CONTENTS

"The crisis we face is not merely an accident of human nature, but a calculated byproduct of the Capitalocene—a system that reorganizes the web of life for profit until the web itself begins to break."

Darko Suvin

Darko Suvin presents a rigorous critique of our current ecological era, arguing that the planetary crisis is not a general human failure but a direct consequence of the "Capitalocene" and its relentless drive for accumulation. Through a blend of political philosophy, history, and social theory, Suvin dissects how the commodification of nature and labor has led to a systemic breakdown that threatens the very foundations of life. These articles, excerpted from Suvin’s book IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO, challenge readers of The Montreal Review to look beyond surface-level environmentalism and confront the urgent need for a radical structural transformation.

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PART ONE:

INTRODUCTORY POSITIONS

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PART TWO:

THREE PROBES

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PART THREE:

THE DEADLY SICKNESS OF OUR CIVILISATION

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PART FOUR:

OCCUPATION OF HORIZONS AND ORIENTATION: NAMING AND NOT NAMING

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This series of essays is paired with the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

Born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Burtynsky’s perspective was shaped by a childhood spent in a landscape dominated by the local General Motors plant and the massive shipping traffic of the Welland Canal. After learning the technical side of the craft in a darkroom his father built, he spent his early adulthood working in the very mines and factories he would eventually document. Over the last forty years, his career has focused on the human systems imposed on the natural world, with his work now held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

The images featured here belong to his study of "manufactured landscapes." Rather than traditional nature photography, Burtynsky uses high vantage points to offer a bird’s-eye view of environments transformed by industry—from vast open-pit mines and quarries to sprawling oil fields and recycling yards.

At a distance, these scenes can appear abstract and structured, often resembling painterly patterns of color and geometry. However, upon closer inspection, they reveal the minute details of industrial waste and labor. By showing the sheer scale of the systems that provide our modern goods, Burtynsky’s work provides a visual counterpart to Suvin’s text. Together, they invite us to look at the physical footprint of the global economy and consider the true cost of our way of life.

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Darko Suvin is a Canadian and ex-Yugoslav literary theorist and Professor Emeritus at McGill University, specializing in science fiction, utopian studies, and drama. He is the author of the influential text Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), in which he established the definition of the genre as the "literature of cognitive estrangement." His work applies a Marxist framework to analyze how literary "novums"—radical creative innovations—function to critique and reimagine existing social and political structures.

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