The scale of social-ecological systems – spatial and temporal – matters for co-management as very often multiple actors and sectors are involved, operating at and across different administrative levels, including across national boundaries. This creates challenges for building relationships, delivering on accountability and transparency, and for fair and effective participation. Geographically dispersed actors involved in collaborative governance may lead to fragmented systems and processes. Responses to such challenges within natural resource governance have included the adoption of multilevel, network and polycentric governance. Collaboration in relation to each of these approaches is investigated, with review of the concepts of scale, networks and polycentricity to identify implications for the concept and practice of co-management.

This chapter concludes the book by synthesizing its main themes and revisiting its central questions: What kind of ethics do we need to grapple with the planetary boundaries framework and the issues it raises? Is it sufficient to accept scientific frameworks as the baseline for ethics or are there other ways of knowing that matter both within and beyond western scientific frameworks? Key themes such as complexity, time, epistemic justice, and scale emerge as central to thinking across, and with, the interdisciplinary chapters that comprise this book, and these themes also suggest important considerations for future ethical engagements with the planetary boundaries framework.

This chapter studies the works of Jules Verne, primarily his forgotten work The Purchase of the North Pole (1889). Providing ideational background, it compares Charles Fourier’s fantasy of the anthropogenic correction of the Earth’s axis in Theory of the Four Movements (1808) with Eugène Huzar’s secularisation of the apocalypse as the result of technoscientific intervention in The End of the World Through Science (1855). Delving into The Purchase of the North Pole, the chapter analyses how Verne exposes the Promethean ambitions of the Baltimore Gun Club by acutely describing the imminent natural disasters following their attempt to correct the axis and climate of the Earth. It concludes that Verne represented climate intervention as a potentially catastrophic practice, rendering the planetary consequences of anthropogenic climate change intelligible through an apocalyptic rhetoric.

The introduction situates the Anthropocene as a contested concept whose formal rejection by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2024 contrasts sharply with its widespread adoption across the humanities. It traces the term’s origins in Crutzen and Stoermer’s proposal, reviews competing “golden spikes,” and examines how debates over dating and definition have shaped cultural discourse. Beyond geology, the Anthropocene emerges as a multidisciplinary figure of thought, raising questions about planetary systems, individual responsibility, and ethical entanglement. The introduction highlights literature’s dual role as historical precursor and critical interlocutor, from Romantic environmental sensibilities and Moby-Dick’s proto-Anthropocene themes to contemporary climate fiction and speculative narratives. It also addresses representational challenges posed by scale and deep time, the politicization of terminology, and alternative framings such as Capitalocene and Chthulucene. Finally, it considers literature’s potential agency in confronting planetary crisis, surveying narrative strategies from apocalyptic imaginaries to realist depictions of “slow violence.” By mapping these debates and tensions, the introduction frames the Anthropocene as both a conceptual battlefield and a lens through which literature negotiates the interwoven histories of humans and Earth.

Now that the notion of the Anthropocene is more than a quarter century old, it is possible to review its career. With a special focus on the notion’s trajectory in literary studies, this chapter assesses that career in three ways. First, it makes the language-theoretical point that the Anthropocene is less a rigid denominator than a necessary misnomer: a term that cannot possibly capture the vast realities it is assumed to name, and is better thought of as a catalyst for debate. This helps explain why the recent dismissal of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit hardly affects the term’s popularity. Second, it tracks the development of the term in literary studies to show how a term that initially signaled ecological urgency began to signify theoretical complexity in the 2010s and, somewhat later, also an increasing awareness of diversity. Third, it underlines that the particular way in which literary studies conceives of the Anthropocene is affected by the specific affordances of literature, which is reflected in the association of the Anthropocene with interdisciplinarity, multiscalarity, embodied experience, the ontology of writing, and a mood of impending disaster.

The concept of “scale” has become central to environmental debate. The challenge is that issues of a planetary nature resist being treated adequately, or even sometimes perceived, at the individual, national, or regional levels on which human thought, attention, and politics almost always operate or “make sense.” Such scalar dilemmas, practical, cognitive, and ethical and political, have been the focus of a small field of “scale critique” (Woods, 2014) and “scalar literacy” (Horton, 2019) studying how underexamined supposed norms of scale determine or pre-structure so many issues. In a literary context it is notions of realism and of genre that are most in question. Various literary exercises in scale are considered – poetry by Gillian Clarke, Gary Snyder, and Evelyn Reilly, novels by Jeff VanderMeer, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. The issues resist reduction to the dogma of there being one “right scale” at which to approach the complexity of environmental scenarios. Questions of scale have even a trickster element, best received as a spur to debate, against evasion, whether intellectual, political, or moral.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

Chapter 6 analyses the ironies of multi-scalar focalisation. I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014), T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts (2016), and Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) as ironic exercises in ‘bringing the biosphere home’ which satirise their focalisers’ limited perception. The difficulty of biosphere perception is highlighted in each of these texts through visual hallucinations and blind spots, which represent ethical failure. These stories respond satirically to the difficulty of perceiving a planetary ecological crisis, and question the idea of enlightenment as a step towards environmental responsibility. This fiction does not work didactically, but neither does it endorse the cynical perspective. Instead, it explores an ironic mode of multi-scalar attention which holds together incompatible perspectives. This leads me to define scalar irony as an epistemic and ethical tool which offers a way forward for Anthropocene response-ability.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.