Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Silent Spring
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?
Pollution's bad for our bodies, surburbia's bad for our souls, and the lack of quiet in city centers might just drive us all crazy. Not a lot of translation needed here. But what does this have to do with reading literature? (Carson is, after all, one of today's true ecocritics.)
"Eco" comes from the Greek oikos, which means house or home. So, how a writer depicts a character's home, and how a character reacts to that home environment, is a type of creative ecology.
Like, consider these questions: How and why is the home environment polluted in To Kill A Mockingbird? What are the characters looking for in this book? How does the home environment affect the characters and the language they each use?
Here's another great example: Homer's The Odyssey is all about the search for a home. Plots shift and change when home-places are destroyed or poisoned. When you think about it, the destruction of beautiful landscapes, the death of loved ones from illnesses born in dirty rivers and sewer systems—these are the main plot points of some of the greatest novels of all time.
Clearly, in the wake of the destruction of our physical environments, we find emotional drama. Charles Dickens may not have had so much to write about without the horrific conditions of Victorian London (many of Carson's "homes in insipid surroundings" could be found there).
Carson gets down to the nitty-gritty details of just how we poison ourselves, in ways both literal and metaphoric. And if we look closely enough, we find that this is quite the universal literary theme.