“It is worse, much worse, than you think” states David Wallace-Wells at the opening of his The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” asks Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). “I don’t think about hope much anymore. But I do think about imagination,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in an interview contained in A voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams (2006). In the spaces between these statements we encounter a range of reactions to our warming condition, from blunt pessimism, to righteous anger, to nuanced reframing. Triangulating these sentiments, we arrive at an undeniable point of ecopessimism, an overwhelming feeling that everything is speeding toward destruction, the painful realization that perhaps Earth, “the only home we’ve ever known” to quote Carl Sagan, is no longer so welcoming. Counterintuitively, the narrative trope of the looming threat of an “inhospitable earth” may facilitate a denial of the reality of climate crisis. The narrative ubiquity of natural disasters, futures of scarcity, and apocalyptic hellscapes results in a figuring of an Earth incompatible with human life as an easily dispelled bogeyman looming familiarly, and therefore toothlessly, over future climate scenarios. What happens, however, if we read the “end of the world” instead as an ego death of the anthropocene? If the idea of an “inhospitable earth” no longer gains imaginative traction in advocacy or art, then we are tasked with imagining an afterlife for Earth as informed by an ethic of hospitality. The opposite of an “inhospitable earth” is not merely one that is conducive to human survival; being “hospitable” is defined as “affording welcome and entertainment to strangers.” How can an ethic of hospitality bend ecopessimism into something worth, as it were, entertaining? If the “end of the world” is certain, what might it look like, as Wendell Berry poetically urges us, to “practice resurrection”?

This ASLE affiliated panel welcomes proposals that address the question of how to live (and entertain) in a world on fire. We are especially interested in work that moves beyond abstract hope and optimism to address the complex and overwhelming force of the overlapping crises of our time. If the worst must be assumed, where does that leave us? And what imaginings should we entertain while here?

Possible topics may include:

-The roles and limits of art and literature in addressing world crises.

-Climate realism, doomerism, ecofascism, abundance and other ideologies that address the realities of an inhospitable Earth.

-The uses/abuses of hope in understanding and planning for possible inhospitable futures.

-The place of imagination in creating more hospitable futures.

-Successes/Failures of environmental/climate justice in creating more equitable futures.

-The image of technology such as A.I. or space travel as solutions to or escapes from climate collapse.

-Treatment of the Other, broadly conceived, in light of environmental/climate crisis.

-Any other topic that considers the overbearing presence of climate collapse, open subject area and time period.

Please send abstracts of 250–500 words, along with A/V requirements and a brief bio, to Jency Wilson (jwilson17@una.edu) and Matt Spencer (mls0142@auburn.edu) by 24 August 2026.