Project outline
This network aimed to raise levels of critical academic exchange and public debate about the possible relations between reading habits and preferences, levels of environmental literacy, and wider patterns of pro-environment behavioural and lifestyle change. Network activities have focussed on a broad literary category: Creative Environmental Writing (CEW). CEW has been examined for its potential to inspire, to communicate and to prompt diverse forms of environmental action and social engagement in society, in the context of contemporary environmental change.
While film, documentary and contemporary art are increasingly popular media for the communication of competing arguments about environmental change in the twenty-first century, literature and the written word remain among the most telling and persuasive of representational forms. Texts still fire the imagination, and give pause for thought. Cultural commentators have given widespread notice of a recent resurgence in nature writing and its recollection of a longer British literary tradition of natural history writing and popular field science (see for example Granta 2008; Archipelago 2009). This literature can be comfortably aligned with environmental writing that figures events in the living world, either microscopic or macroscopic, as harbingers for significant change on a global scale, so conjoining human history and natural history (see, for example, Granta 2003; McIntosh 2009). As such creative environmental writing works with an old language, but constructs a new literary landscape for writers and readers. It is of critical interest not only for its appealing qualities of language and voice, but for its potential to energise and politicise a wider public readership concerned by environmental issues.
The aim of the network activities were to:
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Build new research capacity by stimulating critical reflection on the interpretive, creative and political values that creative environmental writing creates for authors, individual readers, communities and specific sector interests.
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Use novel conversational formats to facilitate networking and critical debate about creative environmental writing among humanities researchers, recognized authors, environmental activists and artists, civic leaders, policy-makers, conservationists and members of the reading public.
Events
Network activities centred on three ‘Conversations on Environmental Change’, using Creative Environmental Writing to investigate precisely:
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what communities and individuals value
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why they value it
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how they value it
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how values are defined, identified and transmitted.
The workshops have operated through directed reading (“set-texts” circulated to participants pre-event), conversation (set-texts discussed in a small-group setting) and staged sessions (author-meets-critics/readers in a large group setting). A spectrum of values and genres (hope; anger; drama; wonder; anticipation; fiction; non-fiction storying) were considered for their appeal and effectiveness in communicating the significance of near-future scenarios for environmental change.
Workshop 1
Location: University of Glasgow
Date: 17th September 2010
‘Environmental Writing and Inspiration’. This event explored the kinds of environmental writing and writers’ voices (past and present) that prompt identifiable social responses and structures of value. Particpants considered the following questions:
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How are scale(s) of environmental change exposed and made affective?
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How does the representation of changing habitats and ecosystems inspire environmental action?
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Is there a continent-based or cultural geography characterising the most influential texts in CEW?
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What are the limits of CEW as inspiration for change, or unity of purpose?
Workshop 2
Location: University of Glasgow
Date: 18th March 2011
‘Environmental Writing and Communication’. This event explored the characteristic qualities and values of creative environmental writing (CEW) that prompt action and intervention, or, alienate readers from ecological mindfulness, such as the communication of anger, resistance, caution, resilience, respect, passion, pragmatism, nostalgia, spiritualism, doubt, hope, grief, guilt, panic, and sadness. Questions considered include:
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How do genres of CEW differently work on the imagination to drive creative environmental endeavour and action, and for whom?
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What kinds of environmental writer are upheld as authority, as witness and as inspiration, and why?
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Does the textual format of CEW (book or blog) attract different kinds of public attention and reception?
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What are the implications of a critical consideration of CEW for academic writing?
Workshop 3
Location: University of Glasgow
Date: 17th June 2011
‘Environmental Writing and Action’. This final event explored what kinds of environmental action/response are produced by what kinds of creative environmental writing (CEW). It considered reformist, sceptical and radical measures, individual and social, local and global, committed and casual and was centred upon the following questions:
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If different CEW literatures make different sorts of appeal, do they also hold varying appeal for different readers from particular communities, sector interests and social movements?
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How does writing itself constitute environmental action and redefine values?
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Is CEW only read by the already active and concerned?
Achievements
One of the achievements of the Network is to have provided a new and effective forum for people with very different interests and investments in communicating messages about environmental change to share their views. Placed in a conversational setting, network members have exhibited a willingness to take a holistic view when seeking to understand others’ positions on the challenges that society faces due to environmental change. Organising dialogues under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities may well give participants the license and liberation to offer more personalised opinion, allowing for the committed, but respectful, exchange of views.
Activities have created possible future pooling initiatives with comparable or cognate research networks in a Scottish context. Links are now established with ‘Creative Research into the Environment’ (a network hosted by Edinburgh College of Art, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh) and EcoArtsScotland (a web-based interdisciplinary platform).