Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment ed. by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (review)

Dear Joe, You have asked me how I feel about climate change. It's probably the first time I have ever been asked to say what I feel, rather than what I think and it's a hard question to answer. [...] So, what do I feel about climate change? Interest, intellectual curiosity, satisfaction, excitement, extreme worry, sadness, fear, and perhaps a glimmer of hope...

—Ruth Mottram (https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/this-is-how-scientists-feel.html)

In 2014, science communicator Joe Duggan created a website called "Is This How You Feel?" His primary goal was to show that scientists are not brain-fed, organically grown robots disconnected from complex emotional life. Rather, Duggan wanted to demonstrate that climate scientists not only think through the challenges of our contemporary climate crisis but also feel their way through them. Duggan did this by collecting hand-written letters from scientists responding to the deceptively simple question: "How do you feel about climate change?" Ruth Mottram's response above exemplifies the affective landscape of many of the letters on the site. An overwhelming number of scientists discuss how "frustrated" they feel, with a cluster of other feelings like "tired" and "angry" making frequent appearances. Amongst these "negative" feelings, almost all of the letters end with a sense of optimism or hope—sometimes alone, or sometimes coupled with apprehension about children's futures.

Frustration, hope, and anxiety are some of the many affects that fill the pages of Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino's wide-ranging and timely edited collection Affective Criticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018). Unlike Duggan's website, Bladow and Ladino's collection is interested in how affects relate to and connect us to different environments, rather than the scientists who study them. As literary scholars, Bladow and Ladino are no strangers to ecocriticism and affect theory: as well as organizing workshops and panels dedicated to "affective ecocriticism" and "grief" at the 2019 ASLE conference, both have explored these fields in their own research. Bladow's work on bioregionalism and materialism features in collections like The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012) and New International Voices in Ecocriticism (2015), and Ladino's Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (2012) brings together affect and nature in a way that appears to methodologically foreshadow Affective Ecocriticism.

In the book's introduction, "Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene," Bladow and Ladino make a claim for attending to feeling in an era dominated by facts and "fake news." Affect, they argue, creates and renders visible connections, works across scales, and offers an expanded, nonhuman, conception of agency. By focusing on affect theory, and encouraged by the idea that "climate and social justice activists require altruistic emotions as a foundation for action," the editors hope to gain "a clearer sense of what those emotions are and how they work" (p. 3). As well as introducing the project's goals and contributors, the introduction contextualizes the work within broader theoretical trends in affect theory and material ecocriticism, drawing attention to the work of scholars prominent in research on affect like Raymond Williams, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Heather Love, and Patricia Clough (pp. 4–5).

The collection is divided into four sections ("Theoretical Foundations," "Affective Attachments," "Animality," and "Environmentalist Killjoys"), each of which draws us progressively closer to more obvious forms of affect in action. For example, we move from the theoretical and formal embodiments of Nicole Merola's and Alexa Weik von Mossner's chapters to the pedagogical practices of Sarah Jaquette Ray's "Coming of Age at the End of the World." While relatively distinct in their methodological approaches, a number of refrains play out across the sections, creating a sense of internal coherence: the essays dwell in affective spaces between the poles of despair and hope, and, often with a nod to Lauren Berlant's (2011) work on "cruel optimism," attempt to move beyond these categories to achieve a...