The chapter details recent and future climate changes, primarily caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. This period of time is now commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. The chapter begins with a critical discussion of the hypothesis that anthropogenic activities have already begun to significantly impact the global climate since the mid-Holocene. The climate changes observed during the last century and their attribution to human activities are presented. The concept of anthropogenic emission scenarios and projections of future climate change are then described. The results of several future model simulations are shown, and the most robust aspects of future climate change projections and their potential impacts on natural systems and humanity are discussed. Finally, the possibility of predicting the very long-term future (beyond the current millennia) is discussed and possible scenarios are presented.

How were seventeenth-century projects of wetland improvement remembered and revived in the centuries that followed? What remnants of wetlands past persist in popular memory, troublesome spirits, floodwaters, and nature reserves? This chapter traces afterlives of the turbulence and tumult generated by fen projects. In doing so, it weaves together the key strands of this book. First, new intellectual and political tools were needed to define and implement wetland improvement, reconceiving the scale of environmental thought and action in early modern England. Second, customary politics proved a powerful force in the negotiation of improvement as commoners intervened in the flow of water, the exercise of property rights, and the practice of sovereignty. Finally, coercive projects of environmental change expanded cracks in the exercise of central authority, becoming entangled in civil war conflict and imperilling the stability of improvement. It concludes by asking what conflict over early modern wetlands can tell us about the environmental politics of the Anthropocene.

The entangled relations of humanity’s natural and digital ecosystems are discussed in terms of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. The discussion focuses on global warming from the perspective of the small world of geoengineering, with a particular focus on geothermal energy, marine geoengineering, and the political economy of mitigation and adaptation (section 1). It inquires into the large world of the biosphere, Anthropocene, and uncertainties created by the overlay of human and geological time (section 2). And it scrutinizes the technosphere, consciousness, and language as humanity’s arguably most important cultural technology (section 3).

The chapter offers provisional compass points for navigating new modes of writing by 21st-century Australian poets in light of a world of overdevelopment, environmental crises and extinctions. The compass points include: modes of anxiety and grief involved with poetic form, and material forms emerging in combination with agencies, matter and forces. Inflection points include the shared becoming of humans and non-humans. The chapter includes a discussion of ecopoetic literary journals, as well as anthologies that have gathered and showcased ecopoetry, radical writing of land, and environmental protest poetry. It includes analyses of poetry by writers such as Judith Beveridge, Louise Crisp, Coral Hull, John Kinsella, Peter Minter and Mark Tredinnick.

This Introduction specifies the book’s aims. Its main thesis is that a comprehensive examination of Kant’s texts displays the relevance of his ethical, legal, aesthetic, metaphysical, and historical ideas for environmental problems like climate change, despite the standard view of Kant as anthropocentrist, individualist, dualist, and nonconsequentialist. Doing so, the book builds a bridge between environmental philosophy and Kant studies by offering distinctly Kantian solutions to environmental problems. I begin with an overview of the tensions in these philosophical fields, emphasizing that the climate crisis exhibits the value of Kant’s philosophy for contemporary environmental problems. After providing empirical background on climate change, I indicate why philosophy matters for the crisis. A recent greening-the-canon movement in environmental philosophy nonetheless places Kant on the wayside. The Introduction also offers an overview of the chapters.

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, while useful for moving past the ecological limitations of the standard reading, is limited insofar as it focuses on individual actors—consumers, citizens, and politicians in particular. Kant’s ethical thought emphasizes individual humans rather than economic and political systems, and his teleological thought appears scientifically outdated. This chapter asks whether these aspects of Kant’s thought need revision. It begins by placing Kant in dialogue with Darwin and Marx, pursuing a critical discussion on the human species and political systems in the context of the Anthropocene. The Kantian reply, I suggest, encourages us to reconsider Kant’s philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology. Kant’s ideas are significant for the climate crisis insofar as they enjoin normative reflection on the human species globally and in the long term. I conclude with critical reflections on Kant’s racism and sexism as obstacles to reading Kant in the Anthropocene.

Failures of environmental law to preserve, protect and improve the environment are caused by law’s contingency and constitutional presumptions of supremacy over the self-regulatory agency of nature. Contingency problems are intrinsic to law and, therefore, invite deployment of technologies. Constitutional presumptions can be corrected through geo-constitutional reform. The latter requires the elaboration of geo-constitutional principles bestowing authority on nature’s self-regulatory agency. It is suggested that principles of autonomy, loyalty, pre-emption, supremacy and rights have potential to serve that aim and imply proactive roles for technologies in environmental governance. Geo-constitutional reform is necessary to prevent the fatal collapse of the natural regulatory infrastructure enabling life and a future of environmental governance by design. Once environmental catastrophe has materialized, however, geo-constitutionalism loses its raison d’être.

Climate and landforms are intimately tied together. Indeed, much of geomorphology is concerned with how landforms, climate, and other surficial processes (like erosion) interact. Landforms are often studied to understand past climates, and vice versa. Thus, a complete understanding of landform genesis requires knowledge of past climates, generally termed paleoclimate.

Climate can be viewed as the prevailing weather/atmospheric conditions for a site, but over long timescales. If a geomorphologist was interested in how sand dunes in a modern desert migrate, they might look at climate over the last few decades. However, a geomorphologist interested in the origin and evolution of the entire desert would need to examine climate over tens of thousands, or even millions, of years. Thus, climate is a somewhat slippery concept, especially when one considers that climate is always changing.

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.