How It All Got Started
Though Ecocriticism-as-such is just an itty bitty baby theory these days, it got its start back in the day, with a dude named Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau wasn't the best student. And he didn't comb his hair, and he wore a neck beard that generally grossed people out—especially his friend Margaret Fuller. All in all, he was the perfect kind of guy to live by himself in the woods.
So he took off and found himself a pond—which is actually a rather sizeable lake, but we digress—and lived off the land there for a couple years.
Sort of. He had a lot of help from the wealthy Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists. The small cabin he ended up building and writing from was actually on Emerson's property.
While there, he wrote gobs of prose about growing beans and watching bugs and the importance of walking and how people are generally out of touch with the natural world. We have to agree. We're not sure about his methods, but still. The message is clear:
Live like a bean. Er, live life simply.
This is nature's creed, and Thoreau thought it should inspire all of society's institutions. He thought we should model our human world after the natural one. Walden is Thoreau's masterpiece, and it remains the foundational text for Ecocriticism, even though it was never intended to be used to analyze literary texts—that part would come later.
So, why is Walden such a big deal to today's ecocritics? It examines just how and why humans have become so disconnected from nature. (And neck beards. But we're hoping man's interest in those never, ever makes a comeback—unlike people's interests in conservationism, ecology, and Materialism.)