• DOI:10.24926/24716839.1703
• Corpus ID: 239060402

Ecocriticism

@article{Siewers2019Ecocriticism,
  title={Ecocriticism},
  author={Alfred Kentigern Siewers},
  journal={Panorama},
  year={2019}
}

• A. Siewers
• Published 2019
• Art
• Panorama

In 1756, the vicar of Selbourne planted four lime trees between his house and the butcher‟s yard opposite, ` “to hide the sight of blood and filth” „ (White cit. Thomas 1983, 299). Gilbert White was a great naturalist and went on to write The Natural History of Selbourne (1789), a text much prized by ecocritics as environmental literature. White‟s arboreal screening out of the slaughter-house is, in a sense, equally significant, for it exemplifies one of the key developments Keith Thomas charts in his history of changing attitudes towards the natural world in England between 1500 and 1800: namely, a growing uneasiness about killing animals for food. Towards the end of the eighteenth century this change in sensibilities led some, including the English poet Shelley, to become vegetarian. i The vast majority of people, including the vicar of Selbourne, nonetheless continued to eat animals. What changed was rather that slaughterhouses were banished from the public gaze, while meat increasingly was sold and prepared as faceless flesh that is, minus the head. What concerns me here for the moment is less the ethics of meat consumption than the concealment of its price. For it is this kind of concealment that would become characteristic of society‟s relationship to the natural world in the modern era – an era, which with the dramatic disclosure of global ecological imperilment has perhaps now begun to come to an end. Since the eighteenth century, the necessity of recalling the true cost, both to subordinate humans and to the earth, of our production processes and consumption habits has grown in equal measure to its difficulty. For at the same time that the ecosystems sustaining all life on earth have become ever more critically endangered by our growing numbers and levels of consumption, ever more people (above all, those whose ecological debt is the largest) live at an ever greater remove from the natural world, unmindful of their impact upon the earth. In addition, as Slavoj Zizek has observed, to the extent that the ecological crisis pertains to what Lacan terms the `real,‟ that which precedes, defies and disrupts symbolic representation, it remains strangely elusive to thought, even while pressing in upon us daily, shifting the literal ground of our being (Zizek 1991, 35-9). ii