There are many aspects of ecological thinking. When reading texts through a lens of dark ecology, certain conflicts that arise from the imposition of human expectations on natural systems are revealed. These include interconnectedness, complicity, and ambiguities. Within a system, boundaries are contingent and transitory. Beginnings and ends are gradual, not definite. Ecological systems change over time, but it is a category error to imagine that change represents progress or to assume a teleological purpose. While there are hierarchies of power, and different roles, no species is, ecologically speaking, more advanced than another. Ecological criticism focuses on interconnectedness, complicity, and ambiguity in art and literature, and is well suited to texts that deal with destructive processes like degradation and decay. Noir serves as a good example of a genre that can be read as an ecological system. Graphic novels, which already defy easy categorization are also ripe for ecological study..In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the boundary between natural and artificial is blurred, not just through the exploration of empathy, but in human artifacts. Watchmen uses many techniques, including a fractured narrative, simultaneous scenes on a single page, and the visual unity space and time to undermine the idea of clear beginnings and endings and critique teleology. A third work, Beautiful Darkness, probes how natural forces of disintegrations overcome temporary human constructs, including civilization. A dark ecological reading yields a sense of humility, instead of certainty, about human capacity for knowledge regarding ecological systems. It fosters respect for the unknowable that lies in shadow and the complicated natural systems that defy attempts at reduction. Disruptive events in narratives, when read ecologically, remind us of the unpredictable results that manipulation of components of the system can have for humanity, as well as on the functioning and balance of the system as a whole.

John Graves's creative non-fiction has earned him respect in Texas letters as a seminal writer but scarce critical commentary of his work outside the region. Ecological criticism examines how language, culture and the land interact, providing a context in which to discuss Graves in relation to the southwestern literary tradition of J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, to southern pastoral in the Virgilian mode, and to American nature writing. Graves's rhetorical strategies, including his appropriation of form, his non-polemical voice, his experimentation with narrative persona, and his utilization of traditional tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and irony, establish him as a conservative and Romantic writer of place concerned with the friction between traditional agrarian values and the demands of late-twentieth-century urban/technological existence. Sequentially, Graves's three main booksGoodbye to a River (1960), Hard Scrabble (1974), and From a Limestone Ledge (1980)represent a movement from the pastoral mode of the outward journey and return to the more domestic world of georgic, from the mode of leisure and contemplation to the demands and rewards of hard work and ownership. As such they represent not only progression or maturation in the arc of the narrator's life but a desire to reconcile ideological poles first examined so long ago in Virgil: leisure and work, freedom and responsibility, rural and urban values.