Editorial: Creative Writing and Art --- Special Focus Issue on Northern Nature

Maps are never neutral. With their linearly organized geometries of North and South, East and West, they express historically constructed balances, silently proposing binary world-visions and normalizing scales of values. And so, too, our imagination is never completely innocent. Talking and writing about “the North” necessarily entails a series of clichés. This does not apply merely to the geo-politically and economically leading North as opposed to a poor or “emerging” South, but also to the North of eco- cultural imageries: the Arctic and Polar North, the North of endless winters, obstinate ices, unprecedented postcolonial expansions, painfully melting glaciers, and gleefully spectral auroras. This is the North that defies our ecocritical mind, and this is what has inspired the critical essays and artistic contributions of this Ecozon@ Autumn issue.