In comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened from nature writing, romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, television, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts.
At the same time, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
Implementing the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism constitutes an "economic school of thought" as it engages audiences to debate issues of resource allocation that have no technical solution.
Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race.
Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature.
Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value.
As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, "One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another's work; they didn't know that it existed...Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.
In 1990, at the University of Nevada, Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR, with the aid of the now-retired Glotfelty and the remaining professor Michael P. Branch, has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone.
From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India (OSLE-India), Southeast Asia (ASLE-ASEAN), Taiwan, Canada and continental Europe.
The emergence of ecocriticism in British literary criticism is usually dated to the publication in 1991 of Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition by Jonathan Bate.
In their 2022 Special Issue for Green Letters entitled 'A New Poetics of Space', the co-editors, Lucy Jeffery and Vicky Angelaki, remark: 'We hope that through the analysis of the act of walking in the creative arts we can understand our role in shaping the environmental state in which we find ourselves.
[25] This scholarly volume is evidence of a current trend in eco-critical scholarship to explore the impact of the twenty-first century's technological developments, societal shifts, environmental challenges, and political situation through the perspective of creative works that are concerned with the poetics of space, health, and the environment (both urban and rural).