Résumé
This chapter argues that discourses on human vulnerability embedded in the extreme living conditions, such as the one that the world witnessed in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, can recalibrate the social semiotics of ecology, bringing as they do environmental awareness as a condition of planetary habitability. This chapter suggests that extreme conditions require transformative measures for healing and survival of humans and the ecology. The chapter goes on to show that such transformations can revive and position interconnectedness as a new way of life, resulting in the creation of an "ecotopian world”-a term used by Mayerson and Bellamy (An Ecotopian Lexicon. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2019). It will use the theoretical framework of vulnerability to examine the crisis of human civilization and, in so doing, it will draw from literary readings from different cultures and knowledge traditions to reflect on a possible ecotopian world. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.