ABSTRACT
“Show, don’t tell” has become a precept as basic to creative writing courses as show-and-tell to kindergarten. When I walked into a Humanities Building classroom to begin my seminar on “Shakespeare and Nature” a few years ago, that admonition had been left on the blackboard by the departing fiction writers. It’s a useful principle also for ecocritics. The tendency to frame ecocritical education as environmentalist politics strikes me as completely understandable, and profoundly counterproductive. It rouses resistance in students, who easily recognize and quickly resent when they are being manipulated (even though they mostly agree), and it helps sustain cynical reactionary narratives like the bogus ClimateGate controversy, in which atmospheric scientists were falsely accused of conspiring to skew their published evidence to win converts for their environmentalist cause. Anyway, the genres of outraged jeremiad and elegiac lamentation have been so heavily deployed in the environmentalist cause, to the exclusion of the community-building implications of comedy, the idyllic but also satiric potential of pastoral, and the hopeful diligence of georgic, that we environmentalists risk losing the attention of our audiences (Meeker; Heise, Sense of Place).
