Several years ago, our family went to a holiday season performance at a kids’ art space in downtown Vancouver. The venue was also hosting an exhibit about children’s visions of the city one hundred years from then. Most of the illustrations were dystopian scenes from an early twenty-second-century future. The sea level rises anticipated under worst-case climate scenarios were depicted through submerged skyscrapers and washed-out roads; eco-apartheid was implied in crayon, with colorful but unmistakably unwelcoming border walls to keep out the teeming masses of Californian climate refugees.

That exhibit made me think that the line attributed to Fredric Jameson — about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism — was in fact an understatement. Our children can’t even imagine a future above water.

In this miserable year of the pandemic, the end of the world feels like it’s here already. In these circumstances, it takes a heroic act of imagination to conjure up a medium-term scenario in which humanity grapples with the existential threat that ecological degradation and climate disruption poses to our societies, our species, and indeed the biosphere itself.