書籍簡介

「生態文學批評」主要討論文學與環境的議題，鼓勵讀者重新探索人類思想、文化和社會發展模式如何影響、甚至決定人類對自然的態度及行為，可能導致環境惡化和未來的生態危機。

本書是第一本由國內學者研發、編撰並導讀的英文版生態教科書。內容精選自和「文學與環境研究」相關領域的古典生態文論和當代生態論述研究，並特別邀請國內生態學者撰寫中文導讀，期能幫助讀者一窺文章的堂奧。選集編排以生態論述的四個波段理論為主軸，包括︰（一）自然書寫與荒野保護；（二）地景研究和環境正義；（三）動物（性）研究、物質女性主義和生態世界主義；（四）新物質主義等。選集作家有Lynn Townsend White, Jr.、Aldo Leopold、Leo Marx、Joni Adamson、William Cronon、Dana Phillips、Elizabeth DeLoughrey、George B. Handley、Ursula K. Heise、Stacy Alaimo、Michael Lundblad、Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai、Chia-ju Chang等。

 With each chapter preceded by a short Introduction, Key Readings in Ecocriticism offers a current look at both new and classic readings that have defined the study of literature and environment. Organized chronologically to document the 4 concurrent waves of ecocriticism, this anthology includes articles on (1)nature writing and wilderness protection, (2) landscape studies and environmental justice criticism, (3) animality studies, new bio-regionalism,material feminism, and eco-cosmopolitanism, and (4) the new eco-materialism.

主編簡介

蔡振興Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai

臺灣大學文學博士，現任淡江大學英文系教授、中華民國文學與環境學會理事長(ASLE-Taiwan)。主要教授科目為英文寫作、西洋文學概論、文學作品導讀、英國文學、美國文學、英美詩選及文學批評。研究領域為文學理論、史耐德研究、全球暖化論述、生態文學與文化批評及世界文學。英文主要著作為  Gary Snyder, Nature and Ecological Communication (Bookman, 2010)；近期期刊論文有 “Technology, the Environment and Biopolitics in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis”(2014) “Gary Snyder: Translator and Cultural Mediator Between China and the World”(Comparative Literature Studies, 2012)、“(Post)Modernity in the Penal Colony: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish”(Neohelicon, 2011)。編著《生態文學概論》(書林，2013)。 

周序樺 Shiuhhuah Serena Chou​ 

美國南加州大學比較文學博士，現任中央研究院歐美研究所助研究員，曾任中山大學外國語文學系助理教授、副教授；主要研究領域為美國環境文學與環境論述，近年學術志趣包含美國農業書寫、後殖民環境論述、亞裔美國環境書寫等。除了積極投入研究，論文主要發表於Concentric、MELUS、Comparative Literature Studies、Foreign Literature Studies等國內外學術期刊。

雷凱Guy Redmer 

雷凱是淡江大學英文系專任講師，在台任教超過20年，曾編撰十餘本英文教科書，主要專長為學習導向教學法。 

Preface◆序  v

Introduction◆        緒論  vii

1. Lynn Townsend White, Jr.◆The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis  1

2. Aldo Leopold◆Thinking Like a Mountain  17

3. Leo Marx◆Sleepy Hollow, 1844  23

4. Joni Adamson◆The Road to San Simon:Toward a Multicultural Ecocriticism  55

5. William Cronon◆The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature  93

6 .Dana Phillips◆Nature, Culture, and Literaturein America  131

7. Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai◆Climate Change,Ethics, and Ecological Communication in Kim Stanley Robinsons?Capitol Trilogy  145

8. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley◆      Postcolonial Ecologies: Bridging the Divide 167

9. UrsulaK. Heise◆Deterritorialization and Eco-Cosmopolitanism  185

10. Stacy Alaimo ◆Bodily Natures  209

11. Michael Lundblad◆From Animal to Animality Studies  245

12. Chia-juChang ◆Putting Back the Animals: Woman-Animal Meme in Contemporary Taiwanese Ecofeminist Imagination  261

Permissions◆ 文章出處  287

Contributors◆        作者簡介  289

Index◆索引  293

懷特教授（1907-1987）為加州大學洛杉磯分校的歷史教授（1958-87），畢業於史丹福大學、紐約聯合神學院，獲哈佛大學歐洲史博士，其專長為歐洲中古史及科技史。他曾任教於普林斯頓大學（1933-1937）、史丹佛大學（1937-1943），並擔任加州奧克蘭女子學院Mills College的校長（1943-1958）。諸多著作中，以《中古科技與社會變遷》（Medieval Technology and Social Change）（Oxford, 1962）一書最享盛名。

本文原為1966年底作者在華盛頓的「美國科學促進學會」（AAAS）會議上的講稿，後刊登於1967年3月10日的學會雜誌《科學》（Science）上。這是在生態論述文獻史上最早也是最重要的文章之一，屢被收入生態批評相關的文集當中，四十多年來引起無數的討論與批評，歷久不衰，影響深遠，催生了生態倫理、生態神學等新的學術領域。

文章的主要論點為：當前的生態危機根源於基督教的人本中心思想（anthropocentrism）。懷特父親為牧師，他自己也有個神學碩士，他詮釋聖經裡的話，認為基督教不只建立了人與自然的二元對立，並且堅持上帝的本意就是要人類好好的利用自然（“Christianity . . . not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends”）。他一再的強調，上帝創造萬事萬物別無其他目的，只為滿足人類的需求。基督教的這個神學立場，毀滅了異教的萬物有靈論（animism），使人類對破壞自然不會感到良心不安。而當立基於基督教自然神學（natural theology）、比較貴族氣的科學於19世紀中葉跟比較平民化的科技（technology）在民主化浪潮中相結合時，人類手中掌握了力量強大的技術，更如虎添翼般對自然環境造成了難以彌補的重大傷害。在這個情況下，基督教實在難辭其咎（“If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt”）。

本文固然影響深遠，爭論亦大，批評者認為他錯解了聖經。上帝並不是授權讓人類肆無忌憚的剝削自然，而是要去為上帝好好的照顧自然，即所謂的照顧論（stewardism）。懷特對基督教人本中心立場的批評，顯示出他的態度接近深層生態學（Deep Ecology）的生態中心主義（ecocentrism）。他堅信人類對生態環境所持的態度和宗教信仰會影響人的行為，所以改變信仰和態度十分重要：“What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-naturerelationship.” 既然西歐的基督教傳統對人與自然關係所持的立場乃是今天生態危機的根源，那麼首要之務乃是改變這種立場與觀念，而不是更進一步的擁抱科技。因此在文末他建議改奉聖方濟（Saint Francis of Assisi）的眾生平等觀，以他做為生態工作者的保護神。

林耀福     

ASLE-Taiwan 榮譽理事長

臺灣大學外文系名譽教授

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man’s unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits’ destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry.

All forms of life modify their contexts. The most spectacular and benign instance is doubtless the coral polyp. By serving its own ends, it has created a vast undersea world favorable to thousands of other kinds of animals and plants. Ever since man became a numerous species he has affected his environment notably. The hypothesis that his fire-drive method of hunting created the world’s great grasslands and helped to exterminate the monster mammals of the Pleistocene from much of the globe is plausible, if not proved.For 6 millennia at least, the banks of the lower Nile have been a human artifact rather than the swampy African jungle which nature, apart from man,would have made it. The Aswan Dam, flooding 5000 square miles, is only the latest stage in a long process. In many regions terracing or irrigation,overgrazing, the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships to fight Carthaginians or by Crusaders to solve the logistics problems of their expeditions, have profoundly changed some ecologies. Observation that the French landscape falls into two basic types, the open fields of the north and the bocage of the south and west, inspired Marc Bloch to undertake his classic study of medieval agricultural methods. Quite unintentionally, changes in human ways often affect nonhuman nature. It has been noted, for example, that the advent of the automobile eliminated huge flocks of sparrows that once fed on the horse manure littering every street.

The history of ecological change is still so rudimentary that we know little about what really happened, or what the results were. The extinction of the European aurochs as late as 1627 would seem to have been a simple case of overenthusiastic hunting. On more intricate matters it often is impossible to find solid information. For a thousand years or more the Frisians and Hollanders have been pushing back the North Sea, and the process is culminating in our own time in the reclamation of the Zuider Zee. What, if any,species of animals, birds, fish, shore life, or plants have died out in the process? In their epic combat with Neptune have the Netherlanders overlooked ecological values in such a way that the quality of human life in the Netherlands has suffered? I cannot discover that the questions have ever been asked, much less answered.

People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their owne nvironment, but in the present state of historical scholarship we usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects man-induced changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, however, concern for the problem of ecological backlash is mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to understand the nature of things, had flourished in several eras and among several peoples. Similarly there had been an age-old accumulation of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly. But it was not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and North America arranged a marriage between science and technology, a union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural environment. The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in the 18th century. Its acceptance as a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.

Almost at once the new situation forced the crystallization of the novel concept of ecology; indeed, the word ecology first appeared in the English language in 1873. Today, less than a century later, the impact of our race upon the environment has so increased in force that it has changed in essence. When the first cannons were fired, in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by sending workers scrambling to the forests and mountains for more potash, sulphur, iron ore, and charcoal, with some resulting erosion and deforestation. Hydrogen bombs are of a different order: a war fought with them might alter the genetics of all life on this planet. By 1285 London had a smog problem arising from the burning of soft coal, but our present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of the globe’s atmosphere as a whole, with consequences which we are only beginning to guess. With the population explosion, the carcinoma of planless urbanism, the now geological deposits of sewage and garbage, surely no creature other than man has ever managed to foul its nest in such short order.

There are many calls to action, but specific proposals, however worthy as individual items, seem too partial, palliative, negative: ban the bomb, tear down the billboards, give the Hindus contraceptives and tell them to eat their sacred cows. The simplest solution to any suspect change is, of course, to stop it, or better yet, to revert to a romanticized past: make those ugly gasoline stations look like Anne Hathaway’s cottage or (in the Far West)like ghost-town saloons. The “wilderness area” mentality invariably advocates deep-freezing an ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High Sierra, as it was before the first Kleenex was dropped. But neither atavism nor prettification will cope with the ecological crisis of our time.

What shall we do? No one yet knows. Unless we think about fundamentals,our specific measures may produce new backlashes more serious than those they are designed to remedy.

As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectualin in tent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecological crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel,democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive it sown implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

The Western Traditions of Technology and Science

One thing is so certain that it seems stupid to verbalize it: both modern technology and modern science are distinctively Occidental. Our technology has absorbed elements from all over the world, notably from China;yet everywhere today, whether in Japan or in Nigeria, successful technology is Western. Our science is the heir to all the sciences of the past, especially perhaps to the work of the great Islamic scientists of the Middle Ages, who so often outdid the ancient Greeks in skill and perspicacity: al-Razi in medicine,for example; or ibn-al-Haytham in optics; or Omar Khayyám in mathematics.Indeed, not a few works of such geniuses seem to have vanished in the original Arabic and to survive only in medieval Latin translations that helped to lay the foundations for later Western developments. Today, around the globe, all significant science is Western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists.

A second pair of facts is less well recognized because they result from quite recent historical scholarship. The leadership of the West, both in technology and in science, is far older than the so-called Scientific Revolution of the 17th century or the so-called Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. These terms are in fact outmoded and obscure the true nature of what they try to describe—significant stages in two long and separate developments.By A.D. 1000 at the latest—and perhaps, feebly, as much as 200 years earlier—the West began to apply water power to industrial processes other than milling grain. This was followed in the late 12th century by the harnessing of wind power. From simple beginnings, but with remarkable consistency of style,the West rapidly expanded its skills in the development of power machinery,labor-saving devices, and automation.

Those who doubt should contemplate that most monumental achievement in the history of automation: the weight-driven mechanical clock, which appeared in two forms in the early 14th century. Not in craftsmanship but in basic technological capacity, the Latin West of the later Middle Ages far outstripped its elaborate, sophisticated, and esthetically magnificent sister cultures, Byzantium and Islam. In 1444 a great Greek ecclesiastic, Bessarion,who had gone to Italy, wrote a letter to a prince in Greece. He is amazed by the superiority of Western ships, arms, textiles, glass. But above all he is astonished by the spectacle of waterwheels sawing timbers and pumping the bellows of blast furnaces. Clearly, he had seen nothing of the sort in the Near East.

By the end of the 15th century the technological superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually hostile nations could spill out overall the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing. The symbol of this technological superiority is the fact that Portugal, one of the weakest states of the Occident, was able to become, and to remain for a century,mistress of the East Indies. And we must remember that the technology of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque was built by pure empiricism, drawing remarkably little support or inspiration from science.

In the present-day vernacular understanding, modern science is supposed to have begun in 1543, when both Copernicus and Vesalius published their great works. It is no derogation of their accomplishments, however, to point out that such structures as the Fabrica and the De revolutionibus do not appear overnight. The distinctive Western tradition of science, in fact, began in the late 11th century with a massive movement of translation of Arabic and Greek scientific works into Latin. A few notable books—Theophrastus, for example—escaped the West’s avid new appetite for science, but within less than 200 years effectively the entire corpus of Greek and Muslim science was available in Latin, and was being eagerly read and criticized in the new European universities. Out of criticism arose new observation, speculation, and increasing distrust of ancient authorities. By the late 13th century Europe had seized global scientific leadership from the faltering hands of Islam. It would be as absurd to deny the profound originality of Newton, Galileo, or Copernicus as to deny that of the 14th century scholastic scientists like Buridan or Oresme on whose work they built. Before the 11th century, science scarcely existed in the Latin West, even in Roman times. From the 11th century onward,the scientific sector of Occidental culture has increased in a steady crescendo.

Since both our technological and our scientific movements got their start, acquired their character, and achieved world dominance in the Middle Ages, it would seem that we cannot understand their nature or their present impact upon ecology without examining fundamental medieval assumptions and developments.