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Paper short abstract

The Climate Fiction Writers League is comprised of authors who transform climate narratives into literature of the fantastic. Utilizing novels by League authors, I trace a path from anthropocenic disruption to climate fiction with emphasis on the ways these authors call readers to climate action.

Paper long abstract

The Climate Fiction Writers League is a growing collective of authors "who believe in the necessity of climate action, immediately and absolutely" and who transform climate narratives about bat conservation, changing weather patterns, water shortages, and other concerns into literature of the fantastic for children, teens, and adults. League authors have written The Tale of a Toothbrush: A Story of Plastic in Our Oceans, a picture book for children, The Girl Who Broke the Sea, a Young Adult thriller about deep-sea mining, The Many Selves of Katherine North, in which a woman projects her consciousness into the bodies of wild animals, and other works of fiction that aim to "inspire passion, empathy, and action in readers."

Climate fiction has as its inception a variety of anthropocenic disruptions of natural systems like ocean pollution, deep sea mining, and the abuse of wild animals, which are transformed into climate narratives by people who discuss them in various contexts. League authors perform their belief in the necessity of climate action by re-narrativizing these disruptions in fiction, hoping to inspire further activism on the part of readers. Utilizing three novels by League authors; Memory of Water by Finnish author Emmi Itäranta, Any Human Power by Scottish author Manda Scott, and The First Rule of Climate Club by American author Carrie Firestone, I trace a path from anthropocenic disruption to climate fiction with emphasis on the ways these authors call readers to climate action.

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This paper examines how Mapuche epew, oral narratives blending myth, ethics, and ecological knowledge, are reinterpreted today to address environmental and social challenges, fostering relational care and ecological imagination.

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The Mapuche epew are oral narratives passed down through generations, weaving together myth, ethics, and ecological knowledge. Often featuring talking animals and magical beings, epew teach relational ways of inhabiting the world, emphasizing connections among humans, non-humans, and the land.

This paper explores how epew are being re-signified in contemporary narratives, where ancestral knowledge is mobilized to address current environmental crises and socio-cultural challenges in Mapuche territories. In particular, we focus on Visiones del Pitrantu, a site-specific performance in southern Chile, where the character Meli Pilun, a clever Ngürü (fox), draws on epew to share with participants lessons of loss, resilience, and care amid the colonial dispossession of Mapuche territory, illustrating how storytelling transmits cultural memory while responding to social and ecological disruptions.

Through oral, written, and performative forms, epew function as a narrative commons, fostering collaboration, ethical engagement, and intergenerational learning. Drawing on insights from Ursula K. Le Guin and Mapuche thinkers such as Elicura Chihuailaf, we examine how these narratives can cultivate foresight and care, rather than heroism or conquest.

By situating epew within broader discussions of storytelling, speculative imagination, and ecological ethics, this exploratory essay highlights how these narratives, both traditional and contemporary, mediate human–environment relations, sustain memory, and open possibilities for multispecies futures. Imagining the future through epew is a radical ethical act: stories do not merely describe the world, they create it, cultivating care, resilience, and collective responsibility in times of planetary transformation.

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This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles dominant cultural narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling and relating. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a liminal state that disrupts inherited worldviews and creates space for ecological reimagining.

Paper long abstract

As ecological crises intensify, growing numbers report experiences of ecological grief: emotional responses to loss of more-than-human lives and environments. While eco-grief is frequently interpreted through conventional, human-centred mourning models focussed on individual experience, it is increasingly recognized as a collective emotional response to planetary collapse. Beyond its emotional impact, eco-grief might serve as a catalyst for reshaping cultural imagination.

This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles dominant cultural narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling, and relating ecologically and collectively. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a meaningful phenomenon: a liminal state that disrupts inherited worldviews and creates space for ecological reimagining.

Drawing on a comparative analysis of Heideggerian phenomenology and Ubuntu philosophy, the essay conceptualizes ecological grief not as a retreat into despair, but as an invitation to reorient ourselves within the more-than-human world, thereby “rewilding” the collective imagination and unlearning habits of control, separation, and linear progress characteristic of anthropocentric thinking. It subsequently examines how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of eco-grief, especially when expressed through art and ritual such as the case study of a glacier funeral, can help articulate new metaphors and affective grammars rooted in ecocentric notions such as affect, reciprocity, and care.

By drawing on culturally diverse perspectives, the paper explores how moments of spatial and existential rupture can catalyse deeper ecological awareness, reframing these affective and spatial disturbances as a foundation for fostering ecocentric values.

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“The tree sums up nature’s perfection” R.Bond

Tim Flannery in the Foreword to The Hidden Lives of Trees by Peter Wohlleben contends that trees have many elaborate means of communication- from electrical impulses to the senses of smell and taste and are sentient and social just like human communities.

My paper would explore trees as sentient beings with reference to Indian classic epics like the Mahabharata, the folklore from Rajasthan and certain tree writings. In our mythology trees were supposed to be the givers of ‘Prana’ or life nurturing elixir and were considered sacred. The Mahabharata quotes that those who plant trees should look after them as they do their own sons. They are not inanimate. Trees like the peepul, the sal , the neem have all been traditionally worshipped in Indian folklore and are supposed to be the abode of divine beings. But in the Anthropocene loss of trees through biocolonisation and the race for rapacious exploitation of nature's resources by human beings has led to irreducible climate change globally. The pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, like the Arboreal Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices? Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as possible, but even more it requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them.

Key words: Arboreal communities, Anthropocene, biocolonisation, folklore.

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Bringing children’s literature into dialogue with the blue humanities, this paper shows how A Whale of the Wild and The Wild Robot Protects use point of view, anthropomorphism, and ethically framed paratexts to render ocean climate change as lived, governable story‑worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper brings children’s literature into dialogue with blue humanities to show how Rosanne Parry’s A Whale of the Wild (2020) and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot Protects (2023) translate ocean climate change into legible, actionable story-worlds. I examine how point of view and anthropomorphic narration function as climate devices as they shape how readers sense marine change, attribute agency, and imagine governance across sea–shore interfaces. A Whale of the Wild, voiced by a first-person orca, renders warming waters, shifting prey, harmful blooms, and ship noise as lived oceanography, where currents, depths, and sound guide kinship decisions about routes, care, and hunting. The Wild Robot Protects, told in close third person with folktale-like brevity, treats the shoreline as a climate frontline: storms, poison tides, and human incursions prompt practical protocols that scale local care into a multispecies commons. Both books also use anthropomorphism strategically to convey perceptions and experiences of ocean-related multispecies communities to young readers, while paratexts and design elements (author acknowledgments of fieldwork and consultation, and illustrations) provide ethical guidance, steering readers away from overclaiming and toward informed care. Situated at the intersection of the blue humanities (Mentz; Oppermann) and post-anthropocentric children’s literature (Jaques; Oziewicz), and inspired by Min Hyoung Song’s “climate lyricism” (2021) and Bailey-Charteris’s “eco-aesthetics” (2024), the paper further argues that these narrative forms converge in a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction for young readers in a way that supports climate literacy without preaching and invites shared, ethically grounded care for a governable blue commons.

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Buddhist monastic communities demonstrate how spiritual narratives can function as cultural resources for climate adaptation, offering frameworks for both individual resilience and collective environmental response.

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This paper examines how Buddhist monastic communities in France and England use storytelling to address climate change and the environmental crisis. Based on ethnographic research conducted at two Buddhist monasteries belonging to the Sōtō Zen and Theravāda forest traditions, the paper explores how traditional Buddhist narratives are adapted to address contemporary ecological challenges.

From this fieldwork, three narratives of storytelling emerged: the adaptation of classical Buddhist stories to guide present-day recycling practices; personal accounts of continuous interspecies relationships that blur the boundaries between humans and nature; and first-person spiritual experience narratives in which practitioners sense their interdependence with the natural world.

I argue that these narratives actively cultivate the 'arts of noticing', which Anna Tsing defines as a refined attention to overlooked beings and relationships. Through these practices, environmental ethics arise naturally, shaping daily practices and morally guided behaviour. Unlike climate narratives that focus on catastrophe or technological solutions, these Buddhist monastic stories emphasise interconnectedness and compassion as a response, practising 'active hope'. Practitioners use these stories to process climate anxiety, moving from despair to what one participant called "responding rather than reacting", and drawing resilience from the environmental ethics that these narratives sustain in order to engage with the topic of climate crisis. These findings suggest that traditional spiritual narratives can provide resources for addressing the climate crisis by fostering both individual resilience and collective environmental practices. This demonstrates how storytelling can function as a cultural resource for sustaining engagement with ecological challenges.

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Muhammad Makhzangi’s short story Safar Shajar (The Journey of Trees) imagines trees uprooting themselves to wander in protest against immobility. Their exodus causes ecological collapse, yet a lone palm remains as fragile hope, redefining vegetal agency through mourning, and resilience.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Mohamed Makhzangi’s short story Safar Shajar (The Journey of Trees) from the collection Rashq al-Sikkīn (Stabbing with a Knife) as a striking meditation on vegetal agency, exile, and ecological collapse. In the tale, trees, mocked by birds and other creatures for their rootedness, violently pull themselves from the ground “like a nail torn from flesh” and begin to walk. Yet their movement is short-lived: roots erode, leaves lose color, and the trees soon collapse, leaving scars and hollows in the land.

The story dramatizes a paradox: the very quality that defines trees—their immobility and endurance—becomes the source of derision and shame, prompting a mass exodus that ends in devastation. This vegetal uprising unleashes cascading catastrophe: fish, birds, and animals die, the skies darken with falling crows, and the world becomes a barren desert. At the narrative’s end, only a solitary palm remains, symbolizing both fragile hope and the stubborn persistence of vegetal life.

By focusing on images of uprooting, wandering, and desertification, this paper argues that Makhzangi reimagines plants not as static backdrops but as actors capable of protest, tragedy, and memory. Safar Shajar stages a vegetal ecology of mourning while challenging anthropocentric hierarchies of movement and agency. Ultimately, the story expands Arabic eco-fiction by showing how plants can narrate resistance and resilience in times of crisis.

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This paper explores how folk stories about the nagas, mythical serpents intimately linked with waterways, landscapes, weather patterns, and cosmologies, continue to provide an allegorical framework for people in northern Thailand in the face of growing vulnerabilities induced by climate change.

Paper long abstract

Like many other parts of the world, the province of Chiang Rai, in the north of Thailand, has been experiencing an increasing number of climate-related catastrophes in recent years. Last September, exceptional rainfall and the overflowing of rivers across the upper-middle Mekong basin were the cause of unprecedented flooding, resulting in extensive personal and property damage. While official and public discourse about these events is mostly framed in modern scientific terms, this is a region where ancient stories about the nagas, mythical serpent-like creatures intimately linked with local waterways, landscapes, weather patterns, and cosmologies, are still part of a rich but waning oral tradition. This tradition, represented in a variety of folk tales, rituals, and artistic expressions, incorporates very ancient animistic beliefs as well as Buddhist principles and practices that have become an integral part of the diverse and dynamic culture of the region. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the persistence and relevance of these narratives for contemporary inhabitants of Chiang Rai and the broader Chiang Saen basin in the face of climate change and other environmental catastrophes. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork conducted by undergraduate Thai students under the author’s supervision, this paper will present and discuss some of the stories that people in this area tell about the nagas today. It will also explore whether these stories continue to provide an allegorical framework for local inhabitants to interpret and make sense of their growing concerns about the risks and vulnerabilities induced by climate change.

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Drawing on recent ethnography in County Kerry, Ireland, this paper will look at legends of the bountiful cow in Irish tradition - the Glas Gaibhneach - and reflect on how these stories have become an allegory for environmental exploitation amongst some tradition-bearers in contemporary times.

Paper long abstract

The Glas Gaibhneach is a cow of abundance in Irish folk tradition. Legends tell of her appearance during famine times to sustain the poor with her bountiful milk, until a deceitful old woman determines to test the limits of the cow’s yield by milking her into a sieve, following which the cow either dies or disappears back across the sea, forsaking humankind.

Although centuries’ old and attested in other countries, recent fieldwork undertaken by the author in County Kerry, Ireland, found that some tradition-bearers view the legends as an allegory for the exploitation of nature, and the finitude of the earth’s resources. While the legends thus demonstrate the inherent adaptability of folklore and its capacity to evolve and carry new meanings - thus persisting into and remaining relevant in the contemporary era - the legends also speak to the importance of folk narratives in mediating a changing ecological consciousness and rethinking our relationship with the natural world. Drawing on eco-critical theory, this paper will consider the vernacular worldviews and nature/culture dynamics presented in the legendry, and how these are being challenged and reimagined in the contemporary era of anthropogenic climate change.

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This paper examines how regenerative agriculture rewrites the ecocultural narrative of sheep and cattle in the context of the climate crisis in Australia. Often the villain of environmental destruction, here livestock agriculture emerges as the hero.

Paper long abstract

The farming of sheep and cattle has often propelled concerns about destructive environmental change in Australia and in recent years there has been growing critique over its causal effect on the climate crisis. Framed as a nature-based-solution, the emergent alternative farming movement, regenerative agriculture seeks to address these concerns by rendering sheep and cattle agriculture as compatible with ecological restoration and climate mitigation. ‘Livestock agriculture’, which is typically framed as the villain of environmental destruction, here emerges as the hero.

This paper examines regenerative efforts to steward the harmonisation of soils, grass and cows as part of a redemptive re-storying of agriculture in environmental terms. However, I find that regenerative attempts to naturalise ‘livestock production’ is not as simple as a green rebranding of an environmentally destructive industry but is embedded within broader settler colonial nation-building narratives of pastoral expansionism and its underlying Judeo-Christian agricultural stewardship ethos. I argue that these ecocultural identities - along with the emergent politics of nature-based-solutions - will have to be reckoned with, as various forms of agricultural production lay claim to narratives of climate-secure futures. As the term regeneration is increasingly applied to a diversity of projects such as environmental rehabilitation, neoliberal extraction and retrospective, neo-agrarian agricultural revival this paper is a timely investigation into alternative stories of hope and environmental care in a period of escalating environmental crisis.

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Paper short abstract

As expressions of processes of cultural heritage, oral tradition contain ontological ideas that humans have wanted to safequard for future generations. I examine a water-related creation myth found in Finnish folk poetry to ask what kind of alternative relationship with the environment it offers.

Paper long abstract

The relationship between humans and their environment is a historical phenomenon that changes over time. Environmental changes and ecological crises give rise to cultural processes of cultural and environmental heritage, in which nostalgia and (co-)imagination interact with the environment. As expressions of such long-term processes, oral tradition, and myths in particular, may contain some fundamental ontological ideas and worldviews that humans have wanted to preserve for future generations.

In this presentation, I examine the water-related creation myth found in Finnish folk poetry, in which the Mother of Water, plays a central role. Research indicates that, thousands of years ago, the Finnish belief system was characterised by shamanistic practices. Shamanism is based on animistic ontology, according to which everything, including water, is alive. Myths that tell of the beginning of the world, for example, have been sung in rituals in which non-human actors in the environment are involved in the creation of a new situation, world or relationship with the environment. Now, during many crises, animism has been seen in discussions among practitioners and researchers alike as an alternative ontology for a relationship with the environment that utilizes nature. What kind of alternative relationship with the environment does, for example, the myth of the Mother of the Water offer?