Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature apocalyptic scenarios, particularly in film and popular culture. However, these dire warnings have seemingly been ineffective at motivating action on climate change. In response, there has been a call for specifically ethical engagement to provide an alternative means of motivation. This article offers an analysis of the effects of ecological apocalypse narratives on the (re)production of the ethical subject of climate change. The article illustrates the intertextual production of the ethics and apocalypse discourses in order to argue that rather than providing an alternative, the ethical motivation approach in fact (re)produces the assumptions and effects of apocalyptic narratives in a way that sediments a non-relational logic of the ethical subject, in both spatial and temporal terms. Such a logic makes responsive ethical or political engagement with ecological futures very difficult and limits possibilities for thinking progressively about climate change.
BleikerR (2001) The aesthetic turn in international political theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies30(3): 509–533.
10.
BradleyAFletcherP (2010) The politics to come: A history of futurity. In: BradleyAFletcherP (eds) The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic. London: Continuum, pp.1–12.
11.
BrassettJ (2009) British irony, global justice: A pragmatic reading of Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais. Review of International Studies35(1): 219–245.
BulleyD (2009) Ethics as Foreign Policy: Britain, the EU and the Other. London: Routledge.
14.
BuzanB (2010) America in space: The international relations of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. Millennium: Journal of International Studies39(1): 175–180.
ColebrookC (2012) Not symbiosis, not now: Why anthropogenic change is not really human. Oxford Literary Review34(2): 185–209.
20.
CroftS (2006) Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
21.
De GoedeMRandallsS (2009) Precaution, preemption: Arts and technologies of the actionable future. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space27(5): 859–878.
DevlinH (2015) Fact or fiction: Climate myths debunked. The Independent, 3May.
24.
DillonM (2015) Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analytic of Finitude. London: Routledge.
25.
DobsonA (ed.) (1999) Fairness and Futurity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26.
EdelmanL (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. London: Duke University Press.
27.
EdkinsJ (2000) Whose Hunger?: Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
28.
EmmerichR (2004) The Day after Tomorrow (Motion Picture). Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox.
29.
EmmerichR (2009) 2012 (Motion Picture). Culver City, CA: Sony.
30.
FaganM (2013) Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
31.
GardinerG (2009) Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race. Journal of Social Philosophy40(2): 140–162.
32.
GardinerS (2010) A perfect moral storm: Climate change, intergenerational ethics and the problem of moral corruption. In: GardinerSCaneySJamiesonD. (eds) Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.87–100.
33.
GardinerSCaneyCJamiesonDShueH (2010) Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
34.
GarveyJ (2013) The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury.
GraysonK (2012) How to read Paddington Bear: Liberalism and the foreign subject in A Bear Called Paddington. British Journal of Politics and International Relations15(3): 378–393.
37.
GrovesC (2010) Living in uncertainty: Anthropogenic global warming and the limits of ‘Risk Thinking’. In: SkrimshireS (ed.) Future Ethics Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. London: Continuum Press, pp.107–128.
38.
GrovesC (2014) Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
39.
GuggenheimD (2006) An Inconvenient Truth (Motion Picture). Los Angeles: Lawrence Bender Productions and Participant Productions.
40.
HaywardTIwakiY (2016) Had we but world enough, and time: Integrating the dimensions of global justice. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy19(4): 383–399.
41.
HeldDHerveyATherosM (2011) The Governance of Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics and Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
42.
HeywardCRaynerS (2016) Apocalypse nicked! Stolen rhetoric in early geoengineering advocacy. In: CrateSANuttallM (eds) Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations. London: Routledge, pp.86–105.
43.
HillcoatJ (2009) The Road (Motion Picture). Los Angeles, CA: Icon Film.
44.
HiskesR (2005) Environmental rights, intergenerational justice, and reciprocity with the future. Public Affairs Quarterly19(3): 177–194.
45.
HoelzlM (2010) Before the anti-Christ is revealed: On the katechontic structure of messianic time. In: BradleyAFletcherP (eds) The Politics to Come: Power Modernity and the Messianic. London: Continuum, pp.98–110.
HousemanT (2015) The negatives of a better world: On-screen apocalypse, dystopia and disaster as (negative) responses to crisis. In: Draft paper prepared for International Studies Association annual convention, New Orleans, LA, 18–21 February.
48.
HughesAHughesA (2010) The Book of Eli (Motion Picture). Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.
JabriV (1998) Restyling the subject of responsibility in IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies27(3): 591–611.
55.
JamiesonD (2001) Climate change and global environmental justice. In: EdwardsPMillerC (eds) Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Global Environmental Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.287–308.
LoweTBrownKDessaiS. (2006) Does tomorrow ever come? Disaster narrative and public perceptions of climate change. Public Understanding of Science15: 435–457.
PageE (2007) Climate Change, Justice, and Future Generations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
79.
ParfitD (2010) Energy policy and the further future. In: GardinerSCaneySJamiesonD. (eds) Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.112–121.
80.
PatersonMStrippleJ (2010) MY space: Governing individuals’ carbon emissions. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space28: 341–362.
81.
Pin-FatV (2009) Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading. Oxon; New York: Routledge.
82.
PinkusK (2010) Carbon management: A gift of time. The Oxford Literary Review32(1): 51–70.
83.
SachsWSantariusT (2007) Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice. London: Zed Books.
WeldesJ (2003) Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: Exploring international relations. In: WeldesJ (ed.) To Seek Out New Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1–30.
