Writing the Canadian Pacific Northwest Ecocritically: The Dynamics of Local and Global in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

In its discussion of transpacific literary, political, and ecological relations, A Tale for the Time Being presents ecological issues as having transnational relevance more pointedly and more effectively than in Ozeki's two previous novels.1 As A Tale for the Time Being reminds us, social and environmental injustice is hardly ever contained within national borders.[...]while My Year of Meats and All Over Creation are predominantly American novels in both their settings and cultural references, A Tale for the Time Being is decisively Canadian in its attention to coastal British Columbia and its literature, albeit in a transnational rather than a parochial way.According to the editors of Greening the Maple, "literary respondents to Canadian environments have attempted to discover or invent vocabularies and literary forms appropriate to the scale and the particularities of the country" (xxv).The island's biotic community has become further unbalanced as wolves have recently killed several pets.[...]apart from being threatened by pollution in the wake of the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear fallout, the island is also at the mercy of logging companies.The two texts require a foraging reading practice as they both use textual mediation and intertextual references to challenge readers' assumptions about reality, language, literature, temporal logic, and sense of place.[...]Wong's reference to herself as an "interbeing" (5), a Buddhist concept that recognizes the idea of an independent self as an illusion and emphasizes human interdependence, is echoed in Ozeki's notion of the "time being."