Tearing Down the Greenhouse: Visual Ecology, Savvy Critics, and Climate Change in T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts

Ecocritics frequently grapple with the problem of containment in their efforts to encapsulate just precisely what “climate change” signifies. Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” for example, is now critical shorthand for these discursive magnitudes. The Terranauts, T. C. Boyle’s fictional engagement with the real-world events surrounding the creation of Biosphere 2, is fixated with the question of containment on spatial, intellectual, ecological, and textual levels. This article argues that The Terranauts uses the spectacular figure containment, Biosphere 2, as an apparatus to reveal the non-material components of ecological systems, more specifically the elements of visual symbolic exchange. These exchanges are imbricated in a reflexive and ironic visual ecology that helps to capture and corrects a voyeuristic reading practice destructive to imagining global environmental problems. It also asserts that comic and satiric forms of fictional containment of climate change hold value in their ability to resist simulative forms of eco-politics.