The four most significant risk factors facing the world today are all environment-related: extreme weather events; biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse; critical changes to Earth systems; and natural resource shortages. We are in the midst of a climate catastrophe that could transform life on Earth beyond our imagining. How can we understand what is happening? How can we critique the forces bringing about this catastrophe? Can we imagine a different future for humanity? In this course we will read texts across different genres – long-form journalism, diaries, novels, philosophical treatises, scientific articles – in order to comprehend the nature of the climate catastrophe. Part of the argument of the course is that climate catastrophe needs to be comprehended and critiqued through different and competing disciplinary modes of thought. Among the books we will read (in whole or part) are: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Aldo Leopold, The Sand County Almanac; Roy Scranton, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future.