Devin Griffiths asks: as we confront the dual challenges of economic stewardship and environmental destruction, how might we rethink the relation between ecologies and economies? In John Bellamy Foster’s analysis of Marx’s “metabolic rift” – the argument that capitalism, in driving a wedge between agricultural production and urban consumption, vitiated the land by destroying the cycle of waste matter and nutrients – many have found a model for thinking about the climate crisis. Yet, in many ways, the crisis represents not the failure to recycle, but, rather, the problem of recycling too much – the frantic return of atmospheric carbon, stocked over millions of years, to the air from which it first came. To understand the relentlessness of carbon capitalism, Griffiths argues, we must pay as close an attention to Marx’s energetic imaginary as to his materialist analysis – to those fugitive forces in Capital, lurking in the vital metaphors of his prose, that power labor and make tables dance.

Expanding Griffiths’s scale of economic agency, Alicia Carroll proposes that, if reading plants and their “sensual materiality can counterbalance the immense scale of climate change” (John Ryan), reading for a vegetal climatology in D.H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” reminds us that global warming is experienced by both human and more-than-human beings. Reading climate through the lives of Lawrence’s alpine flora, Carroll considers what climate change might be like from the perspective of a plant. “Bavarian Gentians” accelerates the temporal process of the carbonization of plants for the sake of metaphor, Carroll contends, igniting the culture and climate of global warming as plant becomes torch, emitting darkness. Grounding the poem in an entangled “modern” botanical world in which plants are paradoxically a “source and sink of carbon” (Ryan), Carroll argues that the lives of common plants demand a vegetal climatology that challenges anthropocentricism, binary thinking, and heteronormative environmentalisms.

Conner Moore’s engagement centers on eco-aesthetics, positing that, in light of anthropogenic climate change, the radically antinature sentiments of Decadents such as Algernon Swinburne, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde may elicit contempt from contemporary readers. Moore proposes, however, that, just as ecocriticism casts light on these authors works, Decadents’ antinature philosophy can productively reshape our understandings of ecocriticism, opening conceptual space for the embrace of necessary environmentalist practices. This rejection of nature can be understood as a rejection of the social and literal construction of nature, used to disrupt prevailing discourses and hegemonic institutions that insist upon their own “naturalness” despite their constructedness and oppressive features. The Decadent embrace of the artificial can, in fact, represent an insistence upon humans’ necessary intervention in our contemporary ecological crises.

Lastly, Kate Flint positions the artifice of climate and plant life under a nationalist lens. The oak tree – a familiar icon of Englishness, with its longevity and associations with Druidical worship and with hiding outlaws and a king – commonly stands for historical continuity. Consider D. H. Lawrence’s “Under the Oak” (1916); the never-finished “The Oak Tree” in that most climate-conscious of novels, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928); and even the constant presence of singular oaks in travel guides for motor tourists. Oaks have, however, a precarious future, stressed and weakened by global warming. Recognizing this incipient vulnerability encourages a mode of reading alert to climate’s potential to transform apparently stable landscapes. Flint deploys Mat Collishaw’s art installation Albion (2017) to ask: should certain versions of English history be kept artificially alive, albeit ones enshrined in venerable native trees? Might environmental restitution and revisionism offer new ways of thinking not just about maintaining woodland diversity that will withstand future climate shifts, but also about living with changing concepts of nationhood?