’ and class.

Ecstatic dwelling: perspectives on place in European Romanticism

In retracing the “fate of place” in the history of Western thought, Edward Casey spares few words for the Romantics. Of the German Naturphilosophen he observes only that in their preoccupation with diachronic processes of development, “they neglected to pay any careful attention at all to how the body relates to space,” and hence to place. While there is certainly some truth in this assessment, the reconceptualization of nature as a dynamic, self-generative unity-in-diversity, of which humans were integrally a part, effected by Romantic natural philosophy did in fact imply a recognition of the formative role of place, as well as time, in conditioning human existence. An appreciation of the power of place to affect human sensibilities and dispositions, which follows from this philosophical reanimation of nature and renaturalization of humanity, can also be traced in the literature of the Romantic period. In this regard, European Romanticism can be seen to have prefigured the insights of those late twentiethcentury phenomenologists of place who are concerned with the ways in which, as Jeffrey Malpas has put it, “our relation to landscape and environment is [...] one of our own affectivity as much as of our ability to effect.” At the same time, moreover, many Romantic writers were well aware also of the place of power in conditioning human relationships with the natural environment: then, as now, if not perhaps in quite the same terms, the rethinking of the oikos was necessarily entangled with the concerns of the polis. If, in the wake of a century marked to an unprecedented degree by the dislocation of people and the transformation of the physical environment, we now talk of “topophilia,” “getting back into place,” “bioregionalism,” and “reinhabitation,” it is surely because any unselfconscious connection that we might once have had with a particular dwelling place has been lost. For the Romantics, too, the rediscovery of place arose from the experience of dislocation, largely in connection with the modernization of agriculture and the beginnings of industrialization at home, and colonial expansion and the slave trade abroad. In responding to these unsettling processes, the Romantic take on place was nonetheless by no means homogeneous or unequivocal. My discussion of Romantic perspectives on place begins with a discussion of John Clare’s invocation of the notion of an indwelling genius loci as a voice of protest against the despoliation of his own dwelling place as a result of the enclosure of formerly common land. Yet

Mines aren’t really like that: German Romantic undergrounds revisited

Drawing on contemporary reconceptualizations of materiality as a site of more-than-human mindfulness, meaning, and moral salience, this chapter brings a material ecocritical perspective to bear on the celebration of caverns, mines, and mining in Novalis’s unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While the German Romantic romance with mining has sometimes been seen as complicit with the emergent extractive economy of industrial modernity, I argue that it is also possible to exhume from Novalis’ literary underground an ecophilosophical ethos of human responsibility for more-than-human flourishing that answers to the socio-ecological exigencies of the present, in which “letting be” is no longer adequate.

Book Review: Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference:

nations and then in the global South, and the consequences of globalization. The strength of these sections is that the authors consistently connect women’s subordinate economic status in the Western countries to the economic conditions surrounding women in the global South. Barker and Feiner conclude with a feminist economic agenda that addresses issues relating to fairness, quality of life, economic security, wastefulness, and the meaning of work. They call for an understanding of economy that promotes these goals and invite states to play an active role in creating the conditions for inclusive and fair economic systems. Liberating Economics returns to terrain long familiar to feminists around the globe and its greatest strength is that it invites us to think again about economics, work and globalization. In a very obvious way, the authors demystify both national and international economics and isolate the gender/race bias that exists in the current systems. They provide new schemata for understanding economics and suggest alternative ways of attributing value to women’s unpaid and paid work. Another virtue of the book is that it systematically demonstrates the connexions between gender, race and economics, as well as between the global North and South. However, I found myself partly unsatisfied with the solution recommended by the authors who place the states at the heart of the development of equality. In my view, even the most ‘women-friendly’ states have failed in challenging the current economic systems: at best they have reduced inequalities, but not resolved them. I was also hoping to read more about the other ‘disappearing values’, such as the natural environment, and although the authors do mention these issues in their concluding chapter they do not develop them. This book is, all in all, a welcome addition to critical feminist literature on mainstream economics and it will be of interest to all who want to develop an alternative, socially progressive understanding of economy.