Introduction to Environment and Loss

Abstract:In this introduction, the authors lay out the problem of an environmental consciousness that is grounded in a logic of recuperability, one that foregrounds the environment as an “object” external to human experience. The introduction shows how discourses of grief, mourning, and disaster are anthropocentric in the sense that they find and perceive the conflicts that go under the name “climate crisis” as always first in the external environment. In a counterintuitive way, this holding outside of human experience names destruction in the external environment as relatable only to the extent that it bears the imprint of human activity. On this model, attempts to show the intensification of loss continually misrecognize the work that the environment does to provide structures of continuity and the thought of the unconscious or inaccessible. Without this, climate breakdown is figured within an economy of “overrepresentation,” where no one can be outside it. The effect is to prioritize a racialized libidinal economy that projects proximity to crisis as always elsewhere and which then seeks “natural” figures for annihilation that testify to imminent extinction. The nonhuman, as paradoxically outside, but nevertheless within, the scope of regulation, is therefore always subtended by a racializing logic of availability. Instead, the authors seek to move environmental thinking to a different epistemological frame where what is withdrawn from view, recuperation, and speculation provides the basis for a reorientation to what is otherwise thought of as “past saving.”