Maggie Spencer-Pick - 11/08/22 - reflection on outside reading

 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.22.1.0034 - article URL

In doing my research for the final paper, I came across this article and found it particularly interesting. This article is titled "Back to the Garden: New Visions of Posthuman Futures" and explores what it means to imagine a utopia, a future world without humans. This article represents some attitudes also expressed by Eisenberg about the survival and continuity of nature/wildness even during the extinction of humans. 

A particular line that struck me as powerful within this article is: "Traditionally, utopian thought demonstrates the human desire for a better life in the present or in some near term. But these works suggest that our society is so hopeless that the best result we can expect is not to destroy the world as we destroy ourselves. They might be an ironic form of critical utopia, suggesting that humans recognize that we are the greatest obstacle to utopia." This desire, as well as the hopelessness that any coexistence is possible, necessarily call into question the human and environment relationship. Environmentalism and scientific proof of the damage humans have caused creates this tension that has culturally evolved into humanless utopias. Is this further evidence of how broken our relationship with the world is? Is this the product of years and years of binaries between ourselves and the rest of the world that we have now understood to mean that our existence cannot coexist with that of nature? Does the death of nature necessitate the death of ourselves? I ask that one in thinking of other dystopia/utopia representations, such as The 100, where nature can heal on its own while humans are away on a time-sensitive, not-earth home.