Faculty Favorites: Environmental Activism in Art & Fiction
In a world that seems increasingly dismal, how do art, literature, and other creative endeavors offer different ways to fight against environmental injustice and climate change? Creative media such as novels, poetry, visual art, and films not only help us process complex emotions tied to climate crisis anxiety and eco-grief, but also present nuanced approaches to an environmental activism rooted in community and caretaking.
In this post, Edge Effects asks scholars to recommend works beyond the traditional “academic” text that explore aesthetic opposition to environmental precarity, or celebrate cultural traditions that uplift alternative ecological narratives and knowledge. The recommendations emphasize anti-hegemonic elements such as care, kinship, responsibility, collaboration, playfulness, and above all, storytelling. As these works demonstrate, fiction and the creative are legitimate forms of resistance that inspire action against intersectional injustice.
Rebecca Ballard, Assistant Professor of English, Florida State University
Recommendation: Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin (Amazon Original, 2019)
Emergency Skin takes place exclusively in second-person address—“You are our instrument”—in which an AI attempts to direct an emissary from an authoritarian exoplanetary colony. The addressee has been charged with braving the alleged hellscape of Earth to retrieve needed biological resources for the eugenicist overlords back “home.” This spring, I’m teaching Emergency Skin as the final text in an undergraduate course on Eco-SF, which surveys how speculative fiction and environmental thought have developed in tandem in the U.S. since 1945. Unlike Jemisin’s revelatory Broken Earth trilogy, Emergency Skin is designed for a single sitting, and it makes the most of its sparseness. Because the protagonist’s speech is never reported, the tenderness and beauty of their acceptance into the terrestrial community—which transformed a barren, polluted planet into an inclusive, egalitarian utopia almost as soon as the elites panicked and pulled up stakes—is left almost entirely for the reader to fill in. Instead, we hear mostly from the AI as it recoils, lectures, panics, resorts to threats, flails, and fails in the face of the addressee’s human interlocutors. Emergency Skin thus stages a narrative debate among the ecological frameworks our previous readings have established: extractivism, militarism and colonialism, shallow and deep ecologies, ecomodernism, Anthropocene apocalypticism, and environmental justice each have their say.
Rebecca H. Hogue, Assistant Professor of English, University of Toronto
Recommendation: ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) (University of Arizona Press, 2023)
This gorgeous poetry collection opens with an image of a mele (song) printed in an ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi newspaper, in October of 1893: “He Mele na ke Kanaka Aloha Aina Oiaio” (A song for the true Aloha ʻĀina). This mele, published just months after the illegal overthrow of the nation of Hawaiʻi, but placed opposite the Table of Contents, signifies not only that these poems do political work (“aloha ʻāina” is sometimes translated to patriot) but that the relationship to ʻāina (simplified as land, but etymologically “that which feeds”), is one of aloha (love, compassion, affection, veneration). And across the collection, with poems that range from Mauna a Wākea to the Red Hill Crisis to Palestine, McDougall lovingly illustrates that environmental activism is a dynamic of caretaking, responsibility, and multigenerational knowledge sharing in the pae ʻāina (archipelago) and beyond.
Jessica Hurley, Associate Professor of English, George Mason University
Recommendation: “Anointed” by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (2018)
Marshallese poet and activist Jetñil-Kijiner produced this spectacular video poem in collaboration with photographer Dan Lin, the people of Runit Island, and Runit itself. Runit is the site of some of the U.S.’s most destructive Cold-War-era nuclear bombings and also now host to the detritus of those bombings in the form of the Runit Dome, a large and now cracking concrete shell housing tons of irradiated waste and called by locals, fittingly, The Tomb. “Anointed” tells this history with rage and sorrow, but it also celebrates the past and present of the island and its people and refuses to cast off Runit as a disposable waste site. Rather, by incorporating Runit into Marshallese practices of kinship, care, and storytelling, Jetñil-Kijiner shows how environmental activism also involves aesthetic practices that recompose relations to Indigenous land. I recommend this beautiful piece to anyone asking or teaching the question, “what can poetry do to help?”
Weishun Lu, Assistant Professor of Humanities & Communication, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Recommendation: That Winter the Wolf Came by Juliana Spahr (AK Press, 2015)
It is difficult to write about extraction when so many of us are feeling eco-fatigue. This collection is a self-aware book in response to concerns like, “the last thing we need is another BP poem” (25). Spahr turns our focus away from spectacles (like oil spills, hurricanes caused by warming seawater, etc.) and foregrounds fossil fuel in the everyday, in a playful way. She opens the book with a juxtaposition of Brent geese (a species after which the Brent oilfield was named) and Brent Crude (a global pricing benchmark and a tool of potential manipulation). To push against this abstraction of fossil fuel, Spahr marks the passage of time using fluctuations in the Brent Crude Oil Spot price. Later on, Spahr invites readers to think about environmental activism by showing the absurdity of not engaging in it. She invents a character called “Non-Revolution,” with whom she had an unsatisfactory relationship. The section about Non-Revolution prompts the reader to examine the implications of settling into a middle-class life with all the trappings of progressivism without attempts at enacting structural change. What I like about this book is that instructors can teach the entire collection or select poems (such as “Tradition”) from the book. Either way, it is a text that inspires conversation in the classroom.
Alexander Menrisky, Assistant Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Recommendation: Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Haymarket Books, 2022)
This book isn’t fiction, but like so many of the most compelling and thought-provoking titles today, it troubles the lines among creative, scholarly, and activist work. In dialogue with each other, Maynard and Simpson link together and collaboratively think through myriad social-ecological challenges of the twenty-first century, from climate change and police power to migration and settler colonialism. What I like best about it is its epistolary form: presented as (and originating in) a series of letters or emails, the six chapters of the book offer a master class in how our most generative insights, arguments, and actions so often emerge out of the conversations among us. For that reason, I find this text indispensable in the classroom for how it models not only robust thinking about social and environmental justice but also how doing and sharing research can be (or always is) a jointly creative, collaborative, and activist act.
Sarli E. Mercado, Teaching Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Recommendations: Montañas and Three or Four Ríos edited by Sarli E. Mercado Blandon & Lori Anne DiPrete Brown (Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara 2022) and Ciudades Visibles: 21 Latin American Chronicles edited by Boris Muñoz and Claudi Carreras (RM, 2016)
This anthology gathers the voices of award-winning Latin American writers of the José Emilio Pacheco City and Nature Literary Prize created by the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales/Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara, México. Founded at the International Book Fair of Guadalajara, the $10,000 prize celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This selection of poetry and fiction was collectively translated by the Women in Translation at UW-Madison—a project that is part of the 4W Initiative—with the generous collaboration of numerous writers, translators, and UW-Madison students. The anthology presents emerging literary perspectives from writers concerned with the environment in the context of the current urban Anthropocene and whose approach divergent from traditional Nature writing. In addition to leading this project, the works by these writers have been an inspiration in my courses, which focus on urban and non-urban spaces, present and past.
Ciudades Visibles/Visible Cities is a collection of chronicles exploring Latin America’s urban landscape. It includes the important work of the Argentine visual artist Nicolas Janowski. His project about Tierra del Fuego, Adrift in Blue, is an amazing way of thinking through ecology, environment, crisis, memory, and Indigenous knowledge in sea & land/territory.
Martin Premoli, Assistant Professor of English and Sustainability, Pepperdine University
Recommendation: Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South by Ben Jamieson Stanley (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)
This Spring, I’m teaching a food justice course as part of my college’s Social Action and Justice Program. While the course will begin with a focus on food histories and food justice movements as they have arisen in the U.S., the class will take a largely global outlook on the issue. Stanley’s Precarious Eating will be an indispensable guide for this perspectival shift. In this text, Stanley draws on an array of objects—including literature, film, recipes, and more—to argue that concepts of eating, hunger, and food production are fundamental to anti-hegemonic cultural narratives that critique how capitalist globalization drives environmental insecurity. In other words, it highlights food as a critical axis of power. Precarious Eating fills an important gap in literary food studies (which so far has largely focused on the global North), helping readers understand why it’s important to attend to the global South: as Stanley writes, “those hungry are above all the poor in the global South, making consumption an important lexicon for fictions concerned with environments and lives in the global South.” I think this is an especially important book for anyone interested in literary representations of food, as it explores larger food and agricultural regimes (the macro-scale) alongside the material and affective everyday lives of the poor and hungry (the micro-scale)—a feat the novel excels at performing. I cannot wait to sit in our campus’s Sustainability Garden and talk with my students about this field-changing book.
Editor’s note: Want to hear more about Precarious Eating? Join Stanley, Sarah Dimick, and Lisa Han in conversation about their recent books, coming soon to the Edge Effects Podcast!
Featured image: Tattoo of the island of Tierra del Fuego on Lola’s feet. The feeling of Fuegian identity is a complex sensation since a large part of the island’s population lives temporarily, as a result of the difficult climatic conditions. Barrio Ecológico, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. Image and description courtesy of Nicolas Janowski, 2016.
You must be logged in to post a comment.