Challenging 'far-right ecologism' through contemporary environmental fiction

在过去的十年里，英国的自然写作通过罗伯特·麦克法兰、罗杰·迪肯等人的作品重新流行起来。“新自然写作”是格兰塔在2008年的同名文集中创造的一个术语，它的出现导致了植物学、地质学和鸟类学写作的爆炸式增长，以及大量新的环境小说。这些体裁与日益高涨的生态行动主义同步发展，自然写作的保护主义原则与研究、代表和保护自然世界的动力重叠。然而，生态保护的原则也导致了另一种环保主义现象的复苏，即“极右生态主义”（FRE）。极右翼生态主义将环保主义重新定义为围绕全球主义、孤立主义和民族文化纯洁性等问题展开的政治战场。民粹主义右翼团体和激进的网络社区推动了它的复兴，28岁的布伦顿·塔兰特在新西兰克赖斯特彻奇谋杀51人之前，在网上分享了他的自由主义宣言“伟大的替代”。离英国更近的地方，英国景观的美学继续被极右翼团体政治化，比如爱国选择党（the Patriotic Alternative），该党于2020年7月在马姆托尔（Peak District）的山顶上展开了一个巨大的“白人的命也是命”横幅，以抗议国民信托组织。我希望我的创造性和批判性作品能够探索和挑战这种特殊形式的环境激进主义的文学根源。我的研究目的是建立在现有的自由文学和英国自然写作的阅读，找到共同的根源，交叉点和冲突点，以产生一个6万字的小说和2万字的批判性反思。通过我的作品，我将利用当代英国自然小说的主题和主题来创作第一部直接解决我们社会中自由森林问题的原创长篇小说。

In the past ten years, British nature writing has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity through the works of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and others. The emergence of 'The New Nature Writing', a term coined in Granta's 2008 collection of the same name, has led to an explosion of botanical, geological and ornithological writing, as well as a wealth of new environmental fiction. These genres continue to grow side-by-side with rising ecological activism, where nature writing's conservationist principles overlap with a drive to study, represent and protect the natural world. However, principles of ecological conservation have also led to the resurgence of another environmentalist phenomenon, that of 'far-right ecologism' (FRE). Far-right ecologism reframes conservationism as a political battleground fought on issues of globalism, isolationism and ethno-cultural purity. Its resurgence has been fuelled both by populist right-wing groups and by the same radical online communities with which twenty-eight year old Brenton Tarrant shared his FRE manifesto 'The Great Replacement' before murdering fifty-one people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Closer to the home, the aesthetics of the English landscape continue to be politicised by far-right groups such as The Patriotic Alternative, who in July 2020 unfurled a giant White Lives Matter banner at the summit of Mam Tor (Peak District) in protest against the National Trust. It is the literary roots of this particular form of environmental radicalism that I want my creative and critical work to explore and challenge. My research aims to build on existing readings of both FRE and British nature writing, locating common roots, intersections and points of conflict, in order to produce a 60,000-word novel and 20,000-word critical reflection. Through my work I will utilise the themes and motifs of contemporary British nature fiction to create the first piece of original longer fiction that directly addresses issues of FRE in our society.