Introduction to Focus: Literary Activism

Beth Miller, Focus Editor

It’s the afternoon as I sit down with a brand new, long-awaited novel by my favorite author. I’ve been working all morning, a small part of my mind peering forward, anticipating this moment. I open the cover … and wonder if I should be doing something else. I know I’m not alone in this. Whether as part of a relaxing evening at home, prepping for a lecture, or following a chat at the local bookstore, many of us have wondered if we ought to be doing something “more” — practical, important, helpful, immediate. What purpose does literature serve in an era of climate change and the wide array of tragedy, injustice, and loss that it entails? Can literature, broadly construed, truly be activist? Can literature inspire effective, ethical, and productive thoughts, actions, and habits, especially regarding environmental concerns? Or should we, as readers, writers, and scholars, turn our thoughts and actions to something more beneficial?

By the close of this special issue of the American Book Review, I hope your answer to that final question is no, or perhaps the more moderate “not necessarily.” This issue examines literary activism in contemporary texts with a specifically environmental focus. The slow violence of climate change, to borrow Rob Nixon’s term, intersects other forms of inequality, whether at a global or local level. Environmental injustice inherently provokes social, political, and economic injustice, an intermingling the reviews that follow will show. This shared theme resonates in the selected texts as well, where each author seeks to demonstrate this inherent interconnectivity and each reviewer finds spaces where we might push boundaries further, especially in fiction. It will not be news to anyone that, at some point, we need to move beyond textual worlds back into the physical spaces around us. But what I believe you will also see, both in this issue and in the coming years, is that ecologically oriented literature has an important part to play in environmental activism.

This shift in perception begins with a re-examination of the reading process and approaching reading as a form of ecology. Environmentally engaging texts invite their readers to take a step back and see the world around themselves, and their place inside it, with fresh eyes. These books can help us find new understandings of how deeply embedded we each are in our own local environments and extend that recognition outward across the globe. Concurrently, readers can more accurately conceptualize how our present moment in history — including the individual person and his or her actions — reaches across vast stretches of time to the far-distant future and ancient past. This approach entails a duality in our reading practice: reading ecologically — for environmental issues — as well as an ecology of reading — a study of the ways in which literature allows us to more clearly see relationship and interconnection. As a new way of seeing, reading ecology emphasizes our mutual dependence on one another and the potential power of individual impact. Crucially, an ecology of reading results in a shift in imaginative scale. In this case, literature serves as a catalyst, expanding the measure by which readers comprehend and evaluate their place in the world and the ramifications of their daily actions for a global environment. The most readily apparent shifts in our imaginations occur across time and space, expanding our cognitive scales to allow us to better grasp the far-reaching ramifications of climate change.

The texts surveyed in this special issue are not equally ecological in their scope or aim. In what follows, two openly environmentalist works of nonfiction bookend a selection of contemporary fiction. First, Kyle Bladow’s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019) questions the practical activism side of ecologically oriented literature. Foer’s text invites readers to examine their own apathy: Why do our actions, even our emotional investment, fall so short of our ideals? On the opposite end of the issue, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) brings us full circle with its meditation...