Post-Truth Ecologies and Manufactured Realities: The Collapse of Knowledge, Media Myths, and Environmental Justice in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Abstract

Within the contemporary discourse, where truth is debatable and environmental collapse is excruciatingly institutionalized, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) accentuates a narrative that interrogates the mitigation of moral and ecological failures of post-truth culture. The tragedies that characterize the twenty-first century, when facts, social duty, and ecological awareness are subservient to business, are all irresistibly immersed in Atwood's speculative work. These include genetic trickery, corporate supremacy, and the monetization of life.

This research analyzes Oryx and Crake within the discourse of post-truth and environmental justice in Canada. It positions Atwood's novel as a source of work that discloses how neoliberal capitalism, corporate media, and technology work together to corrode the very notion of truth. Her perspective of dystopia reflects not only a catastrophic environmental disaster along the spectrum of the entire world but also an especially Canadian anxiety about resource exploitation and colonial histories, along with an erasure of Indigenous ecological epistemologies.

In Atwood's post-apocalyptic world, environmental degradation reflects the collapse of meaning itself and the end of nature becomes indiscernible as well as indistinguishable from the end of truth. By analyzing myth-media-ecological ethics intersections, this research investigates how Atwood modify environmental degradation as a metaphor for epistemic decay. Through the lens of Indigenous Environmental Thought and post-truth studies, this paper argues that Oryx and Crake initiates a critique of settler narratives of mastery and progress. Atwood's fiction thus functions as both ecological warning and epistemological restoration. It demands a reenvisioning of justice in which truth and the environment are not oxymoronic but they are collectively sustaining and preserving the modes of reality.

This research paper demonstrates that how Oryx and Crake illustrates the entanglement and enmeshment of post-truth discourses, ecological crash, and Indigenous environmental justice and what Atwood's speculative vision accentuates about the moral and epistemological failures of the present day Canadian and global post-truth era.