가상지구체험으로서의 녹색종말: 황폐화 서사의 한계를 넘어서

Abstract

Another imagined view of dreadful post-apocalyptic future does not surprise us in 2024, partly because it does not exactly feel like a fiction, but like an incontestable reality. But has it always been this way? Where did stories and images of depleted, post-apocalyptic earth come from? What are/were they supposed to do? Carson’s Silent Spring, the book that spearheaded the environmental awakening of the mid-20th century America, presents its distressing vision of what happens after the environmental “end” as part of the campaign against such future. Its post-apocalyptic fiction is supposed to shock us into the awareness of the environmental precarity, ultimately moving us into a non-apocalyptic path. Such “depleted earth” fiction seems to have outlived its usefulness in the time when it is painfully obvious that we are on an apocalyptic path, and what stands in the way of environmental action is defeatism and nihilism, rather than flat-out unawareness. In other words, there is an urgent and practical need for an alternative environmental fantasy that will sustain us in every sense of the word. The “green apocalypse” fiction―the understudied type of post-apocalyptic fiction in which the sense of environmental crisis gets translated into visions of surprising environmental regeneration post-disaster―might be one possible candidate. Tracing the green apocalypse fiction back to its shared origin with the depleted earth fiction in the environmental imagination of the mid-20th century America, this piece provides a snapshot of the cultural lineage of the 20th century environmental world’s-end visions, along with suggestions for how they might be utilized for 21st century purposes.