"How the Weather Was": Anthropogenic Climate Change and Environmental Damage in Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa

Abstract

Examined in the light of Timothy Morton's "dark ecology," Ernest Hemingway's 1935 work of creative nonfiction, Green Hills of Africa, links the desertification of the American Plains states in the American Dust Bowl to the desertification of Africa, attributing both to the depredations of modernity as constructed by white men of European ancestry. Hemingway conflates the narrative's predominant trope of consumption via overzealous hunting to climate change elsewhere in his fiction. He foresees that industrial modernization will inevitably result in ecocatastrophe and in this ecological lament uses memory and nostalgia to memorialize through art what has been lost to environmental damage.