Chapter 4 - If Only

Summary

Chapter 4 deals with one of the most prominent themes in contemporary utopianism: the notion that science and technology can somehow be harnessed to elevate humanity beyond the current impasse. My argument entails that ecomodernism – the proposition that scientific and technological progress will exert a thoroughly positive impact on the Anthropocene – should be understood as a distinctive type of social dreaming. I analyze this constellation by first reconstructing various theoretical defences of ecomodernism. The chapter thus demonstrates that ecomodernism constitutes a broad movement in which both right- and left-wing defenders of scientific and technological progress have found ideological homes. In a second step, I embark on a reading of what is the most systematic endeavour to fictionally work through the profound contradictions and ambiguities of an ecomodernist response to climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. Robinson’s oeuvre involves a meditation on how an optimistic response to the Anthropocene could organically grow from within the status quo, thereby eschewing both fatalistic resignation and arrogant hubris.