Transpacific Ecologies

In my final semester at Wesleyan I took a course titled Transpacific Ecologies: Race, Literature, Environment, where we engaged with several texts and how they represent the ecological entanglements of humans and nature. At the beginning of this course, I was introduced to a completely different way of thinking about the relationship between nature, history, and human experience, especially in the context of colonialism and climate change. We started with a piece by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, called Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth that centerd the landscape itself as an adapting protagonist of history. In this work the authors also cite other writers, including Guyanese author Wilson Harris. One of the first big takeaways for me was Harris’s idea that nature, or the landscape, isn’t just a passive backdrop for storytelling; it’s an active participant in shaping and reflecting historical events. I had always seen nature as something separate from human history, something that’s impacted by human actions but not one that plays an active role in them; but, in this first reading, Harris suggests that nature is a kind of silent witness to colonial violence and forced migration, as if the land itself holds the memories of all that suffering and destruction. 

Then in the course we looked at Amitav Ghosh’s critique of how climate change and natural disasters are represented in fiction. In his work, The Great Derangement, he points out that climate crises are so extreme and ‘improbable’ that they sometimes feel more like shock value than meaningful narrative. So, if the environment is such a critical and changing actor in how we understand history and human intersections, what are the effective ways of centering it in our stories without it feeling cheap? This question guided our semester’s work with literature, but, on another level I wondered, why is it so important that the modern novel can successfully represent our climate crisis? This second question ultimately combined by interests in storytelling, global infrastructures, and the environment. By seeing nature as a character, we might open up new ways of understanding climate change; not just as a series of facts and statistics, but as something that affects us on an emotional and human level. In sharing global perspectives, and the urgent violence of climate change, through storytelling, we can foster more empathy and collective problem solving across linguistic and cultural barriers.