Working the Dark Edges

Abstract

Environmentalism's wider and wilder possibilities today appear as regions of seeming darkness that bracket or frame acceptable environmental thinking. One of these barely-mentionable darknesses is outer space—the cosmos. Another is the inner and chthonic powers of the land and natural beings generally. This essay aims to bring these two kinds of darkness briefly but provocatively into view, both in the interests of a more expansive sense of environmentalism's possibilities and to point toward some pedagogies that might edge us farther in such directions.