Environmental Futures, Now and Then:

Abstract

Postwar environmental concern has been powerfully shaped by projections of ecological catastrophe. Indeed, it can be said that the global environment as an object of social and political concern came into existence in part through narratives of future crisis. This article explores two successive framings of environmental crisis and the kinds of knowledges that made them up. It examines the announcement of ecological limits to economic growth in the early 1970s, the culmination of an early wave of popular green concern that modeled the future as a choice between the catastrophic continuation of business as usual and the prospect of eco-utopian alternatives. It considers the crisis logics of contemporary climate dynamics, where the power of scientific modeling leaves little room for the imagination of radically different futures. Environmental crisis now cannot perform the anticipatory and utopian functions that it once did. The “apocalyptic horizon” of limits has given way to the collapse of crisis into the present and new kinds of colonization of the future. But in both cases, environmental crisis can be read as a science-fictional object, simultaneously descriptive and speculative, scientific and fictional. Science fiction tropes were crucial to early constructions of environmental crisis, and speculative climate fiction will be a vital resource for negotiating the social-natural futures of the Anthropocene.