Fantasy, Ecocentric Temporalities, and Climate Literacy: A Brief Reflection with Riffs on Darcie Little Badger's A Snake Falls to the Ground and Brian Selznick's Big Tree
This talk concerns the affordances of fantasy in the Anthropocene, with a particular attention to the ways in which fantasy narratives offer visions of ecocentric temporalities.
The notion of holistic, ecocentric temporalities (in the plural) is proposed as an alternative to the dominant reductionist, anthropocentric temporality (singular): a quantitative view of time as a fungible commodity that underpins the operations of the global extractive civilization and has brough the biosphere to the edge of collapse.
I argue that fantasy has a role to play to liberate us from the ecocidal mindset, and that challenging the entrenched quantitative view of time—which enables ecocide—requires conceptual strategies that can best be executed in/with fantasy.
The larger argument is that switching our notions of temporality is a necessity if we want to become climate literate and that fantasy is a capable tool for building universal climate literacy at the time when such literacy can be a difference between allowing a dystopian future or creating an ecological civilization. The reflection is supported by brief readings of Darcie Little Badger's A Snake Falls to the Ground and Brian Selznick's Big Tree.