The Four Elements and the recovery of referentiality: ecocriticism as a pivotal localist theory.

INTRODUCTION

The Four Elements can be understood as both an ancient and a very contemporary way of thinking about the material world. Ecocriticism should be understood as a critical method that both evokes the responsibility of the critic and reinstates referentiality as a crucial and primary activity of literature. It will also be considered as a movement with multiple aspects and theories delimiting it, particularly a drive toward multidisciplinarity that bridges the humanities and the natural sciences. To achieve its goals and remain true to the literature it seeks to study, ecocriticism must remain pivotal and localist in its fundamental orientation.

THE FOUR ELEMENTS: THEN AND NOW

For many years when scholars in the West would invoke the Four Elements -- earth, air, water, and fire -- their listeners would usually recognize the invocation as an allusion to Aristotle and possibly think about notions of balance, unity, and indivisibility. Readers familiar with Aristotle's lecture notes might also make connections among Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Poetics, or recognize the interconnectedness of nature, being and becoming, self-conscious behavior, and literature.

Modern listeners and readers, however, when they hear the four elements invoked, might not think of Aristotle. Rather, they might think of pollution and environmental crises. Perhaps not by accident biologist Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), has titled chapters of her book "earth, "air," "water," and "fire," even though making no mention of Aristotle. In each chapter she emphasizes different types of human-caused pollutants and their relationship with spiraling rates of cancer.

In "earth" she emphasizes changes in American agriculture and the exponential growth of synthetic insecticides and herbicides. In the "air" chapter, she focuses on airborne chemicals that respect no national boundaries in their acts of contamination, noting that "[t]he rising and falling movements of global distillation explain why chemicals used in rice paddies and cotton fields eventually end up in the skin of Arctic trees" (177). In the "water" chapter she focuses not only on the rapid reduction of biological diversity but also on water pollution's poisoning of the animals that live in rivers and lakes and the people who eat those animals and drink that water. And in the "fire" chapter Steingraber looks at toxic waste incinerators, which burn garbage of all kinds and release toxins into the air and dump their concentrated residues in landfills.

As the works of Aristotle are organized today, one can see first of all a linkage among the study of nature and the study of human beings in an interdependent relationship with the rest of nature, which means the study of being-in-the world. Second, one can see an attention to ethics, which means the character of human behavior while experiencing being-in-the-world--including environmental ethics, or the character of human behavior toward the nonhuman aspects of the world, an ethics that is both human and ecological in character. Third, one can see literature, a type of Poetics, with a dependent relation on Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics, as a manifestation and shaping force of human experiential behavior. Steingraber makes explicit the interrelationship of these concerns in Living Downstream by showing the effects of human behavior regarding toxic waste on all aspects of nature, including scientific understanding, conceptions of community, and perceptions of environmental justice.