In recent years, environmental collapse has become an important way of framing and imagining environmental change and destruction, referencing issues such as climate change, species extinction and deteriorating ecosystems. Given its pervasiveness across disciplines and spheres, this edited volume articulates environmental collapse as a discursive phenomenon worthy of sustained critical attention. Building upon contemporary conversations in the fields of archaeology and the natural sciences, this volume coalesces, explores and critically evaluates the diverse array of literatures and imaginaries that constitute environmental collapse. The volume is divided into three sections Doc- Collapse, Pop Collapse and Craft Collapse that independently explore distinct modes of representing, and implicit attitudes toward, environmental collapse from the lenses of diverse fields of study including climate science and policy, cinema and photo journalism.
Bringing together a broad range of topics and authors, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental communication and environmental humanities.
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ix | |
| Author biographies |
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x | |
| Acknowledgements |
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xiii | |
| Introducing the end |
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1 | (12) |
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13 | (76) |
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1 Culture and collapse: theses on catastrophic history for the twenty-first century |
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15 | (17) |
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2 Are dead zones dead? Environmental collapse in popular media about eutrophication in sea-based systems |
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32 | (16) |
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3 Can photojournalism steer clear of the siren song of collapse? |
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48 | (17) |
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4 Environmental collapse in comics: reflections on Philippe Squarzoni's Saison brune |
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65 | (24) |
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89 | (52) |
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5 This is the end of the world as we know it: narratives of collapse and transformation in archaeology and popular culture |
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91 | (23) |
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6 Survive, thrive, or perish: environmental collapse in post-apocalyptic digital games |
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114 | (13) |
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7 Zooming out, closing in: ecology at the end of the frontier |
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127 | (14) |
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141 | (53) |
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8 Imagining the apocalypse: valences of collapse in McCarthy, Burtynsky, and Goldsworthy |
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143 | (17) |
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9 "Something akin to what's killing bees": the poetry of colony collapse disorder |
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160 | (18) |
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10 Salvaging the fragments: metaphors for collapse in Virginia Woolf and Station Eleven |
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178 | (16) |
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| Index |
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194 | |
Alison E. Vogelaar is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Franklin University Switzerland, and co-editor of Changing Representations of Nature and the City: The 1960s-1970s and their Legacies (with Gabriel Lee, Routledge 2018).
Brack W. Hale is Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Science at Franklin University Switzerland, where he is co-director of the Center for Sustainability Initiatives.
Alexandra Peat is Associate Professor of Literature at Franklin University Switzerland, and author of Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (Routledge, 2011).
