Note: Reading the yellow-highlighted annotations is optional.

If that article is unavailable, please read the original: Wallace-Wells, David. “The Uninhabitable Earth.” New York, vol. 50, no. 14, 10 July 2017, p. 24+.

Please read the first three sections of “Introduction: Ecocriticism North of the Forty-Ninth Parallel,” by Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley, beginning on page xiii.

Click on “Open Access” near the bottom of the page. Download the full text version of the book or just the “Front Matter.”

Please read at least five entries of your choice from this book. Recommended entries include

• Aboriginal, by Warren Cariou
• Anthropocene 1, by Dipesh Chakrabarty
• Anthropocene 2, by Rob Nixon
• Canada, by Kit Dobson
• Catastrophe, by Claudia Aradau
• Disaster, by Claire Colebrook
• Ecology, by Timothy Morton
• Fiction, by Graeme Macdonald
• Gender, by Sheena Wilson

In 2021, Wallace-Wells posted this update to “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It provides a somewhat more optimistic perspective on future climate change: Wallace-Wells argues that both the worst-case and the best-case scenarios are becoming increasingly unlikely.

Take a look at recent issues of this journal to see some of the most current developments in ecocriticism.

This book coauthored by Greg Garrard seeks to understand how and why climate-change skepticism remains persistent. You may wish to read the Introduction.

If you are particularly interested in Canadian literature and its ecocritical concerns, you may also wish to read the remaining sections of the introduction to Greening the Maple (pages xxvii to xliv), as well as other chapters from the book.

This introduction to an “Environmental Literatures and Politics in Canada” special issue of the journal ISLE provides a more recent overview of ecocriticism in Canada.

Whetter writes on representations of the Alberta oil sands.

See the book reviews and other features in this journal to get a sense of the most current concerns in ecocriticism in Canada. The Goose is the official publication of ALECC (Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada/Association pour la littérature, l'environnement et la culture au Canada).

Page down for a free download of the "Introduction."

Please read

• Chapter 2: What Does the Professor Want? Understanding the Assignment

Read the section “What’s Critical About Critical Thinking?” (pp. 15–18).

• Chapter 3: Constructing the Thesis and Argument—From the Ground Up

In “Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow,” the poet finds a dead sparrow in his garage and wonders what to do with it.

Morgan is a Canadian writer of Jamaican heritage. In his essay “Race, Privilege, and the Canadian Wilderness” he observes that while closeness to the natural environment has traditionally been a cherished feature of Canadian identity, “Black people have been—and remain—curiously absent from the amalgam of snow-capped mountains, rivers, forests, and animals often collectively labelled ‘nature’ here in Canada.” Morgan considers the implications of this exclusion and also reflects on the problem of “belonging” within Canadian land that has been taken from Indigenous Peoples.

Lanham is an American ecologist and writer. His essay “Birding While Black” is a disturbing account of anti-Black racism in the context of birdwatching and ecology.

Hop Hopkins is a writer for the Sierra Club, an environmental organization in the United States. In “Racism Is Killing the Planet,” Hopkins considers the wide-ranging problem of environmental racism, arguing that “we will never survive the climate crisis without ending white supremacy.”

Please read

• Chapter 4: Secondary Sources in Their Natural Habitats
• Chapter 5: Listening to Sources, Talking to Sources

This piece includes a video of Belmore’s performance art for the Mapping Resistances exhibition that was part of the Ode’Min Giizis Festival, June 17–18, 2010, in Peterborough, Ontario. 

This is Belmore’s website.

Scofield is a Métis writer who has published many books of poetry and taught creative writing at universities across Canada. You may wish to consider how his poem “I’ll Teach You Cree” approaches some of the concerns that Simpson raises in “‘Bubbling Like a Beating Heart’: Reflections on Nishnaabeg Poetic and Narrative Consciousness.”

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is a video game developed in coordination with the Iñupiat, an Indigenous People in Alaska. In the game, an Iñupiat girl and an arctic fox try to find the source of a deadly blizzard. Assessing this game gives you the opportunity to consider Indigenous artistic practice in a different medium.

Note that you can watch the game’s trailer or watch a Never Alone: Full Game walkthrough. However, if you wish to play the game, you must purchase it.

Please consult Younging's book as necessary for details about writing about Indigenous Peoples that go beyond the best practices summarized above.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has published this “Guide to Acknowledging First Peoples & Traditional Territory,” which you may find useful, especially if you choose to write about your own home place in Assignment 3.

Please read the introductory section by Patricia Yaeger (pp. 305–310) and “Literature and Energy Futures” by Imre Szeman (pp. 323–325). You may also wish to read some of the other sections in this article. Click “Save PDF” to view the full text of the article.

Please read “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” by Zoe Todd (pp. 241–254).

Zoe Todd, a Métis scholar, is a professor of anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her chapter “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” from Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, uses personal reflections to develop an account of how Indigenous perspectives exist at the margins in Canada. She aims to show “how Indigenous scholarship can accomplish what anthropological and arts discourses struggle to do: decolonize the academy and its contemporary concerns, including the Anthropocene” (249).

“The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes” is an animation produced by Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie for Slate magazine. The map shows a time-lapse representation of the ships that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries. This may seem like an unusual text for a course in the environmental humanities, but the horrifying scale of the transport of enslaved Africans gives a sense of how deeply the entire economy of the Western world, and therefore how much of its ecological interactions, are founded on the slave trade.

Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of “inhuman geography” at Queen Mary University of London, in the United Kingdom. Her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None argues that the notion of the Anthropocene must be understood in the context of racism, colonization, and slavery. In the chapter “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins,” Yusoff considers the question of when the Anthropocene can be said to have begun. Some scholars have argued that the Anthropocene started when Europeans colonized the Americas, some believe that the starting point should be considered the Industrial Revolution, and others (perhaps a majority) see the beginning of the Anthropocene in the twentieth century, during the era of “nuclear isotopes from missile testing” (para. 2), which will leave distinct geological traces into the deep future.

Yusoff steps back from this argument. Instead, she challenges the deeper assumptions underpinning this kind of discourse. Focusing on anti-Black racism in particular, she writes that “the origins of the Anthropocene are intensely political in how they draw the world of the present into being and give shape and race to its world-making subjects” (para. 2). Yusoff’s book makes for very challenging reading, in terms of both style and substance, but her argument is important for considering how the notion of the Anthropocene risks glossing over the conditions of exploitation and violence that inform the lived experience of many people.