Environmental and Ecological Imagination

Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

Related terms: animality, attunement, concern, critical anthropomorphism, ecocriticism, ecology, environmental aesthetics, imaginary, interdependence, lifeworld, situation, sympathy.

The environmental imagination, also called the ecological imagination, involves the aesthetic, affective, and creative dimensions of awareness of environment and ecology, and of possibilities about them. Imagination facilitates experiences of more than human nature around and within us. While most evident in literature and the arts, environmental and ecological imagination are also manifest in everyday and aesthetic perception of the natural world and in scientific study. This occurs not only through the depiction of phenomena such as landscapes, animal and botanical life, weather and climate, but also through attunement to ecological interconnections which exceed immediate or direct perception.

Before elaborating further, the terms ‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ require qualification. The former has been criticised as implying an “externalised whole” separate from humanity, charged with the assumption “that we humans are at the centre of the system of nature,” and the latter may be preferred as evoking a nexus or continuum of symbiotic interconnection (Latour 2004, 241; Serres 1995, 33). Yet these terms may sometimes be used interchangeably, and in contemporary ecocritical discourse at least, ecological inter-involvements of humanity with the environment have long been acknowledged. With these qualifications, and given the historical plurality of experience, thought, and discourses to which imagination is relevant, both terms are engaged here.

The environmental or ecological imagination has been, for the most part, studied only tangentially to other domains, addressed indirectly, for example, through literary criticism and aesthetics. The concept is prominent in literary criticism due to the imaginative nature of literary description, the referential capacities of language, and the narrative and lyrical significance of place in literary works. Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination offered a study of Thoreau and other nature writing as resources for ecological thinking and practice. For Buell, the “environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination, the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it” (Buell 1995, 2). Jonathan Bate argued for the “Romantic imagination” in English poetry as serving ecological principles, and that literary imagination, with its thought- and language-experiments, is crucial to environmental recovery; for Bate “our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination” (Bate 1991, 56; 2000, 37-38). Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred demonstrated the ecological relevance of German Romanticism, a movement which, through aesthetically charged perception and conception of nature, “solicits the reader to see anew, and dwell within, the natural world” (Rigby 2004, 2). The idea that literary works “can themselves be imaginary states of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems” and serve as models for ecological orientation (Bate 2000, 250-5) is echoed in the promotion of literature as a form of “cultural ecology” (Zapf 2002). In recent decades, ecocritics have explored environmental or ecological imagination across a broad and heterogeneous literary archive, well beyond realist and romantic literature. While descriptive realism was privileged by Buell on the assumption that “the stimuli it registers… produces environmental bonding” (Buell 1995, 98), other scholars have challenged the assumption of mimetic continuity between language as a product of human culture and the environmental referent it depicts (Rigby 2014; Philips 1999). It has been argued that the emphasis on unity or beauty in nature, important in romantic ecomimesis, may foster the illusion of refuge in comforting nature and distract from its anthropogenic damage (Morton 2007).  This view echoes Theodor Adorno’s argument against idealist aesthetics, that it “assumes the attunement of even the extrahuman to the human” and that it domesticates, in refusing to recognise, “the rawness of what is unmediated by spirit.”  (Adorno 1997, 71, 63). Such criticisms notwithstanding, literary and other artistic manifestations of environmental and ecological imagination offer much to be explored, not least in reawakening awareness of interconnections, horizons and possibilities of the more-than-human beyond our immediate present perceptions or concerns.

Although literary scholars have critically engaged issues of representation, narrative framing, generic, medial, and other formal aspects of environmentally relevant literature and art, the imaginative means by which all of this occurs, and the experiences of imagining this may induce, remain understudied. As Steven Fesmire has argued in ‘The Ecological Imagination,’ while the “fundamentally imaginative” nature of ecological thinking is recognised, “little direct attention has been given to theorising about the imaginative dimension of such thinking” (Fesmire 2010, 183). The imaginative means by which the products of ecological expression come about may be as important to understand as the works themselves. For imagination is fundamental to our human ecology, the impacts of which reverberate throughout, and now disproportionately affect, the world of which we are but a part.

The neglect of imagination as such may be due not only to scholarly prioritisation of its cultural products, but to the fact that imagination itself has been insufficiently understood – its significance long contested in philosophy – and characterised in widely diverging ways. In the conceptual history, divergences arise in whether imagination is thought of as primarily reproductive or also productive, imagistic or propositional, integrated with or separate from perception, inessential or essential to rational or objective thinking (Gosetti-Ferencei 2023, 2018; Brann 2016; Kind 2013; Sparshott 1990). Since early modern philosophy, imagination has been conceived as a process of inner representation within a mind assumed, reliance on the senses notwithstanding, to be disaggregated from embodiment. Imagination may be confounded with the merely imaginary, untethered to reality, or understood, as in Sartre’s account, as the “negation of the condition of being in the world” (Sartre, 2004, 136). Like thinking itself, imagination has been conceived as a faculty exclusive to human beings. All of this would appear to diverge from recognising the material interconnections we share with nonhuman beings, from ecological relevance to a real existing world, and from overcoming anthropocentrism.

Imagination, however, has been more recently understood in different terms: in its heterogeneity, as plurimodal, as widely involved across modes of thought, as emerging from embodied situatedness, and as crucial to generating new ways of thinking and being (Gosetti-Ferencei 2018). The charge of interiority is at odds with the recently widespread recognition – already established in the philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – of the extended, situated, and embodied nature of human consciousness (Heidegger 1954; Merleau-Ponty 2002; see Noë 2004; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Haugeland 1998; Hurley 1998). Of course, we may experience imagining as internal to us, taking place in a virtual interior, and we can imagine in divergence from the reality present to us. Yet if consciousness merges in involvement with a living world, so too does our ability to imagine, both with a sense of virtual inwardness and in departure from any present reality. Rather than irrelevant to the real, our capacity to diverge imaginatively from it allows us to resist the fixation of what may be its contingent configuration, and of our cognitive habits therein, and to contribute to its reshaping (Ricoeur 2024; 1979; Gosetti-Ferencei 2018; Goodman 1978). While imagination can of course indulge merely fantastical thought, it is also necessary for freely engaging reality: “only imaginative vision,” as John Dewey argued, “elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual” (Dewey 1980, 345). In light of this, the deliberation of environmental possibilities, and thus the practice of ecological ethics and thoughtful ecology, requires imagination (Fesmire 2010). Imagination, moreover, is not wholly exclusive to human consciousness. Aristotle argued that animals think with the use of imagination, in pursuing goals in their absence of stimuli to perception, and Jakob von Uexküll theorised the subjectivity of the animal Innenwelt as internally modelling its Umwelt or environmental world (Aristotle, De Anima 429a5–8; Uexküll 2010; 1909). More recent studies recognise animal imagination, to different degrees of complexity, in activities that involve pretence, play, or self-awareness (Mitchell 2011; Pellegrini and Smith 2005).

Even the ‘imaginary’ may be understood as emerging from the material reception of the environment. In Poetics of Space, Bachelard theorises the primal, embodied experience of physical spaces as an origin of poetic imagery, and in other works describes environmental elements – earth, water, fire, and air – as embodied in the ‘material imagination’ (Bachelard 1964; 2002; 2021, 3). So understood, the environmental imaginary is not only a source of reverie and poetic creation. It also reveals interconnection through imagination between what early modern philosophy regarded as the disaggregated realms of mind and matter.

In addition to representing or evoking phenomena and their interrelations, environmental imagination may enable us to reach beyond the usual boundaries of our own human experience in efforts to explore perspectives of nonhuman beings. While Thomas Nagel famously argued, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat (or any other being very different from ourselves), we can at least intuit how a bat’s experience might be different from our own by considering its capacities for flight and echolocation (Nagel 1974). Such shifting of perspective may support theoretical understanding, as in Uexküll’s efforts to characterise the Umwelten of animals. Of an oak tree, for example, Uexküll asks us to imagine the diverging perspectives that would pertain to a forest ranger or a child, a fox, owl, or insect; each would regard the oak tree differently according to their relative species and developmental characteristics (2010, 126-132). The meadow, too, would be lived differently by a field mouse, dragonfly, butterfly, snail, blade of grass, bee, or human. What we regard as the same world from a human perspective bears heterogeneous meaning.

While there are significant limits to the phenomenological speculation this invites – since it would be necessarily derivative of a human perspective (see Toadvine 2007) – imagination may also facilitate explicitly fictional engagements beyond the human. Among many examples in literature are Franz Kafka’s modernist short stories, including ‘Investigations of a Dog,’ which describes an environment from a dog’s perspective without reference to any recognized human presence, and ‘A Report to an Academy,’ in which a chimpanzee undergoes a rapid evolution to the intellectual capacities of an average human being, in ironic contrast to his observations of humans (Kafka 1971). Kafka’s stories could hardly be thought to convey with any accuracy ‘what it is like’ to be a dog or a chimpanzee, yet the works achieve through imagined contrast a critical exposure of the human perspective and its limits, in this way challenging human exceptionalism. While Deleuze and Guattari describe such efforts as a mode of ‘becoming-animal of the human,’ overriding if not eliminating species difference, Merleau-Ponty recognizes ‘how living beings proceed to trace in their environment, by the way they act or behave, their very own vision of things,’ their own ‘interiority’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 35; Merleau-Ponty 2004, 75). Perhaps between these approaches, literary and other attempts to imagine animal perspectives may awaken a sense of what, in his late work, Merleau-Ponty calls ‘interanimality ‘(Merleau-Ponty 1968, 172; 2003, 189), the intertwining or ‘Ineinander with animal and nature’ that remains within us as beings whose subjectivity is grounded in corporeality (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 208).

Environmental imagination is involved in the aesthetic experience of the natural world apart from its literary or other artistic representation. Ecological attunement has been promoted, in Schillerian terms, as a new aesthetic education of humanity, to be achieved in part through awareness of our own corporeal-sensuous “creatureliness [Kreatürlichkeit]” (Böhme 1989, 15). In contrast to a Kantian model of disinterested contemplation of nature as an object of beauty, an aesthetics of engagement affirms immersion in the environment, promoting ambient involvement rather than a fixed perspective from which nature would be framed (Berleant 2005; 1992). Phenomenological attention to nature emphasises embodied experience of the senses in their imaginative expansion beyond the immediately evidential. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes imagination as “an attribute of the senses themselves,” namely “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible” (Abram 1996, 44). Imagination may facilitate aesthetic appreciation of nature in exploration of perspectives, projective elaborations upon, and amplification of, what is given in perception, and in facilitating revelatory, and sometimes ecologically relevant, discoveries (Brady 1998, 143-44).  As an example of imaginative amplification, Emily Brady quotes from the landscape painter Andrew Wyeth, for whom: ‘A white mussel shell on a gravel bank in Maine is thrilling to me because it's all the sea – the gull that brought it there, the rain, the sun that bleached it there by a stand of spruce woods.’ (Wyeth 1973, 55, cited Brady 1998, 147). What is given to immediate perception is here amplified through images of ecological interconnection with beings or elements that are not.  In his own study of artistic imagination, Merleau-Ponty cited the painter Paul Klee, who felt that, as he was painting the forest, ‘it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me’ (Charbonnier 1959, cited Merleau-Ponty 1964, 31). Rather than projecting and synthesising knowledge of associative connections, imagination, on this account, invites expanded receptivity, perhaps exposing the relativity of human agency within an environmental context.

A paradigmatic example of imaginative ecological perception is offered by Henry David Thoreau, who in Walden describes his observation of a thawing sandbank. Thoreau discovers the Goethean pattern of a leaf as the proliferative template of natural formations (Thoreau 1899, 321-24). Thoreau describes the leaf as a natural ‘prototype’ for the shape of various elements in nature, including atoms, ice crystals, feathers and wings of birds, the structure of a tree and of rivers. Imagining this primal template for natural formations allows Thoreau, as in Goethe’s formulation of the primal leaf, to intuit underlying patterns across apparently disparate phenomena. This insight is echoed by Uexküll who cites, as an example of the resonant patterns in nature, the path a birch-leaf roller insect cuts in a leaf and the migratory path of birds between northern and southern poles (Uexküll 2010, 122-23), and by Gregory Bateson, who identifies analogies among the bilateral symmetry of an animal body, the arrangement of leaves in a plant, and the grammar of a sentence (Bateson 1979). Such imaginative recognition of ecological analogies may be ancient, as evidenced in prehistoric art. Early humans may have registered knowledge of the stars in their paintings, possibly mapping star clusters, equinoxes and other astronomical observations onto the shapes of animals (see Gosetti-Ferencei 2023, 23-27; Sweatman and Coombs 2018). In such observations, the imagination is not merely projecting onto, but invited by, to quote Dewey again, ‘possibilities interwoven with the texture’ of what is present. The responsive nature of such thinking to the world’s own material influences has been brilliantly explored in vital materialist studies of ecological writing (Bennett 2020; 2009).

Apart from literary and artistic representation and the aesthetic perception of nature, imagination is involved in scientific ecology, which demands objective analyses and the use of cognitive capacities not typically associated with imagination.  While imagination in many contexts can be at odds with the epistemic constraints of science, imagination has been recognised as a necessary part of scientific thinking (see Murphy 2022; Camp 2020; Gosetti-Ferencei 2018, 117-156; Kandel 2016; Jacob 2001). Imagination is involved in the generation of hypotheses as it affords consideration of possibilities, in drawing analogies across disparate phenomena that may illuminate their interconnections, and in envisioning models that transform information into explanatory thought. Metaphors, image schema, and models have been recognised as fundamental to scientific theory (Ricoeur 2024, 259–274; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Black 1962, 219-243). Specific to ecological imagination, Fesmire has examined a range of core operational metaphors, including in the conception of an ecosystem itself as a web, network, fabric, (biotic) community, container, field pattern, intertwining of strands, organism or superorganism, while relations therein are recognised through metaphors of cycles, flows, and so on. In such engagements, “metaphors are not merely linguistic ornaments. They operate together to form part of the metaphorical logic of ecological thinking” (Fesmire 2010, 193). It should be noted that ecological thinkers have long considered the role of imagination in their own studies. Goethe, whose empirical, theoretical, and poetic efforts helped establish an ecological as opposed to merely mechanistic understanding of nature, argued that imagination is required to grasp its metamorphic development (Goethe FA24, 615, FA36, 152). Sustained observation must be aided by imagination to see nature as an interconnected, self-transforming and self-differentiating system (see Gosetti-Ferencei 2025; Hennigfeld 2015; Pfau 2010; Förster 2001). Bateson echoed Goethe in calling for ‘an appropriate synchrony or harmony between rigour and imagination’ (Bateson 1979, 223).

Beyond all of this, imagination facilitates consideration of possible environmental and ecological futures, allowing us to envision the unfolding or as yet unrealised consequences of our current practices, and to consider alternative ways of being that could mitigate them. The notion of environmental or ecological imagination itself emerged with the recognition of human endangerment of the nonhuman world. In The City and the Country, Raymond Williams traced the rise of an environmental consciousness, or an “active sympathy” with nature in poetic responses to encroaching industrialisation (1973, 141). Bruno Latour contended that the “concern for environment begins when there is no more environment”, and scholars have subsequently argued that in the absence of an environmental crisis, “there might be no ‘environmental imagination’” (Latour 58; Philips 1999, 598). Environmental or ecological imagination is requisite in any consideration of how we might regard and interact within a world in which we are inextricably situated, and to which we may respond in damaging or ameliorative ways.

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