Nurturing Early Eco-Agencies Through Ecological Narratives

Abstract

This study critiques the tendency in climate change research to portray children as passive victims or mere actors in global movements, overlooking how their ecological agency is culturally constructed within the Global South. This article argues that contemporary Indonesian children’s literature serves not merely as a representational medium but as a generative space for ecological knowledge and early subject formation. Using an eco-postcolonial critical narrative analysis, this study examines three novels: Haniyah dan Ala di Rumah Teteruga, Mata dan Rahasia Pulau Gapi, and Kokokan Mencari Arumbawangi. The findings reveal that these texts systematically reconstruct the ecological crisis as an epistemological contestation between relational local cosmologies and neocolonial extractive logic. Within this space, child characters emerge not as victims but as active subjects developing ecological agencies through embodied, historical, and affective infrapolitical practices. Furthermore, these narratives function as ecological archives, articulating trauma as a collective memory produced by intergenerational slow violence. Theoretically, this article contributes by (1) positioning children’s literature as a locus of epistemic resistance in eco-postcolonial studies, (2) reconceptualizing early ecological agency as relational practices grounded in the ethics of care, and (3) developing the concept of ecological trauma as a collective historical construction. Ultimately, this research fills a critical gap in environmental humanities, shifting the understanding of children in the global ecological crisis from objects of protection to subjects of knowledge and change.