Over the past two centuries, apocalypse and extinction have become powerful secular tropes, and have been given new urgency in the context of escalating global heating and biodiversity loss. This chapter examines how the environmental humanities can analyse, complicate, democratise, and challenge these tropes. It addresses present-day speculations about the future of the biosphere, both within the field, and in wider culture through the activities of groups such as Extinction Rebellion. It explores the entanglements of these speculations with questions of justice, and offers an analysis of relationships humanity, inequality, and catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826). The chapter ends with some suggestions about the role of the environmental humanities in an ecological emergency. In particular, it addresses how the field might contribute to the communal task of finding urgent solutions for social-environmental problems, while at the same time maintaining focus on issues of justice and rigorous critique of totalising narratives, including the language of solutions and of apocalypse itself.

Climate change poses a profound challenge to human well-being and the very foundation of social justice and human rights. This chapter applies a psychological lens to understand the impacts of and responses to climate change at individual and societal levels. We describe the dire mental health implications of climate change impacts, which cause trauma and uproot lives, destabilize socioeconomic and governance institutions, exacerbate inequality by disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities, and spur conflict through resource scarcity and uncertainty. We examine group identity and belonging dynamics driving societal conflict, including competition over resources; scapegoating, hate crimes, and exclusionary politics; ethnic and political strife surrounding immigration; and political polarization and the rise of far-right parties – and consider their human rights implications. We then explore the psychology of climate inaction. Our moral judgment system is unable to grapple with a psychologically distant threat whose cause is endemic to the foundation of society. Motivated reasoning processes, including identity-protective cognition and system justification, contribute to moral disengagement and resistance to direly needed systemic changes. We offer psychologically informed approaches for overcoming inaction through communication, solution design, and empowerment. Finally, we overview international climate efforts, with a focus on the UN 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development.