The argument of this paper addresses the recent turn in the literary movement of
environmental studies, also known as “ecocriticism” and “green studies,” away from the
spaces of formal textual inquiries towards places threatened by globalisation processes
that made these spaces possible at the outset. It begins with a brief examination of the
concepts of “place” and “space” as they are discussed in ecoscholar Lawrence Buell’s
most recent writing The Future of Environmental Criticism. It makes an analogy between
“space” according to Buell’s definition of this term and the late 20th century and early 21st
century phenomenon of globalisation to claim that if ecocritical scholars have been well
served by globalisation insofar as it has given us geographically and physically unbound
“spaces” wherein we can access products, goods and services including information in
library archives and stacks thousands of miles from us, the crisis of global warming asks
us to be responsive to and responsible for, in environmentally-minded ways, the places
that are physically and geographically much closer to us and that are primarily
nonhuman-made (ecogenic), so-called natural as opposed to primarily human-made
(anthropogenic) “built” environments. It asks us to devote some of the uxorious aesthetic
and imaginative spaces available to us, to learning, teaching, thinking and writing about
the local ecogenic environments of the places we live in, and, occasionally at the very
least, to leaving these spaces in order to engage more with and to protecting those
ecogenic places.
