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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... more
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 imagines that by going out to space we can somehow return 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 more importantly post-ecological future. Yet as the article also points out, other versions of astropastoral, in particular those forms of astropastoral writing which integrate but also modify practices drawn from nature writing, can prompt us to take into consideration already threatened outer space ecosystems and can likewise contribute to helping us understand more clearly the nature, and the limits, of environmental awareness in the Anthropocene.