Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how (...) its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever. This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being. (shrink)

This chapter explores how the climate crisis has fundamentally altered the conditions for green utopianisms—and how green utopias persist in and through the Anthropocene. The climate challenge undermines earlier modes of ecological utopianism. Since the 1960s, environmentalist discourse has typically projected apocalypse into the future to argue for better, greener alternatives, and argued that saving nature would enhance and expand human well-being. But the climate crisis brings eco-social collapse into the present. Climate projections colonise the future. Adapting to climate change (...) often seems to mean more of the same techno-capitalist solutions. And the nature that used to ground ecocentric visions is not what it used to be. Green utopianism now needs to articulate better ways of living and being with what we used to call nature and help us inhabit an already climate-changed world with wisdom, attention and radical hope. Two novels by Kim Stanley Robinson demonstrate changes and continuities in the utopian imagination in science fiction over the life to date of the climate COP (Conference of Parties) process and help us identify resources for a renewed green utopianism in the Anthropocene: Pacific Edge (1990) and New York 2140 (2017). (shrink)

Attempts to imagine a better future from within the climate emergency must work in and through failure: failing eco-social systems, failed narratives, failures of political will, failures to change consumerist lifestyles. Utopia is intimately related to failure. It is a response to something wrong or missing. As a mode of critique and creation it is definitionally impossible to realise. But the climate crisis brings distinctive dimensions, disrupting linear temporalities, resisting solutions and posing existential dilemmas. This paper works through theoretical ideas (...) linking utopia with failure in contemporary utopian and queer theorising, adapting them to the climate context and articulating a weak utopianism in response to theorists calling for a hard or strong utopia in times of crisis. It argues that climate crisis is better understood as a world than as a problem, and explores what kinds of implicated, everyday and entangled utopian desires might enable us to navigate the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Jonathan Franzen's The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of essays about climate change, nature conservation, and contemporary culture. They are good essays. But they left me with no new ways to think with about environment, climate, and the future. Perhaps this is the point. The "personal essay," Franzen reminds us, is a form of "honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas" within the structure of a "personal and subjective micronarrative". Its value lies not so much (...) in generating new analytical insights as in finding interesting ways of reflecting on shared experience from a partial and individual perspective.These essays are thoughtful on the distractedness of everyday life for... (shrink)

In science studies the laboratory has been positioned as a privileged place for understanding scientific practice. Laboratory studies foregrounded local spaces of knowledge production in the natural sciences, and in doing so made the laboratory key to social science epistemologies. This article explores how laboratory studies and observational methods have been tied up together in the science and technology studies project of making scientific practice visible. The author contrasts powerful rhetorics of witnessing and revelation in some significant STS texts with (...) the negotiated and partial ways in which observing science work is done in social science practice. Drawing on empirical material generated with bioscientists and social scientists, the article explores how researchers may resist the observational gaze and mark aspects of knowledge work as private and solitary. The author concludes by arguing that epistemologies of vision point to some unsettling parallels between the study of knowledge-making in STS and audit regimes in contemporary research, and considers how both might devalue invisible work. This analysis suggests that there is a need to reconsider the significance of thinking in the ensemble of knowledge production practices for methodological, epistemological, and strategic reasons. (shrink)

Recently there have been pleas for STS to make a difference in how science policies are constructed and enacted. Much less remarked upon is the possibility that there may be troubling alignments between science studies and research policies in the form of shared conceptual, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Both have come to emphasise material outputs and visible activity, obscuring other processes, relationships and orderings involved in science work. This collection of papers focuses on these connections between STS and contemporary research (...) policies. They explore empirical material from ‘other epistemic places' to foreground and critique what is privileged and rewarded by science policies. But they also seek to make a theoretical contribution to STS itself, showing how its early focus on the hard centres of global technoscience have been constitutive of its characteristic concerns, epistemologies -and blind spots. As science studies moves out of the lab andbeyond the heartlands of the political West and global North, we argue that acknowledging some problematic affinities between science studies and science policy is both a critical necessity and an opportunity for new insights. (shrink)