Conclusion: Apocalypse as Ecopoiesis

Abstract

Listing a series of worrying trends that signal worsening environmental crisis, including rising world temperatures, water shortages, soaring populations, clearcutting and global violence, Gaard (2009: 321) begins an article on the importance of responsible ecopedagogy by asking the question ‘what in the world are we doing by reading environmental literature?’. We may well ask this question of young adult post-disaster fiction, at a time in which our own planetary disaster — our own environmental crisis — is not post- but imminently upon us. Gaard answers her own question, in fact, in her discursive turn of phrase: ‘what in the world’ we are doing is precisely being (and doing) ‘in the world’. The post-apocalyptic novels that I have explored throughout this study aim to embed their young adult readers firmly in the earth. By adopting implicit, or explicit, ecofeminist frameworks, they attempt — more, or less, successfully — to negotiate embedded and embodied subject positions for their young adult readers. These subject positions are contextual, predicated on situated knowledges and lived experiences; they are plural, encompassing multiple viewpoints and collective perspectives; they are local, finding strength in place-situatedness and empathetic engagement with the local landscape; and they are resistant, posing a challenge to the neoliberal representational frameworks that delimit phenomenal belonging.