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A satellite topography of the English literary tradition since the Industrial Revolution might show nature as a spiritual-imaginative object in the Romantic climes, as a religious or scientific object in the Victorian domain, and as a symbolic/formal object in the Modern realm. In the territory of Postmodernity, nature, probably due to its rapid decimation, emerges as a politico-cultural object, one which is no longer restricted to literature, "fine" art, and formalist cinema and video, but also has starring roles in commercials, photos, and movies, and is at the center of heated public debates about "ecocide," "ecoterrorism," "ecopornography," "greenwashing" and "animal rights." Responding to these concerns, academia has itself developed a variety of subdisciplines-"ecopsychology," "ecological economics," "ecofeminism," "ecosophy"-as well as the many orientations named by adding the adjective environmental: science, law, ethics, history. In the humanities, the academic response has primarily taken the form of "ecocriticism," a literature-based approach within a still loosely federated but emerging field generally designated as "green cultural studies."
As the term suggests, green cultural studies has major affinities with cultural studies, whose prevalent concern has been the impact that texts and social practices have upon ethnicity/color, gender, sexuality, economic class, and age (particularly youth subcultures). The origins of green cultural studies could in this sense be located in the admission of a newcomer into this nexus of concerns: namely, nature (plants, animals, elements, or what I have frequently called "worldnature" or the "fifth world"). In our time, probably the first to link nature with issues of race, class, and gender was Donna Haraway with her 1984 essay entitled "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," a critique of Carl Akeley's hunting expeditions carried out for the collection of animal corpses to be used in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. More recently, in his 1991 Introduction to Strange Weather, Andrew Ross called for a "green cultural criticism" (6), or what has increasingly become identified as "green cultural studies," a title that more effectively ties green concerns to the politico-ethical core of cultural studies. Within this context, therefore, the project of green cultural studies is the examination of nature through words, image, and model for the purpose of foregrounding potential effects representation might have on cultural attitudes and social practices which, in turn,...