Najczęściej na rzecz sprawiedliwości społecznej i środowiskowej (enivironmental justice), powstrzymania dewastacji planety, praw człowieka, szczególnie praw kobiet i rdzennych mieszkańców oraz zwierząt. Zob. np. G.A. Love Revaluing Nature.

This book analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part I critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part II focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software, and installation artworks from the United States and abroad that translate new connections between global, national, and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.

The first few frames of the Belgian comic-strip artist Raymond Macherot's work “Les Croquillards” (1957) provide a shorthand for some of the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism, one of the most recent fields of research to have emerged from the rapidly diversifying matrix of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. A heron is prompted to a lyrical reflection on the change of seasons by a leaf that gently floats down to the surface of his pond (see the next p.): “Ah! the poetry of autumn … dying leaves, wind, departing birds…” This last thought jolts him back to reality: “But—I'm a migratory bird myself! … Good grief! What've I been thinking?” And off he takes on his voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the field rats Chlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell of a bad cold), who hitch a ride to Africa with him. “Are you traveling on business?” he asks his newfound passengers. “No, for our health,” they answer.

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This chapter, building on Ch. 1, explores how a sense of globally connected places develops from innovative aesthetic techniques in two works that focus on the Amazon rainforest as an icon of environmentalist concern. German installation artist Lothar Baumgarten’s experimental nature documentary The Origin of the Night: Amazon Cosmos presents images and sounds that ostensibly portray the Brazilian jungle, but are revealed as images of the river Rhine in Germany at the end of the film. The superimposition of the two landscapes generates a complex reflection on global interconnectedness. Japanese American novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest revolves around a mysterious substance discovered in the Brazilian jungle that becomes the point of departure for global business and media ventures and is ultimately revealed to be geologically transformed First-World trash. Yamashita’s thematic focus on a local place transformed by the global, as well as her combination of Latin American techniques derived from the work of Mário de Andrade and Gabriel García Márquez with North American postmodernist strategies, create a narrative world that links the local, national, and global realms in innovative ways. Both works aim to create an “eco-cosmopolitan” awareness of global cultural and ecological spaces.