Environmental Exploitation, Plutocratic Empire and the End of Our Planet | Robyn Walton

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Robyn Walton In booming Edwardian England, few cared to recall Voltaire’s lesson in Candide that the unsatisfying Eldorado was within trekking distance of the sugar-works where a slave missing a leg and hand personified the cost of Europeans’ sweet diet. Joseph Conrad did recall, locating his ironic tale ‘An Anarchist’ in just that part of South America and showing the human and environmental degradation associated with the grazing of cattle destined for reduction to meat-extract. In the novel Tono-Bungay H.G. Wells despatched his narrator to South West Africa to steal a radioactive mineral substance that might make the perfect lighting filament. There the young adventurer not only murdered an indigenous man but saw environmental devastation so bad he had an intimation of ‘the end of our planet’. Ultimately, however, such texts were not designed to induce respect for distant environments and populations. Rather, they were moral fables critiquing bourgeois Englanders’ materialist culture. Robyn Walton has undertaken doctoral studies in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne, having completed her previous degrees at the University of Sydney. Her fiction, essays and chapters on utopianism and cultural history have been published in Australia and Europe in several languages.