Report of the Forty-Sixth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Terry Gifford
Reading D.H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene
July 24th 2025
By Zoom
18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
25 people attended, including, outside of England, Philip Chester in Ontario, Lucas Campoli in Quebec, Philip Bufithis in West Virginia, and Jim Phelps in Capetown
INTRODUCTION
‘The talk addresses three questions:
- What exactly is the Anthropocene and how does Lawrence’s late, brief, reference to his ‘coal age’ relate to it?
- How is reading Lawrence in the Anthropocene any different from reading his work in any other way?
- What would be an example of responding to Lawrence’s work by a reader situated in the Anthropocene?
My edited collection Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press in late September 2025) offers 16 answers from Lawrence scholars to this last question and this talk finally focuses on the book’s final chapter by Adrian Tait on Apocalypse.’
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Terry Gifford is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (Routledge, 2023) and is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante. In September Edinburgh University Press will publish his edited book Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene and he is currently writing an ecofeminist reading of Lawrence’s short stories. A co-founder of British ecocriticism, he has published Pastoral (2020), Green Voices (2011), Ted Hughes (2009), and Reconnecting With John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (2006). His eighth collection of poetry is A Feast of Fools (2018).
READING
Apocalypse would help, especially the last page of Apocalypse II, p. 200 in CUP edition.
PRESENTATION
Terry started with an overview of the history of the term ‘Anthropocene’. It was coined in 2000 by Paul Cruzen (an atmospheric chemist) and Eugene F. Stoermer. The former argued that it was time to stop talking about the ‘Holocene; use the Anthropocene’, because we lived in an era when human activity was being laid down in the geological record. Last year (2024) geologists decided to reject the term, but in the interim it has entered popular consciousness. Its start date is variously determined, with alternative suggestions including the beginning of human agriculture (after which soot from burning forests became part of the ground), the coal age, or the toxic fallout from nuclear bombs and tests. But the scientific research which laid the foundations for the term is much older than the term itself. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius found that CO2 emissions from coal burning were 50% higher in 1890, and had increased the mean temperature of the earth’s surface by 3.4%. In 1901, the year that Lawrence left Nottingham High School, Nils Ekholm argued that ‘The atmosphere may act like the glass of a greenhouse … raising the mean temperature of the earth’s surface’. In 1938 Guy Callender found that ‘The activities of man between 1890 and 1935 have raised global temperature by 0.5C’. The foundations of ‘the Anthropocene’ were therefore laid within Lawrence’s lifetime. Alternative terms have been suggested: the petrocene, the capitalocene, and the cosmocene – this last representing a condition of people respecting the cosmos, such as Lawrence advocated.
Terry Gifford’s forthcoming edited book, Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press) aims to give a long-overdue rereading of Lawrence in relation to modern ecological concerns. The nature of reading should itself be altered by these conditions, Maria Treijling argues in the book; what is needed now is ‘reparative reading’ that constitutes ‘post-criticism’ – reading as an aid to one’s own thought, and in order to refresh perception. Terry noted that a tension between disaster and regeneration runs throughout the book. He made a particular case study of Adrian Tate’s study, in the book’s last chapter, of Apocalypse, with its tension between the green dragon of hope and the red dragon of the apocalypse. Lawrence argues that Christianity (and then enlightenment rationality) killed the body’s connection to the cosmos. What is needed now, Tate argues, are ‘naturalcultural practices’ – humans who are embedded in natural culture, and eschew the hubris of an anthropocentric power dynamic.
DISCUSSION
John Pateman said that he had just read Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, which stresses Marx’s understanding of capitalism’s inherent ecological contradictions and unsustainability. Lawrence, John thought, could be described as a ‘degrowth communist’. Terry said that he was interested in this book, and that such a mode of reading – in the context of a reader aware of the Anthropocene – could be applied to many other authors. Patrick Phillips pointed out that the alternative to political solutions was retreat (as Lawrence envisaged with his ’Rananim’), and cited Paul Kingsnorth, the experimental novelist who retired to the West of Ireland with ‘like-minded people’ in order to live ‘against the machine’.
David Ellis queried presentist readings of literature. If one is reading for the present, he asked, why choose Lawrence? Terry clarified that he believed that historicism was needed also, and that all the authors in his book were in different ways historicist, but that the authorial intentionalism which has been part of so much Lawrence criticism must be supplemented by readings directed straight towards our present circumstances of environmental crisis. He was well aware, however, of the difficulties that Lawrence himself had in finding practical solutions to the problems that he diagnosed, as is reflected in the many different endings, and unresolved nature, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Jim thought that Lawrence was more of an explorer than a discoverer, though John argued that Lawrence’s letters contain many practical suggestions, including for primitive communism and the reform of education. On this last point, Catherine observed that today’s education systems are in many ways part of the problem, directing students towards achieving maximum ‘success’ within, rather than dismantling, an exploitative, ecocidal military-economic system.
Patrick wondered, with respect to Birkin’s contempt for humanity, how the human species could be rehabilitated into the rest of nature. Philip Chester posited that what was needed was a change of perspective which would put the word ‘environment’ in quotation marks, noting that there is no word for ‘wilderness’ in native American and Canadian languages. On this subject he strongly advocated the works of the Catholic theologian and environmental theorist Thomas Berry – in particular his ‘eco-spiritual’ books Befriending the Earth and The Great Work: Our Way into the Future.
Catherine found two important omissions in much contemporary ecological thought: an interest in the condition of farmed animals (perhaps because environmentalism’s emphasis is on the extra-human and the wild, whereas captive farmed animals are treated as quasi-human subjects) – and an interest in war, with its own, infinitely ecocidal potential (she noted that the opening of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Terry had adduced, concerned the aftermath of war). Terry accepted this, but pointed out that Lawrence’s critique of World War One concerned far more than just fighting, but also the capitalist system in which it was enmeshed; war was not, therefore, a blind spot within Lawrence’s ecological concerns.
David queried what the ‘post-human’ might mean. Terry clarified that he meant by it the aspiration to decentre the human. Lawrence goes a long way in this direction (and is also aware of his failures to do so, as apparent in his criticism of the poetic anthropomorphism that he himself uses, through Ursula in Women in Love). David pointed out that the tortoise poems were written from a distinctly human perspective. Terry thought that in ‘Tortoise Shout’, in particular, corporeal apprehension successfully evades language, demonstrating the limits of human understanding.
Finally, Peter Revill-Underwood noted that Ecuador had built into its constitution the legal concept of the agency of rivers, and thought that Lawrence would agree that they, and forests, could suffer. Terry responded that he had recently attended a meeting of environmental lawyers in the UK, at which it was debated whether a river was alive, in the title of Robert Macfarlane’s recent book. He found such questions helpful in decentring the human, but thought that the main environmental crisis lay in addressing global heating. Peter noted that destroying CO2 sinks contributed towards precisely this.
