Volume 29, 2022
Philosophy and the Environment
Serenella Iovino
Pages 55-67
Politics and Ecology among Calvino’s Trees
An Exercise in Narrative Scholarship and the Environmental Humanities
This article examines one of Italo Calvino’s most beloved novels, (1957), contextualizing it in its landscape and exploring the multifaceted strands of its environmental creativity. Unsuspected paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology will emerge, thus showing the timeliness and clairvoyance of his books vis-à-vis our planetary crises. Written in a seminarrative form, this piece is an invitation to read literary works not only along with their landscapes, but their landscapes, and to consider the potential of more-than-human stories for the shaping of our ethical-environmental imagination.