A move so foundational as to have become a commonplace in the larger discourses of eco-criticism and eco-poetics involves a critique of colonialist narratives that construct ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’ within the horizon of a false, racist (and malignant) nostalgia for uninhabited regions. Especially because early eco-criticism thrived in the context of early Americanist and British Romanticist literary studies, a now ubiquitous critique of the stereotypical sexualized ‘virgin’ landscape (ready to be conquered as the object of a male-gendered empire's expanding desires) was nourished by eco-criticism to the point of seeming constitutive of the discourse – even as this early focus on particular Anglo-American genres and periods has long been recognized as opportunistic and thus ‘contingent rather than inherent’ to the development of the field. Thus, eco-criticism often initially articulated its basic lexicon through a critique of narratives that imagine the North American continent as uninhabited prior to European colonization: by means of a practised amnesia of Native American/First Nations/Indigenous inhabitation, or a practised failure to distinguish those peoples as sufficiently human, European colonialism in North America required an erasure of Indigenous human populations with a coordinated construction of ‘Nature’ that registered only European human settlement as distinct cultural ‘inhabitation’. The countermoves have included ecocritical postures articulated from the perspective of Indigenous/First Nations/Native American Studies, and (following a logic that has emerged increasingly out of eco-critical engagements in medieval studies) posthumanist critical turns to consider the ‘agency’ of ‘nonhumans’ (a move that presumably accords to non-human phenomena the status of ‘inhabitants’, or even legitimate political stakeholders).

However, the practice of eco-criticism has shifted, as Lawrence Buell puts it, ‘from an Anglo-American cottage-industry into a worldwide movement’; and critics of medieval and early modern texts have played no small role in its revision. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen locates the fulcrum of his account of a ‘grey’ zombie ecology, for example, in a reading of a well-known episode from the fourteenth-century Icelandic Grettis saga about a fight between the saga's protagonist Grettir and the aptrgangr (revenant, lit. again-goer) Glámr.