In Annihilation (2014a), the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, a territory known as Area X has been sealed off by a secret, military organization called Central. They have set up a military research station, the eponymous Southern Reach, and from this vantage, they are trying to both contain and explore an increasingly unpredictable and dangerous territory. Plants and animals behave in strange ways, the landscape is inconstant and impossible to map, and the humans who enter it soon begin to exhibit weird and erratic behaviour. Annihilation follows a biologist who is part of one of these expeditions. She soon finds herself under threat both from entities within Area X and from other members of the expedition, even as she is turned into something probably not quite human. Authority (2014b), the second instalment to the trilogy, tells the story of John ‘Control’ Rodriguez, a newly appointed director of the Southern Reach facility. He is from a family that has, for a long time, helped run the clandestine operations of Central, but his attempts to manage the station, and to understand and contain Area X, are fraught with failure. Area X resists all military and scientific strategies, it is expanding beyond the geographical, ecological, human, and civilizational borders guarded by the station. In this future, the natural world is out of control.

Miranda Iossifidis and Lisa Garforth (2022) are two of many scholars who have read Annihilation as ‘climate fiction’, because ‘the uncanny atmospheres brought to life by the text, and the affective responses of some of its readers, create new ways of imagining climate futures’ (p. 248). According to standard ecocritical scholarship, climate fiction is a new literary genre primarily involved in the description of the dark futures that will ensue if nothing is done about climate change. As argued by Imogen Malpas (2021), ‘climate fiction provides us with the beginnings of the roadmap we so sorely need to achieve a global society that is both abundant and sustainable’ (np). Climate fiction is supposed to be able to provide such roadmaps partly because it is based on existing climate science. In the words of Gregers Andersen (2020), climate fiction depicts ‘worlds resembling those forecast by the IPCC’ (p. 1), and, by doing so, they provide ‘speculative insights into how it might be to feel and understand in such worlds’ (p. 1). Borrowing a concept launched by geologists (who get to name climate events and epochs), climate fiction scholars sometimes also refer to the genre as Anthropocene fiction (Trexler 2015). The Anthropocene concept here identifies the human as the entity that has produced the event typically referred to as the climate crisis. Thus, climate fiction is typically read and studied as a genre that takes people into futures predicted by climate science, where human activity has caused extensive flooding, parching drought, and terrible storms, and where conditions for human life have been drastically altered.

Before considering how the Southern Reach Trilogy corresponds to these requirements, it is necessary to contemplate the widely circulated, and increasingly problematized, claim that the ongoing breakdown is caused by the human as a species. Since atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer (2000) launched the concept of the Anthropocene, it has come under fire from those who deny the very notion that the planet is warming in dangerous ways, but also from a growing number of scientists, sociologists, environmental historians, Indigenous scholars, and climate activists who find the concept, and the history of biospheric breakdown it relies on, misleading. While this contingent strongly agrees that human activity has caused a biospheric crisis, their crucial objection is that this crisis has not been produced by all humans equally, but rather by a particular group of people in the Global North who have long taken advantage of the opportunities offered by colonialism and capitalism. These critical voices include scholars such as John Bellamy Foster (1999), Jason W. Moore (2015, 2016), Andreas Malm (2016), Malm and Hornborg (2014), Hannah Holleman (2018), Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017), Katheryn Yusoff (2018), Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015), and Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017).Footnote 1 Work by these authors employ different terminology and perspectives and disagree on certain points, but they share the understanding that the history of the climate crisis is also the history of extractive (colonial) capitalism. In this way, climate breakdown has its origin in the extractive monocrop plantations of colonized America, in the elimination of Indigenous people that made the plantation possible, in the chattel slavery system that serviced the plantation, in the industrial landscape created to refine, transform and market the proceeds of the plantation, in the subterranean worlds where the coal and oil necessary to power industry are sourced, and in the establishment of vast armies tasked with protecting this development. Some of those who make this argument still employ the term Anthropocene, but many have turned to the alternative concept of the Capitalocene, coined by Andreas Malm but theorized primarily by environmental historian Jason W. Moore. This book draws from several of the thinkers referenced above, but it is primarily informed by Moore’s work and understanding of the past, present, and future of the ongoing crisis.

I will return to this crucial rethinking of what drives a breakdown that is both social and ecological, rather than just climate-related, in this introduction and in the chapters that follow. First, though, I want to reconsider the idea that the Southern Reach trilogy is ‘climate fiction’ and that, as such, it is capable of showing us the road towards more sustainable ways of life. While there is certainly some merit to this observation—the novel may indeed, through its representation of nature as weird and disturbing, problematize the prevalent notion that humans are in control of, or apart from, nature—it must also be noted that this novel (like many other so-called climate fictions) is strangely quiet on what has caused the weird ecological and human changes that take place within its pages. In the Southern Reach trilogy, the entity that has initiated the transformation of ecology in Area X is not capitalism, fossil-fuelled human industry, or even humanity generalized into species, but an undefined, occult, or possibly extra-terrestrial entity. Against such an otherworldly agent, the characters and institutions of the novel can do little. It must also be noted that the trilogy does not register how the biospheric breakdown it references is part of a global, interrelated, social, economic, and ecological metacrisis, and it does not acknowledge how unevenly biospheric breakdown affects different communities across the planet; how for some, it is an anxiety-inducing future and for others an already brutal lived experience (Nixon 2011; Sultana 2022). This lack of history and global context adds to the confusion experienced by the characters of the trilogy. They cannot comprehend what is going on because the novel refuses to make the world it imagines comprehensible. At the end of the day, the only form of action the characters can take, as the title of the final novel Acceptance (2014c) suggests, is to acknowledge that ecology will be fundamentally different from now on, and to figure out how to live in this drastically altered world.

In other words, when read as climate fiction, the Southern Reach trilogy makes what ecocritic Erin James (2015) has called a ‘storyworld’ in which biospheric breakdown is allegorized into an uncanny spectacle, where the systems, people, and histories that are responsible for this breakdown go unrecognized and where the unevenness of the slow and fast violence of climate change is elided. What geologists have named the Anthropocene may loom in between the lines, but Annihilation does not evoke a future that resembles the predictions of the IPCC, and hardly provides readers with a roadmap capable of taking them to an abundant and sustainable global future. If climate fiction is supposed to do this, Annihilation does not seem to belong to the genre. It is oblivious to the history that has produced socio-ecological breakdown, and it is neither about the biospheric futures predicted by climate science nor about the uneven experience of planetary-scale socio-ecological breakdown in the present.

This is fine, of course. This book does not ask that stories such as Annihilation are not written or appreciated. The Southern Reach Trilogy is a remarkable literary achievement and my purpose is not to create borders for what storyworlds fiction should be allowed to make. That noted, to call the Southern Reach Trilogy a story about biospheric breakdown is problematic because its depiction of such breakdown is ahistorical, unscientific, and ignores how unevenly it affects different people. However, the trilogy’s evocation of anxieties tied to eroding social and ecological worlds, and its portrayal of how the militarized security state responds to such uncanny erosion, are precise and jarring. The Southern Reach trilogy may not be saying anything about why the biosphere is eroding, it may not help readers understand how to mitigate such erosion, and it is notably silent on the fact that this breakdown is experienced in radically different ways in different parts of the world, but it is certainly vocal on how the US security state considers biospheric erosion the beginning of a potentially terminal crisis that merits the declaration of an emergency and a state of exception.

This book shows that this is a common strategy in much American fiction set in futures transformed by socio-ecological breakdown. While there are important novels and films that acknowledge the role that capitalism has played in such breakdown and that recognize how unevenly breakdown is experienced (as discussed in the final chapter of this book), there is a notably large body of texts that instead centres on capitalist crisis, emergency, and the securitization strategies employed to address them. VanderMeers’ trilogy approaches this type of text by describing how a seemingly sudden biospheric crisis creates a considerable dearth of security for a US national security apparatus charged with maintaining the conditions under which US capitalist society can work smoothly. Similarly, it is about how this disturbance prompts the establishment of a state of exception that provides the organization in charge (Central) with far-reaching and unconstitutional powers. In this way, the Southern Reach trilogy is most usefully analysed as a narrative that registers how socio-ecological breakdown is an emergency for the nation-state, and for the security institution tasked with protecting this state and its citizens. In view of this overarching concern, the Southern Reach Trilogy is better described as an American Climate Emergency Narrative, than as climate fiction.

This may seem like a minor adjustment in terminology, but it does transform the scholarly engagement with this type of text. To name texts such as the Southern Reach trilogy American Climate Emergency Narratives recognizes that these texts come out of, and communicate with, a particular location within what Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) has called the capitalist world-system. In other words, these narratives do not enter the conversation on socio-ecological breakdown out of a universal nowhere. With the help of the world-literature perspective introduced by Franco Moretti (1996, 2000) and modified by the WReC (2015), these narratives can be perceived as texts written or otherwise produced within and for the core defined as a privileged and dominant sector of the world-system. This means, as I discuss in more detail below, that they speak from, and about, a certain privileged experience of this system. To call them American Climate Emergency Narratives is furthermore to centre how these texts narrate the security strategies that are used in the US and in other parts of the world to manage and adapt to, rather than mitigate, the various crises and disasters that biospheric erosion is accelerating.

With the help of the concept of the American Climate Emergency Narrative, this book shows how socio-ecological breakdown is often described as an existential crisis for American capitalist modernity, rather than for the planet. As the first chapters of the book demonstrate, this is a narrative that emerges out of the same history as socio-ecological breakdown itself, and that has evolved alongside the economic, ecological, military, and labour-related crises that accompany capitalism. In its most recent, intermedial form discussed in the second half of the book, it registers, but also contributes to, capitalism’s attempt to secure its own future at a time of epochal capitalist crisis. The book furthermore shows that while some of the texts I describe as American Climate Emergency Narratives signal an awareness of the fact that global warming and biospheric erosion are the result of extractive capitalism, they struggle to imagine any other social order and typically turn to capitalism, and to security mechanisms such as the US Department of Defense (DoD), as the only entities capable of relieving their plight. In this narrative, militarized capitalist modernity may have contributed to the emergency at hand, but it is also somehow the solution. In this way, much of the fiction that is discussed in this book sanitizes the idea that capitalist nations must respond to what is imagined as an anthropogenic climate emergency through military adaptation; through the creation of organizations such as Central and the establishment of places like the Southern Reach, via participating in local and global resource wars, by containing migrants displaced by climate change, even by making war on eroding and uncooperative ecology itself. Thus, the American Climate Emergency Narrative I study is not primarily an attempt to give affective shape to recent IPCC reports, but instead a part of both the capitalist and colonial history that has produced the present crisis, and of the culture that attempts to manage this crisis.

World-System, World-Ecology, Cheap Nature, and Crisis

To come to terms with the American Climate Emergency Narrative—to understand where it comes from, what it is that it registers, obscures, celebrates, and condemns, and how it envisions events such as crisis, emergencies, and responses such as securitization and militarization—it is necessary to consider the claim that capitalism is the engine of socio-ecological breakdown in more detail and to explore the material history that bears this claim out. It is similarly important to probe the instrumentalizing concepts of ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate emergency’ and try to understand how they function when contrasted to the very different understanding of crisis and emergency that radical eco-socialist, decolonial, and Indigenous methodologies encourage. In what follows, I briefly describe the historical and intellectual framework that guides my analysis of the origins, rhetorical evolution, and central concerns of the American Climate Emergency Narrative. I also discuss the capitalist imperative to secure the extractive enterprise on a local and global level, and the role that emergency has played for such securitization.

An important beginning to grasp the role that capitalism has played in biospheric breakdown is Wallerstein’s aforementioned concept of the capitalist world-system. This concept notes how European nations reshaped the world into peripheries from where resources were sourced cheaply, a core where these resources were commodified and their proceeds accumulated, and semiperipheries where both processes occurred. The formation of this world-system was complex and involved wars, trade agreements, the formation of new nations states, and so on, but one crucial phase in the making of the world-system that merits particular attention here was the privatization and often violent enclosure of land in Europe and then abroad. As James Alfred Yelling (1977), Jeanette M. Neeson (1993), and Robert P. Marzec (2002) discuss, the enclosure movement began in Britain in the late medieval period and transformed the predominately rural population of Europe into landowners or labourers employed (or forced) to work the land they previously held in common with other people. As Marzec observes, these enclosures were ‘England’s preparatory experiments in the colonization of its own land before the nation began to acquire land abroad’ (2002, p. 13).Footnote 2

The establishment of enclosures abroad, and thus of the commodity peripheries that make up a vital segment of the world-system, was greatly energized by the ‘discovery’ of America in the fifteenth century. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, this ‘New World’ presented early European capitalism with vast tracts of enormously fertile land to enclose and reorganize not simply into settlements, but into plantations that grew cash crops for a European market. The establishment of such enterprises was made easier by the fact that the first settlers brought illnesses for which the Indigenous population had no immunity. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, an estimated 90 per cent of the population had succumbed to these illnesses (Koch et al., 2019). This left the continent relatively open and enabled the comparatively speedy establishment of the extractive, triangular economy that brought cash crops grown in the New World to Europe, trade items to Africa, and enslaved people to the plantations in the New World. In the centuries that followed, the adaptability of capitalism to various crises (many of its own making), its ruthless transformation of people and land into commodifiable resources, turned capitalism into the only game in town: into the world-system.

Wallerstein’s detailed history of the origin and development of the capitalist world-system has influenced more recent world-system authors such as Giovanni Arrighi (1994), decolonial scholars such as Aníbal Quijano (see Quijano 2000; Quijano and Wallerstein 2000) and environmental historians such as Jason W. Moore. Quijano is one of several decolonial thinkers who has done work on how colonial capitalism transformed living conditions and social realities in South America and other parts of the Global South, and on how this reshaping is still going on. Building on but also modifying Wallerstein’s and Arrighi’s work, Moore has crucially argued that capitalism did not simply reshape economic and social systems across the world, it also remade the ecology of the planet to suit its needs. Moore thus names the profoundly interrelated ecological, social, and economic world that capitalism has made over the past 400 years the capitalist world-ecology. An important point made by Moore is that capitalism has not simply worked on nature but has always been in nature so that by reorganizing ecology it has also reshaped its own conditions and possible futures. As I will return to, this is a crucial observation that has great bearing on the attempt to understand how capitalism has helped to shape the current socio-ecological moment and thus also what I term the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

Since the inception of the capitalist world-ecology, capitalism’s reorganization of the social and ecological world has revolved around the appropriation of what Moore calls commodity frontiers (Moore 2015, p. 63) where the cost of growing crops, mining metals, and minerals, or extracting fossil energies, has been relatively low. As Patel and Moore (2018) argue, ‘capitalism has thrived not because it has been violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way’ (p. 19). This particularity is intimately tied to its ability to adapt to crises and to thus continue to source nature and labour cheaply. To do so, Moore argues, has been the guiding imperative or ‘law of value’ (Moore 2015, p. 24) of capitalism. As an example, acting according to this law of value, actors within the early capitalist world-ecology preferred to relocate the sugar plantation from a depleted Madeira to Brazil and the Caribbean, where the necessary fuel and fertile soil could be found, rather than restoring the ecology of Madeira. It was not only non-human nature that was made cheap in this way. To capitalism, ‘virtually all peoples of color, most women, and most people with white skin living in semicolonial regions’ (Moore 2016, p. 91) also belonged to the realm of nature. As such they were also exhausted and replaced when convenient. In this way, capitalism has progressed by turning the planet into a source of what Moore terms Cheap Nature.

As can be seen from the Madeira example, treating people and nature cheaply does not leave room for recuperation and restoration. The law of Cheap Nature depletes people, societies, land, seas, mountains, and soils, and in doing so, it also changes the conditions for the global, capitalist project. In the past, capitalism has been able to manage the depletion of nature and labour by relocating its extractive ventures to other sites, and by reorganizing its relationship to labour. Indeed, as Arrighi (1978, 1994) has shown, and as Naomi Klein (2007) has also influentially argued, crises are endemic to capitalism. Such crises include mines becoming depleted, banks collapsing, commodities going out of fashion, and (Indigenous) communities resisting the transformation of rainforest to grassland for cattle or palm oil plantations. However, while a capitalist entity (a corporation, group of owners, a bank) may suffer from a particular crisis, the capitalist system not only produces crises, it also exploits them. Unemployment makes labour cheaper, resistance from Indigenous groups or competing nation-states boosts the sale of military hardware, and deregulation designed to stimulate energy production opens new areas up for extraction. On Madeira, the end of the sugar plantation became the beginning of the wine industry (Patel and Moore 2018, pp. 17–18).

However, the world has now reached a point where such deregulation, relocation, and reorganization are becoming very demanding or even impossible. The deeply interrelated, uneven, and fundamentally extractive social, economic, and ecological relations on which capitalism relies have reduced the entire planet’s capacity to recuperate. As Moore (2015) puts it ‘it is increasingly difficult to get nature—including human nature—to yield its “free gifts” on the cheap’ (p. 13). At this moment in time, agents of the capitalist world-ecology are trying to adapt to and manage this elevated crisis, but the global capitalist antidote to deregulate and capitalize—to tweak the neoliberal model so that labour is more accessible and cheaper (the gig economy), to (re)introduce new techniques that enable more effective extraction (fracking), and to open new territories for exploitation (the Arctic, new sections of the North Sea, rainforest in South East Asia and South America)—are clearly short-term solutions. To Moore (2015), this indicates that ‘we may be experiencing not merely a transition from one phase of capitalism to another, but something more epochal: the breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries’ (p. 13). Should these strategies and relations truly break down, this would spell the end of the law of Cheap Nature and of the capitalist world-ecology.

This suggests that there is a need to consider two intimately entangled but actually very different, and differently lived, crises. One is planetary, ecological, and biospheric, and the other systemic and capitalist. The planetary, biospheric crisis is considerable; a mass extinction of species at a rate not experienced since the demise of the dinosaurs 64 million years ago (see Kolbert 2014; Ceballos et al. 2015). The capitalist crisis is similarly vast but while it is intimately connected to the biospheric crisis, it is not the same thing. The epochal capitalist crisis is not triggered by the fact that the biosphere is eroding as much as it is produced by the increasing lack of new Nature to appropriate and work cheaply. For the capitalist world-system, this shortage is the crisis. In the postcolonies of the Global South, the crises produced by extractive capitalism have been felt for hundreds of years. To the affluent, most of which are ensconced in the Global North, it appears as something new and sudden: As a future crisis rather than the culmination of a long and extractive history.

This account of crisis and emergency is central to the study of what I call the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Novelists, filmmakers, and other cultural workers and entrepreneurs who produce this kind of text may project the sense that the stories they tell are about the biospheric crisis, when they are in fact exploring the emergencies that erupt out of the epochal capitalist crisis as this takes shape in the Global North. As I have suggested, and as the coming chapters reveal, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is fundamentally uninterested in, even oblivious to, the capitalist history that has brought the current socio-ecological crisis on, and in the fundamentally uneven experience of this crisis in the present. It is instead obsessed with the possibility that capitalism might end, with the various threats to this world order that biospheric breakdown may produce, and with the need to securitize capitalist modernity. Thus, the American Climate Emergency narrative may appear as a textual form that calls attention to biospheric breakdown, and ecocritical scholarship may take it at its word, but as this book argues, the crisis that it probes is fundamentally capitalist.

Emergency and Securitization

The possibility that the capitalist world-ecology may face an epochal crisis is central to the leveraging of the emergency concept in the present, and to a host of security mechanisms designed to prevent or postpone the crisis. As the concept of the American Climate Emergency Narrative implies, this is a body of texts that centres emergency, probes the various insecurities that constitute emergency, and proposes solutions that will resolve the emergency and the crisis that has provoked it. As described in the previous section, the crisis that merits the declaration of the emergency and the action taken to relieve it is not biospheric breakdown per se, but the possibility that the conditions that keep the capitalist world-system running will cease to be.

This has been a concern for core actors within the capitalist world-ecology since its early beginnings. Importantly, the creation of enclosures in the old and new world was also the creation of a new type of insecurity, and thus the beginning of a militarized consciousness that Robert P. Marzec (2015), adapting Michel Foucault’s (1991) notion of ‘governmentality’, has termed ‘environmentality’ (p. 4).Footnote 3 The enclosure effectively transformed what used to be a sustainable, multispecies, communal habitat into a specific energy or commodity frontier that a landowner or other polity now depended upon for accumulable income. This, as Marzec observes, ‘introduced modern conceptions of privatization, surveillance, and environmental manipulation’ (p. 11). What needed to be kept secure, from this moment on, was not humans (however defined) or animals or land, but the enclosure and the commodity frontier that was contained within this enclosure. It can thus be argued that what was securitized by the private actors and the governments that made up the early colonial state was extraction (of sugar, grain, livestock, gold, coal and oil, labour, i.e., of humans and extra-human nature) itself. Put differently, the primary responsibility of state and private militias in America became the securitization of the law of Cheap Nature.Footnote 4

The securitization of the commodity frontier had enormous consequences for how human and non-human lives were lived and ended in early America. From the establishment of the first enclosures and colonies, biophysical nature, and many (racialized, Indigenous) people (Moore 2016, p. 79) became something to be governed and managed. At the same time, the enclosure and privatization of land made it possible to work both the land and the people who tended it harder; to force land and labour to yield more than they had previously done and to expand the extractive process to new regions. To conquer and enclose additional land and to govern and manage this land—to reorganize nature into a capitalist world-ecology—it is necessary to exert a great deal of violence. There must be a mechanism that can manage the various emergencies that threaten extraction, that keeps property borders intact, guarantees the extraction of value from the land, eliminates Indigenous people, controls rebellious labour in fields and industries, and defends, or steals, already enclosed land from competing nation-states. This mechanism, as Rosa Luxemburg (2015) and Louis Althusser (2014) have argued in different ways, and as Alex Vitale (2017) and William I. Robinson (2020) have recently discussed, is the military and the police. By expanding and securing the borders that mark enclosures, and by keeping labour within these borders under control, the military—in its private paramilitary form, or as funded by local governments or by states or nation-states—performs an essential service for capitalism.

This is important when considering the present epochal crisis and the leveraging of emergencies. It is similarly important when analysing the storyworlds that are produced within the American Climate Emergency Narrative. The tendency to turn to the armed sections of the security apparatus when emergencies arise should cause concerns at a time when a number of cities, nation-states, and supranational organizations have declared ‘climate emergencies’.Footnote 5 Because such declarations oppose climate change denial, they are often welcomed by climate scientists and activists. Indeed, there is every reason to consider the current erosion of the biosphere and the ongoing sixth mass extinction of species as precisely an emergency for the planet and the many species that inhabit it. However, declarations of emergency do not necessarily lead to attempts to transform the root causes that have created the emergency. Rather, as Mike Hulme (2019) has observed, emergencies are often a reason for states and other actors to establish what Giorgio Agamben (2005) has called states of exception designed to manage the ‘conditions of war, insurrection, or terrorist threat’ (p. 23), but not to alter the system that has produced these conditions. In fact, as Rebecca Duncan et al. argue (2023), ‘by framing climate change as an imminent but manageable disaster, it becomes possible to bypass questions relating to where this disaster comes from, thereby licensing solutions that reproduce, and work in the interest of, the extractive (colonial) system’ (p. 477). In other words, there is a considerable risk that declarations of climate emergency introduce policies that centre the needs of the states that have declared them, and of the capitalist world-system, rather than the needs of the planet and its many people. To declare (climate) emergencies that ultimately serve to strengthen the system that has produced them not only decentres the entities that are experiencing crisis more keenly (the planet and precarious communities in various parts of the world), it risks accelerating both the biospheric crisis and already existing inequalities.

This is borne out by the fact that the regions, nations, and unions that have so far declared formal climate emergencies have, as a rule, been the least affected by ongoing socio-ecological breakdown and are the least likely to suffer the consequences of accelerating biospheric erosion (see Birkmann et al. [2022] for an estimation of the relative vulnerability of different nations to socio-ecological breakdown and Cedamia [2022] for a list of the nations and regions that have declared climate emergencies). By contrast, very few of the nations that are estimated to be especially vulnerable to climate change have declared climate emergencies. The few nations in the Global South that have made such declarations are mostly islands that have already begun to disappear into rising oceans. There is a clear logic to this discrepancy in declaring climate emergencies. For many people in the Global South, living within nation-states established by, and still mostly dependent on, the nations that make up the core of the world-system, the crisis began hundreds of years ago. What would be the point of declaring an emergency now? In addition to this, from the perspective of the core of the world-ecology, for nations in the Global South to do so risks compounding the emergency, since such a declaration may curb access to the commodity frontiers located in this region. In any case, forcibly inserted into the capitalist world-ecology as commodity frontiers where nature and labour are sourced on the cheap, ‘developing’ nations in the Global South simply cannot afford to declare climate emergencies.

In the Global North, and also in nation-states that aspire to supplant the current hegemonic core of the world-system, a different story is playing out. Whether these nations have declared emergencies or not, they are mobilizing their security apparatuses to adapt and manage oncoming crises. As described in considerable detail by Marzec (2015), dominant nation-states and their militarized security apparatuses are managing the biospheric crisis by projecting climate change as an ‘engagement opportunity’ (p. 9). Indeed, as Marzec has also observed, the biospheric crisis is perceived by the US State, and by institutions such as the US DoD as a ‘threat multiplier’ (p. 2) and as such it is understood as an emergency for the US nation-state, and for the global capitalist economy this state relies on and directs, rather than for the deeply interconnected multispecies ecology that keeps the planet healthy, or for the millions of people who live precarious lives in the shadow of accumulation.

The tendency to seek to resolve capitalist crisis by leveraging emergency, and by preparing to do violence in order to resolve this emergency, is crucially important to the study of the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Writing from the core that narrates capitalist crisis via images of the escalation of internal and international tensions into massive migration movements and warfare is haunted by this militarized history. When such writing turns to the military as a universal panacea for the insecurities that give direction to the narrative, (military) adaptation is perceived as the only viable strategy forward. No other future history than the continuation of the present system can be imagined under these conditions. Some of the texts discussed in this book may correctly identify militarized capitalist modernity as the engine of climate breakdown (and of related forms of social erosion), but even then, alternatives to this social and military order are perceived as impossible or as so detrimental that oblivion is preferable. Thus, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is ultimately about the need to restore and repair capitalist modernity, even if such restoration (absurdly) involves making war on the planet itself.

Cultural Studies in the Capitalocene: The World-Literature Perspective

Just as the realization that fossil-energized capitalism is driving biospheric breakdown ‘changes everything’ (Klein 2015) for how the climate crisis is understood and acted upon, it also transforms the conditions for cultural theory. As Andreas Malm proposes in The Progress of this Storm (2018) ‘any theory for the warming condition should have the struggle to stabilise climate – with the demolition of the fossil economy the necessary first step – as its practical, if only ideal, point of reference’ (p. 18). While there is certainly ecocritical work that openly centres the need to dismantle capitalism, there is a notable tendency in ecocriticism (much of it produced in the US and Europe) to flatten the global impact of socio-ecological breakdown, to erase the material history that has produced it and to take for granted that the (future) European or US experience of this breakdown is somehow universal. A large number of literary ecocritical studies also focus on the affect produced by the reading of climate narratives, rather than the effects that capitalism has on human relations and ecology, on the combined and uneven world-ecology, and on the climate narrative as such.Footnote 6 A better starting point for ecocritical theory at a time of socio-ecological crisis is arguably to acknowledge first that most climate narratives are produced from within, and also for, a particular location of the world-system or world-ecology, and then that these narratives are read from very different positions. A point worth repeating is that the authors, directors, and production companies of the American Climate Emergency Narrative are, for the most part, and not surprisingly, located in the US. This means that they emerge out of a particular, core position of the world-system, and also out of the specific ecological, material, and narrative history that has been central to the production of the current socio-ecological crisis.

By reading the American Climate Emergency Narrative as a culture that emerges out of a particular location of the world-system, this book builds on a fairly recent development in world-literature studies introduced by Italian literary historian Franco Moretti (1996, 2000) and further developed by the members of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC). Building on Immanuel Wallerstein's world-system model, and recalling Fredric Jameson's point in The Political Unconscious (1981) that narrative is a ‘socially symbolic act’ (p. 1), Moretti observes that capitalism has created very different conditions for life in the core, the peripheries, and semiperipheries of the world-system, and that these conditions inform literature in a fundamental way. Extending Moretti’s work, the Warwick Research Collective has argued in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature that ‘the dialectics of core and periphery […] underpin all cultural production in the modern era’ (2015, p. 51), and that ‘world literature’ should be understood as the ‘literature of the modern capitalist world-system’ (p. 8). To differentiate literary studies that focus on the world-system from other types of world-literature studies, the WReC suggest that ‘we should begin to speak of “world-literature” with a hyphen’ (p. 8). This book adopts this understanding of (and this way of spelling) world-literature.

The WReC and scholars (many belonging to this collective) such as Michael Niblett (2012, 2020), Sharae Deckard (2019), Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard (2017), Treasa De Loughry (2020), Jennifer Wenzel (2019), and Rebecca Duncan (2022) have also expanded Moretti’s word-literature model by introducing the world-ecological perspective into it. Thus, Niblett describes in World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890–1950 (2020) how world-literature does not respond just to the social and economic inequalities that capitalism produces, but also to the related, large-scale ecological upheaval that capitalism’s pursuit of Cheap Nature causes. Niblett demonstrates how this happens through a study of literature produced at four different commodity frontiers (sugar, cacao, coal, and oil) that are located at different times and geographical locations, but that all serve an expanding capitalist world-system/world-ecology. His study shows that texts from these dispersed frontiers register extractive human and ecological effects in very similar ways. Descriptions of ‘the sugar mill remorselessly consuming cane, sucking out the energies of its workers’ are thus ‘echoed’ in narratives about the coal pit, the cocoa refinery, and the oil derrick (p. 2). In essence, literature from the periphery or semiperiphery registers the experience of being caught up in the extractive machinery of the capitalist world-ecology.

While sociological world-system research has tended to centre the core, much of the work by world-literature scholars such as the WReC, Niblett, Duncan, Sánchez Prado (2019), and others is comparative and focuses on the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system. Like the postcolonial literary studies that it complements and converses with, much of this scholarship thus sheds light on how cultural production in colonies and postcolonies have registered and responded to the (racialized and gendered) socio-ecological violence conducted in these sections of the word-system. This book adopts this theoretical perspective but extends it in a different direction. Instead of focusing on how the capitalist world-system is registered in the extractive peripheries or semiperipheries, it explores literature, films, and games produced within the core of the world-system.

To do so is important for many reasons. As described, socio-ecological breakdown is a consequence of the capitalist imperatives directed from the core, and it is also where the effort to prevent the breakdown from unfolding must begin. In addition to this, as Andersen rightly notes, North America is the ‘main producer of climate fiction’ (2020, p. 7). By focusing on this geographical, economic, and cultural section within the world-system, this book joins scholarship such as De Loughry’s The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis that centres a set of texts written in ‘proximity to hegemony’ (2020, p. 13). Again, the primary texts discussed in this book were produced by, and in most cases for, the people situated within this core. In addition to this, many of the fictions considered in this book were not produced simply in proximity to the core, but emerge out of the very institutions that support and enable the core. My point here (developed in more detail throughout the book) is that American Climate Emergency films such as Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2009) and Gareth Edward’s Godzilla (2014), were produced in close collaboration with the network of military, capitalist and state interests that make the core function as core, and that are tasked with securitizing this core.

By focusing on narratives produced in the US, this book thus centres on a different experience of the capitalist world-ecology than that focused on by Niblett and Duncan. Their work convincingly shows that writing in the semiperipheries and peripheries registers capitalism as a force exerting considerable extractive, social, and ecological violence. Because of neoliberal deregulation and the long history of structural racism, the core in the US is, of course, closely stratified and heterogeneous, with the inner-city or rural poor living in close proximity to affluent suburbanites (to simplify a very complex social world). This means that such a registering of capitalism as an extractive and violent engine also occurs in core spaces.Footnote 7 However, and importantly, narratives from the privileged segment of the core still tend to register capitalism via the freedoms and comforts that it generates for the core. As De Loughry observes, the ‘baseline of experiences’ in the core, ‘is that of the capitalist world-system, and more specifically of a friction-free mobility during a period of relative financial and hegemonic stability from the 1990s to the early 2000s’ (2020, p. 18). In this way, writing from the core is often about the pleasures of the automobile, the aircraft, the suburban bungalow, the shopping malls, the family constellations, and the casual love affairs that capitalism affords certain strata. In texts such as Top Gun (Scott 1986) or Sex in the City (1998–2010), capitalism is thus registered as an invisible but ubiquitous engine of a variety of racialized and sexualized privileges, powers, securities, pleasures, and comforts, and of the particular masculine and feminine modes of being that the exercise of these privileges and pleasures affords.

The world-literature perspective thus makes it possible to read the American Climate Emergency Narrative as a kind of core utterance; a multi-vocal yet contained expression of how this particular segment of the world-ecology registers, but also seeks to manage, the unfolding epochal capitalist world-ecological crisis. As a type of text that registers such crisis and the possible demise not just of the hegemony of the US, but of the entire world-system, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is relentlessly and repetitively violent. This violence is often disturbing and, as the coming chapters show, it can be understood as a registering of how capitalism’s systemic violence has brought on a terminal crisis. However, as fiction from the core, the American Climate Emergency Narrative manages these eruptions through its erasure of the people and the extra-human lives that have long suffered ecological and social injustice and that are thus the historical recipients of this violence, and also by proposing that the solution to the abject violence it rehearses is to turn to the very institutions that, as described above, enable the core. Again, the solution to world-ecological crisis that is proposed by the American Climate Emergency Narrative is to invest in more of the militarized capitalism that produced the crisis.

By doing so, the American Climate Emergency Narrative can be said to be involved in an attempt to securitize the very system that has made the capitalist world-ecology. The tendency of American fiction to participate in such as project has been theorized within the growing field of literary security studies. A special issue of American Literary History edited by David Watson (2016) describes how American literature, from the dawn of the republic to the post-9/11 moment, has been saturated by a ‘logic of security’ understood as ‘a diverse, heterogeneous, and dynamic set of knowledges, assumptions, and techniques’ (p. 665) that surface in relation to a number of concerns in American life and history, from the notion of ownership and enclosure, to precarity and surveillance in the neoliberal US. Watson warns against viewing ‘US cultural expression as security mechanisms’ (p. 665), as doing so might reproduce the potentially divisive discourses through which states identify and distribute otherness and belonging. Yet, as this book demonstrates, many texts that can be described as American Climate Emergency Narratives do function in this way. This is arguably part of the work that core texts do: they rehearse the tenets that normalize and thus secure the dominant world-system it dominates, even as they register the anxieties and the violence by which the system is maintained.

By approaching the American Climate Emergency Narrative as a kind of core securitization enunciation, it is easier to understand why this voice sounds so different when compared to other voices coming from peripheral or semiperipheral parts of the world-system. To read these fictions as core expressions thus affords an important critical distance; it urges the scholar to read with caution, always aware of the fact that these texts speak about ecology and emergency from a certain position of economic, gendered, sexualized, and racialized power. Reading the American Climate Emergency Narrative as writing from the core also makes it easier to see how this body of text often speaks in unison with other voices that emanate from the US core. These other voices include the champions of liberal Green Capitalism (Sullivan 2009) but also purveyors of far-right ecofascism (Moore and Roberts 2022). The point here is that while these voices are often at odds with each other, they all assume, like the American Climate Emergency Narrative, that capitalism is an inevitable system. In this way, these literary and extra-literary voices are informed by what Mark Fisher (2009) has called capitalist realism. As I will return to, this is a realism premised on the understanding that there is no alternative to capitalism, even when this system is perceived to cause ruin and suffering.

Material and Organization

As described above, this book’s main focus is the US as the hegemonic core of the existing world-system, but it also considers writing produced in Britain during the early phase of settler colonialism and, in its concluding chapter, texts from the US and Canadian semiperipheries. The study is primarily concerned with media forms such as novels, short stories, and film, but it also considers games and, to a marginal extent, the graphic novel. In doing so, it notes that the types of culture that require very substantial funding are particularly closely tied to the economic conditions that exist at the core, and to the institutions that produce these conditions. Thus, as already mentioned and as discussed in more detail in the coming chapters, some of the fiction produced in the core is created not by individuals as much as by networks within the capitalist economy. Such networks consist of globally dispersed creative industries, venture capitalist firms, global media conglomerates, and, notably, the US Department of Defense. These networks are ultimately geared towards producing spectacular and absorbing cinematic and ludological narratives that generate profit that can be accumulated within the world-system, and that disseminate specific political content that steers individual actors in certain directions (see Lenoir and Caldwell 2018; Wark 2009).

To look more closely at the corpus of this study, Chapters 2 and 3, and the first half of Chapter 4 explore texts published between the early seventeenth century and the late twentieth century. These are historical accounts, novels, plays, and Hollywood films that describe but also contribute to the making of America as the hegemon of the world-system, and that thus lay the ideological and imaginative foundation for the contemporary American Climate Emergency Narrative. After having discussed these origin stories, I turn to texts that have typically been filed as climate fiction by critics and literary scholars. Several of the texts discussed in this part of the book have received attention from climate fiction scholars and can be considered canonical to the field. Some of these employ an exclusively realist register and have been celebrated by literary critics, and some, like the books that make up the Southern Reach Trilogy, are far more speculative. However, the notion of the American Climate Emergency Narrative affords a possibility to widen the scope of the investigation and to look at novels and films that, like many of the canonical works, take place in futures clearly transformed by (capitalogenic) socio-ecological breakdown and that thus register epochal capitalist emergency, but that employ (monstrous) allegory and symbolism to tell the story. Climate fiction scholarship has typically ignored these texts or mentioned them only in passing. This is because they are, as Mark Bould (2021) observes, the ‘sort of things the “serious” and the “literary” might wish the seas would swallow’ (p. 4). By not ignoring them, this book is able to draw a much more complete map of the entangled body of texts that make up the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

The book consists of eight chapters where Chapter 2: Settler Capitalist Frontiers and Chapter 3: Fossil Fictions explore the genealogy of the Climate Emergency Narrative alongside the material history that both elevated the US to the core of the world-system and set the world on the road towards world-ecological crisis. These chapters thus show how writing from the early colonial period to the end of the twentieth century registers the extractive relationship between land and people that enabled the emergence of the capitalist world-ecology. Chapter 2 moves through two distinct historical and narrative stages where the first is the settler colonial text that, from the very beginning, narrated ecology as an emergency-inducing space that needs to be violently combatted and the second the white pro-slavery and abolitionist novels that described slavery and the plantation as central to the growing US economy, but that also registered these as drivers of environmental breakdown. Chapter 3 focuses on the specific opportunities and emergencies that were connected to the turn to coal and then to oil in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US. The first section considers writing from the core that celebrates the arrival and extraction of coal in the semiperipheries of the US while the second section discusses how the militarization of petro-energies in the US gave rise to what can be termed the Petrowar narrative. As the chapter demonstrates, this was a self-assured narrative that afforded new ways of observing the world, but as the twentieth century drew to a close, it became coloured by anxieties connected to unfolding socio-ecological breakdown and possible world-system transformation.

Chapter 4: The Irradiated discusses American post-WWII fiction that registers the enormous, but also notably ‘cheap’, violence that nuclear weapons enabled. The release of this violence during and after the war produced stories set in futures where the climate of the planet has clearly broken down as an effect of nuclear warfare and where the capitalist world-system is crumbling. In some of these stories, a planet damaged by nuclear violence and lingering radiation takes the form of a gigantic, monstrous, and uncontrollable security threat that demands the attention of the military. By telling such stories, the chapter argues, these narratives must be considered as the formal beginning of the fully formed American Climate Emergency Narrative. As such, these texts demonstrate an increasing awareness of how militarized capitalism has helped to erode conditions for human and non-human life on the planet, but they still refuse to imagine alternatives to the system they understand as having destroyed the world.

While the first three chapters of the book read the American Climate Emergency Narrative alongside the historical ascent of the US, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 centre on texts written and produced after the turn of the millennium, when it is becoming increasingly clear that the biosphere is in crisis, this while the US is beginning to lose hegemonic control of the world-system. Chapter 5: Geopolitics focuses on American Climate Emergency Narratives that describe how climate breakdown has created international geopolitical tension and conflict. These are narratives that show the US and other major powers such as China, India, and Russia leveraging their considerable military resources to compete over, and secure, vital natural resources, in the process of which they establish new command over, or lose, hegemony over the world-system. These texts thus register the fact that continued erosion of the biosphere may produce world wars in the future, but they see no alternative to such development. The questions these texts pose are ultimately how such future wars can be won by the American security apparatus, but they also investigate what might happen if other actors in the world-system take advantage of American failure.

Chapter 6: The Displaced turns to the question of climate migration and reads a series of texts that follow climate refugees as they cross, or are prevented from crossing, heavily guarded US national or state borders. The chapter shows how some American Climate Emergency Narratives employ allegory to cast the racialized climate refugee as a border-scaling monster, but it also reveals how even texts that seek to critique the racist ideology that informs extractive capitalist border-thinking focus on the future plights of the white and privileged. Chapter 7: Ruins discusses the depiction of thoroughly eroded, post-apocalyptic worlds where capitalism, the commodity frontiers that have always fed capital, and the economic conditions that make standing armies possible, have disappeared. Much of the fiction considered in this chapter describes a Hobbesian world devoid of the material comforts, securities, and privileges previously enjoyed by white, middle-class communities. Even so, as the chapter reveals, the heroes of these texts do their best to honour the violent social contract established by extractive and militarized capitalism.

Throughout these first six chapters, I focus on culture produced in the hegemonic core and I show how most of it is involved in a tacit attempt to sanitize or elide the destructive and exhaustive processes that have produced the ongoing socio-ecological breakdown while at the same time lending support to the attempt to securitize this breakdown into a national security matter that can be resolved through military intervention and via the introduction of various states of exception. In this way, this book is a study of ideologies that can be traced back to the emergence of the settler capitalist state. However, the book’s repeated return to, and description of, the ideologies that give form to this writing, risks naturalizing them. To resist this potential effect, the concluding Chapter 8: Fallout Futures poses that the writing analysed in the book can be considered as a form of ideological and intellectual residue or pathogen released by the core and invading the American imagination. Just as nuclear fallout travels via the stratosphere to all parts of the planet, this ideological fallout, energized by neoliberal globalization, reaches across the globe where it is shifting human environmental concerns towards an understanding of the future as a personal, regional, and/or national security concern. The aim of the final chapter is to refocus the needs of the planet as an entangled, multispecies habitat in the process of being destroyed by militarized capitalism. This chapter thus turns to climate narratives from the peripheries and semiperipheries that exist in close proximity to the US core. These, the chapter shows, register capitalism’s epochal crisis from a radically different position and, in doing so, perform important imaginative work that makes it possible to think outside of the intellectual boundaries that make capitalism seem inevitable.

With the help of these chapters, and via the concept of the American Climate Emergency Narrative, this book hopes to contribute to the already ongoing radical turn that is informing the scholarly engagement with film, literature, games, and other cultural forms that centre the needs of the planet and of humans in all parts of the world, rather than the wants of the system currently involved in eroding it or the desires of the people currently being privileged by these systems. Just as fiction makes storyworlds and thus sets the limits for what futures can be imagined, scholarship is involved in building worlds and futures for readers. This is an important realization for all scholarship and particularly for ecocritical interventions performed at a time when the Earth System may be approaching what climate scientists have termed tipping points (Dakos et al. 2019; Lenton et al. 2019). These tipping points are stages when the detrimental effects produced by global warming accelerate and cascade to such an extent that the niche that makes human life convenient rapidly erodes in many parts of the world. That said, and as argued by Mahanty et al. (2023), what should motivate a transformation of both the world-system and ecocritical scholarship is not necessarily just the prospect of a looming yet still future ecological threshold, but the socio-ecological rupture already caused by the inexorable slow violence of colonial capitalism.

The understanding that capitalism is driving ongoing socio-ecological breakdown prompts an activism very different from that produced by the insistence that the human species is the engine of the climate crisis. Rather than changing humanity, whatever that might mean, the obvious way forward is to profoundly alter the capitalist system that burns oil and coal, and that extracts minerals, human and extra-human life, and accumulates these as capital. To perform such systemic change is not an easy task. Capitalism is folded into most people’s lives on a very deep level, and most humans have been conditioned since birth to become integrated with it in one way or another. Even so, it is a fundamentally possible task. Despite the chorus of voices (many emanating out of the fiction studied in this book) that insists that no other social, ecological, or economic world is possible than the one produced by capitalism, there are futures beyond it. Ecocritical scholarship that resists these voices to instead centre the capitalist histories, systems, responses, and people that are causing socio-ecological breakdown, can assist in creating the intellectual platforms that make it possible to actively and systematically work towards human social and biospheric renewal. This book ultimately hopes to participate in the construction of such platforms.