Eco-Memory and the Anthropocene Imagination: Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter

Despite the relative dearth of ecocritical readings of Canadian literature, environmental concerns have long been part of the bedrock of theorising about Canadian culture and identity. Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden, Margaret Atwood’s Survival, and Sherrill Grace’s Canada and the Idea of North are just three titles which highlight the foundational relationship between Canadian nature and the social order, calling our attention to the precarious enmeshments between humans and nonhumans and the discursive, physical, and biological legacies borne by the land. This chapter gives a brief overview of the conceptual stakes of Anthropocene discourse in regard to reading Canadian cultural frames and employs the lens of eco-memory to examine relationships between nature, culture, and power in contemporary English Canadian fiction. Guided by the tenets of material ecocriticism, I attend to the ways Ed O’Loughlin’s novel Minds of Winter opens avenues of the Anthropocene imagination where we can rethink the interplay of human and nonhuman historical agencies and reconceive memory as an ethical mode of ecological relationality.