Diana Dodson Lee
Introduction In the past few decades, the harmful effects of climate change have permeated our global consciousness, producing awareness of the looming threats to our geopolitical future and inspiring themes of environmental crisis in cultural production. The main topics in my article examine ecocritical considerations in the text, especially environmental disaster and the degradation of natural resources; however, my approach is interdisciplinary in nature. Despite the interval between publication dates, the texts are appropriate for a comparative ecocritical analysis in that they both use the jarring selfishness of humans in the stories to underscore the real possibility of our species succumbing to devastating dispossession, destruction, and death due to climate catastrophes. [...]Mark Anderson nuances Buell's idea of apocalypse to signal its shortcomings in environmental analysis: "while apocalyptic discourse is highly effective in drawing attention to the myriad environmental and social problems that plague metropoli of the size of Mexico City, it is not, for obvious reasons, effective in proposing solutions or even in opening a space in which solutions may be imagined" ("The Ground of Crisis" 101).