What is it about?
Earth Abides, a classic American post-apocalypse novel from 1949, uses the extinction of the human species as a device to measure our impact on the planet. I show that Stewart's ecological thought experiment is inseparable from a contemporaneous phase shift in the common understanding of humanity's place in the natural world. Drawing on a network of Earth scientists at UC Berkeley, Stewart's novel ultimately develops a theory of ecologically embedded history in which human action cannot be understood separately from the environment in which it occurs.
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Why is it important?
Stewart's novel contains a more nuanced perspective on the natural world than what is usually attributed to the post-apocalypse genre, going well beyond the depiction of a simple "return to wilderness" to meaningfully reckon with the extensive scale of anthropogenic environmental change. Further, the novel's central conceit, weighing human impact by imagining our near-extinction, has returned as a speculative device for theorists of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the post-apocalyptic gesture has become central to thinking about the human-nature relationship.
Perspectives
I wrote this article because I think the significance of Earth Abides as an ecological text is under-appreciated, as is the ecocritical utility of the genre it helped establish. It was also a chance to develop a methodology that I think of as ecocritical historicism, in which I establish the relevance of a particular moment in ecological science and environmental thinking to a text's composition.
Philomena Polefrone
Columbia University
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This page is a summary of: Ecology without Us, Extrapolation, January 2018, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/extr.2018.16.
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