Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Industry and Environmental Violence in the Early Victorian Novel: Pastoral Re-visions
- 2 Floating Cities, Imperial Bodies: Reading Water in Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986) and Xi Xi’s ‘Strange Tales from a Floating City’ (1986)
- 3 Sweet Food to Sweet Crude: Haunting Place through Planet
- 4 Nonhuman Entanglements in Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: Bête (2014) and By Light Alone (2012)
- 5 Sum deorc wyrd gathers: Dark Ecology, Brexit Ecocriticism, and the Far Right
- 6 Literature, Literary Pedagogy, and Extinction Rebellion (XR): The Case of Tarka the Otter
- 7 The View from the Field: Activist Ecocriticism and Land Workers’ Voices
- 8 Nature Walking: Marching Against Privilege
- 9 To Be a Witness in the World
- Index
5 - Sum deorc wyrd gathers: Dark Ecology, Brexit Ecocriticism, and the Far Right
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 March 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Industry and Environmental Violence in the Early Victorian Novel: Pastoral Re-visions
- 2 Floating Cities, Imperial Bodies: Reading Water in Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986) and Xi Xi’s ‘Strange Tales from a Floating City’ (1986)
- 3 Sweet Food to Sweet Crude: Haunting Place through Planet
- 4 Nonhuman Entanglements in Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: Bête (2014) and By Light Alone (2012)
- 5 Sum deorc wyrd gathers: Dark Ecology, Brexit Ecocriticism, and the Far Right
- 6 Literature, Literary Pedagogy, and Extinction Rebellion (XR): The Case of Tarka the Otter
- 7 The View from the Field: Activist Ecocriticism and Land Workers’ Voices
- 8 Nature Walking: Marching Against Privilege
- 9 To Be a Witness in the World
- Index
Summary
Referring to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt wrote that the dark times of early-twentieth century Europe were characterised not by an occlusion of the brightly lit world of public affairs but by the capacity of this world to hide its atrocities out in the open. Dark times, whenever they occur, happen in this way through the medium of some supposedly transparent rationalisation, Arendt writes. In Brecht’s ‘To Those Born Later’, written in exile in the late 1930s, the speaker appeals to future generations not to blame him too harshly for having failed to avert the catastrophe:
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped.
Thinking about the impasses of environmental politics today often feels like being in the position of Brecht’s speaker, striving to explain to some future society that the darkness did not look so dark, that it all seemed to happen in the plain light of day. It is a matter of learning to see the darkness for what it is. James Bridle has argued that this is a ‘new dark age’ precisely because our current, massively distributed, networked technologies cannot give the fully illuminated picture of the world that we believe technoscientific reason should do. Bridle argues that the task, then, must be to learn to live in the absence of enlightenment’s certainty, to inhabit the darkness as a space of possibility in which unknowing is not only unavoidable but necessary. This is a profoundly ecological position, and so it is no surprise that he refers to ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’ to characterise technological networks. Environmentalists have long understood that we live in a lighted clearing surrounded by a much greater, denser, darker mass of planetary life. The sunny optimism of ‘bright green’ environmentalism, with its faith in technological solutions, is frequently criticised. This is an ecological critique of light, in which the public world of politics (what Arendt describes as a ‘space of appearances’) is decentred by an appeal to something fundamentally withdrawn from the lumen naturale of human reason. The chromatics or shades of ecopolitics, ranging from dark to bright, suggest degrees of commitment to this position.
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- The Literature and Politics of the Environment , pp. 89 - 108Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023