Smyth, Elizabeth A. (2025) A bird’s-eye view: Industrial technology in eco-writing research. New Writing. (In Press)

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Abstract

Creative writers exploring environmental issues and human relationships with the more-than-human often employ methods for immersion in nature such as critical walking and ‘forest bathing’ or may seek to mirror what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose describes as the ‘footwalk epistemology’ inherent in Aboriginal Australian worldviews. This article offers a new method of using industrial technology, in the form of a canopy crane, for eco-writing. Canopy cranes are typically used for scientific research. This article details my use of James Cook University's canopy crane in applied phenomenological research in comparison with walking on the Madja Boardwalk and with ‘forest bathing’. All these methods were employed in lowland rainforest at Cape Tribulation, Australia, which is within the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area. This highly biodiverse Area covers only 0.12 per cent of the Australian land area yet is home to 30 per cent of Australia’s marsupials, 58 per cent of bats, 60 per cent of butterflies, and over 5000 species of plants. The JCU canopy crane is one of only fifteen worldwide and therefore offers a rare opportunity to use this technology for creative writing research. In this article, I also present an extract of eco-fiction written as part of this project.

Item ID:	84932
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1943-3107
Keywords:	psychogeography; walking; eco-fiction; creative writing; canopy crane; forest
Copyright Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	19 Mar 2025 23:35
FoR Codes:	36 CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 3602 Creative and professional writing > 360201 Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280122 Expanding knowledge in creative arts and writing studies @ 100%
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