“Aldous Huxley’s Island(ness): politics and ecology”

The present paper will focus on Huxley’s last novel Island (1962) and on its anticipation of the contemporary pressing need to interrogate and re-imagine dominant conceptions of community and global politics to face environmental crisis and changes. Huxley’s novel can be considered as the first ecological utopia as it tackles problems whose solution has nowadays become a question of survival, and it anticipates contemporary appeals for new, ecologically oriented values. Island appears to exert a seminal influence on contemporary ecological thought: indeed, in an age of climate change and scarcity of resources, Huxley’s novel offers a powerful counter-discourse to contemporary discussions about political ecology, mirroring the logic of Western anthropocentric industrialized societies.