This chapter analyzes the paradox between the scientific decentering of humanity and the recentering of human responsibility in the Anthropocene, arguing that a Daoist perspective, which emphasizes cosmic entanglement and perspectival knowledge, resolves this contradiction by subverting the human–nature dichotomy.

This chapter critically examines the planetary perspective as it is articulated by David Grinspoon and prominent astrobiologist Adam Frank. The chapter argues that this perspective has problematic societal and environmental implications stemming from its apolitical and ahistorical viewpoint and its alignment with Anthropocene narrative tropes that naturalize the present environmental crisis as a step along the way to humanity’s grand awakening to their planetary presence and power.

This chapter likens David Grinspoon’s interpretation of astrobiology’s societal implications to progressivist accounts of Christian salvation history and contrasts it with an Augustinian interpretation of those implications. Further, this chapter identifies Augustinian theological resources that address both shortcomings in Grinspoon’s interpretation of astrobiology’s societal implications and ethical and political challenges foregrounded by an astrobiological perspective.

A planetary science perspective reveals that life on Earth may be fruitfully viewed as a planetary-scale phenomenon. Implications of this viewpoint for the search for extraterrestrial life, for views of the “Anthropocene epoch” in Earth’s evolution, and for the relationship between scientific and spiritual viewpoints are considered.

The social sciences and history need to mount a matching response to the Anthropocene crisis to that constructed by the natural sciences in the form of Earth Systems Science. Humankind is facing major changes to its conditions of existence. While the natural sciences have done an exemplary job of assessing the limits of planetary carrying capacity, they are not well equipped to understand the social side of this equation. The chapter sets up the idea of a World System Science to complement and extend what ESS has done (and continues to do). It looks at the methodological and conceptual compatibilities and differences between ESS and WSS, and at how concepts such as system, can both unite and divide them. It begins to set out how WSS might be developed, and what it might aim to do.

In the Arctic, the diversity of local realities is often simplified to descriptions of climate and environmental changes as perceived through a Western scientific framework that focuses particularly on the accelerated warming of the polar regions. This chapter draws on a metaphor comparing the whiteness associated with imaginaries of the Arctic landscape and the whiteness of the researchers, mainly from temperate latitudes, who cast their gaze upon this region. We reflect on how narratives about the Arctic come about, and, mobilizing the concept of whiteness, we highlight the ways deployed to study and narrate the Arctic regions, ways that leave little room for the experiences and knowledge of local and Indigenous populations. While Arctic amplification refers to the process by which temperatures in the Arctic are rising three to four times faster than the global average (as explained in the first section), we also consider the amplification of Arctic voices through scientific approaches that also give weight to the narratives of the communities inhabiting these regions.

This chapter introduces the planetary boundaries framework and explains the explicit and implicit role of value judgements within it. It explains the key scientific concepts at work in the planetary boundaries framework, and discusses their relationship to the goal of ensuring a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity. It then considers how the planetary boundaries framework has been advanced by its proponents as a way to achieve justice within the constraints of the Earth system, and more recently the idea that planetary boundaries can be guide humanity’s future on Earth. It considers the influence of the planetary boundaries framework on new ideas of economics and international law. Then, the chapter shows how uses of planetary boundaries to define a perimeter within which justice or fairness is sought encounter difficulties that require further ethical examination. It then presents an explanation of the approach to ethics taken by interdisciplinary, international scholars that contributed to this edited collection.

The Introduction positions the book’s argument – literary representations of climate control promote a hitherto neglected awareness of anthropogenic climate change – within the fields of nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities. It argues that the space-time compression of the fin de siècle afforded not only social and geopolitical but also environmental volatility. The chapter posits that the catastrophic climate event of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and the spread of domestic climate technologies such as the greenhouse (early nineteenth century), the radiator (mid nineteenth century), and air-conditioning (late nineteenth century) provoked symbolic connections between an ever-accruing control of the local climate and an ever-increasing chaos of the global climate. A range of literary authors expressed a desire for global control by pursuing different narrative modes – speculative, utopian, and modern – to represent the deliberate intervention into the global climate of the deep future, ensuing utopia, or the literary exegesis itself.

This essay proposes the Anthropocene as the register to analyze questions of identity in contemporary Irish poetry. It departs from traditional interpretive models for approaching questions surrounding subjectivity, agency, gender, race, and the wider questions of cultural and social belonging. The Anthropocene demands that the connective tissues between these frameworks be made evident and their disjunctions celebrated. Beyond Irish Studies, ecology has entered the realm of not only literary and cultural but also political, historical, and economic study. By re-thinking identity in the context of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, I ask: how can we highlight a potentially combustion-free vision of a sense of belonging in contemporary Irish poetics? In other words, how might we decarbonize Irish identity?

How has modern Arabic literature imagined the future? Focusing on dystopian narratives as cultural responses to political, environmental, and social crises, this chapter examines the shifting concept of “the future” from a modernist ideal of progress to a site of uncertainty and threat, shaped by posthumanist and ecological thought. The analysis centers on Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq’s novel Utopia (2008), which portrays a near-future Egypt marked by extreme inequality, environmental degradation, and social collapse. The novel exemplifies “critical dystopia,” blending pessimistic visions with moments of resistance and open-endedness. The analysis situates Utopia within a broader tradition of Arabic speculative fiction, tracing its roots to the Nahda and its evolution through contemporary climate fiction. It argues that Arabic literature offers a vital space for reimagining temporality, critiquing slow violence, and envisioning alternative futures amid ongoing regional and global upheavals.

Our final part of the volume addresses what we have loosely framed as reflections on an anthropology of death “beyond death.” It opens with Aja M. Lans’s powerful critique of the ways in which the material afterlife of death in the form of human skeletal collections has historically worked to erased life – specifically Black lives and the biographies of living people whose remains have become objects of display or tools of bioarchaeological pedagogy. In exploring her own encounters with the violence inherent in producing and maintaining those collections, she invites us to consider the “corporeality of the body and its exploitation both during life and after death.” Her chapter sets the scene for the chapters to follow, each in its own way wrestling with questions that extend from the phenomenon and experiences of death. The framing of “beyond death” that binds these particular chapters urges reflection not only on death’s afterlife of mourning and memory but also some of the radical innovations and ruptures introduced by the pandemic that have both methodological and theoretical consequences for the field going forward.

This chapter repositions William Burroughs as a radical environmental thinker whose apocalyptic visions and experimental prose provide an oblique but vital contribution to ecocriticism. Steen Ledet Christiansen argues that Burroughs’ work – particularly Naked Lunch, The Exterminator, and the Nova trilogy – challenges the limits of environmental representation through stylistic rupture, linguistic sabotage, and the dissolution of the human subject. Burroughs’ toxic narrative landscapes, cut-up methods, and critique of linguistic determinism reveal the entanglement of language, ideology, and environmental degradation. Far from a conventional ecological writer, Burroughs destabilizes anthropocentric frameworks and anticipates posthumanist theories by framing language itself as a viral, controlling force. His fractured narratives expose the environmental imagination to new modes of seeing and being, making him an unlikely but essential figure in rethinking literature’s role in the Anthropocene.