Dr. Deborah Sims' paper, "No Foregone Conclusions: John Muir, Nostalgia, and Hope for a Green Future," considers the political influence of nature writing by analysing John Muir's impact on Theodore Roosevelt's environmental policy. After reading Muir’s “Our National Parks,” which inspired the two men’s now infamous camping trip in Yosemite, Roosevelt set aside more than 230 million acres of public land. No eco-writing since has had such a monumental impact on land conservancy. Sims examines Muir’s writing and puts it in conversation with modern ecocriticism, which often fails to produce environmental protections. What features of Muir’s writing elevate it to what Professor Lloyd Bitzer calls “genuinely rhetorical” discourse? What roles do nostalgia and hope play in producing specifical legislative outcomes for environmental protection? And, finally, what can modern writers learn that might enhance their capacity to advocate for wild spaces and diverse ecosystems? Professor Sims ultimately concludes that nostalgic writing in this context loses its utility when writers discuss nature as if it is over, as if it is a thing of the past. The use of nostalgia can unite reader and author and mobilize action, but only when celebration of the past does not automatically imply a dystopian future.
Dr. Sarah Coogan's paper, "Before the Break: Landscape, Labor, and Community in Anglo-Welsh Modernism," examines two poets deeply engaged with the rural landscape and its connections to labor and to artistic enterprise: David Jones and Lynette Roberts. Both are keenly aware of rural landscapes as places of accumulated memory, embodied in both their ecology and in the cultural practices of rural communities. In both their poetry and prose, Jones and Roberts exhibit alarmism at the changes industrialisation brings to rural environments and community. In their longing for a world before these changes, their meticulous preservation of cultural memory and practices, they offer a vision for how art can foster a future of greater harmony with the natural world.
Finally, Zarah Khan's "Nostalgia for the Future: Affective Geographies in Palestine," submits that although nostalgia is often considered a reactionary ruse, as developed by Walter Benjamin and Franz Fanon, nostalgia can also be activated as a potential liberatory impulse when it is grounded in the environment and ecologies.This impulse is reinforced in colonial and settler-colonial contexts where nostalgia develops an evolutionary impulse in everyday life. As such, this paper analyzes the unique relations that organize the experience of ecological nostalgia in occupied Palestine—that is, an ecological nostalgia that is experienced as a liberatory impulse not only from complicity in climate change (particularly Israeli efforts of deforestation) but through the retrieval of the ecological past that proposes and legitimizes the hope of return. Specifically, through the investigation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, the paper explores the relationship between nostalgia for Indigenous ecologies in response to the existential threat of Israel. Through analysis of his poetry, I suggest that the catastrophe of climate change and attendant nostalgia for a Palestine pre-Nakba (1948 invasion of Palestine, lit. “catastrophe”) offers an ecological language of Palestinian belonging and return. The paper proposes that his work develops an ecological nostalgia and traces a psychopolitical position that seeks a way back in order to imagine a way forward. In doing so, his poetry not only works to unsettle notions of linear and colonial time but reinvents affective geographies by organizing Palestinian surroundings into something more than resources “managed” by a foreign military regime. The paper considers how these affective geographies can be theorized more accurately through the relations proposed by Jane Bennett (2010) in “vibrant matter” and the ways in which these ecological relations persist, even unsupported by Israeli infrastructure, as a liberatory impulse.
By engaging literature across cultures and political positions, this panel opens an exciting conversation about nostalgia's ecocritical potential.