The first person to use the term appears to have been William Rueckert in 1978, whose purpose in doing so was to suggest that ecological terms and concepts can usefully be applied to the study of literature. This, however, is not the dominant meaning of the term. It tends to be interpreted more loosely as a general term for the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment. Although a number of critics have considered the importance of the environment in literature (e.g. Leo Marx and Williams, Raymond), it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that it became a recognizable sub-branch of literary and cultural studies. One explanation for this may be that it was not until then that the environment itself became of broad and perhaps even urgent concern for many people. Ecocriticism defines itself as a practice of reading literature from an earth-centred (rather than human-centred) perspective. There is also an activist dimension to ecocriticism: at least part of the reason ecocritics want to discuss the centrality of nature in literature is to raise awareness more generally about the need for concern and indeed action with regard to the environment. Unsurprisingly, many ecocritics are also active in the environmental justice movement, whose concern is the uneven and generally inequitable distribution of the burden of environmental degradation (e.g. poorer countries tend to be more polluted than richer countries). See also ecological imperialism. Further Reading: L. Buell The Environmental Imagination (1995). G. Garrard Ecocriticism (2004). C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds.) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Ecology (1995). L. Marx The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). D. Phillips The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003). R. Williams The Country and the City (1973).