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Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

2024; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_9

2520-1387

Charles Travis,

This chapter reviews the environmental dimensions of twentieth-century petroleum wars, and explores the deployment sub-atomic and digital environments to addresses the existential and "wicked problem" of global warming. James Lovelock, father of the Earth-system science model Gaia, employed a mythical metaphor when he observed,… we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does most of us, and our descendants, will die. It is as if we were committed to live through the mythical tale of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and see our Valhalla melt in torrid heat." The Science-Fiction of H.G. Well's World Set Free (1914), and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) contextualize and preface discussions on the invention of the Atomic Bomb, and how the manifestations of extreme weather and climate over the past quarter century, signify that the Earth is engaged in a "power struggle" to draw our species, homo-sapiens, back into biogeographical balance with its planetary systems.