Chapter 1 introduces the concept of transformative novel technologies in the context of the contemporary global environmental crisis. It discusses how technology is central to the crisis as well as its potential resolution, although its status is frequently ambiguous and contested. The chapter makes the case that governance solutions, including at the international level, are indispensable in order to capitalize on the potential benefits of transformative novel technologies, to avoid their various potential downsides, or both. The empirical case studies of the book are then previewed: biotechnology, specifically novel methods for large-scale biological control as well as the utilization of digital sequence information in research, development and innovation; climate engineering, a series of proposed methods for large-scale intervention into the climate system; and mining beyond national jurisdictions, where various technological developments increasingly enable the extraction of metals critical to a global sustainability transition from areas that were previously inaccessible.

The conclusion opens in Vanavara as the author learns that he will not get to walk around the site because of wildfires resulting from ever hotter summers. Global environmental threats such as climate change and mass extinctions garner more attention today than menacing objects from space, but an even richer view of the disasters that threated humankind would incorporate unknown nature more fully. The book ends by reflecting on what Tunguska might teach us about the present environmental crisis.

This chapter examines the current global environmental crisis and the complicity of universities and cultural resource managers in creating this ecocritical moment.

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.

Chapter 1 introduces the environmental crisis in China including the scale and impact of its air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination and pollution by solid waste. The legal responses to the environmental challenge are discussed, focusing on key sources of environmental law including the Constitution; specialized environmental statutes that regulate and control pollution; civil, criminal, administrative and procedural laws that are of crucial relevance to environmental protection; state regulations and administrative rules that implement national laws; judicial interpretations that bind the courts and procuratorates in the adjudication and procuratorial work to ensure consistent application of environmental law; local regulations that implement national laws, regulations and plans at local levels; and international environmental treaties that China has ratified to become a party. The chapter concludes with an examination of the state and party policies and plans that have direct and authoritative influence on the development of Chinese environmental law.

The design of the artificial – including products, infrastructure, land-use and information – is directly responsible for the onset of the Anthropocene. Yet, there is insufficient understanding of the mechanisms that can support design in addressing the resulting crisis. One constraining factor is a misapprehension of designers as hired hands of commerce. Design’s impact and potential are much broader. Humans make plans in all fields. Other lifeforms, including animals and plants, engineer and build too. All live with the outcomes. This chapter connects the discourse in design with literature in environmental humanities and natural sciences. It analyses cities as examples of modified habitats that are simultaneously biological and cultural. ‘Human-centred design’ is useful in inviting the perspectives of affected humans, but it fails to include non-human interests. In response, this chapter highlights the existence of non-human cultures and offers ‘interspecies design’ as a useful frame for the preservation or reconstitution of equitable habitats.

Environmental fiction and nonfiction writers began to use secular apocalypse in the 1960s and continue to do so as the emphasis has shifted over time from scenarios of pollution and population growth to biodiversity loss and to climate change and its consequences: natural disasters, refugee crises, and increased inequality. It has sometimes been considered environmentalism’s most powerful narrative strategy. But environmental projections of apocalyptic futures in popular-scientific texts must contend with the difficulty of balancing known facts and imagined futures. Fictional portrayals of eco-apocalypse, meanwhile, often rely on narrative templates that emphasize the breakdown of civic institutions and explore changing family configurations under these circumstances. But whereas the collapse of societies is intended as a warning about possible real-live developments, it is often portrayed without any accompanying imagination of new social structures. Eco-apocalyptic narrative therefore confronts the challenges of trivialization and spectacularization, with future environmental disasters so common in fiction and film that they have lost much of their ability to inspire fear or activism. This chapter argues that apocalyptic narrative no longer has much force as a strategy of environmental communication or aesthetics. The more promising forms of eco-futurist narrative are those seeking to outline new social forms that can emerge from current ecological crisis, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.

Throughout his career, Cormac McCarthy has produced a rich body of literature that examines the complicated and often fraught interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Encompassing tales about precarity and abandonment, failures of the Western dream to provide new beginnings and new freedoms, philosophical meditations on the limits of human knowledge, and apocalyptic revisions of agency in end times, McCarthy’s writings examine complex entanglements between human and nonhuman characters in an ever-changing material world. His place-based writings reconfigure spatial categories as they unfold across diverse geographical scales that are local, regional, national, transnational, and at times even planetary. Drawing on new developments in materialist ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, this chapter explores how the author engages intersections between economy and ecology; addresses agency across humans, animals, and the more-than-human world; and examines challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Through its depictions of ecology and agriculture, the role of the written word in the conquest of the Americas, and the Great Acceleration resulting from the Cold War global arms race, McCarthy’s writings help readers assess some of the more baffling complexities of our new geologic age.