Speculative Nature Writing: Feeling for the Future

The last ten years have seen a shift in environmental discourse from a focus on 'mitigation of the effects of climate change' to the idea of 'transformational adaptation' (Feola 2014). Responding to a failure to curb emissions and meet targets, transformational adaptation argues that incremental change is now insufficient (Lonsdale et al., 2015). A deeper and more holistic change has become both necessary as a societal strategy and/or inevitable as a reaction to scarcity of resources and overreliance on unsustainable practices.

What this transformation will look like, we are only beginning to understand. Breaking with present structures of behaviour on such a grand scale should be both a feat of radical imagination and ambitious implementation. This project aims to work with this radical imagination - utopian, dystopian or, more likely, both tangled together, 'ustopian' as Margaret Atwood has it (Atwood 2011).

It will look at ways in which literary writing concerned with the environment can help its readers to confront both the need for, and the inevitability of, radical change in our relationship with landscape, wildlife and climate.

Where literature might engage with the potential for transformative adaptation, it requires a critical orientation towards the future that goes beyond the narrow focus on catastrophe that we have seen in much 'cli fi' and its associated criticism. Jameson has been critical of such work's repetitive articulation of contemporary anxieties, suggesting a failure to really imagine a future of radical 'Difference' (2007).

For Jameson, a break with the impasse of contemporary conditions happens most prominently through formal innovation as authors reach towards that which may be unsayable in the present. This project promises to work at just such a level of form.

Bringing together scientific research on future climate and biodiversity scenarios and literary critical research concerned with nature writing conventions (including the conventions of some of this scientific research), the project promises to experiment with form in ways that intervene in dominant modes of thinking and begin to articulate possible futures. It aims to shift current debates about nature writing away from retrospective and symptomatic critiques and asks instead how critical and creative work together might help to produce fresh and unsettling writing with a prospective orientation.

At its heart, there is an attempt to confront necessary and inevitable change by providing affective footholds in a future that seems chaotically and abstractly uncertain. Climate science (IPCC Report 2018) and biodiversity research (IPBES Report 2019) from around the world offer profoundly disturbing information about earth-system breakdown, wildlife extinction and the inadequacy of the current political response to the crisis.

But the interconnected ('wicked') complexity of the problem and the sheer scale of the data can produce paralysing feelings of inadequacy. There is what Timothy Clark has called a 'derangement of scale' at work here as one tries to connect a partial and localised agency to such abstract, high-level data. Epitomising this predicament, wildlife conservationist Hugh Warwick was asked a question at a recent public event - 'What is the one thing I should do in my garden to help hedgehogs?' - to which he replied: 'Bring down capitalism.'

Speculative nature writing is uniquely equipped as a narrative model that can offer its reader an uncannily grounded and embodied 'walk-through' of a particular landscape or 'life-world' that does not yet exist. But it will use playful and innovative experiments with the familiar conventions and modes of this popular non-fiction genre to register possibilities it is difficult to apprehend in the present, unnerving and provoking and stretching the moral imagination.