A ‘Poetics of Planet’: Apocalypse and Our Post-Natural Future

Abstract

‘Apocalypse’, writes Lawrence Buell (1995: 285), ‘is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.’ In post-apocalyptic fiction, the ecocatastrophe of tomorrow is graphically invoked to reflect upon the worsening crisis of today. Climate change is envisaged not as a general process of environmental decay and social degeneration but as an immediate and devastating shattering of cultural norms. Such a dramatic erasure of previous knowledges serves to interrogate the current epistemological frameworks held responsible for crisis whilst laying the groundwork for new and different modes of human-earth interaction. The new world orders put forward in the old world’s stead are predicated on a variety of ethical standpoints that are rendered more, or less, able to engender sustainable human relationships with the earth. These standpoints pivot around the alienation and dislocation engendered by crisis: of humans from the earth and of planetary exigencies from anthropocentric systems of value. In focusing on environmental apocalypse as a representational determinant of a more integrated and agential attitude towards earthly belonging I work from the ecofeminist premise that crisis calls for interrogating established ethical and epistemological frameworks to bring about a radical change in environmental thinking.