Outdoor Fiction

This is a big question, and one that is at the heart of my summer research! Ecocriticism, the literary movement that seeks to explore the roles of nature in a text, has a lot to say about this. There aren't any definitive answers, but I thought it might be interesting to start unpacking this question and offer an opinion.  What does the theory say?  As mentioned, one of the key debates covered by ecocriticism is how far artistic and cultural discourse can actually prove valuable to solving the climate crisis. Greg Garrard discusses and summarizes some of this this in his book Ecocriticism to suggest that, by ecocriticism's currently dominating ideas, ecocritical theory, environmental writing, and art cannot - and should not -  develop new scientific ecological understanding. The reasons for this are multiple. Most notably, literary studies cannot offer new quantitative research to the ecological sciences. Equally, critics such as Timothy Morton suggest that viewing nature as an