Evolution in Extremis: Climate Change Adaptation in Don DeLillo’s The Word for Snow

In Don DeLillo’s play , global warming has dramatically altered the human condition, affecting embodiment, consciousness, cognition, and the prerequisites of communication. In this article, I argue that this play portrays climate change as a highly complex issue that shows both human and nonhuman ecologies to be deeply interconnected and has experiential, epistemological, and ethical consequences. I interpret DeLillo’s play by drawing on concepts from the fields of (eco)phenomenology and biosemiotics, which allow me to describe the play’s presentation of climate change as a confluence of (failed) communicative processes.