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“Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Long River Rewind! My name is Kiara Korten and today we will be exploring the intersection of climate, creativity, and culture. What is eco-futurism and how does fiction shape our consciousness?… let’s dive in!
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“Over the summer, my mom and I went on a movie binge of the alien vs predator franchise. We got caught up in the intense world of humans fighting terrifying extraterrestrial creatures.
The tension, creature design, and the brutal battles kept us glued to the screen. Not only did they entertain me during my lazy days of summer, but they also helped me come to an important conclusion.
It was during Alien Resurrection, starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, that something clicked. In the film, Ripley is cloned by military scientists to extract the Alien Queen embryo inside her, but the cloning process fuses her DNA with the alien’s, making her a hybrid. When the creatures inevitably escape, Ripley and a ragtag crew of space pirates must stop them from reaching Earth. In the finale, Ripley destroys the grotesque Newborn creature by expelling it into space through the ship’s hull.
The survivors crash-land on Earth, and the planet is shown as a ruined, desolate wasteland, brown skies, scorched landscapes, and an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Instead of being a place of safety or homecoming, Earth feels alien itself: hostile, degraded, and almost uninhabitable.
And this struck me; how many times have I seen this idea in popular fiction and popular culture before? Human greed destroying the planet, escaping to space, or humans destroying the planet and barely surviving while on it. And I realized how little representation we have for hope.
Fiction has immense power in shaping our lives and culture. The stories we consume don’t just entertain us but shape our imagination of what’s possible. If the dominant narrative is apocalyptic, dystopian, or dismissive of Earth’s survival, then our cultural imagination risks becoming trapped in despair.
So, what would it mean to envision a repaired future? A future where Earth is not dispensable, but cherished? Where creativity doesn’t just imagine escape pods and space stations, but thriving ecosystems, restored communities, and technologies that heal rather than exploit?
I think it is important to look at how this not only effects our view of this pretty amazing planet but also how we look at ourselves, at humanity. And to showcase how we are capable or much more than destruction
Of course, I recognize why these stories are so popular. They present such compelling narratives, high stakes, terrifying creatures, and the drama of survival. But I also think it’s the easy thing to do. Writing about apocalypse is simpler than writing about its repair.
To imagine a hopeful future is actually much harder. It asks us to stretch beyond the familiar scripts we’ve been handed, the ones that tell us collapse is inevitable, that survival means competition, that consumption is the only measure of progress. These aren’t just tropes of fiction; they echo the logic of the economic system we live in.
But storytelling can resist that. To write about hope, we have to loosen that grip and begin to picture cooperation, regeneration, and care as central to human life. That act of imagining repair is not naïve but radical, which I would argue is also a pretty compelling story
And I know, I am not the only one who is thinking this way.
Many readers are starting to search for fiction that talks about environmental issues in a way that accurately addresses our current problems with intelligence and hope. A way through it if not a way out of it. And this is where Eco Futurism comes into play.
Eco Futurism is not a specific genre but rather a philosophical and cultural movement that envisions a future where technological advancement and ecological balance are intertwined. It is about imagining a world where humans thrive in harmony with nature, leveraging innovation to solve environmental challenges rather than exacerbating them. Eco-futurism challenges us to reimagine our relationship with the planet.
In the literary world, eco-futurist thinking has roots that stretch back centuries. Early speculative writers, from Mary Shelley’s visions of plague to the Romantic poets who imagined nature as both fragile and sublime, were already grappling with humanity’s impact on the Earth. Later, authors carried this thread forward, weaving ecological consciousness into their worlds of science fiction and utopia. What distinguishes eco-futurism today is its insistence on repair, it doesn’t stop at warning us about collapse, but rather asks literature to become a site of renewal
There is already some really great pieces out there!
Richard Powers’ The Overstory shows us how difficult it is to write about hope. Instead of the easy drama of collapse, Powers builds a narrative around patience, interconnectedness, and collective care.
Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia (edited) by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu – is an anthology of speculative fiction that explores the paradoxical idea of “hopeful dystopias.” Rather than dwelling on collapse.
Another great example would be The Parable of The Sower by Octavia e. butler is another great example. This book takes place in a dystopian setting, but the collapse is not the point; it’s the backdrop against which new visions of community and care be forged.
Pieces like these refuse despair and insists that even in dystopia, we can still imagine repair and renewal.
Eco-futurism reminds us that hopelessness is not the only story we can tell. Collapse may be compelling, but repair is radical, and essential! Imagining hope is the hardest, and yet most necessary work of all during global instability. Now this isn’t to say that we can’t enjoy our epic monster filled, dystopian, sci-fi stories
But maybe moving forward, let’s ask ourselves, what stories are we choosing to tell as a culture? And how might those stories shape the futures we are capable of building?
Thank you all for joining me on another episode of Long River Rewind. I would like to thank UCONN’s Radio station 91.7 WHUS Storrs for allowing us to use their equipment and make this all possible.