Environmental Innocence and Slow Violence

"Any day now," says the teacher in Benh Zeitlins 2012 film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, "fabric of the universe is coming unraveled. Ice caps gonna melt, water's gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under. Y'all better learn how to survive now." The film poses a nearly unthinkable, yet all too present, question: how does one prepare a small child for a future marked by imminent environmental collapse? The scene of impossible pedagogy stages the paradoxical relation between the child, so widely theorized as the sign of futurity, and her place at what Bill McKibben has called "the end of nature" (Edelman 2004; Stockton 2009; Sheldon 2013; McKibben 1989). In this essay, I wish to suggest that innocence, as a temporal structure and as a form of absence, deeply informs environmental representation, causing it to make special claims on the figure of the child. I am especially concerned to illuminate the negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for the psychic apprehension of environmental harm. As Anne-Lise Francois has observed, the privileged environmental figure is precisely one of nonimpact, of leaving no trace-a figure of environmental innocence bound up in Romantic childhood that the literature of environmental advocacy works to disallow, asserting instead, and in the face of what Francois has identified as nature's "withheld response" to violence, a call to responsibility (2014, 6). Environmental genres work to expose environmental innocence-a nonculpable earliness or having-time-as a fiction to be strongly countered by a sense of urgency (in reality, we're out of time). Building on Robin Bernstein's analysis of "racial innocence," I suggest that such efforts rest on racialized temporalities of both anticipation (not-yet) and foreclosure (already- over). Environmental innocence plays out against a long-standing shadow drama of specifically environmental black culpability seated in the figure of the black child. I am especially concerned to illuminate the negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for the psychic apprehension of environmental harm. I take Beasts of the Southern Wild as an exemplary object for illuminating the deep interchanges between environmental innocence and racial innocence by situating it in a longer trajectory of stagings of black childhood, from the William Blake poem cited in the film's title to Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.Beasts of the Southern Wild, filmed in the midst of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup, is a self-consciously post-Hurricane Katrina environmental narrative set on an outlying Louisiana island that Zeitlin has described as "literally forgotten by the system" (Mohney 2012; Gallot 2012). Through the subjective centering of a very young child, Hushpuppy (Quevenzhane Wallis), the film seeks to render visualizable what Rob Nixon has called the unspectacularizable-indeed, almost imperceptible-"slow violence" of environmental destruction. Why is a child's subjectivity the key to this visualization? And why must that child be a black girl who is frequently conspicuously misidentified by both age and gender? I wish to suggest that the film's temporalities of innocence, realized formally through the adoption of Hushpuppy's fantastical consciousness, depend on a racialized logic of childhood-a logic that the film attempts to transcend but ultimately only reinscribes. Yet this is not a one-way street: the film's logic also opens out for us the environmental forms already present in conceptions of racial innocence, revealing wider consequences for environmental genres and the representation of slow violence.Temporalities of InnocenceFrom the concept of the "Anthropocene," the geological period of humans' mark upon the earth, to its calls to urgent action, environmental discourses are deeply implicated in negotiations of time-too much time to comprehend, too little time in which to act (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Nixon 2011,12). …