With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

Chapter 1 describes the Tibetan plateau in terms of its geography, ecology, modern subsistence systems, its climate and its changes through time, and, importantly, its linguistic diversity.

Chapter 3 turns to one of the best known but most controversial instances of ecological practice under Nazi auspices. It centers on the coterie of “advocates for the landscape” responsible for environmental planning on a series of major Nazi public works projects, most famously the building of the Autobahn system. The group was led by Alwin Seifert, whose title was Reich Advocate for the Landscape. Seifert was a pivotal figure in the development of the post-war environmental movement in Germany, and the work of his landscape advocates on the Autobahn has been the subject of several important previous studies. The focus of the chapter extends far beyond the Autobahn project to include many other fields in which the landscape advocates took an active part, styling themselves “the conscience of the German countryside.” The chapter shows that Seifert and the landscape advocates consistently applied ecological techniques even in the face of concerted resistance from other branches of the Nazi bureaucracy, with the support of a surprising range of high-level party and state functionaries. Though their achievements were limited in significant ways, through a modernized version of blood and soil ideology they conjoined Nazi ideals with environmentally sustainable policies.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.