{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Sheep Look Up: Brunner's Pollution Apocalypse","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/faff0a1c-5884-47f7-b583-e4be815e7e40.jpg?height=200","description":"John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) is one of the most technically detailed environmental disaster novels ever written. Set in a near-future America where air and water pollution have reached catastrophic levels — everyone wears filter masks, food is contaminated, water is undrinkable, and a corporation-captured government does nothing — the novel follows dozens of characters as the system collapses. Brunner was a British SF writer and peace activist who modeled his novel on actual environmental science, creating a systems-collapse narrative that ecologists have cited as a remarkably accurate model of how environmental catastrophe propagates through social systems. The title is from John Milton's 'Lycidas': 'The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.' This episode examines the novel's extraordinary research, its argument about corporate capture of environmental regulation, and why it reads today as a documentary of the present rather than a warning about the future.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}