“There Is No Planet B”: Youth Climate Dissent, Ecological Grief, and Literary Resistance in Richard Powers’ The Overstory

Abstract

This article reads contemporary youth climate activism as a culture of dissent and proposes that Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) functions as one of its most significant literary correlates. Drawing on ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, Rob Nixon’s account of slow violence, and Judith Butler’s theory of public assembly, the argument advanced here is that the movements gathered loosely under the banner of Fridays for Future are not reducible to a policy intervention. They constitute, rather, a generational poetics of refusal in which grief, embodiment, and the address to non-human life have become legible as forms of political speech. Powers’ novel is approached as a structurally cognate work, one whose architecture of interleaved human and arboreal time, whose narrative redistribution of agency across species lines, and whose insistence that ecological resistance is an ethical rather than merely instrumental act, render visible the imaginative coordinates within which youth dissent operates. The essay argues that fiction of this kind does not illustrate activism but extends it, providing the longer durations of attention and the interior moral grammar that the strike, the placard, and the speech cannot themselves contain. Read together, the novel and the movement disclose a shared archive of planetary mourning and a shared insistence that the unfinished question of the present is not what the future will look like but who, and what, will be permitted to inhabit it.