Flow, form, and feeling: reading Rebecca Solnit and Kathleen Dean Moore’s Riverine writing in an era of ecological crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rivers are a key site of human-nonhuman connection in the work of Kathleen Dean Moore and Rebecca Solnit. Reading this connection against the backdrop of the current climate crisis, this article considers how both writers offer ways of interacting with and thinking about changing landscapes that counter what Timothy Morton calls the ‘information dump’ of climate communication. I argue that by privileging conflicting emotions and uncertainty instead, Moore and Solnit use rivers and riverine forms to advocate for alternative, meaningful relationships to and understandings of shifting environments. With a dual focus on the physical and metaphorical resonances of rivers, this article unpacks the ways rivers might figure in our understanding of climate change, and what it might mean to read about rivers in this context. Ultimately, I suggest that Moore and Solnit’s works demonstrate encounters with joy and despair that not only characterise of twenty-first century relationships to the nonhuman, but are in fact vital to combatting ecological damage.