Going into this lecture given just the name, I thought this presentation was going to be different from what it actually was. I imagined a typical climate change talk, discussing the impacts of climate change, what it’s doing to our society, and the measures we can take to lesson the disastrous impacts/push it off for longer. I was surprised, however, to find that it was nothing like I expected.
Nathan K. Hensley’s Action After Nature: Climate Crisis & the Force of Literature, was an interesting approach to climate change, pairing the study of climate change with literature. To be honest, I thought the pairing was a little bit of a reach, and actually confused be quite a bit. Maybe I am just not educated enough on climate change or literature or am just having trouble grasping the idea of combining the two, but I left the lecture feeling quite confused. Reflecting now, however, I am starting to better understand what he was trying to say. His use of Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor at first seemed like a big reach, but now I understand that Alice was living in world that she was unfamiliar with—just like we are currently living in a world that is new and changing.
The comparison of literature to climate change made sense in the fact that literature is formed within the context of contemporary issues. When talking about Alice and Wonderland, it was interesting to think about it in a different way, since the last time I read/listened to the book was when I was a child. He talked about how Alice tried to apply the same rules from her own world to this new world she entered, which was a mistake. This comparison made a lot of sense to me. In contemporary times, we act as though nothing has changed and all rules remain the same, even though they clearly don’t. The world is an ever-changing place and new ways of being come and go—we can’t just live the same way our grandparents lived anymore, we must change our way of doing things. Alice realized her way of being no longer worked in this new world and had to change in order to fit in and understand the new world. Climate change is changing our world—stronger storms, increased temperatures, rising sea levels—are all becoming more prominent. As a society we need to understand that this is the new world we lived in, not the past world, and go from there. Hensley refers to Hurricane Harvey here, and how Harvey was a storm that would occur very infrequently, maybe even every 1000 years. However, storms like Harvey are happening more and more often, and our society has to adjust to this new climate that is creating these disastrous storms.
This lecture, although it confused me a bit, was a very relevant and an important discussion for this lecture series. This related greatly to the “Presence of the Past” because he talked about the current world we live in by understanding the past, through literature.