Environmental Emotions

In recent years, both researchers and many among the general public are paying increased attention to emotions related to environmental matters. Several terms have been used to describe these emotions, including “environmental emotions” and “Earth emotions”1; here, I use the term eco-emotions for conciseness.2 As contemporary civilizations grapple with manifold socioecological crises, the borders between emotions and other types of emotions regarding the state of the world and the conditions in which we live can be difficult to define.3 The sixth international conference of the Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN), Environmental Emotions: Tracking Affects on Page and Screen, included wide-ranging discussions on eco-emotions and on a variety of cultural texts, including literature and film. The conference was organized by a Finnish research project on empirical ecocriticism, “Literature and Reading in the Era of Climate Crisis,” led by Toni Lahtinen, an expert on environmental fiction, and funded by the Kone Foundation. Conference participants represented a variety of academic fields, from environmental scientists to historians and literary scholars. Here, I highlight key themes from the conference and focus on aspects of likely interest to the readers of Utopian Studies.4People experience many emotions in relation to social and political issues especially, and in that context, eco-emotions can be seen to involve various temporal levels relating to past events, present conditions, and anticipated futures. One such eco-emotion is solastalgia, which refers to a particular kind of ecological grief: the feeling of nostalgia for home despite still being at home, because one’s home environment has become too damaged or greatly changed.5 Eco-emotions can inspire the imagining of future scenarios, both hopeful and not, and in that sense they are therefore relevant to utopian studies broadly speaking. Emotions and visions of the future can shape each other: a strong feeling of despair is likely connected to a pessimistic view about the future. Scholars from various fields have been interested about the relationship between these emotions and different visions of the future, exploring both anticipatory solastalgia and anticipatory ecological grief.6 In all of these complex sets of emotions, both hope and anxiety particularly have been much discussed.7Ecocriticism has long engaged with a variety of environmental texts. A key presupposition has been that engaging with environmental fiction will have positive impacts on the readers’ environmental values. During the last ten years, a new research movement has emerged: empirical ecocriticism. This subfield argues for the importance of empirical studies of the many possible impacts of reading environmental texts. Environmental fiction may have surprising impacts on the reader, both negative and positive from the point of view of environmental ethics. Thus there is growing interest in empirical ecocriticism in many countries, although the approach is not yet widely known everywhere, including in Finland.8 The Helsinki conference focused on both empirical ecocriticism and on the study of eco-emotions, and the organizers wanted to spark further cooperation between scholars of many different fields. The two keynote speakers, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Colby College) and W. P. Małecki (University of Wrocław), are leading experts in empirical ecocriticism whose research has also included work on eco-emotions.Schneider-Mayerson, who coedited the recent An Ecotopian Lexicon (2019), has studied the impact of climate change worries on people’s reproductive decisions.9 His keynote, entitled “Empirical Ecocriticism, Environmental Narratives, and Social Change,”10 introduced empirical ecocriticism to those unfamiliar with the field, and then outlined his research on climate fiction, focusing on a study of North American readers of the novel The Water Knife (2015) by Paolo Bacigalupi. In line with the theory of empirical ecocriticism, Schneider-Mayerson’s study found a high level of variation in how readers were impacted by this critically acclaimed work, with politically liberal and conservative readers expressing very different takeaways. The Water Knife’s “thriller” plot caused many conservative readers to think about lessons on how to survive in a hostile environment, while for many liberals the narrative provoked thoughts about the need for better environmental stewardship. Thus, Schneider-Mayerson noted, narrative choices made by authors can have drastic consequences on what various readers take away from texts. He also observed that casual readers may interpret and respond to texts quite differently compared to professional readers, pointing out that scholars must take their own special position into account when making hypotheses about impacts of texts. The task of ecocriticism, as Schneider-Mayerson sees it, is to actively contribute to the ongoing socioecological transition, and make sure that it is oriented toward justice.11Małecki has a strong interest in interdisciplinary research; his studies on extinction narratives, for example, have drawn on philosophy, literary studies, and psychology. His talk “Measuring Environmental Affects: Experimental Methods in Empirical Ecocriticism” focused on whether narratives can improve social attitudes toward nonhuman animals.12 Focusing on affect and emotions, Małecki explored the possibilities of texts to promote interspecies empathy. Like Schneider-Mayerson, Małecki engaged with the work of Nicole Seymour, particularly her 2018 monograph, Bad Environmentalism (Minnesota). He asked whether the dominant emotional tone of environmental communication—often serious, somber or even melodramatic—could be counterproductive, discouraging people from taking part in environmental action. Małecki shared results from several empirical studies, placing them in the context of interdisciplinary research as a testament to the complexity of psychosocial dynamics. There are no easy solutions to the increasing of interspecies empathy, and therefore different types of people may benefit from different communications media. One of the fascinating research findings of Małecki and his colleagues is that audio messaging can be very persuasive for some people, not just the video materials featuring the graphic imagery of suffering animals and ecological systems.13 Post-lecture commentary by animal philosopher Elisa Aaltola led into a wide-ranging discussion between the speakers and participants.The members of the Finnish research project that hosted this presented their own findings thus far. Toni Lahtinen (University of Helsinki), Olli Löytty, Anna Helle (both from University of Turku), and Panu Pihkala (University of Helsinki) have studied how Finnish high school students responded to reading the globally acclaimed Finnish climate dystopia Teemestarin kirja (Memory of Water) (2012) by Emmi Itäranta. The novel depicts a future landscape, recognizable as Finland but without winters or snow, and with complex social, ecological, and political problems. For this research project, cooperation was established with teachers from several high school. The books were donated to these classes, and students read the book in its entirety, with each writing a response essay afterward. The researchers read the essays and afterward interviewed the students about their reading experiences. Students were asked, for example, which emotions the novel evoked in them, and what their general experience of reading the book was.14The researchers found that the novel evoked many kinds of feelings in Finnish adolescents, sometimes including a feeling of ambivalence. Many psychosocial phenomena could be observed in their responses. For instance, while many students refused to believe that Finland might suffer from severe climate impacts in the future, others were touched by the novel and wrote about the need for progressive climate politics. Furthermore, a few students expressed an awakened awareness of ecological grief in the sense of “winter grief” as they felt shock and sadness about the possibility of losing crucial elements of their identities and lifestyles.15 Notably, these were students from Northern Finland, where winters are harsher. Context, then—namely geography—is key, as young people from warmer countries might not have necessarily perceived a world without snow as dystopian. Still, at this point, it is impossible to know what the long-term impacts of reading the novel might be on the environmental attitudes and behaviors of the various students.Several other presentations discussed climate fiction with dystopian elements. Nina Janasik (Environmental Policy Research Group, University of Helsinki), Eeva-Lotta Apajalahti (LUT School of Energy Systems, LUT University), and Eeva Houtbeckers (University of Turku) continued the discussion on Itäranta’s novel, and added an analysis of as well as the Norwegian novel Blå [The End of the Ocean] (2017), the second novel in a quartet by Maja Lunde. Three other novels are the widely read: Bienes historie (The History of Bees) (2015), Przewalskis hest (The Last Wild Horses) (2019) and Drømmen om et tre (The Dream of a Tree) (2022). Janasik and colleagues discussed various representations of resilience in the novels, and relating them to Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” referring to the pursuit of desires that lead at the same time to a perpetuation of difficulties they face; in other words, people are driven by structural factors and powers to pursue things which are in the end not good for them. The research team looked at several instances of this in the novels—and applied to their interpretations a second concept from Berlant: “crisis ordinariness,” describing scenarios in which crisis is systemic and constantly present, as in many fictional “cli-fi” worlds. The speakers concluded that cli-fi novels can reach beyond cruel optimism if they depict ways in which structural change might be achieved in just ways. Various adjustment mechanisms to crisis ordinariness are depicted in the novels—which suggests, they argued, that cli-fi novels can include simultaneously both dystopian and utopian registers.One of the most interesting talks in the context of utopian studies was “Creative Utopian Stories As ‘Cognitive Frame Changers’ And ‘Future Literacy’ Builders” by Camilla Brudin Borg (University of Gothenburg). Brudin Borg described a project designed by herself and her colleagues, inviting various citizens, and particularly young people, to write utopian stories wherein both human beings and planetary life experienced well-being. The project was linked with “futures education” and “future literacy” curricula fostering the ability to examine and critically evaluate various conceptions of the future.16 Brudin Borg and her team compared their results with the work of climate scientists and policymakers, and observed that the citizens were able to express more imaginative visions through the broad contours of creative writing. The research team therefore saw possibilities for social innovation in this kind of work.Janne Hukkinen (University of Helsinki) spoke of the work of his research group (Environmental Policy Research Group [EPRG]) in making possible futures audio-visually depicted and poignant to decision-makers. In his presentation, “Making the Chronic Environmental Crisis an Acute One with an Audiovisual Dashboard Narrating a Plausible Spatiotemporal Transfer of Events,” the researchers had constructed a newsroom with credible but fictional television news about climate change-related floods, heatwaves, and forest fires in Finland. The participants were tasked, together with academic experts, with developing adaptation and resilience plans. This creative use of possible futures scenario-building challenges binary views of utopia and dystopia by presenting possible future difficulties as a motivation and a tool for envisioning utopian possibilities for resilient and adaptive cities.The scope of the presentations on cultural texts generally ranged from analyses of pop-culture movies to mid-twentieth-century Finnish nature poetry, and works of art presented on site included oral storytelling and documentary films. Participants came from a wide variety of academic backgrounds, suggesting that texts and eco-emotions are of strong interest in many fields. Many texts were analyzed for their combination of utopian and dystopian elements, such as Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003), read by Essi Vatilo (University of Tampere) with a focus on the dynamics of denial, guilt, and complacency manifested by the novel’s hapless protagonist, Snowman.A recurring theme was how environmentalism may motivate people to care for future generations and ecological conditions via storytelling and narrative. Because of the special theme of the conference, eco-emotions, this classic subject area for eco-criticism was now discussed in relation to a broader scope of various feelings than usual. These included empathy, sadness, moral outrage, fear, worry, anxiety, and feelings of guilt and responsibility. Some presentations, such as Silviya Serafimova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) on “On the Moral Concerns about Eco-anxiety in The World According to Anna,” included nuanced discussions of variations of eco-anxiety, such as moral anxiety.For utopia scholars, the conference’s emphasis on the need to be aware of the intricate dynamics of eco-emotions, and on the usefulness of empirical ecocriticism, was likely to be most intriguing. People may experience many kinds of eco-emotions, and the relation between these and any future imaginary is complex. Depending on the interplay between reader or viewer, text and context, a certain eco-emotion or a bundle of emotions may function in different ways. For example, dystopian visions may either cause paralysis or help people to engage constructively with their fears, anxieties, and worries. Or, in relation to ecological grief, a dystopian novel may help some people to engage with their current ecological grief and solastalgia, while for others the impact might be an increase in distancing; that is, the sorrow one experiences from the text might be displaced, thought to be only in these speculative futures. A utopian vision may be empowering for some, while for others it may manifest a disavowal of the severity of the ecological crisis and their eco-anxiety.There is evidently a need for many kinds of texts about futures—and in various media—so that many kinds of emotions may be processed. But it must be kept in mind that the same text can engender widely variant reactions in different individuals and cultural groups. Writers may process their own eco-emotions through their writing, and they may or may not anticipate the kinds of kind of eco-emotional impacts in their readers. Conference presentations also testified to the complexities of temporalities. For example, eco-anxiety is on one hand future-oriented, but on the other gains its power from contemporary happenings with roots in the past. Ecological grief can resonate with past, current, and anticipated losses.17 Scholars of utopian studies can be and are alert to such psychological nuances of eco-emotional response—and this conference illustrated the fruitfulness of collaborations among literary scholars and narratologists, psychologists, and environmental scientists

Art · Art history · Pedagogy · Climate Change Communication and Perception · History · Psychology