Environment

Abstract

Long version: Utopia’s attention to the concept of ‘environment’ now exceeds human-focused concerns and extends to the “more-than-human” world, to use David Abrams’s term which includes animals and living inhabitants of the biosphere, as well as entities such as winds, rivers, climate and soil. Utopian orientations to more-than-human others can be framed through relations of ‘care’, provisionally described using the concepts of absence, utility, regard, co-existence and provisioning. Orientations of utility or regard for the more-than-human can be found in foundational works of Plato, the classical arcadia, and in More’s seminal work. As awareness of ecological harm in the second half of the twentieth century intensifies to awareness of crises in the twenty-first, forms of ‘care’ have shifted in the utopian imagination towards co-existence and provisioning, traced through a selection of environmental utopian writers including William Morris, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Ernest Callenbach, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood. Short version: Utopia’s attention to the concept of ‘environment’ now exceeds human-focused concerns and extends to the “more-than-human” world, to use David Abrams’s term which includes animals and living inhabitants of the biosphere, as well as entities such as winds, rivers, climate and soil. Utopian orientations to more-than-human others can be framed through relations of ‘care’, provisionally described using the concepts of absence, utility, regard, co-existence and provisioning. Orientations of utility or regard for the more-than-human can be found in foundational utopian works. As awareness of ecological harm in the second half of the twentieth century intensifies to awareness of crises in the twenty-first, forms of ‘care’ have shifted in the utopian imagination towards co-existence and provisioning.