Before we called it ecocriticism

I have been thinking about ecocriticism lately, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I came to it long before I knew its name. I did not encounter it first in a theory book or in a university classroom, but in places I had already learned to call home: rivers, farms, coastlines, islands, roads, fields, and communities whose landscapes seemed so ordinary that I rarely stopped to ask what they had been teaching me. Perhaps this is what happens when we grow up surrounded by a place—we become so familiar with it that we stop seeing it. I have spent much of my life reading, writing, publishing, and working with literature from Western Visayas, and I keep encountering the land even when the writers themselves are not consciously writing about the environment. It is there in the farm where somebody works, the sea that feeds a family, the rain that interrupts a journey, the river that becomes a boundary, the island that becomes a home, and the countryside slowly being replaced by subdivisions, roads, resorts, and commercial spaces. The environment has never been absent from our literature. Maybe what has been absent is our attention.

This is why John Iremil Teodoro’s idea of ecocriticism as “bagong luma” continues to stay with me. I like the phrase because it unsettles the idea that ecological thinking suddenly arrived in our literature when universities began teaching ecocriticism. What is new may only be the vocabulary, not the experience. Farmers did not need the word Anthropocene to understand that something was changing in the soil. Fisherfolk did not need environmental humanities to know when the sea was becoming more difficult to depend on. Communities did not need a theoretical framework to understand what floods, droughts, storms, mining, development, pollution, and disappearing resources were doing to their lives. They were already living inside these questions. Perhaps what we call ecocriticism today is simply our belated attempt to listen to knowledge that communities have carried for generations. We gave an academic name to something that people had already been experiencing with their bodies, livelihoods, memories, and losses.

I feel this particularly strongly in Western Visayas because my relationship with regional literature has always been inseparable from my relationship with place. The more I work with Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a books, the more I realize that language itself is a kind of landscape. It carries the names of food, plants, animals, weather, farming practices, rivers, mountains, seas, seasons, and ways of living that cannot always be translated without losing something. A language remembers what a community has repeatedly noticed. It records distinctions that may have mattered because people depended on them. This makes the disappearance of a regional language more frightening to me than the loss of vocabulary alone. When a language weakens, we may also be losing particular ways of seeing the world. We should therefore stop treating language preservation and environmental consciousness as two unrelated projects. Both are, in different ways, about keeping alive forms of knowledge that modern life is very good at making invisible.

I have also become suspicious of the way we have been taught to read literary settings. We identify the setting almost mechanically, answer where the story happened, and then move on to what we consider the “real” literary elements: character, conflict, plot, symbolism, theme. The river becomes a setting. The farm becomes a setting. The island becomes a setting. The forest becomes a setting. But what if we have been asking the wrong question? What if the landscape is not merely where the human story happens but one of the forces producing the story itself? What if a river determines how a family travels, how a community survives, how a child remembers home, or how a disaster enters a life? What if the farm is not simply scenery but livelihood, inheritance, and contested property? What if the island is not picturesque at all but politically, economically, and ecologically complicated? Ecocriticism becomes interesting to me precisely at this point because it refuses to let the landscape remain quietly in the background while human beings take all the narrative attention.

This is where Genevieve L. Asenjo’s work continues to matter to my thinking. Her literary and scholarly engagement with regional literature, Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a, islands, rural life, migration, landscape, and place reminds me that ecological consciousness does not always announce itself with the language we expect. Her Ang Itim na Orkidyas ng Isla Boracay, for instance, makes it difficult for me to think about Boracay simply as a beautiful island. Boracay is also a community, a workplace, a cultural symbol, an economic machine, a tourist destination, and an environment transformed by the enormous human desire to consume paradise. That contradiction interests me. We photograph the beach and call it paradise, but somebody has to live with what happens when paradise becomes a product. We celebrate the island while simultaneously changing the conditions that make the island livable. Literature gives us a way of asking what disappears when a place becomes more valuable to visitors than to the people who call it home.

Whenever I think about Boracay, I find myself uncomfortable with the image of the island that has been sold to us. We have seen so many photographs of white sand, blue water, sunsets, resorts, cocktails, and tourists that it is easy to forget that the island is not a photograph. People are born there. People work there. Children grow up there. Families remember there. People also experience the environmental consequences of development there. This is where ecology becomes inseparable from culture, livelihood, class, memory, and power. What happens when a home becomes a destination? What happens when a landscape that sustained a community becomes something designed primarily for consumption? What happens when the economic value of a place begins to overpower its cultural meaning? And what happens when the people who have lived there the longest become almost invisible in the stories we tell about the place? These are not questions that can be answered by looking at a beautiful photograph.

What I appreciate about Asenjo’s work is that it does not require literature to shout that it is environmental before we recognize its ecological dimensions. Sometimes ecological consciousness is quieter than that. It is found in a remembered landscape, a disappearing rural place, a person leaving home, a community being transformed, or the strange emotional attachment we develop to a particular island, road, river, or field. This matters to me because I have always believed that regional literature does something the national literary imagination sometimes fails to do: it keeps particular places from disappearing completely. A regional book can preserve the texture of a place that the larger literary market might consider too small, too local, too ordinary, or too provincial. And perhaps that is precisely why it matters. When we preserve regional literature, we may also be preserving memories of landscapes before they are erased, transformed, commercialized, renamed, or forgotten.

I return for the same reason to Alex C. Delos Santos’s The Rise of Kinaray-a: History and Anthology of Contemporary Literature in Antique. I have always been interested in anthologies because they resist the idea that literature becomes important only after it has entered the center. An anthology gathers voices that might otherwise remain scattered, inaccessible, or invisible, and Delos Santos’s work provides an important archive of contemporary Kinaray-a literature in Antique. Reading such a collection ecocritically allows us to ask questions that go beyond whether a poem contains a tree, river, mountain, or sea. We can ask what kind of relationship with place the literature imagines. We can ask what happens when land becomes livelihood, inheritance, memory, property, or home. We can ask what happens when people leave. We can ask what remains when the landscape they remember changes. For me, this is where an anthology becomes more than a collection of texts; it becomes evidence of how a community has imagined itself within a particular world.

I do not want to make the mistake of calling every poem with a tree in it ecocritical. That would be too convenient, and frankly, it would make ecocriticism intellectually lazy. A countryside setting does not automatically make a story environmental, just as mentioning a river does not automatically make a poem ecological. What interests me is the relationship underneath the image. How does the text understand land? Is land merely property, or is it also memory and inheritance? Are animals simply metaphors for human emotions, or do they exist in the literary world beyond their usefulness to human beings? Is the sea merely beautiful, or does it carry danger, livelihood, displacement, grief, and memory? Does a river exist only because a character needs somewhere to stand, or does the river have a history that changes the people living beside it? These questions force us to read more carefully, and perhaps that is one of the reasons ecocriticism matters: it makes the familiar strange enough for us to see it again.

The more I read regional literature, the more I think we have not paid enough attention to the ecological knowledge carried by language itself. We sometimes talk about regional languages as though they are simply alternative containers for literature written in a supposedly more important language. I have never believed that. A language is not an empty container. It has memory. It has history. It has accumulated ways of distinguishing one thing from another because people needed those distinctions in their lives. Words for food, soil, plants, animals, weather, water, farming, fishing, seasons, and landscapes are not decorative vocabulary. They are records of attention. When a writer chooses Hiligaynon or Kinaray-a, the writer is not merely choosing a medium. The writer is also activating a history of seeing and naming a world. That, to me, is already an ecological act.

This is why I resist the idea that Philippine ecocriticism should simply become an exercise in applying theories developed elsewhere to Filipino texts. I am not against theory; I need theory because sometimes we need language to articulate what we intuitively know but cannot yet explain. But theory can also become a trap. We can become so fascinated with terms such as anthropocentrism, the more-than-human, environmental justice, the Anthropocene, and other critical concepts that we forget to ask the most basic question: what is this particular place doing in this particular work? I would rather begin with the river than begin with a definition of the river. I would rather listen to the language of the farmer before deciding which theory best describes the farm. I would rather allow literature to complicate theory than force literature to behave according to a theory we already know. Otherwise, we risk turning regional literature into another laboratory where theories from elsewhere are tested while the literature itself is barely heard.

Perhaps this is where the possibility of a Western Visayan ecocriticism becomes exciting to me. I am not arguing that we need to build another academic territory and declare it uniquely ours. I am arguing for something simpler and more difficult: our literature should be allowed to determine some of the questions we ask. What does the sea mean in Hiligaynon literature? How is agricultural land imagined in Kinaray-a writing? What happens to literary memory when rural communities become increasingly urbanized? What happens to an island when it becomes both home and tourist destination? How does migration change the way people remember landscapes? How do disasters enter poems and stories? What happens to rivers when cities expand? How does food connect literature to land? How do regional languages preserve knowledge of a natural world that younger generations may encounter less frequently? These are not merely academic questions for me because they are questions about the places in which our lives are actually happening.

The questions become personal because my own work has always brought me back to books, language, publishing, and communities. The more regional books I encounter, the less I can believe that a book is simply an object containing words. A book carries a place, sometimes loudly and sometimes almost invisibly. It carries place through language, names, food, weather, landscape, memory, humor, idioms, family histories, and the rhythms of everyday speech. A Hiligaynon book can carry Iloilo without ever naming Iloilo. A Kinaray-a story can carry Antique through the way a character speaks about home. A poem can preserve a landscape without describing it in detail because the language itself comes from that landscape. This is why publishing has become, for me, inseparable from questions of memory. We do not publish only so that books will exist. Sometimes we publish because we are afraid that something will disappear.

This changes how I understand regional publishing. If publishing is partly an effort to protect voices pushed to the margins of dominant literary systems, then it is also an effort to preserve ways of seeing. When a Hiligaynon poem survives in print, something more than a poem survives. When a Kinaray-a story is read by somebody years after it was written, a particular imagination of place is carried forward. When a writer records a rural community undergoing rapid transformation, the book becomes a witness to change even if the writer never intended to produce an environmental document. I have come to believe that small books can carry enormous cultural weight precisely because they preserve what larger systems often overlook. Publishing can therefore become a form of ecological memory—not because every book is about nature, but because books can remember worlds that development has no obligation to remember.

This is why Teodoro’s “bagong luma” stays with me. It suggests that perhaps our literature did not become ecological when ecocriticism arrived; perhaps we simply became better equipped to notice what had been there all along. That distinction matters because I do not want regional literature to be treated as a provincial material waiting for metropolitan theory to make it intellectually respectable. Western Visayan literature does not need permission to matter. It does not need a foreign theoretical stamp before we can recognize its complexity. What ecocriticism offers is not permission but another lens. It gives us another way to read what our writers have already been doing. And perhaps the more interesting question is not whether our literature fits ecocriticism, but what ecocriticism itself might learn when it takes regional literature seriously.

There is something deeply personal about this because I have always understood reading as a form of returning. We return to books because something in them refuses to stay finished. A poem can mean one thing at twenty and something entirely different at forty. A story can suddenly reveal a loss we were too young to recognize the first time. I think landscapes behave in the same way. We return to the same road, river, field, coastline, neighborhood, or island, but neither the place nor the reader is exactly the same anymore. Sometimes the landscape has changed because development has changed it. Sometimes we have changed because life has changed us. Sometimes both have changed so completely that returning becomes an encounter with grief. Perhaps this is why books about place affect me so strongly: they remind me that memory is never simply about the past. It is also about what we are losing in the present.

This may be the deepest reason I have become drawn to ecocriticism. It allows environmental change to become something more than a statistic. Statistics can tell us that a coastline has changed, but literature can make us feel what it means to return to a coastline that no longer resembles the one we remember. Reports can document the destruction of a forest, but a story can preserve the emotional memory of what that forest meant to a person. Scientific knowledge tells us what is happening, and we desperately need that knowledge, but literature sometimes asks a different question: what does this change mean to those who live through it? That question matters because environmental destruction is never only about trees, rivers, oceans, or land. It is also about memory, identity, livelihood, belonging, and grief. When a landscape disappears, something inside human memory disappears with it.

But ecocriticism also makes me uncomfortable because it asks us to stop making every story about ourselves. We are so accustomed to interpreting nature according to what it means to human beings that even when we read about a tree, river, bird, animal, or sea, we immediately turn it into a symbol for our own emotions. The tree becomes sadness. The river becomes time. The bird becomes freedom. The sea becomes longing. What if, sometimes, the tree is simply a tree with a life beyond our metaphor? What if the river has significance that cannot be reduced to what it represents for a character? What if the bird matters not because it symbolizes something beautiful about us but because we have built a world in which its existence is threatened? Ecocriticism becomes provocative precisely when it asks literature to surrender some of its human-centeredness and admit that the world does not exist merely to serve as material for our stories.

This becomes particularly important when we read Western Visayan literature because our literary traditions contain countless relationships between people and the more-than-human world. Folk knowledge, oral traditions, agricultural practices, stories of places, beliefs about animals and plants, narratives of storms and seasons, and memories attached to rivers and seas all offer possible ways of thinking about ecology. But I do not want to romanticize these traditions either. Communities can care for environments, but communities can also exploit them. People can preserve ecological knowledge while participating in ecological destruction. There is no simple opposition between the “good community” and the “bad developer.” The reality is more uncomfortable. We are all capable of benefiting from systems that damage the places we claim to love. Literature can help us stay inside that contradiction instead of giving us an easy moral story.

Perhaps universities need to take this more seriously. We often teach literature as though the main task is to interpret what a text means, but interpretation can also ask what kind of world a text imagines. What relationships between people and place does it make visible? What does it consider valuable? What does it ignore? Whose landscape matters, and whose landscape disappears? Regional literature gives us a particularly powerful place to begin because students do not have to travel to some distant imagined wilderness before they can encounter ecological questions. They can begin with the river they crossed on the way to school, the farm their grandparents worked, the food they grew up eating, the coast they visited as children, the landscape that has already changed, or the local word whose meaning cannot be separated from place. Theory becomes less intimidating when it finally has somewhere to stand.

This is also why I think we need much more scholarship on Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Capiznon, and other Philippine regional literatures through ecocritical perspectives. There is an enormous archive waiting to be reread, and much of it is not sitting comfortably inside university libraries. There are poems in old newspapers, stories in regional anthologies, books published in tiny editions, manuscripts kept by families, oral narratives remembered by communities, children’s books, independent publications, and contemporary writing circulating in places that formal scholarship does not always recognize as literary archives. There are writers who have never called themselves environmental writers but whose work is full of land, water, animals, agriculture, migration, displacement, and place. Perhaps the problem is not that we lack ecological literature. Perhaps we have simply been looking for it in the wrong places and under the wrong names.

The problem, of course, is partly archival. Regional literature remains frustratingly difficult to access, especially outside the communities that produced it. Some books exist in only a few copies. Some are sitting in private collections. Some can be found only by asking the right person. Some have disappeared entirely except in the memories of writers and readers. This is one reason my work in regional publishing has convinced me that literary criticism cannot be separated from literary infrastructure. Before we can build a serious critical tradition, we have to make the literature available. Before we can teach regional ecocriticism, we need books in libraries. Before we can ask future scholars to reread our landscapes, we have to leave them something to read. A literature that cannot be accessed is dangerously close to becoming a literature that cannot be remembered.

And perhaps this is where I return to the simplest reason I continue to believe in books. A book can remember. It can remember a river before it was altered, a field before it became a subdivision, a word before younger speakers stopped using it, a community before development changed its shape, an island before tourism transformed its meaning. A book can remember how somebody once understood home. It can preserve not only what happened but how a place felt to the person who lived there. This is why I think publishing is sometimes an act of resistance against forgetting. We publish because memory is fragile. We publish because landscapes change faster than we can document them. We publish because there are forms of knowledge that may disappear if nobody writes them down, prints them, reads them, teaches them, and passes them on.

I began thinking about ecocriticism as a literary approach, but I am increasingly convinced that its deeper value is ethical. It asks us to pay attention, and perhaps attention is one of the most radical things we can offer a world we have become accustomed to consuming. It asks us to notice what we have trained ourselves not to notice. It asks us to question why the human story is almost always treated as the only story worth telling. It asks us to look again at the landscape behind our literature and wonder whether it was ever really “behind” us at all. And when we bring these questions to Western Visayan literature, something becomes clear: our writers have been thinking about place for a very long time. They simply did not always use the vocabulary that universities later developed to describe what they were doing.

Teodoro helps me name the possibility. Asenjo helps me see how regional literature can hold complicated relationships among island life, language, migration, landscape, culture, and environmental change. Delos Santos helps preserve the Kinaray-a literary tradition of Antique and gives us an archive that can continue to be read differently by different generations. Their work reminds me that Western Visayan literature does not need to wait for permission to participate in conversations about the environment. It is already there. The task is not to manufacture an ecological tradition where none exists. The task is to read more carefully the tradition we already have. The task is to stop assuming that theory must arrive first before literature can become intellectually interesting.

Maybe that is what I mean when I say that the land was already speaking. The river did not wait for ecocriticism before becoming part of somebody’s life. The island did not wait for environmental humanities before becoming home, livelihood, memory, and contested space. The farmer did not need a university vocabulary to understand dependence on soil and rain. Writers in Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a did not need to call themselves ecocritics before writing about the places that shaped them. The language itself was already carrying memories of the environment, and literature was already keeping some of those memories alive. Perhaps we were simply too busy looking for the right theory to hear what the literature had been saying all along.

Our task now is to listen differently.

Perhaps this is why ecocriticism remains “bagong luma” for me. It is new enough to give us another vocabulary, but old enough to remind us that the questions were already there. Western Visayan literature gives us an especially rich opportunity to listen because our languages, islands, farms, rivers, coastlines, and communities have always entered the stories we tell about ourselves. But I do not want to turn this into a romantic claim that our region has somehow always lived in ecological harmony. We have not. We have also participated in the destruction of the places we love. That contradiction is precisely what makes the literature worth reading. If literature can hold both love for a place and the violence we do to that place, perhaps it can help us confront the uncomfortable truth that belonging to a landscape does not automatically mean we know how to care for it.

The question, then, is no longer whether Western Visayan literature has enough material for ecocriticism. I think that question is too small. The more disturbing question is why we have not been reading it this way more often. Why have we treated the landscape as setting for so long? Why have we separated language from ecology, literature from place, and cultural preservation from environmental memory? Why do we continue to imagine regional literature as something that must first prove its relevance before we take it seriously? Perhaps the problem was never the absence of ecological thinking in our literature. Perhaps the problem was our own habit of looking elsewhere for what was already in front of us.

There are books waiting to be reread. There are landscapes waiting to be remembered. There are languages carrying ecological knowledge that may disappear if nobody listens carefully enough. There are writers who have already been documenting forms of environmental memory without calling themselves environmental writers. And there are readers who may discover, through these books, that the environment is not some distant subject belonging to scientists, activists, or literary theorists. It is not scenery. It is not merely a theme. It is not something outside the human story. It is the place from which our stories begin, the place where our memories accumulate, the place our languages learn to name, and the place we keep changing even as we claim to love it.

We are talking about home.

***

Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.