Element contents
Aging Earth
Senescent Environmentalism for Dystopian Futures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2023
Summary
Alarmist demography often situates older people as natural disasters: images of the 'gray flood' and 'silver tsunami' imbue senescence with the destructive force of climatic proportions. This Element focuses on the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations: not of a world lacking children, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging. Drawing on examples of science fictional sterility dystopias, Aging Earth challenges the privilege of youth in ecocritical thought and practice, especially the heteronormative urgency to address climate change for the sake of children and future generations. By decoupling the figurative connection between futurity and children, senescent environmentalism attunes itself to the contingency of non-linear and non-teleological futures: drawing together the delicacy of ecosystems on the brink with the structural precarity of older people, queers, and people of color.
Keywords
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009318372Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 03 August 2023
References
Adamson, Joni and Monani, Salma. (2017). Introduction: Cosmovisions, Ecocriticism, and Indigenous-Studies. In Adamson, J. and Monani, S., eds., Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos, London: Routledge, pp. 1–19.Google Scholar
Ahuja, Neel. (2015). Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions. GLQ, 21(2–3), 365–85.Google Scholar
Armiero, Marco. (2021). Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barca, Stefania. (2020). Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Birchley, Emma. (2019). Extinction Rebellion: 91-Year-Old Climate Protester Arrested Near Port of Dover. Sky News, September 21. https://news.sky.com/story/extinction-rebellion-91-year-old-climate-protester-arrested-near-port-of-dover-11815748#:~:text=Demonstrators%20had%20aimed%20to%20blockade,because%20of%20the%20climate%20crisis.&text=A%2091%2Dyear%2Dold%20man%20is%20among%2010%20people%20who,with%20climate%20activists%20Extinction%20RebellionGoogle Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. (2016). Anthropocene Panic: Contemporary Ecocriticism and the Issue of Human Numbers. Frame, 29(2), 11–27.Google Scholar
Byrne, Clodagh Harris, Clare, Gorman et al., Mark (2015). Climate Change in an World, Ageing. Help Age Position Paper, London: Help Age International, pp. 1–12.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (2019). The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category. Critical Inquiry, 46(1), 1–31.Google Scholar
Charise, Andrea. (2020). The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Albany, NY: SUNY University Press.Google Scholar
Charise, Andrea. (2012). “Let the Reader Think of the Burden”: Old Age and the Crisis of Capacity. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 4, 1–16. http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/96.Google Scholar
Chase, Karen. (2009). The Victorians and Old Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Timothy. (2016). “But the Real Problem Is… .”: The Chameleonic Insidiousness of “Overpopulation” in the Environmental Humanities. The Oxford Literary Review, 38(1), 7–26.Google Scholar
Clark, Timothy. (2019). The Value of Ecocriticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coole, Diana. (2012). Reconstructing the Elderly: A Critical Analysis of Pensions and Population Policies in an Era of Demographic Ageing. Contemporary Political Theory, 11(1), 41–67.Google Scholar
Cruikshank, Margaret. (2009). Learning To Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging, Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul and Stoermer, Eugene. (2000). The Anthropocene. The Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17–8.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul, Steffen, Will, Grinevald, Jacques, and John, McNeill. (2011). The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 369, 842–67.Google Scholar
Csiscery-Ronay, Istvan. (2008). The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Daly, Nicholas. (2015). The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Jeremy. (2016). The Birth of the Anthropocene, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Janae, Moulton, Alex, Levi, Van Sant, and Williams, Brian. (2019). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises. Geography Compass, 13, 1–15.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. (1981). Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Domingo, Andreu. (2008). “Demodystopias”: Prospects of Demographic Hell. Population and Development Review, 34(4), 725–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lee. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Erickson, Bruce. (2010). “Fucking Close to Water”: Queering the Production of the Nation. In Mortimer-Sandilands, C. and Erickson, B., eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 309–30.Google Scholar
Falcus, Sarah. (2020). Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction. In Barry, E. and Vide Skagen, M., eds., Literature and Ageing, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 65–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferris, Ina. (2002). The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Freedman, Carl. (2000). Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Furedi, Frank. (2002). Foreword. In Mullan, P., ed., The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population is Not a Social Problem, London: Tauris, pp. xi–xvi.Google Scholar
Garrard, Greg. (2012). Worlds without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy. SubStance, 127(41), 40–60.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gosine, Andil. (2010). Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature. In Mortimer-Sandilands, C. and Erickson, B., eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 149–72.Google Scholar
Grandbois, Donna. M., and Sanders, Gregory. F.. (2009). The Resilience of Native American Elders. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 30(9), 569–80.Google Scholar
Grande, Sally. (2018). Aging, Precarity, and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(3), 168–76.Google Scholar
Grainville, Jean-Baptiste Xavier Cousin de, Francois. (2002). The Last Man, translated by Clarke, I. F. and Clarke, M., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Gullette, Margaret. (2004). Aged by Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gullette, Margaret. (2017). Ending Ageism, Or How Not to Shoot Old People, Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Guterres, António. (2019). Remarks to Youth Climate Summit, United Nations, September 21. www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2019-09-21/remarks-youth-climate-summit.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Haq, Gary, Brown, Dave, and Hards, Sarah. (2010). Older People and Climate Change: The Case for Better Engagement, Stockholm: Stockholm Environment Institute.Google Scholar
Harraway, Donna. (2016a). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Harraway, Donna, Ishikawa, Noboru, Gilbert, Scott F. et al. (2016b). Anthropologists are Talking – about the Anthropocene. Ethnos, 81(3), 535–64.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula. (2018). Climate Stories: Review of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement.” Review of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh, boundary 2, February 19. www.boundary2.org/2018/02/ursula-k-heise-climate-stories-review-of-amitav-ghoshs-the-great-derangement/.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula. (2016). Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hejnol, Andreas. (2017). Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking. In Bubandt, N., Gan, E., Swanson, H., and Tsing, A., eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. G87–G102.Google Scholar
Hensley, Nathan, and Steer, Philip. (2019). Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love among the Ruins. In Hensley, N. and Steer, P., eds., Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar
Hulko, Wendy, Camille, Evelyn, Antifeau, Elisabeth et al.(2010). Views of First Nation Elders on Memory Loss and Memory Care in Later Life. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 25(4), 317–42.Google Scholar
Ibrahim, Habiba. (2021). Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life. New York: New York University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Frederic. (2007). Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Jewusiak, Jacob. (2020). Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Barbara. (1993). The Last Man. In Fisch, A., Mellor, A., and Schor, E., eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 258–66.Google Scholar
Joselow, Maxine. (2023). Why Seniors are Blocking Entrances to the Four Largest U.S. Banks. The Washington Post, March 21. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/21/why-seniors-are-blocking-entrances-four-largest-us-banks/.Google Scholar
Kafer, Alison. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Katz, Stephen. (1996). Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
King, Thomas. (1990). All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
LeMenager, Stephanie. (2017). Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre. In Menely, T. and Oak Taylor, J., eds., Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, pp. 220–38.Google Scholar
Lothian, Alexis. (2018). Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Malthus, Thomas. (2015). An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings, London: Penguin.Google Scholar
McKim, Kristi. (2022). “Always the Same and Ever New”: Clouds, Aging, and Climatology. Clouds of Sils Maria. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 29(4), 1167–89.Google Scholar
McWhir, Anne. (2002). Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism: The Last Man as “Fatal Narrative.” Mosaic, 35(2), 22–38.Google Scholar
Mitman, Gregg, Haraway, Donna, and Tsing, Anna. (2019). Reflections on the Plantationocene: A conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. Edge Effects, October 12, https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha and Levmore, Saul. (2017). Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Paley, Morton. (1993). The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium. In Fisch, A., Mellor, A., and Schor, E., eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–23.Google Scholar
Port, Cynthia. (2012). No Future? Aging, Temporality, History, and Reverse Chronologies. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 4, 1–19.Google Scholar
Psalm 90. The Book of Common Prayer, www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/psalter/psalms-90-92.Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. (2017). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pulido, Lauren. (2018). Racism and the Anthropocene. In Mitman, G. et al., eds., Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 116–28.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sandilands, Catriona. (2004). Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body. Social Philosophy Today, 19, 17–39.Google Scholar
Sandilands, Catriona. (2014). Queer Life? Ecocriticism after the Fire. In Garrard, G., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 305–19.Google Scholar
Scheffler, Samuel. (2018). Why Worry about Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Seymour, Nicole. (2013). Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Sheldon, Rebekah. (2016). The Child to Come: Life after Human Catastrophe, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelley, Mary. (1889). July 1823-December 1824. In Marshall, J., ed., The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Vol. II, London: Bentley.Google Scholar
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. (2021). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. (1972). The Double Standard of Aging. The Saturday Review, September 23, 29–38.Google Scholar
Stafford, Fiona. (1994). The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. (1979). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Thane, Pat. (2000). Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wenz, Peter and Westra, Laura. (1995). Introduction. In Wenz, P. and Westra, L., eds., Faces of Environmental Racism, New York: Rowan and Littlefield, pp. xv–xxiii.Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle Powys. (2021). Time as Kinship. In Cohen, J. and Foote, S., eds., The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–55.Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle Powys. (2020). Against Crisis Epistemology. In Hokowhitu, B., Moreton-Robinson, A., Tuhiwai-Smith, L., Larkin, S., and Andersen, C., eds., Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 52–64.Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle Powys. (2017). Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene. In Heise, U., Christensen, J., and Niemann, M., eds., The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, New York: Routledge, pp. 206–15.Google Scholar
Willoughby, Urmi. (2021). Race, Health, and Environment. In Cohen, J. and Foote, S., eds., The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–85.Google Scholar
Wilson, Shawn. (2008). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Halifax, CN: Fernwood.Google Scholar
Woods, Robert. I. (1996). The Population of Britain in the Nineteenth Century. In Anderson, M., ed., British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–357.Google Scholar
Woodward, Kathleen. (2022). “Old Trees are Our Parents”: Old Growth, New Kin, Forest Time. Age, Culture, Humanities, 6(1), 1–29.Google Scholar
Woodward, Kathleen. (2020). Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View from and beyond Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises. In Barry, E. and Skagen, M. Vibe, eds., Literature and Ageing, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 37–63.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. (2002). Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, New York: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Yusoff, Kathryn. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
- 3
- Cited by