abstract: This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

The concept of cosmopolitics identifies a multispecies political practice within the framework of multinaturalism. The dissertation, "Multispecies Thinking from Alexander von Humboldt to Leslie Marmon Silko: Intercultural Communication Toward Cosmopolitics," is concerned with understandings of multispecies relationships, with the human intercultural communication that could prepare for a cosmopolitical practice, and with the ways Native American fiction supports this endeavor. This research draws from Native American literary studies and ecocritical scholarship to illustrate the potential of transdisciplinary thinking about multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and Indigenous paradigms as providing a promising communication zone against the grain of scientific imperialism. It thus traces the development of pluralist and multispecies-oriented thought and its points of connection to Indigenous paradigms from Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos Studies of the early 19th century to 21st century Indigenous cosmopolitics. First, this study discusses the insights and obstructions to Western pluralist and multispecies thinking in relation to Native American paradigms from Humboldt via 19th century nature writers-Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and John Muir-to contemporary interdisciplinary research. Opening to wide potential with Humboldt's holistic Cosmos Studies, intercultural communication was tempered by the colonial enterprise in the 19th century United States, including a nature-culture dualism and the notion of degenerated, vanishing Indigenous peoples. The resulting conceptual understandings, terms, and attitudes have been influential until today and are what contemporary Native American authors and activists are confronted with when engaged in their work. Detailed textual analysis of exemplary Native American literature outlines how contemporary authors criticize, counter-narrate, and/or integrate Western intellectual traditions. Furthermore, this study outlines 20th and 21st century scientific concepts that refine much earlier ideas, provide helpful terminology regarding Western approaches to Indigenous ontologies and multispecies thinking, and facilitate a new, insightful reading of contemporary Native American fiction as cosmopolitical texts. The analyses of works by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, and Leslie Marmon Silko demonstrate the value of these works to enhance multispecies thinking and respective political practices. Therefore, Native American literature plays a major role worldwide as an educational and critical tool for an intercultural communication toward cosmopolitics.

This teacher research project investigates a high school English teacher’s classrooms that combine outdoor activities in nature with literacy activities, including environmental literature read through a lens of ecocriticism. It seeks to answer the overarching research question: What happens when students read environmental literature and experience outdoor activities in English classes that emphasize critical literacy focusing on environmental justice and ecocriticism? The data sets derive from students’ writing and testimony (from interviews) involving cohorts of between three and six students who participated in classroom research studies in 2011, 2012, and 2018. This teacher research project borrows from grounded theory methodologies in the processes of data collection and analysis. Findings from the data suggest that participants showed an ability to read the word and the world in ways that promoted a critical gaze toward social and environmental injustice. Also, students were able to see “what nobody ever sees” in literature and the natural world. A grounded theory of critical rambling is offered.

The idea of “wilderness,” of nature itself, is being interrogated in history, philosophy, and English departments throughout the academy; books on our place in the natural world have prominent spaces on shelves in bookstores; newspapers feature editorials on climate change and nature preservation. More attention than ever is being paid to environmental philosophers and nature writers as the ongoing climate crisis slowly but steadily worsens. All the while, however, some important thinkers on these subjects of nature and wilderness are utterly forgotten. My thesis focuses on the work of one of these neglected thinkers, the poet and essayist John Haines (1924-2011). Haines’s name is not mentioned often, if ever, in discussions of prominent American nature writers, and I aim to demonstrate why that is an unfortunate exclusion. Guided by his decades as a subsistence hunter and fur-trapper in the Alaskan bush, John Haines offers a perspective on the world outside of us that deserves consideration. I compare and contrast his ideas with those of other nature writers and poets, as well as environmental philosophers and theorists, and argue that he offers a unique and transformative vision of our relationship to the natural world and the non-human animals that live all around us.<br>

This thesis explores a contemporary literary movement that has been called ‘the new nature writing’, framing it in its wider historical and cultural context of the last forty years. Drawing on recent developments in cultural geography, it explores the way such terms as ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ have been engaged with and reinterpreted in a diverse project of literary re-mapping in the British and Irish archipelago. It argues that the rise of environmentalism since the late 1960s has changed and destabilised the way the British and Irish relate to the world around them. It is, however, concerned with challenging the term ‘nature writing’ and argues that the literature of landscape and place of the last forty years is not solely concerned with ‘nature’, a term that has come under some degree of scrutiny recently. It sets out an argument for reframing this movement as an ‘archipelagic literature’ in order to incorporate the question of community. In understanding the present uncertainties that pervade the questions around landscape and place today it also considers the effects of such political changes as the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the British and Irish relationship to the land. The literature that it takes as its subject often explores the way personal and communal senses of identity have found a renewed focus in a critical localism in opposition to more footloose forms of globalisation. Through a careful negotiation of Marxist and phenomenological readings of landscape, it offers an overview of what is a considerable body of literature now and what is developing into one of the most consistent and defined literary movements of the twenty-first century.

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

This thesis encompasses a survey of contemporary environmental literature (1970s to the present) as it relates to the tenets of Taoist literature, specifically the Chuang Tzu and the Tao te Ching. The thesis also presents and evaluates pertinent criticisms concerning the practice of relating modern environmental problems to ancient Chinese philosophy. The thesis contains a preface that describes the historic roots of Taoism as well as an explanation of the Chinese terminology in the paper. The environmental literature is divided into three major groups and discussed in the three chapters of the paper. The three groups include mainstream environmentalists, deep ecology, and ecofeminism.

The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to guide middle school and high school students into critical thinking about environmental issues. Through keen observation of their bioregion and through an integration of interdisciplinary literature which focuses on Oregon writers, students will be challenged to think, write, and discuss current issues effecting local natural resources. The bibliography was designed to incorporate integrated learning, collaborative activities, and handson investigation. The students' community becomes a learning laboratory, a place in which to identify, a place to value, and a place to contribute through active participation in restoration of resources and through other positive activities. Learning to respect diverse and complex viewpoints on environmental issues will help develop good evaluative skills. As responsible, participating members of their community, students can be encouraged to lead the way, providing good role models both to families and to younger students. The diverse literary collection will provide access to a broad range of voices about the land and Oregon, in particular. These become invitations for students to write about their place, their home. Writing empowers students to make connections between experience, thought, and word. Students writing, thinking, and reseeing their community as a place to value and protect is the goal of Time to Listen. / Graduation date: 1995

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 29, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64).

The aim of this study is to study how the themes of loss, hope and place attachment is presented in relation to the concept of ecoglobalist affects in the contemporary nature writing of Swedish author Kerstin Ekman and American author Terry Tempest Williams. I have performed a comparative close reading of three works per author and discussed them in relation to the definitions of nature writing and ecoglobalist affects by Lawrence Buell and the definition of place attachment as a psychological process by Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford. I have found that all of the texts are clear cases of environmentally oriented literature, that the depictions of loss, hope and place attachment are very similar and that while Ekman focuses on the lack of general public knowledge and mostly refrains from dissolving boundaries between the self and the environment, Williams focuses more on the latter. I also found that while examples of ecoglobalist affects could be read in works by both authors in different ways, they were not present in all of the texts. / Syftet med denna studie är att studera hur förlust, hopp och platsbundenhet presenteras som teman i relation till begreppet ecoglobalist affects i Kerstin Ekmans och Terry Tempest Williams naturessäer. Jag har genomfört en komparativ närläsning av tre verk per författare och diskuterat dem i relation till Lawrence Buells definition av nature writing och ecoglobalist affects, samt Leila Scannells och Robert Giffords definition av platsbundenhet som psykologisk process. Studien fann att samtliga av texterna är klara exempel på miljöorienterad litteratur, att skildringarna av förlust, hopp och platsbundenhet har många likheter samt att Ekmans essäer fokuserar på allmän kunskapsbrist och mestadels avstår från att upplösa gränser mellan jaget och den icke-mänskliga naturen, medan Williams fokuserar mer på det sistnämnda. Jag fann även att ecoglobalist affects kunde läsas i verk av båda författarna, men inte i samtliga av de undersökta texterna.