Reading with nature: environmental literacy for a changing world (RewiN)

Approaching environmental literacy as a situated, evolving capacity, the group asks how we learn to read landscapes and environmental processes — around us and in aesthetic represetation — without assuming they ever speak in a single, stable language. The project recognises that all ecosystems are always marked by layered histories and imaginations, whether these places and spaces appear cultivated, abandoned, repaired or under strain. From this starting point, the group explores how literature registers shifts in ecological relations, attunes readers to more-than-human agencies, and tests how language and literary form influence what becomes perceptible, imaginable and open to action.

By examining what a wide range of literary forms can offer in response to the climate and biodiversity crises, the group seeks to understand how genre shapes ecological imagination. Older textual forms that once organised environmental knowledge and seasonal awareness—almanacs, for example—are treated as illustrative cases of literature’s long-standing role in structuring attention to the natural world. These are read in parallel with modern modes – from nature writing and myth-inflected narratives to realist fiction and speculative forms – to explore how literary form not only registers socio-ecological change, but also conditions our capacity to perceive it and to respond.

In exploring the teaching implications of environmental literacy, the group examines how literary study might strengthen students’ capacity to read and understand natural processes and environments and our entanglements with them, along with whether this cultivated literacy supports deeper environmental attention and a more grounded readiness to act. Rather than presuming a linear path from reading to engagement, the group asks what kinds of literary forms—and what kinds of classroom practices—genuinely expand students’ perceptual and interpretive range.