Guest Editors’ Introduction Ecocriticism and a Conservationist Manifesto

World history has seen many manifestos—some political, others artistic. American author Scott Russell Sanders’s environmentalist manifesto is uniquely visionary and inviting. Most manifestos are emphatic calls to action. Sanders’s does more than that. In addition to offering a compelling formula for living human lives that take the future into account and will help to create “a culture of conservation,” Sanders helps readers re-imagine what it means to be human in the context of the natural world, what it means to live in a way that considers the limitations and requirements, the “expectations,” of the world beyond ourselves.

___

  • Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona P, 2002. 3-14.
  • Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
  • Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2002.
  • Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
  • ---. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
  • Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” Introduction. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. xv-xxxvii.
  • Love, Glen A. “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Literary Criticism.” Western American Literature (November 1991): 201-13.
  • Sanders, Scott Russell. A Conservationist Manifesto. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2009.
  • Scheese, Don. “The Inhabited Wilderness.” ISLE 16.2 (Spring 2009): 347-52. Slovic, Scott. “Editor’s Note.” ISLE 16.2 (Spring 2009): 199-201.