Because American ecocriticism, as a movement, is only about a dozen years old, generalizations about it are hard to make and still harder to So I want to begin, not by describing the principles and practices of ecocriticism in any detail (in fact, that is something I want to delay, especially as regards the practices, until chapter four), but by looking at what seems to be, for many of its adherents, ecocriticism’s moment of origin, which is threefold in its implications. This moment takes the form of an epiphany: of a discovery, or a renewal, of faith in all things green, just as the bewildered ecocritic.
