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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.
John MacNeill Miller is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.
"A strong book distinguished by the originality of its argument, the portability of its concepts and coinages, and the clarity of its writing and reasoning. The 'ecological plot' is an elegant term that should prove influential in future scholarship. If the environmental humanities are to be a truly interdisciplinary field, we need more books like this."
– Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California–Davis, author of Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion
"An excellent, paradigm-shifting book that upends many received truths about literature, ecology, and the relationship between them."
– Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington, author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf
"A fascinating look at the role of literary storytelling in the formation of modern scientific disciplines. Miller is himself an excellent storyteller, and finds great examples from influential thinkers in these fields to guide us through the history of ecology."
– David Shiffman, Arizona State University, author of Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World's Most Misunderstood Predator
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