Telecological Collapse: The Inevitability of Climate Breakdown in the Transmedial Podcast Drama Forest 404

This paper presents a close-hearing analysis of Forest 404, a transmedial audio drama that was released to BBC Sounds in 2019. Despite the drama's eco-dystopian critique of teleological ‘progress’ narratives (that enable and perpetuate the destruction of the natural world), I argue that the series ultimately propagates a sense of inevitability surrounding climate breakdown. Terming this inevitability ‘telecological collapse’, I draw upon critiques of linear time that associate Western teleology with colonial practices of expansion, accumulation and environmental devastation. Foregrounding the series' transmedial reach as a project that encompasses, not simply dramatic episodes but also an academic experiment, soundscapes of the natural world, and post-show podtalks, I consider how the series presents a transmedial reckoning with climate change within a specifically national British media context. When analysing the biophonic preoccupations of Forest 404, this involves reference to Estok's opposing concepts of ‘ecophobia’ and ‘biophilia’ as an ecocritical approach attentive to a history of colonial domination and the fetishisation of the natural world. Concluding with attention to the drama's ending, in which the lone-surviving protagonist retreats into an individuated realm of digital simulations, the paper hence raises questions about the role of climate narratives in reinforcing the notion that the only path of mitigation with regards to environmental breakdown involves surrendering the physical and material beauty of the natural world to the dogma of techno-solutionism.