Tag Archives: environmental literature
Embracing Ecological Uncertainty through Fiction
Guest post by Marco Caracciolo The future has always been uncertain, but the ecological crisis presents us with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in thinking about the future. Scientists who model the effects of global warming typically distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. The gap between them is significant: concretely, it could mean the difference… Read More »
Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.
Life in A Bubble
A Conversation Among Objects
Searching for the Anthropocene
Writing about an elusive yet encompassing topic: environmental catastrophe and our role in it Guest Post by Christopher Schaberg I’ve written a strange book about contemporary environmental awareness. It all started about seven years ago, when I thought I might write a book about Michigan. I wanted to write a book that reflected on my… Read More »
Explorations in Science and Literature
We’re announcing a new series! Guest post by Anton Kirchhofer, Janine Rogers, and John Holmes In the twentieth century, a powerful myth arose that science and technology could solve humanity’s problems. New materials like plastics, new drugs, new computational and information technologies, would transform our world, creating a cleaner, brighter, healthier and more equal future. In some… Read More »
The Necessity of Revisions
Guest post by Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins, adapted from Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology There’s a wicked myth about environmental writing (or any creative writing, really): that the great writer ascend the mountain to wait for inspiration to strike. Once it does strike, the writer simply transcribes that revelation verbatim, and… Read More »
Q&A with Jos Smith
Jos Smith answered some questions for us about The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, the latest volume in the Environmental Cultures series. How would you describe your book in one sentence? An appraisal of shifting cultural attitudes to nature and place in the UK over the last forty years through a detailed… Read More »