The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

Wild Abandon’s conclusion contends that an identity politics of ecology is not only impossible to sustain but also politically undesirable, given its erasure of difference and its implicit nihilism – its suggestion that individuals and communities do not matter in the grand scheme of ecological change. However, the question driving the identity politics of ecology – how does one reconcile self with system? – continues to govern contemporary scholarship as well as mainstream representations of wilderness. Specifically, questions regarding the subject’s role in vital networks, its material heft or ephemerality, and the ontological and epistemological forces that center and decenter it remain the focus of scholarship in new-materialist philosophy, queer ecology, and material ecocriticism. In the process, these paradigms participate in the same circuit of ideas that gave rise to the identity politics of ecology. Keeping this point in mind, this conclusion considers how current reading practices might help or hinder environmentalist goals, and recommends that environmentalist thinking eschew the notion of authenticity altogether, in favor of a pragmatic politics of consistency.

This chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework of queer ecology – which interrogates the relationship between the categories of “queerness” and “nature.” In the first section, Seymour traces this framework’s history and deployment by academics, artists, and activists, and also attends to its oversights. She argues that queer ecology has made foundational, though sometimes underrecognized, contributions to the larger nonhuman turn in the humanities. The second section turns to primary sources, using queer ecology and the related framework of trans ecology to read two works of contemporary US literature, Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poetry collection The Spectral Wilderness (2015). Seymour shows how Abbey’s novel tries, unsuccessfully, to oppose the transformativity of nature to the transformativity of sex and gender; meanwhile, Bendorf’s poetry offers an alternative to this line of thought by drawing innovative parallels between the category of the vegetal and the transgender human body.