Environmental Writing

• Main Author: Long, Mark
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2019
• Subjects: Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0206

Most environmental writing in the United States through the 20th century is entangled with the concept of nature—the commonplace idea of a space apart from the human world. In American environmental writing this idea of nature is reproduced in narratives of exploration and pastoral visions of the landscape during the colonial and early national periods; in 19th-century mythographies of the American frontier; and in 20th-century social movements dedicated to preservation and conservation. By the middle of the 19th century, environmental writers were working in forms, such as the nature essay, to record individual experiences of nature and investigate the local knowledge of place-based communities. However, by the middle of the 20th century, environmental writers began considering human life as a part of the nonhuman world. Through this conceptual lens, environmental writing becomes radically inclusive as writers explore natural habitats such as the human body, material exchanges and unfolding biological processes, and the social and economic ecologies of built and urban environments. At the same time, environmental writing has chronicled the global environmental crisis in the Anthropocene—an epoch in which the slow violence of environmental change, accelerated by expanding human populations and inexorable economic growth, becomes visible in deforestation, the loss of soils, species extinction, bioaccumulation, ocean acidification, toxic emissions, and climate change.