Alex Lockwood

The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring

In the fiftieth year since the publication of Silent Spring, the importance of Rachel Carsons work can be measured in its affective influence on contemporary environmental writing across the humanities. The ground broken by Silent Spring in creating new forms of writing has placed affect at the very centre of contemporary narratives that call for pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours. A critical public- feelings framework is used to explore these issues and trace their passage from the private and intimate, where they risk remaining denuded of agency, and into the public sphere. The work of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart and their focus on the struggle of everyday citizenship in contemporary life is helpful in illustrating how Silent Spring mobilised private feelings, particularly anger aimed at environmental destruction, into political action. This template is then explored in two contemporary environmental writers. First, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben is examined for its debt to Silent Spring and its use (and overuse) of sadness in its attempt to bring climate change to the publics attention. Second, Early Spring by Amy Seidl is shown to be a more affective and effective descendant of Silent Spring in its adherence to Carsons narrative procedures, by bringing attention back to the unpredictable and intimate power of ordinary, everyday affects. As such, Silent Spring is shown to occupy a foundational position in the history of the environmental humanities, and a cultural politics concerned with public feelings.

Graphs of grief and other green feelings: the uses of affect in the study of environmental communication

ABSTRACT How can theories of affect and felt emotions be useful in studying the communication of environmental crises? Beginning from tears spilt over a graph of transgressed planetary boundaries published in an academic paper, this article explores the presentation in graphic visual forms of affective imagery and a growing sophistication amongst scientists, policymakers and activist communicators in the visualization of information, data and stories employed to carry the often difficult and complex messages of current earth systems crises. Critically, this article attends to the “emotion work” of such images. Taking a lead from cultural sociology and attempting to elucidate the relationship between societies under pressure and its choice of texts, this article considers the environmental documentary Cowspiracy [Anderson, K., & Kuhn, K. (2014). Cowspiracy. San Francisco, CA: AUM Films & First Spark Media.] to ask questions of affect’s relation to expressions of the earth systems crisis, which is also a crisis of culture.

The Collaborative Craft of Creaturely Writing

What does it mean to write in a creatural way? One way we’re going to find out is by doing it, by telling stories with nonhuman-centred agency, and by exploring the practices of writers engaged with zoocentric elements in their craft. This chapter first engages with a range of literary texts that highlights the creatural in both human and nonhuman narrative voices, before drawing upon in-depth interviews with seven writers occupied with a range of issues related to posthumanism and creatural writing; these writers have also played roles in establishing spaces for such writing to flourish in communal and collaborative ways. And why not scholarly stories too? This chapter adopts an autoethnographic and creative/critical approach to not only examine creatural writing, but also attempt its practice.