the remaining professor Michael P. Branch, has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India (OSLE-India), Southeast Asia (ASLE-ASEAN), Taiwan, Canada and Europe. The emergence of ecocriticism in British literary criticism is usually dated to the publication in 1991 of Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition by Jonathan Bate. Ecocriticism’s second wave emerged in the 2000s through a more complex understanding of the overall history of global environmentalism and environmental justice. According to Lawrence Buell, former Harvard professor and proponent of ecocriticism, the second wave of ecocriticism aligns with public health environmentalism, with ethics and politics that are sociocentric rather than ecocentric. The second wave not only considers rural landscapes or wilderness, but also landscapes of urban and industrial transformation. It is inspired by writers such as Charles Dickens, who wrote about Victorian-era public health concerns, and the American novelist Upton Sinclair, as well as by global activists, such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his protests against ecological devastation in Nigeria, and Michiko Ishimure, who wrote about Minamata disease and the effects of mercury poisoning. The second wave of ecocriticism distinguishes itself from the first wave by prioritizing the exploration of issues such as environmental resource distribution, environmental justice, minority and socioeconomic impacts related to environmental circumstances. A representative of second-wave ecocriticism is the 2002 Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. See also Animal studies Critical theory Cultural ecology Ecolinguistics Ecosophy Ethnobiology Environmental humanities References Sources Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Alex, Rayson K., S. Susan Deborah & Sachindev P.S. Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Barry, Peter. "Ecocriticism". Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Bladow, Kyle and Jennifer Ladino (Eds). "Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment". Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995. Bilbro, Jeffrey.