Ecocriticism’s Big Bang: A Review of Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment by Glen A. Love reviewed by Harold Fromm ike Moliere’s M. Jourdain speaking prose without knowing it, classic writers were unwittingly doing ecocriticism for centuries before the genre burst forth onto the academic scene in the early 1990s. From Virgil’s Georgics to John Clare to Thoreau to Rachel Carson, sensitive people had actually noticed that they were living on and from the primal mud of Earth. Nevertheless, after many years of slow gestation, a meeting of the Western Literature Association in 1991—followed by “The Greening of Literary Studies, ” an MLA special session in December of that same year—issued in an explicit new discipline, a new professional organization (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, known as ASLE), a new journal (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, known as ISLE), and in 1996 a new canonical text, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, produced by Cheryll Glotfelty and me. Ecocriticism’s early years brought together contemporary writers about nature, admiring critics of classic nature writers, and academics interested in, and consumed by, the growing problems of air pollution and environmental degradation. In the decade-plus that has intervened since the birth of ASLE, the ecocritical net has been cast over wider and wider territory to include the ecology of cities, environmental racism, environmental law, capitalism and colonial exploitation, and much more. Although the cultural studies that took over the humanist academy during the last quarter of the twentieth century have slowly begun to recognize ecocriticism, the multicultural/social-constructionist postmodern ethos that generated them has been almost blind to the sciences upon which any knowledge of the Earth and its life depends. Ecocriticism, meanwhile, has gradually been moving into a new and more comprehensive phase that transcends this deficiency and acknowledges the explanatory power of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Nonetheless, like much study in the humanities over the past few decades, ecocriticism had early on L