An Ecological Interpretation Of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace In The Hole

Annie Proulx, a contemporary American woman writer, gains her reputation in her late fifties. Her works mainly touch on the overlooked landscapes and environment, uncovering the fact that industrial civilization thrives in the cost of devastating the bioregion. That Old Ace in the Hole, published in the year of 2002, is another long novel that concentrates on the land and environment, conveying profound ecological and realistic meanings.That Old Ace in the Hole narrates that the protagonist, Bob Dollar, comes to the Texas Panhandle region with his identity disguised to scout sites for the Global Pork Rind. In the beginning of nineteenth century, the panhandle region is a vast prairie with the Indians and bison co-existing with nature harmoniously, while, with the settlement of the first pioneers from the Westward Movement, industrial civilization has exploited this once primal land with scars and wounds. Featuring in the description of geography and environment, history and culture as well as its quirky locative characters, That Old Ace in the Hole not only exposes how people impact the ecological environment of the place, but how it in turn shapes human beings. Annie Proulx demonstrates her great concern towards the panhandle bioregion, and in the same time anchors her hope on the change of people’s dominant attitude towards nature to construct homestead consciousness and restore the harmonious bioregion. This paper examines That Old Ace in the Hole in the angle of ecocriticism and excavates Annie Proulx’s deep ecological visions. The whole paper falls into three chapters:Chapter One explores the ecological features in Texas Panhandle: implicative sense of beauty; intensive sense of place; massive sense of history. Although the ecological environment has become worse and worse under the exploitation of industrial civilization and economic development, the panhandle region still remains its unique and distinct beauty due to its indomitable vitality and endurance.Chapter Two discusses the ecological predicaments the Texas Panhandle confronts. Firstly, it reveals the environmental crisis from three aspects: excessive resource consumption; environment degradation; destruction of biodiversity. Secondly, it discloses human beings’ spiritual predicament by exploring the fact that under the thriving materialism human beings accumulate huge material wealth in the cost of sacrificing environment. Thirdly, it exposes the social injustice in the novel. Living in the edge of white culture, the nomadic Indians suffers unprecedented spiritual predicament and are isolated and marginalized by the white people, and gradually lose their identity and sense of place.Chapter Three elaborates the ecological restoration strategies. It first expounds the strategy that old Ace, a representative of environmentalists, attempts to restore the ecological environment by constructing Ecological Restoration Homestead and Bison Range. Then it takes protagonist Bob, a representative of the outsiders, as an example to expound the importance of constructing homeland consciousness to protect the ecological homestead.