| Central to early environmentalist Aldo Leopold's thinking, the ecological conscience leads individuals, institutions, and societies to understand human existence as a part of ecosystemic integrity---rather than apart from it---and to behave accordingly. An ecocritical literary study, this dissertation observes multiple expressions of this ecological conscience in several works of science fiction (SF). Various philosophical and theoretical insights into why modern culture lacks an ecological conscience emerged with Twentieth-Century environmentalism, including the science of ecology itself, deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecosocialism. The chapters of this study locate narrative efforts in SF to perform the ecocritical, conscience-building work of environmental philosophy and theory. For example, George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949) asserts the essential animality of the human species, challenging the human/nature dichotomy so central to modern ideologies. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)---a work of ecotopian fiction---speculates on many of the cultural changes advocated by deep ecology, an environmental philosophy critical of Western civilization's human-centeredness. Joan Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean (1986) relates the oppression of nature by humans to the oppression of women by men, but turns a critical eye toward ecofeminist understandings that are too essentialist. And Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (1993, 1994, 1996) narrates the possibility of an eco-economy, an ecologically sustainable economic system that eschews destructive capitalist economic paradigms. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that science fiction is actively engaged in ecological work, in a "transformative politics" that operates on the conceptual level to encourage an ecological conscience that in the end will manifest itself in revised human actions. |
