| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. By Glen A. Love. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. viii + 213 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.50, paper $17.50.
Like environmental history in its relationship to its discipline, ecocriticism is environmental literary criticism. In Practical Ecocriticism, Love argues for sociobiologically informed criticism, and applies it to themes of place in Willa Cather, animals in Ernest Hemingway, and the ecological in William Dean Howells. Love presents his own work as an extension of accepted thought. However, there is more diversity in ecocriticism than Love represents. Beyond other ecocritics, Love argues that the natural sciences produce better knowledge than the humanities.	1
Yes, scientific findings about the environment should fuel concern for the environment. Reacting to the strong relativism fashionable in postmodern literary circles, Love argues that environmental problems are real and we need to acknowledge them. However, Love also states that the sciences produce knowledge that is not "just" another cultural construction, but that is fundamentally real in some sense that other knowledge is not (pp. 38–41). He argues that we should treat the knowledge produced in the sciences less critically than that produced in the humanities.	. . .

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