Environmental Nihilism: On Ecocatastrophe and Meaning

Harper, Tyler; Harper, Tyler

From Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”—an essay beginning with a parable about star-bound “clever beasts” whose planetary extinction marks “nothing having happened”—to the more recent emergence of the so-called “speculative realism” movement within 21st-century continental philosophy, ecocatastrophe has often remained inextricable from the philosophical problem of nihilism. Indeed, although important theoretical differences exist among contemporary “speculative realists” such as Ray Brassier (Nihil Unbound), Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet), and Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude), like Nietzsche, these philosophers have made the intersections of extinction, environmental collapse, and nihilism central to their thought. Specifically, such thinkers share the presupposition that the mere possibility of an Earth without humanity poses insoluble challenges to our ability to epistemically ground meaning-making.

This preoccupation with the nihilistic implications of environmental catastrophe and extinction is not only quarantined to contemporary theory: in the last year, historians of science have also entered this conceptual fray. David Sepkoski’s Catastrophic Thinking (2020) and Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (2020) represent arguably the first two comprehensive accounts of extinction’s conceptual history. In both cases, the historians argue that scientific speculation concerning extinction and environmental collapse has always been imagined as presenting challenges to the West’s ethical, political, and cultural worldviews, threatening to unravel the meaning systems they depend upon. Moreover, these recent conceptual histories find kinship with the aforementioned speculative philosophical investigations not only in their shared assumption that ecocatastrophe and nihilism are inevitable bedfellows, but also in their reliance on a maligned literary discourse to bolster these connections: namely, science and speculative fictions.

Despite the theoretical and disciplinary divisions that separate the aforementioned historians and philosophers who have explored the nihilism-ecocatastrophe nexus, they all tend to appeal to works of science fiction to substantiate their accounts: Thacker draws on M.P Shiel, Stephen King, and Mary Shelley; Sepkoski invokes H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard, and John Wyndham; Meillassoux theorizes Isaac Assimov; Moynihan’s dallies with the apocalyptic visions of British Romanticism. Yet, while these scholars have all repeatedly drawn on works of SF in order to buttress their investigations of extinction, ecocatastrophe, and nihilism, they also have tended to treat the works of fiction they rely on purely as thought-provoking archival documents—in other words, they have generally neglected to read these works of literature as literature. This panel is aimed at both redressing this tendency and addressing the comparative lack of literary scholarship that has explored the relationship between environmental collapse and nihilism in speculative fiction.

To that end, the three fifteen-minute papers that comprise this panel explore the ways in which nihilistic accounts of ecocatastrophe have been conceptually leveraged in contemporary science and speculative fictions that have imagined planetary catastrophe. Opening with a paper entitled “Becoming-Lithic: Utopian Possibility in the SF/F Ecocatastrophe,” Caroline Edwards (Senior Lecturer: Birbeck, University of London) draws on the new materialist turn in human geography to situate Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy. Arguing that these trilogies both respond to and subvert the martian utopia and hollow-earth subgenres that achieved prominence in 19th-century science fiction, Edwards reads Robinson and Jemison as rejecting the speculative realist proposition that environmental collapse evacuates the Earth of human meaning. Instead, the trilogies reimagine dead and dying planets as the staging grounds for a new utopian future.

Following Dr. Edwards’ presentation, Tyler Harper (Assistant Professor: Bates College) will deliver a paper entitled: “‘The void breathed hard on my heart’: Watchmen and Planetary Nihilism.” Taking up Alan Moore’s pathbreaking graphic novel Watchmen, a speculative work in which the population of New York City is deliberately sacrificed in a bid to prevent planetary catastrophe, Dr. Harper suggests that the novel stages a confrontation between epistemological nihilism and what he calls “planetary nihilism” (the supposition that the meaning of human life is contingent upon the permanence of our species’ planetary environs).

The panel’s final paper will be delivered by Doron Darnov (graduate student: Wisconsin-Madison) and is titled “Environmental Pessimism: The Cruel Optimism of NewSpace in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” Darnov argues that Silko’s indigenous sci-fi epic mounts a critique of speculative visions that rationalize environmental destruction through rhetorical appeals to a human “destiny” in outer space. Reading the novel through the lens of afro-pessimism, he maintains that Silko points the way to a generative “environmental pessimism” that resists the tendency—endemic to much SF—to imagine the death of Earth as a necessary precursor to humanity’s “progress” toward becoming a multi-planetary species.

655V Environmental Nihilism: On Ecocatastrophe and Meaning: Calls for Papers