On Astropastoral in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The Anthropocene is an era that owes much of its self-understanding to data obtained from space. It is also a period in which fantasies of escaping from Earth to space are proliferating. This article examines one of these fantasies—the astropastoral dream that going to space can somehow return us to an idealized rural state—an ideology that we argue is contributing to keeping our society unsustainable by offering false hope for a post-planetary and post-ecological future. However, as the article also points out, there are versions of astropastoral which integrate but also modify practices drawn from nature writing to resist extraterrestrial expansionism and its violence. Astropastoral is thus presented as both an ideological tool for extraterrestrial expansionists and as a means of cultivating extra-terrestrial environmental awareness in the Anthropocene.