Speaking for nature: The politics and practice of environmental advocacy in American literature and culture

This dissertation examines contemporary American literary and cultural texts that share the stance of environmental advocacy, "speaking for" the rights or interests of nonhuman nature by challenging dominant Western ideologies which construct humanity as separate from and superior to nature. While such advocacy is essential in contemporary American culture, we cannot uncritically accept that texts which speak for nature are selflessly motivated or politically effective. Consequently, I adapt feminist theories about the problems of speaking for others to explore how texts of environmental advocacy are often undermined and infiltrated by traces of the ideologies they seek to transform. In this exploration, I focus on three issues: constructions of human subjectivity, conceptions of human relationships with nature and the role of language(s) in mediating those relationships, and representations of nature itself.; I examine the construction of human subjectivity in texts that highlight the connections between nature and traditionally oppressed groups of people such as women and Native Americans; these texts include works by ecofeminists and non-native writers who hold out Native American cultures as models of ecological responsibility, autobiographical nonfiction by Dian Fossey, Alice Walker and Terry Tempest Williams, and fiction by Ursula Le Guin. To explore concepts of the relationship between humans and nature, I turn to the work of wilderness advocates Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey, the nonfiction of Gary Snyder, and the scientific theories of James Lovelock and Wes Jackson. To examine representations of the nonhuman, I discuss the visual texts of print advertisements and television documentaries. While some of these texts alienate humans from the natural world and each other by constructing falsely unified, static pictures that erase differences within the human subject, between humans and nature, and within the natural world, others resist such constructions. Instead, they work towards a view of the world as complex and shifting, in which humans and nature shape each other through innumerable relationships that produce differences as well as commonalities. Ultimately, I argue that critical reflection on the practice of environmental advocacy can positively transform the ways we represent and enact our relationships with the rest of nature.