Beyond Nature Writing: The Dark Mountain Project and The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights Available to Purchase

Nature writing has long been a revered yet ideologically disputed literary genre and mode. Oscillating between accusations of (bourgeois) escapism and environmental anarchism, nature writing has always been tapping into political debates and agendas. My review seeks to introduce two journal publications that contribute in a wider sense to nature and ecological writing and express their utopian visions in manifestos that deserve attention.

Nature writing (and its literary predecessor, the pastoral) has served as a proxy for topical social and political debates about ecological responsibility, sustainability, and civilization, but more so, about humanness, evolution, and human society. Calling upon mythological resonances such as the Golden Age, Eden, Arcadia, and Albion, a certain strand of the genre carries a profoundly utopian dimension. This prelapsarian utopianism is juxtaposed by the dystopian vision...