*6.1. Anthropocentrism*

Not everyone acknowledges the reality of eco-anxiety, much less its occurrence among children as a problem to be addressed. One critique comes from within ecofeminism itself. While not specifically leveled against climate anxiety, this matter concerns the anthropocentric approach to climate issues within ecofeminist analysis or the tendency to "focus on the consequence to human communities" (Eaton 2021, p. 215) rather than a more expansive engagemen<sup>t</sup> of the wider impact beyond humans alone. A focus on climate anxiety admittedly maintains the anthropocentric approach to the climate crisis by directing attention toward the effects of ecological degradation upon humans, rather than on the harm to the earth itself or non-human inhabitants (McCarroll 2020, p. 39).

It is insufficient to look at the climate crisis exclusively in terms of its impact on humans. Here, I do so self-consciously and in full awareness of the partial perspective of such an approach within ecotheology in order to foreground the situations of children as a group among earth's human population who often find themselves overlooked altogether in contemporary discussions about the planet's wellbeing. One reason to examine the climate crisis through a focus on human *children* is that until recently, literature on the climate crisis has tended to ignore children just as much as it ignores other-than-human creatures. Another more pressing reason to focus attention on human children in the current ecological situation, though, is that by virtue of children's greater proximity to the precarity and contingency experienced by other-than-human creatures in the *oikos*, concern for human children can be a way to garner greater awareness and concern for other precariously situated beings. Concern for children may function as a conduit for concern for other members of the *oikos*.
