Laura Moss (BA, U of Toronto; MA U of Guelph, PhD Queen’s U) is Professor of English at UBC where she teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures, particularly those of Africa. Her current book project is entitled “Necessary to Act: Canadian Environmental Art, Literature, and Creative Activism.”

Taking a climate justice approach, she asks what language and literature can do in the climate crisis that can’t be achieved in other disciplines and media. Mindful that, as Nishnabeeg scholar and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says, “we should be thinking of climate change as part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society,” this project studies the situated histories of settler-colonialism, resource extraction, and creative activism. The book consists of five substantive chapters: on Petrography, Parables, and Protest in the Oilsands; Documentary Theatre, Experimental Poetry, and the Genetic Modification of Seeds; Interconnectedness and Fictions of the Pacific Garbage Gyre; Dystopias, Utopias, and Apocalypic Stories of Deforestation; and Poetics, Fluid Collaborations, and Water.

This book explores the long history of creative activism in Canada—both literary and embodied. Poet Archibald Lampman wrote about the dangers of deforestation in the 1890s, story writer P.K. Page speculated about global warming in the 1970s, and novelist Ruth Ozeki published fiction about the dangers of factory farming and GMO agriculture in the early 2000s.  For some, however, activism is both embedded in their artistic practice and in physical action. Land defender and poet Rita Wong, for instance, was engaged in peaceful protest in 2018 at Trans Mountain’s Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby when she was arrested and later sentenced to 28 days in prison. In her “Notes from Prison” Wong explains:

“Our actions were motivated by necessity due to climate crisis… Since the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to protect us despite full knowledge of this emergency, it became necessary to act.”

This book project considers a range of ways that writers and artists have “acted” creatively in response to the changing environment over the past 150 years in Canada. The work is part literary history of environmental commentary and part explication of a range of forms of literary protest. Her task is to attend to thinkers, artists, and writers who are formulating a cultural politics out of the environment’s disruptive power.