What is Environmental Writing?
Environmental writing is poetry or prose that explores the connection between humans and nature, with topics ranging from ecology to global warming. However, what distinguishes this more modern branch from its Romantic and Transcendentalist roots is its focus on eco-systemic violence like chemical spills, oil extraction, and animal extinction.
Environmental writing stems from Nature writing, a genre introduced in the late 1700s by Gilbert White and William Bartram. While Nature writing under White and Bartram largely documented their observations in botany and ornithology, the genre later experienced a boost in popularity during the Transcendentalist movement and expanded to include philosophy and poetry. In response to growing environmental destruction, Environmental writing branched off from Nature writing as a means for writers to depict the world as no longer sublime and untouchable but damaged and decaying. Like Nature writing, Environmental writing highlights human love and respect for nature across a wide variety of writing genres. But now more than ever, Environmental writing has become a call to action, a demand for justice, and a direct refusal to let humanity blindly perpetuate its own destruction.
Environmental writing stems from Nature writing, a genre introduced in the late 1700s by Gilbert White and William Bartram. While Nature writing under White and Bartram largely documented their observations in botany and ornithology, the genre later experienced a boost in popularity during the Transcendentalist movement and expanded to include philosophy and poetry. In response to growing environmental destruction, Environmental writing branched off from Nature writing as a means for writers to depict the world as no longer sublime and untouchable but damaged and decaying. Like Nature writing, Environmental writing highlights human love and respect for nature across a wide variety of writing genres. But now more than ever, Environmental writing has become a call to action, a demand for justice, and a direct refusal to let humanity blindly perpetuate its own destruction.
Publications
POETRY Magazine published by the Poetry Foundation features Environmental writing from the past seventy years, including works from ecopoets Dg Nanouk Okpik, Craig Santos Perez, and Juliana Spahr.
Subjects range from pollution to climate change to conservation and incorporate experiences of nature from people around the world. Ecotone Magazine integrates literary genres, science, and art into themed issues exploring our connection to nature. Whether it be Ecotone 29: The Garden Issue on agriculture or Ecotone 31: The Climate Issue on air pollution, Ecotone invites writers to submit poetry, essays, and stories. Ecotone’s contributors include winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships.
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From Northview Students
ART
writing
on jeju island
old women count shells along a blue-green coast calloused fingers clutching jaksal spears for hairtail nylon string embroidering their chests and arms as their sisters and daughters dive for sea urchins wetsuits melting into ocean waves. clusters of moon jellyfish tangle decaying phosphorescence. an octopus tentacle pulsates timidly in a shark’s waning shadow. the mermaids with hair like wild brown hijiki eyes and teeth and lips like yours hunt beneath the current, rising to sow seeds of agar for the gods and scrub artemisia into their lenses. at dawn they scatter grains onto silk-- what of the dead must be done for children of the living? You surface to nothing. Poem by Christine Baek |
Chrysalis
Until her release on June 1, 2045, Cherie had been trapped in a Venus flytrap for thirty years. Two weeks after officers from the local Anthropophagic Division slice open the twenty-foot-long leaves, extracting Cherie’s partially-digested body from the flytrap’s maroon sap, Cherie is put on-display in the pavilion. News reporters swarm in, emerging from waxy mobiles parked around the medical center. Furry black microphones extended like antenna, glossy lenses blinking like a hundred compound eyes. The woman’s body from the chin down is swaddled in a safety blanket the color of aluminum foil. But, unlike foil, the grey threads absorb the psychedelic flashing of cameras. A few reporters call out questions-- What do you last remember before being Consumed? Do you have any memories of friends, family? How are you feeling right now, Cherie? -- stiffly at first, soon emboldened by her silence. The questioning turns loud, demanding: incessant unanswered gabbling, punctuated by brief moments of excitement when it appears Cherie is attempting speech. Her chapped, colorless lips rub together once, twice, before opening, then closing. This occurs three times in the two hours and fifteen minutes she remains on-display. The reporters’ anticipation is like sugar, and in the boiling heat of the packed pavilion, it begins to caramelize, the promise of a story sticky and sweet. Cherie never utters a word. Inwardly, some reporters wonder if she’s even alive. Her complexion is ashy, with a sickly porcelain sheen. Her milky eyes are unfocused, and what little hair she has that wasn’t seared off by the Venus flytrap’s digestive fluid is combed over her scalp. Lined with scabs black, brown, burgundy, her scalp gives her the appearance of a quail egg. They can’t have her words. But they can have her face. The clicking of their cameras never stops until the medics wheel Cherie back in. In every photo, they render Cherie fragile, shrunken, like a caterpillar trapped in its chrysalis. Fiction prose by Christine Baek |