The Climate Zombies are the embodiment of extractive capitalism. Horrible, awesome, an unrelenting horde of consumers.  The Climate Zombie is used to excite and grab attention while manifesting a clearcut force of evil to overcome. It’s important to be both exciting and embodied as it overcomes the paralyzing despair that comes with apocalyptic change and helps drive solutions against a more tangible opponent than a changing climate. The cure comes from the survivors, subsisting on what they have, rejecting extractive drive, showing how to do the same and why it matters.

What is the Climate Zombie

We are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, all around us we see the walking dead. The affliction is the Climate Zombie Virus. The Climate Zombie is an embodiment of extractive capitalism ideals. These damaging ideals are sourced from class content and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Guiliani 2020)The Climate Zombie is characterized by a need for consumption, a curated apathy for the destruction caused by capitalism and the self destruction of capitalism itself. The virus is contagious and much of the world is endangered by the crisis of its spread.

The origin of the climate zombie virus goes back quite far. The virus has been widespread throughout recent history but is greatly an affliction of the: Pollution is Colonialism anthropocene. (Liboiron 2021).  Viral susceptibility begins with a certain set of ideals, and the loss of a different set of ideals. Jeremey Rifkin Stated in his: Age of Resilience:  “The underlying temporal orientation that directed the entirety of the Age of Progress is “efficiency”—the quest to optimize the expropriation, consumption, and discarding of natural resources and, by doing so, increase the material opulence of society at ever-greater speed”(Rifkin 2022). This immense hunger for progress of the horde is clearly the driving disease vector, and it’s easy to be caught up in the popularization of efficiency and materialism.

Let's use this oil Jerker line system to reexamine the disposition of one of these undead devourers. In Rutkauskas Video; Oil! a series of still landscape shots play out, each of which “reveal a different working part of a jerker-line system that has been in operation for over 150 years…; harsh angles and jerky movements of machines contrast with the fluttering softness of the trees, bushes, and grass… we are shown the fruits of this machine’s labor: with each pumping movement, a small rig at the end of the line pulls up a tiny amount of oil onto the surrounding ground.There is a sense of unease or eeriness to the video; the jerker-line is a relic from a past that continues into the present, an ongoing machination that seemingly functions completely without human Input”(Rutkauskas 2015). This art piece is a great metaphor for a climate zombie’s internal prerogative and external presentation. The current state of extractive capitalism is clearly portrayed by the depiction of this oil extraction technology. It is far past its time, yet still animated by the zombie virus. Dead and unnatural in the world, endlessly consuming.

Now that we understand how the affliction works once interred in a host, the question of how it spreads between individuals arises. Why can one not simply resist? An answer is interred in: OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE Children, Youth, and the Visual Politics of Climate Change.  “The fraught anxiety about the role of agency in the unfolding of modernity can be seen in Jünger’s text (1993) on the mobilization of war, and novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Coping with horror requires taking some kind of responsibility, otherwise we are entirely subject to the whims of the war machine, the hive, the institutional and economic demands of mass consumerism and mass production” (Dunaway 2021). It’s clear to see that in this late stage anthropocene, the economic demands on an individual make them undoubtedly more susceptible to becoming a climate zombie. In other words, joining the workforce is a safer bet than revolution. They become part of the horde.

A zombie apocalypse would not be complete without decay. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, for instance, asserts that we are witnessing the dawn of a post-capitalist interregnum. Due to its internal contradictions, … capitalism is imploding, but there is no new socio-economic order on the horizon. Capitalism “hang[s] in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the Way”(Mulvogue et al. 2021).  The zombie virus puts individuals in limbo. Enduring an apocalypse, dead from the crisis yet driven to survive and made to extort or be extorted.

For our creative project, to bring the concept closer to our realities, we’ll be creating a depiction of a climate zombie out of assorted garbage. The zombie will be constructed from discarded plastic. An enduring and seemingly undefeatable material that has already lived out its time of functionality and its life in society. Immediately zombie-esque.

The zombie will have a gallon plastic bottle for a stomach, full of wrappers. Not only will its food be made of petroleum products, the lifeblood of capitalism, it will be an impossible task to fill it up to satiation. The zombie will have styrofoam eyes, apparently blind to the destruction it endorses, and lack legs as everything it likes will be delivered. The final things will be added commodities for a polished and chic appearance, with appearance being a great aspiration for the climate zombie

Works Cited

Rutkauskas, Andreas. “Oil!” Vimeo, 15 Nov. 2023, vimeo.com/61412355.

Rifkin, Jeremy. The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. St. Martin’s Press, an Imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2022.

Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.

Maslin, Mark, and Mark Maslin. Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Beanland, Rachel, and Finis Dunaway. The Routledge Companion to Visual Art: The House is on Fire: Children, Youth, and the Visual Politics of Climate Change,. Waterville, ME, Ma: Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2023.