This paper interrogates the dominance of techno-utopian imaginaries in contemporary ecological discourse. While climate transitions are often framed as technical problems solvable through renewable expansion and innovation, such visions frequently leave intact the colonial logics that produced extractivism. Drawing on Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Laurence Davis, I argue that eco-utopian futures can reproduce injustice when progress is equated with technological mastery and endless growth. The work of Imre Szeman, Mary-Jane Rubenstein in Astrotopia, and Terra Schwerin Rowe in Of Modern Extraction exposes the extractive imaginaries that underwrite such futurisms.
In response, I draw on Davis’s concept of grounded utopia and the decolonial intervention of the relational philosophy of Buen Vivir to argue that futures beyond extractivism must emerge from situated struggles, embodied practices, and decolonial cosmologies. Religion, I contend, is a crucial site for both sustaining and transforming ecological imaginaries.