Reimagining Climate Futures: Race, Eugenics, and the Narratives of Utopia and Apocalypse

The research examines the narrative techniques of climate change discourse, analysing how apocalyptic and utopian frameworks frequently reproduce racialised and eugenic imaginaries. Through critical analysis of environmental literature, media representations, and speculative fiction, the study reveals how mainstream climate narratives oscillate between “lifeboat” scenarios rooted in social Darwinism and “collective” visions that often erase histories of colonisation and resistance. The research demonstrates that the “collapse of civilisation” trope central to climate apocalypticism carries deeply embedded racial hierarchies dating back to Progressive Era eugenics, as evidenced in early environmental utopias like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “Herland” and Ernest Callenbach’s “Ecotopia Emerging.” Media coverage of disasters such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake illustrates how identical images generate disparate narratives depending on racialised assumptions about human nature. The paper argues that speculative fiction by authors like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, along with alternative histories like Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and Terry Bisson’s “Fire on the Mountain,” provides crucial counternarratives by centring corporeal difference and revolutionary pasts. By interrogating which bodies are included in visions of sustainable futures, this research concludes that addressing climate change requires technical solutions and fundamental reconsideration of the narrative frameworks that shape environmental imagination. The study contributes to environmental humanities by demonstrating how climate justice necessitates stories that acknowledge historical injustices while imagining futures freed from legacies of imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and white supremacy.