Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

The volume examines forms and functions of fictional and factual anticipatory environmental (hi)stories from antiquity to the Anthropocene, offering a diachronic as well as cross-cultural perspective on how different authors and societies have imagined their respective future environments.

Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene studies the interplay of environmental perception and the way societies throughout history have imagined the future state of “nature” and the environments in which coming generations would live. What sorts of knowledge were and are involved in outlining future environments? What kinds of texts and narrative strategies were and are developed and modified over time? How did and do scenarios and narratives of the past shape (hi)stories of the future? This book answers these questions from a diachronic as well as a cross-cultural perspective. By looking at a diverse range of historical evidence that transcends stereotypical utopian and dystopian visions and allows for nuanced insights beyond the dichotomous reservoir of pastoral motifs and apocalyptic narratives, the contributors illustrate the multifaceted character of environmental anticipation across the ages.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Anticipating Environmental Futures Beyond Pastoral and Apocalyptic Visions

Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek

Part I. Dialogues Between Times and Places

Chapter 1. Experience and Expectations: Hesiod on Work, Justice, and Environment

Astrid Möller

Chapter 2. Ancient Geographies of Health and Environmental Acumen: An Anticipatory Narrative in Galen (Method of Healing V, 12)

Caroline Petit

Chapter 3. The Past Is a Foreign Environment: Some Observations on Roman Wetland Drainage in Ancient and Modern Discourse

Jasmin Hettinger

Chapter 4. Future Imperfect in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Diana G. Barnes

Chapter 5. Retrospective Prophecy in Contemporary Maya Literature: Chim Bacab’s Flower of Memory

Charles M. Pigott

Part II. Extinction and Conservation

Chapter 6. Feeling Like a Species: The Environmental Future in Lucretius

Richard Hutchins

Chapter 7. Anticipating Multispecies Thinking in Plutarch’s Animal Treatises

Christopher Schliephake

Chapter 8. William Temple Hornaday’s Haunting Vision of a Wildlife Apocalypse

Gregory J. Dehler

Chapter 9. Anticipating Extinction: Mammoths, Elephants, and the Late-19th-Century Ivory Trade

Rebecca J. H. Woods

Chapter 10. Narrating Civilizational Collapse in the Anthropocene: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014)

Lena Pfeifer

Part III. Urban Environments

Chapter 11. Sensing Noise, Sensing Space: Environmental Perceptions and the Impact on Future Urban Space in Germany and the United Kingdom (1900–1930)

Heiner Stahl

Chapter 12. The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri: Unbuilt Futures from the Past

Serge Leopold Middendorf

Chapter 13. Utopia’s User Interface: Geoengineering, Smart Cities, and Glass Life in Niklas Maak’s Novel Technophoria

Helga G. Braunbeck

Part IV. Climate(s) and Materialities

Chapter 14. Solastalgia, Future Memory, and Polluted Landscapes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 7

Darrel Janzen

Chapter 15. Nuclear Winter: Science, Fiction, and Temporal Violence

James Dunk

Chapter 16. ‘Nature in Order’ or Human Agency? Visions of the Future in the Long Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Climate Change Discourse

Falko Schnicke

Chapter 17. Explaining Climate Change and Predicting Its Impacts: The Popularization of Brückner’s Theory on Climate Variations as an Anticipatory Narrative

Karolin Wetjen

Chapter 18. Ecology in a Loop: Cyclical History and Alternative Epistemologies in Ella Hickson’s Oil

Martin Riedelsheimer and Leila Michelle Vaziri

About the Contributors