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The Sheep Look Up pictures an eco-dystopian society that stretches ecological disaster to the limit. Ecological crises like pollution, overexploitation of natural resources and species extinction in the current days have been augured by John Brunner in the 1970s.

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1.1.1 Widespread Pollution

The United Nations Development Programme has once stated that the three interconnected planetary crises facing humanity are namely the climate crisis, the nature crisis and the pollution crisis. Indeed, the most conspicuous and typical risk in The Sheep Look Up lies in pollution, whose severity and extensiveness have spared neither the air nor the sea, making the planet unlivable. The United States in the fiction has been polluted beyond recall, and its ecological resilience has been fatally undermined and is spiraling out of control. In addition, pollution is not restricted within the boundary of a nation. As Ulrich Beck observes, it “rather exhibit a tendency to globalization” (Risk Society 7).

Being one of the three most severe risks, air pollution runs through the whole novel. By explicitly pointing out the filthy air, the heavy smog and the grey sky, Brunner portrays a devastating land that arouses an immediate sense of crisis. It is a world where “In spite of the few cars, the air stank” (Brunner 46); where in addition to the stank carrion of human, “the exhaust of trucks and planes” is still pungent (Brunner 60); where people have been blocked out of nature and land for the reason that “smoke made it impossible to use the garden or even open the window” (Brunner 81) and that “smoke from the factories” has left a infertile soil to plough and sow (Brunner 118); where the sun is rarely seen; where “air so bad you can’t go out without a mask” (Brunner 122); where the unmasked people cannot help “coughing and wiping their streaming eyes because of the fumes” (Brunner 233); where relying on the snow to purify the air has become an extravagant hope; where “SO2, ozone and lead alkyl counts all remain high” (Brunner 151)…

1.2 Human Health Risks

Facing the deterioration of the ecological system, human beings, as part of the threatened nature as a whole, are also experiencing a sense of crisis. The risks laid bare to lives in the development of modernization touch commonalities of the experience of organic life that connect the vital necessities of plants and animals to those of the man (Beck, Risk Society 74). In The Sheep Look Up, all the characters from different social classes have health problems. They either suffer from at least one ailment or die from diseases. Be he or she a general manager or a vagrant, his or her life is at stake. On one hand, it shows the ubiquity of risk scenarios; on the other hand, it further confirms that risks have nothing to do with class stratus.

1.2.1 The Omnipresence of Diseases

All the characters in the novel are almost inescapably bound over to risks caused by pollution. Globe Relief’s deputy manager Gerry Thorne has developed conjunctivitis; venereal disease and advanced gonorrhea and syphilis are found among teenage gangsters as well as a hig本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。