Introduction to Special Issue: The Function of Ecocriticism; or, Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For?

How effectual is ecocriticism at practically addressing our most pressing and poignant global environmental issues? What hope through words? We organized this special issue of the Journal of Ecocriticism to consider the application and relevance of our-kind-of-thing, this marriage between words, texts, and earth; between criticism and trees; between the library carrel and the Greenland ice sheet. Tasked to consider how such a project operates within the strictures of ephemeral literary criticism while simultaneously considering what happens on the ground, “The Function of Ecocriticism” demands that its contributors juggle the competing burdens of rhetoric and activism, and reflect on whether the modus operandi of the former has any purchase on the ethical demands of the latter. We fear, however, that our efforts in this endeavor come to more of the same: words upon words, while elsewhere the fearsome and composed economic imperatives that brought us to this place at this time charge ever onward. This ecocritical experiment surely forces us to ask an obvious but no less difficult question: Are we also part of the problem? Each contributor to this volume—like all ecocritics—must tackle the inevitable: What is to be done? That they do so in such disparate ways points to the lively welter that is ecocriticism, as well as to the white noise of ecocide that hums in the not-so-distant background.