The environmental crises we face pose unprecedented challenges for all species, resulting from human activity over several centuries and across the globe. How do we write about loss and damage, and underlying fear, while continuing to celebrate the wonder of the nonhuman world, and to find hope? How do we write in such a way that hope is not false security but positive action to redeem our situation?  

Of particular concern today is the topic of environmental justice, including human and nonhuman displacement (plants as well as animals), ‘two-tier’ environmental problem-solving, and inadequate understanding of indigenous conservation practices. All environmental anxieties have generated a range of international fiction, poetry and literary non-fiction that endeavours to understand climate complexity as well as to devise better stories to live by.  

In this short course, we’ll look at the background to present-day ‘environmental’ writing by tracing its origins in previous centuries, and how twentieth-century fears manifest in new kinds of writing.  

Dr Sue Edney lectures in English at Bristol University. She is book reviews editor for Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, and specialises in teaching and researching literature of all periods related to the environment and human/nonhuman connections.