Abstract
The “dark pastoral” unites the Anthropocene’s strangely sunny celebration of its fossil-fueled agriculture and technology generally with the retro-nostalgic, “pastoral” dreams of resplendent greenery, which is all too often complicit in the wealth of global industrial capitalism and colonial resource acquisition dictating specific land uses. With the dark pastoral, I pay particular attention to “anthropocenic” materialities and human and non-human agencies in order to frame, analyze, and even, perhaps, re-shape our ecological thought(s) and actions. The dark pastoral is thus an ecocritical trope adapted to the “new nature” of climate change, the troublingly catastrophecentered scenarios so popular in the fossil-fueled era of the Anthropocene, and the ongoing centrality of reverently pastoral impulses in environmentalism. By studying together the jarring contrasts of, on the one hand, total catastrophic rubble that may unintentionally reveal naive visions of cultural power in popular post-apocalyptic texts and films and, on the other hand, the traditional (and poignant) ideals of “nature” as a former (deemed lost) blue-green place of harmony that often purposefully dissemble power structures behind utopian settings, the dark pastoral is well armed with diverse strategies for exposing the dynamics of power and agency in relation to material nature-culture.
Highlights
The “dark pastoral” is an ecocritical trope adapted to the “new nature” of climate change, the troublingly catastrophe-centered scenarios so popular in the fossil-fueled era of the Anthropocene, and the ongoing centrality of reverently pastoral impulses in environmentalism
Utilizing Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology,” the dark pastoral juxtaposes localized biophilic representations such as specific trees weathering the travails of time and “progress” with a more abstract, large-scale attention to the ecological challenges of global climate change, pollution, the plight of refugees, and mass species extinctions
Garrard (2012) comments in his chapter on the pastoral in Ecocriticism that this trope tends to envision a sense of eternal natural order that is often used insidiously to portray particular social structures as “eternal” and “natural” and to justify the status of the elite; it has been used for conservative agrarian politics idealizing “Heimat” such as the Nazi ecology (Garrard 2010)
Summary
Many texts embody aspects typical to the dark pastoral’s attention to “anthropocenic” materialities and human and non-human agencies, I propose it here primarily as a means to frame, analyze, and even, perhaps, re-shape our ecological thought(s) and actions.
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