“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” David Wallace-Wells famously opened his bestselling 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, a holistic examination of climate change and the dire consequences of the Anthropocene: drought, fire, flooding, species extinction, famine, disease, climate injustice, government destabilization, mass human migration, war, and global economic collapse. Each year, signs of the rapidly changing environment abound with increasingly severe climate catastrophes and louder scientific alarms. With the developing environmental disaster, often called an existential crisis by world leaders, the human response has been too slow or even counterproductive, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted in a statement in conjunction with the latest distressing UN report in 2022, that major carbon producers are “adding fuel to the flames by continuing to invest in climate-choking industries . . . we are already perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate effects." As we enter the Sixth Extinction, the confluence of impending disaster and debilitating inaction has created higher and higher states of anxiety throughout the world.
This special issue of American Literatures will explore the question: how has the 21st century literature of the Americas responded to the greatest crisis in human history? Given the broad implications of the Anthropocene, contemporary eco-literature intersects with many ideas: ecocriticism, environmental justice, ecofeminism, ecoethics, place, and ethnic—particularly indigenous—literature. This issue of AmLit aims to explore responses to the ecological disasters posed by the Anthropocene in contemporary fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and other relevant literary genres.