The environment has become the center of attention in recent years. The world is at the brink of several interrelated ‘green’ crises: environmental degradation, climate change, peak oil, food crisis, and various natural disasters. Hence, there is a viable threat to society. This essay aims to explore the significance of the environment for societal collapse—with a Western world city focus. The method of choice is a literature-based critical instance case study. In this thesis, the environmentally focused collapse theories of Jared Diamond and Clive Ponting are tested on the empirical example of the city of New Orleans, USA. In 2005, New Orleans was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, 80% of New Orleans was flooded, almost 1,800 people lost their lives, and the infrastructural systems suffered lengthy breakdowns. Consequently, the supply of basic services such as water, food, sewage, electricity, heating, communications, transportation and shelter was severely compromised.   The study shows that in the specific case of New Orleans, the underlying reasons for collapse cannot be explained by ‘green’ collapse theories alone. In fact, poor wetlands management was the only environmental issue of importance. Contributing causes were various managerial flaws (including lack of financing) on all levels in terms of emergency prevention, preparedness and response, as well as long-term structural implications for social justice. Thus, the environmentally related theories of Diamond and Ponting do not prove a perfect match. Instead, the collapse of New Orleans had better been explained by a ‘root cause mix’ theory, which takes political, economic, social and environmental aspects into consideration. / Miljöfrågor har hamnat allt mer i fokus de senaste åren. Världen står på tröskeln till ett flertal miljörelaterade kriser: miljöförstöring, klimatförändring, peak oil (oljeproduktionstoppen), global matkris samt diverse naturkatastrofer. Detta medför sammantaget ett allvarligt hot mot samhället. Examensarbetet syftar till att belysa miljöns betydelse för samhällskollaps – med fokus på den västerländska staden. Den metod som tillämpas är en litteraturbaserad fallstudie. I uppsatsen testas Jared Diamonds och Clive Pontings miljöinriktade teorier om samhällskollaps på det empiriska exemplet New Orleans, USA. År 2005 ödelades New Orleans av orkanen Katrina. Så mycket som 80 % av staden drabbades av översvämning, 1 800 invånare omkom och hela infrastrukturen bröt samman. Katastrofen fick därmed allvarliga konsekvenser för grundläggande samhällsfunktioner som försörjningen av vatten, livsmedel, avlopp, elektricitet, värme, kommunikationer, transporter samt boende.   Studien visar att miljöorienterade teorier om samhällskollaps inte fullt ut kan förklara grundorsakerna till det sammanbrott som skedde i New Orleans. Den enda miljörelaterade orsaken av betydelse var inadekvat skötsel av våtmarkerna. Bidragande faktorer var istället bristande politisk styrning (inklusive otillräcklig finansiering) på alla nivåer vad gäller förebyggande, beredskap och hantering av kriser, samt långvariga strukturella hinder för social rättvisa. Slutsatsen blir därför att varken Diamonds eller Pontings miljöinriktade teorier träffar helt rätt. För större träffsäkerhet, borde New Orleans’ sammanbrott förklaras med en teori som förutom miljöfaktorer även innefattar politiska, ekonomiska och sociala aspekter.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:18:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Angelo Augusto Silva Sampaio.pdf: 715245 bytes, checksum: 61b8725f4ee371bc064c778263e1e6df (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-04-04 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Behavior Analysis has yet to establish a productive research program about culture, cultural practices and their evolution. Although conceptual problems (about the appropriate units of analysis and the complexity of cultures) and methodological issues (there aren t well tested procedures to explore cultural phenomena within a behavior analytic perspective) are at the root of this absence, the conceptual issues have been tackled by some (S. Glenn and M. Harris, for instance). These efforts have not been followed, until now, by validating empirically based studies. We suggest that quasiexperimental studies may be a productive alternative to this problem. Quasiexperimental studies should allow the description of functional relations among events: The experimental manipulation, and therefore, control, is limited in such cases, but there are empirically based measurements of dependent variables when independent variables are present and absent. J. Diamond s scientific position seems to be compatible with philosophical and methodological tenets of Behavior Analysis and Diamond has repeatedly argued for quasi-experimentation as a method to study culture and cultural evolution. The present work focuses were: to explore the possibilities opened by quasi experimental procedures on the study of culture and to further explore Glenn s and Harris interpretations of culture. In order to do it Diamond s book Colapse was analyzed. Diamond s interpretation of the Viking colonies fate was taken as the exemplar. Exerts interpreted as elements of Diamond s construction of quasiexperiments about the Viking colonies were selected and their procedural elements and main results were evaluated. The present results suggest that quasi-experimentation may be a valuable methodological alternative to the empirically based study of culture. Possible relationships between Diamond s results and Glenn s proposition of metacontingencies and macrocontingencies as units of analysis at the cultural level of selection and Harris principle of infra-structural determinism of cultures are discussed. Diamond s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes indicates a relevant separation between variables for the analysis of present and past cultures. The present work also points out methodological aspects pertinent to the implementation of quasiexperimental studies on culture / A dificuldade em se estabelecer um programa de pesquisa sobre práticas culturais, cultura e evolução cultural na Análise do Comportamento deve-se em parte a questões conceituais (sobre as unidades de análise pertinentes e a complexidade inerente às culturas) e metodológicas (ausência de procedimentos experimentais adequados e timidez na exploração de alternativas metodológicas pertinentes). As propostas de S. Glenn e M. Harris têm contribuído para a elucidação das questões conceituais, mas ainda não dispomos de estudos empíricos que validem suas proposições. Um modo de lidar com as questões metodológicas pode ser o uso criterioso da quase-experimentação, uma busca sistemática pelo estabelecimento empírico de relações funcionais entre eventos com limites ao controle de variáveis, mas com dados sobre condições nas quais a variável independente está presente e condições em que ela está ausente. Com os objetivos de explorar as possibilidades da quase-experimentação no estudo específico da cultura e de discutir as propostas de Glenn e Harris a partir de dados empíricos, nos voltamos para a obra do geógrafo Jared Diamond, que tem advogado o uso de quaseexperimentos no estudo da cultura e compartilha pressupostos metodológicos e filosóficos com a Análise do Comportamento. O foco da análise foi a interpretação de Diamond sobre os destinos das colônias vikings, para o que foram tomados como centrais os capítulos do livro Colapso que tratam das colônias vikings medievais no Atlântico Norte. Trechos dos capítulos foram categorizados e fontes de informação adicionais (textos citados em Colapso) foram consultadas. Buscou-se (1) identificar aspectos do texto que caracterizariam metodologicamente o trabalho de Diamond como a construção de quase-experimentos sobre os vikings e (2) indicar o que tais quaseexperimentos sugerem a respeito (2.1) da unidade de análise de práticas culturais, (2.2) da pertinência dos conceitos de metacontingência e macrocontingência e (2.3) da posição de Diamond sobre a complexidade das culturas e sua relação com o princípio do determinismo infra-estrutural de Harris. Os resultados da análise de Colapso indicam que quase-experimentos sobre a cultura são possíveis e podem gerar resultados produtivos já que permitiriam inclusive afirmar relações funcionais entre eventos que seriam relevantes para a compreensão do fenômeno cultural como indica a sugestão de Diamond de que cinco conjuntos de fatores (dano ambiental, mudança climática, sociedades vizinhas hostis, diminuição do apoio de parceiros comerciais e a resposta da sociedade aos seus problemas ) são relevantes para o destino das sociedades. A distinção entre causas mediatas e imediatas também indica uma separação entre variáveis relevante para o estudo de culturas passadas ou presentes. Nossa análise ainda aponta aspectos metodológicos pertinentes à condução de estudos quase-experimentais sobre a cultura