Hopping, Crawling, Hiding: Creatural Movements on the Path to Climate Emergency

Many of the best works of recent literary and creative prose to engage with the climate emergency and extinction risks do so by telling the stories of human lives intricately and often magically woven together with the lives of nonhuman animals. Building on eco-critical research around the practice of a “creatural writing,” I look at the movements both human and nonhuman beings take along “creatural paths” in the ficto-criticism of Joshua Lobb’s The Flight of Birds; the ways in which both animals and writing “hide” inside Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching; and trace the elusive paths of a Woolly Rat around the ark narrative of Abi Curtis’s apocalyptic Water and Glass as an exploration of nonhuman agency and resistance to our climate and animal emergencies.

I argue that these works, foregrounding as they do the embodied movement of sentient beings, are responses to the specific corporeal nature of the threat we face as a species from climate disaster, a reckoning with our bodily alienation from the nonhuman world. In moving along “creatural paths” that are (or imagine) embodied encounters with nonhuman others, these works offer an encounter with this reckoning we need as a species if we are to respond appropriately to the emergencies we face, and, focusing on the production as well as the reception of texts, perhaps such forms of literary production are a way to nurture embodied practices to help us admit we are, and always have been, vulnerable bodies dependent on our environment.

I wish to argue for a clear political value of such texts. While perhaps it is harder today than in Anna Sewell’s time for an individual text of literature to “change the world,” what these, and other, texts do, in a time of proliferating animal voices and nonhuman agency, offer a powerful intervention in the value of non-dominant and unconventional narrative. Developing Anat Pick’s idea of “creaturely poetics” with some broader work in speculative futures that allow us to better question dominant human-centred narratives of the climate emergency and Anthropocene, I suggest creatureliness is a political term with agency that can help us adapt and account for better human responses to climate crises. While others, such as Kathryn Yussof, have argued for either “a billion black Anthropocenes or none” I also take up similar lines to suggest, building on the world of eco-literate critics such as Carol Adams, Roman Bartosch, and others, that we have a trillion animal emergencies wrapped up inside the climate emergency. The way to undo this knot is, I argue, to follow creatural paths, the hopping, crawling, and hiding of animals in texts that resist and re-appropriate the body for nonhuman and human survival under a crisis light.