The affirmatives desire to save the climate is not neutral but rather reveals a fantasy of the child that excludes queer and racialized bodies

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

Children are enmeshed in our conceptions of time. Childhood (for adults) is at once future oriented and nostalgic, composed of imaginaries replete with underexamined assumptions, as adult anxieties—ontological insecurities—fixate on creating determinable pasts and futures. Childhood is already an always-incomplete state (Castañeda, 2000). Children are perceived as not fully formed (pre-adults) outside the normative (adult) subject, which is perceived as complete and fixed. Its indeterminacy and plasticity, as Cindi Katz (2008, p. 7) explains, “opens it as a tremendously fertile figuration.” To adults, children are repositories for adult fantasies (James et al., 1998; Steedman, 1985). Intensified via Anthropocene narratives of past, present, and future loss, adults cope with anxiety by “securing children’s futures and producing perfect childhoods” (Katz, 2008, p. 6). Adult desires to protect children (from adulthood) or prepare children (for adulthood) employ notions of childhood as it should be to protect authentic nature in the lives of real children (Taylor, 2011). Yet, notions of nature are historically situated and unsettled. By the end of the 18th century, Rousseau had inspired the notion that children were representatives of a nature that was true, neutral, and universal: “the locus of essential goodness” (Taylor, 2011, p. 422). While pagans saw nature and the divine as united with the human and not necessarily as purely or innately good, the rise of urban society sparked new moral concerns which justified the separation of nature and the divine from humans, and reimagined nature as good, absolute, and pure (Bell, 2018). In contrast to Puritanical notions of children as sinful, for the Romantics, children offered a way back to this version of nature. Importantly, these influential Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian perspectives saw children as qualitatively different from adults. According to Andrew Stables, differentiating children from adults shifted the way child is included, excluded, and implicated in the all-encompassing categorical. Child came to mean not yet ready, or classified by an age when rights are not conferred. Within this distinction, as Stables (2008, p. 89) writes, child is understood to be “insufficiently developed for immersion in society, or (on the Romantic account, still popular among child-centred educators), as too good for it.” Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, children became an important political site submerged within the term natural (Baker, 2001; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). The presumed separation between nature and culture reconfigured childhood as something that could be influenced by the outside environment. As Carolyn Merchant asserts, capitalism wrought newfound hopes of controlling destiny. Nature became conceived of in mechanistic terms, as resources to assemble and dominate (Merchant, 1980). Children represented another natural resource: empty vessels waiting to be filled, resilient yet innocent, like virgin soil yet to be corrupted, polluted, or sexualized. They were no longer smaller versions of adults, but future adults (Baker, 2001). Contemporary scholarship across disciplines has challenged notions of the natural as absolute, ongoing, and sublime, elucidating ways in which humans perceive the natural environment to erode the categorical distinction of nature/culture (see Cronon, 1995; Denevan, 1992). Yet, the legacies of complex and often contradictory beliefs remain. As questions of modification, labour, and activity collide with materiality, so too does the nature/culture divide, yet the Wilderness Debate Rages On (2008), and 19th- and 20th-century notions of childhood linger in ideas of “human control over the future” (Baker, 2001, p. 64). In the 21st century, tethered to a future that we cannot predict, children are a resource to rescue us from the “future we (adults) threaten” by functioning as “the connection to nature we (adults) have corrupted” (Sheldon, 2016, p. 39). To envision (or make) an imagined future safe, children are figured as denizens of nature—and more so of naturalization—naturalizing futurism to provide an uncertain future with orderliness and meaning. Entangled with views of reproduction as the basis for life, children symbolize the natural order, normalizing (and regulating) the boundaries of personhood, as Judith Butler (2014, p. 426) reasons, “making persons according to abstract norms that at once condition and exceed the lives they make—and break.” Drawing on Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive and Rebekah Sheldon’s (2016) The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe, this paper extends from Edelman’s critique of the universal politics of “reproductive futurism” and Sheldon’s analysis of child as a symbol (and tool) for humanity, framed as the answer to environmental catastrophe, the force that will “coordinate our safe passage into the future” (Sheldon, 2016, p. vii). Children, linked to species survival, might be conceived of as the mechanism to overcome planetary threat—a shift in perspective historically coincides with the Anthropocene’s first articulation, as Sheldon (2016) asserts. Edelman’s invective against heterofuturity highlights how imaginaries of the sacrosanct child disadvantage the queer, who are framed as antithetical to the essentialist assumptions upholding nature and children as natural and good. Edelman, as a queer person, situates himself outside such supposed social and biological norms upheld as “good,” occupying an athwart (Probyn, 2016) vantage point to perceive the political processes that beguile children into maintaining social norms. Thus, while Edelman rejects this figuration of child, he may see himself aligned with actual children who are also not able to choose for themselves what they represent. For Edelman, futurism itself—the drive to guarantee that our social reality will persist even after we’re gone—is the underlying culprit aiming to maintain civilization as is. Child (like “science” or “nature”) is widely understood as “race neutral,” concealing how contemporary configurations of childhood are highly racialized. As Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) details, racialized childhood was central to the 16th- to 19th-century movements that shaped representational democracy in the United States. Child, defined as unable to consent in relation to the rational adult male, came to represent everything that should prohibit a subject from citizenship (Duane, 2010). During this time, child became the embodiment of innocence, distinctly envisioned as white: As Robin Bernstein (2011) writes, “The doctrine of original sin receded, replaced by a doctrine of original innocence” (p. 4). Innocence negates experience, while a figure free of a past undergirds educable heterofutures (Stockton, 2009). Likewise, to sustain a future predicated on the white, able-bodied man of humanism (Braidotti, 2013), environmental futurism often relies on imaginary pasts filled with pure and pristine conceptions of nature, displacing untidy or disordered histories that might conflict with maintaining (Western) civilization. Yet, the United States was not an untouched wilderness, but the result of a violent restructuring of indigenous ways of life (Rifkin, 2011). Natives were assessed as childlike (i.e., incapable and underdeveloped) to justify the United States as “parent” nation in order to normalize, naturalize, and enable claims on land, property, and inheritance (Smith, 2010; Zaborskis, 2016). Moreover, compulsory colonial models of kinship dismantled preexisting collective decision making and multispecies relationships to serve white settler communities. Indeed, the United States conceptualizes and partitions resources to maintain white heteronormative futures. As a white privilege, innocence is systemically denied to brown bodies (Meiners, 2016). This structure guarantees failure of nonwhite bodies to become part of a desired and/or imposed reproductive future and to transition into civic and economic personhood: to vote, own a home, etc. As Jose Munos (2009) notes, if childhood is countered by an adulthood of white futurity, many children of colour are never able to “grow up.” Goaded by increasing environmentalist calls to forestall catastrophe for the sake of the children, child in the Anthropocene relies on prescriptive, unsustainable, and unjust ways of relating to the future. Placed within white supremacist colonial ambitions, reproductive futurism preserves exclusionary ideologies alongside extractive and propriety relationships to the land and one another. Anchored to notions such as “generational shifts” (e.g., father to son), reproductive futurism maintains norms organized around historical (settler) conceptions of progress and change. Adults instill children with stability to carry them into the future through deep-rooted (hetero)normative and racialized logics. As Haraway (2016, p. 1) describes, the present and past are cleared to make futures for coming generations, drawing lines of flight through settler colonialisms’ temporal elimination tied to relations of erasure between the past and future, employing what Eve Tuck and Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013, p. 73) call the “curriculum project of replacement.” Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez draw on Andrew Baldwin to illustrate how futurity relates to the ways that the “future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e., calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e., pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (Baldwin, 2012, as cited in Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013, p. 80).