ABSTRACT
In recent years, British nature writing has become a publishing phenomenon. What are the politics of the new nature writing at a time when dystopian narratives of planetary climate change are circulating intensively? In this chapter, I use Foucault’s ideas about “heterotopia” to analyse examples of the new nature writing, with a focus on Foucault’s distinction between the emptiness of the utopian “no-place” and the real, messy, interlinked concreteness of heterotopia. I argue that these popular books are deeply engaged with narratives of global climate catastrophe, but I make a distinction between the temporalities of the new nature writing and of dystopian (non-)fiction writing about climate change. I suggest that the new nature writing is, at its most interesting, radically at odds with linear climate change narratives that operate by imagining either a rush towards dystopia or fast progress towards utopian solutions. Both sets of temporalities operate without reference to place, whereas the production, and interruptive temporality, of place is where the new nature writing is most engaged and engaging. I conclude that we can provide readings of the new nature writing as heterotopian in ways that interrupt the urgency of a dystopian or utopian politics of global catastrophe.
