In a modernist mode, this problem presents itself to historians of science with the changing conceptions of a complex of ideas known as ecology. There is not one ecology but a constellation of ecological ideologies, including that of a growing literature of the ecologies of cities. Literary critics and historians have inherited the nature-culture duality as an ideological problem. As a young student, I read few passages from Darwin and his supporters. But as Darwinian materials have proliferated in our own time, they have broken down categories of fiction and nonfiction.
Ecology is, after all, a slice of evolutionary theory, or vice versa.
I believe that writers like these require an interdisciplinary ecological criticism, and environment must be conceived of as more than their setting. Reading human beings into and out of texts is an activity that goes on in a real world humanity inhabits, a world undergoing, right now, significant climatic change as a result of concrete human activities. These people, unaware, are saving the world. But it is not true that people, unaware, are saving the world. For most ecocritics, it is not sufficient to take pleasure in tracing an etymology.