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date: 25 May 2022

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin a conversation for the philosophy of technology, philosophies of science fiction narrative discuss the different roles that imagination plays in projecting our concerns with the present onto futures that have not occurred and future generations who are not yet living. One of the key issues that the chapter explores is how science fiction imagination is based on assumptions and values about the history of technological change, including industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. These issues reveal ways in which technology, future narrative, and climate justice are related.

Keywords: environmental futures, science fiction, climate justice, colonialism, future narrative, environmental imagination, Anthropocene, philosophy of technology

Julia D. Gibson

Julia D. Gibson is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the APPLE (Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics) consortium at Queen’s University. They envision their research taking shape where the boundaries between feminist, political, and environmental philosophy grow pleasantly and productively murky. Her publications include articles in Environmental Philosophy, the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, and the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Their research exploring the commonalities, tensions, and incommensurabilities of decolonial and interspecies justice finds relational and material expression in her public philosophy work on the family farm. Julia currently serves on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy.

Kyle Powys Whyte

Kyle Powys Whyte is George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Previously, Kyle was Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability and Timnick Chair at Michigan State University. Kyle’s research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

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