ABSTRACT

In recent years, ‘environmental collapse’ has become an important way of framing and imagining environmental change and destruction, referencing issues such as climate change, species extinction and deteriorating ecosystems. Given its pervasiveness across disciplines and spheres, this edited volume articulates environmental collapse as a discursive phenomenon worthy of sustained critical attention. Building upon contemporary conversations in the fields of archaeology and the natural sciences, this volume coalesces, explores and critically evaluates the diverse array of literatures and imaginaries that constitute environmental collapse. The volume is divided into three sections— Doc- Collapse, Pop Collapse and Craft Collapse —that independently explore distinct modes of representing, and implicit attitudes toward, environmental collapse from the lenses of diverse fields of study including climate science and policy, cinema and photo journalism.

Bringing together a broad range of topics and authors, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental communication and environmental humanities.

part I|75 pages

Doc collapse

chapter 1|17 pages

Culture and collapse

Theses on catastrophic history for the twenty-first century

chapter 2|16 pages

Are dead zones dead?

Environmental collapse in popular media about eutrophication in sea-based systems

chapter 4|23 pages

Environmental collapse in comics

Reflections on Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune

part II|51 pages

Pop collapse

chapter 5|23 pages

This is the end of the world as we know it

Narratives of collapse and transformation in archaeology and popular culture

chapter 6|13 pages

Survive, thrive, or perish

Environmental collapse in post-apocalyptic digital games

chapter 7|13 pages

Zooming out, closing in

Ecology at the end of the frontier

part III|53 pages

Craft collapse

chapter 8|17 pages

Imagining the apocalypse

Valences of collapse in McCarthy, Burtynsky, and Goldsworthy

chapter 9|18 pages

“Something akin to what’s killing bees”

The poetry of colony collapse disorder

chapter 10|16 pages

Salvaging the fragments

Metaphors for collapse in Virginia Woolf and Station Eleven