Arboreal Imaginaries: Environmental Crimes, Survival, and Atonement in Michael Christie’s Greenwood
Arboreal Imaginaries: Environmental Crimes, Survival, and Atonement in Michael Christie’s Greenwood

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers one of the first scholarly examinations of Michael Christie’s Greenwood (2019) as a literary (re)imagining of human–nature symbiosis, interpreted through the lens of ecocriticism. Christie’s eco-apocalyptic, multigenerational saga, whose concentric narrative structure evocatively mirrors the growth rings of a giant Douglas fir, revises contemporary ecocritical discourse on nature-oriented fiction. Spanning more than a century, the novel traces the intertwined destinies of a single family, uncovering their hidden transgressions while celebrating the enduring power of love, sacrifice, and the natural world, particularly the symbolic presence of trees. Throughout the narrative, Christie employs the rhythmic pulse of arboreal life as a central metaphor to illuminate the themes of environmental exploitation, survival, and redemption. An ecocritical reading of Greenwood reveals the author’s strategies for constructing a complex vision of ecological collapse through arboreal imaginaries, offering insights into how the novel conceptualises the environment both as a narrative force and as an ethical framework extending beyond the text itself.

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