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In the first of a two-part episode on the Environmental Humanities, host Roxana talks with Prof. Mark Bould about climate change subtexts, Sharknado, and the utopian potential of speculative fiction.
Mark Bould is Professor of Film and Literature at UWE Bristol and author of The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (Verso, 2021). In 2016 he was awarded the SFRA Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award for Critical Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Roxie:
Hello and welcome back to the Movable Type podcast brought to you by University College London, movable type is a graduate peer reviewed journal edited every year by PhD students from the English department at UCL. Please be sure to follow us on social media to stay up to date on our latest issue, new episode releases and more. We are on Twitter at movable type UCL Instagram at mobile type under score, UCL and Facebook at MoveableType. And if you want to browse our latest issue while you listen, head on over. This month we looked at the fascinating multidisciplinary field of environmental humanities. We understand the concept of environmental humanities is in itself quite complicated and encompasses countless areas of research. Therefore we have aimed to provide a broad overview of some of its infinite possibilities. Though far from comprehensive, we hope the conversations in this episode will inspire many more and be of interest to both people already familiar with and completely new to, the topics covered before we start an exciting announcement. We had so much to share with you, we decided to make this a two part episode.
First up, our interview with Mark pulled Professor of Film and Literature at UW, Bristol, and major figure in science fiction scholarship. In 2016 he was awarded the program Lifetime Achievement Award for critical contributions to the study of science fiction and fantasy. Today we chat with him about his latest book, The Anthropocene, Unconscious, Climate Catastrophe Culture, published by Verso in 2021.
Hi Mark, thank you for being here with us today. Your book is really amazing, so thank you for coming on. How are you today?
Mark:
I'm very good and feel better for hearing that people are enjoying the book. It was a weird experience writing it an absolute pleasure to be here.
Roxie:
Thank you, how can we know it is really, really fun book, but to start us off so the Anthropocene unconscious pushes back against Ghosh's claim that literary fiction has ignored climate change? And you often bring up Fredric Jameson's concept of rewriting the text in terms of a particular master code, which I found such a useful analogy, so for people who have not read it yet, and will of course be compelled to read your book right after this interview, can you outline the core of this process of uncovering the Anthropocene unconscious and give us a brief overview.
Mark:
Yeah, absolutely, and I started off with Amitabh Ghosh, 'cause I I find his book, The Great Derangement fascinating and you know, it's one of those books that I agree with every other day. And then I'm frustrated by on the in between days and he has this argument that serious literary fiction as he calls it I call it mundane fiction throughout. That's an old science fiction fandom. Homme has ignored climate change. It's not able to deal with the way the way the novel is developed, particularly in English. Homme has been to focus down on very specific social economic class. Locations and generally small locations, and in doing so it's lost the capacity of the romance or the epic to deal with large scale. Uhm settings, global settings and long periods of time as well and of course there are exceptions to that. But it's not an absolute uniform pattern, so I was very provoked by this argument, which I find largely - but having grown up reading probably far more science fiction than mundane fiction, and I found this also really odd way of reading those novels, part of that also ties into, as you say, Fredric Jameson, and also Pierre Macherey's. Reading of texts as possessing an unconscious around that. Uhm, we can only ever infer. But one of the tools we can use to draw out their unconscious, reading from a specifically designated perspective. So rather than reading innocently naively or from with our own within our own unconscious situatedness we bring in, you can bring in an idea. And read through filter the text through that idea and with Jameson it's always the mode of production so, for him, the textual unconscious is always about the way capitalism is shaping the fiction and the ideological realm in which the fiction operates. But, you know, one of the tricks I learned very early on when I first encountered queer film theory back in, I don't know, the early 90s was to watch films, but don't assume everybody in the film is straight. And that radically transforms your understanding of you know what seemed like very straightforward, heterosexual heterosexist, heteronormative movies, and I give some examples of that very briefly in the book, but the one that struck me was, you know, the ending of die hard and John Mcclane comes out of the skyscraper is finally reunited with the the policeman or finally united with the policeman he's been talking to, and this is kind of rising strings as their eyes meet across the crowded car park, John Mcclane's wife, who has not been using the Mcclane surname in her new job, is edged out of the frame completely, and Shasta thrust herself back into the frame and McLain introduces her by her by her name. Hologon areas, and she insists she's Holly Mcclane. This kind of she senses there's something going on between these men. And of course, the whole sequence ends with one of the killers, one of the supposed terrorists emerging from the building, and this feminized disempowered black cop able to pull out his large weapon and discharge it to save Bruce. And of course, this is incredibly rich queer reading. So what I do with the book is very, very similar. I make this opening wager that all contemporary culture is in some way about climate change and the task you set yourself is to read from the perspective of climate change being there evident in the traces the unconscious of the text you're looking at. So I deliberately exclude for the most part science fiction I deliberately exclude for the most part, climate fiction, which is one of those categories I don't quite understand the usefulness of and instead look at a wide range of literary texts of what I think is parallel to texts or movies or comics and see where we can find climate speaking to us in those texts, and I set myself very deliberately the challenge early on that the conclusion was going to be about the fast and Furious franchise and we need to end by going right into the kind of heart of the Petro cultural beast and see what we can find in it of use for us in this current.
Roxie:
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean hearing that. How can you not want to read the text? And actually it's funny that you mentioned that that's the title like you came up with the conclusion and you knew it was going to be about the fast and furious because even the title, the dialectic story of Dominic Toretto is just - it grabs you right away.
Mark:
Yeah, it's one of those lovely moments in the long drawn out process of writing the books right in the book where I had a block of uhm, research time and then a long stretch before I could come back to. Where I was stuck at how I was going to end the book. I was just looking through my notes and like, oh, I've already written the last line for the book. I just need to work to that. I'd completely forgotten that I knew where I was ending.
Roxie:
That sounds like an amazing advice for any writing process. I'm sure our listeners will very much appreciate it.
Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. Don't discard those notes in those drafts.
Roxie:
So on the topic of the text selection you have established, you've very decidedly stayed away from most sci-fi and clay. If I but yeah, the the texts are like this selection is so delightfully omnivorous it ranges from Sharknado to Jane Austen and a myriad of stuff in between. And I think I think. And you brought this up, it is very fitting to current models of littering cultural analysis where, you know we're looking at cultural production in general, but how did you end up choosing what text to focus on? Because if there is such a vast range of text you can draw. How do you make the cut?
Mark:
It it was quite a curious process, some of it is driven by Ghosh. He explicitly says in his book that Paul Kingsnorth, Arundathi Roy and himself - people who come in their non fiction write a lot about climate, never address it in their fiction. This is before his most recent novel Gun Island came out so I took that as a challenge. I'm going to look at those three authors and draw out climate change, or Anthropocene it concerns from their fiction. So that was quite an easy challenge. The the sharknadoes stuff really arose because I was pitching the book to Verso, ad was determined to write about something no one else on the Verso list would touch and the chapter where I write about contemporary art house cinema, part of that arose from a piece I wrote for a Boston review a few years ago in their global dystopia issue, where I wrote about this amazing Spanish slow documentary called Dead Slow ahead and the challenge was to write about it and to try and draw out the affective dimensions of the film. And then it just made sense to have a chapter - the focus then on Art House cinema that was about development projects about global shipping and things like that. So that group of films sort of came together quite naturally, uhm? And the chapter that's about trees for a long time, it's actually gonna be a Chapter about rocks. Uhm, but I I couldn't quite find either the texts or the capacity in myself yet to write from, from what we might think of as a geological perspective, as trying to get to some kind of non human temporality and, and then trees came to my rescue. I happened to be on holiday with my partner in Arizona visiting her family and we're on a road trip and I'd happen to pick up the overstory Richard Powers novel come from from her mum's library and I just sat quietly in the back of the car for like 8 hours and read it cover to cover in one go. And that's when trees came to my rescue. And of course, once you have trees, you. want to bring in the more ligneous superhero counters. Like man, thing, Swamp Thing and Groot. So it's a kind of that there's a kind of flashes of insight of things I wanted to talk about. And a webbing together of texts that then made sense, but also determination to not handicap myself in quite the same way that Gosh does by. Uhm, only dealing with what he calls serious literary fiction. He has a series of you know, quite gentlemanly asides about leaving out science fiction and and he has a sense of what science fiction is capable of doing, but sets that aside, because of you know who's who's general readership or who's target audience for the Booker. But then it came to me very early on as well that I didn't want to write the counter text of, you know, gosh, don't be silly. Look at what science fiction is doing, because that's how I actually came to his book. My social media was suddenly full of people who'd read reviews of his book rather than his book, saying, well, this is just silly. He should read science fiction. And of course go she's an award winning science fiction author. He got the Arthur C Clarke Award for Calcutta chromosome, for example. So it's not like he doesn't know science fiction, but it's a deliberate move by his, and I didn't want to come back. Uhm, simple response and there are lots of other people doing that kind of work already. So my friend Andrew Milner's just recently had a book out from Liverpool University Press about science fiction and climate change, for example. So I wanted to find something different, there isn't so much a rejection of Ghosh as a kind of an an attempt to refine some of his argument to add something to this argument because of you know largely because of self imposed limitations, but also this really, really curious thing. That he seems like a really poor reader of fiction, or have a really limited understanding of. How lively our relationship with texts is 'cause we're constantly switching between reading with the grain and reading against the grain. We're constantly drawing out what texts are about and creating meaning from texts, but he himself, in this book, and he has this imaginary scenario of future humans in a climate catastrophic world, looking back at the cultural production of our time and justice. Finding silence and well, you know, that assumes people in the future have forgotten how to read. And so it's about wanting to counter those bits of his argument, or elaborate a response to those bits of his argument.
Roxie:
Yeah, I, I think you're really onto something sort of highlighting how we we are going through a time where everyone is being prompted to read things into culture in a way that I personally don't think has ever done before. I don't know if you're into YouTube video essays. For example, after you find Queer Marxist analysis of like the Barbie films you, you really feel like the possibilities are endless.
Mark:
Yeah, and you know the one thing I would do is I would never describe it as reading into I would describe it as reading because you know we all all we ever have with the words on the page and the images and sounds on the screen and we do a tremendous amount of creative critical work with them just in everyday consumption, let alone when we set ourselves the task.
Roxie:
Yeah, that's great. Of producing criticism. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Uhm, in a blurb at the back of your book, the core editor of green planets points out if the Anthropocene unconscious weren't so fun to read, it might be too terrifying to think about, which I wholeheartedly agree. It is such a compelling and funny book in a way that often academic texts.
Do not allow themselves to be, which is a shame in my opinion, but yeah, your authorial voice. There is so present there's even cursing which was so refreshing to read in a theory book. So could you just tell us a little bit more about the experience of what's happened with the release of the book, but also just yeah, deciding to write trade?
Mark:
Yeah, just insight into that process because we'd love to. Yeah, so you know it's one of those things that undoubtedly annoyed grad students to learn more. But writing academic prose, I find actually really easy 'cause I've done it for so long and so much of it that it is one of those things that you churn out and you know you refine it. You do what you can to make it interesting and engaging, but it's a mode of writing that presents all kinds of opportunities and possibilities, but also tends to have a very restricted audience for multiple reasons, not least the iniquitous state of academic publishing being so profit driven, and so so much stuff gets firewalled or having to pay excessive amounts to access material. So the that's really annoying, let alone you know what we often find in academic writing, is a mode of address that can be seen as full of jargon. A tentativeness a so much passive voice and, uh, you know humorlessness and with this book I wanted to try and reach a broader audience, a slightly different audience to the one I'd normally rage. So actually what I pitched to Verso originally was a really substantial volume that's much more like a conventional academic volume, and Rosie May, who became my editor, came back to me and said, you realize you've pitched two different books here and one of them is this uhm, this kind of more slender, popular, accessible book and the other is a big fat theory book, do you want to do both? And can you do the popular accessible one first? So I said yes to that, I've actually changed my mind about doing that. big fat, more theoretical book because I enjoyed writing this one so much and what I want to do is rework a lot of the material that got left out into one or two more books, like this one. Uhm, but yeah, the action so that was part of it. Then finding the voice for this kind of writing was the next challenge, and fortunately Junot Diaz had asked me to write that piece for Boston review, and I'd written a couple other things for them since then. And I found a different voice emerging as a consequence of that. So that was, you know what I've reached for and developing that voice and having the freedom to switch between registers. And so there is some quite dense theory in there in there, but also, as you say, there's some swearing as well. And there are jokes. And this word play is very much China Mieville’s influence that. It led me to have this kind of desire for a man. A richness of language, an appetite for language. And as I discovered in the process of writing the book as well, a lot of alliteration I've never thought of writing iteratively, but there's a lot in there which surprised me. But you have those moments when you're trying to write them out trees and their interdependencies, and an expression like cellulose, cellulose socialism appears, and that has to go in.
Roxie:
Absolutely getting back to questions of genre you mentioned you grew up reading more sci-fi than what you call mundane fiction, so two questions. First, do you think sci-fi has primed you for thinking with like large scale apocalyptic forces in mind so that allows you to connect to the issues of climate change more? And also just yeah, from there thinking about the usefulness of approaching climate change through the lens of genre because you've chosen not to do that. But yeah, you are interested in speculative fiction and you've kind of stated that you don't find the concept of climate fiction useful as a category, so could you please expand on that a little bit, yeah.
Mark:
Yeah, I I think that first that first question is, uh, it has this kind of really interesting, counterfactual uh, potential to it. I think one of the things it is not just about reading science fiction part of it is that kind of vulgar Marxist upbringing. You know that you have more in common with the international working class than with the capitalist. And that's also always been laced with these kind of green elements growing up dirt poor. We grow our own vegetables because we have to. And also we grew up on the edge of Dartmoor. So there's always been a kind of green strand running through my thing, and that's also undoubtedly shaped my taste for SF, but also within SF as well. Uhm, but I suspect having read so much SF This is why I'm, this has disabled me in some way, uh, in terms of appreciating mainstream bourgeois fiction, a lot of it just baffles me so. The other day I was talking to a grad student being supervised by a friend of mine whos doing a PhD on Eco pessimism and we're talking about Mad Max Fury Road and Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the endings of those films and the kind of ambiguities of those texts are in the ambiguities and ambivalences within them, and I had to admit that corner at the cafe is the road. I just kind of understand why people like it. It's pretty mediocre if we read it as science fiction, but I don't understand why people find it moving. And yet, that's the most common response you get when you know when you look at reviews of it. Favorable reviews of it. An online commentary on it, people find it genuinely moving and I just cannot find that in the text and that I suspect is partly because I haven't grown up really in a way that I've been encountering and valuing that kind of bourgeois fiction of sensibile. So I think science fiction's helped me in some ways, but it's also and perhaps has helped me with this kind of reading for the unconscious as well, because - and when reading mainstream bourgeois fiction, I still haven't think of looking for ideas looking for concepts now in science fiction. Often those ideas you know science fiction likes to think of itself as the literature of ideas you know to be honest. Some of it is, but most of it is the literature of conceits, particular kinds of conceits, but you look for them and their elaboration, and that tends to be missing from mainstream literary fiction. Whether science fiction has a particular link with ecological? Our thinking as well, I think one of the things about science, which I don't think we can generalize about genres in the way that the concept of genres encourages us to. But I think science fiction has a relatively unique mix of potentials that lend it to ecological concerns. It has a global imaginary, it's capable of taking the Longview. Historical, geological, cosmic time scales, and it's capable of. Setting up interplays between scales, and between temporalities, it's fascinated with the definitions and the limits of the human, with alterity with other modes of being. It has this capacity for imagining otherwise and also, it knows how to do exposition which a lot of climate fiction is terrible at. Uh, MIT has uh this long tradition and and well established capacity to engage with and imaginatively inhabit science. It can do empirical depictions. But also what we might think of metaphorical elaborations or symbolic depictions or representations, or something like it, can do the literal and figurative, and it can do all the things that serious literary fiction can do as well. It often doesn't, but it has the capacity to do. That so, as I say, science fiction has this incredible potential and the long tradition of, uhm, not just engaging with ecological thought but inhabiting it, elaborating it, expressing it, developing it. But also, there's no reason why science fiction necessarily does any of that. It doesn't need to do that, and there's no reason why other genres can't do those things or have their own more distinctive generic affordances and capacities that they can use to turn towards ecological thought and depicting climate change or thinking about climate change. The category of climate fiction I, I understand why it exists, I've I've yet to find it critically useful. It's very helpful in in marketing terms, and it does allow a readership who would normally turn up their noses at science fiction to read science fiction. And if it's if something like Stan Robinson, something like Ministry of the Future is called climate fiction people who wouldn't touch a science fiction novel might read that. And so it does have that kind of usefulness, but I've yet to read a work of climate fiction that can't be read as science fiction. You know, even something like Barbara Kingsolver's flight behavior. It's a, it it's a kind of, Um, easily accessible literary melodrama that centers on scientific knowledge about monarch butterflies. I don't understand why that isn't science fiction. I don't understand why you need, uh, another label for it, but you know. Uhm, people do find the category useful. I don't have the power to wipe it out or make everyone forget it exists so. It's there and we make use of it. And there are people doing good work on climate fiction as well. Really interesting work on climate fiction who do use the label and embrace the label. So if it's a way of helping getting people to think about and engage with and be aware of climate catastrophe that we're in, then you know, let 1000 flowers bloom. I won't stop it.
Roxie:
Yeah, well, you make excellent points on the issue of genre, but you have emphasized the utopian potential of science fiction, especially like in a recent podcast interview you did for LCI but self proclaimed or more self conscious climate fiction often emphasizes explicitly their representations of catastrophe or disaster so. Do you think there's any didactic potentials in these representations, or do you find more power in reading the absences? And do you think their representation itself can prompt action? To what extent? Because you do there to asking in your book that what if impasse is actually transition. So where does your faith for a call to action sort of lies there?
Mark:
Yeah, I suspect I've actually stolen that line from in Race Haven. I must have put in quite marxy five years that I wouldn't just plagiarizing. Uhm yes so. I I think there is a real danger with the eco dystopia. Partly because contemporary dystopian fiction can often be really unimaginative and lazy and trivializing. There's no reason why it must be like that, but you know, it's very easy just in the wake of I don't know slide apart to just show the outside world polluted, falling uhm dominated by corporations and raining a lot. You know that once you have the visual images that from Blade Runner available you can just deploy them without thinking about them and so there is that risk with eco dystopias normalizing catastrophe in some way and that you know isn't necessarily the world biggest problem, so you look at some like Wesley choose Tau trilogy. Climate change is just a kind of horrible cliche of aliens engineering our atmosphere to better suit them or Tobias Buckels Arctic rising novels, where sets in a post peak oil climate changed world. That's a backdrop for thrillers with bond like villains and I thoroughly enjoy them. So I think that kind of fiction can exist, and it's you know it's not the worst thing in the world that it does and clearly eco dystopias do affect people, so again, my incapacity to read certain kinds of fiction. I'm baffled by people loving Margaret Atwood's maddaddam novels. And people find them profound and moving and challenging and insightful, and that's fine. They strike me as really clumsy and awkward, and I'm mystified how a poet of her caliber can have such a tin ear for neologisms and things like that for me. They just don't work when she says they're not science fiction. My inclination is, you know, few science fiction's thought, the bullet there. A good name is preserved, or yes, they are science fiction. They're just not very good science fiction. But whatever we label them at the end, I'm not sure it matters that much. What does matter is that they are having this kind of positive effect on certain readerships. And so, just because they don't work for me doesn't render them incapable of contributing to climate consciousness and thus to climate practice. My emphasis on the utopian really, uhm. It is predicated on a particular notion of the utopian, I think I. I don't think it's a single soul solution. I just think in these these dark times.
Just as in writing the book, I had to deploy humor because otherwise, as Gerry Canavan says in that blurb it would be terrifying. I think utopianism never exists on its own, it's. It's like utopia and dystopia aren't separate things. They're like a mobius strip. They you know wine together. So if you go back to the origins, what I think was the origins of science. Thomas More's utopia is not very optimistic. It strikes me, as always, struck me as a really bleak work, particularly the first half. The satire on the state of the nation, but also the utopia in the second half. Or uhm? You know that moment in Frankenstein where Victor's constructing the mate for the monster and he has this kind of vision of them running off to South American breeding, and it scares the **** out of him, but really, that's the utopian moment. It's a vision of proletarian and anti colonial revolution and he just can't countenance it. Or in inverne you have this kind of manic spreadsheet imagination that's constantly cataloguing, measuring and counting things recording things so they can be outdone, but there's also that some wonderful encyclopedias, encyclopedias and something like 20,000 leagues under the sea where he just wants to show off all this incredible richness of marine life. It's like. You know the kind of is like a kind of really not very manic. Melville in Moby Dick, you know, just wants to record it all and show it all so utopian dystopia are always kind of woven together, but I think this current conjuncture, a little bit of utopian thinking, is necessary. It's not a stand alone solution, and obviously utopianism has a bad name because the way it's discourse and its affective dimensions were hijacked by fascism, by Stalinism, by consumerism. By capitalism more generally. By neoliberalism and by you know the current charlatans in office you know that take back control and Freedom Day nonsense. Uhm, so there's there's that wonderful bit in Jim Jarmusch's zombie movie The dead don't die where Steve Buscemi, these planes kind of Trumpian character very pointedly called. Frank Miller has a baseball cap with the slogan Keep America White again we see utopian discourse woven there with dystopian. This course, you know they're they're they're kind of inseparable. But I think you'd hope you're thinking. Uhm, is important. I think that a novel like Stan Robinson, Ministry of the Future that depicts a kind of very carefully picked route through climate catastrophe that doesn't produce utopia, but produces something built on the ruins of this present that really must die. Uhm, is really really important interweaving of utopia and dystopia.
And I think you know, utopian. We have that notion that it's easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism. ******** It really is easy to imagine the end of capitalism. All we have to do is imagine worlds organized differently and for some people obviously that will resemble very closely the end of the world. Uhm, but those aren't necessarily the people we need to worry about.
Uhm, you know? Elon Musk? Not really my concern. And we can build from small practical acts. Network them together, movers from tactics to strategies to policy to large scale transformations. And as long as they're driven by genuine democratic control, I think that's a real possibility and we need hope and I think we tend to misunderstand. Hope we have that sense of hope of being a kind of very passive waiting for things in the hope that they'll work. Count hope if we do it properly, is the enemy of the status quo, and I think hope needs to be promulgated and exercised. If we're going to find any kind of way through the mess we're in, sorry that got very excited then that's great.
I mean on that topic of you know, hope whether you think representations of climate change will look like in the future, can you already see some patterns emerging? And regardless of your answer, this is, I think, a bit of an optimistic question because it assumes that there will be a future to represent climate change, yeah?
Mark:
Yeah, it's like. So yes. That image at the start of Grotius, great derangement, where he imagines these people in the future where everything is being ruined. But there are still libraries and bookstores and museums. And Art gallery isn't. Yeah, so I think you know. On the one hand, climate, destabilization, climate chaos as they become more and more evident in everyday life. All fiction is going to have to struggle wrestle with how to deal with that. I'm not sure the mundane novel, the mundane film, have yet developed the representational techniques they need. Uhm, to represent what we did we we need to start thinking of as a realistic world. And there has to be, you know, a limit. How many times authors can get away with mentioning the weather or having a carrot to fleetingly notice a news report in the background about a catastrophe somewhere else in the world. That is, that is no longer adequate. Uhm, but neither film nor literature have proven themselves particularly adept at representing what we might think of as systemic violence or slow violence, so I'm not sure we they yet have the tools to come to terms with the multiple cases of violence and catastrophe that climate change is bringing. But I'm pretty certain we're going to see a lot of books in the near future, with that kind of publicity guff on the front of no longer the stuff of science fiction. On the other hand. One of the most exciting things to happen in science fiction in this Millennium has been this kind of growing presence of black indigenous and writers of colors and writers from the global South. And their takes on this, even when filtered through the publishing or film systems that privilege readers of power in the global north. Their takes on this are going to be vital among the most vital because they're the ones most disproportionately affected. Oh God, I've got too many hands now. On the third hand. As you say, maybe there isn't the future, so there's all unnecessary concerns. On the fourth hand, maybe changes will be far more radical than we're really prepared to imagine. Yet maybe rather than consuming fictions readers will begin to adopt the imaginative tools of speculation, of extrapolation, of worldbuilding of Utopia, and maybe they'll put their Kindles aside and start using the critical creativity they learn from engaging with fiction to begin imagining and constructing better worlds right where they live. And on how many we up to now the fifth hand. Maybe we got all the valve into some kind of post human beings with additional limbs, so that list of points doesn't sound quite so embarrassingly weird. I always tell my students if you say, on the one hand, you have to have on the other hand, but no more hands than that, and I've just blown it.
Roxie:
Thank you so much for your time and your insights. It's been just so illuminating. I'm sure our listeners will be just delighted and have a great time like I just have. Once again, thank you for being here with us today.
Mark:
An absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Roxie:
And that's all we have time for in part one. Be sure to tune in for Part 2 where we talk to Kate Rigby, Christina called and Peter Riley about definitions of environmental humanities, what the future might hold, and how to learn more.