'There's something you need to hear': The literature of environmental crisis

This chapter explores the role of literature in responding to the environmental devastation at the heart of the ‘polycrisis’ of our time. It begins by addressing the vexed question of how the novel, in particular, can have any role to play in communicating ecological themes when it arises from the very culture that has brought us to the Anthropocene. The chapter also outlines the various challenges the contemporary context poses to literary production – its complexity and resistance to articulation, the challenges to cognition of the vast spatio-temporal scales of the Anthropocene, and the global inequalities that the term itself masks.

‘There's something you need to hear’ focuses on three 21st century novels - Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) - investigating the ways in which they respectively lay bare the ‘slow violence’ of colonialism, engage with ontological shifts regarding the capacities of the more-than-human, and plot a way through the current crisis. The discussion also engages with the way in which the novels deal with the inevitability of violent activism in response to political and economic inertia and, finally, on how they might be read in terms of both the ongoing role of literature and the broader possibility of hope in the midst of despair.