Introduction

Abstract

BACK to the stone Age?This volume grew out of a collaboration between a literature scholar and a social scientist who discovered a rich common ground of concern about our planetary future and our terrestrial present. The specific topic was sparked by something that may seem trivial on the surface, but that rests on a bedrock of cultural assumptions that this volume aims at least in part to examine and dismantle-namely, the assumptions that generate the common reaction which greets almost any concrete proposal for changing today's society along ecological principles: "You want to take us back to the Stone Age!" The underlying fear, it seems, is that ecological concerns will lead to people being asked or forced to "give up" civilization itself, or at least "modernity." Thus, environmentalists are frequently described and dismissed as antimodern, naïve, and wanting to go "backward" in time, like adults wishing to be children once more. To those who react in this way, it feels as if the very meaning of being "human" is under siege; they seem to believe that a desolate future of returning to cave dwellings and blood-thirsty pagan rites is always lurking behind any talk of sustainability and ecological transition. This volume-starting with this Introductionintends to delve into these assumptions, fantasies and fears about socalled modernity, to contest and demystify them and to show how in response to the ecological crisis a range of artists, writers, philosophers and social scientists have been rethinking modernity's temporality, its deeply ingrained dualisms and the human/non-human split that lies at its very heart.While the initial impetus for the volume came from our perplexity about the assumption that thinking and acting ecologically necessarily implied some sort of historical regression or retreat, it is also true that the entire field of contemporary environmental humanities is shot through