ABSTRACT
Through a narrative and visual retelling of a “failed” community-based environmental action project, the author explores how posthuman understandings might re-order the ways in which environmental justice materializes with/for children. Specifically, this chapter details the ways in which an arts organization, a children’s theater group, a community activist group, a historical preservation non-profit organization, and a city council aligned themselves around two specific coordinates: a very old house and an abandoned urban lot turned community garden. While the activism efforts to protect or dismantle particular places and spaces relied on competing discourses of history, culture, value, and wellbeing, the author draws upon Morton’s concept of the hyperobject to examine how unseen and/or unnamable more-than-human human forces were also at work and would continue to exert agency long after human narratives “win” or “lose.”
