Green encounters: critically creative inter/actions with-and-in ecologies of crisis

This article contributes to ongoing dialogues in creative writing research relating to three areas of inquiry: writing as a way of knowing; collaboration and communities of practice; and writing in response to environmental crises. We connect these areas by articulating insights from a collaborative arts-based research project on the theme of green encounters. We associate green with what is often problematically referred to as nature–plants, trees, animals, fungus, landforms, waterways, weather, and more, as well as rawness, naïveté, the unknown, rottenness, death, and the unworldly. Through methods of poetic inquiry, we produced ethical, creative, and critical texts demonstrating a diversity of responses to environmental crises made available through creative inquiry. This article offers a distinct articulation of the pressures and tensions inherent to humans’ relationships with the more-than-human, while interrogating our own precarity as early career researchers as linked to the contingencies of living things. With reference to Félix Guattari’s ecosophical theory, we recognise academia as a part of the mental ecology wherein need currently exists to nurture diversity and evolve praxes for sustainability. Towards this end, we highlight the value of creative arts-based collaborations for generating knowledge about ways we can face multiform ecological and other crises.