Green Letters special issue CFP

The Many Languages of Climate Change: Environmental Humanities, Comparative Literature, and Multilingualism

Co-editors: Claudia Dellacasa & Martin Schauss (University of Glasgow)

In Japanese, samui desu can equally mean ‘I am cold’ and ‘it is cold’, with no clear demarcation between environmental conditions and subjective experiences of them (Berque 1986). Most Germanic languages possess impersonal verbs for phenomena like storms or fog, Slavic languages only use weather verbs in archaic formations, while Romance languages occupy an intermediary position, with French, Italian and Spanish having impersonal verbs for precipitations like rain, drizzle, and hail, and hardly any for other phenomena (Paykin and Meulleman 2023). Examples such as these serve as a reminder that language doesn’t just mediate human relationships with more-than-human beings, nature, and climates; it fundamentally shapes and organises these relationships and the knowledge-formations that surround them. With the origins of the current environmental crisis being almost indisputably recognised as anthropogenic, and given the growing awareness that ‘there is no such thing as a wholly “natural” disaster’ (Rigby 2014: 216), it is increasingly relevant to reflect on the role that human languages and conceptualisations play in relation to more or less exceptional, human-induced meteorological events, ecosystemic imbalances, environmental (in)justices, species loss and degradation. In other words, it is now crucial to ask how different languages – and by extension different cultural contexts and activist traditions – approach, reify, or challenge the complex reality of environmental changes.

This special issue looks into the critical value that the various modes of inquiry characterising Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, and Translation Studies can create for research in ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. Ecocriticism, studies of cli-fi or Anthropocene fiction (Trexler 2015), Energy Humanities and Blue Humanities – these approaches all regularly engage in literary comparison or adopt world literature frameworks. But they don’t necessarily reflect on the specific affordances that are created by putting into conversation distinct linguistic, cultural and/or national contexts. This special issue seeks contributions that illuminate how ecological issues exist in relation to – or are indeed co-produced by – these contexts. It aims to create a space where different traditions of environmental writing/thought and climate activism are brought together or juxtaposed, in order to delineate commonalities and specificities of global approaches to present and past environmental crises.

Prospective contributions might take into account, for example, the politics of translation, intercultural encounters, histories of migration, language extinction, and/or the movement between languages on local, national, and global levels, within the specific context of anthropogenic environmental crises. While climate change communication cuts across political, social, and financial agendas all over the world (Nerlich et al. 2010), this issue aims to identify the relevance of linguistic and cultural contexts for such discourses. The role of language in the climate change debate has indeed been discussed (Fløttum 2017), but little space has been given so far to the role of languages – plural, potentially including more-than-human forms of expression – and to the particular added value of comparative linguistic and cultural approaches. For instance, would it be useful to conceive of language acquisition as an exceptional form of accumulation that contrasts toxic forms of extractivism, cultural and environmental? Conversely, how do the disciplines of Comparative Literature, Translation, and Modern Languages need to adapt in the context of global environmental crisis? What might be the value of Comparative Literature reconceiving itself as Comparative Environments?

Contributions to the special issue may consider the following prompts, but are not limited to them:

• Comparative environments
• Translating climate change
• Languages of ecology
• Comparative analyses of literatures/art forms emerging from places with distinct histories of environmental politics and/or activism
• Critical reflections on comparative approaches/methodologies in the Environmental Humanities
• Politics of translation and cross-linguistic encounters informing environmental cultures
• Linguistic and cultural border-crossings shaping eco-conscious forms
• Literatures highlighting the importance of language in ecological thinking
• Ecopoetics as multilingual or cross-lingual
• Species extinction and language extinction
• Indigenous languages of ecology
• Language of ecology and climate change across different cultural contexts (for instance, etymologies, histories, and cultural uses of key terms like “nature,” “human,” “animal,” “climate,”…)
• Ecological lexicons
• Different languages of the ecological commons
• Ways in which different linguistic/cultural contexts solicit or favour different forms of environmental writing
• Environmental aesthetics across different cultural forms and media
• Cultural and/or linguistic affects of climate change
• Comparative Literature in conversation with planetary and/or worlded conceptualisations of literature and climate change
• Comparative readings of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial environmental contexts
• Concepts of literary and/or linguistic ecosystems and cultural biodiversity across different contexts
• Role of language learning and teaching in climate education
• Academic contexts in different countries negotiating ecocriticism and environmental scholarship in relation to arts and culture

Timeline:

Please send enquiries and abstracts of up to 500 words to the guest editors (Claudia Dellacasa and Martin Schauss) at comparativeclimates@gmail.com by 1 June 2026.

If brought forward, full manuscripts of 7,000 words will be expected by 1 December 2026.

Works Cited:

Berque, Augustin. 1986. ‘The Sense of Nature and Its Relation to Space in Japan’, in Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, ed. by J. Hendry and J. Webber (Jaso), pp. 100–10.

Fløttum, Kjersti (ed.). 2017. The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate (Routledge).

Nerlich, Brigitte, Nelya Koteyko, and Brian Brown. 2010. ‘Theory and Language of Climate Change Communication’, WIREs Climate Change, vol. 1, n. 1, pp. 97–110.

Paykin, Katya, and Machteld Meulleman. 2023. ‘Linguistics of Weather: neglected phenomena, neglected languages, neglected constructions’, 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Athens).

Rigby, Kate. 2014. ‘Confronting Catastrophe: Ecocriticism in a Warming World’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Environment, ed. by L. Westling (Cambridge University Press), pp. 212–25.

Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fiction: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (University of Virginia Press).