Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism aroused with the threat of environment for humanity, society and world itself. It is a globally emerging movement that arose in response to man's anthropocentric attitude of dominating nature. The present world is facing eco-disasters and our environment is now at stake. We need to change our attitude toward nature. During the last three decades, ecocriticism has emerged as a "global emergent movement. William Rueckert talked about the term ecocriticism in his 1978 critical work "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism."
Ecology has two shades: the shallow and the deep ecology. Shallow ecology is fundamentally anthropocentric which means that the center is humanity, believing that the entire purpose of nature is to serve humanity and that humans are the masters of nature; man is the only literary creature who considers himself superior to the others. Deep ecology, on the other hand, opposes this mode of protection and advocates the preservation of nature in its natural state, independent of human intervention, since nature has a right to exist.
There are two waves of ecocriticism as identified by Lawrence Buell. The first wave ecocritics focused on nature writing and wilderness fiction. The wave's goal was to protect the biotic community. This wave's ecocritics informed the public about the effects of culture on nature, with the goal of reversing the damage through political action. The second wave ecocritics were more concerned with environmental justice and "social ecocriticism," which takes urban landscape as seriously as natural landscape. It seeks to locate the remnants of nature in cities. The Ecocritic interprets nature writing texts. The end result is frequently a critique of how our culture devalues and degrades nature.