Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

Beige

170 Beige is the average color. If all the light in the universe, from all its known galaxy systems, were mixed together, what results would look like a latte.1 The universe used to be bluer, but stars turn red as they age. As the age of star production moves toward its end, which is also perhaps a new beginning for the matter utilized in that production, the universe fills with the detritus of exploded stars, the waste of the former systems of the world. Prompted by this astrophysical fact, but hardly limited to astrophysics or to astronomical systems, a beige ecocriticism takes as its subject apocalyptic eruptions within, encounters between, and condensations of the systems of the world. It tracks these eruptions, encounters, and condensations by focusing on the creation of products coded as waste; it studies the end of the world—but also, more hopefully, the creation of new worlds— that this waste encodes. Unlike a green ecology, it focuses not on conservation and sustainability but on destruction and re-creation: on recycling that does not simply preserve the environment. As a “neutral” color like white, however, it also mingles well with many other colors—especially, for my purposes here, the colors of human waste products: yellow and brown, both colors into which beige can shade. Beige shades, too, in pink, or queer, directions. Thus a beige ecocriticism shares Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s goal of “developing a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics W I L L S T O C K T O N Beige Beige 171 that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions , experiences, and constructions of that world.”2 The age of star production will come to an end with no concern whatsoever for human life or sexual politics, but as practiced here, a beige ecocriticism remains anthropocentric to the extent that it focuses on how humans sexually inhabit a natural world that includes stars, planets, plants, animals, and all forms of being both animate and inanimate that contribute to the construction of the “environment.” Inhabiting this world are humans who subscribe to social, philosophical, and theological mandates about what is natural, as well as humans who are sometimes abjected as waste from the category of humanity, including nonwhites, perverts, the homeless, and the insane. Also inhabiting this world are the microorganisms—the viruses and bacteria —that affect sexual relations between humans and provoke transformations in the places and spaces they inhabit. Apocalyptic (world-ending and world-changing) events in this natural world cue a beige ecocriticism. The queerness of this ecocriticism lies in turn in its antiheteronormative insistence that sex, itself a potentially apocalyptic act, is always a social, environmental act, too, not merely a private and personal one. In its stubborn hope for a “brighter” future after the end of the star systems that the universe’s redshift predicts, beige ecocriticism resists the antisocial turn against futurity in queer studies. This turn locates queerness , in Lee Edelman’s words from No Future, “in the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.”3 Yet the social and environmental dimensions of sex imbue it with the possibility to enable ways of living that evade Edelman’s totalizing equation of social viability with the abjection of the queer. Sex facilitates queer, “futuristic” ways of being social that a beige ecocriticism maps within the extant systems of the world. As it does so, beige ecocriticism also resists a tendency within ecocriticism to reduce apocalyptic tropes to divisive tools of Armageddon romance narratives. Apocalypticism often provides, as Greg Gerrard writes, “an emotionally charged frame of reference within which complex, long-term issues are reduced to monocausal crises involving conflicts between recognizably opposed groups.”4 Edelman’s polemic uses just such a frame to oppose queerness and the social, but a beige ecocriticism focuses instead on apocalypses that reflect the multiplicity and coexistence of the systems of the 172 Will Stockton world and the complexity of their interactions. It focuses on the conjunctions of ends and beginnings, reminding us that almost everything is star stuff—that we are all, in a sense, waste products. (All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are cooked in the nuclear furnace of stars. All elements heavier than lead...