Planetary Interventions in the Cultural Imagination

PI: Benjamin Morgan
Co-Investigator: Katherine Buse

This project explores how fictional stories about the Earth shape the way people think about large scale human interventions in planetary systems.

For more than 150 years, novels, films, television, and other media have imagined the Earth as a single interconnected system that can be observed, modeled, managed, protected, or even redesigned. From early science fiction like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine to modern climate fiction and disaster films like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, these “planetary narratives” have helped audiences imagine global warming, geoengineering, ecological collapse, and other major environmental changes long before they became urgent public debates.

The modern idea of the planet as a shared, unified space emerged in the nineteenth century as global travel, communication, and trade expanded. Writers and artists began exploring questions that remain relevant today. They imagined dramatic climate shifts, life on other planets, and efforts to control weather or ecosystems. Some, such as Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, have even speculated about changing the human species to adapt to environmental change. Many of these once speculative ideas now appear in climate science and policy discussions.

Today, planetary stories appear across many forms of media and play an important role in shaping how people think about risk, responsibility, and possible futures. This project brings together scholars from literary studies, film and media studies, and related fields to examine how these narratives influence public thinking about planetary change.

The research focuses on three main lenses.

1. Speculation as a mode of reasoning. Planetary narratives often function as thought experiments that explore “what if” scenarios and unintended consequences, similar to scientific models.
2. Ethics and value as planetary issues. Planetary narratives raise ethical questions about justice, risk, and responsibility across regions and generations.
3. Scale and perspective. Planetary narratives often shift between individual human experiences and vast scales of geography and time, helping audiences grapple with challenges that unfold over decades or centuries.

By examining the history of these narratives, the project seeks to better understand how ideas about managing the planet have developed and how they continue to shape discussions about climate risk, adaptation, and intervention.