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Abstract
In order to understand Earth's increasingly unpredictable climate, we must accept natural chaos and anthropogenic disturbance as a key component of our ecological and social future. Just as Heidi C.M. Scott's Chaos and Cosmos (2014) powerfully demonstrates that a postmodern view of chaotic nature is shown to have been harbouring Romantic and Victorian literary foundations, this article further suggests that chaos ecology also has its roots in the Gothic. Drawing on Algernon Blackwood's collection Pan's Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912), it tentatively begins to unearth some of the ways in which 'walking with Pan' could be anticipatory of ecological concepts recognised today. By rereading transcendental Pan from the context of a 'Gothic ecology', it explores how Blackwood transforms nature into a supernaturally powerful, inviting and terrifying character. In doing so, it becomes clear that disturbing Pan's garden may have far greater consequences for Blackwood's human wayfarers than for nature itself.
Keywords: Algernon Blackwood, Anthropocene, chaos ecology, ecocriticism, Gothic, Pan, walking
We may yet concur ... that Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange ways.
-Patricia Merivale, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times
In 2016, the International Commission on Stratigraphy considered formalising the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, one that heralds the combined impact of human-produced and genuinely nonanthropogenic phenomena in the production of ecological catastrophe. Regardless of whether the Commission will ultimately declare a new geologic time frame, the changes that are occurring - including climate change, air pollution, land and water degradation, habitat appropriation and species extinction - have profound consequences for humanity. Science remains unparalleled in its contribution to the understanding of the effects of these environmental shifts, and is essential in our ability to anticipate, mitigate and adapt to changes in the future. Recent scholarship has further highlighted the need to take seriously the instrumental role the arts and humanities have to play in uprooting dominant anthropocentric ideology implicated in the current ecosocial crisis. Johan Rockström remarks: 'Any profound changes in society would only happen, I knew, if a large enough percentage of citizens were convinced, felt engaged, and believed in something. A deep mind-shift was required for genuine change, and that couldn't be reached through numbers alone. It had to come...