Anthropocene Frontiers: The Place of Environment in Western Studies

What is it about?

This essay adds the geological to the environmental frames—pastoral; agricultural; arid; wilderness—through which we have come to understand the environment of the U.S. West and its cultural representations. Doing so reorients our environmental accounts of the west, highlighting questions of scale and precarity in the region's representations, and putting the U.S. West into conversation with theorizations of the Anthropocene. It also pulls theories of identity, borderlands, and climate changed futures into view, as a material and a representational U.S. West collide.

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Photo by Gautier Salles on Unsplash

Photo by Gautier Salles on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This essay synthesizes and extends recent work in environmental accounts of the U.S. West, providing a broad framework that accounts for the multiple colliding narratives that coexist in the U.S. West. It balances materialist and cultural understandings of the U.S. West, challenging without dismissing the West's frontier myth, while putting this myth into conversation with theories of place in the U.S. West that resist its premise: borderlands theories; indigenous studies; transnational theories; postwestern theories; settler colonialism; new materialisms.