Pollution Theory

Using speculative modes like science fiction novels, film and modernist painting, this book investigates the ways that pollution has come to define every aspect of material life in the Anthropocene.

Offering eight concepts for making sense of the human impact on the planet - haze, flotsam, tumult, glare, solution, blight, splice and feral - this book explores the pollution of air, land, water, noise, light and bodily life. Examining texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut and JG Ballard, artists such as J.M.W Turner and James Turrell, and the television series Black Mirror, it argues that pollution is at the heart of our relationship to a planet that is no longer natural.