ABSTRACT
What new directions in the domains of critical age studies and the environmental humanities might be pursued by bringing the two fields of study together? Drawing on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorization of three scales of time key to climate change, 1) the geological time of the planet, 2) life itself in all of its manifestations across evolutionary time, and 3) human history, this chapter argues we should add another timescale, 4) the human life span and life expectancy, and offers questions that we might pose. The human life span and life expectancy reference bodily time that provides us with a unit of measurement, one bound up with generational time. “Aging in the Anthropocene” insists 1) that we need to expand our capacity to imagine longer stretches of generational time into the future as a way of grasping the urgency of climate change and 2) that we need to represent individual lives in their full amplitude of growing up and growing old as a form of advocacy for aging and elders in the time of global warming and in the full recognition that the gains in longevity we witnessed over the last century may very well decline.
