Through the Eyes of the White, Innocent Child: Whiteness, Vulnerability, and (Environmental) Crisis in Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived Series

This chapter explores the potential of children’s literature to promote environmental justice. Drawing on (ecocritical) affect studies and (eco)narratology, it demonstrates that Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived series, on the one hand, uses natural catastrophes as an access point to children’s environmental education and thus offers the potential to educate them as “ecocitizens” (Massey and Bradford): The affective strategies employed in the series can not only help readers to develop (narrative) empathy for the human protagonists and their struggle for survival amidst natural catastrophes but also provide a starting point for discussing the relevance of environmental protection and more-than-human companionship in the Anthropocene. On the other hand, this chapter shows that many of the texts in the series perpetuate stereotypical depictions of non-white Americans and center the emotions of white protagonists through their narrative and affective strategies, their invocation of historically specific American myths, and their erasure of Black and Indigenous populations. In particular, this chapter highlights that the foregrounding of natural catastrophes as outstanding events manageable through personal action obscures underlying histories of marginalization and oppression which have rendered some bodies and some peoples more vulnerable to such catastrophes than others. More generally, this chapter makes the case that centering whiteness and white suffering in narratives of the climate crisis potentially obscures the unequal distribution of risk and vulnerability in our current ecological moment and thus contributes to the settler-colonial projects that have produced the now unfolding crisis in the first place.