Since our blog debuted in 2017, we have published 500+ posts. While some of you may have been with us from the start (thank you, loyal readers!), others may have joined us more recently.
As a result, we’re highlighting some of the posts that have garnered a lot of views or that address topics of continuing interest in the current moment — posts that you may have missed or that you might want to revisit.
Today’s archival find: posts published in 2019 on “Literature and Climate,” Part I and Part II.
The occasion for these two posts in October 2019 was to mark a global climate strike and a U.N. Emergency Climate Summit in New York. Recent extreme weather — Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton during the past two weeks — prompts revisiting them now in October 2024.
In these posts, as we explained back in 2019,
K-State English department faculty and alumni explore literature’s engagement with the natural world. Through quotations and short, reflective essays, we reflect on how literature can help us understand humanity’s historic relationship with the environment and the current climate emergency, perhaps even offering a roadmap to sustainable future — should we choose that path.
Visit “Literature and Climate, Part I” and “Literature and Climate, Part II” to read excerpts from and reflections on a range of authors who consider our relationship to the natural world, including Greta Thunberg, Anne Bradstreet, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Rush, and John Fowles, among others — and we send warm wishes to the alumni, students, colleagues, and family recovering from recent extreme weather.
— Karin Westman, Department Head
K-State English 