The story itself, however, takes the reader into the natural world and brings it alive...Ideally the landscape and ecosystems--whether fantasy or real--should be as "realistic" as possible and plot constraints should accord with ecological principles."
"Often in fiction nature has loomed as a monstrous character, an adversary dishing out retribution for moral slippage, or as a nightmare region of chaos and horror where fanged beasts crouch ready to attack.
-Patricia D. Netzley [8] "Ecofiction is an elastic term, capacious enough to accommodate a variety of fictional works that address the relationship between natural settings and the human communities that dwell within them.
-John Yunker Given that "Ecocriticism seems to be inherently interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, syncretic, holistic, and evolutionary in its nature,"[10] it would seem useful to apply these traits to the large field of literature that is ecofiction, especially given its history, reach, and continuity.
Further, while ecofiction is "fiction with a conscience," per John Yunker, as shown above, it reveals integrity in the concern for our natural world as well as what can be found on numerous storytelling platforms: mystery, thriller, suspense, romance, dystopian, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, Arcadian, futuristic, crime, detective, and so on.
Given the upstream and downstream effects of such issues as climate change, fracking, coal mining, animal justice, pollution, deforestation, and so on, this branch of fiction is not inclusive and has no demarcation other than the environmental and nature impacts by which it is defined and explained.
Developing: Dwyer's field guide has hundreds of examples of ecofiction across time, from the roots and precursors---the earliest cave drawings, pastoral and classic, etc.--up through the 21st century.
In May 2017, writing in The New York Times, Yale scholar Wai Chee Dimock reviewed Jeff VanderMeer's novel Borne and said, "This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the 21st century will be as good as any from the 20th, or the 19th.
In his field guide, Dwyer cited such examples of climate change fiction as The Swarm and The Day After Tomorrow—also noting that "Ecofiction rarely fares well in escapist Hollywood."
Thus, true to the evolutionary characteristic of ecofiction, from early pastoralism to modern science's understanding of global warming, hundreds of authors have taken up the issue of climate change in the least as a backdrop to their novels or, more heavily, as a moral, didactic cautionary tale centering around this foreboding, current, and very real environmental catastrophe.
Postwar ecofiction writers arrived too, such as science fiction authors who were cautionary about the environment: Clifford Simak, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few.
The anthology included the authors Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, A. E. Coppard, James Agee, Robert M. Coates, Daphne du Maurier, Robley Wilson Jr., E. B.
White, J. F. Powers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Herbert, H. H. Munro, J. G. Ballard, Steven Scharder, Isaac Asimov, and William Saroyan.
Jonathan Levin goes on to explain, "Two key events helped spark this new environmental awareness [leading to ecofiction]: the controversy surrounding proposed dams on the Colorado River that led ultimately to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam (begun in the mid-1950s and completed about ten years later), and the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's exposé of the environmental impact of toxic pesticides like DDT.
Among these were two novels that may be considered ecofiction, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (about the dust bowl, which was caused by farmers failing to use smart ecological principles) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (about Chicago's meat-packing industry).
For example, scholars have found that literary fiction can make readers more concerned about animal welfare[21] and climate change[22][23] and raise awareness of environmental injustice.