"Attempting to discredit Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote to Dwight D. Eisenhower and asked ‘why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.’ Benson’s attack, its misogyny at best thinly veiled, makes legible one of the central challenges to developing a queer ecocritical practice: the status of futurity. Contemporary environmentalism, especially given the recent emphasis on sustainability, tends to be future-oriented, its rhetoric predicated on matters of inheritance and procreation alike…Much recent queer theory, by contrast, insistently resists futurity, marked as it often is by heteronormative imperatives. What does it mean, then, to develop a queer ecocriticism? How might we envision a mode of environmental futurity separated from the imperative of biological reproduction, or outside the scale provided by ‘future generations’? Or, to put these questions another way, one that makes the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between the two camps legible, what possibly constitutes a sustainable ‘no future’? —From ‘Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity’ by Sarah Ensor. American Literature (issue 84:2) June 2012."

http://dukeupress.tumblr.com/