Paradise is a little too green for me”: Discourses of environmental disaster in Doctor Who, 1963–present | Lindy Orthia

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Lindy Orthia Themes of environmental disaster and its aversion appeared as dystopian horror scenarios in the television series Doctor Who throughout its history. In this paper, I chart shifts in discourses about the causes and solutions of environmental disaster over the program’s four decades. In particular, I chart a trajectory of increasing disillusionment with the modern West’s capacity to find solutions to environmental destruction. In 1960s Doctor Who, legislative regulation and establishment science were seen as able to provide solutions. Early 1970s Doctor Who cast industrial capitalism as the cause of eco-destruction, but found solutions in problems associated with climate change can be confronted utopian alternative-lifestyle movements built on sustainable science. This was countered by a soft-modernist backlash against environmental romanticism in the mid-70s. 1980s Doctor Who wholly condemned Western technocracy for environmental devastation, relegating sustainable utopian potentialities to non-Western realms. 21st-century Doctor Who is characterised by resignation towards chronic global environmental problems and vagueness about causes and solutions. Lindy Orthia lectures in science communication at the ANU. She recently completed her PhD thesis on representations of the social, cultural, political and economic aspects of science in Doctor Who. Papers based on the thesis have been published in Public Understanding of Science and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.