Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Introduction Literature and Politics
- Part I 1900–1945: Ideas and Governance
- Part II 1945–1989: New Nations and New Frontiers
- Part III 1989–2000: Rights and Activisms
- Chapter 14 Women’s Rights
- Chapter 15 Sexual Rights
- Chapter 16 Indigenous Rights
- Chapter 17 Environmental Rights
- Chapter 18 Neoliberalism
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 17 - Environmental Rights
from Part III - 1989–2000: Rights and Activisms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Introduction Literature and Politics
- Part I 1900–1945: Ideas and Governance
- Part II 1945–1989: New Nations and New Frontiers
- Part III 1989–2000: Rights and Activisms
- Chapter 14 Women’s Rights
- Chapter 15 Sexual Rights
- Chapter 16 Indigenous Rights
- Chapter 17 Environmental Rights
- Chapter 18 Neoliberalism
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
The chapter explores two major reorientations for environmental politics since the 1960s through literature that influenced and was influenced by these politics. With the ‘New Environmentalism’ of the first ‘Earth Day’ (1970), a younger generation broke with a long tradition of wilderness preservation to meet the urgent new challenges of ecological crisis – a shift in genre from the Romantic resistance to modernity in the nature writing of John Muir and Edward Abbey to the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, who were struggling to think towards possible futures at a planetary scale. The second reorientation also grapples with scale, emerging out of the tensions between the Global North and South in the wake of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment (1972). Sceptical of an environmentalism preoccupied with ‘Nature’ alone, what has been called the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ has refused to see social justice and the environment as separate, as, for example, in Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, whose island home – subjected to US nuclear weapons testing in the mid-century – is now inundated by rising sea levels.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022