In the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from its early incarnation as the relatively under‐theorised preserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophisticated array of ‘earth‐centred’ approaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines including ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology. Ecocriticism's diversity also extends to engaging with a variety of literary forms as well as, increasingly, film, TV, digital environments and music, and to an interest in representations of the urban. At its heart is the conviction both that we are living in a time of ecological crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency our modes of being in the world and that our cultural perceptions of ‘nature’ and the ‘human’, and the relationship between the two, have to a large degree been responsible for these damaging modes of being. Its role is to interrogate and critique these perceptions, even within environmentalism itself, with some ecocritics also committed to exploring alternative ways of conceptualising our relationship with the non‐human world. This paper briefly traces the history of ecocriticism, discussing its initial development in the USA and Britain, outlining the two strands of social ecology and deep ecology that underpin its ongoing formulation, and tracing the ‘waves’ of its development. It then focuses on contemporary and emergent theorisations, in particular the global inflection of current post‐colonial ecocriticism and the environmental justice movement, which introduces the new paradigm of eco‐cosmopolitics, and the recent formulation of ecocritical post‐humanism. This emphasises the imbrication of the human in earth's matrix, drawing on the insights of ecofeminism, phenomenology and biosemiotics, and has its most recent incarnation in the currently emerging field of material ecocriticism, which, in its engagement with the complex entanglement of the human and the non‐human, the social and the scientific, hints at a more dissonant paradigm.

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View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 6 View citing articles EDITORIAL Remaindering: the material ecology of junk and composting 'In the midst of life we are in death, etc.' (The Smiths, 'Sweet and Tender Hooligan') In 2012, Green Letters 16 displayed on its cover an arresting image from Chris Jordan's (2011) Midway series. Jordan's photographs, from the Midway Atoll, a cluster of isolated islands between the American continent and East Asia, document a bizarre and shameful occurrencethe detritus of human consumption in the stomachs of dead baby albatrosses. 'The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents', Jordan (2011) writes, because they 'mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean'. Images of dispersed or far flung or festering, mountainous layers of junk are becoming familiarreplayed, for example, in recent documentaries such as the Oscar-nominated Brazilian-American film Waste Land (2010), the Jeremy Irons narrated Trashed (2012), or the dark humour of the YouTube video hit 'The Majestic Plastic Bag'. Terrible indictments of an international consumer culture junking a global ecosystem, these images also exemplify the other side to this dual-themed Green Letters, composting. For displayed, repeated, re-read, the idea and visual record of a 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch', and related imagery, has been slowly composting in a global cultural sphere, perhaps nourishing changes in consciousness that might be individual, social, even, one day, political. The termsjunk and compostingaround which this issue pivots are considered in connection with recent developments in ecological aesthetics and philosophy that have reexamined the sticky concept of materialism. 'New materialisms' and their theorisation in a 'material ecocriticism' (see Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 448) stress the agency of all forms of matter. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost talk, for example, of 'choreographies of becoming' (2010, 10) to describe the way in which matter is always engaged in dynamic processes of forming and reforming; Stacy Alaimo's 'trans-corporeality' (2008, 238) sees matter as constantly entering into new combinations, or, to use Karen Barad's term, 'intraactions' (2008, 128), as it crosses environments and bodies. Jane Bennett, likewise, draws our attention to the ongoing vitality of material 'things'not least the detritus of human activitythat remain active long after their initial function has been fulfilled (2010, 2). Such ideas direct ecocritical attention towards the interrelated subjects of trash, waste, garbage, junk. But, while material ecocriticism has highlighted the effects of humanity's impact on the earth, arguably it has been less forthcoming in its examination of emotional affect; that is, in exploring the ways in which cultural forms might dramatise those effects or posit alternative outcomes. At one level, applying these motifs so that they might illuminate perspectives afforded by material ecocriticism, starts as a matter (s...