Ecocrit

"Of course, readers have always been willing to pull on their mental boots and journey to places in books they would never think of visiting in the flesh. Millions have read Walden and Life on the Mississippi, yet how many have built a hut in the woods or rafted down the river? What is new about contemporary readers is not their preference for indoor life, but how far indoors they are able to retreat and how long they are able to stay there. The boxes that shut us off from nature have become more perfect, more powerful, from all-electric mansions in the suburbs to glass towers in the city, from space shuttles to shopping malls. Today, the typical adult reader leaves a humming house in the morning, drives an air-conditioned car to a sealed office, works eight hours under fluorescent lights, stops on the way home at night to buy dyed vegetables and frozen meat wrapped in plastic, enters the house through a garage and locks the door. Except for lawns, which are fertilized and purified to an eerie shade of green, and a smoky sky, and a potted plant or two, everything this reader sees all day had been made by human beings. Only the body itself stubbornly upholds the claims of biology, and even this biological datum our reader treats with chemicals designed to improve or delay the workings of nature."

From "Speaking a Word for Nature," Scott Russell Sanders. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. UGA Press, 1996.

Also, upcoming from UGA Press: What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina edited by Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields ($19.95), a collection of essays by 12 planners, architects, policy-makers, and geographers.