OVERTURE

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jody Berland, Rachel Hall, and Ted Striphas for their feedback on this preface, which was sent to the volume contributors in anticipation of their own work in the summer of 2005 and then, in turn, edited again in the summer of 2006 to help foster linkages between the diverse voices gathered here.

Notes

1. Cultural Studies, volume 8, issue 1, 1994. That same year, another noteworthy special issue dedicated to the environment was published: Australian Journal of Communication, volume 1, issue 3, 1994.

2. I favor the term ‘environment’ because it is more encompassing and less alienating than ‘nature,’ admitting to the inextricable linkage between people and the Earth. Arturo Escobar (1995) rightly notes, however, that there is a risk in this move in so far as, taken to an extreme degree, the environmental turn may become distorted as a justification for an anthropocentric view of agency and contribute to a belief in nature merely as a passive ‘appendage to the environment’ (p. 196).

3. Jody Berland, ‘What is environmental cultural studies?,’ Cultural Environmental Studies Symposium, York University, unpublished address 2005, cited with permission from author.

4. In this sense, I read Jennifer Daryl Slack and Laurie Anne Whitt's (1992) call for developing a more specialized ‘ecoculturalist theoretical perspective’ as an invitation to transform how we appreciate and articulate the broader project of cultural studies (as they do, from the historical roots until today), rather than as an attempt to develop a specialized branch that can continue to be marginalized and taken-for-granted. Slack revisits and embellishes on this point in her essay published in this volume, adding five points of her own to this overture's working list of why the environment remains far too marginalized in cultural studies.