The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science(Under the Sign of Nature)

Unraveling the surprising history of the concept of ecology The Ecological Plot traces the roots of this most mainstream branch of science back to an unexpected source: narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of different disciplines, John MacNeill Miller shows how pioneering thinkers drew on a shared set of literary techniques to imagine how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community, redefining the way we conceptualize the natural world. Beginning with a series of revolutionary exchanges between the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the writer Harriet Martineau, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, The Ecological Plot identifies the foundations of modern notions of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, maps how they evolved through the works of Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and shows how they resurfaced in the works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson a century later. Miller’s book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity’s relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.

About the Author :
John MacNeill Miller is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.

Review :
As an exercise in intellectual history and literary history with an insistence on ecological plotting, narrative, and storytelling, Miller's work undertakes a huge task and pulls it off. Ecology and economics, he demonstrates, were never separable, at least in the authors he examines. . . Miller establish[es] both synchronic and diachronic affinities across literature, natural sciences, and social sciences, all plotted meticulously here in his book. The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science is a challenging, intriguing, and essential book for people interested in the interdisciplinarity of ecological thought.--Modern Philology John MacNeill Miller's The Ecological Plot presents a succinct and persuasive recharacterization of these three disciplines [ecology, economics, and literature], peeling back the artificial distinction between art and science to reveal their shared endeavor of foregrounding the interdependency of different species, modes of life, and nonliving environments through narrative storytelling. --H-Environment What Miller stresses so well in The Ecological Plot is the loss of intellectual richness and possibility wrought by the siloing of sciences and the categorical separation of humanness from the rest of the living world. Since the dictates of capitalism and the survival of ecosystems are now at life-or-death loggerheads, an urgent need exists to examine that history of exclusion -- and ideally, to right the wrong.--Washington Post