5
Ecocriticism

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the Anthropocene and its calamitous signatures of climate upheaval, species loss, and biocultural fragmentation has garnered dedicated attention from ecocritics, ecologists, and the public. As the culmination of a fifteen-year scientific process, however, in early 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences, or IUGS, rejected the Anthropocene as a unit of geological time in favour of a view of the Anthropocene as a temporally transgressive event. Prominent within the year’s work are trajectories in empirical ecocriticism, ecocritical ageing studies, intermedial ecocriticism, and blue ecocriticism, all of which place emphasis on agency, narrativity, and temporality. As the example of the blue humanities reveals, explored in this essay’s conclusion, intersections between ecocriticism and emerging areas of the environmental humanities continue to generate novel directions. The expansion of interdisciplinary research engaging ecocritics, social scientists, ecologists, and geoscientists is a potential outcome of the IUGS decision. As ecocriticism evolves in the era of the Anthropocene as an event, concerns of more-than-human agency, expression, and creativity will likely attract greater focus.

In addition to presenting a broad overview of publications, each of the sections below hones in on one specific work. This review of ecocritical publications in 2023 comprises six sections: 1. Introduction: The Anthropocene from Epoch to Event, which contextualizes the IUGS’s refusal to ratify the Anthropocene as an official geochronological designation; 2. Ecocritical Directions: Towards More-than-Human Agencies, which focuses on the special issue of the journal Anthropocenes, ‘Life Out of Place’; 3. Empirical Ecocriticism: Appraising Environmental Narratives, which considers the landmark edited collection Empirical Ecocriticism; 4. Ecocritical Ageing Studies: Rethinking Narratives of Decline, which turns to the edited collection Aging Studies and Ecocriticism; 5. Intermedial Ecocriticism: Diversifying Anthropocene Narratives, evaluating Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose’s monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism; and 6. Conclusion: Ecocritical Agency and the Environmental Humanities, which reflects on developments in the blue humanities.

1. Introduction: The Anthropocene from Epoch to Event

The year’s work in ecocriticism reveals the continuing influence of the Anthropocene on interdisciplinary environmental research. In 2023 the ecological precarities of the era further expanded and intensified. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year ranked as the planet’s warmest since the agency began keeping records in 1850. Along with historically high land temperatures, 2023 saw a marked upsurge in global oceanic heat and, consequently, an alarming reduction in Antarctic sea ice coverage (NOAA). Biospheric destabilization, in turn, has dramatically impacted species diversity across the globe. The State of the World’s Migratory Species (Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, 2024), the first report of its kind, concluded that one in five species worldwide faces extinction while nearly 50 per cent are in decline including, for instance, a staggering 90 per cent plunge in fish populations since 1970 (p. viii). An assessment of all scientifically known flowering plants, furthermore, determined that 45 per cent—or about 149,000 species—are threatened (Bachman et al., ‘Extinction Risk Predictions’ [2024]). The Anthropocene’s intertwined urgencies—climate change, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, species extinction, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction, among others—continued to direct ecocriticism’s growth in 2023.

As evident in the year’s work, the Anthropocene, as both a conceptual territory and a ‘stratigraphic reality’, increasingly impacts approaches to the environment in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (Waters et al., ‘Candidate Sites’ [2023], p. 17). In 2023, the discussion of proxies, varves, candidate sites, golden spikes, and related geotemporal phenomena dominated Anthropocene discourse. In these terms, researchers debated the distinction between the Anthropocene as an epoch, enshrined as a chronostratigraphic unit of the geological timescale, and the Anthropocene as a ‘markedly time-transgressive’ event framing human impacts as ‘diachronous, heterogeneous, and socially differentiated’ (Gibbard et al., ‘The Anthropocene as an Event’ [2022], pp. 395, 398). Those in favour of conferring event status on the Anthropocene emphasize the manifold responses of artists, musicians, writers, historians, activists, architects, and designers to the provocative neologism. The Anthropocene-as-event camp asserts that its preferred designation would enlarge the term’s relevance beyond geoscientific boundaries, inspiring creative interpretations varying between researchers and encouraging wider perspectives on humanity’s biospheric agency (Swindles et al., p. 453). In contrast, the Anthropocene’s formalization as an epoch would constrain ‘the innovative ways in which the concept is being used and applied’ (Swindles et al., ‘The “Anthropocene”’ [2023], p. 453).

For the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), the scientific recognition of the Anthropocene as a geochronological unit gained momentum with the identification of Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, as the place where the proposed epoch began. In late 2022, geoscientists began selecting twelve candidate sites on five continents as a basis for asserting the Anthropocene’s inclusion within the geological timescale. Radiogenic isotopes, organic pollutants, microplastics, and other proxies at each location signify how ‘mid-20th century changes emphatically mark a major departure’ from Holocene variability (Waters et al., p. 7). Out of this comprehensive global process, Crawford Lake emerged as especially revealing. Located in the heavily industrialized lower Great Lakes region straddling Canada and the United States, the lake is a 2.4-hectare freshwater body occupying a limestone sinkhole. Due to its depth, Crawford Lake is permanently stratified and contains distinct varves—annual layers of clay and silt—deposited continuously since 1867 (Llew-Williams et al., ‘Quantifying Conditions’ [2024], pp. 102–05). The AWG posited Crawford Lake as the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) marking the onset of the Anthropocene through irrefutable sedimentary evidence (McCarthy et al., ‘The Varved Succession of Crawford Lake’ [2023]). The lake’s well-preserved varve profile constitutes a material record of local, regional, and global events, including a spike in plutonium in the 1940s amidst nuclear weapons testing and an upsurge in SCPs (spheroidal carbonaceous particles) in the 1950s resulting from fossil fuel combustion (McCarthy et al., pp. 167–69).

Coinciding with the Great Acceleration, the identification of a mid-twentieth-century GSSP at Crawford Lake underscores the planet’s deviation from the range of ecological variability typical of the Holocene (Head et al., ‘The Proposed Anthropocene Epoch/Series’ [2022], p. 1182). As signified by the geoscientific focus on ‘varve chronology’, the Anthropocene directs our attention to storied matter and material narrativities enacted over temporal scales exceeding ordinary human perception (McCarthy et al., p. 156). Notwithstanding the AWG’s recent strides, in March 2024 the International Union of Geological Scientists ‘decisively rejected’ the formalization of the Anthropocene as an epoch (IUGS, ‘The Anthropocene’ [2024], p. 2). An article in the news media announced the denouement in the following terms: ‘The guardians of the world’s official geological timescale have firmly rejected a proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch, after an epic academic row’ (Carrington, ‘Geologists Reject Declaration’ [2024], para. 1). Rather than ratifying the term, the IUGS endorsed a view of the Anthropocene as a spatially and temporally dynamic event comparable to other geological events in planetary history. Approached as ‘an informal non-stratigraphical term’, the Anthropocene nevertheless is well poised to become even more indispensable to ‘future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems’ among geoscientists as well as artists, authors, humanists, social scientists, politicians, economists, and the public (IUGS, p. 2). Regardless of the official outcome, the AWG’s work has resulted in an unprecedented fifteen-year body of research rigorously chronicling human impacts on the biosphere.

2. Ecocritical Directions: Towards More-than-Human Agencies

Understood as an event transgressing geoscientific bounds and permeating popular culture, the Anthropocene will continue to mould ecocriticism’s trajectory. Conversely, the field’s practitioners will contribute further to interdisciplinary debates about the present era. In myriad ways, ecocriticism and related areas of the environmental humanities are well equipped to elucidate the ‘transformative complexity and progressively amplified development’ of the Anthropocene event (Finney and Gibbard, ‘The Humanities Are Invited’ [2023], p. 462). In this context, linguist Ida-Maria Chvostek encourages ecocritics and environmental writers alike to focus on narratives ‘not too vast or remote to add to the abstract issues already plaguing the concept of climate change’ (‘Invite the Humanities’ [2023], p. 459). The transformative potential of place-based, multispecies narratives is the focus of Hanne Cottyn and colleagues’ special issue of the journal Anthropocenes, ‘Life Out of Place’, reviewed later in this section.

Ecocritical publications in 2023 centralize the Anthropocene as both a conceptual signifier and a palpable certainty. Consider, for instance, John Thieme’s Anthropocene Realism (2023), an investigation of climate instabilities in the work of Barbara Kingsolver, Helon Habila, Indra Sinha, and other novelists; Yvonne Reddick’s Anthropocene Poetry (2023), a study of poetry’s particular contribution to climate awareness and activism; and Julia Fiedorczuk and Paul Piszcazatowski’s Places That the Map Can’t Contain (2023), an edited collection containing multifaceted interpretations of Anthropocene poetics. As the Anthropocene’s most ominous imprint, climate change figures conspicuously in the year’s work, evident, for example, in Katharine Cox’s Climate Change and Original Sin (2023), on the moral ecology of John Milton’s poetry, as well as Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky’s edited volume Cli-Fi and Class (2023), which foregrounds socioeconomic justice in contemporary American climate fiction.

In 2023 the field diversified further through applications of ecocritical methods to under-researched regions; convergences with human–animal studies, ecomedia studies, and allied fields; and reappraisals of canonical Western writers vis-à-vis contemporary environmental urgencies. Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (2023), Marco Caracciolo’s book-length treatment of films, novels, experimental writings, and video games through a new materialist framework, exemplifies ecocriticism’s overarching emphasis on narratives and narrativities. Consistent with Chvostek’s call for heightened attention to Anthropocene narratives of place, the regionally focused publications comprising Jessica Cory and Laura Wright’s Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (2023) include a substantive analysis of the literary and cinematographic narratives of the bioculturally diverse Appalachian region. Additionally, ecocritical studies of the Global South expanded with Ursula Heise and Chi Pham’s edited volume Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (2024), calling attention to the interlaced Indigenous, spiritual, historical, political, economic, and ecological narratives of the Southeast Asian nation. Conjunctions between human–animal studies and ecocriticism deepened with Dilek Bulut Sarikaya’s The Human–Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II. Additionally, the ecocritical re-evaluation of canonical writers continued with Steven Swarbrick’s The Environmental Unconscious (2023), an exploration of the early modern ecopoetics of Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Of note, as well, in the year’s work is Greg Garrard’s updated third edition of Ecocriticism (2023), incorporating chapters on animals, apocalypse, decoloniality, and the technological mediation of the biosphere through imagery and data.

A major contribution to this year’s ecocritical understandings of the Anthropocene worth dwelling on in some depth is ‘Life Out of Place’, a special issue of the journal Anthropocenes dedicated to crabs, moles, rabbits, fungi, and other historically translocated creatures. Extending previous work on invasive species in the environmental humanities (for example, Anna Tsing et al.’s Feral Atlas [2020]), contributors turn crucial attention to the life narratives of creatures denigrated as invasive, alien, exotic, and non-charismatic in conservation discourse. As co-editors Hanne Cottyn, Livia Cahn, Lionel Devlieger, and Julie Carlier observe in their introduction to the issue, ecocriticism facilitates insights into invasive species’ histories and confers greater ‘protagonism’—or narrative agency—to stigmatized more-than-humans (p. 3). Transgressing categories and destabilizing infrastructures, these beings are the ‘unlikely protagonists of the Anthropocene’ (p. 3). The arthropodal protagonist of Lionel Devlieger’s essay, for instance, is the Chinese mitten crab, a freshwater species native to East Asia and introduced to Europe by commercial vessels in the early 1900s. Through an array of photos, illustrations, postcards, maps, and newspaper clippings, Devlieger contends that the crab’s status as invasive in countries such as Germany and Belgium reflects its own biological drive to migrate, amplified by the transoceanic impulses of humankind. More-than-human mobilities similarly factor into Cottyn, Esther Beeckaert, and Dieter Bruneel’s narrative investigation of Phytophthora infestans. Originating in the Andes, the fungus-like micro-organism—or oomycete—triggered the outbreak of a potato blight responsible for nineteenth-century European famines. Read in relation to transatlantic exchange, potato modernity becomes legible as ‘a form of modernity enacted through monoculture practices that have dominated potato agriculture, science, and policies since the late eighteenth-century’ (p. 2). In contrast, polycultural Andean farming practices involved ‘negotiation with P. infestans, safeguarding the possibility of co-habitation’ (p. 9).

Cottyn and colleagues draw attention to the collaborative practices between farmers, oomycetes, and other life forms that have sustained Andean agricultural systems for millennia. Comparably, Cahn articulates an illustrative case of collaboration between archaeologists and common moles at a medieval site near Bruges, Belgium. Through tunnelling and other terrene behaviours, the creatures reconfigure the soil structure by blurring clear distinctions between layers. Instead of striving to counter the moles’ underground agency, however, archaeologists began to read the site narratively through the pottery pieces unearthed by the industrious animals. This process required researchers to incorporate ‘the changing seasons and activities of moles’ into their methods (p. 7). The collaboration, accordingly, engendered lively multispecies exchanges based on ‘improvisation, compromise, and a lot of unknowns’ (p. 8). Turning the special issue’s focus towards a fellow burrower, Catherine Mougenot and Lucienne Strivay’s article evokes the European rabbit as a trickster figure offering lessons of ‘crumpled history and broken geographies’ that are both horrifying and enlightening (p. 1). Myxomatosis stands out among the species’ manifold lessons. Introduced to France, Spain, and the United Kingdom in the mid-1900s to control the species, the virus spread rapidly, resulting in the collapse of wild and domestic rabbit populations throughout continental Europe. In her afterword, Anna Tsing characterizes the subterranean occupations of moles and rabbits as examples of the ‘world-making projects of other living beings’ (p. 1). Rather than constructing ourselves in opposition to these creatures, Tsing urges ecocritics to listen attentively to them as ‘we re-examine the world around us’ and gain understanding of the ‘common sociality’ revealed by more-than-human narratives in the Anthropocene (p. 4). Understanding precisely how narratives such as these promote environmental beliefs and values is the objective of empirical ecocriticism, a noteworthy development in 2023 and the subject of the next section.

3. Empirical Ecocriticism: Appraising Environmental Narratives

Ecocriticism’s contribution to Anthropocene studies centres on the transformative power of narratives. Environmental narratives offer a vital complement to the profuse statistical data surrounding climate alteration and related Anthropocene urgencies. As a burgeoning area of research, empirical ecocriticism interrogates the field’s core assertions through qualitative and quantitative analyses of narratives. Notwithstanding considerable momentum gained over the past four years (Empirical Ecocriticism, ‘Aims’), empirical ecocriticism finds historical precedents in the work of ecocritic Scott Slovic and psychologist Paul Slovic who, in the early 1990s used questionnaires to gauge transformations in students’ environmental attitudes after reading ecological texts (Slovic and Markowitz, ‘Tracing the Language’ [2023], p. 284). Nearly a decade ago, moreover, Simon Estok called attention to the value of empirical studies of environmental texts through linguistic, cultural, psychological, phenomenological, and evolutionary frameworks (p. 34). In line with ecocriticism’s ‘big tent approach’, for Estok the inclusion of empirical methods can enhance awareness of ‘the production and reproduction of ideologies’ (‘Utility of Empirical and Systems Studies’ [2015], p. 34). More recently, in Intermedial Ecocriticism, reviewed in the next section, Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose foreground reception studies and sociological theory as optics for illuminating environmental narratives’ impacts on diverse audiences (p. 39). Current topics of empirical interest include the influence of climate fiction on audiences and the effects of multispecies stories on human–animal interactions.

How do novels provoke understanding of the climate crisis? How does poetry heighten awareness of environmental injustice? Is documentary film an especially effective medium for transforming public attitudes towards species loss? These are some of the questions addressed by empirical ecocritics concerned with the reception of environmental storytelling. Bringing the methods of the social sciences to bear on ecocritical theory and practice, this growing area of interdisciplinary scholarship aims to substantiate prevailing presumptions about the capacity of stories to influence public perceptions of climate change, species loss, biocultural justice, and other environmental problems. Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder, the landmark collection, Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, presents a major contribution to the year’s work. In the collection’s introduction, the editors advocate for ‘a holistic, interdisciplinary, data-driven approach to environmental narrative’ (p. 1). The contributors urge ecocritical researchers to support their claims through references to the vast body of empirical data on the psychological and social interventions performed by narratives (p. 7). Through qualitative, quantitative, participatory, and action-oriented methods, empirical ecocriticism endeavours ‘to expand our understanding of the psychological, social, and political work’ of environmental literature, film, music, theatre, television, video games, and social media (p. 8). Comprising three sections—‘Methods’, ‘Case Studies’, and ‘Reflections’—this field-defining publication characterizes empirical ecocriticism as ‘epistemologically flexible and open to new and exploratory methodologies’ (p. 18).

The opening section includes three chapters on experimental, qualitative, and cinematographic methods. W. P. Malecki assays possibilities for measuring affect, defined as the ‘emotions, attitudes, and other mental states that involve evaluative feeling’ (p. 35). Towards an ‘experimental environmental humanities’, Malecki used randomized controlled studies to determine if the affective elements of animal narratives engender interspecies empathy and prompt pro-ecological behaviours (p. 50). The results suggest that the affective intensity of an animal text is more significant than its status as fiction or nonfiction. Comparably, in their contribution, Paul Sopcak and Nicolette Sopcak underscore the value of qualitative approaches—phenomenology, ethnography, and grounded theory—in assessing environmental texts’ capacity to shift public opinion and catalyze action. For Sopcak and Sopcak, qualitative enquiry is especially amenable to ecohumanists wary of oversimplifying environmental complexities. As empirical ecocriticism progresses, researchers should remain alert to the perils of ‘sacrificing conceptual and theoretical depth […] for the allure of the perceived rigor and precision of quantitative approaches’ (p. 60). An ecocritical-phenomenological approach, for instance, would result in sense-rich narratives evoking the experience of space, time, body, and affect in climate-disturbed contexts (p. 78). Vis-à-vis participatory action research, Rebecca Dirksen and colleagues propose ‘field to media’ as a methodology centring on ‘the pragmatic use of video production during research to study and amplify ecomusical responses to environmental challenges’ (pp. 91–92). As practical case studies of field to media, the authors present an overview of music videos created collaboratively with local communities to narrativize environmental challenges in Bangladesh, China, Haiti, Tanzania, and the Salish Sea.

The collection’s second part applies empirical methods to innovative analyses of environmental news, climate fiction, ecological documentary, applied theatre, and scholarly publishing. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues conducted an experimental assessment of the effects of climate fiction—or cli-fi—on readers’ perceptions of climatic upheaval. Using examples of speculative dystopian and realist fiction, the research team asked, ‘After one month, how do the climate change beliefs and attitudes of participants who read climate fiction stories compare to those who did not?’ (p. 126). Cli-fi’s impact varies according to the depth of readers’ narrative transportation—immersion in the storyworld—and identification with characters. The outcomes of the study suggest the significance of cli-fi readers’ ‘self-efficacy, the perception that one is capable of performing the recommended action, and response efficacy, the perception that the recommended action will be effective’ (p. 138). For their contribution to the collection, Scott Slovic and David M. Markowitz used computerized content analysis to examine ecocritical work published between 2004 and 2018 in the field’s leading journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. For Slovic and Markowitz, the ascendancy of empirical studies combines fourth-wave ecocriticism’s attention to transportation, dwelling, and other ‘pragmatic applications’ with fifth-wave emphasis on information-processing and communication strategies (p. 287). Over this fifteen-year period, the authors conclude, ISLE articles increased in length; the content became more specialized; and the writing style became more abstract. As ecocriticism continues to mature into a coherent area of interdisciplinary environmental scholarship, the field acquires greater confidence and identity, resulting in a distinctive scholarly language (p. 301).

Featuring contributions that signal the limitations of empirical approaches, the final part introduces much-needed critical metareflection. While highlighting methods of imparting greater precision to ecocritical claims, the collection places less attention on how ecocriticism can mitigate the prevailing positivism of the social sciences. To be sure, some claims in the collection will leave ecocritics aghast. Consider, for instance, the editors’ blunt assertion that ecocritical hypotheses should be ‘verifiable according to the scientific method’ (p. 14). As Greg Garrard elaborates in the final part, future work in the field will need to consider the ways in which literary and empirical approaches commingle and conflict. Subsequent research should attend to the epistemological privileging of the quantitative and qualitative over the interpretative and creative. It will be imperative, Garrard asserts, to confront the instrumentalization of literature that tends to promulgate tension between ‘artistic polysemy and empirical validity’ (p. 326). Another lingering concern is the impact of the datafication of the environment on human–nature relations and ecological politics (Wickberg et al., ‘The Mediated Planet’ [2024]). Moreover, as a whole, the collection exhibits a curious lack of engagement with the tradition of empirical literary studies. Scattered references to works such as Kuiken et al., eds., Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies (2021), signify insufficient awareness of this rich body of criticism. These shortcomings aside, Empirical Ecocriticism unfolds multiple directions for successive research on the role of environmental narratives in response to biospheric crisis. As one possibility among many, empirical ecocritics could collaborate with researchers in ageing studies to understand the impact of econarratives on elderly readers especially in countries with ageing populations.

4. Ecocritical Ageing Studies: Rethinking Narratives of Decline

Due to lower mortality rates, medical advances, and related factors, the Earth’s human population is ageing steadily. The global population aged 65 years or more is projected to increase from 10 per cent in 2022 to 16 per cent in 2050. During the same period, moreover, the centenarian population in the United States is anticipated to quadruple (Schaeffer, ‘U.S. Centenarian Population’). Consequently, the UN advises countries with ageing populations to ‘take steps to adapt public programmes to the growing proportion of older persons’ (UNDESA, World Population Prospects [2022], p. ii). The field of ageing studies responds to this demographic transformation through studies of gender, sexuality, media, art, literature, film, and popular culture that approach ‘aging as a process—as a set of changing and ongoing cultural and individual practices and experiences’ (Looser, ‘Age’ [2014], p. 28). Researchers in the field aim ‘to articulate a view of aging—or at least of human aging—as a phenomenon that is inextricably caught up in and realized through social and cultural practices’ (Gilleard, ‘Aging’ [2014], p. 36). The contribution of the humanities to illuminating the intricacies of ageing is evident in the recent collections Critical Humanities and Ageing (Goldman et al., [2022]) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature (Falcus et al., eds. [2023]).

With a thirty-year history parallel to the emergence of ecocriticism in the 1990s, ageing studies has begun to integrate environmental perspectives. Jacob Jewusiak’s Aging Earth (2023), for example, interrogates the ageist facets of declensionist rhetoric and the implicit privileging of youth in ecocritical thinking. Jewusiak, in response, posits the idea of ‘senescent environmentalism’ to bring the precarities of ecosystems and elderly people into dialogue. To be sure, the convergence between these fields deepened in 2023 with the publication of the collection Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg. In their introduction, the editors shed light on the growth of studies of human ageing and the environment through shared emphases on complex temporalities, processes of change, narratives of crisis, and questions of intergenerational justice (p. 1). Although ecocritical studies seldom focus explicitly on ageing, the Anthropocene is an era dominated by vulnerability, decline, and extinction. Conversely, ageing studies has tended to privilege anthropocentric concerns of human development over the environment, biodiversity, climate, and more-than-human beings. Offering a clear intervention, the collection advances ecocritical ageing studies through a focus on multiple literary and media genres including the novels of Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer V. S. Naipaul, the short fiction of British author Jean Rhys, the poetry of Canadian writer Lorna Crozier, and the Netflix science fiction series Dark, co-written by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Three thematic threads—ecologies of time and space; relationality and care; and fears of endings and decline—weave the collection’s varied contributions together. As the editors elaborate, ecocritical ageing studies foregrounds questions of indigeneity, temporality, materiality, postcolonialism, and dystopianism.

Interrogating the notion of legacy in relation to ecological heritage and inheritance, Christian Lenz’s contribution navigates these intersecting concerns through a generative reading of fictional narratives situated in the South American rainforests. Understood as the enduring impact of one’s life, legacy has been pivotal to the emergence of green activism, environmental studies, and ecocriticism. The concept underlies practical conservation initiatives such as land trusts and heritage protection measures. At the same time, legacy as an idea continues to inspire environmental values, more-than-human ethics, and intergenerational justice. Asserting one’s ‘gravitas and longevity’, legacy in turn invigorates the act of gifting (p. 43). Legacy, nonetheless, is not a homogenous phenomenon but rather manifests a plurality of forms, including ‘bodily legacies’ (for example, genetics, health, vitality), ‘material legacies’ (assets, property, heirlooms), and ‘legacies of values’ (philanthropy, altruism, assiduousness) (pp. 44–45). To this list, we could also add intellectual legacies and others. Lenz examines these legacy strains and their complications vis-à-vis the depiction of the exploitation or protection of rainforests in American author Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder (2011) and Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet’s graphic novel Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée (2020), set in Brazil and Guyana respectively. Spurred by the desire to impose their legacies on the rainforests of distant lands, the protagonists in both texts disregard Indigenous modes of legacy-making attuned to the natural environment. Highlighting the deleterious implications of gifting, the narratives suggest that producing sustainable intergenerational legacies necessitates relinquishing one’s egocentric longing for legacy. As Lenz demonstrates incisively, the framework of ecocritical ageing studies enables critics to diagnose legacies as favourable or damaging to ecologies and Indigenous cultures. The chapter, nonetheless, exhibits a tendency to perpetuate the stereotypes it aims to transcend through the blithe use of ‘old geezers’, ‘old white people’, and other calumniatory terms that diminish the collection’s focus on reconfiguring ageist tropes (pp. 49, 51).

Other contributions illuminate potential nexuses between ecocritical ageing studies, queer theory, terror management theory, bioethics, and related domains. Combining ecocritical ageing studies and queer theory, Simon Dickel brings ecological concerns to bear on reproductive futurism in the American comedy-drama film Harold and Maude (1971). Emerging from queer theory, most notably the work of Lee Edelman in No Future (2004), the term reproductive futurism denotes the linkage between future-forward temporality and the normative reproductivity associated with childbearing. Described by Dickel as chrononormativity, moreover, dominant conceptualizations of time reinforce the social injunction that specific goals—completing university, getting married, having children, retiring, and so on—should be attained at sanctioned points in an individual’s life. Contrastingly, as queer subjects, the romantically entangled protagonists, Harold, a young man, and Maude, an elderly woman, stand in stark opposition to chrononormativity’s negation of the vibrant temporalities of human and more-than-human worlds. Subverting the predominance of reproductive futurism, the intergenerational romance between Harold and Maude destabilizes normative conceptions of time and, hence, preserves the latent possibilities of polytemporality. Shifting from queer theory to terror management theory, or TMT, Albert Banerjee’s chapter scrutinizes the parallels between the crises of climate change and ageing, both originating in the modern narrative of progress. As the study of age and ageing, gerontology tends to promulgate a conventional social imaginary lacking diverse perspectives on time and mortality. The TMT framework adopted by Banerjee theorizes that people adopt cultural beliefs and practices to temper the fear of death as a biological inevitability. Towards a porous subjectivity, Banerjee foregrounds the vital role of narrative, ritual, and ceremony in transforming the prevailing human outlook on death as a terrifying certainty. Acknowledging the fluid boundaries between life and death, Indigenous stories of mortality offer a means to galvanize a shift towards narrative and contemplative practices in gerontology.

Considering the planet’s ageing population, the concept of elderhood should become ever more crucial to ecocritical ageing studies. In this respect, the editors acknowledge philosopher Harry R. Moody’s research on environmental elderhood and the perception of climate change among the elderly (‘Eco Elders’ [2009]; ‘Overcoming Objections’ [2015]). In the collection’s afterword, neuroscientist Peter J. Whitehouse approaches elderhood as both a psychological disposition and a social performance. Whitehouse urges a ‘deeper reconsideration’ of elderhood that embraces mortality through the potential of storytelling (p. 204). Oral, textual, and corporeal narratives enrich appreciation of mortality’s temporal registers—from the death of individuals to the extinction of species (pp. 202–04). For the author, the concept of ‘field’—a critical domain yielding new imaginaries—is essential to traversing the boundaries between ecocriticism and ageing studies. More specifically, Whitehouse articulates four fields conducive to furthering elderhood in the Anthropocene: autobiographical storytelling (pp. 208–10); cosmodernity or cosmic re-enchantment through attentive dwelling (pp. 210–14); brain health through art–science entanglements (pp. 214–16); and intergenerational learning through nature–culture conjunctions (pp. 216–20). What emerges is a bioethics of ageing and environment that reimagines the limited human timescale through a temporally heterogeneous purview. Nonetheless, absent from Whitehouse’s analysis of elderhood is more-than-human ageing, a consideration similarly lacking in other chapters. Despite advancing possibilities for ecocritical ageing studies, the collection remains ‘firmly centered on the human’ (p. 9). Further research should investigate more-than-human ageing, for instance, through studies of old-growth forests and long-lived reptile species. In addition to its psychological and social valences, elderhood has a non-anthropocentric dimension, as demonstrated by recent botanical research on ‘sentinels’ and ‘mother trees’ known to pass their memories of environmental events to subsequent generations (Ribeiro and da Silva Torres, ‘Sentinel Plants’ [2018]; Simard, Finding the Mother Tree [2021]).

5. Intermedial Ecocriticism: Diversifying Anthropocene Narratives

As ecocriticism continues to ramify in response to Anthropocene precarities, nascent areas such as ecocritical ageing studies would benefit from deeper engagement with intermedial studies. The term intermediality refers to heightened interaction between media as their boundaries are traversed. Inclusive of ‘artistic and nonartistic phenomena’, intermedial studies foregrounds the ‘interrelations and interactions among all forms of communicative media types’ (Bruhn et al., ‘Introduction’, pp. 1, 2). The qualities of ‘increasing interdisciplinarity and media convergence’ that define intermedial studies align well with the push towards narrative multiplicity in the environmental humanities (Bruhn et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 2). Over the last several years, a steady flow of publications signifies burgeoning interest in intermediality among humanists. A prominent example is Bruhn et al., eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (2024) comprising forty-eight chapters on the field’s histories, schools, theories, and methods. Bruhn and colleagues’ contribution to The Palgrave Handbook demonstrates the increasing emphasis on environmental media—or ecomedia—in intermedial studies. More specifically, intermedial ecocriticism constitutes a framework for accommodating a broad spectrum of media narrating environmental crisis. Indeed, Bruhn’s contribution to Beyond Media Borders (2021) delivers one of the first calls for intermedial approaches to the study of environmental narratives. Similarly, Ida Bencke and Bruhn’s edited collection Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices (2022) offers yet another indicator of the upward trajectory of intermedial ecocriticism as a discrete area of research. At the same time, the emergence of intermedial ecocriticism reinforces links between ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, fields that have evolved along comparably interdisciplinary—though infrequently intersecting—tracks.

A valuable addition to the year’s work is Bruhn and Niklas Salmose’s monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism, investigating the climate crisis through the comparative analysis of media. The term ecomedia refers to any media ‘product’ or ‘artefact’—whether factual or fictional—representing ecological concerns. The authors elaborate the intermedialist focus on ‘the interaction between similarities and differences in media as well as the changes that occur in communicative material when content is transported from one media type to another’ (p. 15). As both a theory and a method, intermedial ecocriticism describes, analyses, and compares varied ecomedia types—from research articles, scientific documents, website content, social media narratives, memes, and television advertisements to novels, short fiction, poetry, and scripts, among others (p. 5). The principal focus of intermedial ecocriticism is how ecomedia transform through ‘complex translations, rewritings, and reframings’ of the environmental contingencies depicted (p. 8). For instance, what ecomedia transformations occur when a peer-reviewed scientific study is converted into a popular science article or a work of fiction? Accordingly, intermedial ecocritics evaluate the extent to which ecomedia communicate messages to audiences and therefore enhance ecological agency—the human capacity to respond to, and intervene in, environmental crises. In these terms, Bruhn and Salmose examine the representation and communication of the climate crisis through the interaction of ecomedia artefacts and types. Understanding the ‘affordances’ of ecomedia requires articulating the possibilities and limitations generated by an artefact vis-à-vis ecological agency. After delivering an accessible proposal for intermedial ecocriticism, the book outlines a stepped approach entailing the selection of artefacts for comparative evaluation; the description of the artefacts’ technological, sensory, semiotic, and spatiotemporal features; and the comparison of the artefacts’ affordances towards a more precise understanding of how media enhance or diminish ecological agency in the Anthropocene (pp. 47–49).

Bruhn and Salmose’s Intermedial Ecocriticism offers several valuable case studies illustrating the application of the framework to an array of media artefacts and types. The third chapter develops a comparative analysis of an article by journalist Daisy Dunne published on Carbon Brief—a UK-based science website focused on climate change journalism and data visualization—and the cli-fi novel Den afskyelige (The Abominable) (2016), written by Danish author Charlotte Weitze and narrated by a young nurse in Norway dealing with the climatic upheaval of the future. Both the novel and the article incorporate climate research to create highly legible narratives. Whereas the article attempts to produce a clear account of scientific research for non-specialists, the novel refashions the research into scenes of a climate-altered world, and into dialogue between characters struggling to adapt to future precarities. The case study underscores the importance of transferring research content across media boundaries to enable audiences to become familiar with scientific perspectives on the Earth’s future (pp. 74–75). As another example of intermedial ecocriticism in practice, the fourth chapter compares the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report 2021—the ‘largest collective scientific effort in world history’, at least at the time of writing (p. 82)—to Saison brune (Climate Changed), a graphic novel published in 2012 by French writer Philippe Squarzoni. Notwithstanding the obvious incongruities between a scientific report and a graphic novel, both texts communicate aspects of climate change and broach the question of scientific uncertainty through a ‘media transformation process where form and content are transported from hard sciences to a more accessible media form’ (p. 104). In oftentimes creative and innovative ways, graphic novels and documentary comics visualize scientific information such as the climate research presented in the IPCC Report. Both ecomedia artefacts, however, equally struggle to translate climate science persuasively while acknowledging scientific disagreement over future scenarios.

Ecological agency as a potential affordance of ecomedia is the central concern of subsequent chapters. Bringing intermedial ecocriticism into dialogue with critical food studies, the fifth chapter characterizes food media as any media artefact or type that communicates ideas about food production, consumption, and politics. Bruhn and Salmose apply an intermedial ecocritical framework to understanding EAT, an online popular science platform for discussing the environmental dimensions of food, in relation to ‘Dear Piece of Meat—We Need to Talk’, a short television commercial produced by the Swedish supermarket chain Coop on the ecological implications of meat consumption. Despite their overt medial divergences, both artefacts examine ecological agency through future food cultures, including sustainable agriculture and the locavore movement. Towards greater media convergence, the final chapter develops a comparative analysis of the post-apocalyptic cli-fi novel The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, the 2009 film adaptation of the novel by John Hillcoat, and the online ecogame The Climate Trail, which narrates the journey of climate refugees fleeing the United States. Bruhn and Salmose conclude that the ecological agency of the novel, film, and game vis-à-vis climate change reflects the particular affordance emerging from the interaction of these media types. The book’s intriguing array of ecomedia examples—fictional and factual, commercial and non-commercial, visual and sonic—calls attention to ecological agency as ‘the possibility not only to understand but also to act upon climate crisis’ (p. 165). In the Anthropocene era, an intermedial approach to narratives should become increasingly vital to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Subsequent research could investigate, for instance, the relationship between ecological agency and climate scepticism through diverse media transformations. Another potential research avenue could examine the unparalleled fifteen-year body of research produced by the Anthropocene Working Group to advance ‘future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems’ (IUGS, p. 2).

6. Conclusion: Ecocritical Agency and the Environmental Humanities

Notwithstanding its contribution to the field, Bruhn and Salmose’s Intermedial Ecocriticism neglects the potential for media transformations to enhance recognition of more-than-human agencies. Central to the environmental humanities, a new materialist notion of agency decentres the human subject and confers agency to animals, plants, fungi, air, soil, and water (Trono and Boschman, ‘Ecocritical Agency in Time’ [2019], pp. 4–11). Concerning the question of agency in the year’s work, it is crucial to acknowledge the role of the environmental humanities in broadening ecocritical theory and practice. As a case in point, blue ecocriticism exemplifies the convergences transpiring between ecocriticism and areas of the environmental humanities. Proposed fifteen years ago by Steve Mentz, in his article ‘Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature’ (2009), the blue humanities has grown appreciably as an environmental humanities specialization focusing on water, hydrological systems, and aquatic biodiversity. Consequently, the field has inspired blue ecocritical frameworks recognizing oceans, rivers, lakes, and other water bodies as agential (Dobrin, Blue Ecocriticism [2021]). Blue ecocritics foreground hydrological agencies, investigate the expressiveness of aquatic matter, and regard water bodies as narrative subjects. At the intersection of humans, more-than-humans, and wet ecosystems, blue ecocriticism heralds a shift of emphasis from the terrestrial to the aquatic in environmental literary studies.

Furthering the turn towards aquatic life in the humanities, the blue humanities approaches saline and freshwater bodies—from deep-sea zones and coral reefs to lakes and rivers—as sites of interdisciplinary enquiry. Accordingly, blue ecocritics define ‘the oceanic turn’ as a reorientation towards water as both a material agent and a symbolic formation (DeLoughrey, ‘Mining the Seas’ [2023], pp. 145–48). The ecological concerns navigated by blue ecocritics include climate disruption, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification, as well as the effects of underwater technologies on marine life and the long-term impacts of deep-sea mining. Alongside the oceanic turn, there is burgeoning interest in the cultural, social, and political dimensions of freshwater systems. Although under-represented, freshwater ecosystems are becoming more prominent in the field. Publications in 2023 demonstrating the confluence of ecocriticism and the blue humanities include Jeremy Chow’s The Queerness of Water (2023), an analysis of water’s role in long eighteenth-century literature, and Steve Mentz’s An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), the first textbook in the field. Serpil Oppermann’s Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene, furthermore, provides a concise introduction to the field through an exploration on Anthropocene narratives. For Oppermann, what distinguishes the oceanic turn is its unique combination of ‘data provided by marine sciences with cultural and literary theories to modify our anthropocentrically oriented conceptions and discourses of planetary oceans’ (p. 3). Bringing marine sciences, freshwater sciences, social sciences, and environmental humanities into discourse, the blue humanities approaches water as storied matter imbued with agency.

Blue ecocriticism and the blue humanities evince a vision of more-than-human agency. Through their emphasis on new representational practices, both fields provoke the re-evaluation of cultural assumptions about water. Oppermann’s notion of ‘aquatic naturecultures’ offers a standpoint for rethinking water and narrativizing human–water relations (p. 3). Oppermann, moreover, proposes a fluid poetics of ‘representing the conceptual, sociocultural, and ecological challenges salt and freshwaters are facing today’ (pp. 10–11). In addition to blue ecocriticism’s growth within the blue humanities framework, this review has tracked ecocriticism’s pluralization in 2023 through conjunctions with empirical methods, ageing studies, and intermedial approaches in response to the Anthropocene. Collectively, the year’s work catalyses ecocritical re-examination of the field’s longstanding tenets, particularly vis-à-vis the capacity of environmental narratives to galvanize social transformation. The field’s tentacular nature signifies its versatility in relation to environmental urgencies through the power of storytelling to shape ecological values. As demonstrated by the ecocritical domains included in this review, narratives remain indispensable to engendering social imaginaries of the environment. The year’s work, nonetheless, discloses the persistence of anthropocentric conceptions of agency within some ecocritical strands. As the field evolves in the age of the Anthropocene as an event, attention to more-than-human agency, expression, and creativity will certainly intensify.

Books Reviewed

Journal Issues Reviewed

References