This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

While land improvement is a commonplace theme in Scott’s writing, this chapter looks at counternarratives in which he foregrounds negative environmental impact. Literary forms that are discussed include elegy and gothic. Theories used include ecogothic and ecophobia. Species loss is shown to memorialize the untimeliness of war deaths. Case studies look at environments in which evidence of cruelty, including violence against the land, refuses to be buried or, conversely, remains manifest in the form of depletion and absence. Scott’s most disturbing fiction often features trees and other plants that have been mutilated, grow unusually and in strange places, or do not grow at all. The effect is a disruption of places more usually understood to be reliable, familiar or homely. The chapter demonstrates how Scott shows aesthetics commonplace to Romantic thought to be destabilized by what grows or fails to grow, creating uneasy and uncanny ecologies.

Further investigating the capacities of literary narrative to reveal intertwined environmental and social justice struggles, this chapter presents an overview of the current literature and critical debates at the intersection of magical realism and ecocriticism. Exploring the specific contexts of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, the chapter draws on perspectives from the overarching field of the environmental humanities, including postcolonial ecocriticism, indigenous scholarship and feminism, while it pursues these linked questions: how can and how does magical realism function as an ecocritical tool? In the course of the discussion, the essay aims to show how both Carpentaria and People of the Whale take up various 'nonhuman turns' – articulating the silence and violence imposed by anthropocentrism and its corollaries – while suggesting how techniques such as ecomagical realism may inspire us to bridge the manufactured divides underlying systemic exploitation and bolster the groundwork to demand real change.