2025 Theses Doctoral

Mortal Foresight: Learning to Live through Extinction

Varrato, Rory

This dissertation presents a response to the paradoxical question confronting Homo sapiens in the early Anthropocene: how can we learn to live through extinction? To answer that question, I establish a psychoanalytic frame within which to consider the implications of the Anthropocene for our species’ survival.

From that perspective, I argue that the Anthropocene, conceived of as a function of human population overshoot, must become the central focus of education today. By this, I mean that the difficult affective-cognitive task of working through the empirical reality of the Anthropocene as an extinction-level threat to all life on Earth ought to be recognized as a most urgent form of transformative existential education.

I provide a phenomenological example of what this kind of learning looks like through an autoethnographic recounting of my own experience grappling with the Anthropocene, which led me to co-found the New York City chapter of Extinction Rebellion, the global decentralized nonviolent movement for climate and ecological justice.

Then, I bring that experience back in from the streets to formulate a developmental therapeutic ecopedagogy first for psychic breakdown through ecological mortification and, subsequently, for what I call mortal foresight, or the capacity to robustly imagine and wholly accept the possibility of near-term human extinction in the Anthropocene.

Since this capacity rests in significant part on affective knowledge, I also offer a learning theory for aesthetic education through narrative art that is additionally meant to test the reader’s own emotional learning. Ultimately, I conclude that the systematic educational cultivation of existential transformation to a postapocalyptic identity can serve the adaptive function of swerving our species away from the precipice of extinction.