The epilogue brings together a number of themes of the book and sketches some avenues for further research.

Since the 1990s, there has developed an increasingly sophisticated ecocritical approach within Irish literary studies. Ecocriticism may not seem entirely relevant to analyses of O’Casey’s Autobiographies nor to his ‘Dublin Trilogy’. But this chapter argues that the critical resources of the field can productively re-orient our appreciations of writers who seem to ‘pre-date’ climate change and environmentalism. The chapter suggests how it might be possible to read O’Casey’s work in terms of its engagement with human and non-human relations, with the urgencies of social and economic injustice, and with the politics of representation as they are germane to non-human ecologies.

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The chapter explores the dualistic cosmology of Nature/Culture and its influence on individual and collective behavior narratives. It presents various instances of disputes and debates that underscore the indistinct boundaries between Nature/Culture and between determinism and choice. These include the IQ controversy, genetic engineering, human perfectibility, global warming, the Pygmy tribe categorization debate, and the self-definition of groups in organic/biological versus associative/cultural terms. These discussions highlight the complexities in delineating Nature/Culture boundaries. Ezrahi suggests that the inherent ambiguity in demarcating Nature from Culture has, from a liberal open-ended worldview, engendered undecidability between such competing frames. This ambiguity has opened up possibilities to leverage the authority of Nature to either strengthen or weaken that of Culture and politics and vice versa. It has also enabled the blending of both in varying degrees in fields like technology, medicine, and arts. The chapter further explores the ongoing debate on whether the Holocene epoch of an independent Nature is giving way to the Anthropocene era characterized by significant human impact on Nature’s form. Ezrahi proposes a hybrid perspective of Nature as both separate from humans and humanized, questioning the sustainability of modern democracy’s epistemological constitution premised on an autonomous Nature.

The chapter examines the impact of human imprinting on Nature, blurring the boundaries between humans and Nature and diminishing human freedom. Enlightenment ideals granted individuals rationality, emphasizing their will in the realms of science and politics, enabling them to differentiate absolute truth from human-dependent matters. The blurred boundaries challenge rationality as a measure of norms and erode commonsense – the shared understanding of how the political system operates and the comprehension of causality. These developments lead to the “loss of the subject” and threaten the perception of the individual as an autonomous political agent. The erosion of the dualistic cosmology is also due to feminist theories arguing that women were wrongly placed within the realm of Nature rather than Culture. Similarly, postcolonial perspectives contend that Indigenous peoples were dehumanized and considered part of Nature under the dichotomous cosmology. In the postmodern era, there is a tendency towards hybridization and interactive dynamics. Ezrahi asserts that democracies in a hybrid world require “human-like” judgments from machines and algorithms, necessitating an examination of the intentions and interests of their designers. The question that needs to be asked is whether “humanized machines” serve the interests of a politics of freedom.

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

This chapter describes the continued, still ongoing, trajectory of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework and how it has co-evolved with the “Anthropocene,” another concept with Stockholm roots. During the course of the second decade of the new century, ethical aspects were increasingly taken on board. Will Steffen, former Director of the Stockholm-based International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), was the lead author of a second PB article in Science in 2015. Like the first Nature article in 2009, a sizable share of the co-authors had institutional involvement or other affiliation with Stockholm. This new iteration developed the ethical challenges of sharing the “safe operating space” inside boundaries among regions, nations, and societal groups. Steffen was also a member of the Anthropocene Working Group appointed by the Stratigraphic Committee to make the case for Anthropocene as a new geological era. The chapter articulates the significance of the overlap between the PB and Anthropocene processes and debates. These drew considerable interest from scholars in the social sciences and humanities, which helped make both issues concerns of epistemology and Weltanschauung.