In Patrick Keiller's (2010),Robinson in Ruins, a film set against the backdrop of the current global financial crisis, the narrator describes the film's eponymous antihero, Robinson, visiting the local library to photocopy Fredric Jameson's “anticipation of the crisis” (Keiller 2012: 14). The voice-over proceeds to quote Jameson's (1994: xii) now famous line: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.” Verena Conley's Spatial Ecologies—billed as an “open-ended sequel” (6) to her Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (1997)—might be seen as a kind of user's manual for correcting this deficiency in our collective imagination. A major reassessment of the “spatial turn” in critical and cultural theory, the book advances a broadly ecological argument by tracing...
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