"Reading Walter Scott in the Anthropocene"

Susan Oliver shows how reading Scott through ecocriticism and theory reveals his relevance for twenty-first-century global crises of climate change, species loss, extinction, pollution, and large-scale human migration. Scott’s writing about changing ecologies during the age of ‘improvement’ and Scottish clearances attends to intricate damage, some of which was immediately evident and all of which was long-term. Other effects, as he showed, took place gradually, out of sight. What can we learn from Scott’s anticipation of environmental justice, land ethics and plantationocene agro-economics? Crises affecting humans and nonhumans, the local and global, the past and the future are brought into relief in this chapter.