1st Edition
The Environmental Apocalypse Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis
PART 1 Conceptualising the Environmental Apocalypse
1 On the Apocalyptic Theme in Modern Scientific Discourse
Omar Rafael Regalado Fernandez
2 The Shapes of Apocalyptic Time: Decolonising Eco-Eschatology
Jakub Kowalewski
3 Queer Ecologies and Apocalyptic Thinking
Elizabeth Pyne
4 Slow Catastrophe: A Concept for the Anthropocene
Jonathon Catlin
5 Apocalypticism in Islamic Environmental Thought: The Anthropocene as a Theological Concept
Marita Furehaug
PART 2 Representing the Environmental Apocalypse
6 The Disappointing Apocalypse: Climate Collapse and Visual Art since 1960
Andrew Patrizio
7 Avoiding the Apocalypse: The How-To Guide as a Method
Francesca Laura Cavallo
8 Waiting for the End: Narrating and Grieving Extinction
Sarah France
9 ‘The Evening(s) of Our Day’: Melville, McCarthy, and the Anthropocene’s Double Apocalypse
Lindsay Atnip
PART 3 The Ethics of the Environmental Apocalypse
10 "Guilty?"/"Not Guilty?": Kierkegaardian Reflections on Carbon Ideologies
Simon Thornton
11 Apocalyptic Time and the Ethics of Human Extinction
Stefan Skrimshire
12 Eschatology and Teleology in the Environmental Ethics of Hans Jonas
Robert G. Seymour
PART 4 Beyond the Environmental Apocalypse
13 The Improper Apocalypse: Vitalism with and against a Psychoanalytic Approach to the End of the World
Timothy Secret
14 Wiping Away the Tears of Esau: Adorno’s Reconciliation with Nature
Agata Bielik-Robson
15 Looking beyond the Apocalypse: Environmental Crisis, Colonial Environmentalism and Eastern India’s Tribal Communities
Vinita Damodaran
Biography
Jakub Kowalewski is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Religions and Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester, UK.
"Jakub Kowalewski has compiled a set of essays that investigate the multiple roles that apocalypticism can play in addressing climate change as well as its diverse colonial and capitalist roots. The authors offer accounts of eco-apocalypticism in shifting theological, philosophical and political contexts. In addition to advancing discussions in political theology, these chapters break new ground in their consideration of apocalyptic ideas in areas ranging from literature to Muslim environmentalism to the genre of how-to guides. In acknowledging the dominance of Christian eschatology for apocalyptic thought, but refusing to allow this dominance to go unchallenged, this volume is an important contribution to thinking about a world that appears to be ending around us."
Thomas Lynch, Reader in Political Theology, University of Chichester, UK
"All too often, apocalyptic rhetoric is invoked to lend urgency to the environmental crisis, but can the age-old concept of ‘apocalypse’ have any analytical power facing a catastrophe without event such as the Anthropocene? The essays in this volume show that it can. They give the term a much-needed update, providing rich insights into its history and its usefulness for the predicament we live in."
Eva Horn, Professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural History, University of Vienna, Austria
"This important collection offers a bold attempt to contest the apocalyptic tropes through which the ecological disaster is brought to our consciousness. Without any guarantee of a redemptive offering, the authors engage the environmental apocalypse to trace multiple paths whereby critical thought meets political hope to emerge renewed, ready to imagine a better world."
Joanna Zylinska, Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice, King’s College London, UK
