Were one to be invited to participate in the design of a twenty-frst-century version of ecolonial board games, tiles would be needed in order to capture new geopolitical confgurations and incorporate visual display techniques equipped to accurately personify and convey power dynamics and transactional asymmetries. These should not be understood as innocuous changes, but rather as signifcant modifcations with analogous adverse efects. Contemporary practices share with their historical predecessors a range of raptorial actions, profteering motives, and extortionist orchestrations, as well as reckless and transgressive behaviors. As Giuliano da Empoli has convincingly shown, the “tech conquistadors” have transported us into an “era of digital colonization” and “the age of predators.”

Arguably, no world leader has, at the time of writing, more than Donald Trump, exploited and instrumentalized the nefarious and algorithmic potential of new technologies, and “the new American president has led a motley procession of unashamed autocrats, tech conquistadors, reactionaries and conspiracy theorists eager to do battle.” There has been no hesitation in rewriting history and privileging alternative narratives. Furthermore, the question of narrative is especially relevant to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and other far-right, populist or extremist politicians and thinkers, since recourse to narrative authority inserts itself into governance strategy.

The previous four chapters have explored various ecologies in the context of the interplay between environmental and immigration questions—ecolonial games, migrant ecologies, ecological relations and ecological frontiers. The path forward at this juncture consists in looking at how these intertwined ecologies have been woven into the fabric of contemporary propagandist discourse. Propagandist discourse can serve a dual purpose, humanizing migrants or instead furthering anti-immigration agendas. Likewise, analogous strategies have been operative in the context of environmental discourse, either promoting awareness of climate change or exaggerating denialist positions. What can the analysis of the ecology and propaganda nexus reveal? How has recourse to propaganda furthered anti-ecological agendas by describing climate change as a “hoax,” denouncing the perennial “prophets of doom,” or promoting a lifestyle founded on the exponential use of new technologies? Or instead furthered pro-ecological positions centered on an unrelenting efort to prevent the systematic destruction of the environment and aimed at enacting social change by promoting awareness?

Writing to his representative in London in 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium could hardly conceal his exuberance at the potential for enrichment ofered by the abundant commodities and resources available in what would become his personal possession in the guise of the Congo Free State, a territorial confguration almost eighty times the size of the Kingdom of Belgium which he ruled from 1885 to 1908: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnifcent African cake.”

Literature in the era of global warming might be deemed a relatively new phenomenon given that the formal consideration of climate change and global warming is itself historically recent. However, the conjunction between ecology and literature and the interplay between the environment and creative practices have for a long time been distinguishing features. As Édouard Glissant wrote in 1981, “The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from that land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history.” Eco-criticism and eco-feminism are now established scholarly felds as a result of groundbreaking works on these questions. There has also been a profusion of innovative works in felds such as art history, philosophy, history, political science and sociology, including recent works that have called for a rethinking and overhaul of the existing theoretical apparatus in order to foreground environmental approaches.

When Joseph M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, the impact of this painting at the height of the Industrial Revolution proved to be transformative, amplifying a debate on the atrocities of slavery on the occasion of the World Anti-Slavery Convention being held in London. The massacre that had occurred aboard the British slave ship Zong in 1781 (the subject of Turner's painting) proved to be consequential, fueling outrage while also standing as an important precursor in the context of debates on climate change, and “as a landscape painter his artworks show a sensitive awareness of the efect that the industrialized world was having on the environment.” Artistic and literary works ofer alternatives to racist and xenophobic media and political discourses and have an important role to play in critical thinking.

“The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the twentieth-century was a mere gust compared with the hurricane that is coming.” In making this assertion on October 3, 2023, former UK home secretary Suella Braverman did not hesitate to embed climate alongside migration invasion metaphors in repeated assertions aimed at heightening anxiety around global population movement patterns.