Sustainable Futures and Literary Voices: Eco-Criticism in the Age of AI

Abstract: The accelerating climate crisis and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) have created a new intellectual landscape in which environmental sustainability no longer be discussed independently of technological development. Literature, as a cultural form capable of representing ecological relationships, technological anxieties, and alternative futures, has an important role in this debate. This paper examines how contemporary ecocriticism respond to the environmental challenges associated with artificial intelligence while also exploring the potential of AI to support environmental knowledge, literary interpretation, and sustainable futures. Drawing upon ecocritical theory, environmental humanities, posthumanism, Indigenous ecological thought, and recent scholarship on AI and environmental sustainability, the study analyses selected works including Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. The paper argues that these texts challenge anthropocentric assumptions by foregrounding interdependence among humans, nonhuman organisms, technologies, and ecological systems. Atwood exposes the destructive consequences of technological mastery; Ghosh identifies the limitations of literary forms that marginalize ecological catastrophe; Powers expands narrative attention from individual human lives to forests and multispecies networks; Kimmerer proposes reciprocity rather than domination as the basis of ecological ethics; and Haraway advocates “making-with” other species rather than seeking technological mastery over nature.