Title: Reexamining Ecological Consciousness and Ethical Consideration in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker

Abstract: Known as “an ecological elegy,” The Echo Maker demonstrates an intention to examine numerous ethical issues such as the relationships between humans and their own rationality, between human and nature, and between human and time through an ecological lens. Its ethical concerns far exceed what current scholarship commonly frames as ecological ethics. Centering on two core images—the sandhill crane and the Capgras syndrome, the novel reveals the significance of irrational factors such as emotions in maintaining the wholeness of rationality, revisits the tension between nature and modern civilization, and underscores the need to overcome synchronic and diachronic fractures of modernity so as to reconstitute historical continuity. In doing so, it opens the possibility of restoring modern humans’ poetic dwelling on the earth and offers a point of reference for human existence in the age of artificial intelligence.

Keywords: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, the ecological thinking, ethical consideration

Authors: Yiwei Liu, Lecturer, School of Languages and Communication Studies, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China; Jingyu Chen, Lecturer, School of Languages and Communication Studies, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.01.011