Stories of Environmental Futures: From Apocalypse to Survival and Optopia

This is a hybrid seminar.

attend in person at WCYP SR 9

Attend on Zoom: https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/j/89787628878?pwd=3cGKCile1UImOi5ZTqbnklNNskYobB.1 (Passcode: 229267)

Environmental storytelling has frequently relied on narratives about disaster or even apocalypse to convey its most urgent messages. This lecture foregrounds two concepts and narratives that move beyond apocalyptic thinking to other ways of telling stories about environmental crises and environmental futures. One of these concepts is “survivance,” proposed by the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor as an emphasis on continuing traditions that have persisted outside of capitalism and colonialism. This emphasis is also visible in narratives outside of North America and in different cultural traditions, as the analysis will show through a range of examples. The other concept is optopia, proposed by the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson: a dynamic version of utopia that does not envision a static society, but one that works constantly toward improved futures and seeks to ward off threats to these futures. One of Robinson’s own works, New York 2140 (2017), provides a narrativization of this concept. The temporality of survivance and optopia is quite different – oriented toward continuing pasts and revolutionary futures, respectively – but both offer ways of living in and with environmental crises beyond the imagination of disaster.

A lunch reception will be planned for the speaker, guests and invited participants.

Ursula K. Heise is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (2024) and Unsettling Extinction (2026), as well as the book series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. In 2024, she was awarded the Biophilia Award for Environmental Humanities by Spain’s BBVA Foundation She is currently at work on a book entitled Reclaiming Ecotopia: Speculative Fiction and Environmental Futures.