The anxieties of the 1950s intensified as the Cold War heated up. JFK ’s election promised a New Frontier, and then his assassination extinguished that flame. On the one hand, the civil rights, Chicano (El Movimiento), women’s, student democracy, labor union, environmental, and public interest movements of the 1960s promoted a robust government response in which Congress passed hundreds of new laws to address the concerns raised by the movements. LBJ’s Great Society also included an array of social program that addressed the extraordinary level of poverty in the country. On the other hand, the Vietnam War significantly dampened the hopes for a Great Society as tensions arose between those for and against our continued presence in Vietnam, weakened trust in government. The political movements added to this lack of trust when they supported legal procedures to make sure that government did its job. As faith in government receded, and the reaction to the extraordinary expansion of government intensified, the table was set for a new allegiance to a market economy.

Economic, technological, and demographic changes after World War II created new pressures on species, habitats, and human environments. Concerns about human impacts on the environment mounted. Rachel Carson, Charles Elton, Barry Commoner, and others articulated concerns about pesticides and other harmful substances in air and water, introduced species, escalating extinction rates, and the modification and fragmentation of habitats. Ecologists, economists, and philosophers like Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lynne White, Norman Myers, and Arne Naess attributed these problems to varied causes, including population growth, tragedies of the commons, excessive resource consumption and disparities in consumption, militarism, the misuse of science and technology, externalities, and anthropocentrism. In response to these developments and to increasing awareness of the limitations of utilitarian conservation, a preservationist approach to conservation that seeks to protect species and regardless of their economic value became prominent.

This chapter uses the lens of political ecology and environmental history to interrogate the use of pesticides in tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1945 to 1980, and their effects on the human body, the body politic and the natural environment. It traces the growth of pesticide use from the end of the Second World War, which saw a turning point in the global pesticides’ regime as crop chemicals such as DDT became widespread. It explores the problems that arose with the use of these pesticides and connects this narrative with the various global debates on ‘environmentalism’ that arose in the 1960s, and how this impacted on the evolution of legislation and policies to curtail pesticide use in tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia. The chapter constructs a contextual reading of Silent Spring in Southern Rhodesia and Africa.

In Chapter 14, “Nature, Gender, and Sexuality,” Greta Gaard constructs a genealogy feminist ecocriticism and ecofeminist literary criticism. Beginning with foundational figures like Rachel Carson, Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, and Annette Kolodny (to whom the chapter is dedicated), Gaard displays the challenges that many women faced when establishing the field(s) and giving voice to ecofeminist ideas. Analyzing works by Freya Mathews, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, among many others, Gaard reveals the richly intersectional nature of contemporary ecofeminist criticism and feminist ecocriticism, which explore and develop out of the many junctures of gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and race.

In “Nature in the Anthropocene,” Hiltner contends that we must reject nostalgic attempts to reconstruct a lost harmony with nature that never really existed, such as narratives of Eden and the Golden Age, in favor of a sustainable future-oriented version of nature. Nature in the Anthropocene, Hiltner argues, must be a nature we consciously craft using the tools of modern science and technology. Exploring the classical works of Hesiod and Ovid, as well as the Judeo/Christian/Muslim story of Eden, Hiltner foregrounds how nostalgic visions of harmony with nature still structure much of the environmentalist thinking of the present. Using early modern examples, Hiltner shows how humanity has long grappled with environmental problems of its own creation. The chapter ultimately turns to the example of Rachel Carson to illustrate a scientifically informed approach to forging a more livable and sustainable concept of nature.

This chapter considers the shifting meanings and capacities of American and British seasonal literature and media in light of anthropogenic climate change. Via two case studies, it compares seasonal work before and after widespread concerns about altered seasonal patterns in the United States and Europe. Beginning with a discussion of the seasonal aspects of Rachel Carson’s writing – most notably her sea trilogy – and its literary contexts, this chapter examines seasonal prose produced prior to the climate crisis. It also reflects on contemporary scholars’ tendency to revisit Carson’s work when ruminating on climate change, suggesting a nostalgia for seasonal reassurance. The chapter then turns to the contemporary production of seasonal media, using the BBC series Springwatch as a second case study. Placing Springwatch within a British tradition of seasonal broadcasting, it analyses the intersection of environmental and cultural seasonality in this series. As a show produced during a period of heightened climate anxiety, Springwatch actively works to generate seasonal data for climate research in the United Kingdom. In this sense, seasonal media unfolding within – and responding to – perceptible season creep can route seasonal sentimentality into the observation of phenological change.

The chief place Norwegian ecologists would meet, train their students, and explore the environment was The High Mountain Ecology Research Station, established at Finse in 1965 and located in one of the most beautiful mountain regions of Norway. When finished in 1972 it was, perhaps, the largest and most expensive ecological research station in Europe. The formative years of ecological research in Norway took place at Finse and were supported by ecologists such as Arne Semb-Johansson, Eilif Dahl, Rolf Vik, Eivind Østbye, and the International Biological Program. The picturesque Research Station at Finse was idyllic in comparison to the ecological destruction described in a growing body of environmental literature. Propelled by the publication of Rachel Carson’s warning against pesticides in Silent Spring (1962), the ecologists at Finse became powerful lobbyists in favor of large-scale national parks in the nation’s periphery. They sought an “eco-politics” founded on science, as our common future depended on the development of a “steady-state” social economy that would mirror the steady-state balance of the zero-growth economy of nature at Finse.

Richard Kerridge describes the literary, cultural and scientific context of Plath’s interest in wild animals, landscape, climate and pollution. The letters and journals show that this interest was intense, but also that it was not scientific or systematic, even in a rudimentary way. Plath’s strategy was to preserve the dramatic immediacy of unexpected encounters with wildlife, rather than frame those encounters with scientific information. Nevertheless, an emergent ecological consciousness and environmental concern are evident in her writing. Kerridge provides the historical and scientific background for this concern, by outlining the major conceptual shifts that were taking place in ecological science, the recent history of wild nature in literature, and some of the changing popular attitudes in Britain and the USA.