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When, at the climax of Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 film Planet of the Apes, the astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) discovers the torch of the Statue of Liberty poking through the shifting sands of a post- apocalyptic world, his horrified, despairing cry - 'We finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!' - encapsulated the nuclear anxiety of dystopian fiction and film in the 1950s and 1960s. Thirty- five years later, that iconic image of Liberty's torch engulfed by natural forces was knowingly echoed in both Steven Spielberg's AI and Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, but in the first decade of the new millennium, the imagined apocalypse waiting to engulf the human race was not nuclear, but environmental: New York is swallowed by the rising waters of the Atlantic ocean, and frozen solid by the plunging temperatures of a new ice age. As these high- profile cinematic examples indicate, climate change has made its way towards the mainstream in recent years, on both the screen and the page, and has now eclipsed nuclear terror as the prime mover of the apocalyptic and dystopian imagination.
Writing in his 'Common Ground' column in the Guardian in 2005, the travel and nature writer Robert MacFarlane observed that the spectre of environmental disaster confronting the Earth had, as yet, provoked relatively little artistic response, certainly in comparison with the extensive corpus of literary work that had helped to shape the politics of the nuclear debate in the late twentieth century. While arguing that 'an imaginative repertoire is urgently needed by which the causes and consequences of climate change can be debated, sensed, and communicated', MacFarlane also suggested that 'any literature of climate change would, for the time being, have to steer determinedly away from apocalyptic scenarios', because of the slow and incremental nature of climate change itself.1 In the years since, ever more writers have answered the first part of MacFarlane's call, seeking to provide an 'imaginative repertoire' through which to understand and influence the climate change debate. And yet, contrary to MacFarlane's hopes, the majority of such artistic responses have chosen an apocalyptic scenario as the appropriate means of doing so. Though we are not yet at the stage of environmental apocalypse - not quite -...