Eco-criticism and Biological science

In preparing to write the introduction to my Species in Print book, I finally checked out Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology and the Environment, the book by my emeritus colleague Glen Love, which came out in 2003.

Glen makes a strong case for why literary scholars should study and respect the work of natural scientists. I take that to heart, but I was turned off by much of the argument he uses to advance it.
Love, like others, cites the lecture and book from the 1960s by C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, which foretold an institutional and methodological split in the university, between humanists and scientists. Unlike others, however, he interprets the lecture as chiding the humanists for not respecting the scientists' values of evidence, hypothesis, experiment, and truth. And Love reprimands other literary scholars for their absorption in post-modern theory, which he claims is solipsisitic and subjective, and denies the existence of nature and wilderness. I'm accustomed to the polemic in eco-criticism between this anti-theory camp, which emerged in the 1990s when the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment was founded, and post-structuralist theory still carried high prestige in literary acedemia. But the polemic is stale now, and suffers from ad hominem attacks and sloppy arguments. One recent exchange in the pages of ISLE, the journal of ASLE, featured S. K. Robisch's exhortation: “Let’s reconfigure our departments toward acknowledgement of the biosphere so passionately denied by the Slavoj Zˇizˇeks of the world who have barely ever stepped from a sidewalk.”

The first problem with Love's chapter on "Ecocriticism and Science" is that he lumps together post-structuralist theory with post-modernism in general, and then extends his animus to the environmental historians who have called attention to the socially-constructed status of "nature" and questioned the definition and heritage influence of "wilderness" in American culture. The influential essay collection Uncommon Ground edited by William Cronon and published in 1995 is accused of a "nature constructionist stance" that plays into the interests of "postmodernist skeptics" who want to destroy natural resources such as tropical rainforests (21-22). The volume has a number of fine essays from various disciplines and viewpoints, and so those lines really surprised me.

The second problem is that Love goes in for sociobiology and literary Darwinism so enthusiastically, and fails to question the assumptions and arguments of this movement. He even condemns Stephen Jay Gould over the use of the phrase "Just-so Stories" to describe the kind of reductionist arguments that sociobiology enjoys so much. To use the phrase taken from Rudyard Kipling's fiction is to imply that the explanations of, to use one common example, why humans like open savanna environments, is to dangerous question the truth of the scientist's views!

One line caught my eye: "the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said: 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution'" (51). Well, my project aims to show that biology, or natural history as it was more often called back then, certainly did make sense to its practitioners and readers prior to Dawin's theory of evolution. And eco-critics have much to learn from it.

Species in Print


[Gordon M. Sayre is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon]

My new research project, which I have been pursuing during my sabbatical research leave in Spring, Summer, and Fall 2015, is about species and biodiversity in natural history. This will be the basis for a graduate seminar I will offer at the UO in Spring term 2016, contributing to Oregon's nationally known program in literature and environment.


I've written drafts of several parts of this project for talks at conferences and symposia:

"American Degeneracy: Colonial Science and Environmental Anxiety in the 18^th century" at the Conference on Transatlantic Ecologies, University of California Santa Barbara, Early Modern Center, May 16-17, 2014; and at the Modern Language Association Convention, Vancouver, BC in January 2015.

"The Library of Life" at the

Futures of Environmental Humanities symposium, University of Utah and Brigham Young University, September 24-27, 2015, and at University of Oregon Humanities Center, March 6, 2015

"Misshepeshu and the Walrus: Hybrid French/Anishinaabe Natural History in the 17th-century Art and Writings of Louis Nicolas" at a

UO English department Works-in-progress series talk in April 2015, and at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in June 2015.