Silencing and Distancing: literary representations of strategies that negate meaningful engagement with environmental destruction and climate change

Through a close, critical reading of three novels that were published in 2021, this article will explore the ways in which authors expose how silencing and distancing are mobilized as discursive strategies that marginalize the voices of characters who are concerned about the impact of environmental destruction. The novels are Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson, The High House by Jessie Greengrass, and Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman. These strategies create a false binary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and they serve to scupper attempts at meaningful collective action against ecological damage. Through my engagement with the primary texts, I will demonstrate how gender, race, and class shape the construction of the voices that sound the alarm about harm to the natural world. Perceived differences (or distances) in terms of gender, race, and class enable community members to dismiss particular voices, and this mode of silencing facilitates the perpetuation of the status quo. In all three selected novels, the authors signal the dangers of maintaining the status quo by representing the impact of environmental degradation on both contemporary and future communities. The authors make it very clear that no amount of privilege will protect characters if their natural environments remain under anthropocentric attack.