The Ecological Plot - (Under the Sign of Nature) by John MacNeill Miller

About the Book

"Offers a new history of ecology that traces the science back to narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of ecology, economics, and the realist novel, The Ecological Plot shows how pioneering thinkers in each field relied on a shared set of literary techniques that enabled them to see how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community. Writers and thinkers considered include Thomas Malthus, Harriet Martineau, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

John MacNeill Miller is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.