Chapter 5 - If This Goes On

Summary

Chapter 5 turns to a much bleaker vision of the Anthropocene: the widely shared suspicion that catastrophe is all but inevitable. In this part of the book, I attend to various dystopian visions of our climate-changed world, by first delivering a historical overview according to which the apocalypse's construal in public discourse has recently undergone significant transformations. Dystopias perform one major function in this context - they warn an audience about existential threats that are imminent, but whose true causes still remain concealed from public purview. In the case of climate change, we ought to distinguish more specifically, I suggest, between cautionary and post-cautionary narratives. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy navigates this divide by probing where grave dangers might erupt from within the status quo, without suffocating the desire for alternative ways of being and living. Atwood’s books are so insightful because they move back and forth between a storyline that traces how the environmental catastrophe came about and another one that unravels the surprising ways in which the surviving humans collaborate with other species to build a common future.