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Can stories and poems help us understand our place on the planet? How might they enlighten and inspire us in a time of global environmental change? This course explores the relationship between literature and the environment. It introduces students to ecocriticism and related approaches, through readings of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. Moving from natural history to nature writing, from pastoral to ecopoetry, from science fiction to climate fiction, we will examine literary responses to contemporary environmental crisis and the traditions from which they draw, and consider what effect these have on readers and their relationship to the natural world. We will study the work of, among others, Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Nanao Sakaki, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maggie Gee, and Shaun Tan.