Modernism, Climate Change and Dystopia: An ecocritical reading of light symbology in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Eliot's "The Waste Land"

The drive to modernise cannot be divorced from the evolution of technologies that are designed to profit from nature (specifically, the nonhuman, physical world) without concern for long-term effects on the earth and its capacity to carry substantial human populations. While evolving technologies also have other purposes than this transformation of matter to profit, the twenty-first century ecological humanities respond to the way that industrialisation has mobilised environmentally damaging practices over recent centuries. Yet such critiques must also remain aware of the deep patterns that gird philosophies and practices of profit over sustainability. Current events reveal familiar structural tendencies that link them with ancient

human predispositions.