Today’s Environmental ‘Waste Land’: Eliot’s Prediction of the Current Ecological Crisis Anonymous College

There is no denying it—our world is on the brink of a severe environmental crisis. Critical issues like pollution, global warming, overpopulation, natural resource depletion, waste disposal, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and urban sprawl need to be resolved, or else our earth will no longer be a sustainable environment for the population to live. In her five-part essay “The Waste Land as an Ecocritique,” Gabrielle McIntire presents us with a new interpretation of The Waste Land, showing us that it is an eco-poem that not only describes the desolate, polluted, and urbanized postwar environment of 1922, but also functions as a memorial for all that has been lost and destroyed, and lastly, sounds a warning about impending environmental disaster. It seems far-fetched that a little less than a century ago, a poet would have predicted the ecological crisis that we face today. However, as we view The Waste Land through Gabrielle McIntire’s eyes, obvious parallels of environmental crises emerge between the ‘waste land’ of postwar 1922 and the ‘waste land’ of today.

One of the most common features of the landscapes and cityscapes that Eliot presents in The Waste Land is the presence of pollution and waste. We can take the title...