Dystopian Worlds: the end or beginning of time?

We are living in dystopian times. The global COVID-19 pandemic has transformed speculative apocalyptic fiction novels into a stark reality. It has been a year of reckonings, as the pandemic has painfully laid bare the interconnectedness of the world as well as the socio-economic, racial and structural inequalities underlying the disproportionate impact around the globe. In the meantime, nature has been running its own course, leaving traces of dystopian destruction. Sustained Arctic melting, unprecedented bushfires in Australia and apocalyptic wildfires in The United States; and record wildfires in the Amazon have prompted a group of scientists to call for action: “Fire in Paradise: a Declaration of World Scientists”. On top of lockdown, famine, floods or drought, millions of farmers in Asia and Africa witnessed swarms of desert locust decimating farmlands, invoking Biblical prophesies. Amidst political chaos, pestilence and environmental disasters, we ask ourselves: what have we done wrong? Times of societal and environmental crises give rise to end-of-time tales and stories of moral failure, but they may also foster ideas about new beginnings and brighter futures.

We are very excited to launch our Winter Series on ‘Dystopian Worlds: the end or beginning or time’ . For this series we invited thematic perspectives on the apocalypse & counter-apocalypse in relation to weather, climate and nature and how this is lived culturally and scientifically in the past, present and imagined, desired and predicted for the future. The perspectives that we received from all over the globe, show above all, the power of the environmental humanities that bring into view the rich repertoires through which humans construct, select, imagine, comfortably ignore, ritualise, live through and give meaning to climatic and environmental changes at the intersection of a multitude of other crises. Despite the pandemic and nature’s ravaging force that held sway in 2020, not all tales are of destruction, however. In fact, the value of the environmental humanities becomes vividly clear when the abstract language of climate science is juxtaposed with human accounts of social life, which may also prompt the need for counter-apocalypses.

By Sara de Wit (see the full call here)