Based on the premise that the current environmental crisis is, in fact, a cultural crisis the essay delineates why and how the field of literary studies – conceived as a part of cultural studies – can and must contribute to environmentalist efforts. It opens with observations on the conceptualising and world-shaping power of language and texts, then introduces premises and key categories of the scholarly discipline of ecofeminism, and, finally, in two brief, exemplary analyses of Margaret Atwood’s novels Surfacing and Oryx and Crake, demonstrates in which way an ecofeminist literary and cultural criticism can provide environmentally relevant knowledge.