Susanna Lidström

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknowledge that an understanding of the environmental crisis must include insights from the humanities and social sciences. In order to realize this potential, scholars in the environmental humanities need to map the common ground on which close interdisciplinary cooperation will be possible. This essay takes up this task with regard to two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour, namely ecocriticism and environmental history. After outlining an ideal of slow scholarship which cultivates thinking across different spatiotemporal scales and seeks to sustain meaningful public debate, the essay argues that both ecocriticism and environmental history are concerned with practices of environing: each studies the material and symbolic transformations by which “the environment” is configured as a space for human action. Three areas of research are singled out as offering promising models for cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental history: eco-historicism, environmental justice, and new materialism. Bringing the fruits of such efforts to a wider audience will require environmental humanities scholars to experiment with new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

The balance between concepts and complexity in ecology

Ecological concepts and their acronyms can obstruct understanding of complexity by providing seemingly simple and certain descriptions of the natural world. Their use requires a balanced approach.

Introduction to Special Issue on Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives

Over the past decade, environmental themes, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have occupied significant space in narratives that circulate through legacy media as well as other popular channels such as online and mobile platforms, museums, films and literature. Environmental issues are de facto entangled with the politics and discourses of globalization, and such narratives are increasingly networked, connected and homogenized, multiplied and diversified. Popular narratives constitute powerful tools that shape the sociocultural context of environmental change, influence policymaking and inform public understanding to considerable degrees. Narratives portraying future scenarios and environmental transformations are used and remediated through a multitude of popular communication venues. This special collection of articles explores various constructions of the environment and environmental change mediated through virtual sites and thematic constructions in different popular venues, providing an account of how we imagine and reproduce ideas of the environment. We take popular communication here to include the entire “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of everyday life” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) expressed in literature, media, film, social movements and other performances and speech acts. Several cross-cutting lenses are instrumental in seeking to grasp the complexities of how environmental themes travel through popular sites. A space-specific approach can help reveal the significance of space in considering environmental imaginaries. The actual and virtual sites and locales (e.g. museums, electronic media space, literature, film, music, archives, etc.) where narrative interventions materialize constitute spaces of narrativity. Narrated space (such as “the ocean” in a broad, and “the Arctic” or “the Ozone layer” in specific senses) signifies the site of environmental transformation. In the case of cinema, for example, this “territorial ontology that underlies the world of any film” (Ivakhev, 2013) emerges as a result of complex, multi-actor production choices and the viewers’ own implicit understandings and perception, while appearing as “given”. Due to both the networked nature of planetary scales (e.g. the Great Barrier Reef and the Arctic both being local/ized sites of global significance and human and non-human flows) and transmedial flows in today’s convergent media landscapes, a scalar conception that emphasizes the notion of scalar transcendence (Christensen, 2013) helps to further think of the actual-virtual sites and (re)mediated reach of environmental narratives and framings. The contributions to this special collection explore different narrative spaces and scales in popular science writing, zombie fiction, popular music, social media, and news media.

“Images adequate to our predicament”: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics

This paper discusses the idea of ‘ecopoetry’ by outlining its development from drawing on Romantic and deep ecological traditions in the 1980s to reflecting complex environmental concerns in the 20 ...

Looking for perspectives! EU energy policy in context

Transitioning to less carbon-intensive energy systems involves making difficult choices and priorities. This chapter imagines three individuals who are affected in different ways by EU energy policy. Their fictional stories illustrate that energy policies are embedded in social, historical and cultural practices and need to take a broader perspective than either technological fixes or a narrowly defined goal of low or zero carbon emissions to be fair and effective. We argue that this is often not reflected in the EUs energy policy frameworks, and use the Energy Roadmap 2050 to demonstrate our point. Contrary to the impression given by the roadmap, a narrow technocratic empirical basis for a policy is not enough to define and solve an energy problem. Energy issues are societal problems and need to be addressed as such.