As we find ourselves living through the strange temporal distortion of post-pandemic times, anthropogenic climate change is in full and terrifying swing, environmental and political crisis headlines flood the news, while poverty intensifies as opportunistic governments capitalise on social and class divisions. It is an inescapable and painful consequence that grim circumstances give scholars of environmental literature ever more material and contexts to consider. This open edition reflects that breadth, displaying the scope and richness of current work in the Environmental Humanities. At the same time, articles in this edition reflect on the manifold ways in which writing and literary activism might help expand understanding of and engagement with the environmental crisis in diverse contexts.
It begins with a discussion of the significance of cultural heritage in two famous heritage landscapes – the Lake District and Heaney Country in County Derry, discussed by authors Paul Ferguson and Yvonne Reddick. In ‘“A Threatening Din and Clamour”: Cultural Dissonance in the Lake District’s Harmonious Landscape’, Paul Ferguson examines the ‘harmonious relationship’ between landscape and culture in the Lake District, a popular tourist destination and (as of 2017), a UNESCO World Heritage site. Resisting the illusion of harmony between nature and culture, Ferguson considers the landscape ‘in the contexts of farming, tourism, economic growth and COVID-19’. Through close attention to the often ignored and messy realities of modern farming, Ferguson uncovers concealed truths about human-nature relationships and makes ‘uncomfortable apocalyptic revelations’ about consumerism and its relationship to place.
‘Seamus Heaney’s Ecopoetry and Environmental Causes: From Conservation to Climate Change’ by Yvonne Reddick unearths how literature can play a role in environmental engagement. This can be observed in Heaney’s efforts to support a project focused on conservation and, subsequent campaigns to save the fragile ecosystem of land christened ‘Heaney Country’ in his honour. Additionally, Reddick resists earlier readings of Heaney’s poetry as simply exploring ‘connection’ to nature, instead arguing that his creative work should be read as on a continuum with his environmentalism, and as offering fertile groundwork for later and more radical environmental movements.
Living closely alongside environmental movements, ecocriticism and the climate crisis is the commonly fear known as climate anxiety. In this edition, climate anxiety and psychology are linked to destruction within the climate crisis, taking an interesting turn towards Freud’s death drive theory. Subsequently, as a common theme in various novels in the Cli-fi genre, climate anxiety exists here as a projection of Euro-American anxieties onto marginalised communities.
In ‘Climate Change and the Death Drive’, Robinson Murphy proposes that thinking with Freud’s classic theory of the death drive can help unravel the complex psychic drivers of the climate crisis. Arguing that self-destructive tendencies rooted in normative Western subjectivity have ‘generated destruction on a macro scale’, Robinson proposes that the psychological pull of aggression has had a colossal adverse impact on global climate. However, the death drive need not only tend towards apocalyptic scenarios. In James Bradley’s cli-fi novel Clade (2015) and in the work of social media personality Kaylen Ward, otherwise known as the Naked Philanthropist, Robinson finds novel examples of how the death drive’s destructive powers can be harnessed and ‘partnered with creatively’. The target of one’s death drive, he asserts, can then be repositioned towards the individual-ego, producing a new and ecologically vital ‘psychic flexibility’.
The aim of climate fiction is often to imagine possible scenarios of future societies in the wake of the climate catastrophe. However, in ‘Return of the “Savage” in Contemporary Climate Fiction’, Magdalena Maczynska argues that, although climate-fiction often poses as a ‘future-oriented’ project, its catastrophic scenarios are often paradoxically ‘backwards-looking’. In The Ice People by Maggie Gee (1998), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006), the ‘breakdown’ of modern civilisation is described as a descent into a state of violence and savagery. In this degenerative tendency, we can detect the same ‘colonialist teleologies of progress’ which unpinned eighteenth and nineteenth century Imperial ideology. Clearly, such teleologies present in contemporary Euro-American climate anxieties and as such are ripe to be projected onto societies at the frontlines of the climate crisis. As Maczynska argues, these uncritically examined views seriously ‘limit the imaginative possibilities’ of future climate scenarios, and should be challenged.
Authors M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh use similar emerging themes linked to anxieties and the climate crisis through storytelling by examining various genres in film. In ‘Folk Horror as Climate Change warning’, the authors discuss British director Ben Wheatley’s 2021 film In the Earth. Although the folk sits easily within the established genre of folk horror, it also points the genre into different directions, particularly towards a category that has recently labelled the ‘New Weird’. By mixing folk horror with genres of science fiction with psychological horror, Wheatley ‘generates a complex dialogue surrounding the relationship between humans and nature’. Throughout the movie, this dialogue between creates a ‘complex, but effective warning’ about the dangers of climate change, while attempting to avoid the ‘simplistic pattern-making’ which often characterises cultural attempts to categorise and know ‘nature’.
The harmful categorising of nature and communities is further challenged by authors Natasha Bondre and Subarna De, who take a decolonial approach to ecocriticism and its entanglement in power dynamics, violence and much-needed rehabilitation. In her article in this edition, Bondre looks back to the 1970s and 1980s in order to examine Puerto Rico’s entanglement with the U.S.A. in several ‘interconnected, inextricable’ dynamics shaped by ‘energy coloniality’ (Catalina M. de Onís) and North American imperialism. By reading Luis Rafael Sanchez’s 1976 novel La Guaracha del Macho Camacho in this petro-capitalist context, Bondre highlights the violence of socio-economic imperialism and ‘the orthodoxy of energy coloniality’, as well as the ways in which Sanchez critiques and resists colonial subjection and business as usual.
Subarna De’s ‘The Return of Nature: Decolonial Reinhabitation and Self-Indigenisation in Kodagu, India’ places Southern Indian Kodagu coffee plantations’ ecological and cultural practices into the context of the ‘post-/decolonial framework of bioregional reinhabitation’. After a long history of colonisation, the Kodava community’s need to restore and preserve their culture and their injured land’s natural systems is stronger than ever. De contextualises and explores Indigenous practices in Kodagu through attention to Kavery Nambisan’s 2010 novel The Scent of Pepper. As De argues, rehabilitation in Kodagu’s environment is occurring through decolonial approaches to coffee growing (a non-native plant) to integrate it into the culture, creating a bioregional crop. In this process, self-indigenisation is foregrounded ‘as a prominent decolonial rehinhabitory strategy in indigenous environments of crises’.
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Emily Weltzien
Emily Weltzien is an independent scholar, post-graduate of Bath Spa University’s MA in Environmental Humanities, and Green Letters Editorial Assistant.