Dr. Richard Pickard

Richard Pickard is an associate teaching professor in the Department of English and the Academic & Technical Writing Program. He teaches in the fields of professional communication, the environmental humanities, and academic writing. His literary teaching mostly has to do with literature and the environment, with an emphasis on writing from and about non-urban British Columbia. His communications teaching focuses on government writing, report writing, and environmental communication.

Dr. Pickard received his PhD at the University of Alberta, with a dissertation entitled "Augustan Ecology: Environmental Attitudes in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry." He has been involved with the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) since its inception, and he hosted and organized ALECC’s 2018 biennial conference, as well as hosting the 2009 biennial conference of its larger American affiliate, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).

There are two main threads to his current research: looking back in time at BC literature about logging (from poetry to graphic novels), and looking forward in time to ask what kinds of ecological futures we should be imagining for ourselves.

He is persuaded by recent research about the negative cognitive effects of using LLM-style AI tools, particularly by research arguing that education is the last place where such tools should be deployed. Unless it is used under tightly controlled conditions, virtually none of which are possible in the educational space, “AI” is the processed cheese, the aspartame, the spray tan of intelligence.

Recent Conference Presentations

“‘A time of troubles’: Plans, Places, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.” Embracing the Forte of SDGs in English Language and Literature. SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India, 2024

“Teaching Places: Pedagogies for Ecocriticism, Ecological Grief, and Rage.” Literature, Environment and Climate Change. Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala, India, 2022

“Reading Nature: Climate Crises, Local Nonfiction, and the Writing Classroom.” Watershed. Biennial conference of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, University of Saskatchewan, 2020

Selected publications

“The Ends of the World.” Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times, ed. Catriona Sandilands, Caitlin Press, 2019

“Acknowledgment, Disruption, and Settler-Colonial Ecocriticism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25.2, 2018

“Whatever Else Climate Change Is Freedom: Frontier Mythologies, the Carbon Imaginary, and British Columbia Coastal Forestry Novels.” Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Western Environments, Past and Present, ed. Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones. Environmental Humanities Series, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015