The imagery of environmental apocalypse

This issue of Im@go is dedicated to the analysis of environmental imaginaries and, in particular, their emergency character. The anthropic impact on natural systems reconfigures, as never before, an apocalyptic scenario revealed by extreme events: cataclysms, desertification processes and rising seas, reduction of biodiversity, climate overheating and pollution of ecosystems. To avert the end of the world, mankind seems to have to remedy its faults by setting out, individually and collectively, on a rapid ecological transition. In this path of expiation, the notion of the environment takes on the contours of a semantic reservoir from which emerge moral orders and normative systems capable, with increasing force, of ordering and prefiguring different spheres of social reality: lifestyles and consumption, national and international policies, the capitalist system, techno-scientific research and aesthetic forms. The imagery of the environmental apocalypse has thus become a powerful device of social change that highlights a series of issues around which the journal intends to reflect.