There are many ways to describe and understand the ecological issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, energy extraction and conservation. Scientists may tell us what is happening in the physical world, journalists may record significant events and policy debates and campaigners may provide the arguments that inform our thinking. But there are crucial contributions that imaginative literature can also make.
Humanity’s relationship to what we call “Nature” has been a frequent theme of imaginative writing – from the earliest recorded poem (the 4000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh ) to the speculative fiction of contemporary novelists like Margaret Atwood. How we perceive (and therefore treat ) nature is not something science alone can capture; literature shows us that our relationship to nature is saturated with history, ideology, spiritual beliefs, individual hopes and fears. And solutions to environmental crises will have to take this into account to be deep and lasting.
Centuries of literature show how nature is sometimes perceived to be a threat to humans, while at other times it is viewed as a source of health and consolation. When the poet Percy Shelley encountered the stupendous vistas of the Alps, he wrote about the terror as well as wonder that the non-human world can inspire – and how we feel nature’s power along the pulse as well as contemplating it in the mind. At a more intimate level, a poet like Moya Cannon shows how transformative nature can be even at its most delicate and domestic.
Literature can teach us how we got to where we are now – it teaches us how mindsets of the past have imagined ecological issues in ways that may have contributed to the crises we now face. But it may also give us lessons in resilience. Even myths and folktales offer modes of thinking about symbiotic relationships between human and nature, and model the principles by which healthy ecosystems might be maintained, or alternatively warn about the consequence of neglecting those principles.
Storytelling also gives us the freedom to imagine possible futures that are speculative, but may still be useful and true. The IPCC reports offer certain highly generalized scenarios about the possible societal effects of climate change – but novels offer us a much richer, complex portrait of how humans are likely to react when their environments are thrown into crisis, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel The Ministry for the Future. And the power of literature comes from its playfulness, its flexibility, its ability to simultaneously “teach and delight” in the words of the Roman poet Horace. The Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, for example, combines elements of family saga, political thriller and ecological science to recount how a group of characters are drawn together through their various relationships to trees, at the same time teaching us how trees themselves may communicate through roots and microscopic fungi. Literature even gives us a chance to imagine the voices of the non-human world.
What literature can do most powerfully, of course, is to channel our emotions – our feelings of fear, loss and anger, but also hope, wonder and empathy. Emotions do lead us to knowledge, and certainly may lead us to action. Literature is one of the best ways to remind us that our relationship to our multiple environments – animals, plants, soil, air and fellow humans – must ultimately be one of interdependence, respect and care. In the words of travel and nature writer Robert Macfarlane, 'we will not save what we do not love'.
