Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)

Abstract

Green Matters reflects on the ‘unique cultural function’ of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse? I’d like to explore this question with regard to my own practice. After some years of writing fairly conventional journal articles and conference papers about literature and ecology, I now find myself among those practitioners in the Environmental Humanities who have been prompted by the urgency of the present crisis to reconsider the modes of our academic expression. This means that I wish to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature.