Often we think of environmental devastation as a matter of place—but in what ways does it echo through and against the human experience of time?

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In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor argues for a queer ecocritical futurity—that is, an approach to the future that neither (a) rejects future generations altogether nor (b) focuses on heteronormative time, marked by the nuclear family, linear inheritance, and biological reproduction. She lays out the ways that ecocriticism might be informed by queer temporalities (see also Pryor).

The spinster embodies one such temporality. She “has no marriageable future” and so “comes to have no past” (Ensor 414). She is a figure made asexual, with no infancy, no puberty, no old age, and no death. For those around her, looking on, she appears to be stuck in time, or standing outside of it. Outside of the linear time society runs by and which we have deeply internalized.

This holds true, at least in a similar way, for victims of environmental catastrophe. Following the Chernobyl disaster, those with homes near the power plant, living in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia, had to ask themselves, will time go on? will we move (on)? Many of course had no choice. They continued their daily lives, harvesting vegetables from radioactive fields, as one woman remembers “with horror” (Emmett and Nye 110).

Others have no choice in that they can’t go on as before. They wait for someone to acknowledge their suffering, to take responsibility for it and make it right. They stand beside time, hoping it will resume, even as the lives of family, friends, and loved ones carry on without them. There is no resolution, no denouement. They are stuck in one moment of time: the post-disaster.

Nuclear disaster cuts life in two, into the time before and the time after. As with other traumas, you can’t unknow what you’ve learned, or unexperience what’s happened to you.

In “What if a murderer appeared at your bedroom door?,” an episode of the podcast This Is Actually Happening, a young woman explains what it’s like to barely escape death. A neighbor targeted her house without reason, crept into her bedroom, stabbed her in the chest with a knife, killed her mother, and wounded her aunt and grandmother as well.

The world was no longer a safe place. She describes living in constant fear and anxiety, always wondering if the unthinkable might happen (again). She couldn’t return home, couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t afford to move, often couldn’t move her body at all. Any comfort in the present, fondness for the past, or hopes for the future faded into impossibility. Her experience of time was irrevocably altered.

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Rachel Carson warns of the unpredictable effects brought on by environmental toxins, which may well be underway but whose movement from cause to effect, or from original injury to secondary symptoms, remain uncharted. She writes:

we are already in the future—not simply because today marks one of yesterday’s possible futures, but also because the future is here well before it makes itself legible to us as such. (Ensor 418–19)

Today stands as one of yesterday’s possible futures, but in the case of nuclear disaster, this means playing a game of chance and facing the unimaginable. The future arrives silently, microsievert by microsievert, until a composite of medical conditions emerges.

Little Voices from Fukushima (Kamanaka) shares this lived experience. Besides daily exposure to radiation and these stubborn, sometimes maddeningly vague medical conditions, many residents near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant run the risk of developing a serious—or, if not detected and treated, fatal—case of thyroid cancer.

The clock is ticking faster, but no one takes notice unless it stops altogether. When it comes to environmental catastrophes, only deaths are counted; only deaths count. Anything less cannot be quantified, and so is better left ignored. This is slow violence, a violence all the more insidious for biding time and keeping out of sight, a violence “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2).

Not only will the children in Little Voices from Fukushima never know the simple pleasure of playing in bare feet in their own backyard. They also come to see their parents as fallible and emotionally complex much too soon, a perspective they otherwise might not have taken on until late adolescence. They have to attend frequent medical check-ups, a burden most stave off until old age. The time of innocence is lost.

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Victims of environmental disaster, like the spinster of Sarah Orne Jewett’s imagination, live among “futures that will never come to pass” (Ensor 420). They experience the present as a future that has “failed to become” (424).

Examples from nuclear waste are literal. One woman in the documentary Little Voices from Fukushima expresses her reluctance to bring another child into the world, given the quality of life for her and her community in the zone of exclusion. Veterans and local civilians exposed to depleted uranium in ammunition bear children with birth defects or become infertile. Futures poisoned still in gestation; futures abandoned before they could even know the present.

An episode of This American Life, “One Last Thing Before I Go,” elaborates on this state of being caught up in futures that will never become. As Ira Glass explains, the tsunami and earthquake of March 2011, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, killed 19,000 people in Japan. 2,500 are still missing.

One man, Itaru Sasaki, built an old-fashioned telephone booth in his garden. He needed a place to grieve the disappearance of his cousin. The phone doesn’t work, but he would go there to talk anyway. The phone booth has since gained some renown in Otsuchi and the surrounding area as a means of speaking to those who have died or gone missing. 

What is so moving about excerpts from the phone booth is their everydayness. As they speak to loved ones, who were never supposed to leave or be lost, people find “understated” ways of saying I love you, or I miss you. A young girl tells her father, “I started tennis in junior high school. I’m not in the top eight.” Her lived present is marked by the future denied to her: a future in which he is still alive, standing witness even to small failures.

One wife says, “I feel like you’re still alive. […] We had so many things we wanted to do together.”

A husband promises, “I’ll come again, OK? […] I’ll be back.”

Like so many others, they wait out the present in a haze of nostalgia for what might have been, catching only glimpses of a trajectory imagined but never realized.