Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

As its title indicates, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green attempts to shift environmental discourse away from an exclusive focus on all matters “green” to a broader spectrum of colors and concerns. Each of the volume's sixteen chapters addresses a different hue, and the contributors also examine a wider array of texts and materials—of entities, objects, and phenomena—than those perused in what they are perhaps too eager to identify as traditional ecocriticism. To varying degrees, the contributors to this volume are influenced by the new materialism, feminism, queer ecology, posthumanism, and object-oriented ontology. Many of them also try to expand the range of “ecotheory” by abandoning the linear arguments typical of academic work in favor of a more free-wheeling approach, which allows them to formulate pithy generalizations based on lists of the most disparate-seeming entities they can conjure and to take potshots at more hidebound forms of ecocriticism, which on their account would seem to be all of them but theirs. This approach will strike readers not already converted to the prismatic cause as overly broad, and many of the contributors' conclusions will seem unsupported by careful argumentation and evidence. In his introduction, Cohen gives us a taste of what the house style of “prismatic ecology” is going to be like when he describes the volume's contents as “a restless expanse of multihued contaminations, impurities, hybridity, monstrosity, contagion, interruption, hesitation, enmeshment, refraction, unexpected relations, and wonder. A swirl of colors, a torrent, a muddy river” (xxiv). This description is accurate in more than one way. It does capture the range of interests and impulses that the contributors bring to the task of formulating a prismatic ecology. Yet it also reveals how that ecology may prove less than illuminating: the volume's contents are sometimes so stylized and torrential as to be almost unreadable. Too many of the contributors make the mistake of trying to “write the environment” as they perceive it to be, which rarely renders it legible in theoretical terms. Thus, we find Lowell Duckert evoking “ethereal undulations” (“Maroon,” 58) as prismatic ecology's proper subject matter; Julian Yates defining ecology parenthetically—and in a decidedly traditional manner—as “the world writ large” (“Orange,” 90); and Timothy Morton (whose sway is marked throughout the volume) asserting that by the lights of objected-oriented ontology “there is no intrinsic, ontological difference between me and a sponge cake”—as if there weren't other differences between himself and the sponge cake that might be salient—and that life is “at most a spurious metaphysical fiction” (“X-Ray,” 324). In short, too many of the contributors take “ecotheory” not only “beyond green,” but also beyond anything still recognizable as ecology.