ABSTRACT
The interplay between material and immaterial, the clean and the toxic, the safe and the unsafe invites us to transform our patterns of thought around what is fixed and what is mutable. There are compelling reasons why this particular kind of body discourse would aim to produce anxiety and paranoia – disruption requires a wrinkle in time and space. Among the many issues the environmental humanities are trying to make sense of are questions of how we define the success of environmental and ecocritical texts, what speaks to the public, and what galvanizes people. Ecocritics and environmental humanists often crave the very uniformity that we know has led to troubling practices and we repeatedly rehearse those practices in our efforts to break away from them. William Empson referred to the pastoral "process" of constructing myth around matter as one of "putting the complex into the simple".
