“Everyday Micro-utopias” recapitulates themes from Climate Change, Literature, and Environmental Justice through an examination of pedagogy as a form of what Rebecca Solnit terms “building paradise” in the classroom. I draw on my experience teaching a class on climate change over the past several years, where my students and I remain in the presence of the unbearable grief of climate change, displacements, relocations, and extinctions. The course is a space to imaginine collective responses to climate change that carve what Nicolas Bourriad calls “micro-utopias” within the status quo. I offer a notated syllabus with readings, assignment notes, and the narrative that binds the course together. In the final pages of the epilogue, I turn to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth speculative trilogy, which imagines revolutions of the enslaved that end the world and make possible a new beginning anchored in the archeology of past insurrection.

In the face of growing alarm about climate change, contemporary scholars of apocalyptic fiction have begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? Many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their most compassionate after a catastrophe. In response to this tension, this essay takes a dialectical approach to understanding both the critical and reparative aspects of twenty-first-century American apocalyptic fiction. In the first half, it demonstrates that the violent mythmaking in this work is both symptomatic of the “elite panic” characterized by disaster studies and reflective of other decidedly American ideologies. The second half identifies how some of these same apocalyptic texts complicate or even counteract expectations of panic, theft, and violence, providing insights for how readers might cultivate cooperation and community in the wake of an apocalyptic event.