ABSTRACT
The mental health effects of climate change have attracted a lot of attention as the threats posed by a warming world are becoming harder and harder to ignore. The filmmaker and activist Gillian Caldwell, for her part, has used the language of trauma to describe the emotional demands involved in getting her country to act on climate change. The hypothesis that the dread of climate change amounts to a pre-traumatic stress syndrome is central to another major work of cultural scholarship, E. Ann Kaplan’s Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. Kaplan examines a wide range of futurist disaster narratives allegedly inducing pre-traumatic stress, both cinematic and literary ones. Moreover, the expanded trauma theory called for by scholars such as Saint-Amour and Kaplan, which would be future- as well as past-oriented, remains wedded to the idea that trauma is an essentially human experience.
