In 2018, at the age of fifteen, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started protesting in front of the Swedish parliament about the need to take urgent action to address climate change. From this sole protest grew an international campaign, Fridays for Future, a weekly strike by school children, in a number of countries around the world, to compel adults to act on climate change. Fridays for Future has been awarded Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience 2019. As a direct result, a number of countries have recognised climate change as an emergency, including the UK parliament. The courage and conviction of children marching to call for action has captured the collective imaginary; the children are celebrated as having clarity of vision, untainted by a consumerist mentality which has led to the current situation. Children are seen as the embodiment of hope and of the future; it is their generation that will inherit the damaged environment brought about by regressive adult consumption and policies.

Within this context, the need for posthumanism, or the move to de-centre humans as the apex of all development, is clear. Critical of the ‘speciological chauvinism’ (Ellis 139) of the Anthropocene, posthumanism looks to challenge the sense of autonomy from and domination over nature by replacing consumptive notions of progress with values ‘conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves’ (Hayles 291). Yet concerns about posthumanism’s use of the term human as a monolithic category gives rise to criticism that it lacks engagement with the history of humanism and its problematic relationship to matters of race. Historically, those who have struggled to find recognition of their difference under the term human, specifically racially diverse peoples, colonised subjects, women and even children, find themselves doubly marginalised by a posthumanist discourse that identifies all humans as equal humans. In reality, the experience of those historically excluded from this category is not one of achieving equality. Zakiyyah Jackson argues that racism ‘remains one of the most powerful and resilient technologies for delimiting and policing the border between the “fully” human and the “nonhuman”’ (Jackson 15). It is also the case that these same, marginalised and impoverished peoples are most vulnerable to the devastating effects of climate change.