GREEN THINKING: HOW 20TH CENTURY BRITISH ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE SHAPES THE STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The Gender ARC (Gender, Discourse and Identity) at the Moore Institute presents

DR KELLY SULTZBACH, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, LA CROSSE

US Fulbright Scholar through the Fulbright Inter-country Program

This talk considers how the experience of a muddy, apocalyptic war and the metroland octopus of suburban development influenced the pastoral imagination of environmental writing between the wars. It addresses popular literature and nature writing, much of it penned by veterans of the First World War, including Edmund Blunden, J.B. Priestly, and R.C. Sherriff.  Their stories raise messy questions about rural nostalgia, preservation and prejudice, as well as the fickleness of human nature when confronted with choices about our own consumerist desires and what is best for a thriving countryside.  These stories are less engaged with the progressive posthumanism of contemporary scholarship; instead, they illuminate some of the more contested social struggles of 21^st century climate change:  What kinds of narratives motivate people to support environmental agendas?  Are the reasons most of us love and cherish nature compatible with preserving it?  How do we create stories that don’t just speak to fellow activists, but subtly, compellingly, begin to listen to and cultivate wider fields of green public thinking?  Using examples from both my published work and new research, this talk will explore the continued relevance of environmental modernism to a 21st century Anthropocene awareness.