Situating environmental literature in changing climate

AS climate change impacts negatively and continues to establish its footprints throughout the world, earning itself an interdisciplinary description, it, therefore, requires collaborative and multisectoral approaches.

One of the disciplines that can be harnessed to provide holistic intervention is environmental literature.

This includes poetry, short stories, novels, drama and the arts in the broad network of ecocriticism.

People need to change their unsustainable behaviours and stories which promote environmental destruction, and stay in a state of preparedness through participating in environmental literature, from childhood.

This includes participating in learning approaches through reading, new media technologies and interactive online platforms as empowering tools.

Although environmental literature appeals to a broad section of society, it is instrumental and significant in placing the child at the centre of pedagogy, with writers, teachers and scholars of the environment, playing leading and transformative roles.

The learning experiences need to witness and culminate in lifelong skills realisation through interacting with environmental literature from a tender age to adulthood.

Each stage of academic growth should realise how much environmental literature impacts positively on life-building as a community of practice.

In the framework of environmental literature, as put forward by Glotfelty (1996), ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment.

In this regard, ecocriticism operates in the same way as Ecolinguistics and contrasts in that both discourse communities use language and the environment as transformative pillars.

Ecocriticism explores the relationship between language and the environment.

Ecolinguistics is viewed as the study of how discourses about the natural environment potentially influence human perceptions of the environment and their interactions with it.

However, this discussion is not focusing on both ecocriticism and ecolinguistics, as it seeks to interrogate ecocriticism in the broad network of environmental literature, in empowering children and the wide readership, to change lives, empower communities, build strong institutions and resilience, while respecting the environment.

Environmental literature becomes a more comprehensive and exhaustive way of articulating environmental values, especially in literal texts.

The instrumental nature of environmental literature is that it empowers stakeholders mostly using pedagogy, and establishes sustainable value chains in the framework of value addition.

Therefore, environmental literature as a solution to reading deficiencies seeks to close the gap created by the fast dying reading culture.

With the advent of the new technology and vast social media networks, environmental literature can be integrated and harmonised so that not only the book is the point of reference.

In order to nurture a wide range of voices in transformative ways and influence the most needed climate actions for resilience building purposes, this type of literature is vital.

With the re-emergence of indigenous knowledge systems and their nature-based influence and solutions, environmental literature can offer perspectives between nature and culture.

In this regard, culture is instrumental in shaping human standpoints, ideologies and worldview, according to their underlying needs, necessities and wants.

When everything is said and done, people can safely view environmental literature as a mirror of society’s proceedings and human lives in holistic and transparent ways.

The context-specific nature of environmental literature contributes to the unlocking of a wide range of suppressed voices through environmental activism aiming at exposing, fighting and shaming climate injustices, locally, regionally and internationally.

The diverse nature of environmental literature is that it has a transformative and empowering branch and pillar of a feminist movement known as the ecofeminist literary criticism.

This provides informed perspectives in interrogating injustices against women and oppressive systems through environmental literature as a platform and pathway to nurture and uplift their voices.

Women can always make reference to the feminist communication toolkit for fighting injustices in this regard. The feminist communication toolkit can be used to fight male dominance and gender-based environmental justices with environmental literature as a point of reference.

There needs to be a paradigm shift. Environmental literature, which has been strongly aligned to the adults, should also put children into perspective, integrate them and avoid leaving them behind.

Failure to factor in the children’s concerns leads to lack of environmental budgeting on behalf of the youth and children, yet they are supposed to be at the centre of environmental sustainability.

Through environmental literature, children will be groomed, growing up empowered and deeply embedded in issues of resilience and nature conservation.

This will situate children at the epicentre of the overall environmental and conservation discourse, locally and globally.

In this regard, children acquire knowledge and information to combat future climate crises and injustices, improve their worldview and transform their lives.

Included in this diverse discourse is the ability to nurture problem-solving skills and capacities through literary pedagogy. From reading environmental literature, collaboration between theory and practice will be established so that children don’t just learn but they can also participate, practise and do.