This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning work of feminist science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, from the standpoint of a Hegelian understanding of the politics of recognition. It identifies three approaches to the politics of recognition, associated with the ideas of the politics of difference, the politics of identity, and the politics of identity-and-difference. The first is based on the notion of order, hierarchy status, and relationships between those who consider themselves to be unequals. The second is based on the notion of dialogue and communication between those who consider themselves to be equals. It sets aside all differences as being morally irrelevant. As such, it is associated with the notion of strong cosmopolitanism. The third attaches importance to both the similarities and the differences that exist between individuals. Le Guin’s commitment to feminism in the novel is sometimes associated with the second of these approaches. She is thought to be a strong cosmopolitan thinker. The chapter argues that Le Guin is in fact an advocate of the third approach. She is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker.

The chapter explores two major reorientations for environmental politics since the 1960s through literature that influenced and was influenced by these politics. With the ‘New Environmentalism’ of the first ‘Earth Day’ (1970), a younger generation broke with a long tradition of wilderness preservation to meet the urgent new challenges of ecological crisis – a shift in genre from the Romantic resistance to modernity in the nature writing of John Muir and Edward Abbey to the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, who were struggling to think towards possible futures at a planetary scale. The second reorientation also grapples with scale, emerging out of the tensions between the Global North and South in the wake of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment (1972). Sceptical of an environmentalism preoccupied with ‘Nature’ alone, what has been called the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ has refused to see social justice and the environment as separate, as, for example, in Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, whose island home – subjected to US nuclear weapons testing in the mid-century – is now inundated by rising sea levels.