Then he painted the river an indigo colour to signify pollution from nearby factories. Today's burgeoning cultural studies school, with its insistent and self-referential intellectualising, has demoted nature to the status of a linguistic construct, merely another text to be discussed and dismissed, severed from the natural reality to which it refers. This is especially surprising when you consider how crowded the margins have become since the 60s, as the academy has sought to accommodate class, gender and post-colonial studies, while displaying alarmingly scant regard for nature, the original Other. He follows every trickle and trace of a section of river over a five-year period, witnessing its transition from flourishing stream to a stinking stretch of contaminated water. His disturbing descriptions of the river's decline are intended to impugn both our ignorance and our developmental greed.
Death is hideous and slow, the fishes' poison passed down the food-chain.
Bate begins with Wordsworth on the alienation of city-dwelling and the loss of place due to industrial progress, and looks at Ruskin's call for an organic way of living, before moving on to the Marxist intellectuals, Raymond Williams and EP Thompson. Interaction with nature is imperative, for the ecocritics are not invoking the unblemished blue skies of the pastoral or sublime, at least not in terms of a transcendental escapism. Instead, like Clarke, they argue for the inter-relatedness of all factors within the ecosystem, from the social and the political to the phenomena of the natural world. Clarke's novel is an exemplar of this capacity. The ecocritics and the recently formed Association for the Study of Literature and Environment would like to think so.