From questions posed by Wilfred Owen at a Craiglockhart War Hospital talk ‘Do Plants Think?’ and Alan Turing’s rhetorical echo ‘Can Machines Think?’ to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s query ‘Who is the we?’ in a postcolonial Anthropocene, times of crisis goad us into recognising wider sentience and reimagining collective agency. This essay considers how a collective comprised of humans, intelligent botanical or zoological life, and AI might respond to climate crisis using two literary case studies. Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Vandana Singh’s ‘Entanglement’ use contemporary tree science and quantum entanglement, respectively, as innovative, interdisciplinary narrative models. These models also dictate the resolutions of their stories – eventualities of collectivity that may still be evolving, but gesture toward potential climate-changed futures. As this essay argues, these two works offer contrasting visions based on how they deploy AI design potentials, the emotional responses of hope and despair, and the spectre of uncertainty as either a creative space for solutions or a reminder of impossible choices. These stories also pose important questions about corporate power, empathy, and social justice, reminding us that reckoning with human cultural diversity is still the soil from which any more-than-human climate collective must grow.

While literary texts rely on words to help readers imagine climate change, film relies on a different narrative toolset of images, motion, and sound, pre-packaging our perception, if not our affective response. In climate change cinema, such pre-packaging has tended toward the dark and disastrous as filmmakers are torn between the desire to forewarn and the need to entertain and make money. It has thus become a critical commonplace that cinematic depictions of climate change offer a spectacle-driven, apocalyptic vision that is at odds with the diffuse experience of climate and the slow violence of climate change. Some critics fear such dark visions might prove detrimental to addressing the issue because people end up disengaging from it. The first part of the chapter explores emotions cued by dystopian depictions of climate doom. The second part turns to two films that have tried an entirely different affective approach – Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent’s Demain and Damon Gameau’s 2040 – by presenting possible solutions to the climate crisis along with desirable futures, in a mode that is often humorous, witty, and uplifting. The chapter argues that both strategies have their place in climate change cinema, and both can be effective with some audiences.

Climate change makes demands on our collective imagination, reshaping understandings of what it means to be human in the span of geologic time. This chapter argues that theatre is uniquely positioned not only to bear witness to the lived experience of climate change by amplifying the voices of those people and places most impacted, but also to forward the necessary labour of imagining just and sustainable futures. This chapter also argues that a play is merely a blueprint for performance, and that to discern the role of theatre to leverage social change, it must be understood as a living art form, one in which people gather together in a material time and place to enact shared stories. The chapter examines how contemporary dramatists are innovating new forms, distinct from traditional Aristotelian dramatic structure, in order to leverage social change, engender empathy, and exercise democratic values.

Writing about international organizations and development is a daunting task due to the elusiveness of the concept of development, the manifold international institutions, instruments and policies designed to promote development and the entanglement of the development discourse with colonial and imperial practices of domination and extraction.

International organizations (IOs) are sometimes derided as ‘mere’ talk-shops. This is unfair for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that international organizations do more than serve as venues for government representatives to speak to (or at) one another – they act. The European Union and, to a lesser extent, other organizations have governing powers. The United Nations, African Union and NATO conduct peace operations. The World Bank and regional development banks finance development projects. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and multiple humanitarian organizations run refugee camps and massive aid programmes.

The chapters collected in this Cambridge Companion together demonstrate a few things about the law of international organizations – and law generally perhaps – that may not always be realized. A first point to note is that international organizations are active in nigh-on all walks of life, as these chapters suggest. There are few human activities with which international organizations have no point of contact. Whether it concerns energy provision or the movement of persons across the globe; whether it concerns disarmament or financial stability or the governance of resource extraction, international organizations are often involved in one way or another. And even in those policy domains where there is no single overarching international organization (most conspicuously perhaps the heavily fragmented domain of environmental protection), there are nonetheless entities active which may not generally be considered international organizations (largely because their founding fathers shy away from using that label), but which are remarkably similar to international organizations in all but name.

This chapter reviews how literary and literal atmospheres have cut across each other in complex transactions of meaning and practice over the past 400 years. It traces how atmosphere was first literalised in early modern science, in a process that identified air as a new object of empirical knowledge while also awarding a new meaning of empirical objectivity to literalness. It then shows how this scientifically literal atmosphere was taken up in an expanded set of metaphoric and figurative uses from around 1800, in which such formulations as ‘political atmosphere’ and ‘poetic atmosphere’ breathed new life into traditional understandings of air that had moved fluidly between the spiritual and the empirical. The large-scale cultural re-metaphoricisation of air in this period formed the platform for the emergence of literary atmosphere as a specific practice of double troping, in which aerial figures were reflexively marked as at once figurative and literal. That marking proved integral to the emergence of both modernist poetry and the modern novel. But the discursive divisions and oppositions that underwrote it are brought under unprecedented pressure by climate change, which therefore requires new methods for the writing and reading of literary atmospheres.

The strangest thing about international organizations is that for all the appearance that they have of bringing about a dulling rationalization of life, they are enmeshed in global politics as deeply as any other actor, if not more deeply. The very existence of international organizations in a world order founded on the equal sovereignty of states defies fundamental logic and possibly confirms that they exist both as instruments of policy and as political agents. International organizations have a complex history of their own, and ascertaining their politics is, arguably, in the eyes of the beholder.

This chapter addresses the role of international organizations in securing financial stability. Regulating financial stability is a chief concern of capitalist economies. Like in other fields of economic law, the challenge is to strike a balance between protecting a jurisdiction against overspill risks emanating from other jurisdictions, and containing risks across jurisdictions by shifting regulation to the international level. This results in two modes of regulation, which I call sovereignty and cooperation.

The breakdown of what Donald Wollheim once called the ‘consensus future’ of science fiction – a spacefaring human civilisation migrating to the moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and beyond – has coincided with increasingly dire warnings about the true consequences of technological modernity on the planet. Where the future once seemed to be a site of unlimited possibility, it now appears to be a site of ever-worsening catastrophe and collapse. This chapter considers what might be called the ‘consensus apocalypse’, but also looks beyond it to consider techno-utopian and ecotopian visions of a non-disastrous future for humanity, with a thematic focus on figurations of sea-level rise due to ice-sheet collapse, especially in the work of Kim Stanley Robinson.

The contemporary ecological crisis is also a crisis of human perception, representation, and agency. We are required to make frenetic alterations of scale, adjusting our daily experiences, actions and lifestyles to ever-changing global and atmospheric patterns and impacts. Yet the polysemy of climate and its diffuse presence in our lives – as extreme weather event, day-to-day expectation, scientific data, or urgent socio-political issue – also makes it amenable to multi-media or transmedia dissemination. Analogously, digital media is itself characterised by movement across and between microscopic (tweets, data) and macroscopic levels – i.e. a digital sphere marked simultaneously by ‘infowhelm’ and the possibility of mass global, networked, and resistant communities. This exploratory survey ranges from the quotidian dimensions of digital and online media – how changes in climate are being recorded and registered in tweets, blogs, and citizen science – to deeper qualitative storytelling formats adapted from and sometimes in dialogue with old media. The latter include online self-published fiction, podcasting (e.g. the BBC audio drama Forest 404), and personal ‘climate stories’ and testimonies. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued importance, and potential agency, of human-scale perspectives on micro- and macroscopic ecological complexities and for preserving distinct, often maligned human modes of narrative and storytelling.

Energy, in the broad sense of all sources and forms of energy, fossil, renewable, electricity and fuels, is a latecomer to the field of international organization. The twin principles of permanent sovereignty of producer states over their natural energy resources and the sovereignty of consumer states over their energy mix seemed to remove this matter from the realm of international law and to allocate it to domestic law. The organizational architecture reflects this. Different from other functional systems such as health or trade, there is no single, central international organization of universal membership for the energy sector.

Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.