How environmental issues are springing from the page

Science is not the only discipline to have environmental complexity and looming ecological catastrophes in its sights. Now, climate change, environmental activism and agricultural practices are being picked up, held up to the light and examined by literary and cultural critics.

Ecocriticism is a theoretical framework that looks at the relationship between the physical environment and literature and cultural artifacts.

Researcher Dr Tom Bristow has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne and is currently using ecocriticism to inform his approach to Australian ‘pastoral’ literature.

“Ecocriticism is part of a cultural revolution, a new movement in how we think about nature and the environment,” Dr Bristow says.

Our awareness of the human impact upon our planet and our relationship with other species is informing the literature and pop culture we consume. There is a growth in films and books about environmental catastrophes, from Pixar’s WALL-E and Elysium to Cormack McCarthy’s The Road.

Dr Grace Moore from the University of Melbourne says what we read and watch can shape our relationship and understanding of the environment in which we live. 

“There is even a new genre on the rise – climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’,” Dr Moore says. “People read and write about the things that concern and interest them. Climate change is right up there.”

Dr Moore is using ecocriticism to look at how 19th-century literature set in Australia is informed by attitudes towards the environment.

Anthony Trollope was among the most prolific and successful novelists in Victorian England. He visited Australia twice and wrote significantly about his observations of this antipodean frontier, which were narrated and filtered through his British sensibility.

During the period Trollope was in Australia early English colonialists enacted their familiar European rituals and traditions on the Australian landscape.

Mounted hunting, which was popular in England was brought to Australia. However, owing to the different environment it was transposed across species from a fox hunt to a dingo hunt.

“Trollope describes the dingo hunt as a catastrophic mess. The landscape is different. The terrain is different. The fences are higher because they have to keep kangaroos out,” Dr Moore says.

“The process of elegantly jumping a fence to reach a fox instead involved horses falling and riders crashing down. It just didn’t work in Australia,” says Dr Moore

Ecocriticism can help to unpick complex colonial dynamics and help us understand Australia’s relationship with its past and present. 

Dr Bristow explains the way places in Australia were named according to British geographical benchmarks.

“The first state settled in Australia was New South Wales. It was as though the Australian environmental conditions could be compared to a place in Britain: South Wales. But really the environment is more similar to North Africa.”

Botany Bay was named in 1770. It was part of the young King George III’s patronage of the Royal Society that was granted an official charter by King Charles II in 1662.

Australia was sold and packaged to the Europeans as an important destination for botanical expeditions. It was a botanical colony, which displaced Australia’s Aborigines,” he says.

The researchers say the Australian environment and landscape has, since settlement, been subject to the terms and values of European discourse. Trollope and botanical and agricultural practices are good examples of the relationship between Europe and Australia. 

Dr Bristow says today’s framing of our attitude toward the environment straddles two distinct narratives. 

“There is the framework that perceives the environment in terms of its resources, currency and capital, while there is also the more concerned narrative that is protective of the environment and interested in our emotional response to it,” he says.

Ecocriticism evaluates the language and values located in each of these two positions.

Dr Grace Moore and Dr Tom Bristow are co-convenors of a conference, ‘Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions’ that is co-sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. The event will take place at the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra on June 19-21.