Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Desert Solitaire
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
My God! I am thinking, what incredible s*** we put up with most of our lives—the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephone!
In case you can't tell, Edward Abbey was so mad he could spit. (All the italics and exclamation points probably tipped you off, though.) In any case, if he could have stomached living in suburbia, he would have been the kind of guy who cursed at his neighbors for having three cars for two adults.
But he was such a curmudgeon that he mostly lived in isolation.
What was Abbey so mad about, you ask? Modern society, with its ugly, dirty, claustrophobic cities and endless social obligations. In Desert Solitaire, his argument is pretty simple, actually: city life is awful. Like, going to school on a Saturday awful. Wilderness, on the other hand, is a "necessity of the human spirit."
Why would lit critics care about such claims, you ask? Well, in truth, a lot of literature centered on city life reveals just how miserable many of us are with our loud, time- and emotion-costly urban routines. So many stories have been concerned with leaving the city and going into the wilderness, haven't they?
There are (tall and small) tales of quests to find secret gardens, magic caves, enchanted islands, exotic animals and lost tribes of people. And it's apropos that Abbey says wilderness is "as vital as water and good bread," because the nature metaphor we often find in texts is nature feeds our souls, as much as the animals that live in it (and the plants we domesticate from it) literally feed our bodies.
So, in many great books, analyzing how the protagonist relates is like giving that character a very revealing personality test. Ecocritics care about wilderness in texts because it reveals what a character lacks in her day-to-day life. It reveals what fictional characters—and, likely, our real selves—are running from.