Book Review 'The Collapse of Western Civilization' by Oreskes & Conway (original) (raw)
Related papers
Never Too Soon, Always Too Late: Reflections on climate temporality
WiRES Climate Change, 2019
The 'scientification' of climate change, which placed the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC, has not provoked the required political and economic action to resolve it. 'Tipping point' rhetoric and apocalyptic fictions, conveying increased urgency and shaming the present-day, appear also to yield diminishing returns. Instead of representing the present as a binary choice-catastrophe or salvation-a Humanities-informed viewpoint would represent past, present and future in terms of unknowability, frailty, unavoidable interpretation and limited agency.
Isis, 2016
The authors of The History Manifesto respond to the Viewpoint commentary and extend the dialogue between the book’s arguments and the recent historiography of science, technology, and medicine.
2018
Considering the global threats and struggles being addressed in international policy discussions on climate change and the goals of sustainable development, the question arises as to the ways in which popular film and literary fiction address these issues, particularly how these struggles and outcomes might play out in imagined futures. In contrast to dominant trends toward dystopian, apocalyptic and techno-fantasy themes, to what degree are writers and filmmakers taking up the challenge of producing hopeful and plausible narratives portraying transitions to sustainable societies and communities? Understandably most films and novels today are constrained by commercially risk-averse formulas of audience preference and return on investment as well as consumer culture permeated by neoliberal norms. Today film and publishing industries present audiences with an on-going stream of libertarian tropes celebrating vigilante heroes and violence in contrast to stories imagining movements and struggles leading to future worlds achieving “a higher quality of life for all”. While such imaginative visions and narratives do not yet easily fit into mainstream criteria for marketable fictional products and investments, this should not prevent writers and filmmakers from nevertheless moving beyond current conventions to develop stories exploring the kinds of challenges and possibilities involved in sustainability transitions. More than ever we need social imaginaries of how humanity manages to survive and evolve in overcoming the kinds of threats and inequalities, political quagmires and hopelessness which audiences often go to the cinema and novels to escape. The research presented here draws on theories of sustainable transformation in conjunction with ecocinema and ecocritical theory in examining a variety of films and novels set in the near future. These are discussed with regard to creative opportunities and obstacles for filmmakers and writers in moving beyond consumer and industry demands for escapist entertainment to address the complex and controversial need for hopeful narratives of transition to ecologically and socially sustainable futures.
Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory
This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization— to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.
Prospects of Decline and Hegemonic Shifts for the West
Journal of World-Systems Research
The decline of the “West” and the loss of U.S. global hegemony is accompanied by a three-sided debate. Some scholars have argued that emerging powers in the Global South will succeed the United States and assume a hegemonic role in the world-economy. They argue that China or an alliance of semi-peripheral states in the South will dominate capitalist or post-capitalist cycles of accumulation in the future. Other scholars rather think that China and other emerging states will find it difficult to catch up and assume a hegemonic role. This paper discusses the consequences of decline for the West and describes three possible western responses to its global economic and hegemonic decline: Resisting Decline—The West will seek to maintain its claim to lead by mobilizing defensive and aggressive military forces, searching for new alliances and partnerships, undermining old and new competitors; Suffering (Semi-) Peripheralization—The West will surrender control of global commodity chains, wh...
ANNA GREENSPANa1, ANIL MENONa2, KAVITA PHILIPa3 and JEFFREY WASSERSTROMa4 a1 New York University, Shanghai. Email: ag158@nyu.edu. a2 Email: iam@anilmenon.com. a3 Murray Krieger Hall 300K, Mail Code 3275, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, United States. Email: kphilip@uci.edu. a4 History Department, 200 Krieger Hall, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3275, United States. Email: jwassers@uci.edu. Abstract A conversation between philosopher of digital cultures Anna Greenspan and historian of China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, speculative-fiction writer Anil Menon, and historian of science Kavita Philip, exploring the emerging work from scholars who have grown up with the global influence of science fiction in popular culture while being trained in the disciplinary spaces between science, engineering, social science, law and the humanities. The following questions are addressed: what are the prehistories of science fiction and the futures of such interdisciplinary work? How do India and China, as places where important new science fiction is being written, and as nations exploding now into emerging markets characterized by technological dynamism, fit into older historiographic frames that saw the European Enlightenment as the source of modern science, and the ‘developing world’ as destined only to ever play catch-up? How should the politics of digital futures and non-European pasts figure in historical research and in fiction writing, keeping in mind the historian's fear of presentism and anachronism, and the fiction writer's dislike of political moralism? http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2F1106\_C106BDB7D4EB51263AB6B28773A6DC61\_journals\_\_BJT\_S2058850X16000072a.pdf&cover=Y&code=229754f831c4863c5367dab8427fc72d
SARS COV11 AND OTHER CALAMITIES IN ADAM NEVILL'S LOST GIRL
Epiphany Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies , 2021
Speculating about future based on the present, climate change fiction (cli-fi) proves its potential to predict the environmental and social repercussions of anthropogenic transformation(s) on Earth. As a cli-fi novel, Lost Girl (2015) envisions the collapse of the world through grim depictions of the nonhuman environment and restless societies and recounts the dangerous quest of a father to find his lost daughter amidst (un)natural disasters, pandemics, and chaos. In the realistic world of Lost Girl, new strains of deadly viruses take hold of the world. Prophesying the coronavirus pandemic and other calamities that came out to be true in 2020 such as the destructive wildfires in Australia or the heatwaves in Europe among others, Lost Girl has a realistic touch leaving a wake-up call effect on the reader to change their anthropocentric way of living through a posthuman perspective.