Reconstructing Ecological Justice in the Climate Crisis: A Social Ecocritical Reading of The Long Summer

Abstract

In the context of the Anthropocene, the climate crisis has evolved from a mere ecological disaster into a systemic crisis with social, political and ethical dimensions. The imbalance of ecological justice has become the core crux hindering the radical solution to climate problems. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Long Summer, grounded in rigorous climate science, focuses on the existential dilemmas of human society against the backdrop of 21st-century global warming. Through literary representations of geopolitical disparities, class divisions and institutional flaws, the novel exposes the alienation of ecological justice spawned jointly by capitalist modernity, anthropocentrism and geopolitical power games. Taking social ecocriticism as its core theoretical framework and based on the three-dimensional connotations of ecological justice—intragenerational, intergenerational and geopolitical—this paper analyzes the disorder of ecological justice triggered by the climate crisis in The Long Summer, explores the novel’s social-ecological critique of the roots of ecological injustice, and interprets the pathways and value orientations for repairing ecological justice constructed in the text. The study finds that Robinson, using literary narration as a vehicle, deeply integrates ecological critique with social critique and proposes a just framework that transcends capitalist logic, breaks geopolitical barriers and reshapes ecological ethics, providing important literary reference and ideological enlightenment for contemporary Anthropocene climate governance and the reconstruction of ecological justice.