Impact environnemental de la surconsommation sur les écosystèmes de la science-fiction québécoise: « augmenter le niveau de richesse dans le respect de l’environnement » (Legault 2018)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In science fiction from Quebec (SFQ), several stories tackle the issue of destroying the environment by overconsuming its resources, while people keep doing their daily tasks without worrying about the consequences of their actions. One might think that the inertia in front of such an ecological crisis presented in these Québécois literary works comes from a lack of environmental awareness. On the contrary, in the SFQ ecosystems, when natural resources reach a critical depletion threshold, people increase their consumption instead of slowing it down to avoid the worst-case scenario. A close reading of the novels Les Écueils du temps (2008) by Daniel Sernine and Les Voyages thanatologiques de Yan Malter (1995) by Jean-Pierre April, and the recent short story “Losing What We Can’t Live Without” (2018) by Jean-Louis Trudel, among others, reveals that these overconsumers, driven by their greed, are condemning themselves in the end. This representation of an ecological apocalypse in SFQ brings us to analyze the political discourse of the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, who suggests increasing economic growth in an environmentally conscious way.