Description
Debates around whether adaptation or mitigation are the most desirable (or feasible) strategies for humanity to take in the face of climate change have waned in recent years, as the world passes the tipping point and changes to the climate become inevitable. As adaptation fast becomes the dominant policy frame, we contend that adaptation narratives (re)produce an anthropocentrism that fetishizes human agency. While we have inflicted damage upon the climate, adaptation narratives tell us, it is still within our power to effect some level of control over a (changing) environment. In an attempt to critically engage the continuing fascination and fetishization of human agency, we turn to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and the novel Borne as a resource for thinking through human-nature relationships. Reading VanderMeer’s work and its horror through the register of the uncanny, we plot anthropocentric anxieties that nature may begin to forcibly adapt us to it. In doing so, this paper illustrates how science fiction (and popular culture more broadly) help make sense of contemporary environmental politics by disturbing anthropocentric illusions of power and control.
