Depends on who you ask. For Arthur’s purposes, it rejects anything other-worldly: science fiction, fantasy, punk, because of the simple fact that these are already their own genres.

It starts in elementary school when they teach you the components of a story, part of which is “the setting”, the distilled down version of the actual environment in which the story takes place. The backdrop. The background. Not important and certainly not part of the story. When the reality is there is no separation between us and “the environment”. We ARE the environment. When you turn on the water in the morning, clear the leaves off your windshield, grab your hat before the wind blows it off, or stare at the spider on your keyboard. It is everywhere all the time. It is everything. This idea of relegating nature, the environment, our planet to “just the setting” , the background, not important, optional, can be seen throughout our society. From the “environment” section of a news publication–the “environment” gets half a page. It’s a cute little blurb about a baby panda. To the complete scraping-off of the “environment” for a new building, road, strip mall, because “the enviroment” is in the way. As if we don’t live on and depend on the full functioning of A PLANET. THIS PLANET. The cosmos has made it very convenient for us to forget…To shove it on to the back page or make it just “the setting”. Just scrape it off, oblivious to the fact that the planet has limits, she can only take so much human impact; and for every little tear in the fabric of the global ecosystem, functions of life WE MUST HAVE, WE DEPEND ON, NOT OPTIONAL, our existence as species is degraded, to our peril. Obviously, we are seeing these impacts all around us (but we try to ignore them away).

Ecofiction questions and challenges conventional writing paradigms. Virginia Arthur’s definition:

Ecofiction is fiction in which real earth ecology is a major component of the plot such that it goes beyond just the setting.

The Earth Deserves Her Own Genre.

Unlike the above listed genres that may include elements of the ‘real world’, eco-fiction is not the lazy author’s fiction. It requires research in order to reflect real earth ecology. You can learn about real earth ecology from reading eco-fiction (that is hopefully interesting and/or fun at the same time).

An example would be a story about a girl who climbs to the top of a rock that is the color of a rainbow and the rock dissolves under her feet transporting her into space versus a girl who climbs to the top of a granite outcrop and the sun is reflecting off the crystals of feldspar and quartz and she wonders if the gold flecks in the rock are gold (do you know what they are? They are not gold). After sitting on the granite outcrop for awhile, she spots a particular tree and decides she will hike to it. She doesn’t know why she likes it, she just does. She wants to know what kind of tree it is. The latter is eco-fiction. The prior is easily cooked up piffle. Anybody can do it and it’s very effective if what you want is a fantasy experience but it is not eco-fiction.

How Do I Write Eco-fiction?

Start with a place you love, you go to for refuge, even if it’s just a rock in your backyard. What kind of rock is it? What are the plants, birds, bugs? What is the topography? How does the sun move across the sky? How can you take these real elements of the ecology and build a story from them that goes beyond the setting of the story, a story in which humans must revolve around the non-human, ecological elements that are the center of the plot?

Eco-fiction allows you to indulge in the love of our planet. So indulge.