Abstract
Human cultural products have negotiated—revealed, reinterpreted, and shaped—ecological changes since prehistoric times. Paleolithic cave paintings dating to well before 30,000 BCE give diverse perspectives on early human practices that altered environments. Human language has played an even more significant role in transforming and transformed ecosystems. It has been used to command, describe, justify, celebrate, condemn, encourage amelioration of, and both divert attention from and call attention to human treatment of environments. For thousands of years oral and written texts from around the world have probed not only how people are affected by their surroundings but also how and why they alter environments near and far. References in literature to constructing, inhabiting, and dismantling built environments as well as to hunting, agriculture, and eating all give insight into changed landscapes. Even creative texts that do not include human characters often at least mention human-induced transformation of environments. For its part, world literature—understood broadly as creative texts that have circulated beyond their culture(s) of origin— has since The Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium BCE) depicted people as radically changing their surroundings.
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© 2013 Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim
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Thornber, K. (2013). Afterword: Ecocritical and Literary Futures. In: Estok, S.C., Kim, WC. (eds) East Asian Ecocriticisms. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345363_14
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