Book of the Year
EHCoʼs first initiative is the establishment of an environmental humanities Book of the Year
program, modelled on the first-year book
programs in place at other schools, but focused on climate change and the environmental humanities. EHCo will be developing and curating a range of teaching and learning materials to post on our website, from sample syllabi and assignments, to reflections on different types of assignments, to material related to the book’s content that could support either students or instructors.
2024-25 Book of the Year
The inaugural selection is Rebecca Campbell’s novella Arboreality, published in 2022 by Stelliform Press. Arboreality won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
The first chapter of Arboreality opens on campus at UVic, in the 2030s. The world’s human culture is shrinking and retreating, seemingly in defeat, and UVic is not immune to the catastrophe, with the McPherson Library decaying so badly that the first chapter’s characters decide to remove some of its resources for distribution into the community. This is no dystopic novel, however, even if it does depict climate change playing out as a world-changing rupture in ecology and in human society, but rather a novel of uneasy hope. Each chapter steps another decade or so forward in time, with its final chapter taking place in the year 2100, as generations of characters play their successive roles in keeping civilization alive in this specific place, on the way toward what may turn out to be a new, genuinely sustainable future. UVic’s books, as it happens, have helped to enable this survival, and this turn toward a new world.
The BC Review published a piece on Arboreality by librarian Dana McFarland, from Vancouver Island University. Her review is impassioned and thoughtful, well worth reading in full, and it closes with this comment: Arboreality offers to a present readership a humane vision from an imagined future, of the potential that arises from valuing connection and collaboration in and with place. I highly recommend reading it, and considering what might be different if we were to let this story change us now.