David Fairer just sent me his detailed and fascinating treatment of “eco-georgic“ (in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 40, 2011). Like my colleague Mike Ziser, Fairer sees in the georgic genre (georgos is Greek for farmer) a way out of the difficulties and paradoxes of Green Romanticism, which could easily be associated with pastoral rather than georgic.
Georgic is hands on. It's about “land drainage, rat poisoning, the management of slaves, undersea coal mining, child labour, and genetic modification” (and so on, quoting Fairer). It could be a genre of ecology without Nature, in other words, a genre of hypocrisy and compromise in which Nature “breaks down into discrete phenomena.”