Lawrence Buell is a Harvard College Professor, John P. Marquand Professor of English, and Chair of the Department of English. Professor Buell teaches courses in the history of American literature and culture, and has a particular interest in environmental(ist) discourses, issues of cultural nationalism, and comparatist approaches to American literary study including transatlantic and postcolonial models of inquiry.

What, if anything, do literature and the other arts have to bring to the table in a time of environmental crisis? According to Professor Buell, the answer lies in the power of story, word, and image to ignite imagination, to focus attention and concern, and sometimes to lead to commitment and direct action. Today's environmental crises can't just be addressed through economic commitment, techno-scientific breakthrough, or legislative reform, indispensable though those are. Even more basic than those is what former U.S. president George Bush, Sr. once vaguely but truly called "the vision thing." It's hard to blame Bush for this statement, says Buell, given the inadequacy of our pre-existing conventions of public discourse when it comes to engaging with a number of core issues that the public insists it is seriously concerned about.

As one leading policy historian, Richard Andrews of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes, "We lack a coherent vision of the common environmental good that's sufficiently compelling to generate sustained public support." In order to bring the current environmental situation to the forefront of public discourse, more is going to be needed than just infusions of money, expertise, litigation, and so forth. The contemporary German sociologist Ulrich Beck writes, "Only if nature is brought into people's everyday images – into the stories they tell – can its beauty and suffering be seen and focused on. The success of environmentalist initiatives hinges not on some highly developed technology or some arcane new science, but on a state of mind which is bound to be influenced as much or more by the power of images, narratives, metaphors, and by appeals to feeling…[than by] appeals to data, statistics, expertise, and formal reasoning."