Book Review: Since C. P. Snow published his famous pronouncement on the separation of the "two cultures," the institutional and epistemic gap between science and the humanities has only grown wider. Contemporary literary criticism has tended to constitute itself as an elite hermeneutic discipline, inscrutable to outsiders, while readers of Science magazine can likewise attest to the hermetic quality of contemporary scientific discourse. The prevalence of obscure and impersonal jargon in both fields of endeavor is symptomatic of a deeper and more pervasive problem, which is their common failure to recognize and appreciate the paradigm shifts that have fundamentally transformed the practice of both science and the humanities. Thus many scientists tend to dismiss literary critics as quasi-Paterian appreciationists, while we tend to caricature scientists as ultra-Newtonian rationalists. Of course, neither of these characterizations is correct, and it would behoove practitioners on both sides of the barricade to learn what the other side is really doing. In particular, humanists of all stripes could benefit from a more concrete understanding of recent advances in the field of environmental biology, which has scrapped its pre-Darwinian fixation on the autonomous individual organism in favor of investigating the dynamic and adaptive interdependency between organic communities and their local environment. Ecological Literary Criticism advocates a new approach to the study of literature. More than just another routine method of textual analysis, ecological literary criticism seeks to bridge the gap between the "two cultures." Such an approach

necessarily incorporates recent advances in the science of environmental biology while at the same time it adapts to the changing social and political circumstances of contemporary criticism. In Karl Kroeber's view, an ecologically oriented literary criticism "seizes opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more socially responsible." Rejecting the oppositional rhetoric of the "Cold War critics," this approach examines continuities and interrelationships among ostensibly disparate historical and natural phenomena.