The Eco-humanities as literature: a new genre?(Essay)

WE have recently entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. There is now considerable evidence that humanity has altered the biophysical systems of Earth, not just the carbon cycle which has been the focus of much recent politics, but also the nitrogen cycle and ultimately the atmosphere and climate of the whole globe. It was Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, who coined the term 'Anthropocene', somewhat to the surprise of geologists, who had not considered humans as an 'epoch-defining' biophysical force. Ice core evidence showed dramatic changes in carbon outputs since the time of the industrial revolution, so Crutzen chose 1784--the date of James Watt's steam engine--as the beginning of the Anthropocene, (Crutzen 23). Some have argued that human-driven change dated further back, to the agricultural revolution (5,000-8,000 years ago), but evidence for this is equivocal. What is generally agreed is that human influence on biophysical systems has increased markedly in the past half century or so. During the 'Great Acceleration' (1945-2015?), sometimes called the Anthropocene Stage II, humans have emerged as clearly the most dominant species on Earth (Steffen et al. 615-16). We humans are no longer just biological creatures amongst others, but potent physical agents for change on Earth.

The rise of new ecological and environmental concerns demands a holistic engagement with knowledge, simultaneous understanding of science and politics, and perhaps, above all, a sense of human engagement with the natural world. The ideas of 'world literature', 'world history' and 'global change' are interrelated, and increasingly recurrent themes in public intellectual initiatives (Robin and Steffen 1695-96; Allardyce 23). In this essay, I want to consider the ways in which we write the literature of humans and nature in a world where these are more interdependent than ever before. I began with the global because global concerns drive political pressure and many of the big stories of our times. Those of us with expertise in the humanities--in the issues that make human life matter--have an interest in a literary genre that works on the human scale, but is also inclusive of both the global and the local.

We need a literature that enhances understanding of relations between people and nature, of how we notice change personally, and how such global changes affect places we know intimately.

Global frameworks, whether they frame literary theory or climate science, challenge national, transnational and postcolonial paradigms. A global scale favours the physical sciences, which specialise in the rules of 'everywhere', but nature-writing is more akin to the biological sciences in being fundamentally contextual. Ecology is often (still) described as a 'young' science, because its powers to generalise are perceived as being weaker than those of physics. Yet ecology is a much more useful tool for writing about 'place in time' (human scale and sensibilities of place) because it takes context into account, including evolutionary history and local environment. Particular clusters of physical factors such as climate, topography, aridity and so forth are much more likely to emerge in a biological analysis than a physical one, and there is natural parity of scale between ecology and the literature of the environmental humanities.

This essay reviews historically the poetics of literary writings about the Australian environment. It discusses the rise of rationalism in the late nineteenth century and the privileging of the scientific 'voice of nature' since Federation in Australia. It also considers the new politics of global climate change and the science that is privileged by this crisis, and how such science and politics might engage more closely with the 'regional' literature of the Australian environment.

Writing about nature in a deeply local sense demands more than general scientific principles. Local places demand literary sensitivities to the layers of nature-in-place, contrasting with the universal principles favoured by the stories of Big Science. Although 'nature' has not been the speciality of the humanities and social sciences, the current crisis of nature fits into a long tradition of public intellectualism, and there is a growing set of ecologically nuanced fiction and non-fiction writing that engages with the natural world. The literary ecological humanities are interdisciplinary in style, but they share the goal of foregrounding nature, and the relations between people and environments. Sometimes this may be intertwined in fiction. For example, Janette Turner Hospital in her novel Orpheus Lost uses the Daintree forest of Queensland as part of the set for her drama; her motif of 'quandongs and parrots' inflects this international story with an Australian sensibility. The rich, calm sanctuary of the Daintree contrasts sharply with the disappointing Promised Land of the southern United States, the other 'home' in the story. Most of the action is set in places of horror and terror, places without nature--indeed morally unnatural places that demand the humanising and civilising forces offered by quandongs and parrots (as well as by the music of the violin and oud). In this work, the ecological is on the (geographical) edge of the novel, but central to its moral fibre.

What does the Australian context bring to global environmental issues and how can we write the Australian environment into literature? Bruce Bennett, in his introductory lecture to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in 2007, advocated more emphasis on literatures of place and local understandings of environment, a theme that echoed throughout this stimulating event. (1) Regional writing is often sharply environmentally attuned, and has the potential to offer universal insights in very particular ways. Deborah Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country, for example, draws on stories from Northern Australia to expose the tropes of colonialism, as much as place itself. Rose uses 'wild' in a very different way from the North Americans: in North Australia 'wild' is unkempt, uncultured, unloved in very much the Aboriginal sense, very far from the heroic and picturesque wild of 'high art' nature writing in the other hemisphere. Similarly George Main's Heartland uses his home in the rural south-west slopes of New South Wales to critique the myth that industrial agriculture is good for a place, and to develop a language for healing ecological damage. Neither of these books is strictly regional yet they are driven by powerful regional sensibilities.