Matt Morgenstern lays the panel’s theoretical and contextual groundwork. As climate change’s impacts take hold and the sixth extinction accelerates, previous conceptions of a capital-N nature have disintegrated. The hallowed nature writing of Emerson, Thoreau, and others now resembles a lost world carved up by the Anthropocene. Morgenstern discusses possibilities for the future of nature writing as a reparative genre for those working in environmental rhetoric, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities by drawing from recent popular nature writers, including Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert McFarlane, Merlin Sheldrake, Katherine Rundell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ed Yong. Such writers dissect different environmental problems and foster community engagement beyond academic circles. Nature writing should thus be revisited as a strategic genre for not only negotiating the Anthropocene but also encouraging public humanities and community building. Morgenstern reviews these possibilities through a brief consideration of nature writing theory and recent publishing trends.

Kristin Jacobson examines the emancipatory promise of regional U.S. cli-fi. While Amitav Ghosh makes the argument in The Great Derangement (2016) for the environmental humanities to address the planetary scale, attention to the regional should not be jettisoned. Regional literature provides a sound foundation by offering a Goldilocks zone between the local and global: “not so small as to be powerless and impoverished, not so large as to be ponderous and impervious, a scale at which at last human potential can match ecological reality” (Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land, 55). As a global power with diverse regional cultures and geography, the U.S. particularly benefits from a regional approach to the climate crisis. Karen Russell’s The Antidote (2025) serves as a case study. This historical and speculative novel brings the climate crisis home by highlighting the roles the local and global play in its Dust Bowl setting. While providing no simple cure, regional cli-fi like The Antidote poses emancipatory possibilities for the climate humanities and beyond.

The last two papers address journalism’s place within the environmental humanities. Mary Galli and Jonathan Elmore address how the environmental humanities should reconceptualize journalism and literature together, as they overlap to tell environmental truths. Cheryll Glotfelty’s 1996 introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader suggests that late twentieth-century literary studies neglect environmental issues in favor of scholarship about “race, class, and gender” (xvi). This assertion reinforces the traditional dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction and ignores an integral genre: journalism. While the environmental humanities have paid attention to nonfiction nature and science writing, Galli contends that scholars should also examine journalism to understand how environmental problems are communicated to the public. Galli discusses Barbara Kingsolver, who began her writing career as “a scientific writer” and a “freelance journalist,” turning one of her journalistic stories into her first nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1988). Moreover, her novels include journalist characters like Tommy in Demon Copperhead (2022) and Tina in Flight Behavior (2012). By looking at the overlaps of fiction and nonfiction in Kingsolver’s oeuvre, this paper emancipates journalism from its generic trappings to show how humans write about humanity’s effects on the environment.

The final paper continues the analysis of the interplay between journalism and literature to argue that climate fiction explicitly engages environmental journalism, identifying a pair of destructive trends found within journalism and then subsequently in climate fiction (specifically, Butler, Offill, Atwood, and Rich). Elmore offers a rhetorical analysis of “subjunctive fictions,” which labels a recurring rhetorical pattern in environmental journalism that leads to a pattern of passive misinformation. This pattern arises largely from journalism’s characteristic brevity and accessibility, resulting in two dangerous and often unstated implications. These implications are, first, a temporal distortion around the climate crisis (that there is still time BEFORE the crisis gets here) and, second, a cognitive dissonance (that the developed world need only make adjustments to its collective economy and energy resources to stop, or at least drastically reduce, the effects of the climate crisis). Elmore argues that fictional narratives about, and set within, the climate crisis have evolved alongside environmental journalism, offering emancipatory narratives that run counter to the prevailing destructive implications of such journalism.