This chapter aims to locate an emergent eco-consciousness in the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that in Life Studies and beyond, Lowell’s poetry explores the political production of uncertainty, and considers how anxiety was employed as a political tool used to enforce vigilance and compliance. In poems addressing the prospect of nuclear war, Lowell positions this production of anxiety as a biopolitical process aimed at both managing resistance to nuclear politics and normalizing the fallout – both literal and figurative – from US political, military, and industrial interests in atomic technologies. From an ecocritical perspective, Lowell’s poems demonstrate how, in the nuclear age, the Cold War state renders the natural environment an object of government control. Both the real and the psychological fallout of the atomic age are a prescient ecological threat predicated upon a cruel optimism that conditions Cold War subjects to be complicit in their own ecological ruin.

Examining the trajectories of paranoia and apocalypse in the matrix of Cold War dichotomies throughout DeLillo’s opus, this chapter examines DeLillo's emphasis on class and professions in relation to his Cold War fiction.

This chapter explores the role of environmental change and the emergence of ecocritical critique in Asian American literatures from 1930 to 1965. From the development of industrialized agriculture to the deployment of military technologies like the atomic bomb and Agent Orange, the environmental changes wrought by technological advances in war, commerce, and communication during this period played a key role in driving and directing migrations within and across the Pacific both in this era and in the decades to come. By considering the roles that terraqueous environments and ecologies have played in shaping critical debates over nation, empire, and race, this chapter posits that an ecocritical approach to Asian American studies can demonstrate how mid-twentieth-century attitudes toward the regulation and legislation of US land and sea territories reflects or refracts implicit beliefs about the state of nature, the natural boundary of the state, and who (or what) might belong within it.