The implementation of five-year-plans to collectivise, industrialise, urbanise and modernise socialist territories devastated the homelands of the nomadic and indigenous peoples of the Soviet south, bringing an irreparable loss of species, habitats, cultures, traditions and life. However, despite the scars in the landscape and the generational trauma, the forms of extractivism and colonialism that developed under the parallel system of twentieth century socialisms were different to those of the capitalist Anthropocene. To what extent did the socialist model for organising nature allow for the emergence of more environmentally attuned attitudes and practices? What does the collapse of state socialism under the weight of its environmental contradictions tell us about the future prospects of global capitalism in the face of the unmovable ecological facts of climate breakdown? And how are artists revealing the survival of extinct species in the collective memory and dreamworlds of local communities and exploring the potential to reverse the terminal decline of died out cultures and dried out ecosystems by regenerating socially just ecological relations?