Our project emerges, first, from our immediate experience of climate change. Most of the members of our team either reside or have recently resided in the Pacific Northwest region, where we are learning how to live with dangerous summer fires and how to breathe with the smoke that blankets our region for days, sometimes weeks. Second, it responds to novelist and environmentalist Amitav Ghosh’s provocative claim that Jane Austen’s novels “midwifed” cultural expressions and yearnings for “certain kinds of gardens and dwellings” that are “among the principle drivers of the carbon economy.” Austen’s novels, according to Ghosh, are emblematic of a cultural matrix that brought into being desires–for travel, for commodities, for lifestyles–that are unsustainable in the face of our current environmental crises (The Great Derangement 2016). Ghosh’s decision to single out Austen from among her contemporaries is one more manifestation of her staying power, of her grasp on our literary consciousness. We want to take his statement seriously and trouble it as well. In particular, we hope to highlight how Ghosh’s claim about how Austen’s era contributed to the climate crises coexists with how we might learn from her attentiveness to nature. By engaging thoughtfully with the environments that Austen imagined and with her historical context, we can also better appreciate and advocate for our immediate environments.