The Unlively: Protesting Fossil Fuel Pollution with David Buckel

This book examines air pollution and extinction by looking into how they might contribute, conceptually and politically, to a queer ecopolitics of death. It focuses on the figure of David Buckel, an American LGBT rights lawyer and environmentalist, who self-immolated to protest fossil fuel pollution in 2018. The author considers Buckel’s death as an act of political protest, whereby a (singular) living body attacks itself as a response to the (collective) extinction of non/human life forms. The book mobilizes the materiality of death and non/human extinction, proposing the concept of the “unlively” as that which negates life or is incapable of vitality, to account for Buckel’s self-immolation as well as the deadly effects of fossil fuel air pollution.

Part of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of political ecology, environmental humanities, gender studies, and queer theory, alongside the emerging fields of queer death studies, discard studies, and critical breath studies.