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Ecocriticism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 27, 2016 • ( 3 )

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader , edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm , and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals in ecocriticism is to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and increased technology. It is hence a fresh way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts, which brings new dimensions to the field of literary and theoritical studies. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including “green (cultural) studies”, “ecopoetics”, and “environmental literary criticism.”

Western thought has often held a more or less utilitarian attitude to nature —nature is for serving human needs. However, after the eighteenth century, there emerged many voices that demanded a revaluation of the relationship between man and environment, and man’s view of nature. Arne Naess , a Norwegian philosopher, developed the notion of “Deep Ecology” which emphasizes the basic interconnectedness of all life forms and natural features, and presents a symbiotic and holistic world-view rather than an anthropocentric one.

Earlier theories in literary and cultural studies focussed on issue of class, race, gender, region are criteria and “subjects”of critical analysis. The late twentieth century has woken up to a new threat: ecological disaster. The most important environmental problems that humankind faces as a whole are: nuclear war, depletion of valuable natural resources, population explosion, proliferation of exploitative technologies, conquest of space preliminary to using it as a garbage dump, pollution, extinction of species (though not a human problem) among others. In such a context, literary and cultural theory has begun to address the issue as a part of academic discourse. Numerous green movements have sprung up all over the world, and some have even gained representations in the governments.

Large scale debates over “dumping,” North versus South environmentalism (the necessary differences between the en-vironmentalism of the developed and technologically advanced richer nations—the North, and the poorer, subsistence environmentalism of the developing or “Third World”—the South). Donald Worster ‘s Nature’s Economy (1977) became a textbook for the study of ecological thought down the ages. The historian Arnold Toynbee recorded the effect of human civilisation upon the land and nature in his monumental, Mankind and Mother Earth (1976). Environmental issues and landscape use were also the concern of the Annales School of historians , especially Braudel and Febvre. The work of environmental historians has been pathbreaking too. Rich-ard Grove et al’s massive Nature and the Orient (1998), David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha’s Nature, Culture, Imperialism (1995) have been significant work in the environmental history of India and Southeast Asia. Ramachandra Guha is of course the most important environmental historian writing from India today.

Various versions of environmentalism developed.Deep ecology and ecofeminism were two important developments. These new ideas questioned the notion of “development” and “modernity,” and argued that all Western notions in science, philosophy, politics were “anthropocentric” (human-centred) and “androcentric”(Man/male-centred). Technology, medical science with its animal testing, the cosmetic and fashion industry all came in for scrutiny from environmentalists. Deep ecology, for instance, stressed on a “biocentric” view (as seen in the name of the environmentalist group, “ Earth First! !”).

Ecocriticism is the result of this new consciousness: that very soon, there will be nothing beautiful (or safe) in nature to discourse about, unless we are very careful.

Ecocritics ask questions such as: (1) How is nature represented in the novel/poem/play ? (2) What role does the physical-geographical setting play in the structure of the novel? (3) How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? That is, what is the link between pedagogic or creative practice and actual political, sociocultural and ethical behaviour towards the land and other non-human life forms? (4) How is science —in the form of genetic engineering, technologies of reproduction, sexualities—open to critical scrutiny terms of the effects of science upon the land?

The essential assumptions, ideas and methods of ecocritics may be summed up as follows. (1) Ecocritics believe that human culture is related to the physical world. (2) Ecocriticism assumes that all life forms are interlinked. Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere. (3) Moreover, there is a definite link between nature and culture, where the literary treatment, representation and “thematisation” of land and nature influence actions on the land. (4) Joseph Meeker in an early work, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972) used the term “literary ecology” to refer to “the study of biological themes and relationships which appear in literary works. It is simultaneously an attempt to discover what roles have been played by literature in the ecology of the human species.” (5) William Rueckert is believed to have coined the term “ecocriticism” in 1978, which he defines as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”

Source: Literary Theory Today,Pramod K Nair

Ecocriticism 101: A Basic Introduction to Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

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In the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorised preserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophisticated array of ‘earth-centred’ approaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines in- cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology. Ecocriticism’s diversity also extends to engaging with a variety of literary forms as well as, increasingly, ﬁlm, TV, digital environments and music, and to an interest in representations of the urban. At its heart is the conviction both that we are living in a time of ecological crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency our modes of being in the world and that our cultural perceptions of ‘nature’ and the ‘human’, and the relationship between the two, have to a large degree been responsible for these damaging modes of being. Its role is to interrogate and critique these perceptions, even within environmentalism itself, with some ecocritics also committed to exploring alternative ways of conceptualising our relationship with the non-human world. This paper brieﬂy traces the history of ecocriticism, discussing its initial development in the USA and Britain, outlining the two strands of social ecology and deep ecology that underpin its ongoing formulation, and tracing the ‘waves’ of its development. It then focuses on contemporary and emergent theorisations, in particular the global inﬂection of current post-colonial ecocriticism and the environmental justice movement, which introduces the new paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics, and the recent formulation of ecocritical post- humanism. This emphasises the imbrication of the human in earth’s matrix, drawing on the insights of ecofeminism, phenomenology and biosemiotics, and has its most recent incarnation in the currently emerging ﬁeld of material ecocriticism, which, in its engagement with the complex entanglement of the human and the non-human, the social and the scientiﬁc, hints at a more dissonant paradigm.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Environmental Writing

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Environmental Writing by Mark Long LAST REVIEWED: 05 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 26 November 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0206

Most environmental writing in the United States through the 20th century is entangled with the concept of nature—the commonplace idea of a space apart from the human world. In American environmental writing this idea of nature is reproduced in narratives of exploration and pastoral visions of the landscape during the colonial and early national periods; in 19th-century mythographies of the American frontier; and in 20th-century social movements dedicated to preservation and conservation. By the middle of the 19th century, environmental writers were working in forms, such as the nature essay, to record individual experiences of nature and investigate the local knowledge of place-based communities. However, by the middle of the 20th century, environmental writers began considering human life as a part of the nonhuman world. Through this conceptual lens, environmental writing becomes radically inclusive as writers explore natural habitats such as the human body, material exchanges and unfolding biological processes, and the social and economic ecologies of built and urban environments. At the same time, environmental writing has chronicled the global environmental crisis in the Anthropocene—an epoch in which the slow violence of environmental change, accelerated by expanding human populations and inexorable economic growth, becomes visible in deforestation, the loss of soils, species extinction, bioaccumulation, ocean acidification, toxic emissions, and climate change.

Studies of symbol and myth in Smith 1950 and the analysis of the pastoral in Marx 1964 provided evidence for studies of the expansionist ideology of westward settlement in 19th-century America. Subsequent studies of environmental writing include Gatta 2004 , a broad survey of the presence of religion in American literary and cultural history, and Kolodny 1975 , an influential historical and feminist critique of masculine representations of the American landscape. In the author’s comprehensive survey of American environmental writing, Buell 1995 uses Henry David Thoreau as a reference point. Buell 2001 then broadens his chronicle of environmental writing to include new forms of literary and cultural production engaged with environmental concern. For Murphy 2009 , the study of literary representations of the environment becomes part of a broader multidisciplinary cultural inquiry that investigates urban spaces, discourse of toxicity, watershed aesthetics, environmental ethics, animal studies, bioregional investigations of place, environmental justice, the literature of natural disasters, utopian and dystopian narratives, and transnational approaches to American literary and cultural production.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Buell’s study of perceptions and representations of the environment in nonfiction, using Walden as an exemplary touchstone, describes a tradition of thinking and writing that extends the scope and method for the study of environmental writing and suggests new approaches to impending environmental catastrophe.

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

DOI: 10.4159/9780674029057

This book rejects the conflation of “environment” with “nature” and focuses on environmental writers concerned with toxic discourse, re-inhabiting urban spaces, and the retrieval of unloved places. Buell builds a case for environmental writing as committed to “environmentalist praxis.”

Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

DOI: 10.1093/0195165055.001.0001

This overview of religion in environmental writing highlights the English Puritans to the early 21st century and includes discussion of Jonathan Edwards, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, among others.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience in American Life and Letters . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

This landmark study describes the commonplace use of female imagery to represent the American West. Kolodny argues that metaphors of the feminine landscape appear in documents of exploration and colonization as well as in the pastoral and agrarian writing of male writers such as Philip Freneau, James Fenimore Cooper, John James Audubon, and William Gilmore Simms.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Marx evaluates the literature, ideas, and cultural symbols associated with the pastoral ideal to account for the effects and representations of industrial and technological transformations in the United States, and considers the cultural conflicts that arise in the pastoral desire for a harmonious relationship between the human world and the environment.

Murphy, Patrick D. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.

A transnational approach to American literary and cultural production, Murphy argues, includes not only contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, but environmental science fiction, utopian and dystopian narrative, environmental justice mysteries, and the literature of natural disasters.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Smith documents the myth of the West as an agrarian utopia and elaborates individual and collective perceptions of the environment that structure early visions of American empire. The book includes analysis of writing by Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Gilpin, and Horace Greeley.

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How to Read Environmental Literature 101

Nature was a great teacher for American poet Emily Dickinson. She depicted small animals so vividly that it is clear to the reader that her everyday life was enmeshed in the natural environment. The message that these two facets (everyday life and nature) must be complementary to one another was evoked in her poems such as this one:

A Bird came down the Walk – He did not know I saw – He bit an Angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass – And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass –

He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around – They looked like frightened Beads, I thought – He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean Too silver a seam – Or Butterflies, off the Banks of Noon, Leap plashless as they swim.

For Dickinson the bird symbolized the ungraspable wild essence of nature that evades our desire to tame it. Furthermore, she sketched the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air by comparing the bird’s flight with aquatic motion such as rowing and splashless swimming.

Poetry and literature, our inheritance from previous generations, help us to understand our place in nature. In fact, some literary circles have revisited classic environmental literature, mining that conserved knowledge in order to extract the means to cope with our current ecological dilemmas.

On the 23rd of September, the 76th International PEN Congress in Tokyo will cast a spotlight on environment and literature. The symposium looks like being an exciting place to be as Nobel laureate in literature Gao Xingjian and other eminent authors have been invited from around the world.

Ahead of the forum, Our World 2.0 introduces the ideas presented by the recognized authors of environmental literature, citing words of wisdom from a number of writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gary Snyder, Basho Matsuo, Kenji Miyazawa and Gao Xingjian.

Their literature reminds us that nature is replete with so many aesthetic wonders.

The roots of nature writing

The American author, Henry David Thoreau is known as a naturalist, poet, transcendentalist and, above all, the father of environmental literature. But he is best known for his 1854 nonfiction narrative, Walden; or, Life in the Woods .

This book portrays the transience of the four seasons amid Walden Pond, an area of the Massachusetts woods. In this autobiography of sorts, he shares the enduringly vibrant memory of his experiences over the course of two years living in a small cabin he built himself, and for the most part in isolation.

The Harvard graduate was doubtful of human-centrism and Adam Smith’s economic theory.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” he explained.

He demonstrated his unique understanding of economics in the first chapter and eventually came to the conclusion that nothing is more valuable than wilderness.

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength,” he discovered in his solitude.

[quote quote=”I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” type=”image” image=”2445″ ]

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it…”

Thoreau expressed his idea that interaction with nature creates a positive attitude. Walden endorses the pleasures of living nearby nature. The sound of falling rain, the rustling breeze, and voices of all the living fauna and flora remind us of the values lost in our modernized society.

Moving deeper into the woods

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

The above quote from Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) guides us deep into the woods of Walden. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose forested land Thoreau inhabited for his experiment, had an immense influence on Thoreau. The idea of “the transparent eyeball” is to see nature as “a vast array of symbols, which leads the individual interpreter to the eternal truth of cosmos”. By that, Emerson meant that humans could perceive everything and feel oneness in meditation by viewing nature.

Thoreau indeed refined Emerson’s ideas in such a way as to surmise that we can establish our own identities by direct and continuous correspondence with nature; in other words, through symbiosis. He thought that society would nurture a human identity that can absorb only what is given.

Both Thoreau and Emerson shared the same philosophy: that nature is an integral part of human identity. Their brilliant writings have convinced many readers of the necessity of being surrounded by nature.

Modern Thoreau

Another American, Gary Snyder is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning poet representing the 1950s Beat generation. He is also known as an environmental activist. During the1960s, he practiced Zen training in Japan and learned about Buddhist perspectives on life and living things. Currently, he lives in a hand-built cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and serves as an emeritus professor at University of California, Davis.

His masterpiece, A Place in Space (1995), reflects his environmental philosophy, namely, planet-thought: “Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move toward a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism.” In addition, he emphasizes that , “[w]e do need to nourish interactive playful diversity on this one-planet watershed.”

He proposes that people should feel and act, not as members of a given country, but as members of the planet. Such a notion should inspire humanity to work together to solve common environmental degradation problems.

Snyder envisions our common future with “clean air, clean clear-running rivers; the presence of pelican and osprey and gray whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams.” This vision of the future appears identical to the one Thoreau ruminated upon in the woods. It is worth reading his writings as that of a “modern Thoreau”, but with the addition of a Buddhist perspective.

Japanese environmental literature

The utter silence…

A cicada’s rasp

Cutting through the very stone

This famous haiku poem was composed by Bashō Matsuo. He stands as the most renowned haiku poet. Haiku , a form of Japanese poetry, typically consist of three phrases of 5, 7, 5 moras in original Japanese. Each haiku contains a kigo , a keyword referring to the season it represents. For example, a frog evokes the coming of spring as it emerges into the paddy field as the weather improves and a cicada represents the summer.

Bashō’s major work, Oku no hoso michi , translated as The Narrow Road to The Deep North (1702), was published after his death. It was based on his travelogue written during 1689. He deserted his life in the capital city, Edo, and entered the wilderness of northern Japan to gain inspiration for his writing. His haiku was influenced by his firsthand experiences of the nature around him.

The spring is passing –

Eyes are wet with tears.

The birds all mourn and fishes’

The birds and fishes represent people who see him off. The haiku connotes a mixture of hope and sadness upon opening the pilgrimage. Genuinely, he let his material desires fall in the years preceding the journey and had nothing else to cast away but himself. He meant to restore his true identity by walking the narrow road, to the north.

The country is destroyed;

The grass is green again.

Yet mountains and rivers remain.

Spring comes to the castle;

Bashō versed the above lines when he observed the ruins of the once mighty aristocrat, Fujiwara. This poem summarized well his perspectives on humans and the environment. Civilization undergoes vicissitudes, but green flourishes even after humanity fades.

A tale of a wildcat

Kenji Miyazawa is a Japanese poet and author of children’s literature. He is one of the most read and loved authors in Japan. He is also very popular outside the country. This is partly because Gary Snyder translated some of Miyazawa’s poems in The Back Country (1967) and furthermore almost all of his writings have been translated into English.

Among his works, The Restaurant of Many Orders (1924), from his first collection of short stories and fairy tales, is among the most famous literature works in Japan. It reflects Miyazawa’s insights into the relationship between humans and nature. The story follows two hunters from Tokyo who get caught in a word trap at an unlikely restaurant.

“I wish I could shoot the yellow flank of a deer with two or three bullets. That would be really enjoyable, I am sure. The deer might roll around and fell down with a bang. Don’t you think so?”

The two hunters enjoyed shooting animals for fun during the day and strayed into the middle of woods under the moonlight. By chance, they discover a sign which says ‘Restaurant Wildcat House’. They were so hungry that they enter. The unseen owner of the restaurant, a wildcat, has posted mysterious instructions for clients to follow, which the hunters proceed to also do.

“Customers are requested to set their hair decently and clean their shoes here.”…

“Keep your guns and bullets here.”…

“Please take off your hat, overcoat and shoes.”…

“Please apply the cream in the jar on your face, hands and legs completely.”…

“The food will be ready soon. You will not be made to wait even for fifteen minutes. It can be eaten soon. Please, spray the perfume in the bottle on your head properly.”

After a succession of signs ordering them to do such odd things, in the last room, the hunters find this note: “It must have been quite annoying, as there were ‘many orders’. We are sorry. This is the last order. Please rub your entire body properly with lots of salt from the pot.”

Finally, the hunters realized that the wildcat was in fact cooking them! Almost immediately they escaped from the restaurant. But their faces remained crumpled like “littered waste paper” out of fear even, after they were safely back to Tokyo.

The wildcat represents nature and the hunters symbolize destroyers coming from urban civilization. Miyazawa’s disdain for such hunters who travel from the city to kill animals for sport while trampling nature under foot is obvious. In this fairy tale, Miyazawa expresses both his awe of the natural environment and a warning to humans who do not value it.

Get ready for the forum

Gao Xinjian is a Chinese-born Nobel laureate in literature. His novel, Soul Mountain (1990) is based on the author’s own journey; an asylum from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

In his half autobiographical and half fictional novel, the journey commences in the forest of Sichuan province and continues along the Yangtze River in search for Soul Mountain. Nature serves as an important role in the protagonist’s quest of the self, of death, and of the society that limits freedom. The protagonist meets a mysterious botanist on his way up to the mountain who says:

“Young man, nature is not frightening, it’s people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he’s capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species ever day. This is the absurdity of man.”

His story is replete with history, nature, myth, culture, and folklore of China. It has been described as the Odyssey of the Orient.

Indeed, the examples of literature we discuss above (as well as myriad other writings) highlight how nature is an integral part of humanity and vice versa. Something perhaps many of us have conveniently forgotten in this age of urbanisation. Fortunately, literature can provide us with new perspectives and rekindle our deeper feelings about the powerful bonds we have with the natural world.

Are you now ready to put your noses, hands and feet out into the natural environment again? Go on, we dare you.

Yuta Kinoshita

Yuta Kinoshita is completing the Ph.D. program in Anglo-American literature at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He specializes in the literature and poetry of William Faulkner, and undertakes numerous translations and book reviews including of environmental literature. He holds an LL.B. from Nihon University and a Masters of Arts from Tokyo Metropolitan University.

Kenji Watanabe

Kenji Watanabe is a former intern with United Nation University Media Studio in Tokyo. His research focuses on environmental law and intellectual property rights relating to energy technologies. He holds an LL.B. from Nihon University and LL.M. from The George Washington University Law School.

Long Emergency on Planet Eaarth

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Greta Thunberg, James Lovelock and Amitav Ghosh

Penguin Classics launches ‘new canon’ of environmental literature

Imprint’s Green Ideas series begins with 20 short books by writers from Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg it believes are ‘the classics that made a movement’

From Greta Thunberg to James Lovelock, publisher Penguin Classics has come up with a “new canon” of the environmental literature, which it believes has “changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth”.

The move is part of a growing trend in publishing for books focused on the climate, whether from big hitters such as David Attenborough or Bill Gates, whose How to Avoid a Climate Disaster was out in February, or so-called “cli-fi”, climate fiction, from writers including Richard Powers and Jenny Offill. Penguin’s Green Ideas series capitalises on this appetite, collecting 20 short books it believes constitute “the classics that made a movement”, by “visionary thinkers around the world [who] have raised their voices to defend the planet”.

Nobel peace prize winner Wangari Maathai is included with her exploration of the power of trees and why humans destroy the forests that keep us alive; Rachel Carson for her revelations about how man-made pesticides have destroyed wildlife; George Monbiot for his call for humanity to wake up to the destruction of the planet; and Naomi Klein for her look at how deregulated capitalism is waging war on the climate. Ranging across art, literature and gardening to technology and politics, Penguin believes that each title, extracted from longer works, “deepens our sense of our place in nature”, and that together they can “point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world”.

The publisher came up with the idea for the series in the wake of publication of Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference . “Greta had raised the temperature of the global conversation – suddenly we were talking about a crisis rather than just climate ‘change’ – and there was a clear and growing hunger for more environmental ideas,” said editor Chloe Currens.

The covers in Penguin Classics’ Green Ideas series

Penguin set out to “trace the emerging environmental canon”, moving from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand Country Almanac (1949) – the forester and conservationist’s meditation on the US’s wildlands is included in the series – to Carson’s Silent Spring, which exploded into public consciousness in the 60s, and on into the present day.

“The 20 books we chose struck us as quite obvious starting points for the series, in terms of their originality and their impact,” said Currens. “But there’s such an abundance of important and stimulating environmental writing that the list couldn’t be exhaustive.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is included for her guide towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with the earth. Kimmerer said that she was “deeply honoured that my words will stand in the company of my literary heroes”.

“This series feels like a collective expression of love and grief for the living world and could not be more important in this moment of peril,” said the author. “I view my writing as an act of reciprocity with the land, a way of returning in some small way, the gifts that have been shared with me. The Indigenous worldview offers approaches to healing our relationship with land, which is a counterweight to the dominant materialist worldview. It is both ancient and urgent and I am grateful that it is illuminated here.”

Kimmerer hopes her essays “will work as medicine for a broken relationship with land, healing us from the illness of species loneliness and human exceptionalism that the western worldview has produced”.

Amitav Ghosh, included in the series for an exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, said he was “very glad” to be included. “In my book I make the case that climate change is fundamentally a problem of culture, and I try to pinpoint the precise reasons why this subject is difficult to address within the traditional boundaries of modern literature,” he said.

Jared Diamond’s contribution to the series explores how the remote civilisation on Easter Island destroyed itself by exploiting its own natural resources. “Why does the story of Easter Island society’s collapse so rivet our attention?” said Diamond. “Because Easter’s deforestation and collapse were so complete; because Easter was the most isolated human society on Earth, so its collapse was thus purely for environmental reasons, there being no other humans around to complicate the interpretation; because Easter’s fate may prove to be a metaphor for the fate of our modern Earth society, as isolated in space as Easter is isolated in the Pacific Ocean; and because of another metaphor: that some people nevertheless deny Easter’s clear story, just as some people deny the clear risks facing our modern world.”

Penguin hopes to add to the series. “It’s a growing, evolving ecosystem of great ideas,” said Currens. “I hope that the series will be used by readers as a way of engaging with some of the key ideas in modern environmental thought – that it will offer an accessible path through the vibrant, urgent, and perhaps occasionally overwhelming wider world of ecological writing.”

Greta Thunberg
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Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis Cheryll Glotfelty--Ecocriticism | An Overview

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Australian & Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network

Literature and the environment: fictions of nature, culture, and landscapes.

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December 14, 2013

Teresa Shewry

How do literary texts orient their readers towards conflicts over the meanings and uses of water or of butterflies and their rainforests? What might these texts say about how the planet looks from different perspectives around the world? How does literature try to make readers see struggles over scientific abilities to alter and re-alter life?

In this issue of ENNZ, we focus on literature and the environment, a combination that may seem unusual, given that environmental studies is more often associated with scientists, policy makers, and political movements than it is with literary critics and their texts. Yet, as environmentalism engages increasingly with various places and subjects world-wide, interest in environmental issues has grown and been institutionalized in the humanities, including in Comparative Literature and English departments. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) was established in the early 1990s, and there are now many publications, conferences, and even entire university programmes in the field.

The worlds of the socio-cultural texts that have tried to take their readers beneath the seas, over the ice sheets, across islands and continents and beyond into space, and the aesthetic, political, and cultural contexts in which they are engaged, generate perplexing questions and problems for researchers. I will suggest just a few of the possibilities of the field by outlining some of these questions here.

Why study literature and the environment? Why not just become a scientist in order to undertake research about the environment? The answers to this question vary according to how concepts such as “literature” and “environment” are used and defined, and the contexts in which they are engaged. Recently, it has been increasingly common for environmental literary critics to justify their research as contributing to the alleviation of environmental crisis and therefore to the survival of life on earth. For example, Lawrence Buell argues that scholars in this field foreground cultural texts such as literature and film in approaching the environment because:

The success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on ‘some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science’ but on ‘a state of mind’: on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives. That the advertising budget of U.S. corporations exceeds the combined budgets of all of the nation’s institutions of higher learning is crude but telling evidence that trust in the power of imagination is not a literary scholar’s idiosyncrasy. [1]

A potential (although not inevitable) problem with this approach to environmental literature is that it can lead to assumptions that novels or poetry should speak about the environment as if they are scientists, politicians, or environmentalists. This expectation of literature can be seen in New Zealand at present, where socio-cultural texts are often instrumentalized in varied ways in environmental struggles. For example, poetry, novels, and films are used in education about conservation or to draw eco-tourists to socially and environmentally contested locations.

Does literature simply repeat back to us truths that are already known to science, political movements, or politicians? If literature does act as a prism for scientific or political voices, in what ways does it rework those voices in the process? I think that by analyzing the varied and often experimental struggles undertaken by socio-cultural texts in building narratives about the environment, scholars can investigate alternative perspectives on nature, culture, and landscapes, and the aesthetic, political, and socio-historical contexts in which they are engaged. As the Italian writer Italo Calvino has written, of literature in a different context:

Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude. I mean aspects, situations, and languages both of the outer and of the inner world, the tendencies repressed both in individuals and in society. Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics. [2]

Speaking of Italian writers and their influence, a second issue that researchers currently confront is the difficulty of stabilising environmental literary texts in particular contexts. Literary critics follow their texts as they move in both space and time, and these movements can be unbearably slow (with resemblances in genres unfolding over hundreds, or thousands, of years) and can radiate across vast spaces. Researchers in the field of literature and the environment have carried out experiments with appropriate temporal and spatial scales at which to imagine environmental literatures, and an ideal of “internationalization” has emerged, in a context of criticism (which is not entirely accurate) that up until now the field has been primarily based in and focused on North America. In some cases, scholars assume that because the environment is a world scale phenomenon, the approaches and methodologies of environmental literary criticism also apply world-wide, to all literatures. For instance, Greg Garrard recently wrote that “I will be dealing principally with British and North American literature and culture, although the principles of ecocriticism [environmental criticism] would of course admit of more general application.” [3] . At the opposite pole, some critics have seen non-American environmental literatures as culturally “particular”, or assumed that non-American literature is unable to speak about environmental issues beyond local or national contexts. [4]

In New Zealand, environmental writers and critics often manoeuvre in a context where the nation has been (and often continues to be) imagined not only as a political entity but also as an ecological or environmental entity. Nigel Clark has described the ways in which ideas of a primordial, unique, and national nature were important for settlers in imagining New Zealand as a national community, and were promoted in literary studies among other disciplines. [5] One challenge for researchers may be to consider how socio-cultural texts experiment with ways of imagining environmental problems at scales that sometimes engage intensely with the national context but also that at least partly go beyond it, addressing issues such as various migrations to and from New Zealand, regional or planetary environmentalisms, or the movement of people, ideas, and nonhumans in ways that do not compute with established conceptual frameworks.

Finally, a point of convergence but also contention between many scholars who work on literature and the environment is their investigation of the relationships between nonhuman nature and culture. What characterises the environmental dimension of literature? Lawrence Buell argues that in environmental literature “the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.” [6] Many scholars have tried to balance the ways in which nonhuman nature is always caught up in history, culture, politics and power, without simply squashing resistant, unaccountable nonhuman worlds beneath rhetorics of “culture” or “history.” An as yet unexamined issue that the field may need to confront in defining the term “environmental” has been posed recently in a different context by anthropologist Christine J. Walley:

While obviously all people have relationships with, and ideas about, the environment, since it is the medium in which we live and which sustains us as human beings, must we all possess a common view of nature that bounds our perceptions of the environment in similar ways and sees it as distinct from other phenomena? Although much academic thought particularly in its French variants has rested upon a symbolic distinction between nature and culture, is such a distinction, […] truly universal? [7]

The archives of literature and criticism about environmental issues in New Zealand are rich but diffuse: much criticism exists as book reviews, or in journal articles. Some recent, longer studies and articles that touch on literature and the environment in New Zealand or the Pacific have been published or are forthcoming. Further, interesting work is being done across disciplinary boundaries. Recent works include:

Charles Dawson has a paper forthcoming on rivers and bicultural issues in the journal PAN.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures has been published with University of Hawai’i Press (April 2007) and includes discussions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and nuclear testing.
Diane Hebley’s The Power of Place: Landscape in New Zealand Children’s Fiction 1970-1989 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) is a detailed study of the representation of places such as beaches or islands in children’s literature.
Julian Kuzma’s Landscape, Literature, and Identity: New Zealand Late Colonial Literature as Environmental Text, 1890-1921 is an intricate study of landscape in New Zealand literature and an analysis of the uses of literature in environmental history (Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Dunedin: University of Otago Schools of English and History, 2003).
[1] Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p.1.
[2] Italo Calvino, “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature.” The Uses of Literature (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 98.
[3] Greg Garrard. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom . (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p.5.
[4] Rob Nixon has made this point in “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond . Ania Loomba, et al, eds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 233-251.
[5] Nigel Clark. “Cultural Studies for Shaky Islands.” Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand: Identity, Space, and Place , eds. Claudia Bell and Steve Matthewman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 3 (16).
[6] Lawrence Buell. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 7-8
[7] Christine J. Walley. Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 143

Teresa Shewry is undertaking doctoral research on ways that Pacific literature and film narrates and influences hope for changed ecologies in a context of urgent ecological problems and intensifying efforts to reshape people’s approaches to ecology in the Pacific in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

Jocelyn Tresize is undertaking doctoral research on John Muir’s writing from an ecocritical perspective.

Briar Wood has a paper forthcoming in ISLE (April or May 2007) called “Mana Wahine and Ecocriticism in Some Post-80s Writing by Maori Women.”

David Young published Whio: Saving New Zealand’s endangered blue duck with Craig Potton Publishing (Nelson, 2006) and Keeper of the Long View: the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainability with PCE (Wellington, 2007). His previous book was a history of conservation in New Zealand (2004).

Further interesting starting points for materials and references are the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment web pages:

ASLE Australia New Zealand: http://www.asle-anz.asn.au/
ASLE India: http://www.geocities.com/asle_india/index.htm
ASLE Japan: http://asle-japan.org/
ASLE Korea: http://www.aslekorea.org/
ASLE UK: http://www.rlyeh.entadsl.com/ASLE/index.htm
ASLE USA: http://www.asle.umn.edu/

European Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment: http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/easlce/index.htm

David Young recommends, for those who want to stretch out towards the edge of sustainable thinking, a couple of websites and an article:

Alan AtKisson, “Sustainability is Dead, Long Live Sustainability”, 2001, http://www.AtKisson.com
Adams, W.M., “The Future of Sustainability: rethinking environment and development in the 21st century”, 2006 http://home.flash.net/~jteague/Sue/orglearn.html
Kofman, Fred, and Peter M. Senge. “Communities of Commitment: the Heart of Learning Organizations”. Organizational Dynamics 22.2 (Autumn 1993), p.5 (19).

Editors’ comment, review: geoff park,theatre country.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

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25 classics of environmental writing to help with your summer reading list

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There’s something about the turn of a season that makes me want to draw up a new reading list, and the arrival at last of real summer weather got me thinking about classics of environmental writing I might want to revisit or read for the first time.

So I consulted some expert sources, along with my own bookshelves, and drew up the list below, cutting it off at 25 for no good reason other than that seemed enough (and 250 was certainly possible).

The shortest set of recommendations came from Peter Dykstra, the longtime CNN correspondent and producer who now publishes Environmental Health News and listed his top five for the Mother Nature Network. The longest came from the folks at Goodreads (357 titles), and the most eclectic from an Illinois blogger who goes by Wren .

There were others, too, but they began to get duplicative and, anyway, you may have your own favorite recommenders. If so, feel free to share those links — or other favorite titles — in the comments below.

Silent Spring (1962) — loved both for its craft and its impact in alerting Americans to the dangers of heedless pesticide uses, this landmark book and its author, Rachel Carson, are the subject of On a Farther Shore by Minnesota’s William Souder, published last September on Silent Spring’s 50th anniversary.
A Sand County Almanac (1949) — now frequently published with additional essays and supplemental materials, this is Aldo Leopold’s timeless appreciation of wilderness, species, ecology and a conservation ethic that rises from the land itself.
Earth in the Balance (1992) — Al Gore’s earliest and broadest book about global environmental threats including, but not limited to, global warming; followed in 2006 by An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It and this year by “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.”
Cadillac Desert (1986) — a history of water “development” in the arid West as a pageant of corruption, special-interest politics and wishful thinking, Marc Reisner’s epic is required reading for understanding that region’s water problems and is not without relevance to our own.
Coyotes and Town Dogs (1993) — a personal favorite, Susan Zakin’s “new journalism” approach renders a tedium-free account of environmental radicalism as embodied by Dave Foreman and Earth First! (also, the young and still-to-be-famous Ted Danson, who devoted some time back in the day to toppling billboards along Arizona highways).

The Lorax (1971) — Dr. Seuss’ indispensable tool for enlisting the youngest of children into a lifetime of tree-hugging and anti-corporate hostility, but in a nice way.
Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) — Elizabeth Kolbert’s elegant adaptation of New Yorker pieces remains my favorite treatment of global warming’s unraveling of climate and natural balances as we knew them.
Never Cry Wolf (1963) — Farley Mowat’s treatise on the Arctic wolf, widely credited with inspiring a reconsideration of wolf eradication in latitudes more like ours. I also like his autobiographical Born Naked .
Everyone who loves John McPhee’s books has a favorite, and I suppose mine would be either The Control of Nature (1989) for its look at the folly of trying to keep the Mississippi River from changing course in southern Louisiana, or Encounters With the Archdruid (1972) for its celebration of David Brower’s radical resistance to the federal Bureau of Reclamation in a time when building dams at Grand Canyon was under active consideration.
Ditto Edward Abbey, as to everyone having a personal favorite, but for me there’s a clearer front-runner: Desert Solitaire (1968), a collection of essays and ramblings written from a creaky trailer during the author’s seasonal employment at what was then Arches National Monument. The place is now a national park, replete with the wide roadways and motor-tourist conveniences Abbey railed against, and in a visit to the holy place some years ago I determined that the National Park Service has marked the site of Ed’s old abode, more or less, with a really excellent outhouse.
The World Without Us (2007) — Alan Weisman’s speculative analysis of how the earth we’ve used so thoroughly might respond to our sudden disappearance.

Naturalist (1994) — a personal favorite, E.O. Wilson’s autobiographical tracing of the encounters with nature that shaped his ideas of biophilia and consilience.
The End of Nature (1989) — still perhaps Bill McKibben’s most powerful and accessible work on how greenhouse gases are remaking the world. And while we’re on McKibben, a survey of classic American environmental writing that he edited for the Library of America came out in 2008 under the title American Earth.
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) — lays out James Lovelock’s rather more optimistic line of thinking about planetary fate and resilience, which has been influential despite the considerable derision it also provokes.
Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) — the Euell Gibbons book that launched modern foraging and retains biblical stature for modern seekers after wild food, along with Stalking the Healthful Herbs (1966) and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop (1964).
Last Child in the Woods (2005) — Richard Luov’s sobering look at “nature deficit disorder” and the consequences of raising generations that rarely move beyond the great indoors.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002) — a genuine manifesto about rethinking sustainability, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. McDonough gave me a lasting epiphany on a visit to Minneapolis some years ago when he observed that most environmental regulation is aimed at ensuring merely that we poison ourselves and each other more slowly .
Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) — the first volume in Jared Diamond’s stunningly interdisciplinary look at the environmental factors driving the fate of human societies past, present and future, followed by Collapse (2005) and last year’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Where the Wild Things Were (2008) — William Stoltzenburg’s look at, in the phrasing of his subtitle, “life, death and ecological wreckage in a land a vanishing predators.”
The Empty Ocean (2004) — a rich, complex, non-scolding history of humankind’s use and overuse of the earthly environments we understand most poorly, and with huge consequences, by Richard Ellis.
Break Through (2007) — an important though by no means universally accepted argument for a positivist, “post-environmental” approach to the politics of environmental protection and stewardship by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.
Far Tortuga (1975) — OK, this one was on nobody’s list but my own, but Peter Matthiessen’s experimental novel, constructed from fragments of dialogue and glimpses of Caribbean seascape, renders a doomed turtle-fishing trip in a text that is part poem, part screenplay, completely compelling. I never tire of revisiting it, especially at bedtime in the cramped berth of a small sailboat rocking on Lake Pepin.

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Enviromental Reading

Thank you for the list. Thank you as well for including Aldo Leopold’s wonderful book and placing it ast such a high priority.

“Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas Tallamy

I was inspired by listening to a lecture by Douglas Tallamy and reading his book “Bringing Nature Home.” From the publisher’s comments: “As this revelatory book eloquently explains, there is an unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife. Indeed, most native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plant species disappear or are replaced by alien exotics, the insects disappear, thus impoverishing the food source of birds and other animals. In many parts of the world, habitat destruction has been so extensive that local wildlife populations are in crisis and may well be headed toward extinction.”

This empowering book explains how the home gardener can make a meaningful contribution to the creation of sustainable ecosystems by planting native plant species. There are some excellent commercial sources of native plants in Minnesota, and the Twin Cities has two chapters of the Wild Ones organization which promotes landscaping with native plants. Check out the websites for information on events and tours: http://www.wildonestwincities.org/ and http://wildones.org/chapters/scos/ .

Environment at its best!

All natural things make the ecosystem. One animal needs one another in order to survive just like in the famous saying, “No man is an island”. A message from http://copywritercollective.com/go/copy-writer/ .

Dear author, thanks for the great content here. This is a very wonderful sheet of books. I have already read many of the books and it will be mega useful for students of the environmental department. The important book is The Unsettling of America. The author of this publication claims that just the same good rural statehood is the key to the success of the whole nation, and I even wrote a thesis about this with the help of https://essayontime.com.au/thesis-writing . This was a creative assignment at the end of the last year as a test of students’ thinking in the field of environmental “spirituality”.

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10 Works of Environmental Literature From Around the World

Emily Stochl

Emily is a proud Midwesterner, living in Iowa. Reading literary fiction has always been her favorite. She also enjoys yoga and tending to her hundreds of houseplants -- you might say Emily is a bit “crunchy granola." She is the producer and host of a podcast about vintage and second-hand style, called Pre-Loved Podcast. She’s really into sustainability, and old things! IG: @emilymstochl

View All posts by Emily Stochl

A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. For fans of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven , a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds―and her own final chance for redemption. Migrations has been named a “most anticipated” book by Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Elle, and more. Emily St. John Mandel calls this powerful novel “extraordinary.” Start reading Migrations now.

The climate emergency is a shock that will be felt worldwide. This roundup is meant to highlight environmental literature from around the world and add more perspectives to perhaps the “standard” list of eco-fiction that readers in the United States frequently consume. Though the writers on this list come from a diverse background of places and experiences, this is by no means an exhaustive list of the great works of environmental fiction around the globe, and in fact I urge you to continue to seek out new writers and ways of looking at these themes. As a starting place, definitely check these out:

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. This is his debut novel, which takes place in a small town in western Nigeria. It is a fable about four brothers who decide to go fishing in the forbidden Omi-Ala River when their unyielding father is away for work. While the boys are at the river, they are approached by a man who predicts the oldest brother will be killed. The heart of this novel is a coming-of-age story about brothers: their relationships, the power dynamic of brothers, and the ways they adventure and definitely get into trouble. But beneath the surface, the river is a powerful character, and environmental themes and tragedy seep their way into the boys’ story.

Oil on Water by Helon Habila

Oil on Water takes place in the neocolonial Niger Delta. Two Nigerian journalists are tasked to investigate the kidnapping of the wife of a white British oil engineer. But on further investigation, they get sucked into the extreme corruption of the oil industry in the Delta, and they become determined to expose the environmental and societal damages caused by oil extraction on their riverbanks. The journalists uncover a dangerous story of unfathomable wealth, dastardly oil barons, contaminated waterways, and biodiversity loss. Along the way, they become activists fighting back, more so than reporters telling the story, but either way, their pursuit is very dangerous.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Pitchaya Sudbanthad grew up in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the American South. This book, obviously, takes place in Bangkok, Thailand. It features 23 chapters, some just brief vignettes and some longer stories. They all feature different characters that weave together, and all the stories have some relationship back to Thailand. The stories have themes of disease, climate disaster, violence, grief, and more.

The Butterfly Effect by Rajat Chaudhuri

Rajat Chaudhuri is an Indian writer. The Butterfly Effect takes place in the near future, across a large swath of the Asian continent including India. We see society on the brink of collapse due to civil wars, mass starvation, and climate degradation. The story features a cast of characters that come together in a strange way, from a detective in Calcutta to an internet cafe hostess, a geneticist, and a policeman, and this whole crew of people gives us pieces to solve this mystery of how society as we know it fell apart. Readers might be familiar with the concept of the “butterfly effect”—the idea that any small step along the way can bring about dramatic results. This novel basically takes on that concept through an eco-disaster lens.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes place across India, from Delhi to Kashmir and beyond. Like others on this list, this story also features a vast cast of characters, but it follows two main narratives, one of Anjum, an unhoused trans woman taking shelter in a graveyard, and the other of Tilo, who is an activist.

In her own activism work, Arundhati Roy writes a lot about industrialization, environmental destruction, and social justice. This novel includes similar themes, as well as deforestation, the gross mistreatment of migrants and climate refugees, poverty and class disparity, insufficient public infrastructure, and gentrification, along with various resistance movements in India. It is important to demonstrate how interconnected the climate emergency is to all elements of society, and this novel does just that.

Clade by James Bradley

James Bradley is from Adelaide, Australia. Clade is his near-future cli-fi (“climate fiction”) novel. The main character, Adam Leith, is a climate scientist, and the novel begins with him on a research trip to Antarctica, but on a beach. While there, he awaits news from his wife back home, who is undergoing IVF treatment. It will be a long journey back home for Adam, though, as he faces apocalyptic weather events caused by the climate collapse.

After we leave Adam, following chapters of the novel follow Adam’s next generations of family. If you like intergenerational family stories, this narrative follows that structure, but with a dystopic background of political and climate collapse.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Of course this novel is most recognized as taking place during a cholera epidemic, but it is also a tale with environmental themes. The story unfolds over almost 60 years, during which Columbia experiences civil wars, environmental destruction, and rampant cholera outbreaks.

We begin in a fictional city based off of Cartagena, by the banks of a river and near the mouth of the Caribbean Sea. It is a lush, tropical, and even quite a romantic environment. Which makes sense, because the core story is of a complicated love triangle. But in the background of the love and relationship drama, the backdrop is full of socio-political corruption, environmental destruction, morally-corrupt politicians, and self-interested businessmen who extract without limits. In the end, deforestation and out-of-control hunting results in the previously lush environment stripped back to nothing. Along the way, the novel has a lot to say about the moral corruption of society, and the ways humans driven by greed can destroy the environment around them.

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta

Emmi Itäranta is a Finnish science fiction writer. Memory of Water begins with a world that has been destroyed by climate collapse. Already, resources are scarce, and world wars are even fought for basic needs like clean water. China has taken command over much of Europe, and occupies the Scandinavian country—presumably Finland—where this story takes place. The narrative follows a teenage girl, Noria, who is studying to become a tea master like her father. Being a tea master is an important cultural position, because it carries the responsibility of tending to natural water sources, which are so scarce and valued that only tea masters know the secrets of some of the last remaining water sources. But after Noria’s father dies, and the occupying army moves into her village, Noria, realizes how dangerous her special knowledge and tea master training truly is.

Undergrowth by Nancy Burke

Undergrowth takes place in Brazil, but the writer is American. The story opens in the 1960s, when, due to excessive logging, the Indigenous people in the area face the loss of their homes and the natural world they have protected for generations. The Indigenous communities continuously protest the local government and industry in an attempt to protect the environment, and it often comes to violent conflict. Of course, the Indigenous people are the original land and water protectors of this region, and are best suited to protect these environments. The novel explores the tensions that arise when environmental groups join indigenous environmental protests, and serves as a reminder to make space for those native to these lands to lead in solving the climate issues at hand.

Far North by Marcel Theroux

Marcel Theroux is a British writer, born in Kampala, Uganda, currently living in London. Far North is a dystopian Western novel set on the freezing cold northern frontier, basically Siberia. In the beginning, a sheriff called Makepeace patrols the land and the decaying, abandoned city by horseback. Other than a few traders, very few people pass through, and Makepeace is convinced she is one of the last people left on Earth. But when a strange new person emerges from the vast forrest, claiming they are the survivor of a plane crash, Makepeace realizes there may still be human civilization left elsewhere and goes off in search of it. Without giving much away, the “civilization” Makepeace finds when she leaves home is very bleak. But it forces the reader to ask questions about how the world got here, and how many, or even how few, steps civilization is away from this result.

We have loads more reading about the environment on Book Riot, so definitely go check those out, too!

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Environmental migration? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature

Original Paper
Open access
Published: 30 March 2024

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You have full access to this open access article

Maria Cipollina ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1454-4039 1 ,
Luca De Benedictis 2 &
Elisa Scibè 3

This article provides a comprehensive quantitative overview of the literature on the relationship between environmental changes and human migration. It begins with a systematic approach to bibliographic research and offers a bibliometric analysis of the empirical contributions. Specifically, we map the literature and conduct systematic research using main bibliographic databases, reviews, and bibliometric analysis of all resulting papers. By constructing a citation-based network, we identify four separate clusters of papers grouped according to certain characteristics of the analysis and resulting outcomes. Finally, we apply a meta-analysis to a sample of 96 published and unpublished studies between 2003 and 2020, providing 3904 point estimates of the effect of slow-onset events and 2065 point estimates of the effect of fast-onset events. Overall, the meta-analytic average effect on migration is small for both slow- and rapid-onset events; however, it is positive and significant. Accounting for the clustering of the literature, which highlights how specific common features of the collected studies influence the magnitude of the estimated effect, reveals a significant heterogeneity among the four clusters of papers. This heterogeneity gives rise to new evidence on the formation of club-like convergence of literature outcomes.

A bibliometric review on the drivers of environmental migration

Chup Priovashini & Bishawjit Mallick

A meta-analysis of country-level studies on environmental change and migration

Roman Hoffmann, Anna Dimitrova, … Jonas Peisker

Opportunities and Challenges for Investigating the Environment-Migration Nexus

Kathleen Neumann & Henk Hilderink

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

In a world of changing climate and increasing occurrence of natural hazards, the role of environmental factors in shaping migration patterns has become a most debated topic within institutions and academia. As opposed to a simplistic vision of a general direct role of environmental factors in determining migration flows from environmentally stressed areas and regions hit by calamities, more complex scenarios have emerged, with analyses reporting different and sometimes opposite outcomes. This may not only be due to the intrinsic complexity of their extent and scale, but also to differences in specific characteristics of scientific contributions (International Organization for Migration, 2021 ).

The literature on the relationship between environmental factors and human mobility is characterized by heterogeneous findings: some contributions highlight the role of climate changes as a driver of migratory flows, while others underline how this impact is mediated by geographical, economic, and the features of the environmental shock. This paper aims to map the economic literature on these topics moving away from a classical literature review and offering a methodology that integrates three approaches in a sequence, in this way we believe that our contribution improves the existing literature on several dimensions. First, the analysis starts with systematic research of the literature through main bibliographic databases and collecting previous reviews and meta-analyses, followed by a review and bibliometric analysis of all resulting papers. This step produces a sample of 151 papers empirical and non-empirical contributions, spanning the last 20 years and focusing on different geographical areas, taking into account different socio-economic factors, applying different methodologies and empirical approaches to the analysis of slow-onset climatic events and/or fast-onset natural catastrophic events. Most importantly, the sample provides a variety of different outcomes on the impact of climatic changes and hazards on migration, revealing three main possible scenarios: (1) active role of environmental factors as a driver of migration; (2) environmental factors as a constraint to mobility; (3) non-significant role of environmental factors among other drivers of migration.

Second, to investigate the determinants of this extreme heterogeneity of outcomes, we postulate the assumption that the inter-connectivity of papers may play a role in shaping such different conclusions. Considering the ensemble of papers referenced by each contribution included in the sample, as a second step, we build a bibliographic coupling network, where papers are linked to each other according to the number of shared references. This citation-based method allows for the formation of a network of contributions in the literature space and highlights some potential common grounds among papers. We then run a community detection of the resulting network that produces four main clusters that gather papers together according to not only certain characteristics of the analysis but also resulting outcomes.

Finally, we use the clustered structure in the last step of the analysis: a Meta-Analysis (MA) to summarize and analyze all estimated effects of environmental variables on human mobility. The MA is a “quantitative survey" of empirical economic evidence on a given hypothesis, phenomenon, or effect, and provides a statistical synthesis of results from a series of studies (Stanley, 2001 ). The MA can be applied to any set of data and the synthesis will be meaningful only if the studies have been collected systematically (Borenstein et al., 2009 ). A highly significant result can be potentially considered as a consensual indication of the external validity of the correlation of the phenomena under scrutiny.

Therefore, from the original 151 paper we build - through a replicable process of screening, eligibility, and inclusion of contribution based on PRISMA guideline (see Fig. 1 ) - a unique dataset that synthesises the estimated coefficients of 96 empirical papers released between 2003 and 2020, published in academic journals, working papers series, or unpublished studies, providing 3904 point estimates of the effect of slow-onset events (e.g. climate change) and 2065 point estimates of the effect of fast-onset natural events(e.g. catastrophes) on different kinds of human mobility (international, domestic, and with a clear pro-urban directionality). Overall, the meta-analytic average effect estimates a small impact of slow- and rapid-onset variables on migration, however positive and significant. When the communities of papers are accounted for, however, a significant heterogeneity emerges among the four clusters of papers, giving rise to new evidence on the limits of a consensual effect of climatic shocks on permanent human displacement and the formation of club-like convergence of literature outcomes.

PRISMA Diagram. Note : PRISMA Diagram (Page et al., 2021a ) of identification, screening, eligibility and inclusion stages of academic contributions. The resulting sample is obtained through a search on Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IDEAS RePEc, and previous meta-analyses (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 )

This is not the first MA on environmental migration. Concerning previous published reviews (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Sedova & Kalkuhl, 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 ; Hoffmann et al., 2021 ) our article contributes and adds to the existing literature: (a) providing systematic research of the literature through main bibliographic databases, followed by a review and bibliometric analysis of all resulting papers; (b) building a citation-based network of contributions, that allows identifying four separate clusters of papers; (c) applying MA methods on a much larger sample of both micro- and macro-level estimates of environmental factors (slow- and fast-onset events) as a driver of migration (international and internal, including urbanization). Moreover, our overview highlights the role of the interconnectivity of studies in driving some main findings of the environmental migration literature.

Section 2 offers a systematic review of the literature and gives a detailed description of the data collection process; Sect. 3 analyses the structural characteristic of the network of the bibliographically coupled papers; Sect. 4 summarizes and discusses the results of the MA, finally, Sect. 5 concludes and offers some possible future extensions of the analysis.

2 Systematic review

This section reports the different phases of the systematic review. We do it schematically to facilitate the understanding of the proposed procedure.

Setting the boundaries of the literature This first step provides the most comprehensive sample of economic contributions on the relationship between climatic variations (and natural hazards) and human mobility, in all its different forms. We implement a systematic review aimed at mapping the body of literature and defining the boundaries of our focus. Systematic reviews have become highly recommended to conduct bibliographic overviews of specific literature because they provide a tool to report a synthesis of the state of the art of a field through a structured and transparent methodology (Page et al., 2021b ). To allow for comparability with previous MA and reviews, we also add to our sample all articles included in two recently published MA, Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 ) and Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ) Footnote 1 . We begin with the definition of the research question and the main keywords, to gather and collect data in a sample of contributions. After the definition of inclusion and exclusion conditions, we proceed with a screening by title to exclude off-topic contributions and then to a screening of the text to assure the uniformity of contributions. The resulting sample is then the object of a preliminary bibliometric analysis.

Defining the research question and keywords The purpose of our systematic search is to collect all possible economic contributions to the impact of environmental factors on migration determinants. We define three keywords of the three phenomena under analysis:

climate change, as the most investigated environmental factor in the literature. The events connected to climate change are hereby intended as slow-onset events that gradually modify climatic conditions in the long run. We specifically focus on variations of temperature, precipitation, and soil quality (such as desertification, salinity, or erosion), factors that are not expected to cause an immediate and sudden expected impact, but slowly modify environmental conditions;

natural disasters, defined as fast-onset events that introduce a sudden shock (see Appendix Table 5 );

migration, which captures all possible patterns of human mobility, including within the borders of a country, which might be a potential response to environmental change. Most importantly, internal mobility includes also the process of urbanization of people moving out of rural areas to settle in cities.

Collecting data and initial search results To collect data we use two main literature databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science. Footnote 2 Exploiting the specific indexing and keyword definition of both sources, the search is run allowing for any kind of document type (articles in journals, book chapters, etc.) but limiting the area to economic literature in English. Footnote 3 The obtained sample only includes published documents, however since we perform a MA, it is important to take into account also non-published documents, as a way to control for a well-known publication bias in meta-analytic methodology (see Sect. 4 ). Therefore, we use the bibliographic database IDEAS, based on RePEc and dedicated to Economics, to include unpublished and working papers. Footnote 4 A selection of the contributions is made manually. Finally, to meet the purpose of comparability with other recent meta-analyses on the impact of environmental factors on migration, we also include all the contributions that have been reviewed in two main articles: Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 ) that provide a MA on 30 empirical papers focusing on country-level studies and Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ) that review 51 papers and offer an investigation of the role of methodological choices of empirical studies (at any level) on the sign and magnitude of estimated results. Merging the results gives a sample of 203 records.

Screening of the results. We manually and meticulously screen the collected items through Scopus and Web of Science by title and we exclude papers on the migration of animals, plants, or other species, or focusing on topics different from human mobility (i.e. discrimination, crime, wars) or on the impact of environmental variables not corresponding to our definition of environmental factors (air pollution, mineral resources). All the papers in Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ), Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 ) and those manually selected from IDEAS RePEc are automatically included in the sample with no concern of incoherence. The screening by title leads to the exclusion of 20 papers. The remaining 183 documents underwent a text screening process, which involved a careful and thorough reading of each paper to isolate eligible content. This stage leads to the removal of additional 32 documents covering on the one hand the analysis of the impact of environmental variables at destination countries (thus not focusing on their role on migration determinants at origin). We also exclude all the papers in which the dependent variable of the empirical exercise is not a measure of human mobility (i.e. remittances, poverty, wealth, employment, etc.). After duplicates removal, the sample results in 151 documents of different kinds: 35 records are non-empirical and contain an ensemble of literature reviews, qualitative analysis, theoretical modeling, and policy papers; 116 records are categorized as empirical, in which the dependent variable is a measure of human mobility and at least one environmental variable is an independent variable.

The PRISMA flow diagram (Moher et al., 2009 ) in Fig. 1 shows the process of identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion of contributions in the final sample. It is important to note that there are two levels of inclusion: the first level identifies the sample of contributions included in our network analysis, while the second level is restricted to quantitative analyses suitable for the MA. To conduct a MA it is crucial to select only comparable papers that provide complete information (mainly on estimated coefficients and standard errors) that can then be used to recover the average effect size Footnote 5 . This implies the exclusion of papers that do not comply with the requirements of a MA. However, those excluded papers can be of interest in building the taxonomy of the whole concerned literature, as they may play a role in building links between different contributions (see Sect. 3 ). Similarly, non-quantitative (policy, qualitative or theoretical) papers may participate as well in the development of research fronts or give a direction to a certain thread of contributions and incidentally affect the detection of clusters. These reasons led us to build our citation-based network and perform the network analysis and the community detection on the whole sample, while only the sample for the MA is restricted only to quantitative contributions that meet the coding requirements. Our final database of point estimates for the MA includes 96 papers released between 2003 and 2020, published in an academic journal, working papers series, or unpublished studies, providing 3,904 point estimates of the effect of slow-onset events (provided by 66 studies) and 2,065 point estimates of the effect of fast-onset events (provided by 60 studies). The list of articles is in the Appendix Table 6 .

2.1 Bibliometric analysis

This section summarizes the most relevant features of the ensemble of economic literature collected in our sample. Footnote 6

The economic literature started to pay attention to the potential relevance of environmental events on migration in the early 2000s, although the topic had already gained some relevance in global debate decades before, and scientific production increased sharply in the last 17 years. Figure 2 shows that the scientific production in the specific field is quite recent, spanning from 2003 to 2020, with a peak of 20 contributions in 2016 and an annual growth rate for the overall period at 18.5 percent. Taking a closer look at the cited references, it is possible to trace back an article published before 2003 (Findley, 1994 ), that provides a qualitative analysis of drought-induced mobility in Mali (finding no evidence of any role of 1983-85 droughts on migration). As our research of documents is based on keywords, naturally the three most repeated are those put in the search key (“migration", “climate change" and “natural disasters"). Footnote 7 Within the topic of migration, there’s a greater emphasis on international mobility compared to internal migration. However, internal migration may include also urbanization or rural-urban migration, and when combined, they are as common as international migration (counting 21 repetitions per group). Environmental migration is also explored as a form of forced migration , originating refugees, or specifically environmental refugees. The keywords related to environmental issues are more focused on slow-onset events like ( rainfall, temperature, global warming and climate variability ) rather than rapid-onset events. Although, some of the latter are more recurrent than others, such as drought, floods and ultimately earthquakes .

Number of documents per year. Note : Sample of academic contributions about migration and environmental factors from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IDEAS RePEc, and previous meta-analyses (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 ) collected, merged, screened and included by the authors

Overall 288 authors have contributed to this literature, with 372 appearances, 34 documents are single-authored, the mean number of authors per document is 1.88; when considering exclusively multi-authored documents, the number of co-authors per document rises to 2.16, with a maximum of co-authors of 9. Various disciplines have put attention to the topic. Despite journals specializing in economics and econometrics representing the majority of the sources of publication, the literature includes also other disciplines (Fig. 3 ).

The 20 most relevant publication sources by field. Note : Sample of academic contributions about migration and environmental factors from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IDEAS RePEc, and previous meta-analyses (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 ) collected, merged, screened and included by the authors

Specifically, economic environmental migration is the object of publication in journals specialized in environmental sciences, geography, and social sciences such as urban studies, agriculture, demography, and political studies. A special mention has to be done for development studies: many reviews and journals specialized in development have issued contributions on the topic, highlighting the trend of observing the topic through development lenses. As an example, 14 documents in our sample are published in World Development , a multi-disciplinary journal of development studies.

A picture of the most relevant documents included in the sample is provided by simple measures, such as the number of global citations as reported in Scopus (at the moment of the bulk download of all sources), and the number of local citations, which shows how many times a document has been cited by other papers included in the sample. Measures for the most cited documents (global and local citation scores) in the sample are reported in Appendix Table 7 . The difference between global and local citation scores (almost four times higher) reveals that the documents have been cited by papers not included in our sample. It means that environmental migration has attracted the interest of different disciplines or they became part of the two main strands of literature, climate change, and migration, separately. 58 papers have not been cited in any of our samples, while 52 have zero citations globally. A part of it can be explained by the 18 papers that have been published recently in 2020, which could not have been cited yet because of timing (except for some contributions published in early 2020 such as Mueller et al. ( 2020 ) and Rao et al. ( 2020 ). Footnote 8 Position and the number of citations confirm the central role of papers published by Gray Clark and Valerie Mueller (Gray & Mueller, 2012b , a ; Mueller et al., 2014 ), receiving high citations both globally and internally. Some papers seem to be more relevant locally than globally: Marchiori et al. ( 2012 ) and Beine and Parsons ( 2015 ) had a bigger influence on our sample of economic environmental migration literature rather than globally, scoring the highest number of local citations. Conversely, Hornbeck ( 2012 ) seems to be cited more in literature outside the specific literature of environmental migration.

2.2 Overview of major results

The literature on the effects of climate and natural disasters on migration is characterized by a rich variety of studies both in micro- and macro-economic analyses. Country-level analyses tend to find evidence of a direct or indirect impact of environmental factors on migration patterns, either internally or internationally. Barrios et al. ( 2006 ) and Marchiori et al. ( 2012 ) find evidence of an increase in internal migration, especially towards urban areas in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, according to many specific historical and developmental factors. Both contributions highlight how worsening climatic conditions correspond to a faster urbanization process. Marchiori et al. ( 2012 ) add also that this climate-driven urbanization process results also in higher international migration rates, acting as a channel of transmission of the effect of climate.

The macro literature, in line with most validated theoretical models of migration, also investigates whether the effect is conditioned to income levels of the country of origin of potential migrants (Marchiori et al., 2012 ; Beine & Parsons, 2015 , 2017 ). The role of income in a specific origin country experiencing the effects of environmental events is found to be crucial to determine the sign and the magnitude of the impact. Cattaneo and Peri ( 2016 ) support from one side the active role of those events in fostering migration, but show how this effect is conditioned to middle-income countries. The effect is the opposite when conditioning the analysis to poor countries, highlighting the existence of certain constraints to mobility. Worsened environmental conditions may exacerbate liquidity constraints or lack of access to credit aimed at financing the migratory project, which lead to what has been called poverty trap . Furthermore, these conditioned results seem to be robust even when another important channel is controlled, agricultural productivity. Climatic conditions and disruptive hazards may constitute major drawbacks for agricultural productivity, leading the agriculture-dependent part of the population to move out from rural areas: Cai et al. ( 2016 ) and Coniglio and Pesce ( 2015 ) provide evidence of an indirect link between worsened temperature and precipitation conditions and migration, mediated by the level of agricultural dependency of the country of origin. Sudden and fast-onset hazards, on the other side, are not found to contribute significantly to human mobility, except in the case of a higher-educated population, more mobile than other groups after the disruption of a natural disaster (Drabo & Mbaye, 2015 ).

Number of case studies covered by the micro-level sub-sample per country. Note : Sub-sample of micro-level studies about migration and environmental factors from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IDEAS RePEc, and previous meta-analyses (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 ) collected, merged, screened and included by the authors

Micro-level literature provides a vast variety of case studies on different potential impacts of environmental factors on mobility. In our sample, they almost double macro-level contributions (86 contributions against 47) and provide different scenarios. Firstly, while macro-level studies mostly provide analyses at the global level or for some groups of countries or macro-regions, micro-level analyses tend to observe a specific phenomenon hitting a specific area or to study differences in the impact of a common phenomenon in different areas. The most covered region as a whole is Sub-Saharan Africa, with 65 case studies included in the contributions (Fig. 4 ). Footnote 9 When the level of analysis is less aggregated than the national or sub-national level, and individual or household behavior is observed through the use of surveys, the picture gains complexity and less generalized conclusions. This seems clear in Gray and Wise ( 2016 ) who analyze a series of comparable surveys across five Sub-Saharan countries, which have consistent differences. The heterogeneity of responses to climatic variations across those countries is strictly linked to the characteristics of the area and of the specific households. Poorer countries (such as Burkina Faso) mainly experience internal and temporary migration, often on a rural-rural channel as a way to diversify risk (Henry et al., 2003 , 2004 ). Long-distance migration seems to be constrained by liquidity and access to credit to finance those expensive journeys. Migratory trends of Nigerian households are pushed in times of favorable climatic conditions, while the effect of adverse conditions interacts with a negative effect on income and traps populations at origin (Cattaneo & Massetti, 2019 ). Overall, micro-level studies focused on the African continent highlight the importance of considering the interplay of a variety of factors when it comes to the analysis of the role of environmental factors, defining the new path toward hybrid literature.

The single countries that receive singularly the most attention are Mexico, with 10 case studies, and the U.S., with 9 case studies. This should not be a surprise because of two reasons: firstly, the stock of Mexican emigrates has been constantly the highest in the world (in absolute terms) as well as the migratory flow between Mexico and the U.S. But there might also be a publication-related reason based on the fact that the vast majority of journals in our sample are U.S. based. Major findings support the relevance of environmental drivers (mainly precipitation shortage) on push factors from Mexico ( Feng et al. ( 2010 ) estimates that a 10% reduction of agricultural productivity driven by scarce rainfall corresponds to the rise of 2% of emigrants).

Southern and Eastern Asia, representing by far the most disaster-prone area in the world. Footnote 10 also provide a variety of heterogeneous scenarios. The case of Vietnam (Koubi et al., 2016 ; Berlemann & Tran, 2020 ) shows how the Vietnamese population chooses different coping strategies in response to different kinds of environmental stressors. While gradual climatic variations lead to mechanisms of adaptation in loco to new climatic conditions, sudden shocks drive the decision to migrate elsewhere. However, mobility responses to different types of hazards might be different according to their specific consequences and duration (Berlemann & Tran, 2020 ). On the contrary, the case of Bangladesh supports the hypothesis that the existence of previous barriers to access to migration is worsened by the occurrence of disasters, specifically in the face of recurrent and intense flooding (Gray & Mueller, 2012b ).

The specific case of earthquakes across the world (El Salvador in Halliday ( 2006 ), Japan in Kawawaki ( 2018 ) and Indonesia in Gignoux and Menéndez ( 2016 ) for instance) shows a common trend of outcomes: highly disruptive disasters such as earthquakes tend to decrease mobility from the hit area. An interesting mechanism to explain this common trend found in three very different contexts is given by, not only the already mentioned financial constraints but also the possibility of higher local employment opportunities due to post-disaster reconstruction (Gignoux & Menéndez, 2016 ; Halliday, 2006 ). Moreover, households are found to respond to hazard by using the labor force as a buffer to the damages and redistributing labor within the household, with female mobility drastically dropping more than males and being substituted with increased hours of domestic labor (Halliday, 2012 ).

Analyses on South American countries also contribute to giving a hint of the complexity of the phenomenon. Thiede et al. ( 2016 ) show how internal migration is indeed impacted by rising temperature when considering the general effect; however, it hides an extreme heterogeneity of outcomes when specific characteristics of the areas and individuals are taken into account, resulting in a non-uniform effect.

An evident gap in the literature emerges in Fig. 4 : European countries have rarely been the object of study of the impact of environmental factors on mobility. This might be motivated by the fact that the European continent is mostly seen as a destination for migrants than an origin. It should not surprise that the two articles covering European countries, namely Italy (Spitzer et al., 2020 ) and the Netherlands (Jennings & Gray, 2015 ) analyze historical data of mobility at the beginning of the XX century (respectively earthquake in Sicily and Calabria and climate variability associated with riverine flooding in the Netherlands). Nevertheless, figures show that Europe is not unrelated to the occurrence and frequency of hazards as well as to sizable internal mobility that should receive some attention.

3 The inter-connectivity of papers

Our quantitative approach aims at analyzing the connectivity that exists among papers according to a citation-based approach and detecting the existence of communities or clusters. Since our target literature is characterized by a high heterogeneity of results, both in the direction and magnitude of the impact, we try to investigate the existence of potential specific patterns that lead to a certain type of analysis, methodology, or result under network-analysis lenses. We then use all information from this section to implement the meta-analysis.

3.1 Bibliographic coupling and citation-based approaches

The citation-based approach we choose is called bibliographic coupling. Footnote 11 Two scientific papers “bear a meaningful relation to each other when they have one or more references in common". Thus, the fundamentals of the link between two papers are depicted by the number of shared papers they both include in their references, which constitute the strength of the connectivity they have. In other words, a reference that is cited by two papers constitutes a “unit of coupling between them" (Kessler, 1963a ). Two articles are then said bibliographically coupled if at least one cited source appears in both articles (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017 ). Bibliographic coupling is increasingly becoming widely used in citation analysis, thanks to some specific advantages (and despite some disadvantages). Conceptually, through the linkages established, it gives a representation of the basic literature of reference and, incidentally, implies a relation between two papers that reveals a potential common intellectual or methodological approach (Weinberg, 1974 ). The constancy of the links between the papers over time, being based on cited references which, once published and indexed, is also an asset (Thijs et al., 2015 ). Most importantly, the bibliographic coupling is more suitable for recent literature than other citation-based approaches. For reasons of timing and extension of the time window, Footnote 12 using any other citation-based approach would have resulted in a very sparse matrix and created many isolated observations which would not be inter-connected for reasons other than conceptual, but just for the fact that they could not have been cited yet. Not only do the characteristics of our sample motivate the choice of the approach: keeping in mind that this stage of the analysis aims to investigate and map current research fronts in the target literature rather than to look at historical links or the evolution of school of thoughts, bibliographic coupling seems to be the best tool to capture them (Klavans & Boyack, 2017 ).

To obtain the network of bibliographically coupled papers, we initially extract the list of cited references from each article and build a bipartite network, a rectangular binary matrix \(\textbf{A}\) linking each paper in the sample to their reference (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017 ):

The matrix \(\textbf{A}\) is composed of 151 rows i representing the papers belonging to the sample and 5.433 columns j representing the ensemble of references cited in each paper in the sample. Each element \(a_{ij}\) of the matrix equals 1 when paper i cites paper j in its bibliography; \(a_{ij}\) is equal to 0 otherwise. Starting from matrix \(\textbf{A}\) , we can derive the bibliographic coupling network \(\textbf{B}\) as follows:

where \(\textbf{A}\) is the cited reference bipartite network and \(\mathbf {A^T}\) is its transpose. \(\textbf{B}\) is a symmetrical square matrix 151 \(\times\) 151, where rows and columns are papers included in the sample. Element \(b_{ij}\) of the matrix \(\textbf{B}\) contains the number of cited articles that paper i and paper j have in common. By construction, the main diagonal will contain the number of references included in each paper (as element \(a_{ii}\) defines the number of references that a paper has in common with itself).

The resulting matrix displays an undirected weighted network in which the 151 vertices are the set of papers included in our sample and the edges represent the citation ties between them. An existing tie implies that common reference literature exists between vertex i and j . When two nodes are not linked, the corresponding value of their tie is zero, as they do not share any common reference. Therefore, the network is weighted with the strength of the connections between papers i and j being measured by the weights associated with each tie. To avoid loops, which would be meaningless for our investigation, Footnote 13 we set the main diagonal to zero. Few ties exceed 20 shared cited references, with a maximum value of 48. Footnote 14 It can be argued that the number of references included in an article is not neutral to the resulting tie with any other article. Measuring the correct relatedness of nodes is of primary importance to produce an accurate mapping of literature (Klavans & Boyack, 2006 ). Citation behaviors of authors may interfere with the observation of core reference literature at the basis of coupled nodes. An author may opt for an extensive approach of citations and include a consistent number of references to display some particular links or details of a paper; authors may also decide for a less inclusive approach and include just essential cited references in the list. In other words, the number of included references in one article may dissolve meaningful information about the ties. Furthermore, specific formats or types of articles lead to broader or narrower bibliographies. To address these concerns, a process of normalization is needed so that data can be corrected for differences in the total number of references. Bibliometric literature has dealt with this issue through the calculation of different similarity measures . An accurate overview of the possible measures of similarity is provided in van Eck and Waltman ( 2009 ). Overall, such indices aim to determine the similarity between two units according to their co-occurrence (value of association between them, which in our case, is the number of common references in the bibliography) adjusted in different ways for the number of total occurrences of the single units. However, despite the need to correct data for many purposes in citation-based networks and obtain a size-independent measure of association, there is no consensus on which measure is the most appropriate (van Eck & Waltman, 2009 ): tests of accuracy and coverage proposed by different authors have reached different conclusions (Klavans & Boyack, 2006 ; van Eck & Waltman, 2009 ; Sternitzke & Bergmann, 2009 ). We apply a simple ratio between the observed number of commonly shared references and the product of the number of cited references in each of the two coupled papers. It has been defined as a measure of association strength (van Eck & Waltman, 2009 ) and it can be expressed as:

where \(b_{ij}\) corresponds to the weights of the tie between i and j in the original bibliographic coupling network; \(b_{ii}\) and \(b_{jj}\) are respectively the number of cited references included in paper i ’s bibliography and in paper j ’s bibliography, which corresponds to the original value on the diagonal. The obtained weighted network will serve to detect communities of papers through their common references and investigate if referring to a certain (group of) paper(s) creates meaningful clusters of items aggregating around certain common characteristics.

3.2 Community detection

We intend to identify the existence of communities in our network. The assumption is that papers citing the same references aggregate into a group that shares certain features, which could be methodological approach, level of analysis, specific sub-topics of the literature, and outcomes. The extreme heterogeneity of outcomes in this specific literature may be motivated partially by the heterogeneity of the events themselves (type of environmental factor, type of mobility, preexisting conditions in the specific area) or the theoretical and empirical modeling; it may also be motivated by other factors, that can be traced in some patterns linked to the characteristics of single publications. The procedure of community detection is aimed at investigating which are the “forces" that aggregate or disperse papers with each other, primarily through the direct observation of main characteristics, and then running separate MAs on each cluster. Community detection in the bibliographic network is often made through Louvain community detection algorithm (Blondel et al., 2008 ). In this analysis, a community is thought of as a group of contributions that share common references and form strong common ties with each other, while others have less shared characteristics and structure. The algorithm can detect clusters of contributions with dense interaction with each other and sparse connections with the rest of the network (Fig. 5 ).

Bibliographic coupling network and detected communities Note : Bibliographic coupling network of 151 documents included in the sample obtained from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IDEAS RePEc and previous meta-analyses (Hoffmann et al., 2020 ; Beine & Jeusette, 2021 ). Each node represents a paper included in our sample and its size corresponds to its weighted degree. Nodes are tied by links whenever two nodes share at least one common reference. The thickness of links is given by the association strength of the tie between two nodes (to provide a clear visualization, only nodes with weights higher than the mean are displayed). Colors correspond to communities of belonging of each paper: Cluster 1 is represented in violet, Cluster 2 in green, Cluster 3 in blue, and Cluster 4 in yellow. The description of each Cluster is presented in the text

The procedure identifies four main clusters. Our network being relatively small allows analyzing the main characteristics of each cluster. Following the full-text screening made in the first step of our threefold approach, we summarized some meaningful indicators about the analysis (such as type - quantitative, qualitative, theoretical, policy, literature review -, level - macro or micro for quantitative and qualitative studies -, unit - country, household, individual, territorial units), the object of the analysis (concerning the type of migration and environmental factors studied and the area) and theoretical and empirical approach (empirical approach and whether it is theory-based, estimation strategy and potential channel investigated). Finally, we recorded a synthetic indicator of the concluding effect of environmental factors on migration patterns: for each paper, we assigned the value “positive", “negative", “not significant" or a combination of the three (in case a paper contains multiple analysis of different migration or environmental factors that lead to different outcomes). Thanks to these indicators we were able to have a picture of the main common characteristics of the papers included in a cluster (Appendix Table 8 ), which will be tested and eventually confirmed in the MA.

The first cluster (Cluster 1) is the most populated, counting 51 papers spanning the entire period considered (from 2003 to 2020). In terms of the type of analysis, it contains the largest variety: as in all clusters, quantitative studies represent the majority (as they are the 76% of the full sample), but this cluster contains also most of the qualitative analyses (10 out of 13) and policy papers (5 out of 7) of the full sample. Published papers are predominant (47 out of 50). Except for a few papers, the analysis is mainly carried from a micro perspective, with individuals as units of analysis, based on surveys. Interestingly, most of the micro-level studies included in Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ) can be found in this cluster. Authorship is very concentrated around two main authors, Clark Gray, (co-)authoring 9 papers, and Valerie Mueller, (co-)authoring 4 papers. Many of their co-authors appear in this community, which indeed scores the highest collaboration index of all communities (2.86), much higher than the full sample (2.16). Another important feature is that Cluster 1 includes the micro-level papers with the highest global citations: Gray and Mueller ( 2012b ), Feng et al. ( 2010 ), Gray and Mueller ( 2012a ), Mueller et al. ( 2014 ), Henry et al. ( 2004 ), Henry et al. ( 2003 ) and Gray ( 2009 ). This is also shown by the fact that the number of average citations per document is the highest among all clusters (34.84). Journals are also quite concentrated around a few of them, World Development and Population and Environment mainly. The content of the analyses is mainly focused on climatic change exclusively (precipitation and temperature), while few studies include also natural disasters. All corridors of migration are investigated, with no specific predominance of internal or international migration (which is a characteristic of individual-level studies, mainly based on surveys). Even though the majority of outcomes show a positive coefficient, that can be translated into finding an active role of environmental factors in pushing migrants out of their origin areas, it is not consensual to every paper: variation among results is high compared to other clusters, most paper finding complex relations between the two phenomena and different directions according to different dimensions. Empirical strategies are often based on discrete-time event history models estimated through multinomial logit. This reflects the approach of the main authors included in this community. A strong accent is put on the importance of the agricultural channel and the theme of adaptation to the change in environmental conditions.

The second community (Cluster 2) counts 28 papers, mostly published, except for 4 of them. It is composed of mostly quantitative papers, accompanied by 5 literature reviews. As in the previous cluster, most studies are at a micro level, with all kinds of units of analysis and aggregations. Both patterns of migration are explored, but with special attention to urbanization and internal mobility. Contrarily, it seems to put a stronger accent on natural disasters rather than on slow-onset events. The majority of papers in Cluster 2 have been excluded from Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ) (only 5 included, compared to the 21 in Cluster 1) and Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 ) (only 1, all others being in Cluster 4). All papers analyzing the impact of different kinds of natural disasters in the U.S. are included in this cluster. Empirical approaches such as the differences-in-difference model and instrumental variable are often used. The papers explore a large variety of potential channels and mechanisms of transmission of the impact of environmental factors on migration (income, agriculture, employment, liquidity constraints), and only in a few cases, a negative direction is found.

The third cluster (Cluster 3) includes the most recent papers: only one paper dates 2011, all other ones are published or issued after 2015. This is part of the reasons why the average citations per document in this cluster is the lowest (10.89) compared to any other cluster. Half of the overall unpublished papers are included in this cluster. In terms of kind of analysis, this cluster appears to be very heterogeneous: even if the micro-level analysis is the majority, 12 papers apply a macro-level analysis on countries. Both cross-country and internal migration are considered, but the majority of them investigate the impact of slow-onset events rather than fast-onset. Many of the analyses are theory-based, especially on classic economic migration theories (Roy-Borjas model, New Economics of Labor Migration), or general or partial equilibrium models. This cluster is also peculiar for the heterogeneity of empirical outcomes, which are often multiple for a single paper: outcomes vary according to the different channels explored, i.e. different levels of agricultural dependency, presence of international aid, and level of income. In many cases, environmental factors are an obstacle to the decision to migrate from an area, or completely neutral. Comparatively, outcomes from this cluster tend to show a complex picture and highlight the many dimensions that may intervene in determining the direction of the impact.

Contrary to the previous one, Cluster 4 is extremely homogeneous. It contains almost exclusively quantitative (32 out of 35) and macro-level studies (30 out of 35). It covers equally slow- and fast-onset events and their impact on mobility. Most importantly, it aggregates 23 of the 30 papers reviewed in Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 ), making this cluster very representative and comparable to Hoffmann et al. ( 2020 )’s MA. Additionally, this community appears to be solid also in terms of theoretical and empirical approaches, as micro-founded gravity or pseudo-gravity models are widely used in it (more than half of them use such models). None of the studies find a negative impact of environmental factors on migration, they mainly estimate positive and significant outcomes, with few not-significant results for specific cases. The most locally cited macro papers are included in this cluster, which also receive high global citations with an average of citations per document 24.91 (even though lower than Cluster 1).

This description of cluster composition serves as a preliminary investigation of which are the main characteristics linking papers together through their citation behavior. It emerges that stronger links are given by diverse indicators varying across clusters. To test which are the sources of heterogeneity between clusters that aggregate papers within a cluster and their impact on the estimated effect size, in the next section, we will use this partitioning to run four separate MAs and compare the conclusions.

4 Meta-analysis

The purpose of our MA is to summarize the results of collected studies and, at the same time, highlight any possible sources of heterogeneity. The analysis is based on four assumptions: (i) our parameter of interest, which we call \(\beta\) , is the effect of climate change on migration; (ii) most researchers believe that \(\beta\) is greater than zero, and this is indeed true; (iii) the sign is not enough for decision-makers; (iv) this has attracted a large literature that has obtained a large number of estimates \(\hat{b}\) of \(\beta\) . Each of the 96 selected papers contains one or more equations that estimate the migration effect due to environmental factors. Footnote 15 In addition to the characteristics specific to migration itself, the estimated impact on migration can also be distinguished according to different features of environmental factors. Since comparability among studies, and more specifically among estimated \(\beta\) s, is a crucial issue for the MA, we group all collected estimates and conduct two separate analyses according to the type of environmental phenomenon: gradual or slow-onset events and sudden or fast-onset events. To compare the estimates and correctly interpret the synthetic results we need to standardize all collected effect sizes \(\beta\) in a common metric. In this MA the estimates from separate, but similar studies, are converted into partial correlation coefficients ( pcc ):

and its standard error, \(se_i\) :

where \(t_i\) and \(df_i\) are the t-value and the degrees of freedom of the i-th estimate \(\beta _i\) . The pcc is commonly used in MA literature (Doucouliagos, 2005 ; Stanley & Doucouliagos, 2012 ; Doucouliagos & Ulubasoglu, 2006 ; Brada et al., 2021 ) and allows to analyze within a single framework of all available studies on the effects of environmental stressors on migration regardless of the specification or measure of migration used. Footnote 16 Summarizing all the different estimates together in a single coefficient raises the question of heterogeneity within the same study and between studies. The summary effect is calculated as follows:

where \(\hat{b}_i\) is the individual estimate of the effect and weight, \(w_i\) , in a fixed effects model (FEM) is inversely proportional to the square of the standard error, so that studies with smaller standard errors have greater weight than studies with larger standard errors. The FEM is based on the assumption that the collected effect sizes are homogeneous (the differences observed among the studies are likely due to chance). Unlike in the FEM, random-effects model (REM) takes into account the heterogeneity among studies and weights incorporate a “between-study heterogeneity", \(\hat{\tau }^2\) . In the presence of heterogeneity, the two models likely find very different results, and it may not be appropriate to combine results. A test of homogeneity of the \(\beta _i\) is provided by referring to the statistic Q to a \(\chi ^2\) -distribution with n - 1 degrees of freedom (Higgins & Thompson, 2002 ): if the test is higher than the degrees of freedom, the null hypothesis is rejected (and thus there is heterogeneity). Another test commonly used is the \(I^2\) inconsistency index by Higgins and Thompson ( 2002 ) describing the percentage of the variability of the estimated effect that is referable to heterogeneity rather than to chance (sample variability). Values of the \(I^2\) range from 0 percent to 100 percent where zero indicates no observed heterogeneity. Since most computer programs report \(I^2\) , and so it is readily available, it is largely used to quantify the amount of dispersion. However, it is a proportion and not an absolute measure of heterogeneity in a meta-analysis (Borenstein et al., 2017 ). To understand how much the effects vary and report the absolute values, we compute the prediction interval as suggested by Borenstein et al. ( 2017 ). The results of the meta-synthesis of the collected estimates (Table 1 ) are statistically significant, except for findings of the slow onset effect of paper included in Cluster 2 (where the most of studies focus on the fast onset effect), in which both FEM and REM give statistically insignificant averages.

The preliminary result of the basic MA is that environmental factors seem to influence migration positively, even if the magnitude is very small and the REM mean is statistically significant only in the case of fast-onset events. The mean effect by cluster becomes negative in the case of estimates of slow-onset events in Clusters 1 and 3 and for the estimates of fast-onset events in Cluster 2.

4.1 Meta-regression tests of publication selection bias

Different findings of the same phenomenon can be explained in terms of heterogeneity of studies’ features, however, the literature also tends to follow the direction consistent with the theoretical predictions causing the so-called publication bias. Footnote 17 Meta-regression tests, such as the funnel asymmetry test (FAT), allow for an objective assessment of publication bias:

Weighted least squares (WLS) corrects the previous equation for heteroskedasticity (Stanley & Doucouliagos, 2017 ) and it can be obtained by dividing \(pcc_i\) by the standard errors:

Results are used to test for the presence of publication selection ( \(H_0:\beta _1 = 0\) ) or a genuine effect beyond publication selection bias ( \(H_0:\beta _0 = 0\) ). According to the Funnel Asymmetry and Precision-Effect Tests (FAT-PET), in the absence of publication selection the magnitude of the reported effect will vary randomly around the “true” value, \(\beta _1\) , independently of its standard error (Stanley & Doucouliagos, 2012 ). Replacing in eq. ( 7 ) the standard error \(se_i\) with the variance \(se_i^2\) , as the precision of the estimate, gives a better estimate of the size of the genuine effect corrected for publication bias (Stanley & Doucouliagos, 2014 ). This model is called “precision-effect estimate with standard error” (PEESE) and the WLS version is:

Table 2 shows results of the FAT-PET using multiple methods for sensitivity analysis and to ensure the robustness of findings. To take into account the issue of the dependence of study results, when multiple estimates are collected in the same study, the errors of meta-regressions are corrected with the “robust with cluster" option, which adjusts the standard errors for intra-study correlation.

Column (1) of Table 2 presents the FAT-PET coefficients, column (2) shows the results of the WLS model to deal with heteroskedasticity, columns (3) and (4) present the results of the panel-random effect model (REM) and multilevel mixed-effect model that treats the dataset as a panel or a multilevel structure.

Looking at the estimates of the effect of climate change on migration, the FAT coefficients ( \(\hat{\beta }_1\) ) are not statistically significant, implying that there is no evidence of publication bias, while the positive and statistically significant PET coefficient ( \(\hat{\beta }_0\) ) indicates a genuinely positive slow-onset effect exists, in particular in the case of Cluster 4. Conversely, in the case of Cluster 3 the REM and multilevel mixed-effect model find that, even if in presence of publication bias, the impact on migration is negative. Table 2 provides evidence of publication bias in the literature focusing on the effect of natural disasters on migration. The estimated FAT coefficient is statistically significant in the overall sample, especially due to papers in clusters 1 and 3, and there is insufficient evidence of a genuinely positive effect (accept \(H_0: \hat{\beta }_0\) ).

4.2 Multiple meta-regression analysis: econometric results and discussion

The multiple meta-regression analysis (MRA) includes an encompassing set of controls for factors that can integrate and explain the diverse findings in the literature. To capture possible sources of bias among all analyses, we code all differences in the features of the various studies and regressions and include a set of dummies to control for them. Specifically, we code left- and right-hand side characteristics of regressions estimated in the collected papers and generate a set of dummies for paper features, dependent variables, independent variables, sample characteristics, and regression characteristics. Footnote 18

The overall sample includes both unpublished and published papers, so we add some moderators variables describing different features of the studies that are published. In particular, we introduce a dummy for Published articles and a control for the quality of the journal in which the study is published by adding the variable Publication Impact-factor . In reporting the main results, some authors emphasize a benchmark regression that produces a preferred estimate, thus we add the dummy preferred specification equal to 1 when the reported effect size is obtained from the main specification. Concerning the measure of migration, the dependent variable in the left-hand side of the regression, original studies mainly distinguish migration by corridor , which are mainly two, internal and international migration. In this context, we distinguish also a special internal corridor, the one characterized by rural-urban mobility, to investigate the potential impact of an environmental variable on the urbanization process. Whenever the corridor is not specified, the variable is categorized as undefined (which will be the reference category in the estimation). Dependent variables differ also in terms of measurement of the phenomenon: specifically, we separate measures that express flows from those expressing stocks. The first category includes both studies that use flows (or an estimation of flows) and rates of migration. The second category captures those cases in which migration is measured as a stock of migrants at the destination. The reference category is direct measures, which mainly capture whether migration has occurred or not (typically dummy variables used on survey-based samples equal to 1 when the individual migrates and 0 otherwise). We also include information about the countries of origin and the destination of migrants. Origins are categorized by macro-regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, and North America. The reference category is “world", identified whenever origin countries are not specified (typically in multi-country settings). Destinations are categorized by level of income. The choice of this categorization is led by the aim to identify differences in the possibility to choose a destination. Categories are divided into high, higher-middle, lower-middle, and low-income.

The specific objective of the study is the impact of environmental variables on migration, thus on the right-hand side of the regression a proxy of the environmental change is included. Slow-onset events are typically defined as gradual modifications of temperature, precipitation, and soil quality. Respectively, three dummies temperature, precipitation and soil degradation are created. Each of these phenomena is measured in different ways, and the use of a specific kind of measurement is relevant to the outcome. Both temperature and precipitation have been measured in levels (simple level or trend of temperature/precipitation); deviation, as the difference between levels and long-run averages; and anomalies, mostly calculated as the ratio of the difference between the level and the long-run mean and its standard deviation. Soil degradation includes events such as desertification, soil salinity, or erosion. Additionally, we also code the time lag considered concerning the time units of the dependent variable: whenever the period considered corresponds to the same period of the dependent variable the lag is zero, while it takes values more than zero for any additional period before the dependent variable time-span. This control also allows us to account for varying time-frames in different studies, including situations where migration spans several years or occurs suddenly in the aftermath of a natural disaster. The second battery of coded variables refers to fast-onset events, which can be also defined as natural hazards or extreme events. The main classification of fast-onset events reflects the one reported in Sect. 2 : geophysical (earthquakes, mass movements, volcanic eruptions), meteorological (extreme temperature, storms - cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes), hydrological (floods and landslides) and climatological (droughts or wildfires). Fast-onset events also differ in the way they are measured. Possible measures are occurrence (when the measure is a dummy capturing if the disaster happened or not), frequency (the count of events that occurred in the area), intensity (i.e. Richter scale for earthquakes, wind speed for tornadoes, etc.), duration (length of the occurrence of the event) and losses (when the disaster is measured in terms of the affected population, number of deaths or injured people, number of destroyed houses or financial value of the damaged goods). As for slow-onset events, we code a continuous variable capturing the time lag of the event concerning the dependent variable. A dummy capturing whether the coefficient refers to multiple disasters is also included.

Characteristics of the sample are one of the main sources of heterogeneity. The level of the analysis varies considerably from paper to paper, as we include both micro-and macro-level studies. we code variables capturing both the specific unit of analysis and the source of the data. Typically micro-level studies use data coming from censuses or surveys where households or individuals are the units of analysis. Country-level studies usually take the source of their data from official statistics . Other kinds of sampling are included in the reference group (for example small territorial aggregates such as districts, provinces, or grid cells). We also code a variable capturing the time span of the analysis, subtracting the last year of observation from the first one. The role of econometric approaches may have an impact on resulting outcomes. Beine and Jeusette ( 2021 ) emphasized in their work the importance of methodological choices, with differentiated results depending on estimation techniques. First of all, we code a panel dummy to capture whether the structure of data and related estimation techniques has an impact. Furthermore, we distinguish Poisson estimations that include the Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator and Negative Binomial Models; linear estimators, both Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), linear probability models and maximum likelihood models; conventional Instrumental Variables (IV) estimators, two-stage least squares (2SLS), and other cases of estimators as Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) used to control for endogeneity; and finally, logit which comprises multinomial logit models. Any other estimator (i.e. Tobit, panel VAR) is less frequent and grouped in a category other estimators used as the reference group.

Theoretically, the impact of environmental variables on migration may be mediated, channe-led, or transmitted through other phenomena that can be controlled for or interacted with. Most of models investigating general migration determinants usually control for several possible determinants to recover the effect of the specific objective variable, with all potential other factors being controlled for. The majority of these additional controls are suggested by theoretical models and then introduced in the empirical model. Furthermore, methodological approaches in our sample are found to often include interaction terms to specifically address the combined effect of an environmental variable with other potential factors. Thus, we introduce two groups of variables, controls and interacted terms , categorized both to capture factors or channels such as income, agriculture, conflicts, political stability, cultural or geographical factors. Among the list of controls, we also include a dummy that captures whether both slow- and fast-onset events are included in the regression.

Table 3 shows the results of the multiple MRA on the literature in slow-onset events (precipitation, temperature, and soil quality) in which potential biases are filtered out sequentially by the addition, in a stepwise manner, of statistically significant controls. Column (1) presents results for the whole sample of studies estimating the impact of climatic variations on migration, and columns (2) to (5) show the results of papers grouped by clusters to highlight how specific features characterizing the cluster influence the magnitude of the estimated effect. The results are unfolded below.

Column (1) refers to the overall sample and shows a coefficient of the main variable of interest ( \(\hat{\beta }_0\) ) negative and statistically significant, implying that climatic variations may decrease incentives for migration by exacerbating credit constraints of potential migrants. Looking at results for different clusters (columns 2-5) such a negative effect is generated by studies that are included in clusters 1 and 3. The MRA of papers in clusters 2 and 4, instead, gives positive and statistically significant PET coefficients ( \(\hat{\beta }_0\) ) implying that climate changes induce people to migrate. Concerning the FAT-test, the intercept ( \(\hat{\beta }_1\) ) might deviate from zero confirming the presence of publication bias: the peer-review process seems to particularly affect the magnitude of the estimated effect of studies in all clusters except for Cluster 3.

Most of the papers included in the MRA for slow-onset events are published (52 articles out of 66), indeed the estimated coefficients of controls for published articles are useful to evaluate if the peer-review process exerts some influence on reported results in the collected studies. In Cluster 3 estimates obtained by the Preferred specification tend to be slightly lower while articles published in journals with higher impact factors report lower estimates of the impact of slow-onset events on migration. In Cluster 4, instead, results of Published articles are lower, even if the mean effect of this group of studies remains positive.

From the other sets of controls emerges that specific features of studies included in the MRA differently explain the diversity in the results within clusters. The positive coefficients of controls for corridors such as Internal and Urbanization state that people respond to adverse climatic change with increased internal migration. The only exception is for studies included in Cluster 3, this is the most heterogeneous cluster of most recent papers, where heterogeneous approaches (micro-and macro-level and type of migration) lead to a large heterogeneity in outcomes, varying according to different channels explored. Findings obtained when mobility is measured by Flows seem to be lower in the overall sample. In macroeconomic literature, usually, the measurement of migration is a stock variable, since it is generally easier to find and measure the number of foreign citizens born or resident in a country at any given time. Data on flow variables and migration rates, or the number of people who have moved from an origin to a destination in a specific period, are less available, and analyses often rely on estimates and computations of this data. Therefore, the opposite sign of the coefficient of the variable Flows in Cluster 1 is not surprising since this cluster collects all micro-level studies (where the migration variable refers to the movements of individuals as a unit, based on surveys).

Controls for how the climatic phenomenon is measured, Precipitation measures and Temperature measures , seem to differently affect the heterogeneity of results and, in many cases, the estimated coefficients are statistically significant but very close to zero.

The estimated coefficients of dummies for country groups included in our multiple MRA indicate how results from analyses focusing on specific regions of origin differ. In particular, positive coefficients of controls Asia and Europe support the idea that the results of analyses that focus on the migration from these regions are likely to be positive (with exception of Cluster 1), while if the people move from a country in the region of North America the impact of climate changes on migration is lower and can be negative. The climate impact on migration from LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) countries are higher in Cluster 3 (where the PET coefficient is negative) and lower in Cluster 4 (where the PET coefficient is positive).

Regarding the heterogeneity produced by the fact that studies use different sources of data for migration, we add dummies for sources used. All estimated coefficients of this set of controls are statistically significant in Cluster 1: the use of different databases might influence the wide variety of findings. Effect sizes in Cluster 2, instead, are not affected by the source of data used.

Since it is natural to expect the adjustment of migratory flows in response to climate change is not instantaneous, especially in the case of gradual phenomena, most of the studies use a panel structure with a macroeconomic focus and attempt to assess the impact of changes in climatic conditions on human migratory flows in the medium-long term. Microeconomic analyses mostly use cross-section data to explain causal relationships between specific features of individuals, collected through surveys and censuses, and various factors determining migration by isolating the net effect of the environment. Analyses at Individual level tend to capture a more negative impact of climate changes on migration, whereas analyses at Country level tend to find a more positive effect. As already said, for micro-level analyses in Cluster 1 controls related to sample characteristics have opposite signs. Looking at dummies for the estimation techniques, our evidence suggests that the diversity in the effect sizes is in part explained by differences in techniques. In particular, positive and significant coefficients are found for controls as OLS and ML estimators for cross-section analyses, same for panel studies that use Panel estimation techniques, and Instrumental Variables ( IV ) or GMM estimators to correct for endogeneity. Micro-economic analyses (Cluster 1) use more disaggregated data, while the high presence of zeros in the dependent variable is treated with a Poisson estimator, which tends to produce lower estimates.

Many authors highlight the importance of variables of political, economic, social, and historical nature, in influencing the impact of climatic anomalies on migration processes, emphasi-zing the role of important channels of transmission of the environmental effect to migrations. We include in the multiple MRA a set of dummies for Controls included in the estimation of the model of migration and dummies for Channels through which the climatic event determines migration phenomena. The idea is that studies based on the same theoretical framework tend to include the same set of control variables or interacted terms and we find that many of these controls may positively and negatively affect the effect size of climate changes on migration.

Table 4 shows the results of the MRA for fast-onset events, or rather natural disasters, more or less related to climate change, which appear as destructive shocks of limited duration and for which the ability to predict is reduced. Footnote 19

The coefficient of \(\hat{\beta }_0\) , is positive and statistically significant in the overall sample and clusters 2 and 4, providing evidence of an increase in migration due to sudden natural hazards. It is worth noting that papers in Cluster 2 (column 3) mainly focus on fast-onset events and the summarized effect size is positive and very high. On the other side, the summarized effect of papers in clusters 1 and 3 is negative and statistically significant.

Results show evidence of publication bias for the overall sample and in Cluster 3, with \(\hat{\beta }_1\) statistically significant signaling that the reported effect is not independent of its standard error. The significant and positive coefficient found for the published dummy confirms that there is a general Publication Impact , so the peer-review process seems to affect the magnitude of the estimated effect, especially in clusters 1 and 2. Articles published in journals with higher Impact-factor get higher estimates of the effects of natural disasters on migration, with exception of published articles in Cluster 2, suggesting that editors prefer to publish results that have a positive but more limited effect. Natural disasters affect domestic and international migration flows. The positive coefficients of the group of controls related to the type of migration, in clusters 2 and 3 confirm that people respond to natural disasters with any kind of mobility. Specifically in Cluster 2 natural disasters increase both Internal and Urbanization migration, while studies in Cluster 3 find a greater effect on Internal and International movements of people. In Cluster 4, instead, estimates of the impact of natural disasters are lower in the case of Internal migration. Hydrological events have a greater impact on migration, the estimated coefficient is statistically significant in all clusters; if the fast-onset event refers to Geophysical , Meteorological and Climatological disasters the effect on migration is lower.

The severity of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, landslides, or floods, affects regional agricultural production and it also has direct effects on employment and income in the agricultural sectors of the affected regions pushing people to migrate. However, on the one hand, natural disasters, such as droughts, floods, and storms, push individuals to move to find new sources of income or livelihood, on the other hand, natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes cause losses to populations that might lead people into a poverty trap, with potential migrants not having the resources to finance the trip. These effects, already highlighted by the literature, seem to be confirmed. Also in this literature, indeed, various controls and transmission channels analyzed in the original empirical models have a role in determining heterogeneity in results.

5 Conclusions

The present meta-analysis, aimed to systematically review and synthesize the empirical evidence on the relationship between environmental change and human migration, suggests that while there is a small, positive, and significant effect of slow- and rapid-onset environmental variables on migration, the heterogeneity of results in the existing economic literature highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of the causes and effects of environmental migration, as well as the specific characteristics of the places and populations involved.

If a key function of meta-analysis is to challenge and test the results of empirical studies, our study provides important insights that can inform both researchers and policymakers on the relationship between human migration and environmental changes or shocks. Specifically, our findings suggest that a more nuanced and context-specific understanding of environmental migration is needed. Future research could profit from our work by exploring the average effect of specific environmental shocks, such as droughts or floods, and the important role of mediating factors that influence the decision to migrate, such as specific economic and social conditions.

The paper also offers an encompassing methodology for the empirical analysis of very heterogeneous outcomes of a research field. The sample collected through a systematic review of the literature, the bibliometric analysis, the construction of a co-citation network and the community detection on the structure of the network of essays, allow the inspection of a scientific area also in absence of a uniform and cohesive literature. In the case of environmental migration, the too many different characteristics in terms of object of analysis, empirical strategy, and mediating covariates render the meta-analytic average effect estimates just a first approximation of the quantitative evidence of the literature.

As shown in the present meta-analysis, when the level of heterogeneity in the outcome of a literature is relevant, as for the four clusters of papers that compose the economic literature on environmental migration, a group-by-group analysis has to be preferred and compared with the results of an overall meta-analysis.

Moreover, our analysis highlights the need for greater collaboration and standardization of methods in the study of environmental migration. We report a lack of uniform and cohesive literature, with different studies using different methods, covariates, and definitions of key variables. This limits the external validity of existing results and calls for greater efforts by scholars and institutions to validate existing studies and improve the quality of data and methods used in future research.

Overall, our meta-analysis contributes to a better understanding of the complex relationship between slow or rapid environmental change and human migration. The implications of this work extend beyond the academic community to inform public policy and action. As environmental change and human migration continue to characterize the global system, it is crucial for decision-makers to consider the insights provided by scientific research and for the scientific community to continue to produce results that improve the external validity of existing studies and help delineate evidence-based policies.

A detailed table highlighting specific studies featured in other meta-analyses, along with their citations, that have been reviewed in our study is provided in the Supplementary material, Section A.

The extraction is made through bibliometrix , an R tool for science mapping analysis that reads and elaborates the information exported by Scopus and Web of Science (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017 ).

Scopus: key (“migration" and (“natural disasters" or “climate change")) and ( limit-to ( subjarea ,“econ")) and ( limit-to ( language ,“English")), Date: 24/11/2020. Web of Science: (( AK =(migration and (“natural disasters" or “climate change"))) or ( KP = (migration and (“natural disasters" or “climate change")))) and language : (English) Refined by: web of science categories : (“economics"), Date: 24/11/2020.

We use the Advanced Search tool, searching by Keywords and Title: migration and (“natural disasters" or “climate change").

Our inclusion criteria prioritize studies reporting outcomes in an appropriate and consistent manner. In particular, we have excluded studies that do not rely on a complete set of objective measures. For instance, studies that only present estimated coefficients, solely indicating the significant level, without reporting standard errors or t -ratios have been excluded because they do not allow for the calculation of a meta-synthesis.

All records have been uploaded and summary statistics produced using the R tool bibliometrix (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017 ). Scopus and Web of Science allow for the download in the bulk of records in .bibtex format, ready to be converted in R objects. Other records are manually entered, depending on the publication status of the single record: for published documents additional research of the specific document is made on Scopus and the relative .bibtex file is downloaded and added to the other results; for unpublished papers, which cannot be found in the two sources, a .bibtex is manually created following the structure of fields and information in the downloaded ready-to-use files. After merging each file and removing duplicates we obtain the data source that contains the bibliographic information of all articles, including publication year/latest draft, author(s), title, journal, keywords, affiliations, and references.

Variants of words or concepts have been aggregated in a unique item i.e. climate change and climatic change or environmental migrants and environmental migration .

The issue of timing will be addressed in the network analysis, choosing a specific type of citation-based network, the bibliographic coupling network, to minimize the risk of missing connections between papers.

Some contributions are not single-case studies.

Asia suffered the highest number of disaster events. In total, between 2000 and 2019, there were 3,068 disaster events in Asia, followed by the 1,756 events in the Americas and 1,192 events in Africa (UNDRR, 2020 ).

Bibliographic coupling, first introduced by (Kessler, 1963b , a ), belongs to the broader class of citation-based approaches to science mapping. Co-citation is based on the relationship established by citing authors of a paper: two papers are linked whenever they jointly appear in the cited references of at least a third paper. Direct citation is the most intuitive approach, linking two papers if one has cited a precedent one. As co-citation, direct citation performs better for long time windows to visualize historical connections (Klavans & Boyack, 2017 ). In terms of accuracy, it has been established that direct citation provides a more accurate representation of the taxonomy of scientific production (Klavans & Boyack, 2017 ), but for the specific requirements the methodology imposes, it has not gained much success (Boyack & Klavans, 2010 ).

Our sampled literature starts in 2003 and ends at the moment the research has been done (November 2020), testifying the recent interest of economic literature on the topic.

It is trivial to observe the value of ties that link a paper with itself, which naturally corresponds to the number of listed references.

This number seems very high, but at a closer look, the two papers that register the highest value are two consecutive papers published by the same author (Naudé, 2008, 2010).

Detailed information on collected coefficients and standard errors are provided in the Supplementary material, Section B.

A summary of the distribution of computed partial correlation coefficients is provided in the Supplementary material, Section C.

The publication bias occurs when (i) researchers, referees, or editors prefer statistically significant results and (ii) it is easier to publish results that are consistent with a given theory. However, the consequences of the peer-review process refer more to a general “publication impact" rather than a “bias" (Cipollina & Salvatici, 2010 ).

The complete description of coded variables is available in Supplementary material, section D.

Potential biases are filtered out sequentially by the addition, in a stepwise manner, of statistically significant controls.

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Cipollina, M., De Benedictis, L. & Scibè, E. Environmental migration? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature. Rev World Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10290-024-00529-5

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13 Literary Journals that Focus on Nature and the Environment

Most literary journals, unless they have a very focused mission, or are genre journals, are open to publishing poems, prose, and nonfiction featuring nature. Most writers that focus on the natural world do not have an issue finding homes for their work in general interest literary journals.

Still, there are a number of journals that focus on publishing writing that focuses on the environment.

It’s important to note that most journals that only publish poems that focus on the natural world are currently preoccupied with ecopoetics , which, according to the Poetry Foundation, is a “multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry”.

Of course there is overlap between the ecopoetics and nature poetry, just like there’s an overlap between journals that publish nature writing and those that focus on environmental change. Below I’ve collected a list of journals that publish one or both.

Not all of the journals are currently open to submissions but the majority of the journals are.

The Hopper Magazine

This is an environmental literary journal published by Green Writers Press. The Hopper looks for a number of very specific things in the writing they publish, which includes poetry and prose, including work that “Offers new and different articulations of the human experience in nature. Specifically, nature writing that is psychologically honest about the environmental crisis and the impacts of mechanical modernity” and work that “Explores place as both the cultural and physical landscapes of an author’s region.” Read their full submission guidelines with care.

This wonderful online journals focus is on how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. A lot of what they publish focuses on nature, but not all of it.

This respected and well paying journal publishes fiction, essays, and poetry, about the Pacific Northwest but only by authors based in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.

Minding Nature

This journal publishes a wide variety of work on humans’ interactions with the environment as a whole, including works of ecopoetics.

A literary journal focused on re-imagining place. They publish prose and poetry. They charge for online submissions, but postal submissions within the US are fee-free.

Orion Magazine

Orion Magazine brings ideas, writers, photographers, and artists together, focused on nature, the environment, and culture, addressing environmental and societal issues. They generally have an additional theme for most issues. They are only open for pitches on a theme till October 15th, and are not currently open to fiction, general nonfiction, or poetry.

Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability

Focused more on the environmental and sustainable side of things, Hawk & Handsaw publishes visual art, poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction.

Green Briar Review

An online literary journey that focuses on the natural world, and often on the changing of the seasons, they publish nonfiction, cultural essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry, and photography/art. They read a limited number of fee-free submissions during their reading periods.

Split Rock Review

They are an online publication that publishes “poetry, short creative nonfiction, short fiction, comics, graphic stories, hybrids, visual poetry, photography, and art that explore place, environment, and the relationship between humans and the natural world”. They read a limited number of fee-free submissions during their reading periods.

They bill themselves as the literary journal of the environmental crisis. They publish poetry and essays.

Words for the Wild

This UK-based publisher of poetry and fiction often has an additional theme for online issues and anthologies, some focus more on ecopoetics, others more on nature.

Terrain An online journal that publishes fiction, poetry, and a variety of nonfiction, focusing on nature and the environment.

The Wayfarer

They focus on publishing contemplative voices. Not all that they publish focuses on nature and the environment, but much of what they publish, does intersect with these themes. They publish poetry and essays.

Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions , Submit, Publish, Repeat , and The 2020 Guide to Manuscript Publishers.

She regularly teaches three acclaimed courses on writing and publishing at The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish.

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Ecocriticism: An Essay
Ecocriticism: An Essay By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 27, 2016 • ( 3). Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation.
Ecocriticism
Introduction. Ecocriticism is a broad way for literary and cultural scholars to investigate the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. Ecocriticism originated as an idea called "literary ecology" ( Meeker 1972, cited under General Overviews) and was later coined as an "-ism ...
The Rise of Eco-Literature: Nature and Environmental Themes in Writing
Aug 13, 2023. Eco-literature, also known as environmental literature or ecocriticism, has emerged as a crucial genre in contemporary literature, reflecting society's growing concern for ...
Ecocriticism: A Study of Environmental Issues in Literature
In the study of literature, ecocriticism is known as a study of human-nature relations in literature, film, and other cultural expressions (James & Morel, 2018;Habib, 2011;Bracke & Corporaal, 2010 ...
Ecocriticism 101: A Basic Introduction to Ecocriticism and
In the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorised preserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophisticated array of 'earth-centred' approaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines in- cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
About the journal. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment ( ISLE) is the peer-reviewed, international, and transdisciplinary journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), published quarterly by Oxford University Press (OUP). Find out more.
Literature and Environment
Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural ...
The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Innovative essays analyse the discourse of a famous essay on the nature of evolution ('Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm' by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin), attentive to the intellectual and conceptual effects of kinds of rhetoric in the writing of science.
Environmental Writing
Introduction. Most environmental writing in the United States through the 20th century is entangled with the concept of nature—the commonplace idea of a space apart from the human world. In American environmental writing this idea of nature is reproduced in narratives of exploration and pastoral visions of the landscape during the colonial and early national periods; in 19th-century ...
Ecocriticism and Environmental Fiction
It remains a growing area of scholarship for literary studies, whether dubbed ecocriticism, green studies, or the increasingly popular and broader label of environmental humanities. The term ecocriticism was first coined in 1978 in an essay by William Rueckert, though his use of the term is fairly distinct from its later alignment with this ...
Children's environmental literature: from ecocriticism to ...
Beginning with a review of ecocriticism's scholarly and activist origins and development through the related fields of eco-composition, ecofeminist literary criticism, and environmental justice literary studies, this essay discusses children's environmental literature from the intersecting standpoints of animal studies, environmental justice, and ecofeminist literary criticism. From that ...
How to Read Environmental Literature 101
In fact, some literary circles have revisited classic environmental literature, mining that conserved knowledge in order to extract the means to cope with our current ecological dilemmas. ... The above quote from Emerson's essay Nature (1836) guides us deep into the woods of Walden. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose forested land Thoreau inhabited ...
Penguin Classics launches 'new canon' of environmental literature
Penguin Classics' Green Ideas series. Penguin set out to "trace the emerging environmental canon", moving from Aldo Leopold's A Sand Country Almanac (1949) - the forester and ...
Environmental Justice
Literature scholars Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein's 2002 edited collection, The Environmental Justice Reader, is a benchmark in the emergence of environmental justice as a humanistic field of study, encompassing essays on social movement history and ethnography, ecocritical approaches and literary engagements with ...
Full article: Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives
From literary narratives to film and music. Different forms of communication each have their own history of engaging with environmental themes. In literature, while there is a long and multifarious tradition of nature writing, the beginnings of environmental literature in a modern, Western sense is often attributed to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962.
Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis Cheryll Glotfelty
Cheryll Glotfelty begins the essay "Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis", by acknowledging the vast scale and complexity of environmental issues, from climate change to biodiversity loss, and how these problems have grown increasingly urgent. ... She traces the environmental literature from 1885 to 1993 and points out that it ...
Literature and the Environment: Fictions of Nature, Culture, and
Julian Kuzma's Landscape, Literature, and Identity: New Zealand Late Colonial Literature as Environmental Text, 1890-1921 is an intricate study of landscape in New Zealand literature and an analysis of the uses of literature in environmental history (Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Dunedin: University of Otago Schools of English and ...
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page portfolio of ...
Literary Outlets for Environmental Writing : EcoLit Books
Literary Outlets for Environmental Writing We've compiled a list of publications devoted in large part to eco-literature — essays, articles, short stories, poetry. Last updated on February 26, 2024.
25 classics of environmental writing to help with your ...
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) — Wendell Berry's elegant critique of industrial farming, written with co-author Wes Jackson. Where the Wild Things Were (2008 ...
10 Works of Environmental Literature From Around the World
Far North by Marcel Theroux. Marcel Theroux is a British writer, born in Kampala, Uganda, currently living in London. Far North is a dystopian Western novel set on the freezing cold northern frontier, basically Siberia. In the beginning, a sheriff called Makepeace patrols the land and the decaying, abandoned city by horseback.
Environmental Writing
Writing prompts will help you develop new aspects of your work-in-progress. You will also receive instructor feedback this week meant to be useful for your longer essays-in-progress. Week 3: Environmental Writing on Transboundary Topics or Manufactured Items This week you will practice environmental writing that moves beyond a single landscape ...
Environmental migration? A systematic review and meta ...
This article provides a comprehensive quantitative overview of the literature on the relationship between environmental changes and human migration. It begins with a systematic approach to bibliographic research and offers a bibliometric analysis of the empirical contributions. Specifically, we map the literature and conduct systematic research using main bibliographic databases, reviews, and ...
13 Literary Journals that Focus on Nature and the Environment
Canary. They bill themselves as the literary journal of the environmental crisis. They publish poetry and essays. Words for the Wild. This UK-based publisher of poetry and fiction often has an additional theme for online issues and anthologies, some focus more on ecopoetics, others more on nature. Terrain.
Environmental Sustainability, Essay Example
The implication of sustainability is the inherent potential for tolerance. In the context of human life, the implication of sustainability is maintaining a fair well-being on a long term basis with regard to the dimensions of environmental, social as well as economic perspectives (Bell, 2003, 115-156). The idea of stewardship in addition to ...