An Eco-ethical Analysis Of A Thousand Acres

As a green critical school, eco-ethics is a theory concerning creating a new way of livingin harmony with the world, and restoring a natural balance altered by human activity. Asthe master piece of the contemporary American writer Jane Smiley, the novel AThousand Acres is chosen as text for my thesis, gained wide recognition and won PulitzerPrize for fiction and National Book Critics Circles Award. The novel is set in theAmerican western farm where the farmers fight with nature and with each other to satisfytheir greed for more resources. Applying the eco-ethical theory, the thesis expounds theimportance of nature from two aspects: intrinsic values and extrinsic value, and thenexposes how ethical relationships in family and in society desroyed by diseases, affairand incest, ambition and scheme, and how the ethical crises connect with ecologicalcrises, thereby revealing the importance of ecological protection to eco-ethical balance.The thesis concludes that eco-ethical harmony can be achieved by building sustainableagricultural systems and eco-oriented social values, aiming to break the limit of thetraditional human ethics which focuses only on the interpersonal relationship and toendow the relationship between human and nature with moral meaning and values.