Green Utopianism: Facing the Climate Crisis, Inhabiting the Anthropocene

This chapter explores how the climate crisis has fundamentally altered the conditions for green utopianisms—and how green utopias persist in and through the Anthropocene. The climate challenge undermines earlier modes of ecological utopianism. Since the 1960s, environmentalist discourse has typically projected apocalypse into the future to argue for better, greener alternatives, and argued that saving nature would enhance and expand human well-being. But the climate crisis brings eco-social collapse into the present. Climate projections colonise the future. Adapting to climate change often seems to mean more of the same techno-capitalist solutions. And the nature that used to ground ecocentric visions is not what it used to be. Green utopianism now needs to articulate better ways of living and being with what we used to call nature and help us inhabit an already climate-changed world with wisdom, attention and radical hope. Two novels by Kim Stanley Robinson demonstrate changes and continuities in the utopian imagination in science fiction over the life to date of the climate COP (Conference of Parties) process and help us identify resources for a renewed green utopianism in the Anthropocene: Pacific Edge (1990) and New York 2140 (2017).