One of the central figures of environmental discourses is that of the child. This is not to say that children’s voices are at the centre of environmental social movements; while children are frequent participants in environmental projects and tend to show a high degree of interest in questions of environmental protection, they are rarely the voices that lead the environmental debate. Rather, the child serves to stand in for the future; children become a form of symbolic replacement for future generations and a repository for the hopes and fears of adults. In this way, environmental discourses reinforce the not-yet-human status of children and childhood, reifying children’s futurity while continuing to render children’s personhood unintelligible.
While many environmental justice advocates have called for a forward-thinking interpretation of distributive justice that includes the interest of future citizens, I argue that to be truly democratic, environmental justice must consider tempo...