The Limits of the Capitalist Imagination

In James Tynion IV’s and Martin Symmonds’ graphic novel series Department of Truth (2020, Vol. 1), FBI agent Cole Turner spends his time analysing far-right conspiracy movements, from people who believe that the Earth is flat, to those who subscribe to the theory that the US government has been taken over by shapeshifting reptilians. While attending a Flat Earth convention, Cole is invited by the organizers to attend a cinema screening of the 1969 moon landing that conclusively shows that it was recorded at a film studio by Stanley Kubrick. Cole is then flown in a private airplane to the very end of the Earth where an enormous wall of ice rises up until it meets the sky.

The Earth is flat.

Turner throws up in the aeroplane toilet.

But the Earth is not, in fact, flat. What Cole has seen, both in the cinema and at the end of the plane ride, are versions of the world generated by the concerted faith of a particular conspiracy movement. The universe within which the story takes place is pliable to such belief. Conspiracy theory is thus capable of warping the actual fabric of reality. After his traumatic visit to the end of the world, Cole is picked up and recruited by the undercover Department of Truth. The director of this department explains that ‘the more people believe in something, the more true that thing becomes’ (2020, no 1. p. 37). This allows the major capitalist actors to actively manipulate the fundamental constitution of the world through the invention and dissemination of outlandish conspiracy theories that stimulate these actors’ political and economic agenda. The flat Earth convention and the trip to the end of the Earth have been organized and sponsored by ‘Kennet and Bertram Boulet’Footnote 1 who have used ‘the fortune from their Texas oil company’ to fund ‘right-wing politicians for the last two decades’ (2020, no 1, p. 24). Cole is also told that the conspiracies these and other people like them fund are tied to periodic crises. They are ‘a cyclical thing. It happens in times of primal cultural fear’ (2020, no 2, p. 27).

By promoting the idea that the capitalist world-ecology is the only possible world and that futures that do not include capitalism are already and always dystopian, the American Climate Emergency Narrative performs work disturbingly similar to that done by conspiracy theories in The Department of Truth. These fictions are telling people the world-altering lie that biospheric breakdown is best resolved by investing in the system and strategies that, in fact, have brought the crisis on. Again, this body of texts calls socio-ecological breakdown an emergency, but only to facilitate the employment of the strategies that have always been used to secure extraction: the arming and employment of military and paramilitary units, the building of borders, the creation of surveillance systems, and the dismantling of labour and extraction laws. Even in the case when these narratives attempt to critique the insidious, violent, and profoundly entangled racist, sexist, and cisheteronormative paradigms that have aided extractive capitalism, they fail to offer worlds beyond the horizon imagined by capitalism. The Earth, at the end of the extractive journey, is flat. Capitalism is a great wall of impenetrable ice stretching up into the oblivion of a starry night sky. You cannot move beyond it because there is nothing on the other side.

To expand on this argument, and to summarize the most important points of this book, I have argued that much of what is called climate fiction, defined as a new literary genre profoundly informed by climate science and engaged in an attempt to provide readers with roadmaps towards sustainable futures, is so preoccupied with notions of climate emergency and the inevitability of capitalism that a better denominator for many of them is Climate Emergency Narrative. Thus, these texts cast climate breakdown, rather than the processes and systems that have produced it, as the problem. Consequently, the American military security apparatus that has been central to the effort of transforming much of the planet into a resource for extractive capitalism is leveraged as the only system capable of managing this emergency. In the texts studied, socio-ecological breakdown is thus rhetorically resolved through interstate military conflict, through the violent managing of climate refugees, and by combating the planet itself.

The book has furthermore shown how the American Climate Emergency Narrative builds on a long tradition of writing that can be traced, like biospheric breakdown itself, back to the early colonial period. In this way, the American Climate Emergency Narrative emerges out of the same historical and literary tradition, and the same cyclical crises, that have produced the now hegemonic core of the capitalist world-system, or, as Moore terms it, the capitalist world-ecology. In this way, the American Climate Emergency Narrative describes biospheric breakdown from the particular perspective that the hegemonic core constitutes. Again, the world-literature perspective that I have employed—introduced by Franco Moretti (1996) and reworked by the Warwick Research Collective (2015)—poses that the experience of the world-system is combined and uneven: all people across the planet is currently experiencing the same planetary-scale ecological/socioeconomic crisis—the crisis is combined—but they do so in very different ways—the crisis is uneven.

While precarious communities in the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system have long been experiencing the violence used to enclose and extract land, the ecological depletion such extractive violence causes, and the deregulatory strategies employed to keep nature and labour cheap are only now beginning to affect life in the core of the world-system. This is why this crisis appears as new or as a future emergency in many parts of the Global North. Thus, it is not strange that a socio-ecological crisis that has been unfolding for 400 years is described as new and forthcoming also in narratives from the core. As noted by Kyle P. Whyte (2018) in the article ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises’, there is a prevalent tendency in settler writing to locate climate apocalypse in rapidly approaching futures rather than in the long history that paved the way for the capitalist world-ecology. Similarly, because the US hegemonic core has for such a long invested in, and been privileged by, this world-ecology, it appears, from the perspective of this core, as inevitable and singular: as the thing that saves and the thing that needs saving.

As I have discussed in several of the chapters of the book, many of the texts that I have classified as American Climate Emergency Narratives have been funded and produced by the network of actors tasked with maintaining the core: the US military, the military-industrial complex and the merger between these entities and the entertainment industry that has been termed the Military Entertainment Complex. This is an informal gathering of capitalist institutions and interests tasked with keeping the American nation-state secure and operational. It is not strange that films and other entertainment media generated by this network should struggle to break the bounds of the capitalist imagination. Indeed, they are tasked with policing imagination as such. As the book has illustrated, writing from the core not formally supported by the Military Entertainment Complex also tends to toe the line. Even the most dystopian writing from the core, the texts that register the arrival of a socio-ecological breakdown of such proportions that it may be epochal or terminal, struggles to imagine alternatives to capitalism. The solution, in the American Climate Emergency Narrative, is always adaptation and system restoration, not system change. If this fails, darkness falls. The Earth is flat.

Fallout

It can be argued that if the climate emergency has been caused by an extractive, militarized capitalist modernity, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is part of its cultural, intellectual fallout. Just like carbon dioxide released by fossil capital, methane produced by industrialized cattle farming, radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb testing, or microplastics discharged from the waste of capitalism, the Climate Emergency Narrative emerges out of the core of the world-ecology to spread across the planet, setting the parameters for how biospheric breakdown can be comprehended and acted upon. It is a narrative that restrains agency by posing that the only meaningful type of action can be performed by and within capitalism, and that argues that radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial action is another engagement opportunity. It is a narrative that asks the reader to have faith in capitalism and to conspire with capitalism against the planet and the people who have long suffered the various crises that the capitalist world-ecology has produced in the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system.

This book has been about this fallout and the negative effects it may have also on literary or cultural scholarship interested in ecology and biospheric breakdown. However, by focusing on this type of text, the book also risks helping to cement the very limits built into the climate emergency narrative. If capitalism is not the only future, what other futures are there? The American Climate Emergency Narrative does not provide many clues to this question. This final chapter thus expands the imaginative horizon by considering climate narratives that acknowledge that the borders established between nature and society by capitalism are imaginary, that climate breakdown is not located in the future, but has long been experienced by people in the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system, and that capitalism is not an essential or inevitable social order. To this effect, the chapter will consider four different and interconnected types of climate narrative that do not centre capitalism and adaptation. These are the multispecies, Chthulucene text that folds humanity into a tentacular natural world, rather than into capitalism, the Indigenous climate novel that recognizes how the arrival of extremely violent settler capitalism is the beginning of climate upheaval, what can be termed the black climate narrative that centres a climate injustice largely ignored by the American Climate Emergency Narrative from the core, and the radical, anti-capitalist climate text that proposes political alternatives to capitalism’s seemingly inevitable longevity. The analyses of these texts will be connected to political, sociological, and historical interventions that have voiced strong critiques of the way that dominant capitalist society has remade ecology and human relations.

The narratives discussed in this chapter are also formally American, but they are not fiction from the core. As I discuss, the authors or directors that produce them may live in close proximity to the core, but they have very different relationships to the peripheral and semiperipheral spaces where what Jason W. Moore calls the Four Cheaps (labour, energy, nature, and resources) are extracted and put to work. Stephen Shapiro has defined the semiperipheries as ‘the sites where the experience of trauma by peripheral peoples and the speculative entrepreneurship of the core collide to produce new forms of representation, especially as it receives both the oral, folk beliefs of the periphery and the core’s printed matter and institutionally consecrated notations, objects, and behavioral performances’ (2008, pp. 37–8). This collision enables a different kind of story of the capitalist world-ecology, its possibilities, and futures, and of the strange possibilities that capitalist epochal crisis offers. If fiction from the core is ultimately geared towards celebrating and extending the life world that nurtures the core, fiction from the periphery or semiperiphery is able to query such celebration and extension, and to imagine futures outside of the system that turns the world into core, semiperipheries and peripheries.

Texts that move beyond the imaginary that informs the Climate Emergency Narrative are speculative and future-oriented in ways that the Climate Emergency Narrative is not. As I have argued, the Climate Emergency Narrative pretends that large-scale, socio-ecological crisis is in the future, when this is something that has haunted the Global South for a long time. The imaginative leap performed by climate narratives from the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system allows it to explore a world truly set in the future: a world where not just the capitalist world-system has folded, but where the extractive logic that drives the system is no longer operational. By doing so, climate narratives from the periphery or semiperiphery often employ what Michael Niblett (2012) and the Warwick Research Collective (2015) term a ‘“critical irrealist” politics of form’ (p. 97). This speculative fictional register shatters the assumptions that guide this narrative and instead employs the apocalypse described in the Climate Emergency Narrative as a door to other, far less dark futures. In other words, if the American Climate Emergency Narrative insists, in ways that recall Fredric Jameson’s aforementioned observation that it ‘seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ (1994, p. xii), that the end of capitalism is inevitably the end of everything, the peripheral or semiperipheral climate narrative depicts the end of capitalism as an opportunity for a new type of socio-ecological world. The rest of this concluding chapter probes some of these stories as they refuse to be infected by the intellectual fallout that the Climate Emergency Narrative is spreading across the planet.

Chthulucene Climate Futures

In Canadian-born author Helen Marshall’s novel The Migration (2019), set in a near future where the climate is eroding in the Global North, a new and inexplicable illness named ‘Juvenile Idiopathic Immunodeficiency Syndrome’ (p. 34) or JI2 is affecting young people all over the world. Like HIV, it appears to compromise the immune system of the afflicted, making them more susceptible to a range of other illnesses and ultimately killing them. The symptoms are psychological as well as physical, sometimes operating like the parasite Toxoplasma gondii that, as a physician in the book observes, can make those infected more reckless than normal. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, seventeen-year-old Sophie Perella, has a sister named Kira who has been diagnosed with this syndrome and they travel with their mother from Toronto to Oxford to receive the best care. This fails to save Kira who succumbs to the illness, leaving her sister and mother in a state of despair. Their sorrow is compounded but also complicated by internet videos that show how people who have died of JI2 experience substantial and disturbing post-mortem tremors. Suspecting that Kira’s death may not be final, Sophie wants to save Kira from being cremated. She sneaks into the hospital morgue, finds her sister’s body, and drives it to an abandoned factory where she hurriedly abandons it when it begins to shake and quiver.

The Migration makes the connection between the illness and the planetary emergency perfectly clear throughout. Sophie’s scientist aunt explains that the Earth System is out of order and that ‘the melting of continental glaciers causes massive shifts in already geologically active regions. Storms and flooding here, droughts in Europe and across most of the Middle East. The scale of all this change is unprecedented’ (p. 179). The aunt suggests that it is this ecological upheaval that has produced the illness. This also becomes clear when it is discovered that the parts of the world that have been hit the hardest by climate breakdown are also where the illness is most prevalent: ‘The areas with the highest mortality rates of JI2 have been China and the Philippines. Bangladesh. It hit earliest in places where there was massive flooding’ (179). In this way, the novel importantly acknowledges the uneven nature of climate breakdown. However, what truly sets the novel apart from the conventional climate emergency narrative is its dismantling of the artificial borders that locate humanity as apart from nature, its similar undoing of the notion of regional and nation-state borders, and finally its critique of the state of exception created to manage this illness and its consequences.

Not long after her sister’s supposed demise, Sophie finds out that she too has been infected. This makes her abject in the eyes of many people. They leer and shout at her in the street and she will not be able to follow the path set out for her (college followed by a ‘productive’ life in the Global North). At the same time, she understands that JI2 is not so much an illness as the beginning of a transformative stage. It does not kill young people but sends them into a deep and temporary hibernation during which their bodies acquire a new form. Returning to the factory where Kira’s body was abandoned, Sophie collides with her sister who has completed her transformation into a new type of being:

the slanted shape of bones, the hard keel of her welded ribs, her skin bristling with thousands of tiny pins, a soft layer of flocculent down, new growth. She is trembling, and it’s as if she is growing larger, expanding toward me. It’s her wings, bursting through the thin membrane of her skin. Those masses on her shoulders, those hulking deformities moving beneath the surface—now stretching out, unfolding. (p. 233)

For lack of a better word, these winged beings are referred to as nymphs and thanks to their wings, they are radically mobile. They can fly for ‘thousands of miles’ (p. 255, italics in the original) and thus escape the drowning cities and the parched deserts left behind by capitalist extraction. Just as importantly, they are no longer reliant on the capitalist world-system. Like birds, they travel, find shelter, and feed themselves without its assistance. This means that Sophie is not ill at all. As her physician explains ‘[y]our body isn’t changing because you’re sick, Sophie. You manifest as sick because your body has already begun to change, because certain genes have already been activated by the hormone’ (pp. 276–7). In other words, the transformation is not an illness, but a kind of evolution. Just like in Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Hell Diver’s series discussed in Chapter 7, the planet has altered human biology and produced an alternative, airborne human capable of living outside the capitalist system. However, in absolute contrast to Hell Divers’ Climate Emergency imaginary, this new type of human species is unaggressive, beautiful and a future of sorts.

In the eyes of the capitalist nation-state and its militarized branches, however, the mobile and independent nature of the new winged humans is extremely problematic. Unable to control them and clearly afraid of the transcendent mobilities they embody, the state responds by creating a state of emergency and an extra-legal strategy of violent repression that allows it to contain and destroy this new, transformative species. Those who appear to die from the infection are cremated to prevent them from completing the change. Those who succumb to the ‘illness’ in seclusion so that they can complete their transition into the new species are shot down by the police or the military: ‘I brought it down’, one officer explains on television, ‘Three shots, didn’t hesitate. It isn’t for me to say what it is…but the training, you know, it kicks in right away’ (p. 229, ellipsis in the original). The rationale behind the burning and the killing of the (soon to be) transformed is described via Thatcher’s capitalist realist adage ‘there is no alternative [to neoliberal capitalism]’, or TINA.Footnote 2 This is voiced by ‘Director Ballard’ who insists that children are burned before they rise as nymphs and who has told his co-workers that ‘there were no alternatives’ (p. 280). This is the strategy by which this militarized capitalist modernity intends to adapt to the threat that the new form of independent and vastly mobile human life is imagined to constitute.

Those infected and waiting for the people in power to violently end their new afterlives react with justifiable anger. A friend of Sophie named Reddy hatches a plan to burn a nearby crematorium. Other friends sympathize but also observe: ‘You’re not a revolutionary, Reddy, you’re an English major’ (p. 258). But Reddy, evolving, is a kind of revolutionary simply because his transformed state allows him to flow through the web of life in a radically different way. Reddy’s revolution is expressed partially through his desire to destroy the infrastructure that will be employed to eradicate his future self, but also through his transformation into something that exists entirely outside of the paradigms that capitalism recognizes.

The way that this novel folds humans into ecology by turning them into a kind of border-transcending bird marks a politicized awareness of what Donna Haraway (2016) has termed the Chthulucene. This is a concept that focuses on the entangled and tentacular nature of all life on the planet. To enable a fundamentally extractive relationship to ecology, capitalism needed to sever the lived connections between humans and nature. As scholars such as Bruno Latour (1993) and Val Plumwood (2005) have observed, and as Moore (2015, 2016) describes in much of his writing, thinkers such as Descartes promoted a dualism where a perceived separation between mind and body came to stand for a separation also between human (as mind) and nature (as body). Posed as an external entity, nature could be thought of as something humans could master, possess, and remake for their own purposes. Because this ontological and epistemological thinking made it possible to pretend that extractive violence did not necessarily affect those (white, male, moneyed people) defined as humans, it was extremely useful to capitalism. As this book has repeatedly argued, this externalizing thinking also informs much writing from the core. Thus, Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene is geared towards making the multispecies connections that capitalism has always attempted to erase from the ontological record visible again. The human body inhabits a multispecies planet. It is dependent on the collaborative work performed by a great number of other species, and it is also host to a multitude of other species.

Marshall’s The Migration is a novel about climate breakdown that attempts to make readers in the Global North aware first of the fact that humans are as rooted in ecology as the things humans consume. When children and young adults turn into a kind of bird, this centres on how all human beings are in fact animals given life by the planet. This, in turn, makes it possible to understand capitalism’s organized extraction of nature as fundamentally hostile also to humans. As evolved, post-capitalist humans, they have also become independent of the borders through which the capitalist world-system has organized the planet. Via the imaginary of a transformed and independent new type of global youth, the violent strategies employed by capitalist modernity to adapt to climate change come across as both abject and useless. In The Migration, the systematic killing of transformed children and young adults is just as futile as it is horrific; the rehearsal of a bloody fantasy of control. Finally, the suggestion in the novel that the transformed human species will replace the dominant, endemically violent, capitalist modernity that is eroding the planet is fundamentally, if conditionally, utopian. There is a world beyond extractive, militarized capitalist society, even if reaching it requires a profound and foundational transformation of how we think about the human and society.Footnote 3

Indigenous Climate Pasts and Futures

While The Migration demonstrates a certain awareness of the uneven nature of socio-ecological breakdown that the American Climate Emergency Narrative is largely oblivious to, it does not recognize the long history of this breakdown and how it has been lived by Indigenous communities for generations. This important history is told by what can be termed the Indigenous, postcolonial, and/or decolonial socio-ecological breakdown narrative that rightly centres on how the arrival of settler capitalism caused what can be termed an emergency for the planet and Indigenous people rather than for capitalism. One of several such texts is Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice’s novel Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018). This book takes place in the Great Lakes region, on an isolated reservation where people are getting ready for winter by hunting and preparing for what may be a prolonged isolation from the big cities in the south. The novel’s protagonist Evan Whitesky makes an effort to observe the traditions of his ancestors and he gives thanks for the moose bull he has just shot. Not everyone on the reservation is as observant. The community has seen its fair share of alcoholism, drug use, and suicides. Even so, it is evidently made up of a resilient group of people who have managed to survive far from the lands in the south from where the Anishinaabe were once deported by white settlers.

On returning to his house, where his wife and two small children are waiting, Evan learns that the satellite television signal has gone down. Mobile phone service, Internet and finally the power also disappears and before long the community understands that something is wrong in the cities to the south. As in any other community, this creates tension. Food and other merchandize sell out from the community’s store and no new supplies arrive. The rationing of power, water, and communal food produce a simmering panic. When two young boys who have attended college in the South arrive on snowmobiles, they bring news of a society that is falling apart:

“It’s chaos down there, Izzy,” replied Nick. He was referring to Gibson, about three hundred kilometres to the southwest. “The food’s all gone. The power’s out. There’s no gas. There’s been no word from Toronto or anywhere else. People are looting and getting violent. We had to get the fuck out of there”. (pp. 74-5)

This is a story told repeatedly in the American Climate Emergency Narrative, but set in an Indigenous community, it plays out very differently. The Anishinaabe community certainly suffers from the lack of fossil-fuel energy and food deliveries from the south, but several hundred years of settler colonialism have made the Anishinaabe into survivors. Under the leadership of elders who have seen worse days, the people on the reservation persist. They will make it through this storm, through the winter, and into a different future.

That is, until the appearance of a white settler on a snowmobile. It is obvious from the beginning that this new arrival is a harbinger of death. Evan sees that ‘[e]verything was black—the snowmobile, the sled, the boots, the suit, and the helmet’ (p. 99), and also that the stranger ‘was a beast of a man who was invading his people’s space’ (p. 100). After declaring that ‘I come in peace’, the new arrival begins to ‘laugh, a mild chuckle, that quickly escalated into sharp guffaws’ (p. 100) as if the notion that he may bring peace is enormously comical to him. The name of the newly arrived settler is Justin Scott and he joins up with Evan’s low-life brother and other community members who have struggled the most with alcohol and drugs. Justin’s authoritarian nature and commandeering personality turn this group away from Evan and the rest of the community. As winter progresses and food becomes more difficult to find, Justin and his hangers-on appear to still eat well. Noticing this, Evan is plagued by strange dreams, and he encounters Justin in one of them:

A tall, gaunt silhouette stood in the doorway, outlined by the scarlet blizzard behind it. The smell made him gag. The creature hunched forward. The hair on its broad shoulders and long arms blurred the lines of its figure. Its legs appeared disfigured, almost backwards. But its large, round head scared him the most. It breathed out another savage rumble.

Evan slowly raised the flashlight, illuminating the figure’s pale, heaving emaciated torso under sparse brown body hair. He brought the beam up to its face. It was disfigured yet oddly familiar. Scott. His cheeks and lips were pulled tight against his skull. He breathed heavily through his mouth, with long incisors jutting upward and downward from rows of brown teeth. His eyes were blacked out. If it weren’t for the large, bald scalp and the long, pointy nose, this monster would have been largely unrecognizable. (p. 187)

As Gail de Vos (2022) and Priscilla Jolly (2021) have observed, Justin here takes the form of the monstrous, flesh-eating Wendigo that is part of First Nations storytelling. The dream prompts Evan to confront Justin and the crowd he has gathered. He then discovers that Justin and his group have been engaging in cannibalism. Bodies have been stolen from the community’s morgue, but Justin has also murdered members of the community and consumed them. In the confrontation that ensues, Justin is shot in the head and dies, but this is not, as in the American Climate Emergency Narrative, a case of extractive violence executed in the name of capitalism. Rather, it is a form of self-defence performed so that settlers will stop eating, and stop encouraging the eating of, Indigenous people.

Through its description of a collapsing white settler society, Moon of the Crusted Snow also narrates the arrival of an epochal capitalist crisis, but unlike the American Climate Emergency Narrative, it historicizes this crisis and it also avoids the nihilistic closure of the dominant mode. As the novel unfolds, it traces the present crisis back in time, to its origin in the arrival of extractive settler capitalism. Speaking to the elder Aileen, Evan is told in no uncertain words that:

Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash [white people] came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! […] Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again. (pp. 149-150)

In this way, to the Anishinaabe community in the novel, the demise of capitalist modernity is not the world-shattering event that the American Climate Emergency Narrative describes it as. Instead, the epochal crisis is a kind of beginning and an opportunity to break out of the violent and extractive system settlers introduced.

Even with this knowledge in mind, and with Justin out of the way, the community is still damaged and divided. As Whyte (2018) notes, there is a tendency even among anti-colonial settler authors to ‘privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence’ (p. 224). The same settler writing furthermore poses Indigenous people as ‘Holocene survivors’ (p. 236) that the ancestors of white allies ‘have not fully harmed through the colonial, capitalist and industrial drivers of the climate crisis’ (p. 236) and that, once saved, can reintroduce settlers to a sustainable Holocene economy. Moon of the Crusted Snow clearly departs from this narrative through its depiction of the white settler as cannibalistic intruder rather than altruistic saviour prepared to be schooled in (lost) strategies of Holocene survival. To survive the sudden arrival of a distinctly capitalist crisis, this Anishinaabe community must first survive and exorcise the presence of the white settler. With Justin out of the way, the road ahead is still difficult, but not impossible. Thus, the post-capitalist future that the novel envisions is not one where white settlers save Indigenous people from climate death, nor is it the arid, post-capitalist dystopia into which the progeny white settlers are thrown in stories such as The Road or The Dog Stars. As in The Migration, a utopian space opens up at the end of the novel, but this one is not premised on the transformation of an entire species. What is required, from this particular vantage, is simply the eviction of settler capitalism.

A Billion Black Anthropocenes

If the American Climate Emergency Narrative from the core describes capitalist/ecological crisis via the catastrophic loss of comforts and privileges, capitalist colonialism is registered, in the American Indigenous (semi)periphery, through the centuries-long depletion of land, culture, languages, religion, and life that the arrival of white settlers set in motion. Black socio-ecological breakdown narratives emerge out of a similar (semi)peripheral location. Like Indigenous climate fiction, this category of texts is inherently suspicious of capitalism and the extractive violence it performs. It is also a type of text closely related to, if not indistinguishable from, what has been termed Afrofuturism as a genre of writing that uses science fiction to investigate black history and interrogate ongoing social injustice, but also to explore non-dystopian black futures.

One of the trailblazers of this type of writing, and one of the foundational authors of the socio-ecological breakdown narrative, as opposed to the American Climate Emergency Narrative, is Octavia Butler. Her remarkable, prescient, and path-breaking novel Parable of the Sower (1993) and its sequel Parable of the Talents (1998) tell the story of socio-ecological breakdown in ways that are fundamentally different from the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Parable of the Sower opens on ‘Saturday, July 20, 2024’ (p. 3) and introduces the reader to a world very similar to those described in many other climate narratives. Thus, this is a future where socio-ecological breakdown has produced resource shortages, increased wealth disparity, and created violent community conflict. Fascism and religious fundamentalism dominate American politics and climate refugees are forced to abandon already unsafe housing to enter roads that are even more dangerous. Unlike in the dominant Climate Emergency Narrative, however, capitalism does little to provide these refugees with futures. The rich secure themselves behind large walls. For those less fortunate, the only alternative is to join one of the many ‘company towns’ where they will become indentured servants, locked into lives of eternal debt while making a profit for the companies that run these towns.Footnote 4

The protagonist and first-person narrator of the Parable of the Talents is Lauren Oya Olamina, a young black woman who turns 15 on the day that the first chapter opens. She lives with her father and her stepmother in a gated and racially mixed community outside of Los Angeles. The people of this community are not rich but are still better off than those who try to survive outside the walls. Led by the father, the people of the community are creating strategies that will help them survive in an increasingly eroding and erosive nation. Things deteriorate further when Christian fundamentalist ‘President Donner’ is elected and intensifies the already ongoing neoliberal political program introduced to manage the unfolding socio-ecological crisis. By the time Laureen turns eighteen, the social world she is part of is in free fall. Lauren’s brother and father become victims of the gangs that run the world outside the gates and a short while later, the borders of the community are breached, and the houses of the families that shelter there are overrun by desperate scavengers.

With her entire family and most of her friends dead, and deprived of all her possessions, Lauren must take to the road. Resourceful and strong despite her young years, she gathers up other survivors and begins to trek towards northern California. As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the journey is extremely hazardous and other travellers take advantage of those who cannot defend themselves. People are killed for their resources, for amusement or as sustenance when there is nothing to eat except other people. Even so, Butler’s novel never devolves into a conventional climate emergency narrative. There is no sense that the extractive, neoliberal system that has clearly brought the crisis experienced by Lauren and her fellow travellers on will be able to restore them or the planet. Instead, Lauren works to establish a radically different type of community that she terms Earthseed.

The Parable of the Sower sheds light on, and has also paved the way for, a number of important critical interventions that focus on the connections that exist between socio-ecological breakdown, extractive capitalism, and slavery in America. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), Karen Yusoff builds on work by Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, and (speculative fiction author) N. K. Jemesin to problematize what she refers to as the ‘structural Whiteness of the Anthropocene’ (p. 61). In concert with many other critics of the Anthropocene concept, she thus focuses on the extractivist ‘white’, ‘colonial geo-logics’ (p. 2) that systematically elides the constant violence done both to the Earth System (to geology) and to the enslaved people who have been forced to help perform this violence. Her important point is that the Anthropocene concept erases the role that slavery and race have played in this breakdown. In this way, and like Whyte, Yusoff also calls attention to how black (and Indigenous peoples) have already suffered ‘a billion black anthropocenes’ organized by white extractive capitalism.

As I have argued in this book, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is informed by these precise colonial geo-logics and the structural whiteness that haunts the Anthropocene concept. By contrast, The Parable of the Sower clearly works against the logics and structures that inform this dominant narrative. To return to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Brian Hart’s Trouble No Man, Butler’s novel does not centre the plights of white men, but instead casts as the protagonist a young, black woman keenly aware of the long history of extraction, social injustice, and extractive violence through which the capitalist world-ecology was made. Unlike the white protagonists of the American Climate Emergency Narrative, Lauren’s life is informed by that historical legacy and the upheaval that she experiences is part of a history that is at the same time racial and personal. Her experience of the destruction of her community is made even more acute by the fact that she suffers from ‘hyperempathy syndrome’ that forces her to live the pain (and pleasure) of other people as if she experienced it herself. Lauren’s hyperempathy thus signifies, as Diana Leong (2016) has argued, black women’s ‘fleshy existence’ (p. 22) as sexualized bodies within the colonial history of the US, but equally her ability to comprehend the suffering of other people.

Butler’s novel is furthermore notably different from the dominant Climate Emergency Narrative through its rejection of the capitalist or post-capitalist futures that they project. While the road that Lauren enters is extremely dangerous, it is not the dog-eat-dog, Hobbesian world that dominates the post-apocalyptic stories discussed in previous novels. Lauren encounters dangers but also communities as she makes her way through a crumbling US society. Moreover, if the white post-apocalyptic narrative insists that nothing can change, in the sense that the tenets of capitalism are eternal even in a post-capitalist world, Lauren’s Earthseed creed and religion is: ‘God is Change’ (p. 25). This conviction that change is not only possible, but a divine imperative, drives Lauren’s successful attempt to establish a new kind of community. This is no utopia, but it is utopian in its attempt to create a world for ‘the living’ (p. 3). As such, the formation of the Earthseed community points towards the possibility of a functioning, social world beyond white, Christian fundamentalism and extractive capitalism.

Radical Climate Futures

Alongside Indigenous and black writing from the semiperiphery of the world-system, there is also fiction produced in close proximity to the core that promotes climate futures different from those circulated by the American Climate Emergency Narrative. The most often cited examples of this radical trend in climate fiction are the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson (once the PhD student of Fredrick Jameson). In several science fiction and climate fiction novels, Robinson has built futures that imagine alternatives to the worlds that capitalism is able to conceive. At the time of writing, the most recent example is the novel The Ministry for the Future (2020). If ‘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) as Imogen Malpas (2021) has proposed, The Ministry of the Future is one of few examples of this genre. Set in a near future where governments are doing ‘too little, too late’ to prevent global warming, India experiences a week-long heat wave where forest fires and a wet-bulb temperature above 35 kill an estimated 20 million people.Footnote 5 This causes the Indian government to spray ‘sulfur dioxide’ (p. 18) into the atmosphere, this in order to shield the nation from the rays of the sun. The mass death in India also lends authority to an already existing UN organization named The Ministry for the Future, tasked with ‘defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection’ (16). The Indian catastrophe and continued political inertia also provoke the establishment of more or less well-organized eco-terrorist organizations such as the ‘Children of Kali’ (49) that begin harassing especially erosive international capitalist endeavours, this by downing passenger jets in flight and sabotaging the global meat industry.

The Ministry for the Future is a sprawling, polyphonous novel that considers how the restoration of the Earth System needs to involve a multitude of tactics and solutions. It is narrated via two main protagonists—Mary Murphy, the chairwoman of the Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, an aid worker who has been so traumatized by the unfathomable number of deaths in India that he has turned to violent eco-terrorism—but it is also told with the help of newspaper articles, meeting minutes, poetry, and other types of text. To stop doing harm to the Earth System is not, as Robinson describes it, a straightforward, one-solution endeavour, but an enormously complicated, multi-layered political process that involves the various forces that make up, or resist, the capitalist world-system in very different ways. Meticulously based on up-to-date climate science, the novel explores socio-ecological futures that are reminiscent of, but still very different from, those evoked by the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Like these texts, Robinson’s novel includes eco-terrorism, geoengineering, security emergencies, states of exception, green and fossil capitalism, interstate conflict and war, but unlike the dominant narrative, the novel avoids the capitalist realist closure that states that no other future can be imagined other than the restoration of business-as-usual capitalism or devastating post-apocalyptic collapse. The Ministry for the Future is as dark as it is optimistic, as optimistic as it is dark, yet the ending of the novel reveals a planet where the Earth’s temperature is no longer rising, where much of the planet has been left to its own devices, and where socialism operates as a functional alternative to extractive capitalism.

A less often discussed example of the radical climate text is Neill Blomkamp’s expensive Hollywood blockbuster Elysium (2013). Blomkamp is a South African director best known for his dystopian and anti-apartheid science fiction feature District 9 (2009), a film that brought him to the attention of Hollywood studio TriStar Pictures. Because Elysium is a Hollywood film, there can be little doubt that it emerges out of the capitalist core. It includes product placements for luxury brands Bugatti, and Versace, and for more affordable manufacturers such as Sony and Adidas (Han, 2018). Even so, Blomkamp’s ecological and political vision conjures a future beyond capitalism. This vision is often vague and unfocused, but still critically irrealist, rather than unconsciously political.

Elysium describes a future where extractive capitalism has made the planet such a hellish place to live that the privileged have built an enormous space station with its own atmosphere. In white Roman villas surrounded by gigantic green lawns, an almost exclusively white (and French-speaking) population enjoys eternal lives free from disease thanks to ‘med bays’ that can cure any illness or physical damage in seconds. This is the ultimate gated and militarized community set apart from still Earth-bound people not simply by its elevated location, its armies of formal and informal border guards, but also by a digitized, AI-run political regime that stipulates that only those who live on Elysium are citizens. In Los Angeles (above which Elysium lazily revolves), the better part of humanity eke out utterly precarious lives on the edge of oblivion. To convey what the future of this city might look like once its immensely rich classes have escaped, part of the film was shot in the favelas and enormous garbage dumps of Mexico City (Mirrlees and Pedersen, 2016). By inserting this already existing space of iniquity and poverty into the narrative, the film clearly recognizes the uneven nature of the ongoing socio-ecological crisis.

As in Mexico City and other parts of the world today, inequality is rampant. Almost all people have been deprived of basic dignity and comfort and few of those who can find the money to pay one of the local coyotes to take them on a rogue spaceship to Elysium survive the journey. This is because the ruthless Defence Secretary of Elysium Delacourt will have these ships shot down before they can land on the pristine lawns of the elevated space community. In ways that recall the strategies of the US Department of Defence, she adapts to the challenge that increasing ecological and economic justice entails by violently fortifying the border between the privileged community to which she belongs and the crumbling world below her. At the same time, the film extends the contours of what Mike Davis has termed ‘Fortress Los Angeles’ (2017) into a future where capitalism is still the roaring engine of a fundamentally uneven world-system.

The film’s protagonist Max has always looked towards the gleaming silver wheel that is the space station, working to save up the money needed to pay a smuggler to take him to this promised land. The road to this transition is difficult, however. To find the money needed to travel, Max has stolen cars, spent time in jail and is now on parole. With an ankle monitor strapped around his leg, he travels through slums heavily surveilled by drones and ruthless robots to spend a 12-hour workday at a factory producing the very robots that are used to keep him and his fellow human beings in check. He now has little hope of ever making it to Elysium, and when he is exposed to a deadly dose of radiation during a workplace accident, he is told that his life is over. The owner of the industry, the powerful and absurdly cruel magnate John Carlyle, shows no sympathy. To him, Max is disposable waste or what Giorgio Agamben (1998) has referred to as ‘homo sacer’: a figure who lacks legal standing and can be killed without consequences. Carlyle thus orders Max to be thrown out of the room where he is recuperating from radiation poisoning because ‘I don’t want to change the bedding’. This triggers an acute personal crisis fuelled by a wish to live but also by hatred, a crisis that sends Max on a violent journey towards the promised land in space.

Max’s new plan is to quickly find the money needed to pay a smuggler to take him to Elysium so that he can use one of the fabled med bays and thus save his own life. But as the film progresses, his project transforms. On board the spaceship that eventually brings him to Elysium are also his former love interest and her acutely ill child. During his preparation for the forbidden transit to the space city, he has also acquired software that makes it possible for him to reset the AI-controlled systems that understand the people of Elysium as citizens while it defines all people of Earth as waste and extractible, subhuman labour. Solidarity with people on Earth, and love for his former girlfriend and her sick daughter, change his agenda. He ultimately abandons the selfish project of restoring his own body for the grander project of revolution. With help from a well-connected crime boss/revolutionary leader, he succeeds in rebooting the system. This allows him to reset the parameters of the system so that all human beings become citizens. In the closing scene, the governing AI has dispatched robots with medbays to Earth, thus beginning a dismantling of the capitalist system that turns people to waste.

Blomkamp’s political vocabulary, as Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia (2016) have noted, is clearly Marxist. His film identifies capitalism as the engine of ecological and environmental injustice and his white working-class hero (played by Matt Damon) decides to sacrifice his life to complete the violent but still noticeably unbloody and algorithmic revolution that takes place in the film. It is not a perfect film by any standard. As observed by Christa Van Raalte (2015) it celebrates the white, hypermasculine hero and it pays only marginal attention to the sexist, heteropatriarchal, and racist epistemologies that enable and structure capitalism. Also, it says very little about what type of society will emerge now that all people on Earth are citizens of Elysium. Will the sharing of Elysium’s vast resources and technology produce an egalitarian utopia or will all people now be part of the capitalist world Elysium is the crowning achievement of? Even with these questions in mind, Elysium is trying to say something very different from the dominant climate emergency narrative. In this Hollywood film, the emergency is obviously the suffering that socio-ecological breakdown is causing, aggravated by the state of exception declared by the capitalist security state. In other words, Elysium takes place in a storyworld where the biospheric crisis is one element of an interrelated metacrisis that deprives all but the one per cent (in the film soaring above the Earth in the ultimate gated community) of security, food, dignity, and hope.

Rebooting the System

While these four categories of climate writing focus on different histories and experiences, and propose different developments and futures, they are not separated by fixed boundaries. They intersect at times, they stress similar organic relationships to the planet, and they all reveal the emergency to be the violence done to the planet, to multispecies ecologies, and to the Indigenous, racialized, and impoverished people that are leveraged as resources or waste rather than treated as humans. When capitalist colonialism is perceived as the engine of emergency, rather than its only antidote, it becomes possible to imagine futures where it does not reign. These futures are not necessarily utopian, but they are not post-capitalist wastelands either. It is possible to imagine the end of capitalism and the beginning of another set of relationships that do not understand the planet and other people as resources to be extracted.

Such counter-narratives are important at this point in time. The story told about socio-ecological breakdown by the American Climate Emergency Narrative arguably dominates not only fiction, but also the conversation that takes place outside of the cultural sphere. Few governments in the Global North are involved in an organized effort to save the planet or those who have long suffered from socio-ecological erosion. Rather, most such governments are feverishly trying to save capitalism. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) declaration that ‘we’ are now at the end of history, the dominant political vision has been shaped by liberal/colonial capitalism. The shifting positions of Russia, China, and India within the world-system may be causing great concern in what is still often called the West, but this has not altered ‘Western’ governments’ faith in capitalism as the only world order. However, as tensions rise between these major actors of the world-system, as ‘cheap’ natural resources are increasingly depleted, climate refugees grow in number and nation-states and alliances invest more and more of their proceeds in the military,Footnote 6 it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the capitalist world-system will produce a sustainable, politically sound, and socially just future.

Because of this, it is necessary to shift the conversation. As Evan Calder Williams (2011, p. 5) has argued, what is needed is ‘an apocalypse’; not one of ‘total destruction but rather a destruction of totalizing structures, of those universal notions that do not just describe “how things are” but serve to prescribe and insist that “this is how things must be”’ (p. 2). What form can such apocalypse take? What futures can take place beyond the capitalist realist insistence that the future is either capitalist regeneration or the resurrection of Hobbes’ war of all against all? Hannah Holleman is one of many who has proposed a radical program for Earth-system survival and human social justice that does not build on capitalist renewal. In Dust Bowls of Empire (2018), she dismisses mainstream environmentalism’s strategy to alleviate climate breakdown with the help of Green Capitalism or via the three Rs: ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ (p. 162). While these serve a purpose, they are not what will restore the planet. Such restoration instead needs to be performed via a different set of Rs: ‘restitution (of lands and sovereignty, of power to the people), reparations (for slavery, stolen labor, genocide, and other past injustices), restoration (of earth systems), and revolution (moving away from capitalism)’ (p. 162). In this way, Holleman argues that Earth-system restoration must begin with the establishment of a robust and socially just system that does not work according to the logics of extractive capitalism.

When propositions such as these are not dismissed by liberal thinkers with a flick of the wrist—as already proven wrong, as absurdly utopian, as catering for the needs of a small minority, or as averse to ‘human nature’—its proponents are being harassed or even murdered and their activism and scholarship outlawed.Footnote 7 Yet, and to emphasize a point already made, the observation that the socially and economically unjust world created by the capitalist world-system is driving the ecological crisis is now also being made by climate scientists who do not emerge out of decolonial, feminist, or Marxist intellectual traditions. The 2022 IPCC report (Lee et al. 2023) argues that ‘[a]ctions that prioritise equity, climate justice, social justice and inclusion lead to more sustainable outcomes, co-benefits, reduce trade-offs, support transformative change and advance climate resilient development’ (66). Similarly, the aforementioned Earth for All (Dixson-Declève et al. 2022) combines hard climate science with computer simulations that reveal, as Christiana Figueres (2022) observes, that ‘the climate crisis, the nature crisis, the inequality crisis, the food crisis all share the same deep root: extractivism based on extrinsic principles’ (p. xvii). It follows that to come to terms with biospheric breakdown, it is necessary to address these related human and ecological crises in unison. To this effect, Earth for All proposes five turnarounds: (1) Ending poverty, (2) Addressing gross inequality, (3) Empowering women, (4) Making our food system healthy for people and ecosystems, and (5) Transitioning to clean energy (p. 5). In this way, this publication promotes an ‘essential reboot of civilization’s guiding rules before the system crashes’ (p. 29).

Such visions for the future launched by the authors of the reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change resist the paradigm rehearsed by the American Climate Emergency Narrative. As this book has demonstrated, this conservative type of text is premised on the Anthropocene model of the world where all humans have somehow contributed to biospheric breakdown, and it focuses on the planet and the conflict that Earth-system breakdown will produce as an opportunity for capitalism to save (a certain segment of) humanity by going to battle; by making war on the planet, by engaging other states or by combatting the displaced millions that are forced onto the road by floods and droughts. It is a narrative written from the core of the capitalist world-system, and while it registers the arrival of an epochal crisis, it insists that the emergency that such crisis constitutes must be addressed by the system, and must serve to preserve the system. In the few instances where a world after capitalism is envisioned, it takes the shape of an abject darkness of such proportions that it resembles Hell.

Being aware of the limitations of this type of text is essential when considering what has brought on the current crisis, and when thinking about how to address it. Biospheric breakdown did not arrive like an asteroid from outer space or as the inevitable result of human evolution. It has a material history that begins with capitalist colonialism, and it is an effect of the social, ecological, and economic injustice caused by this system. As ‘we’ and our governments prepare to act upon this crisis, awareness of this history and its intellectual consequences—of the climate emergency narrative as a form of fallout—is essential. Biospheric breakdown must not be thought of as a military engagement opportunity but as an impetus to reorganize the very system that is destroying people and ecologies and calling it progress.

The world is not flat and there is no impenetrable wall at the end of the journey. The trick is to imagine a movement forward and through and a life beyond based on other values.