Abstract:“Nature”,“place” and “justice” are some concepts that undergird the emerging movement for social and environmental justice. Different from the dominant American enviromentalists advocating the “wilderness ethnic”, American Indian poet Simon Ortiz puts forward a new “garden ethnic” by going to the garden—the middle place between nature and culture and shows a totally different view of nature from the former. Based on this, the ecocritics probing into the “middle place” will lead people to think about how differences in ecological, cultural, economic, political, and social conditions get produced in specific places which will greatly contribute to the development of the social and environmental justice movement.
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