Episode 5: Nature in Crisis; Creativity as Cure

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This fifth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. John discusses how poetry helps us to negotiate the legacies of Darwin’s discoveries and the Pre-Raphaelites’ shaping of the culture of Victorian science (and vice versa). He introduces us to the Synopsis Network, which explores art in natural history museums, to the Ruskin Land project in the Wyre Forest, and to his more recent work responding to COP26 from an humanities perspective. We also debate the importance of method to disciplines.

At the end of the episode, you can hear John read ‘Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association’ from ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Episode resources (in order of appearance):
• Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Such a pair!”: The Twin Lives of Humans and Trees’, Hay Festival 2019
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1995)
• Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (2015)
• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)
• Isabelle Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018)
• Russell Foster, Understanding the Impact of Sleep Loss in the Industrial Era (2018)
• Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (1846)
• John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1985)
• The Symbiosis Network
• Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Guild of St George
• John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
• The Kogi people, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1990)
• The Kogi people, Aluna (2012)
• The Germ (1850)
• John Holmes, ‘Rebels art and science: the empirical drive of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Nature 562, 490-491 (2018)
• Charles Allston Collins, Covent Thoughts (1850-51)
• William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851-53)
• The Fairy Creek Blockcade
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
• Alberta’s Energy “War Room” takes on a Netflix family cartoon
• Bigfoot Family (2020)
• Michael E. Mann tweet 17th October 2020
• Yu-Tzu Wu et al., Perceived and objective availability of green and blue spaces and quality of life in people with dementia: results from the IDEAL programme (2021)