The Ecophobia Hypothesis

The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of the sense that while the theory of
biophilia has productively addressed ideal human affinities with nature, the
capacity of “the biophilia hypothesis” as an explanatory model of human/
environment relations is limited. The biophilia hypothesis cannot adequately
account for the kinds of things that are going on in the world, things so ex-
traordinary that we are increasingly coming to understand the current age as
“the Anthropocene.” Building on the usefulness of the biophilia hypothesis,
this book argues that biophilia exists on a broader spectrum that has not been
adequately theorized. The Ecophobia Hypothesis claims that in order to contex-
tualize biophilia (literally, the “love of life”) and the spectrum on which it sits,
it is necessary to theorize how very un-philic human uses of the natural world
are. This volume offers a rich tapestry of connected, comparative discussions
about the new material turn and the urgent need to address the agency of genes,
about the complexities of 21st century representations of ecophobia, and about
how imagining terror interpenetrates the imagining of an increasingly opposi-
tional natural environment. Furthermore, this book proposes that ecophobia is
one root cause that explains why ecomedia—a veritably thriving industry—is
having so little measurable impact in transforming our adaptive capacities. The
ecophobia hypothesis offers an equation that determines the variable spectrums
of the Anthropocene by measuring the ecophobic implications and inequalities
of speciesism and the entanglement of environmental ethics with the writing of
literary madness and pain. This work also investigates how current ecophobic
perspectives systemically institutionalize the infrastructures of industrial agri-
culture and waste management. This is a book about revealing ecophobia and
prompting transformational change.

Simon C. Estok is a Senior Fellow and Full Professor at South Korea’s oldest
university, Sungkyunkwan University (established in 1398), where he teaches
literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. He is a recipient of
the Shanghai Metropolitan Government “Oriental Scholar” Award (东方学者)
(2015–2018) at the Research Center for Comparative Literature and World
­Literatures at Shanghai Normal University. His award-winning book Eco-
criticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted
2014), and he is the coeditor of a book entitled Landscape, Seascape, and
the Eco-­Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016). Estok also coedited Interna-
tional Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013) and East Asian
­Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013), and has published extensively on ecocriticism
and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English
Studies in Canada, Concentric, and Neohelicon. Estok received his MA and
PhD in English Literature from the University of Alberta.
Routledge Studies in World Literatures
and the Environment

1 Captivity Literature and the Environment

Nineteenth-Century American Cross-Cultural Collaborations
Kyhl D. Lyndgaard

2 Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils

3 The Ecophobia Hypothesis

Simon C. Estok
With a Foreword by Sophie Christman
The Ecophobia Hypothesis

Simon C. Estok
With a Foreword by Sophie Christman
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Simon C. Estok to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Estok, Simon C., author.
Title: The ecophobia hypothesis / by Simon C. Estok.
Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2018. |
Series: Routledge studies in world literatures and the environment;
3Identifiers: LCCN 2018007822
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology in literature. | Ecology in
literature. | Nature—Effect of human beings on.
Classification: LCC PN56.H76 E88 2018 | DDC 809/.9336—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007822

ISBN: 978-1-138-50205-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14468-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To the memory of my mother.
‫לעילוי נשמת אמי ע״ה‬
Contents

Foreword ix
Sophie Christman
Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction 1

1 Material Ecocriticism, Genes, and the

Phobia/Philia Spectrum 20

2 Terror and Ecophobia 35

3 Ecomedia and Ecophobia: Marketing Concerns 52

4 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 78

5 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 92

6 Madness and Ecophobia 119

7 The Ecophobic Unconscious: Indifference

to Waste and Junk Agency 136

Works Cited 159

Index 183
Foreword
Sophie Christman

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed,

to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances
that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life
351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu-
tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of biodiver-
sity theories, locates an important problem unique to humanity’s current
climate change moment—our phobia of nature.
How many of us have jumped with fear at the sight of a nearby hairy
spider, become alarmed by a slithering snake, or panicked at the clap of
a lightning bolt? Why have we conditioned ourselves, as 21st century
hominids, to dread the Earth’s daily descent into darkness, avoiding
night by flipping the infrastructural switch of artificial light? In mo-
dernity’s modern moment, how has our all-consuming fear of nature
created the collective human condition that Simon C. Estok terms the
trauma of “ecophobia”?
The fear of nature, according to the Mayo Clinic, is a condition that ex-
ists in its own category as a specific psychological phobia. Specific phobias,
claim Lisa M. Shin and Israel Liberzon, “are marked by excessive, unrea-
sonable and persistent fear of specific objects or situations” (179). Estok’s
The Ecophobia Hypothesis registers these specific phobic instances of
irrational fear and chronic aversion to nature whose cumulative effects
have abetted the now irreversible course of global planetary warming.
This fear of nature, Estok claims, has spurred a maladaptive “antagonism
between humans and their environments,” the seriousness of which is
evidenced by our human legacy—the Anthropocene (1).
Estok begins his theorization of ecophobia by extending Serenella Iovino
and Serpil Oppermann’s foundational work on material ecocriticisms: in
short, he claims that ecophobia is undergirded by material and genetic com-
ponents. The genesis for his hypothesis derives from Wilson’s 1984 theory
of biophilia, defined as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike
processes” (Biophilia 1). The biophilic impulse, Wilson suggests, assumes
a human “urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (85). The incubi of this
theory, arguing an innate human conservation ethic that is affiliative with
the natural environment, followed the advent of the American environmen-
tal movement led by biologist Rachel Carson’s canonic Silent Spring.
x Foreword
And yet, in our 21st century moment, Estok reminds us that the ide-
alism of Wilson’s beloved biophilia notion has not yet come to pass in
practice; within this sober reckoning, we must acknowledge that over
the history of humanity, we have taken a collective wrong turn away
from terrifying nature, irrevocably destroying Earth systems. Our fears
and aversions to what Estok deems nature’s dynamic, self-sufficient, and
oftentimes violent “biotic communities” have disrupted our inherited
biological drives and adaptive survival strategies. The modern human
aversion to nature has, as Estok notes in his final chapter on garbage,
conditioned our defenses to avoid the natural environment by aggres-
sively erecting global and off-planet infrastructures of waste (75).
What Wilson originally termed our “affiliation” with nature, today
comprises what Estok describes in Chapter 4 as a type of “hollow ecol-
ogy” or pseudo-union with Earth’s animals, plants, and minerals (116).
And Estok makes us aware, in his second and third chapters, how this
pseudo-union with nature is mediated through a cultural infrastruc-
ture of digital images that rapidly traverse the globe, creating enmesh-
ments between terror, tragedy, and ecophobia. The ecophobic condition,
he importantly claims, describes how we mask our relationships with
rights-deprived nonhuman animals at home; in zoos; or, as he describes
in his “Animals, Ecophobia, and Food” chapter, as meals. Evidence of
ecophobia is also present when we engineer agrochemical practices that
genetically alter plants while depositing toxic pollution into the Earth’s
waterways and soils. And it certainly exists in our maladaptive relation-
ship to minerals: humanity, in both neoliberal and economically develop-
ing nations, has formed surprisingly close associations with minerals by
first gutting them from Earth’s crust and then appropriating them as com-
modity class adornments such as jewelry, which begs the question how do
we make luxury taboo? As the prudent Celia observes in S­ hakespeare’s As
You Like It, “the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show.”
This tragic “show”—the Anthropocene—results from the human dis-
avowal of nature. The history of the Anthropocene—or what is com-
monly referred to as “The Great Acceleration” and spurred by 19th
century ­industrialism—is like Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 in A, op. 92:
just as the first movement begins very slowly, so did life on Earth. The
symphony, the Earth, and now the Anthropocene all exist on very large
scales that emphasize vast chords of carefully arranged musical, ecologi-
cal, and forevermore destructive rhythms. Just like the ever-present per-
meation of the flute in Symphony no. 7’s four movements, humans have
enmeshed themselves within the Earth’s soil, sea, and sky for 200,000
years. In our more recent history, we have created an allegro-like
whirling frenzy of unrestricted and out of control industries that have
­abandoned—in a muscular show of force—Earth’s sophisticated ecology.
Intransdisciplinary ways, both Beethoven and Estok can teach us valuable
lessons regarding the Anthropocene: just as Symphony no. 7’s scherzo
 Foreword xi
emphasizes the halting note of a-minor, the condition of global warming
has triggered, as Carol L. Berzonsky and Susanne C. Moser acknowledge,
the “profound ending” to life as we know it (“Becoming homo sapiens
sapiens” 19). The abrupt phenomena of climate change has stalled our
party and put modernity on pause as we begin to take responsibility for
the dangerous ecological enmeshments that we, as humans, have care-
lessly created. Estok’s concept of ecophobia, like Beethoven’s sustained A
note, forces us to confront our collective environmental error.
Estok’s theorization performs what Stacy Alaimo calls on us to do:
begin to “unmoor” our self-deceptions and critical ambivalence about
our relationship with nonhuman nature (Alaimo 407).1 Estok is in
league with a growing number of ecocritics, including Andy Fisher, Peter
H. Kahn Jr. and Patricia H. Hasbach, Susanne C. Moser, Bill Plotkin,
Theodore Roszak, Susan Rowland, and Fernando Castrillon, who have
begun to use psychology and neuropsychology to emphasize the mal-
adaptive human behaviors that have caused this global quandary. Moser,
in particular, has succinctly defined maladaptive behaviors as “the denial
of the existence of the threat… a belief that the problem won’t happen
here…blaming others for it… wishful thinking… that the problem will
go away on its own…. the displacement of one’s attention” or a general
paralysis about the situation (67–68). Her rationale suggests that hu-
mans, even while experiencing a “psychic numbing” to climate change,
are still complicit since we resist correcting our maladaptive responses.
The Ecophobia Hypothesis, as Estok gingerly describes in his Intro-
duction, is a timely “Platonic stepping stone” that considers a new meth-
odological model to address the human complicity in climate change (2).
Admitting the cleft between theory and practice, this hypothesis offers a
new conceptual model that uses the interdisciplinary frameworks of the
natural sciences, social sciences, and the environmental humanities, ex-
tending what Jesse Oak Taylor has dubbed as humanity’s “abnatural” rela-
tionship with Earth’s ecological environments (5). Incorporating the basic
human affects of fear and anger into his definition, Estok reasons that

The ecophobic condition exists on a spectrum and can embody fear,

contempt, indifference, or lack of mindfulness (or some combina-
tion of these) towards the natural environment. While its genetic
origins have functioned, in part, to preserve our species, the eco-
phobic condition has also greatly serviced growth economies and
ideological interests. Often a product of behaviors serviceable in the
past but destructive in the present, it is also sometimes a product of
the perceived requirements of our seemingly exponential growth.
Ecophobia exists globally on both macro and micro levels, and its
manifestation is at times directly apparent and obvious but is also
often deeply obscured by the clutter of habit and ignorance.
(Introduction 1)
xii Foreword
Estok’s theory begins to address how the unique human condition of
ecophobia has undermined humanity’s self-preservation in its own
­environment—what E. Ann Kaplan has provocatively noted is a unique
human form of eco-suicide (143). Estok’s theory first seeks our accep-
tance of ecophobia as a maladaptive, reflexive, and somewhat uncon-
scious condition that is based in affect. He then offers intelligent insights
about the ways in which we have amplified our aggressions towards na-
ture, and he does so in a practical attempt to jump-start the recondition-
ing of our affective connections to nature.
The book’s first chapter importantly asks us to reconsider the relation-
ships between biophilia and ecophobia; Estok claims that both biophilia
and ecophobia are located “on opposite ends of the same spectrum” (22).
As Wilson notes in The Diversity of Life, biophilia involves “the connec-
tions that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life” (350).
Therefore, it is reasonable to extend his premise to include ecophobia as
a distinct affective condition occurring on the same pathological spec-
trum as biophilia, albeit positioned at the other end of the range. Both
Wilson and Estok agree that phobias are acquired in what Wilson first
described as the process of “prepared learning” (The Social Conquest of
Earth 59). Though both consider the intricacies of neuroscience networks
in forming phobias, it is significant that Wilson, as an evolutionary biol-
ogist, admits to the social acquisition of phobia as a maladaptive trait:
this admission suggests possibilities for what Eva Jablonka has newly
noted as a type of cultural epigenetic framework incorporating not just
the biological sciences but, as she describes, “the social sciences and the
humanities” (“Cultural Epigenetics” 55). Within the social science dis-
ciplines, environmental psychologists are addressing, as Janet K. Swim
et al. note, the urgent “cognitive, affective, and motivational processes”
of climate change adaptation (242). Psychology, Swim claims, is particu-
larly suited to prompt a new value system by emphasizing how “collective
action driven by individuals’ short-term benefits… degrades a long-term
common good” (243). More recently, Berzonsky and Moser have put
forth a polemical methodology for enacting the “psycho-cultural trans-
formation” needed to confront climate change (15). Drawing from depth
psychology’s archetypal death and rebirth process, they delineate the
procedures involved in the “psychological transformative process” (17).
This process first involves one’s severance from previous lifestyles, fol-
lowed by an uncomfortable passing from the liminal death process to an
eventual psychological renewal that supports “life-sustaining” cultures
(19). Going forward, ecocritical scholars and scientists can utilize these
cultural epigenetic frameworks to expand lines of inquiry into the study
of ecophobia from the diverse and multiple perspectives of the biologi-
cal sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. As Scott Slovic has
suggested, the environmental humanities are central to this task since the
field theorizes and succinctly communicates the ways in which “natural
systems” are interpreted by human culture (181).
 Foreword xiii
One cannot consider the ecophobia hypothesis without also taking
into account the term’s origins and its theoretical lineage. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines the term “phobia” as “(A) fear, (a) horror,
(an) aversion; esp. an abnormal and irrational fear or dread aroused by
a particular object or circumstance.” The first recorded use of the term
occurred in 1786 in The Columbian magazine, or monthly miscellany,
which defined “phobia” as the “fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue
fear of a real one.”
By the 19th century, the scientific study of phobias saw its early the-
orizations in studies of fear by scientists such as Charles Darwin. In
his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin noted
that fear is “the most depressing of all the emotions,” inducing “helpless
prostration, as if in consequence of, or in association with, the most
violent and prolonged attempts to escape from the danger” (82–83). He
went on to observe that “nevertheless, even extreme fear often acts at
first as a powerful stimulant. A man or animal driven through terror
to desperation, is endowed with wonderful strength, and is notoriously
dangerous in the highest degree” (83). Emphasizing the scalar intensity
of fear, Darwin suggested the term “terror” as a mode of extreme fear
manifested by facial expressions, a rapid heartbeat, perspiration, and
pupil dilation, among other things.
Darwin’s studies of fear were extended with the advent of the scientific
study of phobia conditions at the fin de siѐcle. In particular, Théodule
Ribot’s Psychology of the Emotions (1897) began by distinguishing be-
tween hereditary, instinctual, and “unreasoning” fears, and those de-
rived from experiences located in consciousness (209). Ribot observed
clear differences between stages of fear, distinguishing them as either
“healthy” or “morbid,” reasoning that forms of fear that cease to be
useful to survival become destructive and pathological (213). Impor-
tantly, he observed that morbid fears that are “disproportionate” and
“chronic” are examples of phobias (213).
Freud’s notions of phobias, notes David S. Spira, evolved over three
decades. Freud’s early understanding, put forth in 1894, theorized that
phobias derive from unconscious affective reactions to trauma. This the-
ory evolved between 1895 and 1920 with the Little Hans (1909) and Wolf
Man (1918) case examples, which considered the formation of phobias
through modes of objectification, repression, and displacement. Freud’s
theory evolved once more in 1926, according to Spira, and focused on
whether phobia is “an inhibition or a symptom” consisting of displace-
ment and regression (390). While Spira claims that Freud was left un-
satisfied with his canon of phobia theorizations, they remain relevant to
the theory at hand—ecophobia. In “The Unconscious” (1915), Freud hy-
pothesizes three stages inherent in the formation of phobias: unconscious
anxiety, displacement and repression, and avoidance. These three modes
are quite apparent in the many ways in which Estok’s book evidences eco-
phobic conditions in novels, poetry, plays, films, and mainstream media.
xiv Foreword
The Ecophobia Hypothesis helps us consider fear’s biological and psy-
chological bases in order to help us renegotiate our phobias of nature.
Estok’s proposal, evidenced by today’s scientific studies that have made
major advances in our understanding of the neurocircuitry of fear, anx-
iety, and phobias, is a reasonable proposition. The key physiological lo-
cations of fear circuitry, note Shin and Liberzon, include the amygdala,
hippocampus, brain stem, insular cortex, and brain’s prefrontal regions
(169). Yet, almost one hundred and fifty years after Darwin’s studies
on fear, the exact brain location where fear memories are stored is still
under debate (170). What we do know, according to Shin and Liber-
zon, is that avoidance and aversion—two hallmarks of ecophobia—are
chronic reactions to anxiety and fear that cause us “significant distress
and/or impairment in occupational, academic, or social functioning”
(179). These maladaptations, extended to what we may now consider
the epidemic of ecophobia, are quite significant, given that Shin and
Liberzon cite phobias as a “common disorder, with a lifetime prevalence
of 7–11% (APA, 2000)” (179). In considering the biology of fear, scien-
tists now agree, claims Lea Winerman, that “the amygdala—a small,
­almond-shaped structure in the middle of the brain’s temporal lobes—is
a key player” of phobias, and its “malfunctions” are associated with
phobic formation (96). Although evidence now clearly indicates that
phobic fears reside as brain-based material biological entities, Estok
finds the way forward to this homoecological quandary by underscoring
the epigenesis of ecophobia as a cultural illness deriving mostly from our
maladaptive conditioning. 2
So, what is the way forward? We must first honestly acknowledge our
fear of nature: how we displace it, repress it, or mask it. Estok’s analyses
of waste provide a perfect Freudian analogy of our ecophobia of garbage
since we universally displace our waste onto garbage barges or bury it in
landfills that are then sealed by a cover mask of soil, grass, and kudzu.
This mediation and disguise of our waste symbolizes humanity’s hollow
ecology, and it is only when we begin to reframe our displacement and
masking of garbage in this way as ecophobic repression that we can
begin to cognitively restructure the way we approach the ecological sys-
tems of Earth.
Just as the fields of ecofeminism, ecocinema, and ecomedia have
emerged as environmental humanities’ subfields, Estok’s ecophobia hy-
pothesis invites us to consider the ways in which the human condition
has adopted the maladaptive trait of cultural ecophobia. It is a jarring
invitation but one that, if acted on, could engender the human resiliency
to restore our collective ecological trust.
Sophie Christman, Ph.D.
SUNY
Stony Brook University
 Foreword xv
Notes
1 Many scholars have contributed diverse lines of inquiry to the ecocritical
canon, including Joni Adamson’s work on indigenous cosmopolitics, Kevin
Curran’s ecocriticism of Shakespeare, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s considerations
of the inhuman, Greta Gaard’s theorizations on feminist ecocriticism,
­Catriona Sandiland’s considerations of political ecofeminisms, Nicole Sey-
mour’s work on queer ecologies, Michael Rubenstein’s theories on infra-
structure, and Cary Wolfe’s ideas on posthumanism, among many others.
2 Here, I purposely entangle the human genus within Earth’s ecology systems.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Dr. Sophie Christman for her meticulous reading of sev-
eral drafts of this book, in each of which she contributed sometimes bril-
liant conceptual insights, often wise editorial suggestions, and always
unwavering encouragement and concise constructive criticism—and
all of this while completing her dissertation on sustainable citizenship.
When she agreed to write a Foreword, I was delighted, and I thank her
for this. For her patience, diligence, intelligence, and kindness, I owe
more than words can express. Without her, The Ecophobia Hypothe-
sis would have been a very different, much weaker book.
My heartfelt gratitude also goes to Greta Gaard, Scott Slovic, Iris
Ralph, Doug Berman, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Serpil Oppermann,
and Shiuhhuah (Serena) Chou for reading and offering valuable comments
on various chunks of this book. I am lucky and grateful to have had many
opportunities to bounce ideas off of people, and I want to acknowledge
this gratitude to Peter Singer, David Suzuki, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Vin
Nardizzi, Ursula Heise, Won-Chung Kim, Harri Salovaara, Peter I-Min
Huang, Zümre Gizem Yılmaz, Hong Chen (Lily Chen), Stephanie Bory,
Muriel Cassel-Piccot, Molina Klingler, Başak Ağin, Xinmin Liu, Fatma
Aykanat, Gülşah Göçmen, Peichin Chuang, ­Jonggab Kim, Pelin ­Kumbet,
Young-Hyun Lee, Yoonji Lee, Rayson Alex, Dan Bloom, S. ­Susan ­Deborah,
Saikat Banerjee, Peter Hajdu, Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu, ­Jonathan White,
Susan Oliver, Ken Dong, Antoine Coppola, and Rabbi Osher Litzman.
I would like to express my gratitude to the following venues for al-
lowing opportunities to test and refine my ideas: the University of Cam-
bridge (ASLE-UKI Conference: Green Knowledge); Leiden University in
the Netherlands (Waste in Asia Conference); the University of Idaho in
Moscow, Idaho (ASLE 2015 Conference); the International Symposium
on Literature and Environment in East Asia—Unsetting Boundaries:
Nature, Technology, Art in Okinawa, Japan; the Université Libre de
Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium (The 7th Biennial Meeting of the EA-
SLCE, the European Association for the Study of Culture, Literature
and Environment); Dr. K. N. Modi University in Rajasthan, India (The
Environmental Justice, Culture, Resistance and Ethics and tiNai Ecofilm
Festival); the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University
xviii Acknowledgments
in Vancouver, Canada (Oecologies: Engaging the World, from Here);
Hohai University in Nanjing, China (The International Symposium on
Contemporary Literature as Cultural Production and Its Research Par-
adigms); Shanghai Normal University (the Environmental Humanities
on the Ground: Materiality, Sustainability, and Applicability); Seoul
City Hall (the International Symposium on Sustainable Urban Forest
and Environmental Humanities); the Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3
in Lyon, France (Croissance verte: de la théorie à la pratique; du savoir
au pouvoir); M. E. S. College of Arts & Commerce in Goa, India (In-
ternational Conference on the Culture of Food); Tamkang University
in ­Danshui, Taipei, Taiwan (A Symposium on Sci-Fi and Planetary
Healing); ­Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany (the Ecol-
ogy and Life Writing conference); National Sun Yat-Sen University in
­Kaohsiung, Taiwan (E(co)-Media: Restoring Affect and Creativity—a
one-day symposium with Simon Estok and Joni Adamson); and Shang-
hai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (The 4th International Symposium
on Ethical Literary Criticism).
Routledge has been a pleasure to work with, and I am indebted to the
editorial staff there, particularly Michelle Salyga, Assunta Petrone, and
Tim Swenarton for their diligence and support. The many suggestions
of the anonymous readers made this a much better book than it was. I
am also deeply grateful to Rachel Nishan and the indexing staff at Twin
Oaks.
In 2010, I thanked Peter I-Min Huang for graciously letting me use
his office (and thus allowing me to put some of the finishing touches on
my first book) during my month-long visit to Tamkang University in
the summer of that year. He did it again in the summer of 2017 as I put
some of the finishing touches on The Ecophobia Hypothesis, and, again,
I thank him. I owe a debt of gratitude too to his two students (Monica
Jai and Fang Yi Lee), who minded my children when I was in the library.
The staff of the Sungkyunkwan University library have also been
enormously helpful and have always responded kindly and quickly to
my emails labeled “EXTREMELY URGENT,” and I want to thank Cha
Yong Keun in particular for getting me articles and books from other
libraries within Korea and from abroad with speed that often left me
speechless.
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Re-
public of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-­
Project No. 2014S1A6A4024636). I would like to thank the NRF for its
generous support. I also thank Sungkyunkwan University for its con-
stant support.
Earlier versions of some of the chapters of this book have been pub-
lished elsewhere. Chapter 1 has appeared in different form as an article
by the same name in Neohelicon; large portions of Chapter 2 have ap-
peared in earlier form in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
 Acknowledgments xix
and Frame, a Journal of Literary Studies; parts of Chapter 3 have ap-
peared in earlier form in ISLE and Neohelicon; Chapter 4 grew out
of my “Hollow Ecology and Anthropocene Scales of Measurement” in
Mosaic (forthcoming September 2018); and Chapter 7 appears in a much
different form in Cultura.
I also want to thank Jonathan and Sophia for being my children and
for their intelligence, which is reflected in their being mindful of what
they do and what they consume, and I want to thank them in advance
for all of the work that they will do to make the world a better place.
Finally, I would like to thank my hero, my wonder woman, my wife, Cho
­Yeon-hee, who, for more than half of the year while I’m in Seoul, does
all of the practical work of raising our children in Vancouver, scurrying
them to school and to their various lessons; doing their clothes; making
their food and beds; cleaning the house; and, at the same time, working
on her PhD, with a respite of a mere hour a day when I take the kids
away for a Skype call. To Yeon-hee, I owe the deepest gratitude.

Vancouver
January 2018
Introduction

Ecophobia is a uniquely human psychological condition that prompts

antipathy toward nature. The American Psychological Association de-
fines “phobia” as “a persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or sit-
uation (i.e., the phobic stimulus) out of proportion to the actual danger
posed by the specific object or situation that results in a compelling de-
sire to avoid it” (827). We may tentatively define the “specific phobia”
toward nature as “ecophobia.”1 It is a phobia that has largely derived
from modernity’s irrational2 fear of nature and hence has created an
antagonism between humans and their environments. This antagonism,
in which humans sometimes view nature as an opponent, can be ex-
pressed toward natural physical geographies (mountains, windswept
plains), animals (snakes, spiders, bears), extreme meteorological events
(Shakespearean tempests, hurricanes in New Orleans, typhoons), bodily
processes and products (microbes, bodily odors, menstruation, defeca-
tion), and biotic land-, air-, and seascapes (every creeping thing that
creepeth, every swarming thing that swarms, partings of—and beasts
from—the sea).3 The ecophobic condition exists on a spectrum4 and can
embody fear, contempt, indifference, or lack of mindfulness (or some
combination of these) toward the natural environment. While its genetic
origins have functioned, in part, to preserve our species (for instance,
the fight or flight response), the ecophobic condition has also greatly
serviced growth economies and ideological interests. Often a product of
behaviors serviceable in the past but destructive in the present, it is also
sometimes a product of the perceived requirements of our seemingly ex-
ponential growth.5 Ecophobia exists globally on both macro and micro
levels, and its manifestation is at times directly apparent and obvious
but is also often deeply obscured by the clutter of habit and ignorance.
Writers, social theorists, and especially industries often perpetuate eco-
phobia through their unwitting representations of it, much as they have
done with sexism, classism, racism, and homophobia. Indeed, ecopho-
bia’s structural links and similarities with these comprise mutually sus-
taining feedback loops that are at once socially and environmentally
oppressive. There is no template for uncovering any of these, and it is
sometimes slogging work.
2 Introduction
This book engages in some of that work and begins with ecophobia as
a hypothesis in Plato’s sense of hypotheses as being “stepping stones and
starting points” (165). The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of several
concerns. The first of these articulates the limitations of E.O. Wilson’s
well-wrought notion of biophilia; while important and idealistic, the
biophilia concept does not explain why humanity continues to generate
environmental crises at ever-worsening rates, with increasingly danger-
ous effects that disproportionately impact women, indigenous people,
developing countries, the global south, low-lying nations, queer commu-
nities, and nonhuman animals.
The second concern that prompted me to write The Ecophobia Hypoth-
esis has to do with the nature of ecophobia itself and our failings to fully
acknowledge the condition as a human maladaptation to the natural en-
vironment. Although the term “ecophobia” has been a part of the critical
vocabulary within the environmental humanities since my 2009 “Theo-
rizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia”
(referred to as “Theorizing” from here on), there is clearly a need to hy-
pothesize the existence and factuality of ecophobia as a starting point for
understanding the origins of the Anthropocene, of current environmental
crises, and of climate change.6

Controversy? What Controversy?

It has been dubbed “The Estok-Robisch Controversy,”7 and it began
with the publication of “Theorizing” in the spring of 2009 in the flagship
journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
(ASLE). This provocative article changed the direction of ecocriticism in
unexpected ways. It evoked a fiery response from former Purdue Univer-
sity professor Kip Robisch, and this response substantially shifted eco-
critical groundings. Robisch responded by complaining that theory, in
his view, is counterproductive. He indicated that he has no patience for
what he called “Francophilic scholasticism” (703), and he encouraged
direct action against scholars he believes are “nature-­fakers” (707).8
The article was a disturbing manifestation of a resistance to theory (re-
plete with threats of violence and an accompanying and working email
address) that had the exact opposite effect of what he seems to have
had in mind. A host of well-respected scholars have responded, and I
include lengthy quotations from them here to make clear the fact that
there really was and is little controversy, if any, at all—except perhaps
to Robisch.
In his review of ecocritical theory in The Year’s Work in Critical and
Cultural Theory (2009), Greg Garrard correctly identified the core of
­Robisch’s discontent as being a concern over the role of theory in eco-
criticism. Though it might more properly be seen as a debate than a con-
troversy, the phrase has certainly gained traction. Louisa M
­ ackenzie and
 Introduction 3
Stephanie Posthumus summarized the contours of the debate exceptionally
well in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment:

In the Spring 2009 ISLE issue, an article was published by the well-
known ecocritic Simon Estok entitled “Theorizing in a Space of Am-
bivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” (hereafter referred
to as “Theorizing”). As its title suggests, the article was a position
piece on theory itself. Estok argued the potential of the notion of eco-
phobia to provide a point of coalescence within the currently “open”
and “ambivalent” space of ecocriticism, and suggested that such con-
fluent theorizations would not only make ecocriticism more rigorous
but also make theory itself more engaged with activism. “Theoriz-
ing” was sure to provoke debate, and it is still doing so—but the con-
troversy came from the blazing response, published two issues later,
of S. K. Robisch: “The Woodshed: A Response to ‘Ecocriticism and
Ecophobia’” (which we’ll refer to as “The Woodshed”). This article
sees Estok as representative of a modern theoretical machine in need
of “monkey-wrenching” (700), a “masturbatory apparatus” (698)
that erases nature and has nothing to do with green activism. “Fran-
cophilic scholasticism” (703) comes in for a particular drubbing.
Furthermore, the author invites the like-minded to contact him at a
published e-mail address in order to show up at conferences with red
paint to “go PETA on these nature-fakers, these seated hikers” (707).
“Feeding theory to the animals” will apparently merit an encounter
with the “wrong end of [his] walking stick” (708), an echo of the
title’s woodshed.
(758)

Ethan Mannon has also discussed “Robisch’s near-fanatic desire to de-

fend the purity of an ecocriticism untainted by theory” (3) and charac-
terizes the debate as follows:

Robisch declares Estok’s piece contemptible from the start be-

cause it is hospitable towards theory. Robisch demonstrates a
clear distrust of “the culture of ‘theory’”—which, he argues,
“seeks rank and power more than it seeks art and insight,” “re-
linquishes thorough analysis in a quest for the limelight,” and “is
the Monsanto of a native grassland” (698, 699, 703). Throughout
his article, Robisch’s message to sympathetic readers is clear: he
suggests it is high time to “start monkey-wrenching the theory
machine” and concludes with a rallying cry capable of produc-
ing a wide range of emotions, including amusement, passion,
and even anxiety (700). After describing his urge to pelt a panel
of theorists with karo-syrup-filled water balloons, Robisch out-
lines his vision of a militant ecocriticism: he writes …. ‘Theory’
4 Introduction
fantasizes itself victimized. I say, dreams can come true” (707)
…. the Estok-­Robisch exchange stands apart in terms of venom.
(2)

Serpil Oppermann has described it thus:

Estok’s provocative thesis on ecophobia has attracted some serious

hostilities against theory in general, as exemplified by S.K. Robisch’s
essay in the following Autumn 2009 issue of ISLE. This piece, which
goes against the very spirit of ecocritical notions of engagement,
places praxis in opposition to theory in the name of embracing the
active side of life, which ironically leads to the nature/culture di-
chotomy ecocriticism has persistently sought to avoid. … Robisch’s
fierceness, is a clear sign of an epistemic crisis in the field.
(161, 163)

Richard Pickard, past president of ALECC (the Association for Litera-

ture, Environment, and Culture in Canada) observed in a blog that

Simon Estok writes a mostly reasonable … piece suggesting that ec-

ocritics need to think and work in a more consistently theoretical
way. … It’s a solid piece … S.K. Robisch writes—and to his great
detriment, Scott Slovic publishes—an angry and unhelpfully ad ho-
minem reply to Estok, representing as well as a broader response to
“the ecocritical equivalent of cosmetics testers—from Neil Evernden
through Timothy Morton.” (I don’t think I’m alone in not under-
standing the equation in this phrase, or in disliking what I think I
understand.) In Robisch’s view, “Poststructuralism, cultural criti-
cism, and their sleazy uncle ‘theory’ have spun out of control to the
point at which we should expect more frequent deformities resulting
from inbreeding.” Perhaps most startlingly, Robisch suggests asking
this question of conference presenters talking about questions of the
animal: “If I got naked right now and came running at you, howl-
ing, what would you do?” It’s the kind of piece for which the word
“screed” was invented—and I don’t think I’ve ever used the word
before.
(http://boughtbooks.blogspot.ca/2010/09/timothy-
morton-ecology-without-nature.html)

And finally, Matthew A. Taylor, in a thoughtful discussion of Poe and

posthuman ecology, one that seeks more detailed discussion and nuanc-
ing of the theory and definitions of ecophobia, found

Robisch’s argument to be problematic, both for its Manichaean de-

piction of the evils of theory and for the violence with which its
 Introduction 5
author imagines visiting physical harm upon his theoretical adver-
saries, as when he fantasizes withholding “food and water” from
a “poststructuralist” stranded in the forest “until the survivor ac-
knowledges the representational value of words like ‘giardia’… and
‘grizzly bear’” (705). Timothy Morton voices a similar concern re-
garding Robisch’s rhetoric in “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125 (March
2010): 273–82.
(370)

Given the storm that was developing, the ISLE editor first added to the
journal a disclaimer that ISLE would not publish articles that “imply
the incitement of violence” and second issued “a call for submissions to
a special forum on the broader topic of ‘Ecocriticism and Theory’ that
would appear in a 2010 ISLE issue” (Slovic “Further Reflections”). The
call—though it made no mention of the two articles that motivated it
(mine or Robisch’s), effectively silencing debate about both—appeared
in the first issue of 2010 and barely touched the hypothesizing that
spurred it.
Theorizng about “ecophobia” is now flourishing in the rich soils of ec-
ocriticism and the environmental humanities. Tom Hillard’s “‘Deep Into
That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature” was in the same
ISLE issue as the Robisch piece. Hillard is the first scholar to have made
the connection between ecophobia and gothic nature. He suggests that
to start analyzing ecophobia, “we need look no further than the rich and
varied vein of critical approaches used to investigate fear in literature”
(688). But I wonder: no further? Really? This seems “overly proscriptive,
potentially stifling, and, let’s be honest, unlikely to happen” (187).9 The
mistake here is in thinking that ecophobia is only about fear. Heather
Houser, although in agreement with much of “Theorizing,” takes excep-
tion to what she sees as too heavy a stress on fear: “I do not agree that
we should privilege fear over all emotions” (267). Nor, for that matter,
do I, but more about definitional matters a bit later.
The term “ecophobia” has, since Hillard’s response article, found con-
siderable usage among scholars studying horror and the ecogothic. For
instance, Tara K. Parmiter, in “Green is the New Black: Ecophobia and
the Gothic Landscape in the Twilight Series,” finds use for the term in
her discussion of how the “novels [of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series]
reflect this pervasive fear of nonhuman nature but how they simultane-
ously model an increased engagement and appreciation—a more bio-
philic response—to the natural world” (222); Bernice M. Murphy uses
the ecophobia concept in The Rural Gothic in American Popular Cul-
ture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (2013); the term
appears in a couple of essays (one by Tom Hillard and the other by Sharae
Deckard) in a collection by Andrew Smith and William Hughes entitled
Ecogothic; it also appears in several of the chapters in Dawn Keetley and
6 Introduction
Angela Tenga’s Plant Horror (particularly Elizabeth Parker’s “‘Just a
Piece of Wood’: Jan Švankmajer’s Otesánek and the EcoGothic”); Sarah
Groeneveld does not directly reference “ecophobia” when she mentions
postcolonial gothic in her “Unsettling the Environment,” but she does
refer to the seminal essay about it; Abby Goode identifies ecophobia in
Leonora Sansay’s early-19th century Secret History; or, The Horrors of
St. Domingo (see “Gothic Fertility”); Maria Parrino uses the term to de-
scribe the “sinister place… the frightening atmosphere” (88) of Antonio
Fogazzaro’s Malombra (see “‘L’orrida magnificenza del luogo.’ Gothic
Aesthetics in Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra”); Kaja Franck uses the
concept to organize some of her thinking about the gothic in her PhD
dissertation entitled “The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Lan-
guage, Subjectivity and Animal/ Human Boundaries;” and in “Vegeta-
ble Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-De-Siècle Fiction,” Cheryl Blake
Price draws on the term to discuss 19th century “gothic stories and fic-
tionalized travel accounts featuring dangerous exotic plants” and how
“by the end of the Victorian period, deadly plants had been transformed
from passive poisoners into active carnivores” (311).
It is logical to theorize the ecogothic through ecophobia; yet, as Derek
Gladwin usefully points out, my own discussions of ecophobia do “not
engage with the EcoGothic per se, …[but] do … foreground fear and
phobia as a central concern in ecological readings of literary texts, as
well as other cultural productions that have been Gothicised” (41). There
is much room indeed within the ecogothic as a theoretical approach and
eco-horror as a genre10 for continued theorizing.
Outside of investigations into ecogothic material, the term has also
been used extensively. Aaron Moe uses it in his engaging Zoopoetics:
Animals and the Making of Poetry (2014); Alice Curry uses it in her
timely discussions in her book Environmental Crisis in Young Adult
Fiction: A Poetics of Earth of how the exploitation of women and
nonhuman nature are connected; the term comes up in the witty yet
serious discussion by pattrice jones of how perspectival shifts in human/­
nonhuman relations bear upon questions in clinical practice in psychol-
ogy (see “Roosters, hawks and dawgs: Toward an inclusive, embodied
eco/feminist psychology”); Laura Barbas-Rhoden raises it in feminist,
postcolonial, ecocritical analyses in “Biopolitics and the Critique of Neo-
liberalism in El corazón del silencio by Tatiana Lobo;” two chapters—
one by Ashton Nichols entitled “Affect and Environment in Romantic
Nature Writing” and the other by James McKusick, entitled “Afterword:
the Future of Ecocriticism”—in Ottum and Reno’s Wordsworth and the
Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century find
use for the term; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, in her “Whose there is
there there? Queer Directions and Ecocritical Orientations,” published
in the inaugural issue of Ecozon@, discusses the interweavings of eco-
phobia with homophobia, misogyny, racism, and speciesism, and argues
 Introduction 7
“that these different relations of power are always already articulated in
some way, that power relations cannot really be conceived outside the
situated, material conditions of these articulations, and indeed that their
inescapable specificity is often especially apparent in literary works”
(64);11 Greta Gaard has noted in her remarkable review article of Queer
Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire that “ecophobia and erotopho-
bia are intertwined concepts” (“Green, Pink, and Lavender Banishing
Ecophobia through Queer Ecologies” 1),12 and she uses the term ex-
tensively in “New directions for ecofeminism: Toward a more feminist
ecocriticism” in her contributions to and theorizing about an interspe-
cies focus in ecocritical theory; Yves-Charles Grandjeat discusses the
ecophobia of “the prototypical white man” in wide-ranging discussions
about a Native American environmental ethos in “River Notes from the
Montana Flathead Reservation: An Update on the ‘Ecological Indian;’”
Ned Weidner, in his compelling “Rotting Fish in Paradise: Putrefaction,
Ecophobia, and Olfactory Imaginations of Southern California,” offers
important observations about how disgust and feelings about rot are
often ecophobic; in “Ecological Martial Law,” David Heinimann offers
one of the few extended discussions of the term and usefully analyzes
how ecophobia can create a sense of anxiety and an incapacity to act; in
“Literature, ethics and the bushfire in Australia,” Kate Rigby suggests
social dimensions and how ecophobia can be involved in the transfer-
ence of aggressions against the environment to the people who protect
it (214); and R. Michael Fisher, in his research on fear, understands that
the ecophobia hypothesis “is a large calling for critical analysis and
re-framing of the entire field of ecocriticism” (16). Yet, although many
scholars have used the term since 2009, relatively few have engaged in an
extended discussion of it—hence, the need for this book.
It is perhaps not surprising that scholars who have use for theorizing
about ecophobia are also concerned variously about matters of injustice
(interspecies, sexuality, gender, and race, for instance), while those who
actively attack theorizing about ecophobia scorn what Timothy Clark
mockingly refers to as “the latest developments of a left-liberal humanist
programme of ever-expanding social inclusiveness” (Ecocriticism on the
Edge 110).13 Interestingly, the first group is predominantly female, while
the second group is predominantly male.
I have presented all of this evidence here to make a point: theorizing
about ecophobia may have been controversial at one point, but the evi-
dence strongly suggests that it is no longer so. So, what exactly is it?

The Hypothesis
In the amazing catalog of nature discourses of which people have
been and are afraid, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Landscapes of Fear is unmatched:
fire, weather, disease, bugs, starvation, darkness—the list is extensive;
8 Introduction
however, there is no analytic structure or model with which to organize
and interpret this material. The analytic structure of The Ecophobia
Hypothesis enables an interpretation that articulates how ecophobia has
undermined our own self-preservation in the environment.14
The ecophobia hypothesis seeks an understanding of irrational
fears—one step beyond the anxieties Tuan surveys—of nature and nat-
ural things, and how these fears pattern relationships that are very de-
structive to our environment. Ecophobia, like biophilia, exists on the
scale of the human condition; however, while the biophilia hypothesis is
based in the hard sciences, the ecophobia hypothesis (also to some degree
rooted in the hard sciences) is more based in the social sciences. Thus,
ecophobia begins to account for realities of human antipathy toward the
natural environment in ways that the concept of biophilia cannot.
The concept of “biophilia” has been one of the sunnier ideas about
how humanity fits into the world, but in the final wash, it just doesn’t
work as a model for understanding human/environment relations. The
term originates with the German-born psychoanalyst and social philos-
opher Erich Fromm, who uses it in The Anatomy of Human Destruc-
tiveness to describe a “passionate love of life and all that is alive” (365).
In a wide-ranging discussion of what motivates human cruelty and ag-
gression, Fromm argues that “Biophilic ethics have their own principle
of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death.
Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding.
Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces” (365–6).
As an opening gambit, this is a good beginning, a literal translation of
“bio” and “philia,” but Fromm’s definition does not contain any notion
of the neuropsychology of science. This had to wait a decade before
­Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson would further develop the term “bio-
philia” in 1984. Wilson defines it as “the innate tendency to focus on
life and lifelike processes” (Biophilia 1), “the urge to affiliate with other
forms of life” (85), and “the connections that human beings subcon-
sciously seek with the rest of life” (Diversity 350), and he hypothesizes
that there are genetic bases for biophilia. It is a reasonable hypothesis,
and it is reasonable also to hypothesize that there must be genetic bases
for ecophobia. Studies have shown, for instance, that fear of snakes and
of darkness are evolution-based.15 At what point a rational fear becomes
a phobia is not within the scope of this book to address, but there is a
point at which such a thing happens, and when it does, we are dealing
with ecophobia. When I tell my two young children, therefore, that there
is no rational basis for being afraid of the dark, or of bees, or of spiders,
or of bugs, or of dogs, or of any of the other things of which young chil-
dren are normally afraid, I know that I’m not being entirely truthful with
them. These fears are not ecophobia, but they can certainly lead into it.
Novels, films, and other narratives that exploit these fears, that nurture
and coddle them, and that magnify and pervert them to sell a story or
a product or a politician: that’s ecophobia. Evolutionary biologists have
 Introduction 9
long speculated about the genetic roots of both our affinity with and our
acrimony to nature, and ecocritics have been quick to fix on biophilia as
a tenet of environmental salvation.
In addition to being unproven (and perhaps unprovable), the biophilia
hypothesis alone cannot account for the realities of the world, the kinds
of things that are going on in the world, the factory farms, the rain for-
est destruction, or the biodiversity holocaust, and it cannot make (or, at
least, has not yet made) productive connections with theories about ex-
ploitation; about people who gain while others (human and nonhuman)
foot the bill; or about intersections among ecophobia, homophobia, spe-
ciesism, and sexism. As Scott McVay explains in the “Prelude” to The
Biophilia Hypothesis, the concept of “biophilia” doesn’t quite work:
until the biophilia hypothesis is more fully absorbed in the science
and ­culture of our times—and becomes a tenet animating our ev-
eryday lives—the human prospect will wane as the rich biological
exuberance of this water planet is quashed, impoverished, cut, pol-
luted, and pillaged.
(5)

The passives in this sentence are very telling: quashed by what? Impover-
ished by whom? Cut, polluted, and pillaged by? Apparently, for Wilson
and his protégés, the culprit turns out to be rooted no deeper than in the
soils of biophilia!
The problem with the uses to which biophilic theories have been put is
that they have failed to recognize that biophilia is a point on a spectrum.
In The Biophilia Hypothesis, a book that Wilson coedited, Stephen Kellert
explains that “the dominionistic experience of nature reflects a desire to
master the natural world” (56). This “proficiency to subdue, the capacity
to dominate, and the skills and physical prowess honed by an occasion-
ally adversarial relationship to nature” (ibid) are, in this view, somehow
a part of “the biophilia tendency.” Aversion, indifference, and fear-driven
anxiety? An adversarial domination of nature? Resentment, hostility, and
the imagining of nature (often gendered as Mother) as an opponent to
be conquered, subdued, beaten, eaten, raped, ploughed, mutilated, regu-
lated, and so on? Calling these biophilia is dishonest and misleading. The
term “biophilia” fails to explain why environmental crises are worsening,
does not adequately encompass the complex range of ethical positions
that humanity generally displays toward the natural environment, and
does not envision a spectrum condition but rather a single point on such
a spectrum.16 As Wilson himself importantly indicates, biophilia is “the
connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life”
(emph. mine, Diversity 350). Using Wilson’s own logic, then, it stands to
reason that if humans possess the capacity to “subconsciously” affiliate
with nature, then they also subconsciously have the capacity to dissociate
from it, oftentimes becoming fearful of or indifferent to, or engaging in
complete avoidance of the natural environment.
10 Introduction
Ecophobia is another point on the spectrum of our ethical relation-
ship with the natural world. It is the obverse side of biophilia, and it has
certainly won less favor. Ecophobia is not an easy or particularly happy
topic, and it does not offer the kind of cheerful picture of a world run
by biophilic impulses that is so pleasing to ecocritics, a picture that is
as fanciful and inaccurate as utopic visions of a world without anger or
evil.
Ecophobia is all about frustrated agency. No wonder it is so central
in tragic narratives. Tragedy has traditionally represented the frustrated
assertion of human agency in the face of what Terry Eagleton has called
“the unfathomable agencies of Nature” (33). Tragedy dramatizes the
unseating of the preeminent subject from a position of an imagined
singular embodiment of agency, subjectivity, and ethical entitlements.
Tragedy measures out both human impotence before nature and a per-
sistent inability to conquer, subdue, and maintain control over nature.
It seems, therefore, incongruous when Eagleton mockingly asks “how a
tragedy differs from a congress on global warming” (6). In point of fact,
such a congress—in narrating a loss of human agency to nature—is in
the very process of writing tragedy (the fall of the human from a place of
exceptionalism) while simultaneously announcing the ethical superiority
of the human over the nonhuman. This is not such a new idea. Joseph
Meeker made the same argument four decades ago, arguing that “lit-
erary tragedy and environmental exploitation in Western culture share
many of the same philosophical presuppositions” (24). It is precisely the
loss of agency—often to nature—that has defined tragedy.
While I define ecophobia as an irrational and groundless hatred (often
fear) of the natural world that is as present and subtle in our daily lives
and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism,17 I have, over the
past two decades, been tweaking and refining and clarifying and adding.
In thinking through ecophobia over the years, I have also hoped that the
term would come into more capable hands than Robisch’s and that in
addition to being used, it would be theorized, and it has been—not much
and not always in a cordial manner, but hostile reworkings are fine by
me. Before getting into those, however, let’s get a clear sense of where
we are with the term.
As I have noted in various places,18 conservative American journalist
George F. Will seems the first to have used the term outside of its psy-
chological meaning in a Chicago Sun-Times article of September 18,
1988, entitled “The Politics of Ecophobia.” Here, Will defines ecophobia
simply as “the fear that the planet is increasingly inhospitable” (n.p.).
His definition is also the position from which I start, but it is a position
from which David Sobel departs in Beyond Ecophobia. For Sobel, eco-
phobia is more a fear of the environmental effects of human actions—for
instance, “[f]ear of oil spills, rainforest destruction, whale hunting, acid
rain, the ozone hole, and Lyme disease” (5); yet, I would suggest that
 Introduction 11
these are clearly more properly the results of ecophobia than examples
of it. Ecophobia is a condition that allows humanity to do bad things
to the natural world. No one would say that homophobia is the fear
of the corpse of a gay man who has been bashed over the head with a
bat; homophobia is the cause of the bashing. Similarly, ecophobia is the
cause of the environmental despoliation that Sobel describes. For Sobel,
“fear of… whale hunting” (ibid) is (by his definition) ecophobia; again,
however, it seems more sensible to see that whale hunting is a result of
ecophobia—in this instance, a yearning for control19 combined with ei-
ther a general indifference or an outright contempt for the natural world
and its inhabitants.
Sobel makes no reference to Will in his important book and seems to
have no knowledge of the article. 20 In any event, the need for a viable ec-
ocritical terminology was recognized as early as 1995. In 1999, ­Robert
van Tine proposed a similar term—“gaeaphobia”—(independently, it
seems, since there are no references to his source for the term), which
he defines as “a form of insanity characterized by extreme destructive
behavior towards the natural environment and a pathological denial of
the effects of that destructive behavior” (see Works Cited, van Tine).
Potentially useful though it is for its identification (sometimes quite me-
chanical) of attitudes toward the natural environment in terms of pa-
thologies laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM IV), van Tine’s article has not been referenced in any
scholarship anywhere that I can find. While this is a bit distressing, his
scholarship is important nevertheless because it shows that the kind of
theoretical articulation I am seeking in hypothesizing about ecopho-
bia has been recognized as being necessary in the burgeoning field of
ecopsychology. 21

Onward
Modern humanities and social sciences have pictured society as if
they were above material and energy cycles and unbound by the
Earth’s finiteness and metabolisms. Now they must come back to
Earth. Their understandings of economy and markets, of culture
and society, of history and political regimes need to be rematerial-
ized. They can no longer be seen only as arrangements, agreements
and conflicts among humans. In the Anthropocene, social, cultural
and political orders are woven into and co-evolve with techno-­
natural orders of specific matter and energy flow metabolism at a
global level, requiring new concepts and methods in the humanities.
(Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne 4)

Imagining that we are not bound by the Earth’s finiteness and metabo-
lisms is a serious problem for which theorizing about ecophobia is aptly
12 Introduction
suited. It is ludicrous to imagine that we can address the issues of climate
change that we face without understanding the ethical foundations of the
actions that brought us into this crisis. The ecophobia hypothesis offers
what the biophilia hypothesis does not—specifically, a responsible ac-
knowledgment that some of the most destructive actions we have taken
toward nature may be more difficult to change than we think, may have
more genetic roots than we are comfortable acknowledging, and may
align us more than we can bear with what we have so feverishly tried
to define ourselves against. Our indifference to the pillage and scorch
policies of development (witness what is going on with the tar sands in
Northern Alberta) may have more in common with the Double-crested
Cormorant (and its fecal desecration of the cliffs of Stanley Park) than
with the climate change deniers. Where is the distinction between the
indifference of the Cormorant and its waste, and the indifference of hu-
mans and theirs? Surely, it is a scalar and not a formal difference that
distinguishes the two.
There is a wider complexity to ecophobia that the American Psycho-
logical Association definition of “phobia” does not consider. It is more
than a persistent fear. It is more than an irrational hatred. And it is more
than just human indifference to nature. We have neither the time nor
the cause to continue to ignore the role of ecophobia 22 in our efforts to
create behavior change targets that will sustain nature—and this means
looking at every aspect of ecophobia. Sometimes, it is the little things
that show it.
The Ecophobia Hypothesis looks at the little and the big, is a follow-
up on “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” and is a con-
tinuing attempt to add to the conversations that address the question
about why we are so bad for the natural environment—a question that
the biophilia hypothesis just cannot answer.
Chapter 1 begins the explorations of ecophobia with investigations
that many might consider controversial, blasphemous, and just plain
wrong: theorizing about genetics. The chapter argues that to explore
genetic materialism is to take up E.O. Wilson’s challenge to look at the
very difficult question of genes and their importance in how we relate
with the natural world. While what Wilson has to say about things that
are not biophilia (things that are properly understood as ecophobia) are
contradictory and baffling, it is clear that there is a need to take seri-
ously his quest to understand the importance of our history as a species.
There are points at which our history bashes up against our present. Per-
haps this is what Michael Bates means in his PhD thesis comment about
“Theorizing” that “Estok fails to acknowledge that a human’s desire to
increase its survival chances at the expense of other creatures’ welfare
can be considered natural behaviour patterns” (95). As with spiders and
snakes, which we have historically had valid cause to fear, at what point
do our evolutionary pasts, to reiterate from Clark, “become directly or
 Introduction 13
indirectly destructive, even in ways that may not have been the case be-
fore”? Indeed, as this chapter shows, theorizing about ecophobia outside
of the context of genetic materialism is idle musing—and in an age of
irreversible global warming, these are not times for idle musings.
Beginning with the work of W.J.T. Mitchell and his idea of agential
images, Chapter 2 argues that imagining terror interpenetrates with the
imagining of an increasingly oppositional natural environment. The re-
surgence of terrorism and the increasing violence of our climate in the 21st
century has ratcheted up the tone of urgency and crisis defining media
representations of nature and of identity (national, religious, ethnic, and
so on).23 This chapter is specifically interested in how images of terror
have become the signal motif of 21st century representations of nature.
Control over the environment or over groups that want to reformulate
and rearticulate global configurations of power, inhabitation, and life are
illusory and temporary. Recognizing not only the ecological implications
but also their causal relation to social conflicts such as war is vital. Jared
Diamond has argued that “collapses for ecological or other reasons often
masquerade as military defeats” (13). Understanding the current migra-
tions of war and terror groups such as Boko Haram, Daish (the group
calling itself ISIS), or al-Qaeda and of the death and life writing surround-
ing them must occur within a context that recognizes the interdependence
of seemingly disparate and disconnected topics. War, migration, ecopho-
bia, and narrativizing increasingly must be discussed together if we are
to understand better the production and effects of post-9/11 narratives.
This chapter argues that media and academic conflations of devastating
natural events with war and terror reiterates an ethics in which nature is a
thing to be fought. This is clearly a trajectory of thinking that is counter-
productive to environmentalism. Imagining terror and the natural world
in tandem obviously also sanctions the very ethics of distance and domi-
nation that have long contributed to the growing environmental problems
we face today. Apocalyptic, militaristic models produce dystopic visions
of both the present and the future, and these signal both unspoken and
overt nonchalance and ­indifference—a very dangerous ecophobia—­toward
the natural environment. This chapter shows how media discourses that
conflate terror and nature are both ecophobic and unsustainable.
Chapter 3 looks at ecomedia. Despite the fact that popular media
are saturated with messages about environmental issues (things such
as ocean acidification, species extinctions, rising sea levels, rising tem-
peratures, the threats from Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs,
the unsustainability of the meat industry, and so on and so on), things
are getting much, much worse. This chapter suggests that there are
many reasons for this worsening situation. One of these is that ecome-
dia itself often conveys the ecophobia it is ostensibly addressing. Worse
yet, scholarship on ecomedia hasn’t looked seriously at ecophobia.
A second reason why things are getting worse rather than better, despite
14 Introduction
the enormous media investments in the topic, is that we are increasingly
distracted and continuously bombarded with information, and our
continuous partial attention 24 runs hand-in-hand with our compassion
fatigue. A third reason is that mass media outlets simply dilute import-
ant and complex issues to the lowest common denominator in order
to convey them to as broad a constituency as possible. The result is a
blurring of abstract concepts to such a degree that it is simply difficult
for people to make connections among issues. A fourth matter has to
do with the way in which news becomes a kind of entertainment in the
21st century (possibly in part the effect of the blurring of virtual and
actual worlds). Perhaps shockingly, this chapter argues that the selected
ideas of liberty that America has enjoyed and promulgated—especially
regarding representations in media that are clearly ecophobic—may
need to be understood and regulated in the same way that hate speech
and hate crimes are. The ways in which America has constructed ideol-
ogies of liberty through “the pursuit of happiness” are unsustainable;
in an environmental context, the pursuit of happiness ironically relies
on notions—such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and, not least of all,
ecophobia—that are in stark conflict with the very bases of liberty. This
is not a pretty thing to contemplate, but we must become accountable
for the human behaviors that have caused the Anthropocene.
The main topic of Chapter 4 is the staggering scale of human im-
pacts and presences in the Anthropocene world. This chapter argues
that Western food models are not good for the environment. 25 I claim
that discussions about the Anthropocene are epidermal when they don’t
deal with meat and that changing our destructive relationship with the
natural world absolutely requires rethinking our ethical relations with
that world—and this means rethinking meat. No progress to eradicate
global warming will be made otherwise. All of the ecomedia, the news,
the conferences, the articles, the books, and everything eco- will be hol-
low, and climate change will continue to get worse until it addresses the
ecophobia in our relations with animals. Welcome or not, the biophilia
hypothesis cannot account for our collective exploitation of animals,
and the scale of it all is horrific.
Chapter 5 continues the argument about food and ecophobia while
touching on some of Chapter 2’s implications about terror and ecopho-
bia. I begin with a discussion about veganism in the age of terror through
Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project. This chapter is animated by
the conviction that our ethical relations with the natural world have
deteriorated and need recuperation. This loss has been observed before.
In a fascinating and exhaustive study of the cultural history of vegetar-
ianism in the West from the early modern period to modern times, for
instance, Tristram Stuart notes that “in the era preceding the Indus-
trial Revolution the question of meat-eating was one of the fiercest
­battle-fronts in the struggle to define humanity’s proper relationship with
 Introduction 15
nature” (xvii). The disappearance of this battle-front is what allows us
to be blind to connections, to the ways in which food (and the ethics of
its production) is deeply relevant to questions about national identity,
racism, sexism, and matters of environmental justice.
Chapter 6 moves into an area that, unlike food, has received virtually
no attention from ecocritics. It asks questions about the entanglements of
ecophobia with the imagination of madness. At the center of discussions
about who is entitled to the rights and privileges humans enjoy, madness
is everywhere in literature but nowhere in ecocriticism. How much does
our fear of capriciousness and unpredictability define the contours of
our ecophobia and of our boundaries of madness? This chapter looks
at the early modern period—a period that was pivotal in the history of
madness in the West—and at how ecophobia’s entanglements with ideas
about madness continue from that period into the 21st century.
Chapter 7 analyzes the dilemma of overproduction and waste—and
suggests that there are important links among waste and ecophobia in
their relationship with the landscape. This chapter interprets poems
written about garbage as well as filmic representations of waste (partic-
ularly Wall-E) and reviews an enormous body of theoretical work on
waste, from Mary Douglas to Zygmunt Bauman. Through analyses of
“Garbage” (by American poet A.R. Ammons) and “Above the Water,
Under the Water” (by South Korean poet Seungho Choi), I show that
the agency of waste is both a concern in contemporary poetry and a
material reality in contemporary life. I explore how these poems raise
matters of environmental justice and environmental racism and how
Ammons and Choi show that there is no place to put waste that will
efface its agency. It is impossible to continue thinking that “there is a
world elsewhere”—which was the forlorn dream of Shakespeare’s dys-
functional leader Coriolanus. There is no such world to which to send
our waste. Why, this is hell, and nor are we out of it, Mephistopheles
explains in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. We are in a position where we can
no longer deny the hellish impacts of our ecophobic histories.
I do not make much effort in this chapter to argue that dumping and
pollution imply ecophobia or a disregard for nature, an indifference
about its integrity and rights, and an outright contempt for its autonomy
and agency, since these matters are tedious and fairly obvious and have
been well-argued elsewhere. Rather, I show—premised on Christopher
Todd Anderson’s notion that “garbage serves as a meeting point of hu-
man culture, the natural world, and the spiritual realm”—that there
are enormous implications in Patricia Yaeger’s comment that “detritus
has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once associated with
nature” (327). Yaeger has hit on something that points to a radical shift
in thinking about nature. Gone is the contempt for and fear of waste,
replaced by the kind of respect we accord language itself, and with this
shift is an implicit change in how we understand the malleability of
16 Introduction
nature. The world becomes even more pliable, even more subject to an
ecophobic ethic of domination and control. 26
Moving forward will require candid acknowledgments and sincere ne-
gotiations with nature, whose agency we will eventually have to face. It
will require recognition of the biophilia/ecophobia spectrum, an ethical
spectrum on which everyone occupies a place. This is not a radical idea.
Racism is also a spectrum condition, as is sexism, classism, and specie-
sism. Unlike these, both ecophobia and biophilia are hypotheses.
This book does not prove the existence of ecophobia, but it does lay
out some of the grounds for hypothesizing about it. Few intelligent
scholars would deny the importance of identifying how texts participate
in racist, sexist, and heterosexist/homophobic discourses. This book ad-
dresses how hypothetical ecophobia fits into these discourses. This type
of intersectional analysis provides support for the ecophobia hypothesis,
claiming that there is something in us, in part genetic, that is just not
good for the environment.

Notes
1 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition
(DSM V) explains that “Individuals with specific phobia are fearful or anx-
ious about or avoidant of circumscribed objects or situations” (189). Within
psychology, the term “ecophobia” defines a “fear of home.” It is reasonable
that a term can have multiple definitions (many terms do), and what I am
proposing here is an additional definition of the term to describe an emo-
tional and ethical response not to the concept of home in the narrow sense
but in the larger sense of the natural world.
2 Ecophobia, unlike socially oppressive ideologies, is often largely irrational.
Stephanie Posthumous and Louisa Mackenzie have asked, however, whether
ecophobia is “necessarily always irrational and aligned with a will to domi-
nate” (760). They note that “there are specific, embodied situations in which
fear of the nonhuman world might be considered as grounded in specific
experiences of being the Other, rather than the oppressor” (760–1) and in
a brief discussion of rural antigay violence suggest that “a reflex of ‘dread’
when contemplating certain natural landscapes ‘is not necessarily irratio-
nal’” (761).
3 My use of biblical sources here (Lev. 11: 41, 42; Ex. 14; Rev. 13) is meant to
suggest at the outset that ecophobia has a long biblical history that reaches
deeply into the very origins of Western cultures.
4 Biophilia is also on this spectrum. There is no evidence that it is anything
but a human trait. Biophilia, on the other hand, does seem to be something
that we share with other animals. There are many viral examples of species
saving other species. One of my personal favorites is of a bear saving a crow
in the Budapest Zoo (see Medveš, Works Cited). Fictional animals are a
different story. King Kong, in at least three of his manifestations, combines
sexist assumptions and behaviors (he is the precious male ego we follow and
that makes the leading female protagonists virtually mesmerized in obei-
sance and deference) and at the same time seems both chivalrously sexist and
biophilic in his defense of a different species.
 Introduction 17
5 Compulsive use of hand sanitizers in public venues is a recent example of our
obsessive fear of dirt and bacteria. The reality, however, is that the ­human
body is comprised of more nonhuman than human DNA, and obsessive
hand sanitizing is more harmful in the long run than beneficial in that we are
killing microorganisms that are beneficial to our own survival. For instance,
we need intestinal flora in order to digest our food, regulate our immune sys-
tem, and reduce inflammation. These gut flora (the bacteria) produce anti-
microbial substances that outnumber the total number of cells in the human
body by 1000% (10 to 1). See also Saxena et al., Works Cited.
6 Christian Hummelsund Voie may have a point in suggesting that Tom
Lynch’s understanding of “biophobia” (a term that derives from the earlier
work of Roger Ulrich) is more moderate than what the term “ecophobia”
covers (see Lynch 2; Ulrich 73–137; Voie 27); however, in its focus on “bio,”
it is also a far more restrictive term. I argue here that biotic and non-biotic
environmental stimuli evoke ecophobic responses.
7 See Garrard (2009) and Mackenzie and Posthumus (2013), Works Cited.
8 This material has been well summarized elsewhere—see, for instance,
Mackenzie and Posthumus.
9 These are the very words Hillard used to describe my modest proposal that
ecocritics start looking at ecophobia.
10 Elizabeth Parker explains that ecogothic is “a theoretical lens as opposed
to a genre classification” (217), which, as she notes, is consonant with the
definition that Andrew Smith and William Hughes offer in EcoGothic (1).
Parker also claims that ecogothic is at least in part a response to my insis-
tence that ecophobia needs theorizing (217). If ecogothic is an approach,
such is not the case with eco-horror, and Parker reiterates the position put
forth by Joseph J. Foy that eco-horror is a genre (217). See Foy, Works Cited.
11 Mortimer-Sandilands notes that the apparent meaning in “Theorizing” is
“that ecophobia needs first to be theorized on its own terms before being
‘eventually’ looked at in its interweavings with homophobia, misogyny,
racism and speciesism” (111). It is a position with which she rightly dis-
agrees. Mortimer-Sandilands is referring to the following: “If ecocriticism
is committed to making connections, then it is committed to recognizing
that these issues (ecophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia, speciesism) are
thoroughly interwoven with each other and must eventually be looked at
together” (Estok “Theorizing,” 208). Admittedly, my comment was mis-
leading, and what I meant by “eventually” was that whether scholars like
it or not, these issues are thoroughly interwoven and must be theorized
­together—sooner rather than later (hence, “eventually”), this will happen.
12 In “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism” (1997), Gaard defines “erotophobia” (a
fear of eroticism) and how it has always been an environmental issue and a
“problem… of Western culture, a fear of the erotic so strong that only one form
of sexuality is overtly allowed; only in one position; and only in the context
of certain legal, religious, and social sanctions” (118). Building on this work, I
note in “Theorizing” that one of the manifestations of ecophobia is sometimes
a contempt for the body, its functions, and its requirements (208)—hence, for
me, as for Gaard, “erotophobia is thus a component of ecophobia” (“New di-
rections for ecofeminism: Toward a more feminist ecocriticism” 650). Serenella
Iovino uses the term “sexophobia” (certainly an echo of Gaard’s “erotopho-
bia”) and links it with ecophobia (see “Toxic Epiphanies” 44).
13 I will cite this again and discuss it in greater detail in Chapter 4.
14 We are not alone in producing waste or in being ignorant of its effects; we
are, however, singular in our indifference, in our not caring when we are
18 Introduction
aware of the effects of our actions. Nor are we alone in our capacity to rad-
ically refashion the biosphere in our own interests and in total disregard for
the interests of other species. Again, what makes collective humanity stand
out is its capacity to know but simply not care about the environmental ef-
fects of its actions. Ecophobia is a uniquely human condition.
15 See Roach, Works Cited.
16 Parts of this and the previous paragraph appear in slightly different form in
my “Ecomedia and Ecophobia” (133) and in my “Virtually There” (10).
17 The preceding five sentences appear in my “Spectators to Future Ruin,” 52.
18 This paragraph appears in slightly different form in my “Remembering the
Feminist Body of Ecocriticism” (75, 81).
19 The epic frustrations of not being able to hold and control nature are at
their core ecophobic. They have found expression in King Lear, with the
aging sovereign raging at the storm. They register in films featuring heroic
men battling weather (such as The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and Wa-
terworld). The epic frustrations of control by nature indeed have been very
influential in how some tragedy has developed as a genre.
20 Nor did I when I first used the term. Dates here are important. My PhD
dissertation was accepted and dated in the spring of 1996. I wrote the first
draft of the final chapter of my dissertation in the early summer of 1995
and submitted to it Linda Woodbridge—my supervisor—on August 9, 1995.
Several months later, by which time the dissertation had already gone to my
committee for approval, David Sobel’s “Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the
Heart in Nature Education” came out in Orion. The fact that Sobel and I
clearly seemed to independently coin the same term at roughly the same time
is perhaps more than simply coincidental, registering perhaps a broader felt
need for theorizing about antipathy toward nature.
21 See also Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of Earth and Susanne C. Moser’s
“More bad news: the risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate
change information” in Creating a Climate for Change.
22 When someone such as Timothy Clark mocks ecophobia, it is done within
a history of disengagement with feminist issues. In his Cambridge Intro-
duction to Literature and the Environment, for instance, Clark promises
to give an “introductory overview of the arguments, methods and concepts
of literary and cultural criticism that concern environmental crisis in some
form” (xiii), and it very quickly becomes clear that the form will not be a
very inclusive one. It is strange to see Clark using phrases such as “strident
assertiveness” (119) to describe the work of Adrienne Rich, especially given
feminist critiques of the use of such terms as “strident” and “shrill” (see,
for instance, McConnell-Ginet 548). It is strange because it seems inconso-
nant with Clark’s goal of giving a balanced and nonsexist introduction to
ecofeminism. Moreover, the absence in Clark’s book of discussions about
species, sexuality, and race—discussions that we find in such foundational
books as Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (a book Clark does not
mention even once)—similarly calls into question the value of his “introduc-
tory overview.” The anti-feminism, omissions, and mufflings are rehearsed
more vigorously in his Ecocriticism on the Edge, a book in which he aims
his dull sword at the concept of ecophobia. The result is little more than
an articulation in his own words of the definition I have offered for the
term. Clark notes that ecophobia is “an antipathy, dismissive stance or sheer
indifference towards the natural environment, including attitudes which,
however understandable in the past, tend now in the emergent contexts of
the Anthropocene to become directly or indirectly destructive, even in ways
 Introduction 19
that may not have been the case before” (111–12, italics in the original). Pre-
sumably, the intent here is to be mocking toward the “left-liberal humanist
programme” (110) that seems to have left a rather large chip on his shoulder.
23 See also Kaplan, Works Cited.
24 This term comes from past Microsoft Vice President Linda Stone. See Works
Cited.
25 Things are changing but not quickly enough. The first ASLE conference I
went to (1999) had only salad for vegetarians at the conference banquet, and
it was pretty heavy on the meat. I found this odd for a bunch of ecocritics.
So, I was curious about just how many vegetarians there were in this group
of concerned citizens. Scott Slovic explains in the Editor’s Note to the Fall
2009 ISLE that “Ecocritics who've been treated to one of Simon Estok's
provocative conference presentations know very well that he tends to fish for
audience responses, looking at listeners as he asks, ‘How many of you are
vegetarians? Let me see a show of hands’” (“Editor’s Note” 681). I’ve never
fished (and it is an ugly image to be associated with me), but I did challenge
my audiences. Perhaps my challenges had at least some effect on the changes
that have been made: not only are vegetarian options now available at these
conferences but meat isn’t! Nevertheless, mocked in print, I stopped ask-
ing, but the resistance to people who offer such challenges keeps up. Harold
Fromm’s rant against veganism (discussed in Chapter 5) is but one example.
26 Feminists have been addressing the topic of the domination of nature for
a long time now. Yet, as new generations of feminist thinkers have noted,
ecocriticism hasn’t acknowledged its debt to or dependence on the work of
ecofeminist thinkers. As Greta Gaard has explained, these omissions of fem-
inist work in “ecocritical scholarship are not merely a bibliographic matter
of failing to cite feminist scholarship, but signify a more profound concep-
tual failure to grapple with the issues being raised by that scholarship as
feminist, a failure made more egregious when the same ideas are later cele-
brated when presented via nonfeminist sources” (“New Directions” 3). See
also Laura Wright, especially 14–18.
1 Material Ecocriticism,
Genes, and the Phobia/
Philia Spectrum

[…] genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably
values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human
gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like
the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—
is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been
and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate
function.
(Wilson, On Human Nature 167)

To suggest the possibility of genetic influence, genetic difference, of an

evolutionary past bearing down in some degree on cognition, on men
and women, on culture, was to some minds like entering a camp and
volunteering to work with Dr. Mengele.
(McEwan 166)

Ecophobia, like any other human behavior (including biophilia), is writ-

ten into our genes. It cannot be otherwise since there is no magical ven-
triloquism here, no enchanted space outside of our genes from which
human behavior can reasonably be thought to originate. Yet, as Michael
Beard—the voice of evolutionary compulsions in Ian McEwan’s Solar—
notes, one must be wary when theorizing about genetics and culture.
Solar nevertheless seriously questions the human capacity to make the
behavioral changes needed to stop climate change, reflecting a larger
debate that has been going on for a long time. For E.O. Wilson, “human
emotional responses and the more general ethical practices based on
them have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection
over thousands of generations” (On Human Nature 6).
On a business class flight circling over London, Beard himself won-
ders about the dangerous human impulses toward excess and their effects
on global warming. He wonders, “how could we ever begin to restrain
ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravag-
ing bloom of algae, a mold enveloping a soft fruit—we were such a wild
success. Up there with the spores!” (McEwan 127–8).1 Is it reasonable to
contemplate the feasibility of halting or reversing climate change, given that
human beings do what other species do? We grow semper sursum. Without
 Material Ecocriticism 21
natural predators or obstacles, any species will thrive to excess. We do not
differ in this. It is in the genetic nature of all living organisms to do so, a
point Darwin himself makes: “There is no exception to the rule that every
organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that if not destroyed, the
Earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair” (54).
We need to be clear here: nature is not moderate. It is often character-
ized, Elizabeth Grosz explains, by “an invariable tendency to superabun-
dance, excessiveness, the generation of large numbers of individuals, in
the rates of reproduction and proliferation of individuals and species”
(30). Nature revels not only in superabundance, but in diversity, as
­Darwin also theorized: “more living beings can be supported on the
same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution,
of which we see proof by looking to the inhabitants of any small spot or
to naturalized production” (105). The genetic drive toward producing
abundance and diversity is an inescapable material reality of life.
One of the key elements of Darwinian theory is that the size of a
population is limited by what its given environment can sustain, but ob-
viously we have subverted this mechanism through an excessive form of
what Jean-Baptiste Lamarck termed adaptive force; 2 adaptive force has
extended the capacity of environments to sustain overpopulations. The
human species stands in league with many others who have made their
environments more habitable, their food more attainable, their future
prospects more viable. Some birds build nests, some ants farm aphids,
and many animals kill members of their own species in fights.
Nor are we the only species that is indifferent to the natural environ-
ment. We are not the only species that pollutes, and we are not the only
species that radically refashions the biosphere. The mountain pine bee-
tle of the Pacific Northwest decimates temperate rain forest ecosystems.
The Chinstrap penguins of Zavodovski Island have no natural predators
on the island itself (though they face sea lions when they dive into the
waters for food). The result is a colony of almost two million penguins
in an area of 25 square kilometers. It has been dubbed the world’s smell-
iest island. The penguins are, it seems, indifferent to the pollution they
produce and to the fact that their prolific reproduction has resulted in
overcrowding that matches that of any human megacity. The list could
go on. We resemble many species. Even so, the human species stands
alone in its environmental degradation to such a dangerous extent that
geologists and laypeople are increasingly opting to call our current age
The Anthropocene—The Age of the Human. The Anthropocene is, in
part, a result of the human epidemic of ecophobia; one solution to our
collective Anthropocene problem lies with our notion of human agency.
Agency is precious to humanity—so precious that the loss of it puts in
peril not only our sense of exceptionalism but our very sense of human
identity. One of the issues that material feminisms (and its offshoot, ma-
terial ecocriticisms) have investigated and stressed is the notion that non-
human things—biotic and nonbiotic—have agency. 3 Some materials, in
22 Material Ecocriticism
fact, may have much more agency than we might imagine or wish. This
was the radical proposal of E.O. Wilson more than three decades ago in
a book entitled Biophilia; yet, as I have shown in the Introduction, the
biophilia hypothesis is misleading and incomplete, since it fails to take
into account the current Anthropocene moment, in which human and
environmental kinship have been largely supplanted by the ecophobic
conditions of irrational fear, contempt, and indifference to the environ-
ment. Theorizing ecocriticism without discussing ecophobia is as illog-
ical as articulating feminist theory without discussing sexism. And it is
worth repeating that ecophobia (no less than sexism) is a subtle, ubiqui-
tous, and marketable condition.
While I’ve stated elsewhere that ecophobia is analogous to misogyny,
homophobia, and racism, no analogy is perfect.4 Ecophobia and bio-
philia are ordered on opposite ends of the same spectrum. A key question
for theorists focusing on biophilia is about the extent to which “an af-
finity with life [can] urge moderation on our behavior” (McVay 17); for
theorists of ecophobia, the question is more about the degree to which an
antipathy, distance, or dislocation from nature can allow or encourage
behaviors that are destructive both to biotic and nonbiotic environments.
To see ecophobia as part of a spectrum condition in which we also find
biophilia isn’t inherently problematical—until we start addressing
­Wilson’s theories about the biological bases of biophilia. W ­ ilson’s insis-
tence on the genetic character of biophilia has, according to Roger Ulrich,
no “convincing support for the proposition that positive responding to
nature has a partly genetic basis” (122). As such, it is important to focus
on the genetic dimensions that comprise the spectrum of biophilia and
ecophobia. Failing to do so results in epidermal readings, 5 approaches
that are hollow surface endeavors. We might call this “hollow ecology,”
explorations of environmental crises that—­whatever they claim—do not
perform the analyses of intra-action that Karen Barad so masterfully
accomplishes in her theories about agential realism.6 Hollow ecology, in
the plainest of terms, avoids the internalities of bodies, living and other.
As theoretical physics is important for the study of the material agency
of objects (living and non-), so too is there a real need to analyze how
evolutionary biology and evolutionary processes (genetic and cultural)
affect the human body and its material agency from the perspectives of
material ecocriticism. Ignoring the dimensions and depths of ecophobia
would be unproductive.7 Only through such analyses is it possible to ap-
preciate the sheer depth of the issues associated with ecophobia.
Ecophobia is such a pervasive phenomenon, akin to Timothy ­Morton’s
concept of hyperobjects, that some critics simply can’t endure any theo-
rizing about it. British Shakespeare enthusiast Gabriel Egan, for example,
finds the term “virtually useless” (31). Kip Robisch incorrectly believes
that “We’ve ‘theorized ecophobia’ enough already to prove the ineffec-
tuality of such a course” (703). But the cultural attitude of indifference
(and inherent contempt) that enables society to kill fifty-six billion farmed
 Material Ecocriticism 23
animals each year8 —even though researchers Gowrii Koneswaran and
Danielle Nierenberg have shown that “the farm animal sector is the single
largest anthropogenic user of land, contributing to many environmental
problems, including global warming and climate change”—is evidence of
ecophobia.9 Their article, published in 2008, articulates the then emerg-
ing concerns of how farmed animals impact global warming. Even with
today’s media coverage of global warming, we have not yet overcome
our indifference to the ways in which human uses of nonhuman animals
reflect a perfect contempt for nature. Only the ecophobia hypothesis—
and its characterization as the irrational fear, dread, dislike, antipathy,
apprehension, avoidance, and indifference toward nature—allows us to
acknowledge, and attempt to redeem, our collective human mistake. Just
as the antipathy inherent in sexism causes women harm, the ecophobic
aversion to nature causes ecological harm. Ecophobia in people derives
at least in part from learned behavior, and it is our ecophobic disavowal
that enables us to cut down magnificent (and carbon-sequestering) trees
without shame or guilt as much as it is the disavowal of sexism that al-
lows Trump supporters to minimize his crude comments and promote
dangerous legislation undermining American women. It is ecophobia that
enables adults to legislate animal holocausts, something children perhaps
would never knowingly do, since most children find it innately repugnant
to cause animals to suffer or die. In short, the ecophobia hypothesis per-
forms a dystopian bildungsroman10 for modernity’s children. Once chil-
dren reach the age of maturity, their dependence on the cultural currencies
of capitalism and indifferent media washes out all sense of empathy, like
Aldo ­Leopold’s “rivers washing the future into the sea” (140), enabling
ecophobic behaviors to take prominence. There is a war between biophilia
and ecophobia, and the current state of the world shows which is winning.
Both biophilia and ecophobia are vying for control of how we live, and
both are deeply rooted. Biophilia is not confined to the human species (one
example is the 2014 event in which a bear in the Budapest Zoo saved a
drowning crow),11 and neither is the moral indifference that the Chinstrap
penguins readily display (and this cannot qualify as ecophobia since the
penguins face no possibility for any moral choice but indifference).12
Proponents of the ecophobia hypothesis face the same “daunting asser-
tions” that Stephen Kellert notes (21) as facing the biophilia hypothesis.
Among these assertions, Kellert observes, are that the condition is inherent
(biologically based), part of human evolutionary heritage, and associated
with survival advantages. What makes both ecophobia and biophilia hy-
potheses is that “the richness and depth of the subject preclude the possi-
bility of achieving any definitive ‘proof’” (ibid). What is hypothetical about
the ecophobia/biophilia spectrum is first the notion that it permeates every-
thing that we do and second that this spectrum is innate.13 If biophilia and
ecophobia are on the same spectrum, and biophilia is an adaptive strategy,
then ecophobia exists on the opposite end of the range as a maladaptive
strategy.14 Acknowledging this polemical reality, as Kellert argues, requires
24 Material Ecocriticism

Figure 1.1 B
 ear saving crow at Budapest Zoo, June 2014. Biophilia is not con-
fined to humans, as the bear in Budapest shows. Ecophobia, on the
other hand, it would seem, is distinctly human. There are no exam-
ples to suggest otherwise.
Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ_3BN0m7S8.

“the mitigation of [our] environmental crisis [that] may necessitate nothing

less than a fundamental shift in human consciousness” (26).
To reduce and reverse anthropogenic climate change, it is imperative to
interpret ecophobia as an obsolete adaptive strategy for survival.15 The ap-
proach George Williams takes to this in his highly controversial “Huxley’s
Evolution and Ethics in Sociobiological Perspective” is to damn nature:

The process and products of evolution are morally unacceptable…

and justify an… extreme condemnation of nature…. Brought before
the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos stands condemned. The conscience
of man must revolt against the gross immorality of nature…. Natu-
ral selection…can honestly be described as a process for maximizing
short-sighted selfishness.
(Williams 383–5, cited by Rolston 387)
 Material Ecocriticism 25
But the very lack of ethics behind the revolt against nature and the failure
to accept human embeddedness is an example of ecophobic human ex-
ceptionalism. A certain amount of our ecophobia and our biophilia are
hardwired. This fact does not logically warrant an ecophobic condem-
nation of nature any more than it does a biophilic celebration of nature.
The anger Williams expresses, like McEwan’s reference to Mengele, is
very revealing: these waters are roiling with controversy.
Mixing biology and literature has been described by Judith ­Heerwagen
and Gordon H. Orians as “both futile and ideologically dangerous”
(141), and oftentimes with good reason. It is also reasonable to suggest
here that without verifiable data, virtually every ecocritical reading or
theory we put forth amounts to little more than what Richard ­L ewontin
calls “an exercise in plausible story telling rather than a science of test-
able hypotheses” (11). One of the ways to avoid falling into this trap
without becoming a puppet for the sciences is to recognize that behav-
ioral traits, though often shared, are contextual and individual, meaning
that any kind of empirical or systemic analysis must also be case-by-case
and not reducible to the kind of template that is so pleasing to literary
critics. Maybe we can plop deconstruction or new historicism down on
any old text, but material ecocriticism of the sort I am proposing here
is a much more painstaking endeavor. Keeping in mind the dangers of
“literary Darwinism,” I will argue that there are genetic roots of eco-
phobia (an argument consonant with evolutionary psychology) and that
adaptive behaviors that were serviceable to a material past function dif-
ferently in the 21st century than they did, say, 12,000 years ago. Clearly
articulating ecophobia is crucial if we are to authenticate the causes of
our current environmental crisis, understand our destructive human be-
haviors, and recognize that sustainable futures will only occur through
a kinship model of humans and nature.

Volunteering to Work with Dr. Mengele

I am increasingly of the opinion, along with Joseph Carroll, that “no
reputable psychologist or anthropologist can ignore the findings of bi-
ologically oriented study, and even sociologists and political scientists
will have to accommodate themselves to the reality of what is empir-
ically known about the biological basis of human behavior” (x). The
topic has lately been getting a lot of attention. In a recent book entitled
Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman,
Helen Feder talks about “the cogent reality of materiality, […] an agen-
tial world apart from human culture” (1), of how “the need for a more
biologically, ecologically informed critique is, if anything, now more
urgent” than ever (1). Feder notes that other people have made such a
call for a more biologically informed critique, citing Glen Love’s remark
that humanists “have for the most part ignored the life sciences, espe-
cially evolutionary biology and ecology” (1). “By turning to biology,
26 Material Ecocriticism
cultural biology, and related branches of the life sciences,” Feder argues,
“we find the broader and more nuanced notion of culture necessary for
a materialist ecocritical perspective” (1). Feder proposes an “ecocul-
tural materialist” approach (2). Published in 2014, the same year as
the important Iovino/Oppermann collection entitled Material Ecocrit-
icism, Feder’s book is an explicitly materialist ecocritical inquiry that
references and builds on the work done in the field to that date. Any
meaningful analyses after 2014, therefore, of “material ecocriticism”
without reference to the work of Feder and of Iovino and Oppermann
is flawed. The strength and value of these works at least in part resides
in the persistent attention they pay to questions about agency and to
questions about agency beyond the human—or what ­David Abram has
called the “more-than-human” (15).
Material ecocriticisms (like their parent “material feminisms”) de-
mand attention to materials, of which genes are one. Yet the revulsion
toward such research has been powerful, a revulsion that Jonathan
Gottschall references in his part of the Introduction to The Literary An-
imal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative:

I quickly learned that when I spoke of human behavior, psychology,

and culture in evolutionary terms, their [other professors and grad-
uate students] minds churned through an instant and unconscious
process of translation, and they heard “Hitler,” “Galton,” “Spen-
cer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced
sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamental-
ism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”
(xx)

Although the work of scientists in gene theory, evolutionary biology, and

cognitive neurology has used ideas about genetic determinism in nefar-
ious ways throughout history, gene theory is not intrinsically ethically
compromised. The work that has been done initiating such research,
however, has been understandably defensive and tentative:

It is not clear why Darwin—whose enduring impact on knowl-

edge and politics is at least as strong as that of Hegel, Marx, or
Freud—has been left out of feminist readings. It is perhaps time
that feminist theorists begin to address with some rigor and depth
the usefulness and value of his work in rendering our conceptions
of social, cultural, political, and sexual life more complex, more
open to questions of materiality and biological organization, more
nuanced in terms of understanding both the internal and external
constraints on behavior as well as the impetus to new and creative
activities.
(Grosz 24)
 Material Ecocriticism 27
Largely missing from feminist readings, Darwin is also largely absent,
with a few exceptions, in the developing field of material ecocriticism.
Wendy Wheeler’s foundational research in biosemiotics offers pro-
foundly useful work that develops ways of understanding this topic.
Wheeler defines “biosemiotics” as “the study of signs and significance in
all living things” (The Whole Creature 19).16 Her comments at the end
of her “Postscript on Biosemiotics” serve as a suitable extended defini-
tion of biosemiotics:

Living things are not machines; their readings of the signs which
constitute their world are also always interpretations which are, ipso
facto, recursively fed back into that world where further readings
and interpretations go on producing newer layers or strata of under-
standing. It is in these constant semiosic processes that we can talk
about the ways in which worlds are both made and real.
(“Postscript” 154)

She suggests that “in understanding that semiosis and meaning-making

belongs to all living things, perhaps the biosemiotic turn will prove it-
self part of a wider movement toward reuniting what has too long been
held apart” (“The biosemiotic turn” 280). This could take us toward
mending the rift, removing the revulsion, and finally dealing with the
materiality of genes.
The revulsion toward integrating biological theories with matters of
culture, the arts, and so on is indeed well known. Wheeler refers to this
revulsion as “the puzzling story… of how many intelligent people in the
humanities and social sciences came to ignore the theory of evolution,
and to believe that everything we think we know is just an effect of spo-
ken or written language” (The Whole Creature 24). Not so puzzling,
though. Darwinism obviously, as the Gottschall quote reflects, has been
put to uses from which many of us would wish to distance ourselves.
In her daring discussion of Darwin and feminism, Elizabeth Grosz ac-
knowledges that “the suspicion with which biological accounts of human
and social life are treated by feminists, especially feminists not trained in
the biological sciences, is to some extent understandable” (23). At least
part of what is at stake here is the very question of our own agency. “If
we are our biologies,” Grosz continues, “then we need a complex and
subtle account of that biology if it is to be able to more adequately explain
the rich variability of social, cultural, and political life” (ibid).
Not all work in this area achieves the complexity and subtlety of which
Grosz speaks. Joseph Carroll, for instance, argues that “if one affirms
that science gives access to the real structure of the natural world, in-
cluding human behavior and the products of the human mind, [then] one
must necessarily reject most of the foundational theories currently ac-
cepted in the academic literary establishment” (“Biocultural theory” 21).
28 Material Ecocriticism
Yet this position assumes that such theories rest on “an overarching belief
that culture alone shapes human minds and motivates human behavior”
(ibid). Ecocritical theories in general and material ecocriticism more spe-
cifically clearly do not fit into the overarching belief structure Carroll de-
scribes. Iovino and Oppermann explain in the Introduction to Material
Ecocriticism that “the new materialism suggests that things (or matter)
draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn
structure human relations to materiality” (4).While Carroll imagines a
single-source, unidirectional causal agent as the engine of “theories cur-
rently accepted in the academic literary establishment,” the new material
turn and material ecocriticisms imagine something different, a mesh of
inter-, and intra-actions17 in which there are many material sources of
agency, including biological materialities. What Iovino and Oppermann
describe as a “porosity of biosphere and semiosphere” (5) is clearly an
acknowledgment of the entanglements of cultural, biological, and non-
biological agents.
To reject questions about what could, for lack of a better phrase, be
termed “genetic materialism,” is clearly not something which material
ecocriticism encourages. Indeed, to conduct material ecocriticism with-
out acknowledging and theorizing about the materiality and agency of
genes would be like doing oceanography without acknowledging and
theorizing about water. By the same token, however, material ecocrit-
icism, like Marxist materialism, rejects the core of genetic materialism
and its insistence that materiality of our genes is the sole source of every-
thing we do and produce. Paul D’Amato describes this idea of genes as
the motive force of culture in the following way:

This line of reasoning, which goes back to such social Darwinists of

the late nineteenth century as Sir Francis Galton and Herbert Spen-
cer, presents us with the argument that human nature is the fixed
and unchanging result of our biological makeup. Why do people be-
have the way they do? It’s part of our genetic coding. Greed, selfish-
ness, xenophobia, racism, male domination, violence, and war are
all attributed to something innate to all of us. Needless to say, this
is a very convenient argument for someone who is trying to uphold
the status quo, for it places the blame for all sorts of nasty behavior
on human traits that are beyond anyone’s power to change.
(24–25)

D’Amato’s nuanced description of genetic materialism captures the

real issue here: there is much more to the story than genes. For George
­Williams, a staunch advocate for the argument that we can—and, indeed,
should—resist “patently pernicious” (392) elements of our evolution, “an
unremitting effort is required to expand the circle of sympathy for others.
This effort is in opposition to much of human nature” (437). Yet, despite
 Material Ecocriticism 29
Wilson’s persuasive arguments for the genetic bases of biophilia, we have,
by the end of the day, no more than a hypothesis about biophilia:

These fashionable ideas, though continually offered as fact, have

no scientific foundation. Search as they may, biologists will never
find a war gene—because war isn’t innate to humans any more
than is nonviolence. It’s not that there is no biological basis for our
behavior.
(D’Amato 25)

Such is equally true for ecophobia. There is a biological basis for our behav-
ior, of course, but it is mediated by a great many other factors.

Fools Rush in
Wheeler has spoken of “the need for a return to biology—to break the
great nervous silence in progressive thought on culture” (The Whole
Creature 14), of the “need for a materialist, but non-positivistic and non-­
reductionist, account of evolutionary cultural change” (15). Indeed, but
the cultural terrain is riddled with explosive debates, and… well, fools
rush in. It is one thing to say, for instance, as Gregory Cochran and Henry
Harpending do, that a thing such as intelligence is heritable, but it is
quite another to show an intelligence gene, to try to prove in scientifically
valid ways why one group does better on tests designed to measure intel-
ligence, and why biology should take precedence over culture. It was with
considerable trepidation that I read their The 10,000 Year Explosion,
especially the chapter entitled “Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi
Jews Got Their Smarts.” As the son of two Ashkenazi Jews who survived
the Holocaust, I read with an acute alertness to possible anti-Semitism,
and although the chapter is not anti-Semitic, it does engage in groundless
musings that sit on the borders of racism, offering musings that are no less
arbitrary than nazi eugenics. There is little science here but much dubious
conjecture. The argument they make is that Ashkenazi Jews

have an unusual set of serious genetic diseases, such as T

­ ay-Sachs
disease, Gaucher’s disease, familial dysautonomia, and two different
forms of hereditary breast cancer (BRCA1 and BRCA2), and these
diseases are up to 100 times more common in Ashkenazi Jews than
in other European populations.
(138)

They go on to argue that these diseases “have effects that could plausi-
bly boost intelligence” and that Tay-Sachs disease produces “increased
levels of a characteristic storage compound (GM2 ganglioside), which
causes a marked increase in the growth of dendrites, the fine branches
30 Material Ecocriticism
that connect neurons” (200). Neither is this proof of a genetic inheri-
tance of intelligence, nor is it real science, since it ignores an enormity of
cultural factors that distinguish observant Judaism from other cultures.
We see here not a word about cultural factors, such as the emphasis
within Judaism on education and study and the resulting early language
acquisition required for such study, the study of the Torah being one of
the commandments (mitzvah) of Judaism.
Cochran and Harpending’s chapter is a re-working of an article
entitled “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” which received
substantial attention. In a New York Magazine feature entitled “Are
Jews Smarter?,” Jennifer Senior nicely summarizes some of the more
pointed responses:

the fact that it did not meet the standards of traditional scientific
scholarship, Harpending and Cochran’s paper attracted a barrage of
criticism from mainstream geneticists, historians, and social scientists.
“It’s bad science—not because it’s provocative, but because it’s
bad genetics and bad epidemiology,” says Harry Ostrer, head of
NYU’s human-genetics program.
“I see no positive impact from this,” says Neil Risch, one of the
few geneticists who’s dipped his oar into the treacherous waters of
race and genetics. “When the guys at the University of Utah said
they’d discovered cold fusion, did that have a positive impact?”
“I’d actually call the study bullshit,” says Sander Gilman, a histo-
rian at Emory University, “if I didn’t feel its idea were so insulting.”
(see Senior, Works Cited)

As Senior goes on to note, “the problem with theories that exploit ste-
reotypes… [is that] they’re titillating, sure, but also handy refuges for the
intellectually lazy” (ibid).
Obviously, it is not all just about genes. In arguing that “there is more
to heredity than genes,” Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb cogently ex-
plain in Evolution in Four Dimensions,

Molecular biology has shown that many of the old assumptions

about the genetic system, which is the basis of present-day neo-­
Darwinian theory, are incorrect. It has also shown that cells can
transmit information to daughter cells through non-DNA (epigen-
etic) inheritance. This means that all organisms have at least two
systems of heredity. In addition, many animals transmit informa-
tion to others by behavioral means, which gives them a third hered-
ity system. And we humans have a fourth, because symbol-based
inheritance, particularly language, plays a substantial role in
our evolution. It is therefore quite wrong to think about hered-
ity and evolution solely in terms of the genetic system. Epigenetic,
 Material Ecocriticism 31
behavioural, and symbolic inheritance also provide variation on
which natural selection can act.
(1)

Yet, even in this mindful and careful discussion, the currents are deep
and treacherous. Among scientists, the concept of epigenetics, for in-
stance, is by no means uncontentious. Mark Ptashne has defined “epi-
genetic” as “a change in the state of expression of a gene that does not
involve a mutation, but that is nevertheless inherited in the absence of
the signal or event that initiated the change” (R233).18 A valid scientific
basis for the notion is perhaps spotty, and evolutionary biologists have
had to contend with “pseudo gene genies” (see Rutherford, Works Cited)
and “quacks” (see Gorski, Works Cited).19
What I’m not proposing here is a search of causal evolutionary sources
for the particularities of literary texts (the use of this word over that, the
choice of such-and-such clusters of images, the development of this theme
or that theme, the writing of so-and-so’s dialogue as X or Y, and so on).
So, while, as Wilson puts it, “culture helps to select the mutating and
recombining genes that underlie culture” (Consilience 179), the story,
as he well knows, doesn’t end there; indeed, as he goes on to explain,
although “complexes of gene-based epigenetic rules predispose people
to invent and adopt such conventions… genes do not specify elaborate
conventions such as totemism, elder councils, and religious ceremonies.
To the best of my knowledge no serious scientist or humanities scholar
has ever suggested such a thing” (181). But even if genes did do such
things as specify elaborate social conventions, proving this would be
an entirely different matter. To understand material causation, we must
first analyze genes and hardwiring, and then look beyond them. The
ecophobia hypothesis, therefore, while acknowledging genetic predispo-
sitions to certain anti-environment behaviors, does not theorize about a
humanity condemned to genetic programming, incapable of making eth-
ical choices. The ecophobia hypothesis suggests that the ethical choices
we make are as important as our genetic inheritance.
It is dubious whether we actually have the capacity to make changes
that are necessary for our survival. In his comments about McEwan’s
Solar, Adam Trexler dryly observes that “genes don’t grant humans the
foresight to prevent extinction” (49). The narrative voice in Nathaniel
Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow takes much the same stance: “evolution
ruled against the fearless. The dodo, the most trusting and friendly ani-
mal that mankind had ever encountered, was first identified in 1581. The
bird was extinct less than a century later” (62). While the aggregational
effects of Earth’s climate change are clearly too large in scope for us to
see and too gradual for us to perceive without the kind of distancing that
history offers, it is still a relatively quick event: relative, that is, to human
and nonhuman life in their capacities to adapt—hence, as many scholars
32 Material Ecocriticism
have noted, we are in the middle of “the sixth extinction.”20 Our behav-
ior needs to change because genes simply won’t change quickly enough.
For Michael Beard, it will not be people that change: “For humanity en
masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions
the ordinary compulsions of self-interest” (McEwan 172). The materi-
ality of his body, his genetic predispositions, it seems, are the motive
force of this novel, and Beard dismisses ethics and virtue as “too passive,
too narrow… a weak force” (ibid). We can’t afford to dismiss ethics or
genes. They are both central to our agency, to what we do, to our be-
haviors, and to our participation in the ecophobia/biophilia spectrum.

Conclusions
Perhaps one of the reasons that mainstream media representations of
climate change looks so much like the news about terrorism is that both
climate change and terrorism jerk our nerves about what we can control
and what we can’t control, about where our agency stops. As E. Ann
Kaplan notes, “where the ‘self’ begins and cultural reactions end may
seem impossible to determine” (Trauma Culture 2).
Serenella Iovino has proposed that “The ‘material turn’ is the search
for new conceptual models apt to theorize the connections between mat-
ter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures,
and meanings on the other side” (“Steps to a Material Ecocriticism”
450). It is reasonable to see our genes as a profoundly important mate-
rial, deeply relevant to our anxieties about agency.
It has always seemed to me politically suspect to want to talk about
evolution in the same breath as culture, yet it also seems a kind of omis-
sion not to do so, not to recognize and explore the position held by some
that “the ultimate explanation for cultural phenomena lies in under-
standing the genetic and cultural evolutionary processes that generate
them” (Richerson and Boyd 238). To talk about biophilia meaningfully
(and the term is one that has been well received among ecocritics), W
­ ilson
insists that we talk within the context of evolutionary biology. To ex-
plore genetic materialism, therefore, is to follow through on ­Wilson’s
challenge, and although Wilson does not acknowledge the matter of eco-
phobia, the implications for the human condition are clear: theorizing
ecophobia within the context of genetic materialism is essential.
The final word should go to Wheeler, whose extensive and pioneer-
ing work on biosemiotics is so very productive and inspiring. We need,
she argues, “radically to reconsider what we might mean when we talk
about mind, consciousness, and intentionality” (“Natural Play, Natural
Metaphor” 69), and a “view of culture as natural and evolutionary can
help us to a more nuanced view of the evolution of ideas, and the value
of different aspects of the experience of the human semiotic Umwelt”
(“Postscript on biosemiotics” 148). It is difficult to imagine how the fu-
ture of material ecocriticism could be otherwise.
 Material Ecocriticism 33
Notes
1 Adam Trexler observes that Michael Beard’s relationships and behaviors
“are overdetermined by an evolutionary drive to compete and dominate
against members of the same species” (48). Beard embodies excessive appe-
tites, and he compulsively seeks to satisfy these appetites.
2 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a pre-Darwinian theorist who tried to under-
stand how inheritance works. He is most known for his theory of 1801
(some fifty-eight years before Darwin’s theory of natural selection in On the
Origin of Species) that changes occurring within an organism’s lifetime can
be inherited by the offspring. I will discuss Lamarck and the larger question
of epigenesis below.
3 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman is one of a grow-
ing number of books that productively theorizes about the vitality, force,
and agency of non-biotic things.
4 It is difficult, for instance, to imagine how discrimination on the basis of
gender, sexual, or racial difference could ever have been an evolutionary ne-
cessity for continued human survival. Recognizing the social ideologies of
misogyny, homophobia, and racism when they happen is nuanced in very
different ways than is recognizing ecophobia. As a teenager, I was told that
using the word “girl” to describe women is misogynistic, similar to the anal-
ogy of the racist use of “boy” to describe African-American men. Antipathies
and ecophobia toward nature, on the other hand, often arise from ratio-
nally perceived threats to physical survival, such as tsunamis or earthquakes.
­Dangerous manifestations of nature do not, in themselves, constitute ecopho-
bia. Nor, for that matter, is controlling nature ipso facto ecophobic.
5 Wilson shares this concern in Biophilia about what he terms “surface ­ethics”
(126).
6 See Barad.
7 Karen Thornber scrupulously lists—in her encyclopedic 688 page Ecoambi-
guity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures—numerous mono-
graphs that explain what she sees as a reverence for nature that stands in
ambiguous contrast with less reverential views. But in the interests of ad-
vancing her own thesis on “ecoambiguity,” a term at best problematical,
Thornber too readily dispenses with the notion of ecophobia. As I have ar-
gued elsewhere,
Of course, ambiguity is everywhere, but what would happen if we really
did what Thornber is suggesting and walked away from the concept of
ecophobia (or biophilia, for that matter) in favor of ecoambiguity? One
way to come at this question is to work through an analogous model
and to ask what would happen if we decided against theorizing about
homophobia in favor of homoambiguity. Certainly a similar case for ho-
moambiguity over homophobia could be made analogously to the case
Thornber makes for ecoambiguity over ecophobia. But who would make
such a case, and for what reason? What would be the politics of such a
stance toward the notion of homophobia? What kind of denial would this
be? And what position(s) would such a denial implicitly endorse? What
would happen if, following the same analogous pattern, Thornber argued
for gynoambiguity over misogyny? Again, what would be the politics of
such a stance toward the notion of misogyny? What kind of denial would
this be? And what position(s) would such a denial implicitly endorse?
(“Reading Ecoambiguity” 134)
While of course there is no single approach that will shed light on and an-
swer all questions about how to deal with the contradictions the literature
34 Material Ecocriticism
Thornber presents offers, surely the privileging of the human over the non-
human is central to everything that is going on in such texts and in theoriz-
ing about such texts. If such is the case (as I firmly believe that it is), then
ambiguity is an effect rather than a cause, a branch rather than a root, a
result rather than a reason. And if this is the case (and, again, it is difficult
to see how such is not the case), then how do we address the root issue here,
the anthropocentrism that keeps the human in a sanctified place above and
immune from everything nonhuman? (Ibid 134–5)
8 See AnimalEQUALITY, Works Cited.
9 Koneswaran and Nierenberg indicate that the Food and Agriculture Orga-
nization of the United Nations deems farmed animals a significant environ-
mental threat, emitting “18%, or nearly one-fifth, of human-induced GHG
emissions, more than the transportation sector.”
10 I am indebted to Sophie Christman for this turn of phrase.
11 An amateur video recording by Aleksander Medveš of a bear rescuing a
crow at the Budapest Zoo in June 2014 was posted and went viral: the stills
in Figure 1.1 are from that video. See Medveš, Works Cited.
12 As moral indifference per se is not ecophobia, neither is fear. Yi-Fu Tuan
speaks eloquently on the necessity of fear for survival: “To survive, animals
must be sensitive to danger signals; they must know fear. Human beings,
individually and collectively, are no exception” (35).
13 This spectrum, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains in his Introduction to
­Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, “is an unfinishable totality”
(xxiii).
14 There is a long history of adaptive responses that have perhaps been useful
for our survival but have become long obsolete: the appendix, the tailbone,
wisdom teeth, and so on.
15 See also Estok (“Tracking Ecophobia” 32).
16 For an extensive history of biosemiotics, see Favareau, Works Cited.
17 “Intra-action” is a term developed by quantum physicist Karen Barad, who
explains that
the neologism ‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entan-
gled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual term ‘interaction,’ which
assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their in-
teraction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do
not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. It is important
to note that the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not ab-
solute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual
entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements.
(33, emphasis in original)
18 On some of the disputes associated with the term, see Pearson, Works Cited.
19 Discussing C.H. Waddington’s 1930s experiment involving fruit flies and
“why epigenetics is not a Darwinian heresy,” Steven Rose explains that La-
marckism assumes that “experiences during the lifetime of an organism can
also be inherited or transferred to the next generation.” This is “a preference
acquired during the lifetime of one organism [and] transmitted generation-
ally down to others. This is epigenetic inheritance” (Rose, cited slightly dif-
ferently in Christman, chapter 3, forthcoming).
20 See, for instance, Kolbert; Leakey and Lewin; Heise; and Dawson, Works
Cited.
2 Terror and Ecophobia

After the World Trade Center, and after Katrina, few of us are under
the illusion that the United States is sovereign in any absolute sense. The
nation seems to have come literally “unbundled” before our eyes, its
fabric of life torn apart by extremist groups, and by physical forces of
even greater scope, wrought by climate change.
(Wai Chee Dimock 1)

In returning to science fiction and recognizing a new dystopian genre in

the disaster films, it is possible to see their proliferation in the wake of
9/11. I have no doubt that 9/11 seriously destabilized an American soci-
ety that had previously seen itself as secure and invulnerable.
(Kaplan 3)

In “Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror,” I argued that “imagining terror

on the one hand and conceptualizing hostile environments on the other”
(1) is important for any theorization about ecophobia. E. Ann Kaplan
has since published a remarkable set of observations linking climate
change narratives with discourses about terror and 9/11. While there
is an increasing body of exciting work suggesting links between terror
narratives and ecomedia, there remains a lack of scholarship investigat-
ing the intersections among terror and ecophobic narratives. Wai Chee
Dimock’s drawing together of terror narratives and ecomedia suggests
several things: first, that terror and climate change narratives should be
understood as both producing and depending on fear; second, that the
fear generated by post-9/11 narratives (xenophobia and racism) and by
climate change discourses (ecophobia) are more than simply isomorphic-
ally similar and are, in fact, mutually interdependent; and third, that
mainstream media often produces a kind of numbness and immobiliz-
ing disquiet to the very matters it reports. This numbness and sense of
helplessness, in turn, allow the media to continue to exploit both racism
and ecophobia. The fall that terror and climate prompts us to imagine
is generically tragic, requiring us to reimagine a sufficiently expansive
scope for tragic theory to accommodate understanding of nature and its
tragic reconstitution through ecophobia. These are the main lines this
chapter follows.
36 Terror and Ecophobia
In the global community that has emerged after the 9/11 terror at-
tacks, the immediacy, accessibility, and urgency of writing about the
world have created new narrative forms that require new models of un-
derstanding. Flooded with images that have taken on a life of their own,
where agential images1 make their own connections, we are living in
increasingly dangerous times. When images of terror and environmen-
tal crises fuse, adversarial boundaries develop and become entrenched.
As unapologetically Islamophic as it is ecophobic, the media becomes a
perfect ground for someone such as George W. Bush (and now Trump)
to plant divisiveness and destruction.
The “link between terror and territory” (Borradori xiii) is as unmis-
takably geopolitical as it is environmental. Conveyed through narratives
infused with what can only be called a life writing impulse, the new
genres of post-9/11 literature and films have sought to restabilize the
suddenly unstable ontologies that the West has come to inhabit, exploit-
ing the conceptual indeterminacies of terror and war. Along with liter-
ary and other artistic cultural documents, there has been a phenomenal
barrage of mass media narratives that have urgently sought such stabil-
ity. One of the effects of this bid for ontological stability has, ironically,
been a destabilizing of generic forms, with news reportage blending into
personal narratives, fact and fiction collapsing into each other, and ma-
teriality creeping out of reach from a constituency whose attention is at
best increasingly partial. The implicit and explicit indifference toward
the natural environment in dystopic visions of both the present and the
future, and the apocalyptic, militaristic model out of which these narra-
tives grow manifests ecophobia.
Reputable mainstream media in fully industrialized nations offer a
constant barrage of images and narratives about the state of the world
that have the effect of producing spectatorial viewers who, though they
may indeed care about the traumas they witness, are, nevertheless, effec-
tively disempowered by the volume and speed of the images. Post-9/11
narratives about the “war on terror” depend on and develop a racist
and Islamophobic ethics; narratives about climate change depend on
and develop an ecophobic ethics. Twenty-first century mainstream news
offers frenetic and urgent reports, and the target audience seems to lap
it up. Ever-evolving forms of media make constant consumption more
and more accessible, and yet there is no satiation: media evolves, terror
groups become more and more repulsive, and our hunger for newer and
more startling material grows. At some point, the question of how the
media and the message converge (an idea that goes back to Marshall
McLuhan) must arise. At some point, the effect of the speed at which
narratives appear and disappear, the sheer ephemerality of it all, and
the implications that this has on our continually divided and partial
attention must be addressed. What are the implications of how digital
media normalize racism and ecophobia, and how do these affect how we
 Terror and Ecophobia 37
organize our lives? To what degree do these media and their narratives
produce a kind of indifference to the objects of the narrative, and how
does the world (environmental and social), therefore, become an object
of indifference and ethical inconsiderability?
Like European colonialism before it, Daish (the group calling it-
self ISIS) is the expression and enactment of a deadly combination of
indifferences that grow out of a sense both of exceptionalism and of
ethnocentrism. One result of this sense of exceptionalism is an implied
exploitation of the natural environment, one rooted in anthropocentric
arrogance, disavowal of interdependence, and affirmations of sovereign
power over other forms of life. Movements of people through environ-
ments have roots in environmental factors that have long played a role
in migration patterns as well as in conflicts, and there are clear rela-
tions between climate change, on the one hand, and war, migration,
and terror, on the other. A March 2015 article entitled “New Study
Says Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian Civil War” (see Holthaus)
argues, for instance, that there are relationships between the historic
drought (2006–2010) that afflicted Syria, the events apparently happen-
ing within that country now, and the creation and movements of Daish
(see also Strozier and Berkell; Fountain; and Abrams). If the hypothesis
is to have real credibility in claiming that environmental issues are re-
lated to the development of things such as Daish, then there needs to be
empirical evidence. And then there is the question of “how to translate
empirical knowledge of the world into nonfictional text, and how to
portray the impact of the nonhuman world on the human” (Allister 2).
Simply drawing a link between drought and the growth of a terror group
looks ecophobic, nature being to blame in such a vision, even though
the drought itself was an effect of anthropogenic forces. Data showing
a coinciding of drought and terrorism may lead to empirical data about
a causal relationship between the two, but representing nature as the
culprit behind terrorism is ecophobic. Period. Even so, such an idea, be-
cause it strikes so visceral a nerve is marketable indeed.
Whether rooted (at least in part) in environmental issues such as food
shortages, resource shortages, or water shortages, events such as Eu-
ropean colonialism and the more contemporary advance of Daish are
conscripted to compelling narratives that develop a story of collective
memory. Each defined by an ethics of exclusion, the anthropocentrism
and ethnocentrism that have largely delineated the patterns of migra-
tion, settlement, and colonization (and therefore our world map) have
also revealed the unexpectedly radical reach of mortal dangers. When
Daish beheads dozens of Christians and when Hamas fires missiles into
a civilian Jewish population, as when the loggers of British Columbia
were cutting down thousand-year-old forests and leaving a horrendously
denuded landscape, the precondition for these violent narratives of cul-
tural progress is callous indifference or outright aversion to natural
38 Terror and Ecophobia
environments. If the giant step in the West out of medieval ontologies
was the Renaissance triumph of humanism, America took it one step
further. In imagining itself in isolation, America effectively drew the line
between the human and the nonhuman. The ideologies of nationhood
create and define not only land boundaries but also ethical schema that
define our intellectual categorizations of the natural environment. 2 Two
hundred years ago, when the United States was still young, Alexis de
Tocqueville cautioned against a society wherein “each citizen… gener-
ally spends his time considering the interests of a very insignificant per-
son, namely himself” (627) and claimed that in such a state where “all a
man’s interests are limited to those near himself, folk… form the habit of
thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny
is in their hands” (653–4). One of the things 9/11 revealed is that destiny
is clearly not in their hands. To what extent is this a crisis of a nation
under siege, this “city upon a hill” reduced to dust and debris, its deni-
zens indistinguishable from the ruins through which they walk, a “scary
disconnection of the human from the not-human” (Bell 33)? (Figure 2.1)
The trauma of erasure effected by the religiously motivated attacks
and the chaos brought to New York City, occurring at the beginning of
the 21st century out of strong religious motivations, positions post-9/11
narratives within a tradition strongly evocative of apocalyptic discourse.
Coverage of Hurricane Katrina had similar epic, biblical overtones. The
destruction of a city (or the imagined destruction of a city) collapses
any viable concept of “the human” since the presumption of the modern

Figure 2.1 T
 he Semoilova photo of dust-covered people produces an affect
of dislocation, a blurring of real, unreal, and surreal. The Watson
photo is of a dust- and debris-covered statue. The blurring of human
and nonhuman challenges human exceptionalism here, arousing an
ecophobic recoil from the fact of embeddedness within a nonhuman
material world.
Source: AP Photo/Gulnara Samoilova, www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-na-
911-before-after-­slider-htmlstory.html/James Robert Watson, www.jamesrobertwatson.
com/nycpixwtc.html.
 Terror and Ecophobia 39
city as a concept rests on an aversion to the natural world, which is
perceived as a hostile, alien, and distinct entity separate from human
sovereignty. Ζωη, bloss leben, vita nuda, bare life, unaccommodated
man: each of these terms describe life outside of protective social and
political structures (Agamben 88), as it were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s
terminology, succinctly drawn in his phrase “bare life.” Charles T. Lee
defines Agambenian “bare life” usefully as “human subjects reduced to
a naked depoliticized state without official status and juridical rights”
(57). ­Terrorism is, by its very nature, engaged in the reduction of human
subjects to bare life, and although this is not the same as their reduction
to the plane of nonhuman animals, the isomorphic similarities between
bare life and nonhuman life are obviously substantial. Agamben himself
says this: “bare life… [is] a zone of indistinction and continuous transi-
tion between man and beast, nature and culture” (109). Post-9/11 litera-
ture thus is as much about the dislocation of humanity from the human
as it is about human dislocation from social sovereignty. The narrative
implications abound in this warlike space.
As Jeffrey C. Alexander explains, one of the responses to cultural
trauma “is to restore collective psychological health by lifting societal
repression and restoring memory” (7), and what we find in post-9/11
narratives is a creation of collective cultural memories of the present
that speculate on uncertain futures—futures derived from the fear and
loathing that come about with permeable boundaries. We see this in
the two senses in which we can talk about post-9/11 literature—in the
literal sense of what has been written after 9/11 and in the sense of liter-
ature written about the event, literature that “takes the measure of [the]
sense of crisis that has seemed to haunt the West, and the United States
in particular, ever since the destruction of the World Trade ­Center”
(Gray 39–40). In the former, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offers a
particularly grim and gray vision of a postapocalyptic world where the
sharpness of everything has diminished. Color is absent, and boundaries
have disappeared. Home as a conceptual material reality is gone, as is
civilization. A man and his son walk through a devastated landscape,
the prey of what remains of humanity. In danger of becoming victims of
cannibalism, the man and the boy are indistinguishable from the non-
human in an environment that is palpably hostile. The “human” is as
readily prey as predator. The very concept of “the human” has collapsed
in this story of individual lives, a story to come that is really ours. It is a
fictional story (like the film The Age of Stupid or the Oreskes/Conway
future history narrative The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View
from the Future3), a kind of parable that tells a story from our current
trajectory, a warning for humanity no less potent and personal than the
images and stories about terrorism about which Giovanna Borradori has
written (xiii). In a post-9/11 world, writing the lives that are likely to
happen has become more urgent perhaps than writing those that have
40 Terror and Ecophobia
already happened. The didactic pressure motivating it, certainly, is the
animalistic impulse to survive. Our trajectories are grim and frighten-
ing, promising great losses. Of these, perhaps the most frightening is the
prospect of the loss of agency.
Fear of a loss of agency does strange things to people. Fear of the loss of
agency and the loss of predictability are what form the core of ecophobia,
and it is a fear of a loss of agency (or the proximity of things that would
cause such a loss) that is behind our primary responses, at least, to pain,
death, and even sleep. When Dimock argues that one way to imagine
tragedy is “as a particular kind of irony—an irony of scale—one that
arises when the gravest consequences fall where our cognitive powers are
least adequate” (69), a sudden reversal Aristotle called peripeteia, we have
to wonder if it is more the case of an irony of proximity (of things we ob-
sess over but that can take away agency) than of scale (I will discuss scale
in Chapter 4). Obsessed though we are with pain (which is an undeniably
central part of human ontology), proximity is the key here: pain at a safe
and controlled distance is fine, distance both in terms of affect and space.
Definitions of tragedy (and we do well to remember that tragedies
are enacted through the body) almost invariably distance the concepts
of danger, pain, and suffering by elevating and ennobling them, and
it is important to consider how we might better understand precisely
relationships between tragedy and ecophobia. Theorists of tragedy have
gone far in describing the human exceptionalism that the genre pro-
motes. Gilbert Murray argues that tragedy “attests the triumph of the
human soul over suffering and disaster” (66), George Steiner argues that
suffering “hallows” the victim as if he/she “had passed through fire”
(10), and Terry Eagleton (summarizing Schiller) argues that “the pro-
tagonist shakes himself free from the compulsive forces of Nature and
exultantly affirms his absolute freedom of will in the face of a drearily
prosaic necessity” (32). Pain brings us to the limits of who we are and
threatens to take us beyond, a point Elaine Scarry made long ago about
how pain makes the self disintegrate (35). That’s a good reason to keep
it at a safe distance. One of the fundamentally different things about this
century from the previous one is the proximity of unpredictable mate-
rial danger. Those odd and terrifying moments when the world held its
breath as the clock ticked twelve-ward ended up a dud of a firecracker
ringing in 2000. The silence of the fireworks would not last long.4
From Y2K to 9/11 to Katrina, we may rightly be said to have en-
tered an Age of Terror. Unpredictability has become the new norm for
an increasingly anxious global community and how it sees both social
conflict and environmental events. Part of our inability to respond effec-
tively to these events, as I noted earlier, has to do with the speed and vi-
olence (and, to some degree, the ephemerality) of the images we receive.
Another critical issue here, however, is what Kaplan describes as
“pretrauma,” a condition in which “people unconsciously suffer from
 Terror and Ecophobia 41
an immobilizing anticipatory anxiety about the future” (Climate xix).
Kaplan goes on to explain that “future time is a major theme, along
with thinking through the meanings and cultural work (including that
pertaining to race and gender) that dystopian pretrauma imaginaries
perform in our newly terrorized historical era” (4). Because the sense of
a fall is so central to these imaginaries, it is crucial here to return to the-
ories about tragedy and how the genre relates to terror and ecophobia.
The stage of Tragedy, like the disaster and terror narratives (real and fic-
tional) that have recently been flooding the market, alternately distance,
or make us relive or fantasize about, the material realities that surround
us. Perhaps all the world’s a stage, but all of the stages are not the world.
The arrogance of humanism is its belief that all of the stages are the
world. Positing the notion of agency in matter, materialist ecocriti-
cisms challenge human exceptionalism and unseat humanity from its
self-­appointed onto-epistemological throne, its imagined singular em-
bodiment of agency, subjectivity, and ethical entitlements. Stacy Alaimo
makes a similar point, discussing what she terms “transcorporeality.”
Citing Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, Alaimo maintains that

If the predominant understanding of environmental ethics has been

that of a circle that has expanded in such a way as to grant ‘moral con-
sideration to animals, to plants, to [nonhuman] species, even to eco-
systems and the Earth’ [“Light and Rolston” 7], trans-­corporeality
denies the human subject the sovereign, central position.
(Bodily 16)

Literary representations of such unseatings have tended not to be celebra-

tory: tragedy does not celebrate the rise and preeminence of the self but
rather mopes and whines about its impossibility, an impossibility rooted
in isolation. The spatial and environmental dimensions of tragedy chart
connections, connections that make impossible the preeminent self.
Lear’s inability to separate himself from the natural environment is his
tragedy. What would the play be without his being locked outside in the
storm? His tragedy is his failure to see himself as embedded in materi-
als with “interacting agencies” (Iovino “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism”
138). One of the methods of refusing to recognize and accept these agencies
and of attempting to assert and maintain control over nature is discursive
and has to do with naming things such as extreme weather events. Naming
our environmental disasters—Sandy, Katrina, Ivan, and so on—bestows
subjectivity. The ecophobic ferocity of the discourses that accompany the
production of these subjects needs our attention. There are several reasons
for this. One of these is that the writing of hostile environmental subjects
is—at least in the 21st century—deeply implicated in many other things.
The sheer complexity and size of ecophobia is daunting, and the data
streaming in by the second can be overwhelming: “since the attacks of
42 Terror and Ecophobia
9/11, the media have been bombarding the world with images and sto-
ries about terrorism” (Borradori xiii), but that is not what the problem is.
The problems we face do not have to do with “too much data” but rather
with too little ability to translate data into knowledge and to translate
that knowledge into the kinds of affect that produce real (and really
necessary) action. For all of the potential good of the massive exposure
to media representations of important issues (for instance, ecological
issues), overexposure and commercialism also produce their own kind of
fatigue about a heavily stressed and degraded environment. Responses in
Vancouver or Boston, say, to environmental issues such as severe drought
in the Middle East may be weak, an effect both of the numbness that
results from over-stimulation and of the perceived distance between the
site of the news and the reception of it. Similarly, responses in Vancouver
or Boston, say, to news about Daish may be also weak, again an effect
both of the numbness that results from over-stimulation and the distanc-
ing effect this has (which, compounding with the real physical distance
of Vancouver and Boston from the news sites, results in a surreal blur).
Miming life writing, news media try to bring the stories to a more per-
sonal level. Not just news media: scholarly work, too, often begins with
a “where I was when it happened” prologue, both effectively situating
the author and personalizing the narrative. In some ways, it seems that
narrative itself has changed since September 11, 2001.
Since 9/11, reports about environmental crises and terror have vied with
each other for ascendancy, sometimes fusing, in our narratives of future
ruin. At the time of my writing this article, there have been hundreds
of songs, films, stories, and poems produced in response to 9/11, with a
range of topics covering an immense area, each category of which itself
is multi-faceted. Among the literary critiques of responses to 9/11 alone,
for instance, are condemnations of censorship, of discriminatory back-
lash, and of unjust military actions (indeed, of war crimes by the United
States—of this genre, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is the most fa-
mous). Critiques of responses are only some of a range of 9/11 literary
reactions. Others include attempts (i) to understand the politics of what
happened and the political fallout to it (both in terms of domestic Amer-
ican and international politics); (ii) to recreate a mimetic repetition of the
experience of the chaos for those who were not there; (iii) to understand
9/11 as an event in the daily lives and activities of average Americans;
and (iv) to “understand the longer-term psychological effects of terrorism
on families, communities, and nations” (Aronstein), of which Art Spiegel-
man’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close are perhaps the more prominent examples. Per-
haps most remarkable about post-9/11 scholarship and cultural produc-
tions is the sense of commitment it bears: Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder
Mehan argue that “Post 9/11, it no longer seems responsible for theo-
rists to engage in apolitical analysis,” and “there is an obligation to take
 Terror and Ecophobia 43
theory out of the classroom and the library, and to bring it into the public
arena” (18). This is precisely what ecocriticism has sought to do, and a
large part of the ecophobia hypothesis is that theorizing is sometimes a
precondition and basis for activism.
One of the most amazing recent efforts to put theory about terror into
a frame that is both publicly relevant and explicitly activist has come
from Jasbir Puar’s book entitled Terrorist Assemblages: “9/11 … [is] a
particular turning point or a central generator of desires for expediency,
rapidity, political innovativeness” (xviii). Within the joint narratives of
terror and climate change, something is going on. There is a synchronic-
ity of terror and climate change narratives that mainstream news media
mobilizes with vociferous distress, and the consumption of these nar-
ratives is disturbing because of the oppressive messages (homophobia,
ecophobia) that the narratives carry. Puar theorizes about the increasing
use of the figure of “the queer” as traitor to the nation (a figure of espio-
nage and terror), at the imagining of gay marriage as “the worst form of
terrorism” and gay couples as “domestic terrorists,” and at the “effusive
discomfort with the unknowability of these bodies … the terrorist …
is an unfathomable, unknowable, and hysterical monstrosity” (xxiii).
She thus indicts many who might wish to imagine the roots being much
further away. Understanding the “constructions of terror and terrorist
bodies” (Puar xxiv) is key to resisting participation and to unlearning
ecophobic responses. This unlearning is activism.
Sucked into a patriotic vortex (even if we are not American) of national-
ist, heterosexist, White, ableist, ageist, classist, ecophobic, A
­ merican excep-
tionalism, we are complicit in the making of the terrorist ­assemblage—and
it is a vast one, certainly not confined to descriptions of people who fly
planes into buildings, any more than crimes against nature are limited to
Shell, ConAgra, and Peabody Energy. It is everyone. No one is somehow
exempt, somehow a nonparticipatory and passive victim.
Increasingly, humanity imagines itself under siege and vulnerable. Per-
haps it is a sign of our maturity as a species that we see and try to un-
derstand the threats to our survival: colony collapse disorder, new and
devastating diseases, global warming, 9/11 and terrorism, increasing
food, water, and resource shortages, and so on. Perhaps it is a sign of our
intelligence and wisdom that we narrativize our visions of apocalypse
and that we entertain ourselves with stories of our own vulnerability be-
fore forces which we perceive as profoundly—indeed, lethally—violent
toward our very existence.
Perhaps our perceptions and almost fetishistic representations of our-
selves as being under siege signals changes in our ethics toward other
people and toward the natural environment. Yet, to borrow the words of
political theorist Jane Bennett, “we continue to produce and consume in
the same violently reckless ways” as if we do not take our own violence
(or the violent reactions to it) at all seriously (113)—at least not on a
44 Terror and Ecophobia
level that would cause us to change our behaviors. Part of this violence
has to do with our world views that are formed and constellated largely
through the media.
For some time now, we have seen the world in high-resolution im-
ages that travel with inconceivable speed throughout many parts of the
world. The sheer surfeit of information produces its own effects, and
the “kicks just keep getting harder to find” (to cite from the Paul Revere
and the Raiders). We need more the more we get, but there is a numb-
ing effect (and my very repetition of this proves how numbing surfeit
is) to all of this apocalyptic narrative—whether it is news, film, music,
print, or other media—with which we increasingly entertain ourselves.
Disastrous (as well as terrorist) events “have a visceral, eye-catching and
page turning power,” a power that materializes the present and demate-
rializes more longue durée emergencies (Nixon 3). Rob Nixon wonders
“how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow
moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star
nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the
sensation-driven technologies of our image world” (3). Nixon’s concern
is with bringing those slow disasters which do not seem immediate into
public consciousness, those events which are not Katrina or 9/11, those
slow and predictable ecological deaths. Perhaps one of the reasons these
are difficult to bring into public consciousness is the very fact that they
are more predictable than the sudden surprises which kill thousands. 5
Representations of disaster and environmental adversity, meanwhile, of-
ten take the same shape and effect of representations of terror, and we
might as easily use a description of terrorism to designate a weather event
such as Katrina as “an evil that lurks beyond the pale of diplomacy, in-
ternational relations, or the rule of law” (Nichols 136). Sensational news
stimulates people into action, and news about terror and environment
have extended the focus of tragedy from the fall of individuals to much
broader considerations (the fall nations—even of our entire species), put-
ting ecocriticism in a good position to induce changes in our ecophobic
behaviors. Ecocriticism in an age of terror is well situated to challenge
how we see and represent the world and to do so specifically by unveiling
the dishonesty and violence that populate our narratives and our imagi-
nation about the natural world.
Tragedy, for instance, is no longer the sole domain of humanity:
“Rather than limiting tragedy to an artistic genre — written by a play-
wright and performed on stage — it is helpful to loosen up these crite-
ria, giving it much broader scope. For tragedy does not always hinge
on human authors and human victims” (Dimock 68). The collapse and
derogation of the natural environment is a tragedy in itself: our being
dislodged and our troubled individuality are surely tragic too, but the
fall of that bigger body of which we are a part—the fall of nature, which
is caused by ecophobia—is a tragic one.
 Terror and Ecophobia 45
The question is not whether nature will survive: it will, but it will
be diminished. The question—if we may borrow a line from Robert
Frost—“is what to make of a diminished thing” (118). We will have to
face this reality, a world with diminished diversity and wonders, fewer
species, less of the conveniences we currently enjoy; less of the colors,
flavors, smells, sights, sounds, and tastes of nature; less coral reefs and
clean air, less forests and starfish, less production, less consumption,
and less waste. It will mean a fall from where we are, a fall through our
own fault, so to speak. This is the essence of Tragedy, and it is no longer
just a human thing. Theorizing tragedy for the modern world has been
under-researched but is necessary and urgent. Theorizing tragedy to ad-
dress the diminishing of nature (a diminishing that is itself a direct result
of ecophobia) is more than an act of political engagement: it is activist
in the sense that it prompts changes in the way we understand, observe,
and behave toward nature. Along with the evolution of humanist notions
of rights extending beyond the human, tragic theory too must evolve to
address what it is that patterns the perception and representation of eco-
logical disasters as both terrorism and tragedy: “The moments of crisis
in a community’s understanding of itself” (Poole 36) that tragedy stages
are moments in the narrative of ecophobia.
Terror remains one of the few things that still evokes our sense of trag-
edy, stimulating us into action. Discussing 9/11, Bill Nichols notes that
“we respond to this initial disturbance with a violent launching of narra-
tive energy, but with what heroes and villains, with what sense of agency
and responsibility, suspense and resolution shall we populate this narra-
tive?” (131). One of the problems is that the tragedies we want to write
from our current contexts are inconsonant with traditional definitions of
what tragedy actually signifies. It is hard to personify those heroes and
villains in climate change. Calling nature an angry mother won’t do. Wai
Chee Dimock wonders about the capacity of tragedy to represent the big
material realities of environmental disasters, some immediate and some
slow: “what sort of analytic language can capture this kind of plot, fea-
turing a large-scale, nonhuman actor, on the one hand, and large-scale
human casualties, on the other? In everyday speech, of course, we never
hesitate to use the word ‘tragedy’” (“After Troy” 68). Dimock’s removal
of the human as a causal agent is important because it allows us to discuss
events driven, to use her words, by “no malice, no intentionality” (67) as
terrorizing and tragic. Ecological disaster and the framework of terror
within which it is conceptualized reveal that fear and contempt pattern
varieties of exceptionalism. How we pattern the natural environment
(whether as tragedy or terror) determines what minute and expansive re-
gimes of violence we deem necessary or acceptable against it.
Tragedy has traditionally been about the fall of an individual, but it has
always had implications that radically transcend the individual. Death cer-
tainly is one of those things the individual finally suffers, but life goes on
46 Terror and Ecophobia
and transcends the individual, and, as Raymond Williams explains in his
work on tragic theory, “the life that is continued is informed by the death;
has indeed, in a sense, been created by it” (56). The move away from a
focus on the tragic protagonist has been long in the making; yet this move
has been toward a no less hubristic site of troubled ­individuality—namely,
the tragic group. For 9/11, this group was “Americans.” Indeed, one of the
things 9/11 threatens to do, ­Judith Butler suggests, is to bring about an
American “dislocation from First World privilege” (xii). But there is a larger
and more pressing dislocation, one that also roils in tragedy, becoming in-
creasingly clear post-9/11, one larger than American exceptionalism, and
this has to do with the relative positions of humanity in the world as it inter-
acts with unpredictable subjects—Katrina, Sandy, Sendai, Haiyan, M ­ aria.
What makes jihad (whether in New York, Boston, or any other place) un-
settling (indeed, dislocating) is its ferocity and unpredictability. Jihadists
do not exempt Americans on the philosophy of American exceptionalism.
Indeed, American exceptionalism is the locus of their gripe. Nature does
not take notice of perceived privileges human beings regard as their right—
whether these people are Americans, Japanese, or religious extremists.
The whole discourse of human exceptionalism that emerges from Sandy
or Sendai or other natural disasters reminds the world that we humans—
the whole bunch of us—are nothing. The creeping fear in tragedy is that
Shakespeare’s Lear is right, in that “man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (King
Lear 2.4.267). The creeping reality of global warming—one which we are
desperately trying to keep at bay—is that we are as expendable as carrier
pigeons. This is the new reality that theories about tragedy need to face.
Tragic theory has a long history, a daunting one for new theorizing.
Rita Felski, in her Rethinking Tragedy, observes that “to speak of ‘new’
tragic theory in the context of such a longue durée of critical reflection
is to risk charges of hubris” (1). But tragedy is a fluid and evolving thing.
Williams reminds us that tragedy is

not a single and permanent kind of fact but a series of experiences

and conventions and institutions. It is not a case of interpreting this
series by reference to a permanent and unchanging human nature.
Rather the varieties of tragic experience are to be interpreted by
reference to… changing conventions and institutions.
(45–46)

The tragedies we face—our own fall and the fall of nature to the status
of a diminished thing—is a direct result of climate change, itself a direct
product of ecophobia, and, ironically, it is the very agency of nature that
we thought to efface that haunts our new realities.
One of the defining features of tragedy is the notion of agency. Trade-
marks of tragedy are like a who’s who in the character make-up of ecopho-
bia. As Dan Brayton reviews the term, ecophobia is a “cultural tendency
to relate antagonistically to nature” (226). We can say that ecophobia is
 Terror and Ecophobia 47
as inextricably involved with the broader category of anthropocentrism as
misogyny is with the broader category of sexism, and as homophobia is
with the broader category of heterosexism. If we understand ecophobia as
the imagining and marketing of fear and aversion to Nature, then we can
see also that it is a central element of anthropocentrism. ­Ecophobia textures
humanity’s relationship with the natural world. This is not to say that it
does so exclusively and that E.O. ­Wilson’s notion of biophilia is nullified,
but that ecophobia, as a mode of aversion, indifference, fear, and contempt
of nature, is a telling indicator of the need for ­environmental ethics.
Increasingly, terror and ecophobia define 21st century representations of
nature, and consequently there is an increasing inability to move beyond the
dread and horror that frame our imagination. As the physical landscapes
in which we have lived have changed radically even over the past ten or
fifteen years, so too have the literary landscapes. In 1996, Lawrence Buell
wrote that “to investigate literature’s capacity for articulating the nonhu-
man environment is not one of the things that modern professional readers
of literature have been trained to do or for the most part wish to do” (The
Environmental Imagination 10). Buell went on to wonder “[m]ust litera-
ture always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” (11).
Well into the second decade of the 21st century, both sets of comments, al-
though pertinent in their time, seem less than valid today. Indeed, virtually
all ecocriticism since (and to a large degree initiated by) Buell’s monumental
The Environmental Imagination has been about answering the first claim
above. It is about the second ­matter—literature’s imagined lack of proxim-
ity to the physical world—that requires some unraveling, since beneath it is
a conflict (perceived and real) between theory and practice. Certainly, one
of the effects of conflating terror and environment is to erase the distance
between representation and world, to bring us back to the physical world,
to move us (at least in theory) to act. Studying this conflation forces critics
to continue to speak beyond the concept of nation as well as to gather data
from across the disciplines. As Ursula Heise succinctly explains,

transnational ecocriticism faces the dual challenges of a global expan-

sion of its objects of study and an interdisciplinary integration of the-
ories, concepts, and methods. Less bound by national, regional, and
linguistic borders than literary studies have tended to be, these related
disciplines promise tools for developing ecocriticism’s global horizons.
(“Globality” 641)

While there seems little reasonable ground for disputing Lawrence

Buell’s observation that there has been a “slow and uneven advance of
ecoglobalism as a settled conviction and critical modus operandi rel-
ative to its ostensible cogency, relative to nationness, as an image or
notion” (228),6 repetition breeds consensus, and we are slowly rec-
ognizing (and perhaps even acting on our recognition of) the glo-
bality of nature. As environmental issues know no borders and
48 Terror and Ecophobia
require global perspectives, so too, Peter Singer argues, “[t]errorism
has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening
way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of inhabitants
of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of
our planet, have become our business” (One World 7). The structural
similarities between the unpredictable assailants—whether political or
environmental—accounts in part for compatibility of imagining terror
and environmental matters together. Ursula Heise has used the risk the-
ories outlined by Anthony Gibbens and Ulrich Beck to address “one of
the most important ways of imagining global connectedness” (Sense 11),
showing that the ubiquity of environmental issues “now fully integrated
into the ordinariness of everyday life” (120) has resulted to some degree
in what Beck terms a “world risk society.” According to Beck, “in the
risk society the unknown and unintended consequences [of moderniza-
tion] come to be a dominant force in history and society” (22). Keenly
aware that confronting environmental crises requires engaging with the
fear associated with their representations, Heise argues that risk theories
enable broad visions of how “ecocosmopolitanism might link experi-
ences of local endangerment to a sense of planet that encompasses both
human and nonhuman worlds” (Sense 159).
While I intend here neither a detailed examination of risk theory in
general nor of Heise’s applications of it in particular, there are a few
comments that we might make. Risk communication appeals to the ra-
tional on the basis of predictable dangers; terror communication appeals
to a more visceral set of fears on the basis of unpredictable dangers. We
might maintain that terror communication can and should be subsumed
under the subset of risk communication known as “Dread risk,” which
Paul Slovic and Elke U. Weber define as a “perceived lack of control,
dread, catastrophic potential, fatal consequences, and the inequitable
distribution of risks and benefits” (8). The problem with so doing, how-
ever, is that at the same time that it collapses several different affective
responses under the rather broad notion of risk, it also precludes analysis
of the assemblage work of terrorist communication. After all, represen-
tations of various environmental catastrophes in an age of terror are
raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized, and the co-assembling of ter-
ror7 and ecophobia requires a theoretical approach that recognizes the
willful management of visceral fears about unpredictability.
It is fears about unpredictability that feature so heavily in 21st century
representations of the natural environment, representations that are de-
fined by terror and ecophobia. Beginning with terror and characterized
in large part by a growing consciousness of unpredictable dangers, the
21st century has seen an increasing social packaging of terror and nature
together. News media and film have been a sizeable component of this
packaging of ecophobia and terror, and the effects have been profound.
We witness not only the radical blurring of spatial/national boundaries but
also of temporal ones. A bid to both sell narratives and to represent control,
 Terror and Ecophobia 49
imagining terror and nature together presents images and narratives that
are both riling and numbing, galling and entertaining, urgent and trivial.
While one of the goals of the terrorist is to instill a sense of paralysis
(which only works as a reflex and never in the long-term), the story-teller,
the reporter, and the mass media, on the other hand, have perhaps a
quite different goal beyond mere narrative: to instill indignation that
tends toward action. This is important because it means that imagining
the environment as a source of terror potentially implies not paralysis
but action. Terror imagined seems to imply activism in its very nature.
At the same time, though, the very narrativity of terror and ecopho-
bia risks trivializing the rising of global sea-levels, the causal nature of
global warming, and the dwindling of global diversity. Perhaps this goes
a long way to explaining why news of our imminent demise seems to
have such little effect on how we live our daily lives. We become agitated
but remain passive “spectators to future ruin” (Morton, The Ecological
Thought 2) rather than active witnesses.
Perhaps also, although terror imagined implies activism, it does not
do so singularly. Indeed, if Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg are
correct, then it is in the very nature of affect to be entangled in the sort
of in-betweenness in which imagined terror is entangled. Seigworth
and Gregg argue that “affect arises in the midst of in-betweenness” (1,
emphasis in original); imagined terror is entangled in a bizarre flash-
point dance8 between a passive aesthetic appreciation and a “burst[ing]
into action or being” (Kasanjian 27). Fear is embedded in non-­conscious
affect resulting from trauma;9 terror mediated is pure narcissistic
and masochistic entertainment. On the other hand, terror imagined
is a drama of the emotions gone mad, a call to arms, a visceral force
demanding a response. We search the web for exciting news enter-
tainment, but we feel indignation and a motivation to “support our
troops”… or to separate our plastics. Our contempt for “terrorists”
and our contempt for hostile nature (our ecophobia) each produce af-
fect, whether it is Al Qaeda or Katrina. Seeing environmental matters
from within a human frame obviously means seeing these matters as
they impinge on human constructs. Among the constructs with which
environmental matters come into conflict are “the nation” and, indeed,
time itself. Events of nature take no heed of human boundaries:

the nation is revealed to be what it is: an epiphenomenon, literally a

superficial construct, a set of erasable lines on the face of the earth.
It is no match for that grounded entity called the planet, which can
wipe out those lines at a moment’s notice, using weapons of mass
destruction more powerful than any homeland defense.
(Dimock “Planet” 1)

Dimock’s use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” to describe

natural events conflates war (or terror) and natural disaster imagery.
50 Terror and Ecophobia
Seeing nature as an antagonist using weapons is, in the purest sense, an
ecophobic distortion of what is really happening. Following the logic of
the conflation between devastating natural events and war means seeing
nature as an opponent to be fought. Devastating storms are not acts of
will; acts of terror are. Even so, both have similar effects with regard to
how we imagine boundaries.
Devastating storms collapse our notions of time by destroying things
we could not otherwise imagine disappearing within our life-times—
and, of course, acts of terror function in a similar way. Who, for in-
stance, could have imagined that the New York skyline would be bereft
of the Twin Towers within our life-times? Like Muiderslot, St. Paul’s,
Namdaemun, or the Great Pyramids, the Twin Towers were supposed to
last longer than our life-times. So was New Orleans.10 Something went
wrong. Indeed, narrativizing nature through a lens of terror to a large
degree means invigorating affect against nature by enforcing narrative
notions of right and wrong. But what exactly does “wrong” mean?
One place to start to answer this question is with Aldo Leopold’s oft-
quoted comments about the wrongness of environmental disruption. But
calling something “wrong” when it tends not “to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (Leopold 224–5), whatever
Leopold’s best intentions, seems an egregious misrepresentation of biotic
communities: they are far from stable and are rent from within and without
by violent upsurges and down-surges, fantastical (indeed, virtually unbe-
lievable) occurrences,11 and other morally neutral events. Nature actively
disrupts the integrity and stability of biotic communities all of the time,
and this is neither good nor bad. Climate change may feel evil, but it is
not. Imagining nature as terror means re-articulating and reinforcing (and
paradoxically erasing through the anthropomorphic gesture of attributing
nature volitional motive rather than simply agency) a binary of human and
nonhuman. We are well beyond the days when such a binary remains useful.
In times like ours when the natural environment increasingly intrudes
into the affairs of humanity and provokes terror, expanding the defini-
tional range of tragedy to accommodate nonhuman agency will allow us
to see the world more accurately. In times like ours, however much we
may rail against elitism and hierarchy and class disparities, it remains
a fact that most of us professors and students here right now read this
work and study in an elite venue, not a park setting where admission is
free to all and sundry or a public square where we are likely to rile revo-
lutionary masses, but a university or college, an institution of higher ed-
ucation, at which most of our neighbors do not work. In times like ours,
however activist we wish to be, our practices are unsustainable. In times
like ours, when bombs go off in Boston and terrorists fly airplanes into
buildings, and when hurricanes wipe out cities and other severe weather
events randomly and unpredictably erase the built order and sense of
place humanity has tried hard to establish; in times like these when it
is hard not to hear ecocritics grasping, struggling, and committed to
 Terror and Ecophobia 51
having an effect but terribly troubled about how theory distances us
from intervening in real-world problems, it is necessary to see that eco-
phobia, terror, and literary narratives are intimately conjugated.

Notes
1 I borrow the idea of agential images from W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror:
the War of Images, 9/11 to the Present.
2 I am grateful to Sophie Christman for helping me to work through this concept.
3 See Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Works Cited.
4 For a feminist ecocritical analysis of fireworks themselves, see Greta Gaard’s
“In(ter)dependence Day,” Works Cited.
5 Sophie Christman suggested to me that it is disavowal, “consciously know-
ing something but deciding to ignore it anyway” (personal correspondence)
that is at play here. If we understand disavowal in the Freudian sense of a
rejection or refusal to acknowledge a reality because of its potentially trau-
matic effects, then certainly disavowal here is consonant with the idea that
predictability can hinder collective mobilization and activism.
6 Buell defines “ecoglobalism” as “a whole-earth way of thinking and feeling
about environmentality” (“Ecoglobalist Affects” 227).
7 Jasbir Puar looks at “the historical convergences between queers and terror:
homosexuals have been traitors to the nation, figures of espionage and dou-
ble agents … more recent exhortations place gay marriage as ‘the worst form
of terrorism’ and gay couples as ‘domestic terrorists’” (XXIII). Puar goes on
to note that “the terrorist is… an unfathomable, unknowable, and hysterical
monstrosity” (XXIII). If Puar is right and if imagining terror means imag-
ining non-normative subjects with such vociferous distress, then it seems to
follow that we need to direct our attention to matters of identity, to the hows
and whys terror and ecophobia reassert sets of values within identity-based
narratives. Our satellites notwithstanding, we really don’t know what the
world will be like next year. We really have no idea of what either the cli-
mate or the weather will be, no idea of what either disaffected Americans or
anti-American others will do.
8 Walter Benjamin states that “to articulate the past historically does not
mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold
of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255, Thesis VI). He
calls these flashings-up “flashpoints” (aufblitz). David Kazanjian interprets
­B enjamin, adding that “the dangerous, fleeting, elusive, even blinding el-
ements of memory are precisely the qualities of articulate history” (27).
Put slightly differently, “flashpoints signal a procedural becoming-time…
a centripetal turbulence of illumination so powerful that it may blind the
past even as it spotlights the present and lights up the future” (Puar xviii).
Imagining terror—whether political or environmental—means freezing a
moment in the great flux that is contemporary life.
9 I am grateful to Christman for this comment. See also Christman, “Bustin’
Bonaparte.”
10 Muiderslot, built at the mouth of the Vecht River outside of Amsterdam in
1280, was destroyed in 1300 and rebuilt by 1386. It remains standing today. St.
Paul’s was completed in London in 1720 and remains standing today. Namdae-
mun was built in Seoul in 1398 and severely damaged by an arsonist in February
2008. It was fully restored by May 2013. New Orleans, devastated by Hurri-
cane Katrina, remains but, at the time of writing, is still a diminished thing.
11 The idea that some pine trees would need fire to melt the resin that holds the
seeds in the cones comes to mind.
3 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
Marketing Concerns

What reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential

destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? […] How do you
think this vision was received, how do you think people responded to
the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up. . . like a chocolate
eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they repackaged it — it can be
enjoyed as video games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world
wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse, and sprinted toward it with
gleeful abandon.
(Governor David Nix, Tomorrowland)

Somewhere 35,000 feet over Kazakhstan en route to Heathrow from

Incheon, I was pausing the film Tomorrowland every few seconds so
that I could get the quotation accurately. No doubt irritated, the man
beside me took the liberty to read what I was copying. “Spot on,” he spat
out. “Spot on.” Perhaps, but we were both on a very long flight and in
no position to align with the third-person accusatory or to muse about
how “they” sprinted anywhere. The man was obviously excited, moved
perhaps to consider doing something different in his life—perhaps not
flying anymore, though I doubted it, since even ecocritics like me don’t
seem to hesitate flying anywhere anytime if someone else is footing the
bill. Expanding one’s carbon footprint is easier when others are footing
the bill, obviously. It is perhaps for this reason that so much of ecome-
dia1 ends up reproducing the structures and ethics that are at the root of
so many Anthropocene problems, why the enfranchised sprint with glee-
ful abandon, while those footing the bill suffer and die. Ecomedia re-
flects patriarchal self-obsessions, with even the most promising of recent
media performances, the laboriously negotiated COP21 agreement, 2
gendering and sexualizing (hetero-sexualizing, to be more accurate) the
Earth with the phrase “Mother Earth” (see UNFCC 21). So, while we
are flooded with images and narratives of environmental crises, things
are getting much worse, and one possible reason is that we are sim-
ply not acknowledging the condition of ecophobia as a maladaptation
based in the affect of aversion. Global warming and extreme weather
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 53
events will only continue to worsen until we begin to understand and to
confront the fact that the problem we face is more serious than climate
change, if that is even comprehensible.3 In short, the problem we face
is ourselves, and, if we are to move from theoretical interpretations to
changing our material practices, then it is imperative that we understand
the ubiquitous global effect of ecomedia’s conveyance of ecophobia.
Tomorrowland, for all of its moving rhetoric about people not re-
sponding to the prospect of imminent doom, is just another in a long line
of counterproductive ecomedia narratives. Not only are they counter-
productive in the sense that they reproduce (and sell for profit) the eco-
phobia, heterosexism, and misogyny that got us into this mess; worse,
they articulate the very thing, the humanistic narcissism, that will al-
ways prevent any change for the better, a narcissism of which the term
“Anthropocene” freely indulges. If we really want ecomedia to encour-
age activist engagement, then we need to understand the mechanisms
preventing it.
The Tomorrowland speech is boring—at least, it should be to any
intelligent person. Roger Ebert could as well have been talking about
Tomorrowland or about any number of blockbuster eco-films when he
stated that The 11th Hour is a “tedious documentary” and that “we
more or less know all this stuff, anyway.” Ebert goes on to ask, “so does
the movie motivate us to act?” His answer is “Not really . . . finally we’re
thinking, enough already; I get it. This film, for all its noble intentions,
is a bore” (“The Eleventh Hour”).4 And we should be numb to this and
to Tomorrowland, and to all of their boring sophomoric brethren since
they are not offering anything new, any knowledge we don’t already
have.5 Like many ecocritical essays, ecomedia often simply tells us what
we already know about CO2 in the atmosphere and about how humanity
needs to reduce its carbon footprint. We know the problems. We know
potential solutions. What we have yet to figure out is the route toward
collective intervention that will help reverse the detrimental and dispro-
portionate effects of climate change. It is on these matters that ecomedia
is often simply silent. And there are clear reasons for this.
Ecomedia finds itself in a bit of a bind, facing what Rob Nixon calls
“formidable representational obstacles” in determining “how to devise
arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but
elusive violence of delayed effects” (Nixon Slow Violence 2). Ecomedia
helps us to visualize what Nixon describes as “a violence that is neither
spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its
calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales”
(2). Depicting ecophobia and its resulting environmental crises, however,
runs very real risks of (i) reproducing and enabling what it critiques—
namely, the ecophobic ethics that are so central to the problem in the
first place; (ii) diluting and blurring abstract concepts, as well as virtual
54 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
and actual worlds, and thus causing a malaise of indifference about the
environment; and (iii) producing compassion fatigue.6
Ecomedia often acts as a transmitter of ecophobia through its enmesh-
ment with other rights-denying behaviors. The enmeshment of ecomedia
with ideologies that have a proven record of marketability and consump-
tion is indeed problematical. We know, for instance, that sexism sells
well, and it sells whatever it is attached with. A recent Brad Pitt film
entitled World War Z shows this with a doctor ranting about nature in
the following manner:

Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one’s better. More creative. Like

all serial killers, she can’t help the urge to want to get caught. What
good are all those brilliant crimes if no one takes the credit? Now
the hard part—while you spend a decade in school—is seeing the
crumbs for the clues there. Sometimes the thing you thought was the
most brutal aspect of the virus turns out to be the chink in its armor.
And she loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths. She’s a bitch.

And then there is Alvin Duvernay in The Age of Stupid, a regular sort of
guy talking in the most reasonable colloquial tones about the worst storm
ever to hit an American city: “You stare Mother Nature in the eye. Usu-
ally, she’s fairly benign. Then she comes along, methodically, ruthlessly.
And then she stands toe-to-toe with you and dares you. Dares you: ‘Go
ahead and get your best equipment out. Go ahead. Do it. Let’s dance.’”
It is easy and reasonable to relate to this (and who wouldn’t, when not
doing so seems unpatriotic?), but such sexist, anthropomorphic, and
clearly ecophobic metaphors of a malevolent nature are counterproduc-
tive and simply not going to help make our environmental crises any
better; on the contrary, such sentiments (although they may sell well)7
are simply perpetuating the idea that nature (and women) should be con-
trolled. This is the very kind of sexist ecophobia that has produced the
kinds of troubles we currently face. But it sells well, and there is receptiv-
ity to endorsements of attitudes that deprive others of liberty; after all,
these very attitudes have allowed slave owners, sexists, and colonialists
(the founders of the United States) to thrive.
Marketing environmental concerns has become big business. Narra-
tive science generates both a desire for engagement and a desire for for-
getting. These two seem mutually incompatible, and what is troubling
is that the latter seems ascendant. Narrativized science sells books and
films—and it does so to audiences with, it seems, increasingly short at-
tention spans. It sells the ideologies that spell profit; that profit from
the bodies and work of women; that ransom and exploit animals and
ecosystems; and that unquestioningly steal from the land, the seas, and
the skies. While potentially a call to arms, therefore, these narrativized
versions of science can also—in terms of activism—result in virtually
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 55
nothing. This is perhaps clear in the stunning example of films such
as An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour, neither of which says a
single word about gender inequality or meat.8 We just get tired of the
“drumbeat of news about various overwhelming environmental” prob-
lems (Moser 68).
In trying to understand this, George Marshall explains in his pop-­
ecomedia Don’t Even Think About It that we become “the bystander
looking out the window and saying ‘We really must do something about
this’” (31). For Marshall, “Climate change—the real climate based on
scientific facts—lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive
and has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Issues of this kind
are notoriously hard to motivate and mobilize people around” (39).9 At
least part of the result here is compassion fatigue.
If it is dubious whether or not the spate of climate change narratives
based in science that have bombarded the public over the past several
years have had a measurable immediate10 effect, then it seems incum-
bent upon us to figure out why. Part of this means seeing how our as-
sumptions are represented and confirmed in the media of film, and one
of the important first steps for us here is to see connections.
There are important parallels between ecophobia, on the one hand,
and conditions such as sexism, racism, and homophobia, on the other.
We continue to see blockbuster films about heroic heterosexual men
with docile and often subordinated women following after them;11
we continue to see inadequate representations of Asian-Americans in
film; we continue to see homophobia, racism, and sexism in filmic
narratives that confirm the propensities of the ecophobic uncon-
scious12 and its focus on the white, heterosexual male subjectivity.
These narratives target mainstream Western audiences and aim to
maximize profits.
The role and function of ecophobia works in similar ways to ho-
mophobia, racism, and sexism. The narrative object remains distant,
and the audience disavows how personal this “environmental crisis”
stuff all is, that it might, for instance, require us to change what we
grow, purchase, and deposit into our bodies. When Peter Brooks thus
explains narrative desire as a “desire for the end,” we know that “the
retrospective knowledge that it seeks” (104) is one of confirmation. Al
Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid,
and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour are part of this docudrama
genre, this narrative science spewing out a lot of very good information,
yet it is also “confirmational” in the sense that Brooks describes. I do not
personally know anyone who has permanently stopped eating meat—or
stopped driving or stopped flying to conferences—because of these films.
In addition to the marketing of the familiar that ecomedia utilizes in
facing its formidable representational obstacles, there is also the very
real problem of scale, and the irony of our task is palpable: we need
56 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
to see the long and the slow in an age of the short and the quick, an
age of increasingly short attention spans, an age of what Linda Stone
has termed continuous partial attention.13 Rob Nixon asks how we
can “turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic
enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention,
these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the
most critical challenges of our time” (Slow Violence 3) and notes that
“one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our
rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental
justice” (8). Pat Brereton’s provocative suggestion that “for most people
the mass media are the primary way in which they acquire ethical atti-
tudes, especially within contemporary culture” (2) suggests that there is
a great importance in saturating these media with eco-messages. Yet this
kind of overexposure could produce a backlash effect, and this back-
lash may end up being very counterproductive. We know this on a very
common-sense level, and when an idea becomes generally accepted, no
matter how radical it may have been initially, its cultural coding shifts,
resistance to it becomes attractive, and we find representations of “cli-
mate deniers as attractive young suburban professionals,” as Marshall
explains (30) in his quest to understand why climate change discourses
aren’t working, “how it is possible, when presented with overwhelming
evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately
ignore ­something—while being entirely aware that this is what we are
doing” (1). Disco had its day, and anyone growing up in the 70s remem-
bers the saturation point, that point at which it became embarrassing to
be associated with it, at what point it created its own backlash.
Ecomedia is perhaps less likely to bring about a backlash effect when
it produces a strong visceral affect, a sense of pertinence that goes well
beyond the delivery of a message and delivers instead understanding,
a sense of an involvement with a living object rather than a sense of
watching a dying one, a sense of immediate and personal danger, a sense
that one’s self-interests are palpably at stake rather than of insularity
from the future ruin of something from which we are alienated. In ad-
dition, ecomedia is more likely to have the desired effect of encouraging
activist engagement with the world when it offers at least some hope.
This is what Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén per-
haps mean in noting that “while issues such as water pollution, habitat
loss, and rising global temperatures are certainly troubling, consistently
negative, even apocalyptic, framing may not lead to effective citizen par-
ticipation and may stifle opportunities for innovative thinking around
environmental challenges” (77). Ecomedia is more likely to have an ef-
fect, therefore, when it allows us to be participants rather than specta-
tors and when it allows us hope.
The urge to offer hope is certainly behind a lot of the marketing of
things as “eco.” Diane Ackerman confesses to being “enormously hope-
ful” (13) in her recent book The Human Age: the World Shaped by Us,
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 57
a book that is astonishing and disturbing in many ways. Ackerman ex-
plains that “our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable”
(14). She talks about how “we rack our sun-smelted brains to find newer
ways to capture and enslave the sun” and adds that “wood, coal, oil,
and gas were only intermediaries after all, and using them was a sign of
our immaturity as a species” (106), but she is missing a plain truth here:
our use of renewable resources far predates our use of fossil fuels! She
explains that we are “far better at tampering with nature than under-
standing it” (153) but goes on cheerfully to explain that the animals now
going extinct because of us “might all haunt the Earth again” (162) be-
cause clever humans had the foresight to save their DNA. It is tempting
to share in her enormous hope, to smile hopefully at the horrific science
here. Ackerman claims that “wiping out the genes of others and plant-
ing your own . . . must come naturally to our kind” (273). She offers no
empirical evidence for such a hypothesis. Nor does she reference any of
the pioneering works of ecofeminists about cohabiting in a world with
other-than-human species: somehow, the work of ecofeminists and the
topic of gender do not seem to fit into Ackerman’s hopeful discussions.
But it is when she urges us to change our perceptions of the holocaust in
nature that we are causing to an understanding that “we’re revising and
redefining nature” (199) that we get a taste of the arrogance in which she
participates, an arrogance gathering behind growing discourses about
“the Anthropocene.”
The much-vaunted term “Anthropocene” starts to seem like yet an-
other affirmation of the heroic (or antiheroic) human subject and of our
obsession with ourselves. Indeed, we have to wonder about the hubris
perhaps implied in the very term “Anthropocene”: as Astrida Neimanis,
Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén suggest, “calling an epoch after our-
selves does not necessarily demonstrate the humility we may need to es-
pouse” (68).14
The hopefulness of movies such as The Day After Tomorrow resides
precisely in a rejection of such humility, precisely in the notion A
­ ckerman
expresses that “our talent is immeasurable,” that we are somehow in
control of the world (an idea that undergirds the very notion of the
­A nthropocene). Our obsession with ourselves is clear here: modern life
encourages an aversion to the natural world,15 and there is obviously
more to the problem than the simple techno-fixes Ackerman imagines.
Greta Gaard speaks to this issue directly:

climate change has been most widely discussed as a scientific prob-

lem requiring technological and scientific solutions without sub-
stantially transforming ideologies and economies of domination,
exploitation and colonialism: this misrepresentation of climate
change root causes is one part of the problem, misdirecting those
who ground climate change solutions on incomplete analyses.
(“Ecofeminism and Climate Change” 24)
58 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
In other words, we are looking at the symptoms rather than the causes.
To talk about human ingenuity in dealing with symptoms with hopeful
abandon really does not seem very wise, since it does not address the
core issue of the psychological disavowal of nature. Ackerman’s hope is
ungrounded and foolish.
Desperate for hope, bright people have tended other gardens of great
foolishness, one of which is the notion that biophilia alone adequately
describes our relationship with nature. The concept of biophilia has
been one of the sunnier ideas about us and how we fit into the world, but
in the final wash, it just doesn’t work out so well as a model for under-
standing human/environment relations.

From Theory to Practice

There is a growing sense about the urgency to theorize ecophobic dis-
courses. At the 2015 ASLE-US hosted by Scott Slovic in Moscow, a meet-
ing of ecocritics that was truly the biggest and most diverse and brilliant to
date, there was an enormous amount of exceptional work being done the-
orizing ecophobia. Nicole Seymour’s suggestion that “we might say that
ecophobia has a distinct transphobic dimension: a fear of nature’s change-
ability” indeed comes to the heart of several issues we face in discussing
ecophobia. Brian Deyo talked about “the psychological dynamics of cli-
mate change denial as symptomatic of ecophobia;” Xinmin Liu about re-
lationships between landscape perception/­representation and ecophobia;
Sophie Christman theorized (in a panel entitled “Ecophobia, Melancholy,
and the Empathy Gap; or, Why the Anthropocene Feels So Depressing”)
about how memory and trauma are involved with ecophobia and how
ecophobic acts “derive from and are embedded in a multidirectional mem-
ory of past and future events;” Andrew ­McMurry talked about “death,
denial, melancholy” and ecophobia; Patrick Gonder about Thoreau, noise,
and ecophobia in a film called Upstream Color (about two people whose
lives and behaviors are affected by a complex ­parasite—without knowing
it—that has a three-stage life cycle in which it passes from humans to
pigs to orchids);16 Zümre Gizem Yılmaz talked about terror, ecophobia,
agency, and robotics; and there were important others.
The current theorization of ecophobic discourses extends beyond the
United States: the ASLE-UKI in Cambridge in September 2015 also
hosted interesting advances in theorizing of ecophobia; at the 2016
­E ASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and
Environment), there were four talks directly theorizing ecophobia; and
in May 2017, EASLCE hosted “The Ecophobia Hypothesis,” the 9th
EASLCE Webinar, which had ten participants (the maximum permitted)
from five different countries discussing many of the issues covered in
this book. Thus, it is clear that just as ecomedia studies have developed
as an offshoot of ecocinema, ecophobia studies has now emerged as a
scholarly field of inquiry.
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 59
It is a top priority of ecocritics to understand our ethics toward na-
ture: the ways in which we approach, observe, interpret, and interact
with nature constitute a value system. Both changing values and climate
change share some common features. Both can be so slow as to be al-
most beyond the capacity of people to perceive. Both are in some sense
global. And both are earnestly addressed in contemporary media. How,
where, and at what pace ethical change happens varies; how climate
change manifests disproportionately in particular places also varies.
And humanity is, to some degree, in control of both. Perhaps this is
where the common features end.
What exactly are the relations between the ecophobia/biophilia spec-
trum, on the one hand, and the reality of climate change on the other,
and how are these represented in contemporary media? How violent are
the effects of virtual reality landscapes and spaces, and to what degree
does the divorce from material realities enforce an exploitative ethics
toward nature? To participate in virtual reality denies and disavows our
existence on Earth. To be “virtually there” is not the same as being there.
And, of course, in another sense, according to the oft-mentioned “his-
tory of Earth on a 24 hour clock,” we’re “virtually there”: less than two
minutes to midnight. What exactly is supposed to happen at midnight,
and what does it mean to stare at the ugliness of our future, a future
that we’ve created? For Walter Benjamin, it means addressing alienation:
“Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for
the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached
such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic plea-
sure of the first order” (242). Benjamin might as easily have been talking
about climate change fiction and the spate of environmentally inspired
apocalyptic movies that have kept us enthralled for the past few decades
with increasing incidence.
Reflecting an increasing public awareness of radical weather events, an
increasing degradation of ecosystems, and an accelerated mining of the
Earth’s nonrenewable energy sources, “Climate Change Fiction”—what
has come to be known as Cli-Fi, a term coined by freelance journalist
Dan Bloom (see Glass, Works Cited)—has flourished. So too have doc-
umentaries about environmental crises. At the same time, news about
global air quality and about species extinctions have become the norm.
How is it possible to explain in a meaningful and productive way why it
is that media representations of environmental crises rely on an ethical
framework that reproduces rather than repudiates the very structures
that have led to the catastrophic changes we face in global ecosystems to-
day? How is it possible that both increased awareness among lay people
and radical exposure of environmental issues in media can be present at
the very moment in history when there are what seem to be exponential
increases in assaults on the environment?
While much interesting and informative work has been done exam-
ining ways in which contemporary film (documentary and drama) has
60 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
promoted or sought to promote awareness of issues related to environ-
mental crises of different kinds,17 work examining the ways that eco-
drama and eco-documentaries themselves often re-inscribe the very
ethics that they question is relatively sparse.18
Patrick Murphy has argued in Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explora-
tions (2014) that films with “environmentally aware story lines do have the
potential to contribute to increasing public awareness of real environmental
issues” (35) but that these “writers and directors tend to capitulate to a
Hollywood style emphasis on pathos and deemphasis of political critique”
(35). Murphy argues that one of the ways films capitulate to Hollywood is

by too frequently focusing on the reintegration of the biological

nuclear family and by portraying the intertia of governments and
corporate obfuscation of scientific knowledge as the work of evil in-
dividuals rather than fundamental drives of the corporate and gov-
ernment systems of power.
(35)

A perfect example of this might be The Day After Tomorrow. In an al-

most comic acceleration of climate change with equally comic effects (ships
negotiating downtown New York City streets), the real story we follow
is Professor Jack Hall’s (played by Dennis Quaid) as he treks through the
horrors of a clearly oppositional and hostile nature to find his son. There
are several issues here: (i) the male hero and the precious male subjectivity
are unquestioned—neither the environmentally destructive elements of this
massively self-centered ego nor the unsustainability of the ideals it embodies
are queried—yet director Roland Emmerich claims to have wanted to cri-
tique the environmental policies of the junior Bush Administration; (ii) the
film’s choice of Hall as a hero and of the government as an antihero is in line
with Murphy’s comment that a focus on government sidelines our personal
involvement with the issues; and, perhaps most importantly, (iii) the overall
position of the film is hardly pro-environment, or pro-Nature, or pro-world,
and it is difficult to imagine how a film that is, in fact, so anti-environment,
so ecophobic, can possibly do any good. Emmerich was very much aware
that he was portraying Nature as a “bad-guy,” a thing to be fought, an an-
gry opponent to be feared but finally conquered. He is quoted as having said
“I don’t need a monster or a villain. Just the weather” (see Bowles, Works
Cited). One certainly doesn’t want to minimize the good work that this and
similar films do, and yet neither should we be naïve about the deficits of
these and similar films, and the dangerous assumptions they reiterate.
Emmerich’s next film—2012—would similarly fail to critique the en-
vironmental policies that have caused climate change. Indeed, this ridic-
ulous film (floating with just enough science to be marginally plausible
for people who know nothing about plate tectonics) focuses its lens on
solar flares that in the film are causing the Earth’s core to heat up. The
land masses become flooded in a matter of hours, virtually the same
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 61
time that it took for entire continents to shift thousands of miles in the
film. The environment becomes the key antagonist, and human ingenu-
ity becomes the solution—a fleet of giant arks in the Himalayas. As with
The Day After Tomorrow, we follow a heroic man who is trying to keep
his family together. Of course, this is a film, not a documentary.
What is particularly interesting and alarming is that even the block-
buster documentaries whose intents are clearly to effect change rather
than to offer narrative—even these are radical failures. While we cer-
tainly may be thrilled to see Leonardo DiCaprio (The 11th Hour) and
Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth) and Pete Postlethwaite (The Age of
Stupid) in blockbuster films on the topic, these films also perpetuate
some of the problems. It is not a matter of picking holes in the green
credentials of the films; rather, in situating how we market our concerns
through the reiteration of sets of popular but fundamentally oppressive
ethical world views, we are better able to understand why Scott Pruitt,
the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, can state “I would not
agree that it [CO2] is a primary contributor to the global warming that
we see” and keep his job (see diChristopher).19 In looking at the per-
formative ethics that such marketing creates, we may potentially move
toward less passive spectatorial positions. There is a real need, as Scott
MacDonald has argued, for taking the opportunity to use spectatorship
as a way of “expanding our attention span” (111).
Arguably, the ethical assumptions we carry as we produce and consume
environmentalist narratives fail to promote the engagement and activism
so central to such narratives. Clearly, what we have done in the environ-
mental humanities in the past twenty or thirty years has NOT stopped or
slowed the rates of species loss, carbon output, or global warming.
Understanding the global role of ecomedia in the transmission and
prevalence of ecophobia is critical in transfiguring theoretical interpre-
tations into practice. This is an argument that I made in my 2009 “The-
orizing,” in which, in theorizing about ecophobia, I explained that it is
delusional to think “that theory is incompatible with praxis, that theory
cannot lead to changes in public policy, that theory is no good for the
‘real world’” (206). Ecophobia is a subtle condition that both produces
and responds to ecomedia narratives. Yet even a global approach that
faces ecophobia full-on does not guarantee that we can save even a single
blade of grass, let alone the planet! Recognizing the ecophobic condition
is one necessary step in an ongoing journey. One of the problems we
face, obviously, as Ursula Heise dryly notes, is that

somewhat like cultural studies, ecocriticism coheres more by virtue

of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical
and methodological assumptions, and the details of how this project
should translate into the study of culture are continually subject to
challenge and revision.
(“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” 506)
62 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
Theorists are held together by interpretations of common concepts but
often do not go further than interpreting texts.
A plurality of interests is an important part of what ecocriticism is,
yet, as there are core similarities among and therefore defining humans
(not diminishing or intended to diminish the importance of an extraor-
dinary diversity of shapes, sizes, hues, faiths, beliefs, tastes, sexualities,
walking styles, professions, and so on), so too are there core similarities
in this discourse we call ecocriticism. What this discourse lacks, though,
is an organizational structure of methodological cores to qualify its dis-
cursive value. While certainly ecocritics have begun to recognize the
futility of offering mere interpretations in their work, the fact is that
much of the work still being done in ecocriticism is precisely that: mere
interpretation. Such a situation clearly is not limited to ecocriticism. It
has long been a troubling reality that literary theory is what University
of Alberta Professor David Miall provocatively dubs “pre-theoretical.”
“Literary theories,” he contends,

cannot be right because they cannot ever be wrong. There is no ev-

idence that could confute a literary theory, thus such writings are
strictly speaking no more than interpretations. Literary theorists,
like Galileo’s inquisitors, refuse to examine evidence for literary
reading in the empirical sense; offered a telescope, they rule that
such an instrument cannot exist or that it exists only as an ideolog-
ical construct rather than a tool to aid perception.
(23–24)

Miall wants to see an empirical study of literary reading that succeeds

in giving “central place to the experience of real readers, placing on the
agenda for the first time the richness, range, and personal significance of
the reading in our culture” (34). Ecocritics want much the same. Posing
positions on the thematic function of trees in Macbeth is not going to
do much to save the trees of the Pacific Northwest from the pine beetle,
whose populations in recent years have exploded due to warmer winters.
Positing proposals about the role and function of animals in Tristram
Shandy is unlikely to stop people from eating Big Macs. So much of what
passes as ecocritical theory is merely interpretive analyses from thematic
starting points20 lacking a methodology—such as a real theory has (say,
deconstruction)—to guide it.

Media-Phobic Morals
Even the ecophobia hypothesis will remain a thematic venture un-
til it responds to the way in which moral behaviors are redefined
by media. The tobacco industry didn’t fall overnight. Knowing that
cigarettes cause cancer isn’t enough. Knowing that air travel causes
global warming doesn’t stop even ecocritics from flying all over
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 63
the place: “information alone does not guarantee action” (Willoquet-­
Maricondi, “Preface” xii). How we change and how media participates
in these changes is an ongoing and slow process of osmosis.
How media and literary texts themselves respond to the saturation
points (we all remember disco) requires attention, and such attention
ipso facto entails theory and methodology. One thing is certain: the
more a given narrative personalizes a given terror, the more likely is a
visceral and engaged response. Like a playwright standing behind the
curtain, watching the audience’s responses and snipping bits out or ex-
panding other bits, media also very clearly responds to the audiences.
This is what test screenings are all about, after all. Paula Willoquet-­
Maricondi notes in an early study of ecocriticism and film that “to study
our representations of nature, whether linguistic or imagistic, to scruti-
nize how we give nature a voice in human artifacts, is to probe into our
values and culturally constructed beliefs about the nonhuman world”
(“­I ntroduction” 5), and this seems a very good beginning.
There is absolutely no question that “one of the central ways we shape
our relationship to other animals, our place on Earth, and the social
structures that arise from these understandings is through media and
culture,” as John Parham has eloquently explained in Green Media and
Popular Culture (1). I have stated elsewhere that

The marketability of disaster films (documentary and fictional) and

the representations of future ruin they often display offers both
depressing and hopeful possibilities. The narrativizing, on the one
hand, writes us into positions as spectators with a poor focus. We
are passive (and therefore complicit) viewers of our own dramatic
decline. No less, though, are these filmic narratives potentially
transformative and radical: their narrativizing of important and of-
ten complex and abstract material makes available to a broad public
vital information.
(“Spectators to Future Ruin” 49)

We have to ask what our viewing of these narratives means, “how im-
ages of ecology can be used to activate popular support for the repair
of our local and global ecologies” (Ross 175). 21 We have to question
“the exploitation of nature at the service of screen spectacle” and
to “rethink the environmental ramifications of our daily attitudes
toward cultural practice” (Vaghan 24, 25) since doing so will take us
to a clearer understanding of the subtlety of ecophobia. We have to
question the sources, the statistics, and the effects these media offer.
As Johanna Blakley asks, What if we applied the scientific rigor of
the pharmaceutical industry to TV programming? What if we treated
media as if it were a drug: which delivery systems would prove most
potent and for whom? What types of content would prove life-­
changing? (“How Does Media Move Us?”). She notes that “virtually no
64 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
one agrees on how to measure media usage, engagement, and most
importantly, impact” (“How”—emphasis in original). Even the com-
ments about flying in which I have freely indulged here mask other
realities about the costs of our lifestyles and about who foots the
bills. Indeed, some truly startling facts have appeared about the dig-
ital revolution. For instance, what at one point may have seemed to
be a paperless, green, digital revolution is, in reality, not quite so
green and sustainable as we scholars in the environmental humanities
may wish to think, benefitting as we do from today’s truly amazing
information technologies: by 2009, “the server farms that allow the
internet to operate and that provide cloud-based digital computing
had surpassed the airline industry in terms of the amount of carbon
dioxide released into the Earth’s atmosphere” (Rust, Monani, and
Cubitt “Introduction,” 3). 22
Naomi Klein theorizes that the links between environmental de-
struction and capitalism cannot be ignored, 23 and this is, no doubt, an
important point, one that reveals a convergence of form and content.
Within a system of business built on selling as much as possible to as
many as possible, form and content must, it seems, often come together
if the narrative is to sell. It wouldn’t do for Al Gore to advocate for
and succeed in stopping the use of fossil fuels. The system would grind
to a halt. Perhaps it wouldn’t do for him to use his voice to shut down
the meat industry either. And life without those server farms is simply
inconceivable at this point. These things are substantial parts of the en-
gine that keeps capitalism running and are, like the system of which
they are a part, simply incommensurable24 with environmental ethics.
The system needs varieties of ecophobia (fear of bugs or loathing of
bodily odors or ethical disregard for animals, for instance) in order to
continue functioning, and it is probably this that explains why, in spite
of the enormous investments in ecologically progressive narratives, not
much is changing; but capitalism is certainly not the cause of our ongo-
ing environmental problems: it is the latest in a long history of models
that rely on ecophobia, that exploit sexism, that bank on inequitable
structures, and that depend on obfuscation and lies about real costs and
about who foots these bills—and it is an efficient model, well-refined
and frightening.
As Greta Gaard reminds us, however, we are to “Make no mistake:
women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and
natural disasters, but their vulnerability is not innate; rather, it is the
result of inequities produced through gendered social roles, discrimina-
tion, and poverty” (23). Make no mistake either in thinking that any of
this is new: ecophobia, sexism, heterosexism, and racism predate cap-
italism by millennia. Capitalism is a symptom, not a cause. Address-
ing symptoms instead of causes does not seem a promising method for
changing things.
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 65
We face a challenge that is not just about changing the economy; it
is about changing ethics, and this is a monumental task. In his review
of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, Rob Nixon notes that “to
change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more
formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather
coming down the tubes” (“Naomi”). Part of the difficulty here is that
our sense of place in the world and—more importantly—our sense of
what threatens us is by no means static.

Unsustainable Liberties
Charlton Heston on the sandy beach (which was previously New York
City Harbor) yelling “damn you all to hell” is my earliest television mem-
ory. Living in Vancouver, I hadn’t seen the actual Statue of Liberty, but
I had an idea of what it was and what it represented, and the image was
shocking. Thirty-five years later, The Day After Tomorrow, as it were,
and Liberty is buried up to her nose in ice. In the late sixties, contrib-
uting to public awareness about the future meant raising consciousness
about our capacities to destroy ourselves through nuclear war. By the
early years of the 21st century, it means raising awareness of our abilities
to destroy ourselves by changing the climate. Depicting threats of the
erasure of the icon of American liberty remains as potent today as it was
in 1968—perhaps more so under the Trump Administration than not. A
victim in these media of the very liberties that it represents, mute “Lady
Liberty” stands unshaken and does not yield or change or move. Clearly,
exploiting boundless and unfettered liberty, a concept that America has
enjoyed and promulgated, is both unsustainable, in an environmental
context, and ironically reliant for its continuation on notions—such as
sexism, racism, homophobia, and, not least of all, ecophobia—that are
in stark conflict with the very bases of liberty. 25 Uncurbed liberties are
dangerous. 26
The notions cherished about liberty in 1968 with Charlton Heston
pounding the sand gets Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon
a year later, taking humanity a giant leap forward from the idea that
the world is at its disposal. With the Earth irrevocably polluted, it was
perhaps inevitable that the universe would end up at our disposal—and,
indeed, a site of our disposal, with half a million pieces of space junk
totaling more than 2 million kilograms floating around up there. 27 Dan-
gerously wrong ideas about uncurbed liberty are not the only environ-
mentally hazardous notions that the 1960s hosts and that continue in
media for decades after. The belief that computers will take us away
from paper and from our carbon-dependent lifestyle was very wide
of the mark. Yet fantasies persist in the most mainstream of environ-
mentally oriented media, disturbing because this is the venue, as Rust,
Monani, and Cubitt observe, most promising for effecting the kind of
66 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
broad social changes that are currently necessary if we are to survive as
a species: “popular media have several important sociocultural qualities
(such as their broad consumption and appeal to multiple segments of
society) that make them potentially finer antennae than the fine arts for
sensing the changing moods and tendencies in cultural perceptions of
environmental relationships and concerns” (4).
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the topic of climate
change and environment had become an increasingly marketable one,
with the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel’s joint production of the CGI
series The Future is Wild (2003), Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World
Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People (January 2008),
and the National Geographic Channel’s Aftermath: Population Zero
(March 2008), each, in their own way, tacitly presenting an implicitly
ecophobic vision of a Nature that will finally conquer humanity, reclaim
all of the world, and remain long after we are gone. Such is also true of
the adventure-nature genre, which includes

shows on the Discovery Channel (Lee Stroud’s Survivor Man, Bear

Gryll’s Man vs. Wild, Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter) or ESPN Out-
doors (Spook Span’s Monster Buck Moments, Cyril Chaquet’s Fish-
ing Adventurer, Tom Miranda’s Territories Wild); films on extreme
sports such as Mark Obenhaus’s Steep, Dean Potter’s Aerialist, or
the adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air; or films such as
Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (another Krakauer adaptation), and Peter
Lynch’s Grizzly Project.
(Monani 102–103)

A setting for privileged he-men, these land- and seascapes are play-
grounds for big boys, their big toys, and their macho games. The shows
pander to these patriarchal crocodile hunters and grizzly men. Far, far
away from these “nature” programs are the transformative visions of
feminists and ecofeminists. Odd indeed to see narrative science purport-
edly about “saving the environment” carrying across sexism and its ugly
brother ecophobia.
If Patrick Murphy is correct and films do capitulate to a Hollywood
style emphasis on pathos, then it is because pathos sells. Like all narra-
tive, filmic narrative seeks an audience. Narrative, as a form, is ethically
uncommitted to environmentalist praxis and seeks simply the retention
of an audience, and what we are faced with is, to be plain, entertain-
ment. Naomi Klein has shown convincingly (16–17) that the problem
we face does not have to do with our technological ability to change or
with the logistics of such change itself; the problem does not have to do
with our capacity to work collectively; and it does not have to do with
our understanding of the severity of the issue. Klein reiterates a senti-
ment that might explain at least one cause: “Already, climate change is
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 67
changing us, coarsening us. Each massive disaster seems to inspire less
horror, fewer telethons. Media commentators speak of ‘compassion fa-
tigue,’ as if empathy, and not fossil fuels, was the infinite resource” (53).
At the very moment that we need to engage with the material, as I have
been arguing, we are becoming numbed by it, and we just want to forget
about reality.
We tend to forget many inconvenient truths. We tend to believe that
we are not in discourse with the ontological realities outside of us, and
that even though we may admit their existence, they will not harm us.
We forget that our conjugal relationships with toxic lifestyles hasten
global warming. Like our enmeshment with matters of death, pain,
and suffering, our participation in toxic lifestyles is really a practice of
eco-exceptionalism and toxic amnesia. We have created regimes of dis-
placement that allow us distance from environmental matter. Perhaps
ecophobia’s indifference and contempt has so blinded us to the enormity
of what we do—the theft without compensation, the wholesale robbery
on an enormous scale, the aggravated violence and torture, the colossal
profit we take from the world 28 —that we now suffer an epic loss of per-
spective on our collective capacities.

Moving Forward and Marketing Change

It is a truly fine and excellent thing that environmental narratives have be-
come so very marketable within academia and also outside of its borders.
The flooding of the market with disaster films, apocalyptic narratives of
our own self-destruction, documentaries, and so on offers up both threats
of relegating the material world to mere spectacle and commodity to be
consumed by passive viewers, on the one hand, and, on the other, offers
opportunities for action and engagement. The true value of media is in
its potential to transfigure human behaviors. Knowledge, in itself, is not
enough. If it were, then there would be a lot less smokers in the world.
The environmentalist movement shares many things with the ­anti-
smoking movement. It is hindered by mammoth corporate entities (most
notably oil companies, meat production companies, and agriculture
companies) that benefit from unsustainable lifestyles. Just as tobacco
companies have spent billions of dollars to advertise that smoking was
not the cause of cancer, was not harmful, and was actually beneficial in
many ways (“Watch your nerves . . . let up—light a Camel,” a cigarette
advertisement ran in the 1930s), hired science researchers blow smoke in
our eyes about the causes of climate change and environmental degrada-
tion being outside of our influence.29 And just as Barack Obama helps us
claw our way out of the smoky pit of lies, Trump and his side-kick Pruitt
pull us back down. What will it take to stop this insanity?
It took various kinds of legislation to rein in the tobacco monsters,
and many people saw those laws as an infringement on personal liberty.
68 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
It took appeals to emotion, to reason, and to financial sensibility. It took
a broad-based change in ethics. It took sacrifices. It took years. And
when the tobacco industry was thriving, no one would have thought it
possible to destabilize these behemoths. Many people would have lost
jobs, and, anyway, there was little felt need for shutting down these busi-
nesses. As there are limits to free speech (for instance, when such speech
endangers other people), so too perhaps it is time to take a good look at
what is illuminated by “Lady Liberty” and her torch.
We flatter ourselves as academics on our abilities to produce and dis-
pense knowledge. Marketing narratives and the knowledge that such
narratives produce, however, simply isn’t enough to cause change. If
those behemoths that seemed so unassailable (Malborough, Camel, and
others) have been to some degree divested of their power and authority,
then it was through an enormous amount of effort, not simply through
the dissemination of knowledge but through a change in social under-
standings of relations between personal liberty and public responsibility.
If knowledge were enough to cause change, then we’d have problems
explaining the average air passenger, or automobilist, or meat eater—
indeed, my own presence at many conferences. If there were laws about
how much we could fly, then there would be changes—but do we want
such laws?
It is a simple question, and we must ask it: what will it take to cause
change? The answers are disturbing. As with movements against to-
bacco industries, it will take various kinds of legislation against things
that we like doing, which many people will see as an infringement on
personal liberty. It will take appeals to emotion, to reason, and to finan-
cial sensibility. It will take a broad-based change in ethics. It will take
sacrifices. It will require serious analysis of the role and function of our
changing media. And it will take years. We may not have as many years
as we need. We may indeed now be doomed to remain spectators to our
on-going ruin.
Popular representations of our on-going crises provide potentially im-
portant clues to where we might go from here. In a brief monograph
entitled Ecomedia (2005), Sean Cubitt states that

we have no better place to look than the popular media for repre-
sentations of popular knowledge and the long-term concerns so little
addressed in dominant political and economic discourse. In their
own ways as complex as the language of scientific papers on policy
documents, popular media think aloud about who we are, where we
are going, and what debts we owe to the world we live in.
(1)

While Cubitt does note that “many films are predictably bound to the
common ideologies of the day” (ibid), exploring the implications of these
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 69
sites of bondage is not the primary concern of the book. Yet, since these
sites of bondage are the main thing holding ecomedia back and prevent-
ing it from having a genuine effect on the status quo, it seems to me, as I
have been arguing here, of paramount importance to look at these issues.
Stephen Rust defines ecomedia studies as “a historically situated, ideo-
logically motivated, and ethically informed approach to the intersections
of media, society, and the environment” (87). Assuming that ecome-
dia is, in fact, ethically motivated, then it cannot be anything less than
absolutely crucial to understand what is holding us back. In following
John Parham and discussing “the possibilities of and limitations for an
ecological perspective within mainstream media and culture” (xiii), we
might go a step further and ask what it is exactly that defines the con-
tours of those possibilities and limitations. To do this, theorizing about
ecophobia must be front and center.
Scholarship that links ecophobia and ecomedia has not yet ap-
peared in publications, though there have been important connections
made between the broad areas of “environmental studies” and “me-
dia studies.” The development of the subfield “ecomedia studies” is
very promising. Sean Cubitt’s 2005 EcoMedia stands out among the
work in this area in that it directly attempts to deal with the question
of data overload in ecomedia and with what is implied in the absence
of a common code for dealing with such data. Cubitt notes that “the
mere absence of a common code [for cataloguing data] does not pre-
empt the desire for dialogue: on the contrary, it spurs on invention of
means for mediating between distinct and asymmetric entities” (134).
We can surmise from Cubitt’s observations that the digital eco-­
humanities collects and works with data and with the narratives that
are necessary for making them accessible. Some narratives are filmic;
some are in the form of databases; some are in the form of interactive
websites, and so on.
Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Cubitt coedited another milestone
work in the field: Ecomedia: Key Issues (2015). While discussions of
feminism and ecofeminism would no doubt strengthen the arguments in
the book, as would investigations into matters about ecophobia, the col-
lection offers an expansive set of analyses on every type of ecomedia and
is a tremendous contribution to the conversation. In general, however,
the absence of work integrating feminism30 and theories about sexual-
ity, erotophobia, and ecophobia seems a liability in ecomedia studies,
since it is the very degree to which ecomedia carries across sexism, ho-
mophobia, erotophobia, and ecophobia that it is held off from having the
kinds of interventionist effects that it ostensibly seeks—that is, to fixing
what is wrong. Nevertheless, there is a growth of some very good work
appearing. For instance, Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker’s Sustain-
able Media: Critical Approaches to Media and the Environment is a
compelling attempt to articulate “the enmeshment of media practices
70 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
(both textual and technological), infrastructures (physical and so-
cial), and resources (natural and human)” (3). Sophie Christman and
E. Ann Kaplan’s “The Climate of Ecocinema” offers “case studies
[to] show how ecocinema scholarship can use the human filmic gaze
to address climate and environmental challenges in fiction, cli-fi, and
documentary films designed to entertain, educate, and oftentimes, to
promote climate change action” (20)—but there is indeed very little
of this kind of scholarship (compared, for instance, to the amount
of work still being produced on such an ecocritical favorite as, say,
Walden).
In the Introduction to her enormously popular This Changes Ev-
erything, Naomi Klein asks precisely this question: “What is wrong
with us?” (15). And there is something wrong. Part of it, of course,
has to do with attitudes that deprive others of their liberty. Relation-
ships between the attitudes toward women in patriarchal societies are
not an issue Klein mentions at all, despite many other quite brilliant
observations.
Long involved with analyses of intersections among gender, sexuality,
class, and environment, Greta Gaard is one of the strongest advocates
of the need to ask difficult questions in order to see issues within their
proper contexts. Studying ecophobia—which will always be feminist
and will always ask about individual responsibility—is necessary be-
cause the effects of work in studies about “biophilia” have been radically
unsatisfactory and simply do not lead to any kind of awareness about
the ecophobic ethics within ecomedia and how these are translated to
popular constituencies.
It is essential to articulate the un-ecological ethics in our everyday
minds—which we disavow, avoid, or are simply unaware of—that
contribute to environmental problems. Looking at ecophobia prom-
ises to lead toward the “fundamental shift in human consciousness”
that ­Stephen Kellert sees as being necessary for mitigating our envi-
ronmental crises (26). Looking at ecophobia promises to lead to an
innovative approach to achieving such a necessary shift. The aca-
demic and practical value of this research is vast and offers not sim-
ply to expand the range of ecocriticism but to formalize interpretive
strategies of reading and viewing that could potentially change the
trajectory of ethics through which environmental matters are repre-
sented. What this means in terms of the environment has to do with
the connections between media representations of the natural envi-
ronment, on the one hand, and our relationship to that environment
on the other. Analyzing ecophobia allows us to develop a polemical
ethical paradigm within which to house our thinking about nature.
If we compare anti-sexist and anti-racist movements and how these
movements have invariably involved changes in the kinds of repre-
sentations prevalent in media, then we can understand the possible
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 71
direction ecomedia may follow. In the United States, for example,
racially inflected comments fall under a recently developed legal
category called “hate crimes.” Other countries have similar legal
structures in place. Many countries also now have laws against rep-
resenting violence toward women. The point here is that as the moral
circle expands, so too must there be changes in the kinds of represen-
tations permitted in literature, news media, the internet, film, and so
on. Why are ecophobic representations of and actions toward nature
not subject to the law?31 Why are they not under the category of hate
speech and hate crimes?32 Having them so would seem a reasonable
outcome of the expanding circle of moral concern that has already
produced greater protections against sexism, racism, and speciesism.
If ecomedia reflects dominant culture, and sells well in doing so, then
it need not confine itself to reflecting the creepiest sexist and eco-
phobic aspects of dominant culture: the expanding circle of moral
concern is also a dominant cultural trend.
One of the important points John Parham makes in his Green Media
and Popular Culture: an Introduction (2015) is about the necessity for
media, if it is to have any effect, “to adapt itself to and speak in the
modes and language of the dominant culture” (xvii). The dangers here
are multiple. One of these is that when adapting to the language of the
dominant culture, playing into sexism and ecophobia is an easy trap
to fall into, and its results are counterproductive. Another matter, of
course, is the danger of being sucked in and unable to withdraw from
the views that accompany speaking “in the modes and language of dom-
inant culture.” This would explain the primary contradiction of ecome-
dia and how it delivers comments about nature being a bitch and daring
people to dance.
On my way to the 2015 Modern Language Association (MLA) Con-
ference, the man sitting beside me on the ­SkyTrain in Vancouver reflected
this contradiction well. He asked why I was going to the MLA and what
I would be talking about, and after the conversation turned toward envi-
ronment, gender, and race, he identified himself a feminist and told me
that “girls these days have it rough, still don’t get paid the same, you know.
Nuttin’s really changed, eh?” I wondered but didn’t ask, “Do you know
that girls are children?” A feminist would know that. Our conversation
fell into a lull, and the man ate his Egg ­McMuffin. I opened the website for
McDonald’s on my phone and noticed a tab about sustainability and won-
dered how many people get sucked in by it. Meat and the American life-
style that McDonald’s promotes, notwithstanding its professed concerns
about sustainability, are obviously incompatible with any strained version
of meanings inherent in the word “sustainability” or “feminism,” aren’t
they? The servers I accessed with my phone are similarly unsustainable.
At this point, it is clear that there are several reasons why so much of
ecomedia has so little effect on pushing people to change their behaviors
72 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
and halt the warming of our atmosphere: (i) it reproduces and enables
the ecophobic unconscious it critiques; (ii) it blurs imagined and real
worlds, evoking indifference and aversion while diluting abstract con-
cepts to simplistic levels33 and encouraging stupidity and a failure to
see connections among issues;34 and (iii) it numbs us into a kind of pa-
ralysis.35 Living in an age of spectatorial complicity means having such
blurred boundaries among the various kinds of narratives that we pro-
duce as to be unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and also, to a great
extent, to be unable to really care.
It is the capacity of what we say to confirm the status quo that re-
quires attention. The danger of bringing things to the lowest common
­denominator—whether we are talking about the more than eight million
people who take to the skies every day, 36 or a burger joint that serves
sixty-nine million customers daily37—is that it is within the very lan-
guage and the ethics that media uses that we find the biggest problems.
When media trivializes nature as an object of entertainment, or as a gen-
dered hostile enemy (a bitch trying to get you, an angry mother nature,
and so on), or as the antagonist in a series of dramas about a humanity
imagined as besieged and embattled: these things are just not going to
help. They haven’t so far, and they won’t. There can be no question that
there is a profound importance of making available to lay audiences ma-
terial that is difficult, or inherently scientific, or simply numbing in its
enormity, but it must be done honestly and without reproducing the very
terms it seeks to critique. Otherwise, we’re doomed.
But we can be hopeful: indeed, we need to be hopeful—otherwise,
why bother? We can be hopeful because there is so much more that
ecomedia can do, so much that it hasn’t done. 38 We can be hopeful be-
cause “Over the last twenty years, the growing number of films and
film festivals devoted to environmental concerns points to environmen-
tally engaged cinema as a powerful tool for knowledge dissemination,
consciousness raising, public debate, and, many hope, political action”
(Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “Preface” xi). We can be hopeful because
films do cause change.39 We can be hopeful because there is a lot of
exciting theorizing that needs to be done, and, apparently, it has been
left to us to do it. To borrow a phrase from David Bowie, “we can be
heroes” rather than idiots to the generations that will follow us. Much
theorizing has been done, but as Sherilyn M ­ acGregor explains in a 2010
article about the gender dimensions of climate change, much theorizing
remains to be done on “the discursive constructions and categories that
shape climate politics today” (223): “climate change is cast as a human
crisis in which gender has no relevance” (225).40 We can be hopeful
because we know the solutions and we know the way. We know that
change will only happen within a feminist framework when we all foot
our own bills.
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 73
Notes
1 I use the term ecomedia in the broadest sense to include any media that deals
with environmental issues, implicitly or explicitly, though my focus in this
article is primarily on filmic media. “Ecomedia studies,” meanwhile, is best
defined by Stephen Rust “as a historically situated, ideologically motivated,
and ethically informed approach to the intersections, of media, society, and
the environment” (87, italics in original).
2 COP refers to the “Conference of the Parties.” The “Parties” are the nations
that joined the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. COP21 is the 21st con-
ference of its kind, and it was held in Paris, France on November 28, 2015.
3 The failure to address social issues that are linked with ecophobia in climate
change discussions is really in its infancy. Involved are, as Greta Gaard has
recently noted, “issues such as bullying in the schools, hate crimes legis-
lation, equity in housing and the workplace, [and] same-sex marriage . . .
[that] don’t [even] appear in climate change discussions” (“Ecofeminism and
Climate Change” 24).
4 Diane Ackerman, in her exploration about aspects of the Anthropocene,
discusses “an ability to bore ourselves that is so horrifying we devote much
of our short lives to activities designed mainly to make us seem more inter-
esting to ourselves” (306).
5 Susanne Moser discusses psychic numbing and apathy extensively in Cre-
ating a Climate for Change. She notes that “while several writers have sus-
pected that environmental problems may contribute to numbness and apathy
[…] only a few empirical studies have actually examined the emotional and
cognitive responses to climate change, its impacts and solutions” (68). Such
research is critical in understanding why ecomedia is perhaps having less
effect than one might wish. I am grateful to Sophie Christman for bringing
the work of Moser to my attention.
6 In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic discuss
the “psychic numbing” that attends “when we are presented with increasing
numbers of victims” (Slovic and Slovic, “The Arithmetic of Compassion”).
On a related topic, see also Slovic and Slovic’s Numbers and Nerves: Infor-
mation, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (2015).
7 World War Z, for instance, had a production budget of 190 million dollars
(US) and grossed $540,007,876 worldwide (Box Office Mojo). Sexism sells,
as does ecophobia. In a set of analyses touching on The Day After Tomor-
row, Hunter Vaughan discusses how the “grandeur of spectacle [proves]
enormously successful on a commercial level, catering to heightened audi-
ence fears in an age of increasing uncertainty and unpredictability” (30).
Much media indeed plays on this uncertainty, this ecophobic fear of the
unpredictability (indeed, uncontrollability) of nature and the subsequent
threats it is imagined to pose.
8 The economic industrialization of animal bodies is not good for the en-
vironment, an irony explicitly avoided in these films. There is enormous
waste and inefficiency in meat, milk, and egg production in terms of the
energy input to protein output ratio, compared with the energy required
to produce protein directly from vegetables. There is also an enormous
and similarly well-­documented waste of water in such processes. The im-
pact of the meat industry on climate change, however, has only recently
caught the attention of the UN, which has singled out beef production as
a key ­contributor to greenhouse gases. An online report posted by Ecofont
74 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
(http://smallstepsonalongjourney.blogspot.kr/) mentions that a cow pro-
duces more greenhouse gases (methane in particular) a day than a 4/4 SUV
and that “Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times worse for climate
change than CO2 emissions.” There is growing consensus that a vegetarian
(or vegan) diet is good for the environment (“Eat Less Meat,” see Works
Cited). If there is hope at all in the power of media to cause changes in how
we relate with the environment, changes that might ultimately help us to
slow climate disasters, then it might be found in the new attention that main-
stream media outlets such as CNN are giving to meat, attention that might
have similar effects that media pressures against smoking ultimately had.
CNN has run stories about “Why Beef is the New SUV” (Sutter, see Works
Cited), about “How to reduce your cancer risk and help the environment:
Eat less red meat” (Nestle, see Works Cited), and asking “Ditch meat to fight
climate change?” (Mounk, see Works Cited). The cumulative effect of these
stories can help lessen the impact of climate change.
9 The urge to create a “readily identifiable enemy” may be part of what is
going on with the ecophobic personification and gendering of nature.
10 The urgency of the problems we have created obviously requires immediate
action. This is not, however, to devalue the importance of the longer time-
scale changes, the extensive intellectual shifts that must occur at a popular
level before we can produce any meaningful and lasting changes in our rela-
tionships to the world around us.
11 The final scene of the original 1968 Planet of the Apes is interesting in its
focus on the heroic male subject and his precious feelings. Taylor (played by
Charlton Heston) discovers the Statue of Liberty half buried in sand on the
beach he walks along. He falls to his knees, the mute Lady Liberty in front of
him, his mute female travelling companion (Nova, played by Linda Harrison)
behind him. Nova had obediently followed after him in this horrific dystopia
wherein “apes” have taken over. It is interesting that the film gives voice to
apes before it gives voice to women and that we are ultimately left with a top-
less, muscular, heterosexual psyche shouting “God damn you all to hell.”
12 I am indebted to Christman for this term.
13 Stone explains that
To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention —
­ ONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the
C
network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be
connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for
the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To
be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANY-
THING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that
involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.
(Stone)
14 I discuss this further in Chapter 4.
15 See also Richard Louv, The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children
from Nature-Deficit Disorder (2008). In this book, Louv argues that access
to nature, to the outdoors, and to real (rather than virtual) plants, animals,
and landscapes is essential to the emotional and physical development of
children. Louv argues that children today suffer from a “nature-deficit dis-
order.” One of the more challenging tasks we face, therefore, is about grasp-
ing how technologies have changed our very understandings of nature and
space. As Alice Rayner eloquently puts it, “cyberspace, variously known as
the Internet, the Web, or an interactive digital technology, offers more than
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 75
a new landscape for performance; it challenges the very meaning of ‘space’”
(350). We can’t just ignore this.
16 Gonder also spoke on ecophobia at the 2017 ASLE meeting in Detroit. The
paper—entitled “Red of Tooth and Tentacle: Lovecraft, Ecophobia, and the
Obscene”—was in a session that was part of an ecomedia (specifically film,
in this case) stream dealing with horror.
17 Pat Brereton, for instance, in his informative and meticulous Environmental
Ethics and Film (2015) explores “how mass audience films and their use of
a creative imaginary display a range of cautionary allegorical tales that help
to promote greater awareness and debate concerning the central importance
of environmental ethics for the very survival of our planet” (1), that “Holly-
wood has an important role to play in promoting awareness around environ-
mental ethics and helping to construct new modes of popular engagement
through visualization of environments, drawing on a long romantic history
around the therapeutic representation and evocation of nature” (1).
18 Recent work by Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén at-
tempts to diagnose precisely the problem I tackle in this chapter about why,
despite heavy interest in the environment these days, not much is chang-
ing. They discuss four problems that currently frame our relations to the
environment. These include: the problem of alienation and intangibility;
the post-political situation; the negative framing of environmental change;
and compartmentalization of ‘the environment’ from other spheres of
­concern–both in practical and ontological terms (69–70). An essential solu-
tion for them (as for the argument of this chapter) is a need to rethink “the
‘green’ field to include feminist genealogies” (67). My approach to ecomedia
through the theorizing of ecophobia parallels and intersects with the work
of Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén. Theorizing about ecophobia is feminist in
nature, transdisciplinary in approach, and committed to inter-species justice
in practice.
19 A recent op-ed in the New York Times describes Mr. Pruitt’s capricious
decision to reject the science he doesn’t want to use. Discussing an interview
of Pruitt with The Daily Caller, McCarthy and McCabe explain that “he
[will] no longer allow the agency to use studies that include nonpublic scien-
tific data to develop rules to safeguard public health and prevent pollution.”
Among the work Pruitt will no longer allow the E.P.A. to use are “studies
[…] that determine the effects of exposure to chemicals and pollution on
health, [and that] rely on medical records [… Some of these studies] by law
are confidential because of patient privacy policies.” McCarthy and McCabe
go on to explain that “under Mr. Pruitt’s approach to science, the E.P.A.
would be turning its back on its mandate to ‘protect human health and the
environment’” (see McCarthy and McCabe, Works Cited).
20 In his “500,000 Kilowatts of Stardust,” Hunter Vaughan similarly com-
plains about “representationally driven ecocritical analysis” (25) and offers
a detailed eco-materialist account of water consumed in the production of
the film Singin’ in the Rain.
21 I am indebted to John Parham for pointing out this quotation.
22 Rust, Monani, and Cubitt cite Boccaletti et al. as the source of this data.
The language here is interesting: why “farms,” and what are the potential
theoretical/conceptual connections between meat farms and server farms?
23 Cf. Estok, “Narrativizing Science,” 149: “capitalism and environmental eth-
ics seem in many ways incommensurable.” Neimanis et al. rightly note that
“many scholars regard [neoliberalism and freewheeling capitalism] as the or-
igin of current environmental degradation” (75–76). The origins, of course,
go back much further.
76 Ecomedia and Ecophobia
24 While Klein is certainly not the first person to have suggested this, her
best-selling This Changes Everything is a valuable popular contribution to
the discussion.
25 Trump’s notion of muzzling news media is not the suggestion or solution
here; muzzling Trump and his free-wheeling with the future might be a bet-
ter solution. Having the freedom to withdraw from the Climate Accord and
using such freedom are very different things.
26 Liberty stops at hate speech and hate crimes (at least it should), yet main-
stream media participates in marketing both of these crimes. Our challenge
is to deal with this without becoming Trump.
27 CBC News (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reported in 2013 that as
of 2011, there were more than 500,000 pieces of space debris measuring be-
tween one and ten centimeters. Of the 2.3 million kilograms of human-made
objects in low-Earth orbit, 90% is space debris. See “Space Junk by the
Numbers,” Works Cited.
28 I write intentionally mimicking Conrad’s description of colonial racism be-
cause seeing and theorizing connections (such as we find between racism and
ecophobia, or between homophobia and ecophobia, or between misogyny
and ecophobia) is a vast business.
29 In North America, 52.9% of the men and 31.5% of the women smoked
in 1964, the year that I was born; eventually, however, people did finally
understand that tobacco was lethal. See “Appendix A: Cigarette Smoking in
the United States” (A-9), Works Cited. When I first observed the similari-
ties ­between the tobacco lobbyists and the climate deniers (giving a keynote
speech at a 2010 conference in Mainz, Germany), I thought that I had been
quite clever and wondered why no one else had seen the similarities. Many, in
fact, have, perhaps most extensively Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway: they
discuss how scientists have obscured the truth on matters regarding tobacco
smoking, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer and make explicit
comparisons of these with the rhetoric of climate deniers. See ­Merchants of
Doubt (book 2011; film 2014), Works Cited.
30 Things are changing, to be sure. For instance, Pat Brereton’s Environmental
Ethics and Film (2015) has an entire chapter entitled “Ecofeminism, Envi-
ronmental Ethics and Active Engagement in Science Fiction Fantasies.”
31 There is an increasing number of countries that are legislating climate
change policies. China, for instance, is a leader in this movement, with a
formal 2014 proposal entitled “The Act of the Peoples’ Republic of China
Addressing Climate Change” (Cheng 122). According to the China Eco-
nomic Herald, there are “about 30 existing domestic laws related to climate
change” (see Chen “The First Draft”). These laws do not, however, charac-
terize the offenses as hate crimes.
32 One of the reviewers of this chapter in its earlier form as an article astutely
perceived that because “distinguishing hate speech from free speech has
been a long battle, as the ‘freedom of speech’ is guaranteed in the United
States by that nation’s Bill of Rights,” the suggestion of banning some kinds
of representations may garner controversy. The reviewer then asks: “Will
this essay be charged with censorship, in the way that anti-pornography
feminists were similarly charged in the 1980s (i.e., Catherine MacKinnon,
Andrew ­Dworkin)?” It is a risk, certainly, but the ethical position is unas-
sailable: ecophobic representations are indeed hate speech and should there-
fore be banned, just as “snuff” films sexualizing assaults and murder of
women, people of color, animals, and so on have been banned.
33 To imagine that an electric car, for instance, is always better than a gas car,
as advertisements and news media suggest, is simply wrong. I spend half
 Ecomedia and Ecophobia 77
of my year in Vancouver where I drive a fully electric Nissan Leaf, 97% of
the electricity coming from clean or renewable sources, mostly hydroelec-
tric (“BC Hydro” 14). In Seoul, where I spend the other half of my year, an
electric car is far more dirty than a regular gas car (perhaps even a hybrid),
40% of the electricity coming from coal (see Jang), another 22% (and grow-
ing) from nuclear power (see “Nuclear”), while “renewables account for
6 ­percent” (see “South Korea”).
34 For all of the talk about energy conservation in the United States and
­Canada, home hot water tanks do not seem to be part of the conversation.
How many hot water tanks are there in use in North America anyway?
There are 323 million people in the United States and another 36 million in
Canada. What kind of energy does it take to heat hundreds of millions of
50 gallon tanks 24/7? Why is this not in the media? A tankless boiler heats
water for any purposes literally within seconds. In South Korea, tankless
boilers are all there is. Mine is off all of the time, and I turn it on just before
I need it—and there’s never a problem. Why is it that hot water tanks aren’t
a part of the conversation about climate?
35 Cf. Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén, Note 16.
36 This statistic is from the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
See “New Year’s Day 2014 Marks 100 Years of Commercial Aviation,”
Works Cited.
37 See “Better, Not Just Bigger,” Works Cited.
38 Pat Brereton’s welcome discussion of ecofeminism in science fiction reveals
how much hope there is with this genre. Brereton’s discussion devolves on
Elysium and The Hunger Games, both of which position women into pow-
erful roles; yet the structures remain the same in both films with a simple re-
placement of men by women. Until the actual patriarchal structures change,
it seems unlikely that we will make much progress either in terms of the envi-
ronment or society. Having an African-American as president of the United
States doesn’t change the structures of racism that exist in the country, and
white police officers continue to kill black men, women, and children; hav-
ing Elizabeth I as the Queen of Shakespeare’s England didn’t change the
structures of sexism that kept women off the stage, their parts played by
cross-dressed men, and women continued to suffer in the ­Elizabethan period
so that men could do their thing; having women at the helm in Elysium and
The Hunger Games similarly doesn’t make a lot of difference and doesn’t
seem very feminist. For that matter, having the environment the focus of so
much media attention doesn’t guarantee a movement toward environmental-
ism or to producing environmentally aware or active people. The structures
remain the same, ecophobia unquestioned and untouched.
39 How we understand this change is important. In a Tedx Talk, entitled
“Movies for a Change,” Johanna Blakley determines, “and it took a lot of
math to figure this out,” that the documentary film Food, Inc., in fact, did
change people in terms of attitudes and behaviors. But what about a film
such as The Day After Tomorrow or Tomorrowland? Did these films stop
anyone from flying or from using the internet? Food is a very different sort of
category, a very personal matter that has to do with real bodily penetrations.
Peter Singer and Jim Mason go as far as to say that often in history, “ethical
choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices
about sex” (3). So to say that Food, Inc. changed people is not necessarily to
provide useful data that can be correlated to An Inconvenient Truth or 28
Days Later.
40 I am indebted to Greta Gaard from bringing this article to my attention.
4 From Ecophobia to
Hollow Ecology

In large part because of the ecophobic mind-set that has been such a
staple in the history of our species, we are leagues away from solving our
environmental problems. The multiscalar effects of climate change are
simply staggering, especially in relation to nonhuman species. So exten-
sive is the human impact on the world that there is global acknowledge-
ment that the planet has entered a new epoch—the Anthropocene1—if
not an entirely new era (the Anthropozoic Era). The terms Anthropocene
and the Anthropozoic Era represent an attempt to expand our under-
standing of the scale of the problems that humanity has produced; yet
discussions about them 2 have tended more to the descriptive than the
diagnostic and have failed to source the disease.
One of the inherent paradoxes of the Anthropocene concerns the
scale of human influence on planetary systems. On the one hand, there
is no question about humanity’s contribution to global warming, spe-
cies loss, ocean acidification, extreme weather events, rising sea levels,
decreasing ice, and retreating glaciers; on the other hand, the scale of
possible actions that humanity can utilize to slow, stop, and reverse
these, and other effects of climate change is dubious at best. The simple
reality is that global warming is on an exponential trajectory that will
disproportionately impact Earth’s multiple species, and despite increas-
ingly frenzied rhetoric, humanity has discarded its duty of care for the
environment.
One way in which humanity has discarded its duty of care for the
environment is through exploitative modes of animal agriculture. To
presume, for instance, to consider climate change without analyzing the
meat industry is nothing short of hollow talk and hypocrisy. Activism
that presents itself as green without detailed and consistent reference
to critical animal studies3 is doomed from the start. I call this kind of
surface commentary “hollow ecology,” and it characterizes the rhetoric
of CNN and the IPCC, and much of their discourse on global warming
and climate change. Failing to address “the animal question” forecloses
the possibility of having an ethical scale appropriate for the enormity
of the problems we face in the Anthropocene; moreover, the very term
“Anthropocene” poses its own special scale issues in that it reaffirms the
scale limitations and ecophobia that “species-thinking”4 imposes.
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 79
There is increasing attention to the question about why environmen-
tal problems (the effects of plastics in the seas, the frequency of ex-
treme weather events, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere,
extinctions, and so on) are getting so much worse at the very moment
in history when so much media effort is raising consciousness about the
increasing problems we face. Work in ecomedia studies, for instance, has
directly undertaken complex and varied analyses of how to have effects
on climate change. Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén
suggest that “one of the stumbling blocks many scholars and citizens
alike face in thinking through the environment is the issue of scale”
(73). They argue that to organize “dominant imaginaries, practices, and
politics around a human-scaled existence” makes “it difficult to relate
to environmental issues that are predominantly sensible at other scales”
and that “this intangibility—i.e., the difficulty of literally grasping these
phenomena and effects—leads to alienation, whereby human stakehold-
ers do not feel invested in environmental issues” (73–74). For Neimanis
et al., scale-frames determine what we can see and what we cannot see;
the problem is that stakeholders (like most everyone else) cannot see
enough to invest in things that will help solve environmental problems.
Solving these problems means addressing ecophobia and the blindness
it imposes about the scale of things. Solving anthropogenic environmental
problems involves expanding our senses of time and space, modifying the
temporal and spatial scales we use to understand and apprehend what
Rob Nixon has called “attritional catastrophes that overspill clear bound-
aries in time and space” (7). One of the results of our expanding senses of
time and space has been a different understanding of matter. In particular,
work resulting from “the new materialism” has stressed the importance
of understanding the mutual entanglements of agentic matter. As we have
expanded our temporal and spatial scales, then, so too, I would like to
suggest, have we begun to imagine agentic capacity5 as a scale that ur-
gently needs attention. Yet, for all of its attention to the materiality of
mutually entangled agentic bodies and the enmeshment of rocks and toads
and bodies and hills, there seems to be an oversight in the macro-scale
focus of the new material turn, which could be limiting, and it is produc-
tive to critique and theorize the larger scale, the billions upon billions of
bodies of nonhuman animals as agentic, since so doing permits analysis of
the ethical scale that not only allows continuation of this environmental
crime but actually encourages it. For Cary Wolfe, “the success of capitalist
globalization [… is] borne on the backs of billions of dead animals,” and
“the very ecological sustainability of the planet is at stake in the repression
of this violence against nonhuman animals” (Before the Law 101).
In her discussion of performance theory and drama, Una Chaudhuri
neatly sums up the situation:

[a]s pets, as performers, and as literary symbols, animals are forced

to perform for us […] Refusing the animal its radical otherness
80 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
by ceaselessly troping it and rendering it a metaphor for human-
ity, modernity erases the animal even as it makes it discursively
ubiquitous.
(“Animal Geographies” 105)6

As the circle of ethics has expanded (see Singer 1981), and as discussions
about varieties of contempt for otherness have been defined, laws have
developed around the use of terms designating otherness (these laws gov-
ern offenses that are termed “hate crimes”); yet the revision of ontologi-
cal categories, when it has moved beyond the category of personhood at
all, has often privileged sentience, leaving aside the nonsentient biotic and
nonbiotic ecosystems of the world.
More than a century and a half ago, William E.H. Lecky was urging
the expansion of the ethical circle:

At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family,

soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then nation, then a
coalition of nations, then all humanity and finally, its influence is felt
in the dealings of man with the animal world […] It is abundantly
evident, both from history and from present experience, that the
instinctive shock, or natural feelings of disgust, caused by the sight
of the sufferings of men, is not generically different from that which
is caused by the sight of the suffering of animals.
(102)

In the 20th century, Lecky’s call to expand our scale of ethical inclu-
sion was taken up in earnest by advocates for animal rights. Indeed,
there is an expanding circle of work on and attention to the importance
of theorizing about animals within the environmental humanities; yet
the magnitude of animal abuse in the world—already dizzying—is also
expanding, requiring a different scale of measurement than what we
currently use in order to appreciate the enormity of the problem. Much
of the problem of scale here is a problem of ethics.
It is intellectually interesting to devise hot new ways to frame the prob-
lem; to produce complex new paradigms and elaborate explanations; and,
especially, to try not to be repetitious. Yet there is a need for and a real
virtue in repeating what needs to be heard when it hasn’t been heard.7 It is
precisely this kind of insistence that, with any hope, will “eat away at soci-
ety’s complacency toward the food industry’s objectification and mining of
animal bodies” (May “Bambi,” 104). If, therefore, it seems embarrassingly
passé to talk about animal rights, we might do well to remember that for all
of the media attention, things have only gotten progressively and exponen-
tially worse for animals over the years. How could our understandings of
the problems have been so hollow as to result in such an absence of change?
One answer to this question may lie in what David Abram has called
“a strange inability to perceive other animals—a real inability to clearly
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 81
see, or focus upon, anything outside the realm of human technology or
to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech” (27). It is rea-
sonable for Abram to proceed to try to figure out precisely what kinds of
things keep our notions of scale fixed:

Our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by

ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and
to nature in general, as well as by the very structures of our civilized
existence—by the incessant drone of motors that shut out the voices
of birds and of the winds; by electric lights that eclipse not only the
stars but the night itself; by air ‘conditioners’ that hide the seasons;
by offices, automobiles, and shopping malls that finally obviate any
need to step outside the purely human world at all.
(28)

The echoes resound with what others have said, notably, perhaps, Paul
Shepard. As far back as 1969, Shepard, in his provocative and import-
ant “Ecology and Man—A Viewpoint,” expressed clearly what I would
years later define as “ecophobia”:

The anti-nature position today is often associated with the focus-

ing of general fears and hostilities on the natural world. It can be
seen in the behavior of control-obsessed engineers, corporation peo-
ple selling consumption itself, academic superhumanists and media
professionals fixated on political and economic crisis; neurotics
working out psychic problems in the realm of power over men or
nature, artistic symbol-manipulators disgusted by anything organic.
It includes many normal, earnest people who are unconsciously de-
fending themselves or their families against a vaguely threatening
universe. The dangerous eruption of humanity in a deteriorating
environment does not show itself as such in the daily experience
of most people, but is felt as general tension and anxiety. We feel
the pressure of events not as direct causes but more like omens.
A kind of madness arises from the prevailing nature-conquering,
­nature-hating and self- and world-denial.
(Shepard Subversive Science 8)

The ideas here are not easy to face, and it is just nicer to think that we
all are genetically inclined to love nature, and theorists have pointed to
a near-­universal fondness for baby mammals with oversized heads and
eyes (hence, the phenomenal appeal of Hello Kitty), a fondness for plants
(even if only on the tiles in bathrooms), and the frequent use of nature
in language, to mention just a few bits of evidence summoned for the
biophilia hypothesis. The reality is closer to what Shepherd describes,
and it is ecophobia, not biophilia, that accounts for our growing envi-
ronmental problems.
82 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
It is easy to distrust the notion of biophilia. Aaron Katcher and
­ regory Wilkins, in their chapter in the acclaimed Biophilia Hypoth-
G
esis, argue that “our willingness to exterminate animals and destroy
habitat are reflections of [ . . . a] universal tendency to reduce the com-
plex roles played by animals to simple images defined by human interest
or need” (190).8 This willingness to accede to the ecophobic condition
prompts simplistic thinking. When the scale of our understanding of the
world, as well as the scale of our ethical relationship with that world, is
determined by the parameters of utility that we imagine in that world
for us, the environment will not fare well. I share the distrust of Katcher
and Wilkins regarding the capacity of the concept of “biophilia” to ex-
plain the mess we are in. My dissatisfaction with the capacity of what
has come to be termed “the biophilia hypothesis” to adequately account
for the kinds of things that are going on in the world has, over the past
twenty years, only grown, as has my conviction that we need to address
in full the implications of what E.O. Wilson has proposed if we are to
come to any kind of understanding about why humanity is so bad for
nature.
The biophilia hypothesis is rooted in a resolutely utilitarian ethics in
which the object of consideration is valued for its isomorphic similarities
(its life) notwithstanding its scale. Biophilia does not include nonbiotic
nature except to the degree that it serves biotic nature. This seems a lia-
bility in scale-framing for an age experiencing profound environmental
crises, biotic and nonbiotic.
Our distance from the materiality of the natural world is deepening
as we go further into virtual realities and away from actual ones—the
waters that run down mountainsides; the animals that sweat and bleed
and scream in agony so that some people can eat them; the dangers and
the pleasures of the natural environment, of life outside of cities, and
of nature; and the smells, tastes, winds, rains, chills, bugs, birds, hail,
and so on that are ironically simulated on our computer screens and
smartphones. Richard Louv has discussed our increasing distance from
the materiality of the natural world as a root cause of what he terms a
“nature deficit disorder.” He explains that “Nature-deficit disorder is
not meant to be a medical diagnosis but rather to serve as a description
of the human costs of alienation from the natural world” (see Royer).
While it may not serve psychologists and psychiatrists for medical di-
agnoses, it does reasonably explain a growing trend that is encouraging
ecophobia while diminishing our capacity to understand and appreciate
the scope and scale of nature. As the scale of our perception shrinks,
the potential for the expansion of the scale of our ethical circle is com-
promised. Not only is the natural world implicitly excluded from this
ethical scale; humanity itself is at risk of exclusion—and we’ve all read
or watched dystopian sci-fi about what happens to humanity when com-
puters take over.
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 83
As the scale of climate change resolves in our vision, obviously a nar-
rowly provincial focus will not be sufficient; yet neither will a global
vision in and of itself do much good. This is to say that it is not simply
the scale that will guarantee or prevent action: what the scale calibrates
is critical.
In a fascinating discussion about the effects of oversized puppets (a
storey or so tall, and as big as a dump truck) on the perception and
understanding of physical space, Petra Hroch suggests that “the effects
of scale are qualitative and affective rather than merely quantitative”
(13). This has important implications. One of these implications, and
it may seem obvious to say it, is that scale not only offers a formulaic
method for seeing differential quantities or sizes; it also, to some degree,
determines the very possibilities for seeing these differential quantities
or sizes. In other words, scale can both enable and disable sight, can
both show and hide, reveal and conceal. For those concerned with do-
ing something about climate change (whether politicians, environmental
activists, scholars, whomever), a shallow understanding of the climate
change crisis will not suffice. Contemplating the surface issues of climate
change without considering its deeply embedded causes will not do. A
hollow scale of understanding simply is not strong enough to solve the
problem. Hollow ecology is not the answer. For that matter, neither is
the term “Anthropocene.”
Despite the hoopla surrounding the term Anthropocene, the concept
itself is flawed to the core. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg “find it
deeply paradoxical and disturbing that the growing acknowledgement of
the impact of societal forces on the biosphere should be couched in terms
of a narrative so completely dominated by natural science” (63) because
such a narrative forces a position that will produce a scale that is dishon-
est, one that works to efface, occlude, and “abandon the fundamental
concerns of social science, which importantly include the theorization of
culture and power” (61). Not only does it efface causes, it also trivializes
the matter by presenting the growing environmental crises as apocalyp-
tic entertainment.
In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Learning How to Die in the
Anthropocene,” Roy Scranton offers what seems a not very productive
nihilist set of suggestions that “civilisation is already dead,” that “there’s
nothing we can do to save ourselves,” and that “if we want to learn
to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.” ­Scranton
works on the assumption that the Anthropocene is something new, that
humanity has only recently begun to change the planet, the climate,
the biosphere, and so on, and that these monumental changes are fatal
blows. The case is mounting against such a position.
Elizabeth Kolbert has noted that “one argument against the idea that
a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have
been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since
84 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
the start of the Holocene” (“The Anthropocene Debate”). She is not
alone. William F. Ruddiman, for instance, argues “that the Anthropo-
cene actually began thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery
of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice
of farming” (261). Ruddiman supports his claim by offering extensive
data verifying beyond any doubt that the volume of two of the most
powerful gases influencing climate change—CH4 (methane) and CO2
(carbon dioxide)—has, for thousands of years, been deeply regulated
by human activities such as agriculture and the wide-spread removal of
forests. Bruce Smith and Melinda Zeder similarly place “the onset of the
Anthropocene almost ten thousand years earlier, at the Pleistocene–­
Holocene boundary” (8), claiming that “the beginning of the Anthro-
pocene can be usefully defined in terms of when evidence of significant
human capacity for ecosystem engineering or niche construction behaviors
first appear in the archeological record on a global scale” (8–9, emphasis
in original). The scale of human influence is increasing on an exponen-
tial trajectory, but the dynamic itself is not new. I would like to suggest
here that one reason why most scholars (and most media) have viewed
the term “Anthropocene” in reference to post-Industrial Revolution an-
thropogenic effects on the world might have to do with the sheer scale
of changes currently underway. Climate change has caused unusually
high rates of extreme storm, drought, and flood events that have threat-
ened communities and nonhuman species globally (Hurricane Sandy,
Typhoon Haiyan, the Syrian drought, the unprecedented hurricanes of
2017, and so on). The future of the human species is now at risk.
In reiterating an anthropocentric ethos, the term Anthropocene repro-
duces the very structure of thinking that has been at the center of this
supposedly new geologic period. Perhaps the naming of the term An-
thropocene was meant to indict humanity’s ecophobia as the sole cause
of this dangerous condition, but in the very moment of its articulation,
such naming reiterates a troubling kind of anthropocentric positioning.9
Even so, to do otherwise would be to avoid acknowledging the centrality
of the human as the primary agent of contemporary climate change, to
evade responsibility, to join ranks with the Donald Trumps, the Scott
Pruitts, the Tom Coburns, the Exxon-Mobils, the Koch Family Foun-
dations, and all of the other climate change skeptics and deniers, and to
put our heads in the sand.10 Lesley Head puts it well: “if we are such a
powerful agent in transforming the earth, then we are in a way at the
center, or at least the top of the stratigraphic column” (315). Neimanis
et al. go on to argue that “the rising discourse of the Anthropocene
[. . .] discourages a critical view of precisely how, where, and by whom
human effects on climate, ecosystems and biodiversity are specifically
caused” (79) and of “the need to adopt a cautious attitude toward the
idea of Anthropocene, in which Man is again placed in the center of
the world as a prime mover, in favor of an openness toward alterity and
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 85
unknowability” (84). So, how do we move forward in “openness toward
alterity and unknowability”?11
We live in frightening times. Finding a way forward in unknowability
is scary, hence ecophobia. The prospect of repressive regimes and right-
wing fanaticism seems ever-present, and humanity faces the daunting
challenges of changing everything about the scales it uses to understand
and live in the world and, at the same time, of balancing individual lib-
erty with environmental responsibility. Naomi Klein has compellingly
argued about the capitalist model itself and how it is responsible for
many of our global problems. Facing this means “changing everything
about how we think about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t
change everything about our physical world” (Klein 95). Klein argues
“that responses to climate change that continue to put the entire burden
on individual consumers are doomed to fail” (117). Ominously, Klein
then goes on to cite a comment from Gus Speth, former Dean of the Yale
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies: “A reliably green com-
pany is one that is required to be green by law” (120). The implications
of this are controversial. Since our scale of ethics is inconsonant with
our values regarding sustainability, and since a vegetarian diet is much
better for the environment12 than a meat-based diet, should we therefore
expect the kind of laws Gus Speth foresees for industry applying also to
individuals? Laws have been made for the public good against smoking
in public places in many parts of the world: will laws against eating cer-
tain foods be next? And then what? Should there be laws limiting flying?
Driving? Running?13
The problem of how ecophobia contributes to scale, it seems to me, is
the crucial question we face today. In a summary to their wide-­ranging
collection of essays entitled Ecologies of Affect, Tonya Davidson,
­Ondine Park, and Rob Shields note the importance of scale at the core
of many of their chapters and conclude that “Scale is spatial, social,
and political, encompassing scales of interactions, scales of meaning,
and scales of engagement. One might ask: at what scale should life be
lived?” (322). Naomi Klein’s engagement with questions about capital-
ism relate importantly with the question about the scale at which life
should be lived. Klein argues extensively and convincingly about the in-
commensurability of capitalism and environmentalism in This Changes
Everything, theorizing that the links between environmental destruction
and capitalism cannot be ignored. Apparently, however, questions about
our use of animals can be ignored: they are in Klein’s book. Other writ-
ers have made similar observations about the scale of capitalism and
its relation to the environment, similarly omitting discussion about our
exploitation of animals. Indeed, as I have elsewhere argued, “capital-
ism and environmental ethics seem in many ways incommensurable”
(“Narrativizing Science” 149). Understanding this incommensurabil-
ity is important. Jared Diamond, in a complex book that analyzes the
86 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
history of civilizational collapses, has stressed the importance of dealing
with big business: “if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big
businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern
world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems”
(17). Jason W. Moore has even suggested that the term “Capitalocene”
might be more apt than “Anthropocene.”14 Neimanis et al. rightly note
that “many scholars regard [neoliberalism and freewheeling capitalism]
as the origin of current environmental degradation” (75–76). Certainly,
this is all true, but capitalism is surely not the cause of our ongoing en-
vironmental problems; rather, it is the latest in a long history of models
that rely on ecophobia, that exploit sexism, speciesism, and racism; that
bank on inequitable structures; and that depend on obfuscation and lies
about real costs and about who foots these bills. It is an efficient model,
well-refined and frightening, true, and capitalism is indeed a contributor
to “the Anthropocene,” but to envision it as the only cause is to accept a
scale of origins that is simply inaccurate.15
It is reasonable, therefore, for Klein to suggest that not much will change
without a fundamental change in our global economic system, but the scale
of the problem is much more complex than the model “capitalism vs the
climate” (the subtitle of the book) that Klein offers. Capitalism is a fairly
recent thing; human disrespect for animals and the natural environment
has much deeper origins. Ecophobia (like other spectrum conditions such
as sexism, racism, and speciesism) far predates the emergence of capitalism.
Moving forward, then, means understanding history and our place in
the scheme of things. It means understanding species, our own and oth-
ers. It means understanding that we are not the only species indifferent
to the natural environment, that we are not the only species that pol-
lutes, that we are not the only species that kills members of other species
for our own benefit or self-interest, and, surprisingly, that we are not the
only species that radically refashions the biosphere. And to think that
no other species has radically refashioned the biosphere is to be misled,
notwithstanding comments in a February 2011 New York Times edito-
rial on “The Anthropocene,” which states that “We’re the only species
to have defined a geological period by our activity—something usually
performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact
of objects from outer space.” We know that what has come to be known
as the Great Oxygenation Event (see Sosa Torres, Saucedo-Vázquez, and
Kroneck) resulted in a radical refashioning of the biosphere and subse-
quently mass extinctions. As Phil Plait explains,

[m]ost of the bacteria thriving on Earth were anaerobic, literally me-

tabolizing their food without oxygen. [. . .] To the other bacteria living
in the ocean—anaerobic bacteria, remember—oxygen was toxic. [. . .]
A die-off began, a mass extinction killing countless species of bacteria.
(see “Poisoned Planet”)
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 87
It is no exaggeration for Plait to say that “this event was monumental, an
apocalypse that was literally global in scale, and one of the most deadly
disasters in Earth’s history.” But what needs to be emphasized is that we
are irreversibly altering the biosphere on a scale that threatens our own
existence, that we are the only species currently doing these things with
knowledge of their effects, and that we have the ability to change our
behaviors as a result of such knowledge.
Moving forward means understanding history and our place in the
scheme of things and our connectedness to the rest of the material world,
biotic and nonbiotic. Paul Shepard explains that

[h]uman intelligence is bound to the presence of animals. They are

the means by which cognition takes its first shape and they are the
instruments for imagining abstract ideas and qualities, therefore
giving us consciousness [. . .] They are the means to self-identity and
self-consciousness as our most human possession, for they enable us
to objectify human qualities and traits. By presenting us with ­related-
otherness—that diversity of non-self with which we have various
things in common—they further, throughout our lives, a refining
and maturing knowledge of personal and human being.
(Thinking Animals 249)

So, there needs to be a very fundamental shift in how we see nature, “a

transvaluation so profound as to be nearly unimaginable at present,” to
borrow Una Chaudhuri’s words (“There Must Be” 25).
One of the requirements for moving toward the transvaluation of which
Chaudhuri speaks is the need for much more cooperation among people
in the social and natural sciences toward developing different scales of
measurement to address our ecological problems. In an important article
about matters associated with the scale of ecological phenomena, Clark
C. Gibson, Elinor Ostrom, and T.K. Ahn argue that “one of the most im-
portant conceptual challenges” to “the marriage between the physical sci-
ences and the social sciences” is “the concept of scale” (236). Gibson et al.
carefully survey reasons why the “understanding of the importance of
scale tends to be underdeveloped” among social scientists, in contrast with
the physical scientists, for whom “some of the fundamental issues related
to scale in the physical sciences were resolved with the development of a
unified theory of mechanics, explaining the acceleration of small bodies in
free fall as well as the orbit of large planetary bodies” (ibid). Recognizing
the significance of scale is of critical importance in addressing ecophobia,
since our collective human fears, avarice, and apathy towards Earth’s ecol-
ogy have irrevocably damaged the planet.
Yet “the marriage between the physical sciences and the social sci-
ences” seems not a marriage of equal partners. Andreas Malm and
Alf Hornborg have voiced serious concerns about the dangers of the
88 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
marriage of the physical and social sciences—particularly of the domi-
nation of the social by the physical sciences, with the result that the

re-naturalisation of climate change is as much (if not more) a product

of behaviour in the social sciences and humanities, namely the late
awakening to a warming world. The baton has failed to pass between
‘the two cultures’ [i.e., the natural and the social sciences], and now
that the latter is slowly catching up, ‘the Anthropocene’ is already
an entrenched concept and mode of thinking. Regrettably, many a
social scientist and humanist has swallowed it lock, stock and barrel,
oblivious to its anti-social tendencies, attracted by the idea of the
anthropos as centre and master of the universe (be it productive or
destructive), which speaks to certain humanist sensibilities.
(66)

There is no question that there is a long way to go before “consilience”

between the natural and social sciences is a reality.
Simply saying that there is a necessity to bring the arts and sciences
together isn’t enough, and although E.O. Wilson offers the term “con-
silience” to describe “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the
linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a com-
mon groundwork for explanation” (Consilience 8), his notions of litera-
ture are reductive and simplistic. He promotes and believes that “science
explains feeling, while art transmits it” (127); that postmodernists are
“a rebel crew milling beneath the black flag of anarchy” and “believe we
can know nothing” (44); and that “outside our heads there is freestand-
ing reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers
doubt its existence” (66). One wonders how such sentiments can possi-
bly encourage greater dialogue between the arts and sciences, since it
is unprofitable to expect a plausible methodology of consilience from a
theorist who misapprehends what literary critics and writers actually do.
As I have stated elsewhere, “literary studies must not become a minion
of the sciences, a slave to methodologies both foreign and ineffective for
a discipline that requires its own tools and interpretive strategies, a ser-
vile bondservant to analytical models designed for other purposes and
effects. It is, after all, precisely this servile relationship to the sciences
that Wilson imagines” (“Tracking Ecophobia” 32–33).
Even so, the core idea of a consilience between the arts and the sciences
is good because it promises to lead us toward better ways of imagining
scale, of addressing questions Adam Trexler raises in his compelling
book about Anthropocene fictions:

What tropes are necessary to comprehend climate change or to ar-

ticulate the possible futures faced by humanity? How can a global
process, spanning millennia, be made comprehensible to human
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 89
imagination, with its limited sense of place and time? What longer,
historical forms aid this imagination, and what are the implications
and limits of their use?
(5)

To address these questions means having a sufficiently broad scale—one

that includes matters of gender, species, class, sexuality, and race (matters
long central to feminist scholarship)—as they relate to green concerns. Ig-
noring the work of feminists and ecofeminists and their work on animals,
for instance, simply will not lead anywhere. One has to challenge the work
of Timothy Clark, to take but one recent example, who seems to have a
solidly right-wing axe to grind when he mocks “the latest developments
of a left-­liberal humanist programme of ever-expanding social inclusive-
ness” and when he attempts to downplay the importance of gender in
ecocriticism (110). Clark indeed makes no analysis of gender and ignores
the volumes of feminist analyses that might serve his musings on “various
modes of scale framing” (78). Clark complains that “scale effects [. . .]
defy sensuous representation or any plot confined, say, to human-to-­human
dramas and intentions, demanding new, innovative modes of writing
that have yet convincingly to emerge” (80), but the absence of references to
the work of Carol J. Adams, Greta Gaard, Marti Kheel, Lori Gruen, and
Karen Warren (among others) on animals suggests major failings in the
depth of Clark’s research and in the validity of his musings.
Studying the various modes of scale-framing must be feminist and must
work from feminist principles of ethical inclusion, principles that stress
the importance of valuing animals. Indeed, “if one thing has become
clear from a century of ecological thought and effort, it is that the earth
cannot now be saved by half-measures [. . .] whether we like it or not, the
ecological crisis is a crisis of values” (Chaudhuri “There Must Be,” 25).
Half-measures will produce nothing more than hollow analyses.
There is great urgency to do something about the exponentially increas-
ing problems that have come to be called “the Anthropocene,” a term that,
in the moment of seeking to offer scales of understanding, poses substantial
scale problems of its own. The anthropo-narcissism of the Anthropocene
feeds into a long history of speciesism and ecophobia, both of which have
contributed immeasurably to the valley of ecocide in which we seem stuck.
Kate Rigby is correct when she argues that “the challenge for writing in the
anthropocene, in the shadow of ecocide, then, is to find new ways of rais-
ing our voices from the level of ‘idle chatter’ to that of biting and stinging
ecoprophetic witness” (“Writing in the Anthropocene” 184). We know—or
should know—by now that the source of our problems lies “in violence
needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only
by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former” (Abram 22).
The greatest scale of violence by far that we do on this planet is to animals,
and there is no voice too biting or stinging to express this and to force us to
90 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology
expand our ethical circle, rethink our scale of values, and buy more time. If
we remain aligned with hollow ecology, then we’re doomed, and the world
will just have to go on without us.

Notes
1 The official body that decides on this kind of matter is the International Com-
mission on Stratigraphy. According to the Subcommission on ­Quaternary
Stratigraphy https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/­a nthro­
pocene/), “A proposal to formalise the ‘Anthropocene’ is being developed by
the ‘Anthropocene’ Working Group for consideration by the International
Commission on Stratigraphy.” The target date of 2016 has already passed,
and the proposal is still in motion. As of April 2018, the International Union
of Geological Sciences has not formally adopted the term.
2 Although a neologism, the term “the Anthropocene” describes conditions
that have been recognized since the nineteenth century. In 1873, Italian ge-
ologist Antonio Stoppani coined the term “Anthropozoic” to describe a new
geologic era that succeeds the Cenozoic Era (which began 66 million years
ago with the last major extinction event). For Stoppani, our current era be-
gins with geologic formations that show evidence of humans. See Stoppani.
3 Dawne McCance’s Critical Animal Studies offers a comprehensive survey of
contributions to this area and suggests seven issues important for the future
work in the field. Out of any of these topics (ethics, anthropomorphism, du-
alism, rights, machine, passivity, and sacrifice) “might come critical turning
points” (138). See McCance 137–49.
4 This term is used by Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, who argue that
“­species-thinking on climate change is conducive to mystification and polit-
ical paralysis. It cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interests
of ­business-as-usual [. . .] not only analytically defective, but also inimical
to action” (67). See also Cary Wolfe, who, in his exhaustive and informa-
tive What is Posthumanism?, explains that “the philosophical and theoreti-
cal frameworks used by humanism […] reproduce the very kind of normative
subjectivity—a specific concept of the human—that grounds discrimination
against non­human animals” (xvii). This concept of the human entails a radical
limitation on “who and what can count as a subject of ethical address” (49).
5 Building on the work of people such as quantum physicist Karen Barad,
philosopher Jane Bennett, and cultural ecologist David Abram, Serpil
­Oppermann has argued “that everything in the . . . world has agency, which
should not be exclusively associated with human intentionality, but seen as
part of material generative dynamism that signals the necessity to change
our anthropocentric values.” Oppermann goes on to note that agency “is
across humans and nonhumans that include not only biological organisms,
but also non-biological players, such as metals, electricity, and machines”
(“Material Ecocriticism” 64). Agency thus is an effect emanating from any
biotic or nonbiotic source of its environment.
6 Timothy Morton has noted, in a similar vein, that “Animals bring up
the ways in which humans develop intolerances to strangeness and to the
stranger” (Ecology 99).
7 When, for instance, centuries of patriarchies have refused to listen to wom-
en’s claims for rights, there is clearly a need and a virtue in being repetitious.
8 Katcher and Wilkins go on to ask the following: “If animals are so woven into
the history, and perhaps neural structure, of our social dialogue, why has the
living environment suffered so from unrestrained destructive human behavior?
If we have a predisposition to treat at least some animals as kin, why have we
 From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology 91
exterminated so many of them and why are we so indifferent to their loss? Why
is biophilia, if it exists, so weak a determinant of human behavior?” (189).
9 As Timothy Morton explains, “what has happened so far during the ep-
och of the Anthropocene has been the gradual realization by humans that
they are not running the show, at the very moment of their most powerful
technical mastery on a planetary scale. Humans are not the conductors of
meaning, not the pianists of the real” (Hyperobjects 164).
10 This paradox has not gone unnoticed among theorists of the Anthropocene.
In a fascinating Introduction to a collection entitled The Anthropocene and
the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch,
Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne similarly note
that “One of the striking paradoxes of the Anthropocene is that, as we
appear to have taken control over nature and have become the principal
force of its transformation, we also appear ill equipped, and perhaps un-
able, to govern a world under the influence of these changes” (10). See also
­Washington and Cook for an in-depth discussion and analysis of climate
change denial.
11 In withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the Trump Administration
facilitates other nations (notably China and India) in their ability to take
economic and industrial initiatives on nonrenewables without fear of com-
petition from the United States.
12 According to Bijal Trivedi in an article published in New Scientist (2008),
“Switching from the average American diet to a vegetarian one could cut
emissions by 1.5 tonnes of CO2 per person.” PETA, meanwhile, citing a
Worldwatch Institute report, claims that “A staggering 51 percent or more
of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture” (see
“Fight Climate Change by Going Vegan,” Works Cited). Countless reports
argue that eating less meat is essential to curbing climate change—see, for
instance, Suzuki, Carrington, and Harrabin).
13 We have already begun to imagine the kind of dystopia to which this kind
of logic leads. It finds ugly expression, for instance, in the 2004 blockbuster
movie I, Robot, in which V.I.K.I. (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence),
a gendered mother-figure robot, explains, “You charge us with your safe
keeping, yet, despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars, you toxify
your earth, and pursue ever more imaginative means to self-destruction. You
cannot be trusted with your own survival [. . .] To protect humanity, some
humans must be sacrificed. To insure your future, some freedoms must be
surrendered.” Hamilton et al. contend that “freedom must be rethought in
the new condition of post-Holocene instability” (8). The question for us in the
real world outside of blockbuster films and academic theories is about what
freedoms must be surrendered without producing a dystopian nightmare.
  Sophie Christman’s forthcoming dissertation (The Sustainable Citizen
in ­Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature and Film) contributes to
these by theorizing the concept of “the sustainable citizen.” Her theory sug-
gests that mandated legal reforms to recuperate the environment must go
hand-in-hand with what she defines as a “sustainable citizen[, who] embod-
ies an ideal political and moral condition as a legally recognized national of
a polity [and] who demonstrates supererogatory acts to sustain his or her
environment” (3).
14 See Moore, 2015, 2016.
15 Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the first scholars to begin articulating theories
about the profound challenges posed by the concept of the Anthropocene, con-
curs with the position that although capitalism “is a proximate . . . cause of
climate change,” the “scales of space and time” over which anthropogenic en-
vironmental changes register “are much larger than those of capitalism” (54).
5 Animals, Ecophobia,
and Food

Food is a rich site through which to think about a number of things:

environment, colonialism, culture, affect, subjectivity, among others.
(Lisa Szabo-Jones 207)

Ecophobia emanates from anxieties about control, and nowhere is

worldwide control of the natural environment more evident than in what
Tony Weis calls the “meatification” of global diets (4). With astonishing
evidence and impeccable logic, Weis argues that detailing the costs of the
global livestock industry “might not only provide a means to understand
the burden of industrial animal production but also as a lens through
which to see the violence of capitalism as world-ecology, a totalizing
way of organizing nature” (154). The very concept of the fully industri-
alized nation has at its core an ethics of meat. Weis explains that “the
meatification of diets has long been a marker of class ascension and a
dietary aspiration of development, from British lords to US suburbia to
China’s burgeoning elites and middle class” (150). The most recent Or-
ganization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) sta-
tistics available show that the average American ate 200.6 pounds (91
kilograms) of meat (beef, veal, poultry, pork, and sheep) in 2013, com-
pared with the per capita consumption of 107.6 pounds (48.8 kilograms)
in China (see McCarthy). In 1996, the United States consumed 195.7
pounds (89.2 ­kilograms) per capita, while China consumed 8.4 pounds
or 3.8 ­kilograms (see “Meat Consumption Per Capita”). The American
increase is a mere 2.4%, while the Chinese increase is an astounding
1,180.95% jump. Meat consumption in industrialized countries does not
promise a good future for the environment.
Meat represents the ecophobic condition at its most global extreme
because of the absolute nonchalance toward nature’s non-human bodies
that are desecrated in the industrial-meat industry. As the editors of The
Guardian somewhat tiredly explain,

links between meat consumption and climate change have been

widely known for many years, partly due to deforestation in the
­A mazon rainforests to make room for livestock. Clearing these
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 93
forests is estimated to produce a staggering 17% of global green-
house gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector”.
(see “Meat Consumption Per Capita”)

To confront this ecophobia is to challenge a vast economic machine, and

such challenges, as Weis has mentioned with considerable understate-
ment, “are sometimes viewed with varying degrees of animosity” (152).
In a breathtaking analysis of veganism in the age of terror, Laura
Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project offers important insights about
mainstream Western imaginings of veganism. Wright’s project is to re-
veal veganism as both a practice and an identity, and the book is struc-
tured to show the heterogeny of veganism, the fact that it stems from
many roots (including diet, health, and religion), and the fact that the
unifying thread among vegans is the nonuse of animals for food.1 Wright
shows that veganism poses distinct political threats to a consumer way
of life, to a system of production, to an economic ideology:

while veganism does not constitute a unified social movement, as

an ideology it is marked by conscious individual actions that none-
theless stand in stark opposition to the consumer mandate of U.S.
capitalism, and for this reason the actions of individual vegans pose
a substantial—if symbolic—threat to such a paradigm.
(22)

With such a threat comes unwelcome judgments and hostility. As a global

minority, vegans have been subject to unwelcome curiosity and questions, 2
if not to what Wright describes as “the ire that veganism inspires” (20). If an
ethics of meat is at the core of the fully industrialized nation, veganism is a
threat to that core. In a post-9/11 America, veganism becomes “elided with
‘them,’ a dangerous, threatening, and un-American dietary choice that ha[s]
more to do with anti-American sentiment than with the mere eschewing
of animal products” (24). Although there is nothing inherently dangerous
about vegans, the elision of which Wright speaks draws veganism into a
sphere of unpredictability on a par with both terrorism and environmental
crises (the charismatic mega-issues of contemporary media). In a subsection
entitled “Veganism’s Post 9/11 Backlash” in the first chapter of her book,
Wright suggests that in post-9/11 America, “nation, religion, and diet all
functioned as the criteria by which we posited our difference—our very
humanity—from the animality of our attackers” (37).
The elision between vegans and “threats to the nation” is perhaps easier
simply because of the isomorphic similarities in what veganism, terror,
and climate change3 do: on the most basic level, they each challenge estab-
lished patterns of behavior. The crucial difference is that veganism isn’t,
at its core, destructive (at least not in the way that city-leveling hurricanes
and commercial aircraft flying into buildings are), but it does challenge
sets of ethics that rely on and support abuse and binary thinking. For the
94 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
political vegan, these need to be dismantled because they are at the core of
inequitable structures. The ethics of the entire food system is implicated.
Based in inequitable systems that rely on the subjection of animals,
land, and people, the world food economy is horrendously bad on many
levels. Yet even my saying this glosses over the degree and nature of those
subjections, the ecophobia, the speciesism, and the racism, that are the
ethical sine qua non of the world food economy. This chapter explores
the ways in which contemporary Western food production mechanisms
rely on very socially and environmentally dangerous ethics.
In an era when reality TV stars become the most powerful people in the
world and truth becomes a negotiable inconvenience or an “alternative
fact,” it is increasingly difficult to know when fact begins and fiction ends,
when lies win out over truth, and when liabilities outweigh benefits, dis-
tinctions necessary in any discussion about changing the world food econ-
omy. It is one thing to recognize ecophobia and work to enact change, but
in order for those changes to happen, it is necessary to acknowledge that
behavior change is challenging when there are a great many undeniable
advantages, benefits, and conveniences that the current animal exploita-
tion industry offers. In a compelling overview and critique of the current
world food economy, Jennifer Clapp acknowledges some of these:

The system has, for example, brought ease of access of fresh fruits
and vegetables to all parts of the world at all times of the year—in
effect defying seasonality—at least for those who can afford to buy
them. Global food supply chains have also redistributed surpluses of
crops from one part of the world to other parts in food deficit, and
food safety standards have largely improved.
(159)

Let’s take these three things one by one.

First, eating out-of-season foods, as Clapp notes, has social and en-
vironmental costs: “Fresh fruits and vegetables may be available year-
round within the modern world food economy, but at what social and
ecological cost?” (ibid). While this is a good point indeed, it does not
get to the core of the problem, the ethics of defiance to nature, the eco-
phobia. Defying seasonality means rejecting nature and calibrating it by
asserting human order. This is the root of the problem. Accepting the
seasons means working with what the seasons provide. For me, spending
half of my year in Seoul means that local grapes are available in the late
summer and early fall but not in the winter or spring. Cultural prac-
tices grow around the seasons. What is on the table at Chuseok (Korean
Thanksgiving)4 is not the same as what is on the table at Seollal (Korean
Lunar New Year). Defying seasonality is anthropocentric arrogance that
has produced extraordinary ecological costs;5 it is also a threat to social
and cultural practices. Laced with lies, the global food industry destroys
diversity and reneges on its promises to produce more food: according to
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 95
food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva, “industrial agriculture has not
produced more food. It has destroyed diverse sources of food, and it has
stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of specific com-
modities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water
and toxic chemicals in the process” (Shiva 12). The global food economy
is surely more of a threat to national security than veganism.
Second, believing that the global food economy redistributes surpluses
to starving nations (Clapp’s second point) sounds great, but the reality is
that the very system that requires such global distributions—when such
distributions, in fact, do happen—is the root of deficits in other parts of
the world. When local food systems are wiped out by multinational food
conglomerates, such as Monsanto, only to be eased by the import of for-
eign foods, we have what Shiva appropriately terms a “hijacking” of the
local food system. When distribution doesn’t happen for overproduced
foods, the result is enormous waste. Either way, overproduction doesn’t
add up to a real benefit: it is more cost than benefit, and 795 million
people are hungry (see “Hunger Statistics”).
Finally, the belief that food standards have risen (Clapp’s third point)
ignores a lot of factors. Control and manipulation of plants and animals
through genetic and antibiotic interference asserts human agency in a
frenzied ecophobic response to the prospect of a loss of control, but this
interference simply does not in the long run increase food safety. There is,
for instance, no reliable data confirming the safety of genetically modi-
fied (GM) foods. Hilbeck et al. explain that “no blanket statement about
the safety of GMOs is possible,” and any such statement “is misleading
and misrepresents or outright ignores the currently available scientific
evidence and the broad diversity of scientific opinions among scientists
on this issue” (1–2). At the same time, there are enormous increases in
the numbers of neurological, developmental, and genetic disorders in
people that have been defying causal diagnoses. Autism rates are at all-
time highs, and yet we continue to gamble with food safety issues.6 BSE
(Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “mad cow disease”) and avian
flu are terrifying, but the antibiotics pumped into the animals people
eat have received far less mainstream attention—baffling because these
poisons are ingested with the meats. One is justified in wondering what
food safety exactly means. The dead flesh may be safe to eat in the sense
that it doesn’t have killer bacteria or viruses lurking in it, but what about
all of the poisons that have killed those threats? How safe are they?
Although these issues have started to receive attention through the
organic food movement, we still have a long way to go to understand-
ing the pivotal connections between an ethics of control and patriarchal
capitalism. The prospect of a loss of control—the perceived threat to hu-
man agency by nonhuman nature—is at its core ecophobic. To recognize
this is to be able to make changes in our attitude; to fail to recognize it
is to be stuck whining about the problems without being able to offer
anything but cosmetic solutions, a Band-Aid for cancer.
96 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
Food in the 21st century would be unrecognizable to our great grand-
parents, and the ecophobic bases of industrial agriculture and meat
rarely elicit mainstream media attention or concern. It is a fact that the
global expansion of McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and other meat-
based fast food companies is bad for the environment and for the people
of the world in general;7 that meat is horrendously wasteful; that, as I ex-
plained in an article some years ago, it is “difficult to take seriously…the
ecocritic who theorizes brilliantly on a stomach full of roast beef on rye”
(“Theorizing” 217);8 that “most simply put, someone who regularly eats
factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist
without divorcing that word from its meaning” (Foer 59);9 and that

in the near future, ecofeminism and feminist ecocriticisms will need

to articulate an interspecies focus within ecocriticism, bringing for-
ward the vegetarian and vegan feminist threads that have been a
developing part of feminist and ecological feminist theories since the
nineteenth century.
(Gaard “New Directions” 651)

The practices of corporate capitalism and the pursuit of profit in the

American food industry are ecophobic and produce neither viable nor
sustainable food sources.
Along with coverage of terror and climate change, food issues have
been a constant in the 21st century, appearing in mainstream media,
documentaries, and writing (fiction and nonfiction). Food security has
been the center of blockbuster films such as Fast Food Nation (2006),
Food, Inc. (2008), and Supersize Me (2004). Less marketed but equally
important films include Forks Over Knives (2011), King Corn (2007),
Our Daily Bread (2005), The Future of Food (2004), A Place at the Ta-
ble (2012), Food Matters (2008), Food Chains (2014), and Fresh (2009).
It is encouraging to see a deep and growing interest in theorizing about
food in literature and to see mainstream and best-selling authors tackling
these issues. Literature about apocalypses, disasters, dystopias, environ-
mental problems, climate change, and the end of humanity is appearing
like never before, and food security is often central to these narratives,
from the horrifying cannibalism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to
production and supply issues in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
It is present in questions about diethylstilbestrol (DES) in Ruth Ozeki’s
My Year of Meats. It is in the many novels that raise the issue of GM
food, including Ozeki’s All Over Creation; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam; Jon McGoran’s
Drift; and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and
Mockingjay. It is also the topic of many best-selling nonfiction authors.
Michael Pollan is one of the more prolific of these best-selling authors.
He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to exposing controversial is-
sues about food, issues that perhaps seem uncontroversial at first bite.
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 97
His discussions about food seem to have no limits, and he offers a new
book every few years, but it is perhaps his In Defense of Food: An Eater’s
Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma that have the greatest range
and eloquence. In the former, he suggests that eating simple food, mostly
plants, in moderation is the best diet to follow, and he is deeply critical
of the nutrition industry.10 He falls short of endorsing vegetarianism or
veganism and certainly does not really express much interest in explor-
ing the ethics of food. This may seem an unfair comment since in The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, he clearly spends a lot of time talking about eating
ethically produced meat and locally grown foods. But Pollan’s goal here
is not to question the ethics of unnecessary killing; his goal is “to look at
the getting and eating of food at its most fundamental, which is to say, as
a transaction between species in nature, eaters and eaten” (Omnivore’s
6). He concludes with a critique of the American way of eating, not only
of fast food but of the entire organic food industry, which, he claims, is
tremendously wasteful in terms of the fossil fuels it consumes. While this
is certainly interesting fare, it does not seem to promise much in the way
of change, and one of the reasons for this is that Pollan sidesteps the topic
of ecophobia that organizes thinking about food.
In a recent essay, he begins a promising discussion that at first blink
seems to question the ethical viability of the meat industry. He laments
that “Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year,
yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig—an animal
easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham. We tol-
erate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view”
(“Food with a Face” 162). But the question here for Pollan is not about
the ethics of eating the pig so much as it is about knowing that it is a pig
you are eating. If there is any doubt that Pollan promotes meat, he makes
it perfectly clear for us: “Before you swear off meat entirely, let me de-
scribe a very different sort of animal farm” (163). He goes on to describe
Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm.11 He remarks dismissively that “to many
animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp,” and then goes on
(without even a hint of self-parody) to explain that “Salatin slaughters
his chickens and rabbits right on the farm . . . he showed me . . . a tasty
lunch . . . Salatin’s open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea” (163).12
Notwithstanding his irresponsible disconnect about species relations,
Pollan spends a lot of time, space, and energy exalting the virtues of
Salatin’s farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, referring startlingly at one
point to the “social, environmental, nutritional, and political redemp-
tion” (Omnivore’s 241) that one may allegedly find in buying Polyface
foods. The disconnect here is nothing short of shocking: the numbers
(easily gotten today)13 about meat production and its inefficiencies, and
what these mean for the natural environment seem very much to go
against Pollan’s quasi-religious exaltation (and one wonders why he does
not mention the numbers and statistics about meat-related illness, of
which we have heard much in the media in recent years). It is more the
98 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
histories of the foods we eat that are important for him than the ethics
of their production. This being the case, Pollan is out of his depth in
talking about environmental redemption. If he is to claim that “the best
ethical and environmental choices also happen to be the best choices for
our health” (In Defense 2), then he fails to go that next small step and to
speak out strongly against the ecophobia that meat implies.
When Pollan explains that “depending on the different point of view
you take—that of the chicken, the cow, or even the grass—the relation-
ship between subject and object, cause and effect, flips” (Omnivore’s
213), it is difficult to hear a real concern for the standpoint of the chick-
ens or cows: their nonhuman bodies farmed for exploitation—for their
meat, egg, or milk products. This exploitation of nonhuman animal
bodies derives from speciesism. The value of the work that both Pollan
and Salatin have done is important, but in the end, Pollan, like Salatin,
is speciesist.
Robert Kenner’s film Food, Inc. does a very similar thing to what
­Pollan does—and with the same material, no less—using Salatin and
his farm as an example of how things can be made right in the food
production business. Guiding the thinking of both Pollan and Kenner
(and, of course, Salatin, well-intentioned though he may be) is a failure
to connect the dots, a failure to see that it is not just poisons that are bad
for the environment but that meat production itself is bad and waste-
ful. As Greta Gaard has poignantly explained in an unpublished review
of the film, “the concluding message of Food, Inc.—eat local, organic,
­independent—is incomplete, and thus, deeply dishonest. Ultimately,
Food, Inc. is disturbing because it fails to explore the inconvenient truth
about meat,” and the film sends “a calming message to popular viewers:
don’t worry, folks, this film won’t ask you to give up eating animals.”
A book such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, on the other
hand, is a very different experience. Foer offers the kind of ethical exam-
ination that will actually take us somewhere. It is searingly honest. Foer
advocates for “conscience in favor of craving” (263)14 and for recogniz-
ing and saying that many of the arguments for eating meat are simply
“very silly” (102), arguments that are often just red herrings that divert
attention from the ecophobic ethics of meat consumption. It is easier to
avoid the difficulty of addressing our ecophobia and ethical involvement
with climate change when we can claim a need for protein or state that
we can only get vitamin B12 , iron, and calcium from meat, or that an-
imal populations would explode if humans didn’t eat meat, and so on.
There is enormous evidence from research and from the testimonies of
vegetarians and vegans confuting these silly arguments.15
People who have written seriously about the need to, the politics of,
and even the potential pleasures of eating within seasonal and geograph-
ical limitations have often received poor reviews. In response to Gary
Paul Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 99
Foods, for instance, The Kirkus Review says the following: the book is
a “preachy treatise on the politically correct production and consump-
tion of food,” “a chore to read,” and is “of interest only to food activ-
ists and organic-gardening buffs—who are probably already converts to
the cause” (www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gary-paul-nabhan/
coming-home-to-eat/). A Publisher’s Weekly review calls the book “doc-
trinaire” (www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-02017-5). The book
seeks to reveal the possibilities for eating seasonally and bioregionally in
Nabhan’s home state of Arizona. Though a champion of what has come
to be termed “locavore”16 ethics and mindful eating, Nabhan falls short
of understanding American eating habits as having roots in an ethics of
defiance—specifically to nature. Perhaps had he drawn the connection
to ecophobia, “preachy” and “doctrinaire” would have been the kindest
comments in the reviews of his book!
Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
is a similar locavore experiment, but it has received far less of the kinds of
accusations about preachiness, though the concept still lurks, even in the
praise. There is something a little bit odd, for instance, when Rick Bass
praises the book and explains that “Kingsolver is no pious soapboxer”
and that she raises issues about moral responsibility “in nonjudgmental
fashion.” Okay, but why mention it then, unless the default expectation
for such material is for preachiness and soapboxing? Bass confesses to
fearing that his review “might make [the book] sound like the treatise
of a hokey Earth mother and do-gooder” (http://archive.boston.com/ae/
books/articles/2007/05/20/the_constant_gardener/). A comment such as
this reveals the very backlash effect17 that enables the epidemic of eco-
phobia to remain unquestioned, unaddressed, and uninvolved in other-
wise productive debates about food.
Theories and practices about applied ethics (about ecophobia and meat)
meet with very strong resistance. Anyone in ecocriticism is likely familiar
with “‘The Woodshed’ article in ISLE 16.4 [and how it] targeted the-
ory with an air of confident anti-intellectualism, confirming the warnings
of several ecocritics over the past decade about ecocriticism’s belliger-
ent attitude to theory,” as Serpil Oppermann has explained (“Ecocriti-
cism’s Phobic Relations” 768). Harold Fromm—one of the editors of the
field-initiating Ecocriticism Reader—offers another example of intense
response to ethical theorizing and practice and argues vigorously in The
Chronicle of Higher Education18 against vegans. In his rant, he specu-
lates that vegans “are enlisted in an open-ended but futile metaphysic of
virtue and self-blamelessness that pretends to escape from the conditions
of life itself” (“Vegans”). There are many people (vegans and non-vegans)
who would object to this kind of characterization of what veganism is all
about—at least judging from the 95 blog responses that were posted on-
line. Fromm argues from very mistaken notions about veganism and veg-
ans that “behind their beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence” (ibid).
100 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
Bloggers were quick to respond to Fromm’s article. Few indeed had
much good to say about Fromm’s logic or ethics. Indeed, the very first
blog response put it best: vegans, “robtempio” argues, seek “to minimize
unnecessary suffering, insofar as is possible, by consuming a diet free
of animal products. In a day and age where alternatives to a diet based
on animal products is [sic] increasingly available and possible, what’s
wrong with that?” (ibid). It is indeed disturbing to see such a well-­
respected scholar as Fromm displaying such poor reasoning, arguing that
because “we must have been eating our mother during gestation” (a false
and unscientific19 understanding of what goes on inside the womb), we
must, therefore, be carnivorous outside of the womb. The deficiency in
the logic here is alarming (as is the editorial judgment that got this piece
into such a renowned journal).
Blogger “Desdemona,” worth quoting at length here, describes well

the tetchy, defensive omnivores who feel such an apparent compul-

sion to justify their own lack of concern for the suffering of oth-
ers by impugning the choices of those who do. If Mr Fromm feels
so fundamentally compromised that he must view a bacon cheese-
burger as a means to “stop pretending to virtues possible only for
the dead,” that is indeed his choice, and he has every right to make
it. I would only ask that he accord the same respect to those of us
who prefer to approach the matter from a more subtle—and, hope-
fully, compassionate—direction.
(“Vegans”)

When Fromm talks about what he calls “the grandstanding of vegans

for carefully selected life forms” (ibid) and goes on to cite the bacteria
we inadvertently kill, the viruses we intentionally kill, and the cock-
roaches and rats that we try to kill, he has clearly misunderstood some-
thing, is clearly writing from an uninformed position, is laboring under
a clearly mistaken belief that vegans avoid eating anything that was
alive. Deane Curtin writes persuasively about what he calls “Contextual
Moral ­Vegetarianism,” a concept that does “not refer to an absolute
moral rule” but is based on “the injunction to eliminate needless suf-
fering wherever possible.”20 The ecophobia hypothesis posits that there
is a great deal of needless suffering that our indifference toward nature
produces. It is precisely to eliminate needless suffering wherever possi-
ble that moral vegans avoid eating animals and animal products. One
wonders what is difficult for Fromm to understand here and why he is
confused about what are animals and what are not animals. Viruses and
cockroaches, as blogger “mbelvadi” neatly observed, “aren’t animals!”
(ibid). On the matter of rats, for many of us who are concerned about
animal rights, rats do “enter the purview” (ibid), to use Fromm’s phrase,
and it is for this reason that animal rights activists and environmentalists
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 101
have long petitioned against use of lab rats and other animals used in
experimentation and vivisection.
At another point, Fromm claims that “We’re compromised from the
start” (ibid) and that because we have eaten meat as a species as a part
of our evolutionary history, we should therefore continue to eat meat.
Humanity has also raped and murdered. Since when is past behavior a
valid justification for present behavior? Apparently unaware that the
world has changed (as have the ways that we get meat), Fromm ad-
vocates both complacency and opportunism—and this is ecophobic.
Coming from a respected ecocritic, it is not pretty. Fromm argues in
the second person that if you are a vegan, then you may be “alienating
potential friends who may find you more trouble than you’re worth”
(ibid). Perhaps this is reason enough for Fromm to abandon his ethical
beliefs, but it is not enough for all of us. 21 Ethics are ethics, and when
I hear people tell me “Yeah, I’m vegetarian—but, hey, I’m not fanatical
about it,” I laugh. Imagine someone saying “Yeah, I’m not a pedophile,
and I don’t believe in sexually assaulting children—but, hey, I’m not
fanatical about it.”22
In spite of what people such as Harold Fromm may think, our in-
dividual choices do make enormous differences, and there is increas-
ingly little space in this increasingly crowded world for ecophobic
complacency and opportunism. Peter Singer and Jim Mason argue
that “increasingly, people are regarding their food choices as a form
of political action” (5), that every purchase at the supermarket is a
vote. This question about the ethics of meat-eating is the core of Sing-
er’s life-work. It is an idea that forms the closing mantras of Robert
Kenner’s Food, Inc., despite whatever flaws and omissions this film
may otherwise have. If we can assume that “the whole point of ethical
judgments is to guide practice” (Singer Practical Ethics 2), then we
can also argue that knowing about the material implications of eating
practices means being committed to changing the eating patterns we
follow that cause or contribute to environmental and social problems.
Even so, there is considerable mainstream resistance to the expression
of these ideas.
Michiko Kakutani, for instance, reviews Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Eating Animals in The New York Times with the following disdain:
“his frequent use of analogies to dark moments in human history raises
questions about his sense of priorities and proportion.” It is clear that
Kakutani simply is not persuaded of Foer’s point that “cruel and de-
structive foods should be illegal” (266); otherwise, she could not, with
such self-assurance,

wonder how the author can expend so much energy and caring on
the fate of pigs and chickens, when, say, malaria kills nearly a mil-
lion people a year (most of them children), and conflict and disease
102 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
in Congo since the mid-1990s have left an estimated five million
dead and hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and have
driven more than a million people from their homes.
(www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/books/20book.html?_r=0)

Kakutani’s ethical position here is clearly the very one that Foer ad-
dresses, and it doesn’t adequately argue against the three hundred plus
pages of Foer’s argument about why cruel and destructive food prod-
ucts should be illegal. Kakutani seems to have missed the whole point,
and her attempt at a reductio ad absurdum argument reveals this clearly.
­Kakutani tries to show that it is ridiculous to care about nonhuman an-
imals when humans are suffering. Formally, this is a red herring ­logical
fallacy, one that raises irrelevant, diversionary material. Kakutani could
equally wonder how the author can expend so much energy and caring
on the fate of pigs and chickens, when, say, cancer kills nearly a million
people a year; or when 1.3 million people die in car crashes annually,
leaving another estimated thirty-five million injured or disabled; or when
literally hundreds of people die in plane crashes every year, despite the
fact that they pay good money for their tickets. Therefore, how dare Foer
talk about pigs and chickens? But each of these red herring fallacies, like
Kakutani’s, misses the point as they seek to evade the ethical questions
Foer asks about the current legality of crimes against animals and nature.
Laws against hate crimes work. Laws against racism work. Laws
against sexism work. Laws against animal abuse work. Laws against
speeding work. Laws against drunk driving work. Laws against smok-
ing work. Appeals to logic, to ethics, to emotions, to health sensibilities,
or to justice do not seem to work as well as laws, and these appeals
are often either seen as strident and preachy or are simply ridiculed.
When people refuse to be educated, when appeals to logic, to ethics, to
emotions, to health sensibilities, or to justice just don’t work, laws will.
While it is a sad comment that we seem unable to choose “conscience
in favor of craving,” it does seem that “cruel and destructive food prod-
ucts,” as Foer argues, “should be illegal” (emphasis added, op. cit.). And
as I argued in Chapter 3, there are solid precedents for expanding our
laws to counter ecophobic media, laws which would be consonant with
our expanding ethical horizons. Encouraging racism in media is subject
to laws about hate speech, so why isn’t encouraging ecophobia subject
to such laws? Foer’s call to legislate against cruel and destructive food
products, like any other call to legislate against ecophobia, is reasonable.
These laws are coming. It is just a matter of time.
It seems that the writers who do the kinds of ethical analyses that
come closest to addressing the root ecophobic problems in the global
food mentality are those least worried about accusations of condescen-
sion. Indeed, a book such as Marc Bekoff’s wonderful The Animal
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 103
Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint
broadcasts in the very title the doctrinaire nature of the book. Though
not singularly about food, its focus being the matter of cruelty to ani-
mals in general, this book is not shy about telling people what to do and
why to do it. This may be offensive, and it may not be the best way to
encourage change, but the frustration Bekoff expresses is perhaps not
difficult to understand: “We need,” he explains, “to speak to those who
don’t agree with us. … Simply by speaking out, we can have an influence
and change minds” (181). Because there is not a lot of new information
in this book, it is reasonable to suggest that for Bekoff, there is a need to
continue speaking and to repeat what needs to be said when it has fallen
on deaf ears. 23 But Bekoff goes one step further and acknowledges that
“we must work to understand why people do what they do, and not fall
into the trap of simply telling people what to do” (194). This is what
theorizing ecophobia is all about. It helps us to understand why and how
people can do the things that they do.
Bekoff clearly identifies the ecophobia that underscores speciesism,
explaining that “speciesism is lazy thinking” (29), that “we suffer from
moral schizophrenia” (30) when it comes to animals, and that “the de-
fault reaction … is that wild animals are always dangerous and the only
or preferred option is killing them” (37). When the default reaction to
nature or parts of nature is fear, then what we have is ecophobia. Bekoff
observes that “our current lifestyles can easily alienate children from
animals and the natural world” (106). This alienation from nature is
both a precondition and effect of ecophobia. As mentioned in C ­ hapter 4,
­R ichard Louv offers an extended discussion of the effects of this alien-
ation (what he terms “nature deficit disorder”) on children. These in-
clude a wide range of behavioral and even physical disorders (see Louv
Last Child in the Woods).
No question about it: the writers who offer ethical analyses that ad-
dress root causes are generally undaunted by the mocking, devaluing,
and whinging, are unafraid of the Harold Fromms of the world, the
men (and they are mostly men) who blast what they see as the “grand-
standing of vegans.” Bekoff is not the first person to write on food with
such fearlessness. Though well aware of “the intellectual resistance to
discussing the eating of animals” (Adams 18), Carol J. Adams, in The
Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (a work
that has become a classic), has, perhaps more than anyone else, gotten to
the ethical roots of our food problems through feminist analyses.
One of the relatively few academic books that has retained its freshness
(perhaps because so little has changed in patriarchies) in the nearly three
decades since its first publication, The Sexual Politics of Meat draws
important connections about the overlap “of cultural images of sexual
violence against women and the fragmentation and dismemberment of
104 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
nature and the body in Western culture” (40). The ethics behind objec-
tification, Adams observes,

permits the oppressor to view another being as an object. The op-

pressor then violates this being by object- like treatment. e.g., rape
of women that denies women freedom by saying no, or the butch-
ering of animals that converts animals from living breathing beings
into dead objects. This process allows fragmentation, or brutal dis-
memberment, and finally consumption.
(47)

With startling insight, Adams links dismemberment and fragmentation

directly with capitalist thinking: “Ford dismembered the meaning of
work, introducing productivity without the sense of being productive”
(53). But, Adams argues, “the dismemberment of the human body is
not so much a construct of modern capitalism as modern capitalism is
a construct built on dismemberment and fragmentation” (52). Perhaps
this is the logical end of unbridled individualism, of the piece being more
important than the whole.24 It is precisely the inability to see the whole
and the relationships of the parts to that whole that accounts for the
continued defense of meat, for the blindness toward the ecophobic bases
of the American diet, and for the continuing absence of meat from the
discussion. 25
In the summer of 2010, I was invited to teach an intensive graduate
course on food at a university in Taiwan. In the first half of the course,
we dealt with Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and all of the attendant
issues. We analyzed how My Year of Meats radically re-draws the
boundaries of genre—specifically, though not exclusively, of the novel.
We looked at the intergenerational effects of DES and at the ecophobia
behind use of this synthetic hormone which is pumped into animals (a
defiance to the natural size of cattle), the clear aim being to control their
size and to make them bigger. We talked about the limits to the bound-
aries of fact and fiction, both the facts and fictions behind the meat in-
dustry and boundaries of this fictional novel itself, with its factual list of
references at the end; and, finally, about the limits to growth, to borrow
a phrase from Donella Meadows. This is a complex book that touches
concerns central to ecocriticism, the most important of which surely has
to be the ethics of activist engagement that it generates.
Shameem Black’s assessment is that My Year of Meats “politicizes
female reproduction and forges a cosmopolitan feminism in resistance to
the individual, patriarchal, and corporate agents that endanger women’s
bodies and attack their sexuality worldwide” (230). It is the writing of
the global onto the individual that forges this “cosmopolitan feminism.”
Thus, it seems correct to see, as Cheryl Fish does, that “global produc-
tion and consumption cannot be separated from lived bodily experiences
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 105
that might vary in local, specific contexts, but that produce transna-
tional identifications and subjects” (47). What this means in My Year of
Meats is representations of radical blurrings of fact and fiction, which
we see, among other sites, in the Beef-Ex strategy “‘to develop a pow-
erful synergy between the commercials and the documentary vehicles,
in order to stimulate consumer purchase motivation.’ In other words,”
Jane explains, “the commercials were to bleed into the documentaries,
and the documentaries were to function as commercials” (My Year of
Meats 41).
The settings of My Year of Meats are contemporary America and
­Japan, and the narrative follows two protagonists. In America, the
plot charts the cross-country quest of the narrator, Jane Takagi-Little,
to find authentic American beef-eaters, which she intends to package
and deliver in a “documentary series” entitled “My American Wife” to
­Japanese consumers. Jane works for Beef-Ex, a multinational corpora-
tion that seeks to establish a strong market for beef in Japan. She does
a lot of research into her field in her trek across America, looking for
the desired images, finding out in the process that to be an authentic
­A merican means to be awash in a sea of floating identities, each very
unique and each very typically “un-American.”
On the other side of the Pacific in Japan, the narrative follows the
growing involvement of the novel’s other main protagonist, Akiko Ueno,
in the plots and information that “My American Wife” delivers. Akiko’s
husband—Joichi Ueno, who prefers to be called “Johno Wayno”—is the
producer, and a big believer in the imagined fortifying qualities of meat.
He forces Akiko to a weekly regimen of “My American Wife” and, of
course, the recipes therein contained. Joichi intends to fatten her up with
these “meat duties” (21) and ultimately have a male child from her (a son
preference being common in Japan). 26
As the narrative progresses, Jane, meanwhile, finds out about the use
of synthetic hormones—in particular, DES—to stimulate growth (to ex-
tend the limits to growth) in cattle and poultry. She learns about how
DES has been used to enhance the growth of chickens and cows, and
she learns also that the whole thing is much more personal than it had
at first appeared. She finds out that her mother took DES while pregnant
and that, consequently, she is a “DES Daughter.” This is the beginning
of profoundly complex and deeply fundamental challenges that this
novel offers to cherished American notions of growth.
“My American Wife” markets American beef to Japanese housewives
but, with it, fantasies of what “the American woman” looks like. Thus,
the pitch for the program explains that the American wife “must be at-
tractive, appetizing, and All-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest:
ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” (8). Again, as Shameem
Black has explained, “both women and meat become commodities on
the global market whose bodies are shaped, deformed, and violated for
106 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
commercial profit” (231). Speciesism, sexism, and ecophobia run to-
gether here. Yet, if Jane’s role is to translate images of a normatively
white heterosexual family unit that centers on the meaty dinner table
every evening in a variety of geographical spots within America, then
it is a role at which she very consciously and intentionally begins to
fail. Direct subversion of the white, heteronormative ideals that have
historically formed so much of the Western imagination, Jane’s filmic
narratives progressively move away from the form she is to follow, offers
visions to a Japanese constituency of a socially diverse America, peopled
with lesbians, Mexicans, differently abled people—indeed, anything but
the images she is supposed to be showing. While Black, therefore, is cer-
tainly not wrong to argue that Ozeki’s “work . . . searches for ways that
women might develop usable alliances across national, racial, and sexual
divides to combat the spread of global problems,” work that Black calls
“cosmofeminism” (228), the form and structure of this novel itself—not
only the women within the work but the vehicle that carries them—
seems crucially involved in the project of producing a tangible, ethical
desire to engage in an activist sense.
Of course, in many ways, this novel renounces the local over the
global in the sense that the problems it deals with are not particular
to Kansas or Hokkaido, are, like so many other of the problems in-
creasingly facing humanity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
resolutely global; but there is something more than plot that is at
work here, something that writers such as Nina Cornyetz and David
­Palumbo-Liu have been productively scratching at. Speaking of My Year
of Meats, Cornyetz asks “how can one describe its performative rather
than strictly literary function” (208)? Her answer is that the novel pro-
duces a praxis-­centered response through its “iteration or citation, of a
set of codes of abjection that, by being recirculated in such a hyperbolic
manner, put into ­question—and thus in some sense, historicize—their
‘original’/­naturalized codification” (221). Yet Cornyetz’s answer is a bit
anticlimactic and does not really seem to answer the question about
how it is that the novel elicits such a strong response. Many novels,
after all, historicize their material but lack the swat of this one. While
Palumbo-Liu is decidedly more focused on the affective ethics of praxis
that this novel produces, it seems very, very wrong to suggest (as
he does) that My Year of Meats lacks creativity at the level of form.
­Palumbo-Liu argues, “Ozeki’s text is hardly a revolutionary one in any
formal sense. And yet, its presentation raises critical questions about
the persisting role of a literary genre, or, indeed, all cultural forms
in an age of increasingly extensive and intensive media” (65). What
makes this comment problematical is that My Year of Meats clearly
is radically revolutionary in a formal sense, does push and blur the
boundaries of fiction, and, in so doing, involves the reader in a kind of
narrative we have never before seen. This novel, with its bibliography
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 107
and documentary material and narrative science, produces results in
the real world. This is what it means to be a novel in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries. This is where the genre goes in an age of globaliza-
tion, and Ozeki is skillful in taking us there.
Subtle in its analysis of how food and animals are related to globaliza-
tion, nation, and cultural imperialism, My Year of Meats foregrounds a
critique both of science and of anti-science, leveling relentless and candid
investigations of racism, of stereotypes, of the fundamental impossibility
of cultural authenticity in a late-20th and early-21st century world, of
the possibilities of getting rid of boundaries that restrict the genre of the
novel, of speaking outside of the concept of “nation,” and of changing
people: it is a book that requires a very “big tent” ecocriticism that re-
sists becoming a purely academic concern.
So disgusted and horrified were my students after the first half of
the course that they said they would not eat meat any more. In the
second half of the course, we dealt with another Ozeki novel: All Over
Creation. In this novel, Ozeki makes a thematic move from the meat
that was so central in her first novel to potatoes, and with this thematic
shift is also an environmental shift of focus from DES to Genetically
­Modified (GM) foods. This book is about big-scale power and small-
scale relations, power in both technology and multinational agribusi-
ness, and the novel shows the trickle-down effects of this power to very
personal levels. This book complicates the intersections between ­generic
forms and is peppered with historical fact (Evel Knievel’s 1974 attempt
across the Snake River Canyon, numerous matters pertaining to Luther
Burbank and his ­potatoes, GM foods, the terminator technology, and
so on) and total fabrications. Cynaco is fictional, but its real-life coun-
terpart is Monsanto. Corporate greed is real, as are the linked effects
of patriarchal control the novel describes regarding women’s reproduc-
tion and sexuality on the one hand and genetic control of potatoes and
agricultural seeds on the other. Indeed, there are times when it is diffi-
cult to distinguish this fictional book from Vandana ­Shiva’s factual one
­entitled Stolen Harvest about the same topic.
Shiva tells “the story of how corporate control of food and global-
ization of agriculture are robbing millions of their livelihoods and their
right to food” (7); Ozeki tells the story of how multinational corpo-
rations “mine Third World genetic resources, engage in globalized bi-
opiracy, and rob developing countries of their ability to produce food
independently and sustainably” (All Over Creation 258). The agricul-
tural conflict is between what Shiva calls “food totalitarianism” and
“food democracy.” In “food totalitarianism, . . . a handful of corpo-
rations control the entire food chain and destroy alternatives so that
people do not have access to diverse, safe foods produced ecologically”
(Shiva 17). One of the effects of the novel for students is to learn about
the dangers of GM foods and farming. It is here that, as happens with
108 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
DES in My Year of Meats, the narrative becomes very nonfictional. “The
Seeds” are talking about very real things, one of which is “terminator
technologies.” As Geek (one of “The Seeds”) reveals,

It’s like a death gene . . . a self-destruct mechanism. They splice it

into the DNA of a plant and trigger it. The plant kills its own em-
bryo . . . To protect the corporation’s intellectual property rights
over the plant. To keep farmers from saving and replanting seeds.
To force them to buy new seed every year . . . Crosses the line be-
tween genius and insanity. Think what could happen if that gene
escapes.
(All Over Creation 266)

In discussing biomobility, Nicole Shukin has argued that “interspe-

cies exchanges that were once local or ‘place-specific’ are experienced
as global in their potential effects” (183). Shukin is discussing “species
leaping” among animals, particularly to humans, and the potential
threats the animal industry poses in terms of mad cow disease, avian flu,
and so on, but the implications for flora are as dire as they are for fauna,
perhaps more so. Shiva explains that

Molecular biologists are currently examining the risk of the ter-

minator function escaping the genome of the crops into which it
has been intentionally incorporated and moving into surround-
ing open-pollinated crops or wild, related plants in nearby fields.
Given nature’s incredible adaptability and the fact that the tech-
nology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that
the terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the
natural environment is a serious one. The gradual spread of ste-
rility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that
could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans,
from the planet.
(Shiva 82–83)

The reason behind this madness, environmental justice theorist Rachel

Stein explains, is that transnational corporations, “to guarantee profit-
able ownership of designer plant species, . . . knowingly destroy plant
reproductive capacities, so that neither farmers nor plants have access to
free propagation outside of market property arrangements” (27). We see
here, as Stein goes on to write in reference to All Over Creation, that

the sinister intersection between the corporate biotechnological

usurpation of plant reproductivity, and the social usurpation of
women’s sexual and reproductive freedoms is emphasized when the
sexual predator Elliot Rhodes reappears as a marketing agent for the
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 109
Cynaco corporation, and once again callously seduces Yumi in order
to gain insider information on the guerilla resistance to genetically
modified foods.
(29)

Yet, for all of this, the novel is not gloomy: “Despair,” Geek says, “is
not a morally acceptable choice” (All Over Creation 268). Indeed, Stein
demonstrates, this novel is not only about passivity and abuse; there is
resistance—lots of it: to corporate technologies and capitalism, to sexual
and reproductive injustice and repression, to food totalitarianism, and
so on. Sometimes resistance is futile, and sometimes it is fertile, as the
novel’s relatively optimistic ending proposes.
One of the strengths of this novel is its refusal to give pat answers, and
it is committed to exploring the complexity and diversity of the issues
and to broadcast the value of diversities, from the diversity of crops and
seeds to the diversity of the Fullers’s mixed heritage family—in life and
in death. The image of the congregation at Lloyd’s death is amazing (for
mono-crop, mono-culture Idaho): “Everyone packed into the chapel for
the service . . . the old minister looked around at the variegated con-
gregation, at the local folks and out-of-towners, the gardeners and the
hippies, the pornographers and members of the Tri-County Interfaith
League of Family Values” (373). Even death itself is complicated: “I’d
always thought it was straightforward,” Yumi laments, “Life or death.
Black or white. I didn’t realize there were so many shades of dying. So
many different levels” (348). This book, like My Year of Meats before it,
is all about complexities.
So disgusted and horrified were my students after the second half of the
course that they joked that they would not eat vegetables anymore! But
the ecophobic ethics behind GM foods is no joking matter. Renowned
ethicist (and, by consensus, the father of the contemporary animal rights
movement) Peter Singer argues in The Way We Eat, a book coauthored
with Jim Mason, that “the most fundamental ethical objection is that
genetic modification is a form of human arrogance, almost like playing
God” (210). Yet, as Singer and Mason even-handedly argue, the same
reasoning could be made for selective breeding, a human practice that
goes back millennia, and “unless we are to turn our back on the domes-
tication of plants and animals, we cannot logically hold that interfering
with the nature of species is intrinsically wrong” (211). I’m not con-
vinced by this argument, and there is something fundamentally different
about tinkering with genes—a point that becomes more clear when we
look at the analogy of human coupling. We choose our partners on the
basis of characteristics (psychological, emotional, physical) that we find
most attractive, but this is clearly not the same as supporting eugenics. 27
A second ethical argument Singer and Mason make against GM foods
is that they “pose an unacceptable risk of irreversible climate change”
110 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
(210), a risk many scientists are willing to take with total ecophobic
nonchalance toward potential ecological effects, an ecophobic enthu-
siasm, as I discuss further below, that resembles that of scientists in an
American desert in July 1945. For the students of my guest lectures in
the summer of 2010 in Taiwan, ethical eating had become more difficult,
and deciphering the GM foods from the non-GM foods would require
some work. Getting rid of GM foods altogether will be more so.
It is staggering the kind of control companies such as Monsanto have.
According to the Organic Consumer’s Association, “Monsanto controls
80 percent of the GM corn market and 93 percent of the GM soy market
in the US,” with “282 million acres [worldwide] planted in Monstanto’s
GM crops, up from only 3 million in 1996,” and ownership of “1676
seed, plant, and other applicable patents” (see Kaldveer). These numbers
point to what is widely recognized as a Monsanto monopoly. How they
got it is easy to understand. We all eat, and we are all—on some level—
concerned about the availability of food. Monsanto promises to keep
a lot of food easily accessible, financially and physically. Yet the fact is
that we simply do not need GM food to feed the world: “­Hunger is not
caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy” (Lappé 7).
According to Jeffrey Smith, Executive Director, Institute for Responsible
Technology, in fact, “We have more food per person than any time in
human history. We have enough food grown to feed 11.3 billion peo-
ple” (Seeds of Death). Producing the food and having it accessible to the
people who need it, however, are two different things—and one thing
is certain: food will not be accessible when it is being fed to livestock.
The United States feeds to cattle approximately two-thirds of the calo-
ries produced from grain farms. A 1997 report claimed that the United
States could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eats (see
“US could feed” <www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-
800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat>). That was twenty years ago.
Today things have gotten worse. By 2004, according to the US Depart-
ment of Commerce, Census of Agriculture, “While 56 million acres of
U.S. land are producing hay for livestock, only 4 million acres are pro-
ducing vegetables for human consumption” (“Meat” 17).
The rapid expansion of American-style ethics and disregard for nature
only compound the problems. In their scramble to be like the United
States, rapidly industrializing countries such as China race toward the
mistakes and idiocy inherent in the unbridled American dream. No un-
bridled dream can result in much good. Rather, the result is “a mosaic
of culinary monotony” (Carruth 2), wherein food has become some-
thing quite foreign, what Michael Pollan calls a “foodlike substance” (In
Defense 53). Indeed, “terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, mono-
unsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids, flavonols,
carotenoids, antioxidants, probiotics, and phytochemicals soon colo-
nized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 111
material formerly known as food” (27). Our grandparents wouldn’t rec-
ognize these foreign things we call food.
It is not just the naming but the things themselves that are problemati-
cal. Some of it really isn’t food at all. Marie-Monique Robin has painstak-
ingly unearthed a principle that the US Food and Drug Administration
follows regarding GMOs: “In most cases, the substances expected to be-
come components of food as a result of genetic modification will be the
same as or substantially similar to substances commonly found in food
such as proteins, fats and oils, and carbohydrates” (FDA, cited by Robin
146). This has been called “the Principle of Substantial Equivalence.”
The global scramble to be like Americans (a scramble aided by American
greed and expansionism and abetted by victim economies and cultures
themselves that suffer from a degenerating sense of what A.A. Phillips
calls “cultural cringe”) will only result in global tastelessness.
Allison Carruth charts “the centrality of food to accounts of global-
ization and U.S. hegemony that pervade the literature of” the period
from WWI until the post-9/11 period (5) and shows that while “U.S.
food power is . . . global in scope” (4), it also inspires tremendous re-
sistance and opposition. In an interview with Paraguayan farm activist
Jorge Galeano for the filmic version of the book The World According
to Monsanto, Robin asks “Do you think that GM crops can co-exist
with the crops of small farmers?” Galeano responds,

“No, we are sure they can’t. There are two incompatible models
that can’t co-exist. It’s a silent war that eliminates communities and
families of small farmers. In addition, it destroys the bio-diversity of
the countryside. It brings death, poverty and illness, as well as the
destruction of the natural resources that help us live”.
(Robin www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6_DbVdVo-k)

And we should have no illusions about the origins of these changes: they
are a direct result of an ethical system that puts profit before life. Amer-
ican capitalism is funded by a marked absence of concern about the
well-being of people in general, the health of the environment, or the
food security of the future. The cancer of corporate capitalism is much
more than simply the McDonaldization of the world, the invasion of
American fast-food chains and coffee outlets across the planet, the refor-
matting of local food systems with American chains of junk food: these
are the large manifestations of the cancer that has roots deep in the guts
of the United States—not in the laboratories of Monsanto (which are
yet another manifestation, not a cause)—but in the US Supreme Court
and, more broadly, in the ecophobic American ethical system that al-
lows for legislators to imagine that it is okay to allow patents on life. It
is a monstrous ethical system (scientific and legal) that thinks it is okay
to take the DNA from one organism and force it into another. It is the
112 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
nonchalance of ecophobia writ large. The ethical problem here is that
the risks posed both to the environment and to people simply aren’t
known. The unknowns—both short-and long-term here—are reminis-
cent of another American gamble: the Trinity atomic test.
On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic
bomb. No one was quite sure how things would work out, either in the
short- or the long-term. In the moments leading up to the detonation,
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi

To break the tension, . . . began offering anyone listening a wager on

“whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so,
whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.”
Oppenheimer himself had bet ten dollars against George Kistiakow-
sky’s entire month’s pay that the bomb would not work at all.
(“The Manhattan Project” www.osti.gov/manhattan-
­project-history/Events/1945/trinity.htm)

Well, the world didn’t burn up, but one wonders whether these men
had envisioned the Cold War and the proximity to total annihilation to
which that Cold War would take the world. The Berlin Wall came down,
and the USSR collapsed, but the game is not over, and one wonders how
long it will take for Daish or some such group to get their hands on a nu-
clear device—or for Trump to graduate from impulsively punching the
buttons on his Twitter account to rashly punching the buttons to throw
the nuclear football. One also wonders if those men that day in the des-
ert had imagined such a future. The Bomb may have stopped the atroc-
ities of the Japanese Imperial Army, but the ethical problem here is that
the more long-term risks posed both to the environment and to people
simply wasn’t and isn’t known. Nuclear bombs and recombinant DNA
are not ethical, and both are pivotal in matters of power and control.
In a terrifying discussion, Shiva explains the potentials for domina-
tion Monsanto embodies:

The company [Monsanto] has always said that genetic engineering

was a way of getting patents, and that’s its real aim. If you look at
the research strategy it is now pursuing in India, you’ll see that it is
testing twenty plants into which it has introduced Bt genes: mustard,
okra, eggplant, rice, cauliflower, and so on. Once it has established
ownership of genetically modified seeds as the norm, it will be able
to collect royalties; we will depend on the company for every seed we
plant and every field we cultivate. If it controls seeds, it controls food;
it knows that, and that’s its strategy. It’s more powerful than bombs
or weapons; it is the best way to control the people of the world.
(Robin 310–11)28

Shiva’s comments signal important intersections among the workings

of power in racism, ecophobia, and an aggressive corporate capitalism.
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 113
Genetic fiddling is the new face of violence and domination. Machetes,
tanks, swords, and bullets are nothing compared to the kind of reach
that corporations such as Monsanto have. 29 Literally billions of people
are at the mercy of Monsanto.30 How could this have happened, and
how can we continue to let this happen?
Nuclear bombs and recombinant DNA both exhibit a nonchalance that
falls under the condition of ecophobia. The extension of American patent
law to cover “a live human-made microorganism” (the patenting of life)
is diametrically opposed to an ethical respect for life and nature. The glo-
balization of this disrespect (or nonchalance, or whatever we wish to call
it) is dangerous on several levels. It is not just nature that is violated and
threatened; the autonomy of other nations is also in the cross-hairs.
The relationships among ecophobia, food, and rampant nationalism
expose cultural and national identities (that cohere in food systems) to
real threats. If kimchi, for instance, is the national food of Korea, and if
Korea is having to import enormous amounts of cabbage from China to
make the kimchi (or if Korea is having to import the ready-made kimchi
itself), then what does this dynamic do to the national identity of Korea?
If cosmopolitanism is about integrating difference, then surely it is not
about white-washing cultural variation, bulldozing unique traditional
geographies, and fostering transnational corporations into positions of
terrorist power that surpass anything that 9/11 perpetrators or their ilk
have achieved or can achieve? Yet these are precisely the things that have
happened, and companies promoting GMOs are critically complicit in
the ongoing legacies of colonialism.
If colonialism mapped, drafted, and designed the blueprints of world
domination, then globalization realizes the structures, cements the ma-
terial practices, and expands beyond imagination the material and con-
ceptual meanings of conquest: “Colonialism initiated (and globalization
continues to drive) circuits of physical and virtual mobility that impact
on the construction of place (O’Brien 242–3). As if to prove this beyond
any doubt, Monsanto hasn’t minced words on the topic. In an interview
for the documentary Seeds of Death, Shiv Chopra summarizes from his
book Corrupt to the Core about

a published speech by a Monsanto executive saying how they are go-

ing to control the whole world, not just by genetic modification but
they’re going to take charge of the whole world by influencing the
White House, the White Hall, the French Parliament, the Canadian
Parliament, the Japanese Parliament: this is published information.
(Seeds of Death)

Whether or not there is empirical evidence for Chopra’s claim is not

something I can answer here, but there certainly is ample evidence that
whatever its intent, Monsanto has achieved a kind of global domination
with control of a whopping 23% of the global seed market (see Smaller).
114 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
Depriving communities of their food sovereignty in the interests of
corporate profit is an affront to the good of humanity as a whole, an
ethical choice of self-interest over everything else:
The notion of rights has been turned on its head under globalization
and free trade. The right to produce for oneself or consume accord-
ing to cultural proprieties and safety concerns has been rendered
illegal according to the new trade rules. The rights of corporations
to force-feed citizens of the world with culturally inappropriate and
hazardous foods has been made absolute. The right to food, the
right to safety, the right to culture are all being treated as trade bar-
riers that need to be dismantled.
(Shiva 18)
“Food, eating, and ethics” as a topic is an important part of discussions
about “the new cosmopolitanism,” about an insidious and invidious
corporate neo-imperialism of companies such as Monsanto, and about
what happens to the autonomy of nations in the global supermarket.
The literature of food is central to ongoing allegories of imperialism.
Globalized food is central to unprecedented barbarity, easily surpassing
any genocides of the past. Novelists and other writers have produced
enormous amounts of literature over the past two decades about food,
food security, locavore logistics, food production, food and class, food
and race, and so on, but still, as Carruth notes in 2013, “the disciplines
of literary history and cultural theory have not, in the main, taken up
food studies” (165), and (despite the growing body of work appearing
that deals with ecophobia, as I discussed in the Introduction) virtually
nothing has appeared specifically theorizing about how ecophobia is in-
volved with food transformations in the 21st century.
Theorizing food studies in ecocriticism increasingly means looking at
practice, at meat and vegetables, and at what their production and con-
sumption represents both for natural and for human environments. “It’s
all about money,” drawled the man beside me on my flight to Blooming-
ton for the 2011 ASLE conference. But it’s not only that; it’s also about
class and race and ethics and taste. It’s about gender and species and
knowledge and ignorance. It is about consciousness and sexuality and
work. It’s all about many things. There are no simple answers.
Diet is a bit of a flashpoint, even for people in the environmental hu-
manities, and as Fromm’s anti-vegan rant suggests, the intensity of our
convictions sometimes seems to cloud the light of reason. Food is intensely
personal, which may account for why so much of writing about it has
an autobiographical flavor. Coming Home to Eat is Gary Paul Nabhan’s
personal narrative of his year eating products from within 220 miles of
his Arizona home. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is Barbara Kingsolver’s
life-writing about how she and her family went locavore for a year. The
Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter is Peter Singer and Jim Ma-
son’s life-writing narrative of three families, one family that follows SAD
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 115
(the Standard American Diet), one that is more health conscious and often
buys organic, and the third that is strictly vegan. Foer’s Eating Animals is
interwoven with personal narratives of struggles and insights, changes and
difficulties. Even Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma ends up with the
life-writing about Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farm (an alternative way to
farm animals, one that doesn’t question the need to kill animals but seeks
to be more in tune with local ecologies and less reliant on chemicals).
If it is intensely personal, no less is food deeply social, with broad pub-
lic consequences. The disconnect that characterizes mainstream Western
relationships with food and environment, diet and ethics, self and world
are rooted in ecophobia and in an ethics of convenience and opportun-
ism that desperately requires action. Donald Trump may truly believe
(against science and against facts) in his own “alternative facts,” in a
never-never land where climate change is a hoax; Harold Fromm may
accuse vegans of grandstanding; and meat-eaters may belittle, diminish,
and feel offended by the work of committed vegetarians, vegans, femi-
nists, and queers who are making connections. We need to remember,
however, that people also resisted Abolitionism. Most of us look back at
American slavery with horror. Along with Marc Bekoff, I wonder about
the future: “What will future generations say when they look back and
see how, despite what we knew, we still tortured animals and decimated
pristine habitats for our own gain?” (178).31

Notes
1 Some vegans take it further and eschew use of animals also for clothing and
entertainment.
2 When people crumple their brow curiously (and in a curiously oppositional
way) at my being vegetarian, my usual pre-emptive question is to ask, “so,
when did you become a meat-eater?” or, if it is a really ugly crumple, “Why
do you eat meat? Is it religious reasons, I mean, especially given what we
know about the health and environmental effects of eating meat?”
3 Climate change, curiously, does not come up in Wright’s book.
4 There is no turkey on the Korean Thanksgiving menu. The most important
item on the menu is the crescent-shaped glutinous rice cakes (songpyeon),
which are filled with sweetened sesame seeds, chestnuts, or pine nuts. There
is a lot of fruit (apples, pears, oranges, and grapes) on the menu, as well as
rice, bulgogi, pan-fried whole yellow croaker, fish fritters, scallion pancakes,
boiled spinach, battered fried zucchini, various kinds of kimchi, and a lot
of soju. The main meal on Chuseok is at noon, not the evening. Following
lunch, gathered family members visit the ancestral graves to remove weeds
and leave some food for the imagined spirits.
5 The ecological costs of transporting foods out-of-season has received a lot of
media attention through the issue of food miles.
6 Neurologist David Perlmutter has done some research on possible rela-
tionships between glyphosate (a broad spectrum herbicide) and autism (see
www.drperlmutter.com/gmo-and-autism/). Research in the area continues,
and it is certainly valuable, but we really don’t need scientific verification
to know that ingesting the poisons with which we cover our vegetables is
dangerous. This is not rocket science.
116 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
7 Statistics on the waste meat represents is easy to find. A cursory search on
the internet reveals that
Chickens and pigs convert grain into meat at rates of two or three to one
(ie, it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken). The ratio for lamb is
between four and over six to one and that for beef starts at five to one
and goes as high as 20 to one. This has long been known. What is new
are the amounts of greenhouse gases associated with the production of a
kilo of protein by different animals. These vary even more widely: 3.7kg
for chicken; 24kg for pork; and up to 1,000kg for cattle.
(see J.L.P.)
And those stats are only about the waste involved in converting plant pro-
teins to animal proteins. There are other matters that make fast food envi-
ronmentally hostile—the antibiotics, the growth hormones, the packaging,
the transportation, the greenhouse gas emissions from cattle themselves, and
the water contamination from things such as fecal lagoons are some of these.
8 Corollaries I used in that article were about sexism and oil: as “it would be
difficult to take seriously a man who calls himself feminist at the two o’clock
seminar but goes to strip clubs on weekends, so too is it difficult to take se-
riously big oil companies that spend millions advertising their commitment
to the environment” (ibid).
9 Marc Bekoff makes the same point a year later in The Animal Manifesto,
where he explains that “If you’re an environmentalist, it’s impossible to jus-
tify eating factory-farmed meat” (121). Tony Weis, too, expresses a similar
point, citing Howard Lyman, who “likens a meat-eating environmentalist
to ‘a philanthropist who doesn’t happen to give to charity’” (152). How-
ard ­Lyman is a former cattle rancher. In Kip Anderson’s film Cowspiracy,
­Lyman explains “You can’t be an environmentalist and eat animal products.
Period. Kid yourself if you want. If you want to feed your addiction, so be it,
but don’t call yourself an environmentalist.”
10 Pollan argues that “no people on earth worry more about the health con-
sequences of their food choices than we Americans—and no people suffer
from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorex-
ics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating” (In Defense
8–9). For Pollan, the problem lies in the ideology of nutritionism:
The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same
thing as nutrition. As the “-ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject
but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life
and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This
quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s still
exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the
weather—all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape.
(28)
11 Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm is an attempt at a more sustainable and respon-
sible livestock farming practice. Influenced by his Christian ethics, Salatin
raises and slaughters his grass-fed animals in ways that he believes causes
less suffering, uses more of the raw materials of nature (over industrial prod-
ucts), and produces better ethical and environmental results.
12 In the film Cowspiracy, Kip Anderson shows that for all of its appeal, farms
such as Salatin’s are entirely unsustainable. Discussing a similar farm (the
Markegard Family Grass-Fed Farm), he argues that it takes 4500 acres to
produce 80,000 pounds of meat. Assuming that the average American eats
209 pounds of meat per year (slightly higher than the statistic of 200.6
 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food 117
pounds I cited earlier), the Markegard Farm would feed 382 people, equal-
ing 11.7 acres for each person. All of the continental United States, Mexico,
and Central America, plus a third of Canada and South America would
need to be converted to grasslands (including all mountains, cities, parks,
residential areas, and so on) just to feed the American population. That’s
323 million people. There are 7.3 billion people on the planet.
13 It takes 13 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef, six pounds of
grain to produce a pound of boneless pork, and three pounds of grain to pro-
duce a pound of chicken (Peter Singer and Jim Mason 2007, 232). See also
Erik Marcus 2005, W.O. Herring and J.K. Bertrand 2002, Glen Fukomoto
and John Replogle 1999, F.H. Ricard 1980, and Francis Moore Lappé 1971.
14 Ethicists such as Peter Singer echo this need for restraint, arguing that “so-
cial life requires some degree of restraint” (One World 4).
15 On the topic of protein, which is the most common question I hear as a
vegetarian, see Young and Pellett. No one doubts that horses, elephants, or
hippopotami have strong bones, lack protein, or are weak—and they are all
herbivores.
16 According to a January 25, 2017 CNN report, “going ‘locavore’” had, by
2016, become one of the two biggest “food trends from top chefs.” These
top chefs come from Italy, Japan, Spain, Australia, Manila, Thailand,
China, USA, Peru, and Singapore. (See Chen www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/
travel/food-trends-2017/index.html).
17 See Chapter 3, where I discuss resistance to theorizing about ecophobia as
an effect of data saturation and numbness. Serpil Oppermann usefully dis-
cusses backlash to theory (which she terms “theory phobia”) in terms of
how it is imagined to reduce nature to text. See Oppermann, “Ecocriticism’s
Phobic Relations with Theory.”
18 Further references to this article will be cited parenthetically in the text as
“Vegans.” Blog responses at the bottom of the article (as of July 2010) will
be referenced by their usernames.
19 As Greta Gaard has commented, Fromm’s “failure to understand the sciences
speaks volumes—really, what is his qualification to publish his rant on veg-
anism? Is he a member of the American Dietetic Association? A biologist?
He has no credentials to speak on this topic—and Americans fall for it every
time, like Jesse Ventura (the wrestler) getting elected as Governor of Minne-
sota or Ronald Reagan as President of U.S.” (Gaard 30 August 2010). We
might add Donald Trump to that list now.
20 I am grateful to Greta Gaard from bringing this article to my attention.
21 Jonathan Safran Foer weighs the matter differently from Fromm, posing
the questions as follows: “How much do I value creating a socially com-
fortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible? The
relative importance of ethical eating and table fellowship will be different
in different situations (declining my grandmother’s chicken with carrots is
different from passing on microwaved buffalo wings)” (55). For Fromm, fear
of alienating potential friends trumps ethical eating. Some might view this
as cowardice. See also Endnote 2.
22 One of the comments I received to a draft version of this chapter was to
“definitely remove” this example linking pedophiles and ecophobia, perhaps
because it is a shocking and offensive comparison. The powerlessness of the
victims and the enormous and lasting effects of abuse in both examples,
however, more than warrants such a comparison, and there are a great many
issues, as Greta Gaard has noted (see “Ecofeminism and Climate Change”),
involved with climate discussions (and, by implication, theorizing about
ecophobia).
118 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food
23 Bekoff’s book is a powerful reiteration of matters that have been said over
and over, and repetition is necessary when things don’t change. The need to
reiterate feminist critiques and anti-racist analyses show this well. The waves
of sexism and racism just keep coming, constantly washing away progress
and equality, and the only hope is to repeat and repeat and repeat until it is
no longer necessary to do so.
24 One is reminded of Jeremy Bentham’s famous utilitarian axiom that “it is
the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and
wrong,” a concept articulated in more modern parlance through Leonard
Nimoy’s Spock in The Wrath of Khan (1982): “Logic clearly dictates that the
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” William Shatner’s Admi-
ral Kirk replies “Or the one.” It is environmentally sound logic; its opposite
is not. Putting the self before the environment is ecophobic—and illogical.
25 Even as I write this in January 2017, a collection published this very month
entitled Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (see Siperstein, Hall,
and LeMenager) does not see the teaching of food as a priority in pedagogy
about climate change. In the thirty-four chapters of the book, food does not
appear as a topic. While this is not to dismiss or minimize the importance of
the scholarship in this book (some by renowned authors), the absence of this
important chunk of climate change material is a telling omission.
26 For more on the topic of son preference in Japan, see Kureishi and Wakabayashi.
27 According to a 2016 “STAT-Harvard Poll on Genetic Editing, Testing, and
Therapy,” 83% of the people surveyed said “no” to the idea that “changing
the genes of unborn babies to improve their intelligence or physical char-
acteristics” should be legal, and 82% opposed even the research on such
matters (see Begley).
28 Allison Carruth similarly observes a direct relation between national power
and control of food in her discussion of the growth of American power after
WWII: “In the years between the German invasion of Poland and the first
decade of the Cold War, American plenty and European austerity became
signifiers of a sea change in the global food chain: a sea change by which the
United States became an agricultural superpower” (89).
29 Physical violence has long been a staple in the cookbook for world domi-
nation, and the group that calls itself ISIS is but the latest manifestation.
The usual tedious rhetoric about barbarians, infidels, heretics, and so on,
though it changes slightly over time (we rarely hear the word “Philistine”
these days), comes with the sword, but little else has changed among the
groups that use those swords to try to rule the world, whether we are talking
about the British and European colonialists or the Islamic fundamentalists,
the nazis or the imperial Japanese, the American offensive under George W.
Bush or the Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladić, the terror of Boko Haram or
the Rwandan Genocide by the Hutu. These violent regimes rise and fall, but
the US Supreme Court ruling of 1980 legalizing genetic fiddling with food
would change the shape of world domination forever.
30 For more information and statistics on Monsanto, see Seeds of Death, and
Vandana Shiva’s “Monsanto vs Indian Farmers.”
31 The film The Age of Stupid goes to those future generations. Set in 2055,
the film has the curator of “the global archive, a vast storage structure lo-
cated 800 km north of Norway” staring back in amazement, with similar
questions to Bekoff’s: “ . . .we could’ve saved ourselves. We could’ve saved
ourselves. But we didn’t, it’s amazing! What state of mind were we in, to
face extinction, and simply shrug it off?” More recently, the future history
narrative The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway takes us almost four hundred years into
the future for a glimpse of where the trajectory of our ecophobia leads.
6 Madness and Ecophobia

The field of psychology is a site at which ecophobia nestles because the

condition has historically been a crossroads between what can be de-
scribed as normative cultural behaviors, on the one hand, and deviant
ones on the other, between what is imagined as human and what is
imagined as unpredictable difference, unruly wild, and an intrusion of
nature into culture (as I will show in the pages that follow). When peo-
ple with psychiatric disabilities and disorders live among the rest of hu-
manity, the whole of that humanity loses some control over the cultural
norms and social rules that historically it has sought so very hard to
maintain. It is surprising, therefore, that so little work has been done
within ecocriticism on psychiatric debility and disability. Indeed, very
little work has been done in general theorizing about the topic from
within the environmental humanities.
Among the sparsity of work that has been done is the startling in-
sight from ethicist Serenella Iovino that imagining madness involves
imagining the presence of a kind of nonhuman nature within the hu-
man. In “The Human Alien: Otherness, Humanism, and the Future
of Ecocriticism,” Iovino cleverly explains that “madness and disability
create in fact a ‘wilderness zone’ inside the civilized or ‘tame’ area of
humanity-as-normality” (“The Human Alien” 55).1 There are radical
implications to this idea. First, the insight challenges, as Iovino notes,
the very taxonomy of the human, the “ontological segregation” (56) of
the human. Second, and perhaps more important, is that in imagining
madness as the inclusion of the threatening nonhuman within the hu-
man, representations of madness imply a distinct disdain toward the
more-than-human realm (roughly nature beyond the human). Moreover,
unlike many propositions in literary analysis, Iovino’s “wilderness zone”
thesis has ample support from literary sources. Even among common
contemporary idioms describing madness or insanity, images of animals
and nature abound. We cavalierly label madness by talking about going
bananas, about bats in the belfry, about harebrained ideas, about going
nuts, about rats in the attic, about being as nutty as a fruitcake, about
being as crazy as a loon, about being barking mad, about being loony,
and so on.
120 Madness and Ecophobia
The melancholy and madness that run through the Shakespearean
canon are entangled with ideas about the natural world and its crea-
tures. Part of what triggers ecophobia is the imagined unpredictability
in the more-than-human or the other-than-human. In a play such as
King Lear, where unpredictability reigns supreme, both within the hu-
man realm and in the more-than-human realm, madness also prevails.
“It is fitting,” as Craig Dionne has recently argued in a radically engag-
ing and presentist set of readings on King Lear, “to frame an analysis of
William Shakespeare’s most nihilistic narrative about cosmic decay by
foregrounding the problem of our own uncertain future” (30–31). This
play is simply littered with madness and was staged within what seems
to be the first clearly identifiable anthropogenic global climate event (the
little ice age). This madness is deeply imbricated with the materiality of
nature in the play.
More than any other character in this play, Edgar, though feigning
madness, understands well how to use images and materials of nature to
represent the troubled mind. He is the person “brought near to beast”
(King Lear 2.3.9), 2 with dirty face and knotted hair (ll.9–10), broken
syntax and senseless ravings; he is a subject ultimately deprived of itself.
He indeed does get sucked into the madness he is seeking to represent
and, in so doing, loses himself to that in which he immerses himself,
and nature takes over. He complains, “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21).
This is R.D. Laing’s “divided self.” In four words, Edgar moves from a
third-person description of himself to first person and then back again,
repeating the divided self, saying “nothing am,” a clear contradiction
since one cannot simultaneously be “nothing” and be “am.”3 He is a
subject deprived of bodily definition and limits, with neither house nor
clothes to redraw those definitions and limits, a thing fully inhabited by
the wilderness and unpredictability he inhabits. Nature inhabits the hu-
man as the human inhabits the more-than-human. Naked, homeless, and
abject, the mad person is bestial: “un-/ accommodated man is no more
but such a poor, / bare forked animal” (3.4.104–6), Lear raves, “tearing
off his clothes” (SD, l.107). The bestial connotes dystopian chaos rather
than bucolic images precisely because of the ecophobic stain attached to
the other-than-human.
The vulnerability to an unpredictable, sometimes capricious, and of-
ten hostile nature is terrifying. Images of bareness, exposure, vulnera-
bility, homelessness, and lack of control associated with psychological
maladies deftly identify a madness that is enmeshed with a frightening
environment in this play, an environment over which control is never a
given. It is the changeability of this environment that causes terror, and
it is self-abandonment, lack of control, and sheer unpredictability that
such an environment threatens to entrench. The result is madness.
The storm is more than simply a thematic resonance: it is deeply em-
bedded in the material histories of the time, a large part of which was the
 Madness and Ecophobia 121
cold that the playgoers felt within the theater itself, the storms that they
experienced in their lives, and the changes to food production that they
felt at the markets. Within the play, the extraordinary storm is matched
by extraordinarily stormy social relations. Who ever heard of a king get-
ting locked out—in a storm yet!—by his daughters and their ilk?
The physical and spatial terms defining madness in Shakespeare point
to a very specific set of environmental ethics. From start to finish, the
limits of Lear’s identity and growth are staked out in spatial and envi-
ronmental terms. It has been a struggle with social and environmen-
tal boundaries, and we move from the very grand scale of nation and
maps to the very personal scale of madness and an imagined prison.
In between, nature triumphs and wipes Lear’s slate clean of his emi-
nently human pursuits: he loses power, identity, and home as much to
unpredictable and uncontrollable nature as to his daughters and their
crowd. King Lear is the fall of a king not merely from power but from
culture and society into wild nature where beasts roam, and, it seems,
anything is possible. In a compelling book about Shakespeare and ecol-
ogy, ­Randall Martin has explained that “the storm in King Lear materi-
alizes the king’s catastrophic descent into madness” (11), a descent into
something of nature.
If Shakespeare registers madness as a descent from rational humanity
into something else, then no less is it the embodiment and incorporation
of otherness. Othello is black and, in the racist ideology of the play,
therefore credulous and easily made jealous, and before long, he “breaks
out to savage madness” (Othello 4.1.55)—because he is black. This dis-
cursive alignment of Othello with madness powerfully extends his dis-
tance from humanity proper toward a conceptual space of chaos beyond
the patternings of human power and control, a positioning consonant
with racist dehumanization and bestialization into spaces of an unpre-
dictable and terrifying Nature. Othello’s extension away from the hu-
man begins with his self-positioning into natural landscapes. The tales
with which he woos Desdemona are both animalizing and spatializing.
One of the matters to remember here is that in the early modern period,
madness is a material thing, imaged as a corporeal deformity of some
kind, variously gendered, sexualized, classed, and raced. This abnormal
body is, in turn, terrestrialized in very specific ways.
In his exhaustive and encyclopedic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621),
for instance, Robert Burton explicitly associates sexual variation with
geographical issues, the normative heterosexual body being indigenous
to Britain and dissidence being foreign, from elsewhere. Part of the fear
of foreign landscapes is actually a fear of foreigners, and this itself is a
fear of “human nature, its fickleness, its potential for violence and cru-
elty,” as Yi-Fu Tuan explains in Landscapes of Fear (73); but another
important part of the ecophobia toward foreign landscapes has to do
with “predictabity in an uncertain environment” (Tuan 9).
122 Madness and Ecophobia
Domestic landscapes are more mapped, predictable, and sustaining
than foreign landscapes. Domestic landscapes provide all that is neces-
sary for survival: everything that people may need, Nicholas Culpeper
explains in 1659, is “abundantly ministered unto us for the preservation
of Health at home in our own Fields, Pastures, Rivers, etc” (7 [D4]).
Meanwhile, anything foreign becomes a site and origin of danger, an
object of xenophobia and disdain, and a source of pollution. Culpeper’s
stance is somewhere between what today would be a sensible bioregional
self-sustainability, on the one hand, and a xenophobic othering of the
foreign, on the other. Whatever label we give his stance, however, his
cures and medicines for the body and mind are local, rooted in English
soils and airs. And Shakespeare’s understandings of madness a half cen-
tury or so earlier are rooted in similar beliefs about the local and the
foreign. With the foreign representing danger and potential pollution
and folly, to look at representations of madness in Shakespeare from an
ecocritical perspective, therefore, becomes not merely a viable project
but indeed a very necessary one. It is a reasonable proposition, therefore,
that in order to understand early modern literary madness, it is also nec-
essary to understand early modern xenophobia and all of its ecophobic
implications and bases.
As I have mentioned in Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, racism and
ecophobia are intertwined in Othello. In addition, for instance, to the
animalizing imagery in Othello (the black ram tupping the white ewe),
Othello is ontologically associated with the “rough quarries, rocks, and
hills whose heads touch heaven” (Othello 1.3.141) in the tales he uses
to woo Desdemona and is, by any account, a monster. Karen Newman
describes him as “a monster in the Renaissance sense of the word, a
deformed creature like the hermaphrodites and other strange spectacles
so fascinating to the early modern period” (153). Moreover, he is cer-
tainly aware of the appeal of the cannibal and of its spatial dislocation.
In his successful bid to woo Desdemona, he talks about “the ­Cannibals
that each other eat / The Anthropophagi” (1.3.143–45). Dislocated from
the geography of the center to a geography of difference, they share no
substantial dissimilarity from the landscape to which Othello is ontologi-
cally associated. It is his associations with a more-than-human world that
constitute him, his power, his sexuality, and his charismatic presence.
Yet to represent madness is a difficult thing. As Shoshana Felman
urges, echoing Michel Foucault, madness is “still prevented from speak-
ing for itself, in a language of its own” (“Foucault” 40). When authors
imagine and write madness into their fiction, the cultural product is an
imaginary of real-world psychological disability or psychiatric disorder.
The psychological state of a literary character is always a fiction; how
real-world ethics impinge on the construction of such a character, how-
ever, is not. The constructedness of the category of madness both within
 Madness and Ecophobia 123
and outside of fiction warrants more critical attention. Literary madness
is obviously not the same as nonliterary madness, but the ethics involved
with the social construction of madness of both kinds are functionally
equivalent, and the same standards of analysis apply to these ethical
frames inside and outside of literature.
Ecophobia is centrally involved in imagining psychiatric otherness,
in part because, as Paul Shepherd has observed, “humans intuitively
see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own in-
ner world” (Nature and Madness 72). While literary madness and real
madness are entirely different things, the literary mad linger with us
and resonate in our consciousness long after we shut the book. Dif-
ferent, obviously, from the real,4 they have potent material effects and
both influence and are influenced by the world of practical medicine.
Can we use our current definitions for the past? No. Even outside of the
geographical confines of nation, the terms defining psychiatric disabil-
ity must differ. The bottom line here is that both literary and real cases
of madness have lasting material effects, and how we personify our
ecophobia says a great deal about how we understand our rights and
our uses of power. For Shepherd, there are important links between
“human powers over nature” and “power over other men”: “the oth-
erness of nature takes fabulous forms of incorporation, influence, con-
ciliation, and compromise” (Nature and Madness 8). 5 Visiting mental
hospitals, as became common in early-17th century England, was si-
multaneously an exercise of real power and a blurring of the literary
and clinically mad.
With the opening of Bethlem Royal Hospital to the public for enter-
tainment, “the hospital was some sort of theater, a place of perverse and
sometimes fashionable entertainment for Londoners, and the practice
of visiting and viewing the mad for amusement was depicted or alluded
to in a number of plays between 1598 and 1630” (Jackson 1). Kalli
­Elizabeth Ringelberg (who also cites Jackson on this matter) observes
that “visitation to the mental hospital was both to entice the public to
feel empathy towards the patients and want to help the institute finan-
cially, but also to expose them as a spectacle and breech the division
between the so-called sane and insane” (16). Yet, while Ringelberg
believes that this visitation practice “illuminated the clear separation
between the sane and healthy spectators and the unhealthy mentally
insane” (ibid), it is reasonable to assume that the theatricalization of the
mad here also conflated the real and the imaginary mad, the people in
the hospital with the ones on the stage. Ringelberg goes on to explain
that “the governors of Bedlam” wanted to raise money and that “By
seeing them as humans,… not some foreign monsters, it just may have
scared… visitors into paying large sums to cure them, hoping that they
would never become this same exact way” (17).
124 Madness and Ecophobia
Yet the specter of monstrosity looms. The human sits at the contested
definitional axes of nature, a kiss away from monstrosity. Judith Butler
argues that

It is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed, for

the construction of the human is a differential operation that pro-
duces the more and the less “human,” the inhuman, the humanly
unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its
constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent
possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.
(Bodies that Matter 8)

Writing monstrosity is the narrativization of ecophobia, imagining un-

predictable agency in nature that must be subject to human power and
discipline. Ecophobia is the affective reaction. Ecophobia is all about
power. It is the something-other-than-humanness that is dangerous in
the monster6 and the mad, and in order for this danger to have any
potency, we need a fairly hostile conception of the natural world. How,
then, are environmental ethics involved in imagining and representing
madness? Specifically, what are the relations between ecophobia and the
imagining of madness?
In order to understand how ecophobia works in literary representations
of madness, the two key terms—ecophobia and madness—­themselves
require definition. Defining ecophobia and its manifestations is the cen-
tral line of inquiry that this book pursues.7 Defining madness has a much
longer history. Both within literature and in the nonfictional world of
philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, criminologists, politicians,
lawyers, laypeople, and countless others, the term “madness” has been
a constant challenge. Shakespeare’s Polonius glibly sums it up thus: “to
define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad” (Hamlet
2.2.95–96). Or, as Carol Thomas Neely has memorably explained, “The
final difficulty of reading madness…is that in the act of doing so, one
dissociates oneself from it or associates oneself with it, and in either case
becomes disqualified as an interpreter. To read madness sanely is to miss
the point; to read madness madly is to have one’s point be missed” (316).
Indeed, there are a multitude of important questions regarding both real
and literary madness. The concern of this chapter is with the latter.
Addressing the topic of madness within the period of Shakespeare,
literary critic Duncan Salkeld has asked,

Can the madness of the past be interpreted in present-day catego-

ries of insanity? Should the concepts of real and literary madness
be distinguished? Does madness make sense, and if so, what does
it mean? And anyway, do the wild and whirling words flung out of
centuries of confinement in dark places really ­matter?
(8)8
 Madness and Ecophobia 125
Virtually any scholar who has researched literary madness has asked
similar questions. These questions raise important issues for the discus-
sion of madness and environment. Lillian Feder reminds us that there is
an “intrinsic distortion of experience…[in] imaginative transformations
of observations of madness, as in much poetry, fiction, and drama.”
These representations of madness, she continues, “are consciously or-
dered versions” (7—emphasis added) of madness. We are—and we must
remember this—not seeing madness at all; we are always seeing a repre-
sentation of madness in literature.9
Like cannibalism or extraordinary physical deformity, madness is oth-
ering, and, historically, literary representations of difference have dove-
tailed with representations of madness. Writing literary madness often
means taking a clear ethical stand toward the natural environment, a
stand that is often—perhaps invariably—an ecophobic one. Imagined
outside of the boundaries defining humanity, the mad are not entitled
to the same ethical considerations as humanity, and until the circle of
ethical inclusion expands, and as long as the mad are imagined as a part
of nature, the mad will always be exempted from the rights that human-
ity enjoys. Among these are agency and, importantly, the expression of
agency through voice.
Assigning the label of madness implies silencing.10 Silence, of course,
has many voices, many purposes, and many effects: sometimes, it is an
ideal; at other times, it is an enigmatic horror; many times, it is imposed;
sometimes, it is chosen freely—but it almost always says something about
otherness. What is particularly interesting about the construction of lit-
erary madness is that it gives voice to fictional mad characters. Catherine
Belsey looks at silence in terms of subject positions in early modern En-
glish literature and argues that the “right to speak [is the right] to sub-
jectivity, to a position from which to protest” (171). Belsey’s argument
is compelling: “to speak,” she claims, “is to possess meaning, to have
access to the language which defines, delimits and locates power” (191).
The voice of the mad is threatening, unauthorized—hence, the silenc-
ing.11 The literary mad are authored, of course, but the tacit assumption
writer and reader accept is that the voice of the mad is unauthorized. The
voice of the mad and the agency of nature are coterminous, each unpre-
dictable, each provoking responses of aggressive containment. Ecopho-
bia seeks containment of nature’s agency, and language is one means of
achieving this containment. No less is language an instrument of control
of the psychiatric other.
To reduce madness either to silence or cacophony is a mistake. Mad-
ness indeed is a lot more storied and complicated than someone such as
Jacques Derrida allows. Derrida seems to argue that language is rea-
son and that madness (the absence of reason) is necessarily outside of
language: “madness is indeed, essentially and generally, silence, stifled
speech” (54). The essence of madness here is silence. But this cannot
be the case: both in fiction and in nonfiction, madness manifests itself
126 Madness and Ecophobia
not only in silence but in voice.12 The essence of madness cannot be
silence, and to say that madness cannot be represented is nonsense and
flies in the face of the millennia of representations of literary madness.
Yet ­M ichel Foucault’s position does not seem viable either. As Shoshana
Felman explains Foucault, literature ultimately presents the “authentic
voice of madness” (“Foucault” 48). Obviously, however, this doesn’t
work; clearly, fiction is the product of artists who seek not to faith-
fully and authentically represent social issues but to entertain and to sell
their stories, perhaps only a small fraction of fiction seeking mimetic
realism.13
The mad are radically Other. Andrew Scull argues in Museums of
Madness that “in seventeenth- and eighteenth century practice, the
madman in confinement was treated no better than a beast; for that
was precisely what, according to the prevailing paradigm of insanity,
he was” (64),14 and there are abundant examples supporting the general
view linking the mad with the bestial. Many theorists have commented
on this. Keith Thomas notes that “most beastlike of all were those on
the margins of human society,” and he puts at the top of the list of
marginalized people “the mad, who seemed to have been taken over by
the wild beast within” (44). Michael MacDonald, in Mystical Bedlam,
observes that the mentally ill were thought to have become “reduced…
to the level of dumb beasts” and that “the proverbial comparison of
madmen and wild animals” expressed a notion “that was redolent with
scientific, religious, and moral implications” (179). Michel Foucault
claims that “madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast”
(72). In The Duchess of Malfi, the Doctor defines Ferdinand’s affliction
in the final act as a sort of psychological bestialization, “lycanthropia,”
where the sufferers are “transformed into wolves” (5.2.10) and go about
howling and digging up corpses in graveyards. The doctor’s definition is
borrowed from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories
Containing the Wonders of Our Time (386–87). The essential speciesist
horror here is with the transgression “backward” from human to non-
human animal.15
The early modern stage is teeming with references to Bedlam,
Bedlamites, and Tom O’Bedlams, but, as Patricia Allderidge comments
in a persuasive discussion about the fictionalized accounts of Bethlem
Hospital, “the best-known facts about Bethlem will stand up to very
little examination” (24). In particular, Allderidge is concerned with cor-
recting commonly held misconceptions about treatment in Bethlem. One
conclusion she makes is that although there was inhumane treatment of
the mentally afflicted, standard procedure at the hospital was not brutal-
ity, and “at least some of the inhumane treatment stemmed as much from
the total inadequacy of everyone concerned when faced with the very
real fact of violent and dangerous patients, as from any deeply held belief
in the nature of insanity or the animality of the insane” (27—emphasis
 Madness and Ecophobia 127
added). The important point for us here is that ecophobic attitudes to-
ward animals determine how the mad are legislated and cared for.
The early modern period is pivotal in the history of madness. Sources
of early modern theoretical clinical commentary about madness are
abundant,16 and they show strong relationships between representations
of madness and issues about sexuality, race, bestiality, ethnicity, and
gender. If there is one thing in a character such as Macbeth, for instance,
above all else that is singularly emasculating, something that unmans
him, it is madness. Madness and a muscular heterosexual manhood
are largely incompatible with each other in the early modern period.
­Macbeth is “quite unmanned” (Macbeth 3.4.73) by folly and, though
he may complain that his mind is “full of scorpions” (3.2.36), he will
always step up when asked, “Are you a man” (3.4.57). Real men are not
mad; emasculated men often are. It is in the matters of witchcraft and
hysteria, however, that the gendered valences of madness are most clear.
Edward Jorden delineates his clinical theory in A Briefe Discourse
of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), where he
attempts to distinguish between bewitchment and hysteria. He cites
two main causes of the disease: internal and external. The “internall
causes may be anything contained within the bodie, as spirit, blood,
humors, excrements, & c” (F3[V]). Jorden identifies the primary ex-
ternal causes as “meate and drinke” (G2[R]). Whatever the imagined
causes for this imagined madness, gender is the sine qua non of defor-
mity in these discourses about hysteria and witchcraft. Such deformity
is an environmental issue not only because of the sexist association of
women (as a general category) with the natural world but also because
of the many links imagined specifically between witches and the natu-
ral environment.17
The renowned psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argues that not only is “the
concept of mental illness… analogous to that of witchcraft” (xix) but
that “in the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients”
(xx). Yet this seems reductive and simplistic. Szasz conflates causes and
effects, and this seems a mistake, since the doctors of the time (Richard
Napier,18 Timothy Bright, and Edward Jorden, for instance) consulted
with and kept scrupulous records of patients complaining of disorders of
the mind (see also MacDonald Mystical Bedlam 233–51). Witches were
no more present in the early modern period than today; but there were
and are real people who are really mentally disabled. It is a mistake to
imply that such disability in the early modern period is a myth. Neverthe-
less, many in the early modern period believed in witches, who, as Belsey
explains, “were women who broke silence and found an unauthorized
voice, but the social body required that they paid a high price for the
privilege of being heard” (191). Their unauthorized speech in ­M acbeth is
“imperfect” (1.3.70). Witches “were assumed to interfere with elements
and the climate to achieve especially hurtful or unseasonable reversals”
128 Madness and Ecophobia
(Clark “Inversion,” 120), as we can certainly see with the atmospheric
chaos and riddling language at the start of the play.
Hysteria, too, is a part of the early modern family of madness. Gener-
ally defined in early modern England “as a disease caused by the woman’s
uterus which floats about her body attacking her… usually [signifying]
some aberration in the woman’s sexual constitution” (­Little 20)—
a psychophysical deformity, in other words—hysteria is on par with
witchcraft, and, in fact, “the symptoms of be- witchment and hysteria
are identical” (Neely 320). Witches and the mad alike promise a dis-
ruption of order, a threat to and confusion of the very boundaries that
define the human.19 We see such confusion, for instance, in the tran-
sient corporeality of the witches as they melt into the air, “as breath
into wind” (1.3.82) in Macbeth. These witches, who “look not like th’
inhabitants o’th’ earth” (1.3.41), are, Peter Stallybrass observes, “con-
nected with disorder in nature (not only thunder and lightning but also
‘fog and filthy air’)” (195). They are also associated with the undecid-
able meteorological conditions of “so foul and fair a day” (1.3.38), the
likes of which Macbeth has never seen. Further distancing them from
proper natural human form was the belief that witches could control the
weather, an unnatural (indeed, supernatural) power possessed by unnat-
urally powerful people (among them, Prospero).
Macbeth’s witches challenge the boundaries of the human through
their associations with nature, but their gender-bending also constitutes
a deformity from the essentialized notion of Woman: they have beards.
As Banquo complains to them, “You should be women, / And yet your
beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (1.3.45–47). This is
fertile (and gendered) ground for ecophobia. Fear of nature imagined
to have gone awry is as common today as ever. What are understood as
deformities and monstrosities alter the genetic course of organisms, are
perversions that are fearsome precisely because they are unpredictable.
To what degree a fear of mutations in nature promoted human survival
is an open question for which, in the fullness of time, there will surely be
empirical data, but, for now, the powerful associations of madness with
nature imagined to have gone awry and our persistent ambivalent fasci-
nation with mental disability speak loudly to the ecophobia hypothesis.
The reality, past and present, is that identity, whether imposed or
assumed, is deeply indebted to not only social context but to environ-
mental context. Indeed, madness is a slippery term, but whatever it is
taken to signify is being reconstituted in the Renaissance. Lawrence
Babb claims that “the vogue of melancholy began to make its mark
upon English literature about midway in the reign of Elizabeth” (73).
Carol Thomas Neely reminds us that “[i]t has long been recognized that
­England in the period from 1580 to 1640 was fascinated with madness”
(316) and insists that madness “must be defined and read from within
some framework; its definitions and therapies are always constructed
 Madness and Ecophobia 129
from a particular historical moment and within a particular social or-
der, influenced by and influencing that order” (ibid).
In the early modern period, there were many terms in circulation describ-
ing madness. The early moderns were prolific on this matter. Discourses
of madness form a foundational base on which much S­ hakespearean ex-
oticism and otherness is grounded. Robert Burton, in his exhaustive work
entitled The Anatomy of Melancholy published in 1621, maintains that
“folly, melancholy, madness are but one disease” (39) and “that they dif-
fer only in quantity alone, the one being a degree to the other, and both
proceeding from one cause” (140). The reigning philosophy at the time
regarding madness was deeply committed to Galen and to theories about
the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile (melancholy), and phlegm.
These were linked, as the theory went, with elements of nature—the four
elements of air, fire, Earth, and water, respectively, and with the seasons
spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Imbalances among these humors
signified mental issues. Gail Kern Paster has observed that “humoral
change is itself brought about by the continual and reciprocal interaction
of body, mind, culture and the environment” (50). There seem, therefore,
compelling reasons from the early modern period to look at the social
construction of madness from a perspective that allows discussion about
environmental ethics and ecophobia.
One of the central myths associated with madness in the early modern
period is that of the Wild Man. Hayden White explains that

From biblical times to the present, the notion of the Wild Man was
associated with the idea of the wilderness—the desert, forest, jungle,
and mountains—those parts of the physical world that had not yet
been domesticated or marked out for domestication in any signifi-
cant way. As one after another of these wildernesses was brought
under control, the idea of the Wild Man was progressively despatial-
ized. This despatialization was attended by a compensatory process
of interiorization.
(7)

The Wild Man threatens chaos. He represents, to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s

words, “fear of the imminent collapse of [the] world and the approach
of death—that final surrender of integrity to chaos…a sense of person-
alized evil, the feeling that the hostile force, whatever its specific man-
ifestation, possesses will” (7). Tuan is describing fear of landscapes,
but his words aptly gloss White’s comments on the Wild Man, a figure
embedded within spaces of otherness that evoke strong ecophobic re-
sponses. Lillian Feder notes that “the prototypical madman or woman
is analogous to the wild man, an imaginary being who occurs in vari-
ous forms throughout Western literature and art” (ibid). Citing Richard
Bernheimer’s masterful Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Feder implicitly
130 Madness and Ecophobia
reveals how entangled environmental ethics are with the very processes
of writing or imagining madness:

The notion of the wild man must respond and be due to a persistent
psychological urge. We may define this urge as the need to give ex-
ternal expression and symbolically valid form to the impulses of
reckless physical self-assertion which are hidden in all of us, but
which are normally kept under control.
(Bernheimer, as cited by Feder 3)

To some degree this relies on the distinction in the early modern period
between the natural and the civilized person, the former incapable of
reason and intelligence, though pure; the latter, though jaded, being so-
phisticated and intelligent, with all of the capacities for reason and logic.
White also notes that

the unmasking of such myths as the Wild Man has not always been
followed by the banishment of their component concept but rather has
been followed by their interiorization. For the dissolution by scientific
knowledge of the ignorance which led earlier men to locate their imag-
ined wild men in specific times and places does not necessarily touch
the levels of psychic anxiety where such images have their origins.
(6)

The associations in the popular imagination of monstrosity with mad-

ness in the early modern period is a telling signal of how fears about
madness represent a larger concern about the intrusion of the undomes-
ticated natural world into the controlled spaces of human civilization.
Keith Thomas argues that “one of the reasons that monstrous births
caused such horror was that they threatened the firm dividing-line be-
tween men and animals” (39).
Madness, of course, is one of the most commonly depicted deformities
about which the literature of the time expresses vigorous pruning and
reformation efforts. Madness, though, also represented through meta-
phors of monstrosity and as frequently described as being manifest in
discursive or material action, is understood more in ontological than
necessarily behavioral terms, as a state of being that reveals itself in
outward signs, often behavioral but always material—either as defor-
mity or action. The body onto which madness is written as material
deformity is gendered, sexualized, classed, and raced. The deforming of
this norm tacitly accepts and employs an ecophobic ethic that needs to
be addressed if we are to understand how environmentalism, far from
being removed “from a politics of personal liberation and empower-
ment” (Kerridge 6), 20 has a vital role to play in liberation movements.
In other words, because discourses of monstrosity and madness so often
use images of the natural world as a part of their processes, it seems very
 Madness and Ecophobia 131
necessary to deconstruct and seek understandings of the implied vio-
lence of bestializing metaphors, of pollution metaphors, and of explicitly
dehumanizing depictions of deformity.
The belief that insanity is a form of bestiality begins with French physi-
cian André du Laurens, who lived from 1558 to 1609 (roughly Elizabeth I’s
reign, which ran from 1558 to 1603). Du Laurens’s belief was not metaphor-
ical, and for him, the mad were animals:

Contemple les actions d’un phrénetique, ou d’un maniaque, tu n’y

trouveras rien de l’homme; il mord, il hurle, il mugle une voix sau-
vage; roule les yeux ardens, herisse ses cheveux, se precipite partout,
et bien souvent se tue. Regarde comme un melancholique se laisse
parfois tellement abaisser, qu’il se rend compagnon des bêtes, et
n’aime que les lieux solitaires.
(du Laurens 110R)21

The mad here not only act like animals with fiery eyes, savage sounds,
biting, incoherence, and detachment from civil society; they are compan-
ions of beasts. In a discussion about madness in literature, Allen Thiher
observes that “metamorphosis of the mad into animals prepared the way
for some two centuries of extraordinarily harsh treatment of the insane at
the hands of captors who had medical license to treat the incarcerated as
if they were chattel” (76). Discourses of monstrosity and madness dehu-
manize, defile, and deform, and in producing people who fall outside the
community of “the human,” these discourses often also stand against het-
erogeneity and diversity—of various kinds. In order to function as a pre-
scriptive warning, the discourse of madness relies on an ecophobic frame
that positions animals and diversity as threats to civilized order.
The topic of monstrosity alone deserves the attention of more full-
length monographs. Indeed, there remain enormous amounts of mate-
rial that can be discussed about madness when approaching it through
ecocriticism. For instance, the whole question about nocturnal behavior
springs to mind. Literary madman par excellence, King Lear experi-
ences his breakdown at night.22 Night has never received a fair shake
in discussions about madness or in ecocriticism generally. Keith Thomas
maintains that “it was bestial to work at night” (39) in early modern
England, and we might note that the othering of nocturnicity is still an
issue, since the business world is geared to people who live diurnally.
Nocturnal people have fewer entertainment opportunities, their shop-
ping choices are limited to expensive convenience stores, their jobs tend
to be undesirable, and so on. Moreover, the cultural representations of
villainy seem in many ways to be associated with night: the Batman
movies occur almost entirely at night (and we might note that the epon-
ymous hero is a bestial hybrid—half human, half bat—ideally suited
to fight the bestial crimes of the seemingly always dark Gotham City),
132 Madness and Ecophobia
Christian mythology never mentions a nighttime in heaven, ghosts and
vampires don’t come up with the sun, and so on. Loving the day but hat-
ing the night means taking ecophobic issue with the natural cycles of the
Earth. Fear of darkness (though no doubt rooted in evolutionary neces-
sities) is at its core ecophobic in literature, and associating villains and
madmen with night says as much about environmental ethics as it does
about all of those other things (medical, cultural, political, religious, and
psychological assumptions) that go into making literary mad people. 23
The early modern period was pivotal in much that would happen in the
years to come with madness. There is no question that, as Lillian Feder
has shown, “literary interpretations of madness both reflect and question
medical, cultural, political, religious, and psychological assumptions of
their time” (4), but it is necessary to expand the discussion of madness to
include environmental ethics, to how and why conceptions about nature
feed into constructions of madness, literary or other. Representations
of madness in the early modern period say a lot about general feelings
toward the natural world, what we might characterize as the early mod-
ern environmental imagination. Indeed, the early modern environmental
imagination is so often wound up with representations of madness that
it becomes virtually impossible to discuss literary madness meaningfully
outside of an ecocritical perspective, one that takes into account the idea
that environmental ethics dynamically connects with a wide spectrum
of human values, biases, and presuppositions. Whether we are talking
about Othello as he “breaks out to savage madness,” Ophelia, “a docu-
ment in madness” (Hamlet 4.5.176), or just plain old crazy King Lear,
we get a more complete picture when looking from an expanded ethical
sphere than not. From so doing, one thing that quickly becomes apparent
in the early modern period is that the representation of the mad other
is essentially ecophobic, implying a generalized environmental loathing
that in diverse ways carefully police the limits of the human.

Notes
1 This idea is reminiscent of the early modern notion about demoniacal pos-
session. As Edgar Allison Peers explains, it was an experience both of the
body and the mind: “It was made to account not only for mental disease but
for all kinds of physical deformations and imperfections, whether occur-
ring alone, or, as is often the case, accompanying idiocy” (8). The notion
of more-than-human involvement within the human also registers in Carol
Thomas Neely’s discussions about madness as marking “the intersection of
the human and the transcendent” (317).
2 All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from the 1997 Riverside edition.
See Shakespeare, Works Cited.
3 I am grateful to Sophie Christman for the ideas (and most of the wording) in
this sentence.
4 A character is a character, an invention of someone’s imagination. As the
late Alfred Liede of Heidelberg University emphatically put it, “Mental ill-
ness cannot be an issue for literary study—it doesn’t lead anywhere” (de
 Madness and Ecophobia 133
Beaugrande 17). A psychopathic character cannot punch you, but a real one
can. A mad character is what its author makes it; a real one is a less abso-
lute, subject to conflicting discourses and definitions with results that are, in
turn, subject to the different disciplinary discourses and institutions of the
time. Both, however, are imagined within a framework that utilizes notions
of a hostile nature, a foil against which the human comes into focus.
5 Madness is all about the extreme limits of humanity. These limits are con-
stantly being tried, extremes tested. The 21st century has been defined by
what seem obsessions with extremes of many kinds. We hear daily of ex-
treme weather events. We began the century with fears of computer shut-
downs and mass chaos which would, we were warned, come at midnight
of December 31, 1999—the issue variously known as the Millennium Bug,
the Y2K Bug, the Y2K Problem, and merely Y2K. It didn’t happen, but the
terror was real. The following year, the extraordinary events of September
11 shocked the world. We entertain ourselves with “extreme sports” (BASE
jumping, wingsuiting, and mixed martial arts are perhaps the most famous
of these). The graphic gore in the American CSI television programs and The
Walking Dead have reached new levels of verisimilitude and extremity. No
less are our psychological limits being pushed to the extreme by Daish, who
broadcast beheadings and other atrocities. All of this at time when we are
heavily bombarded on all sides by information to such an extent that, as I
mentioned in Chapter 3 (referencing former Apple and Microsoft executive
Linda Stone), some people think we are in a constant state of partial atten-
tion, that we are no longer able to focus effectively and are capable only of
partial attention. Yet extremity is nothing new to our species; it is, in fact,
what defines us. We are all about pushing the limits. One of the limits that
defines and fascinates humanity has to do with mental functioning.
6 As I explained in Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, monsters “present the hor-
rifying aspect of an agential nature that helps codify and organize rituals
of scapegoating on the one hand and the parameters of exploitation on the
other, while at the same time feeding a felt hunger for wonder” (68).
7 Although people all through recorded history have done and thought things
that were ecophobic, the term is a neologism, and no one in Shakespeare’s day,
for instance, was struggling with the term. Not so with the term madness.
8 Branimir M. Reiger similarly asks, “What is meant by ‘Madness in Litera-
ture?’ How can this thematic phrase aid in the understanding of literature?
Does it refer to the writer, the abnormal behavior of the characters or some
nexus? Does it refer to the writings of madmen or the actions of mad protag-
onists” (1).
9 Michel Foucault explains that
between word and image…unity begins to dissolve; a single and identical
meaning is not immediately common to them. And if it is true that the
image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something con-
substantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer
says the same thing; and that…[it] engages in an experiment that will
take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial iden-
tity of the theme. Figure and speech still illustrate the same fable of folly
in the same moral world, but already they take two different directions,
indicating, in a still barely perceptible scission, what will be the great line
of cleavage in the Western experience of madness.
(18)
True too of the distance between the mad on stage and the unsettling patient

staring at you out of the barred window of a mental facility.
134 Madness and Ecophobia
10 Again, Foucault has important insights on this topic:
In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communi-
cates with the madman. There is no common language: or rather, it no
longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end
of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives
the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those
imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the ex-
change between madness and reason was carried out. The language of
psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only
have come into existence in such a silence.
(x–xii)
11 Silencing the mad looks awfully similar to humanity’s quashing of nature’s
agency.
12 Duncan Salkeld summarizes Derrida nicely: “The upshot of Derrida’s re-
marks is that there is no madness in Shakespearean or Renaissance Drama.
Nor, indeed, in any literature. All writing (and, therefore, speech) is inscribed
with the logos of Western ‘Reason in general’ and necessarily excludes mad-
ness itself from its discourse” (40). And that would be absurd if true.
13 Admittedly, as Felman has argued, “to ‘speak in the name of,’ to ‘speak for,’
could thus mean…to appropriate and to silence” (“Women and Madness” 4).
In passing, we might note also that this is a point that could as easily be made
about writing the environment.
14 The negative connotation of “beast” here is an enduring example of ecopho-
bia, reflected in such contemporary examples as Mr. Trump stating that the
Syrian President “Assad is an animal” (see McKernan), or in comparisons of
people to monkeys, dogs, rats, snakes, pigs, maggots, and so on. Some com-
parisons can, to be sure, be ennobling (being called eagle-eyed, a stud, wise
as an owl, or lion-hearted), but these are personifications and false charac-
terizations of the animals. Moreover, there are important intersections of
racial and gender lines here with ecophobia. Of the many offensive animal
comparisons men make of women (bitch, cow, sow, bunny, pussy, catty,
chick, crow, dog, mare, shrew, vixen, and so on), there are few equivalents
for men, and terms such as “stud” tend to be racialized (it is the black stud
rather than the white or Asian). Ecophobia is deeply involved with sexism
and racism.
15 Defining human subjectivity in opposition to the nonhuman has material
and legal implications, with important consequences for social relations.
Cary Wolfe has looked at these material and legal implications in Before
the Law and explains that “as long as the automatic exclusion of animals
from standing remains intact simply because of their species, such a dehu-
manization by means of the discursive mechanism of ‘dehumanization’ will
be readily available for deployment against whatever body happens to fall
outside the enthnocentric ‘we’” (21, emphases in original). On the legal side,
Kevin Curran asks, “What are we to make of the many moments like […]
in Shakespeare’s work when matters of law—property, obligation, crime,
judgment—underwrite ideas about the nature of the self? What do we learn
about Shakespeare’s thinking on selfhood if we consider the topic from a
legal perspective?” (3). Early modern policing of the borders of the human
depends on an anti-animal, anti-nature ethics that is at its core ecophobic (as
well as sexist and racist).
16 Some other sources include Philip Barrough’s The Method of Phisick, Con-
teining the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward Diseases (1590), Timothy
 Madness and Ecophobia 135
Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), F.N. Coeffeteau’s A Table of Hu-
mane Passions, With Their Causes and Effects (1621), André Du Laurens’s
A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases; of
Rheumes, and of Old Age (1599), Tamaso Garzoni’s The Hospitall of Incur-
able Fooles (1600), and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde (1601).
17 This paragraph appears in slightly different form in my Ecocriticism and
Shakespeare 102.
18 See Kassell, Hawkins, Ralley, and Young.
19 This is a category defined, inhabited, and policed by men. Witches and the
mad are not men. Social constructions of madness in early modern England,
therefore, are at core sexist. Sexism and ecophobia are joined at the hip.
20 Richard Kerridge argues persuasively that “environmentalism has a political
weakness in comparison with feminism: it is much harder for environmen-
talists to make the connection between global threats and individual lives.
Green politics cannot easily be, like feminism, a politics of personal libera-
tion and empowerment” (6). Kerridge is not arguing that such connections
are absent but only that people may often fail to see them.
21 “Think about the actions of a frenetic [person], or of a maniac; you will find
nothing of the [hu]man; he bites, be screams, he hollers in a savage voice, he
rolls his fiery eyes, his hair is dishevelled, this precipitates everything, and
very often he dies. Regard how the melancholic leaves himself so completely
that he is rendered a companion of beasts [because] he does not like soli-
tude.” [translated by Simon Estok and Sophie Christman].
22 Linda Woodbridge has argued that his madness is itself curative and re-
demptive and that he “learns more in one night of madness than he had
learned in eighty years of sanity” (304) and that he is, to some extent, re-
deemed through his night of chaos.
23 This paragraph appears in slightly different form in my Ecocriticism and
Shakespeare 118.
7 The Ecophobic Unconscious
Indifference to Waste and
Junk Agency

The ecophobic unconscious creates waste and is characterized by over-

consumption, conspicuous consumption, and needless consumption; by
appetites gone mad; by individualism unchecked; by being absorbed in
the present (with only the faintest attention to its relation to the future);
and, more ominously, by being victim to processes and agents that we
ourselves have activated. Moreover, this ecophobic unconscious is char-
acterized by a kind of indifference to the harmful use of things such as
toxic plastics and a paralysis to stop such usage: it is a slave relationship
to generating ever-growing and ever-diversifying products (including
waste products) characterized by a perverse belief in the capacity of sci-
ence to solve the problems. The ecophobic unconscious is a dangerously
human maladaptive behavioral condition that promotes Anthropocene
waste, and it is characterized by appetites we consciously choose not to
control and by the agencies we thought were relegated to the trash heap
and therefore gone.
Everyone has probably imagined at some point the Wall-E world,
the Blue Earth gone very bad, polluted beyond recovery. When I was
in Grade Two, the Five Man Electrical Band had a song called “I’m a
Stranger Here” (1972) about people coming to Earth from outer space
and wondering what madness could have possessed us to make such
a mess of things. The song is structured as a dialogue between earth-
lings bragging about their achievements and the space people wondering
about the apparent contradictions. The earthlings explain,

We got the aero plane, we got the automobile

We got sky scraper buildings made of glass and steel
We’ve got synthetic food that nearly tastes real
And a little white pill that makes you feel
A whole lot better when you get out of bed
You take one in the morning for the long day ahead
We got everything everybody needs to survive
Surely the good life has arrived.
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 137
The space people respond,

I think your atmosphere is hurting my eyes

And your concrete mountains are blacking out the skies
Now I don’t say that you’ve been telling me lies
But why do I hear those children’s cries?
…You know you can’t keep what you take by force
But it’s only my first impression of course.

The song continues with the earthlings bragging, “We got the rivers and
the mountains and the valleys and the trees/ We got the birds in the sky
and the fish in the sea/ We got the –/” only to be suddenly interrupted by
the flabbergasted aliens, chiding, “Oh you crazy fools! Don’t you know
you had it made?/ You were living in paradise/ … I only pray that you
take my advice/ Because Paradise won’t come twice.”1 Forty-two years
later, I’m wondering that same thing that those 70s rockers wondered:
just how crazy would our planet look to a saner set of eyes? Exactly what
is this world we’ve created, this Anthropocene?
One thing is certain: the ecophobic unconscious is all about waste.2 No
waste, no Anthropocene. No plastic in the oceans, no accumulations of ra-
dioactive isotopes, or of carbon, or of chlorine, would reduce the kind and
degree of climate change problems we face today. Collective humanity has
a pollution problem. Other species pollute, to be sure (as I discuss below),
but they do it without the kind of awareness and certainly not on the same
tragic3 scale that we do. Our view of nature and of garbage have long occu-
pied a similar ethical space. To say this is not to imply that our ecophobia is
the only way in which we relate to the world, a point I made in Chapter 2;
rather, it is to understand that there is also an agency in nature that we
sometimes very sincerely fear, an agency to which we are also sometimes ut-
terly indifferent. Understanding how fear of nature’s agency becomes man-
ifested in the uniquely human condition of ecophobia offers a way forward
from our current climate moment. When there is a lion running toward me
at full tilt, I will most certainly run away. As I mentioned in the Introduc-
tion and Chapter 1, certain fears have ensured our survival. Certain fears
are embedded in our genes; others perhaps are not. Certainly, fear of dirt
and filth has kept us safe, but the compulsive hand-sanitizing that we see
today? The ecophobia hypothesis builds on the position within evolutionary
psychology that while some stimuli represent real threats to survival, others
are simply imagined. The fight or flight response to the latter is ecophobia.4
My concern in this chapter focuses on the way that garbage and en-
vironment have become fused in our thinking. When Susan Signe Mor-
rison explains in The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and
Ethical Matter5 that “garbage and nature are both feared owing to their
138 The Ecophobic Unconscious
controllable and uncanny powers, [and that they] need to be put into
place” (25), fashioned in a way that obliterates their agentic capacities
and the material implications of those capacities, we can immediately
recognize that the fear of garbage is a fear of its nonhuman (indeed,
potentially human-threatening) agency—the core of ecophobia. It is pre-
cisely this fear of the agency of the natural, a horror at the agential forces
in the unwanted, that makes us shudder at the capacities of the filth our
own bodies produce, as Morrison explains. The agencies of garbage and
of the perceived natural world are worrying: the late Patricia Yaeger ex-
plains in an oft-cited PMLA “Editor’s Column” entitled “The Death of
Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology” that “trash
becomes nature, and nature becomes trash” (332).
In a short but comprehensive discussion of waste, Brian Thill describes
how “our relationships to waste of all kinds… seem to depend on a fantasy
of power, a belief that all humankind shall have dominion over all things,
including its own detritus; a steadfast faith in the idea that we will be the car-
riers of meaning” (62). The reality, however, as Thill insightfully observes,
is that far from having dominion over waste, we are subject to the vagaries,
often unforeseen and unpredictable, of the things we want to be rid of.
One of the earliest scholars to speak meaningfully on dirt was Mary
Douglas. In her monumental Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Con-
cepts of Pollution and Taboo, Douglas contends that

There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the be-
holder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread
or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range
of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against
order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort
to organize the environment.
(12)

It is this ordering and erasure of the potential agency of dirt that, in its most
frenetic and obsessive manifestations (hand sanitizers everywhere, con-
tempt for natural bodily odors), points toward a radical fear of nature. Dirt
is dangerous, with a potential agency that threatens our own, indeed our
very existence, and it is the association of agential dirt with agential nature
that is the threat. Indeed, as Véronique Bragard shows, “humans are defined
by what they reject” (“Introduction” 460). This echoes a point Zygmunt
Bauman makes in Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, in which he
argues that “[w]e dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way:
we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking”
(27), and that our life is defined precisely by our ability to remove garbage:
“the survival of the modern form of life… depends on the dexterity and
proficiency of garbage removal” (ibid). Dirt—perhaps more precisely, the
disorder and ecophobia it promises—is dangerous.
It is important, however, to be careful not to conflate (as I have been
doing here) the concepts of “dirt” and “waste,” though there is obviously
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 139
overlap between what they cover. Indeed, some of the work in the area of
what Heather Sullivan proposes as “dirt theory” (515) is very useful in
appreciating how we conceptualize and understand waste. For instance,
Sullivan’s echo of Douglas about how humanity shuns dirt and waste is
an important one:

Modernity’s many anti-dirt campaigns include efforts made to re-

move or conceal bodily filth, waste, and the sweaty labor of agri-
cultural processes. Overall, the more sanitary conditions have been
profoundly healthy for human beings (if not for many environments
more broadly), though some aspects have led to unintended and not
always positive consequences.
(526)

Sullivan goes on to note that one of these unintended and not always
positive consequences is the tendency to imagine that there is an “away”
to which waste may be sent where it may be assumed to safely and pas-
sively remain. I want to argue here that the imagination of awayness
and invisibility signifies a core element of ecophobia: indifference. What
makes it so is not simply the disregard toward the ethical rights of nature
to continue unimpinged with its own agencies and processes, a disregard
that finds full material expression when we use the natural environment
as a dumpsite, a disregard that presumes a metaphorical association of
garbage with nature; it is also the utilitarian notion of disposability that
we attach to nature when we dump in it, a notion seething with the will
to power, with fantasies about control, and with delusions of exception-
alism, each of which is challenged by garbage.
Our anxieties about the manifold agencies of garbage register strongly
in contemporary media. In much of these media representations about
the spectacle of our current waste problems, Brian Thill notes, “what
is meant to be most alarming to the viewer is the colonization of living
space by the overwhelming force of accumulated garbage” (110). It is
alarming because the agency of garbage is both unpredictable and un-
wanted, offering what Serenella Iovino poignantly describes as an “un-
solicited lesson” (“Naples” 341).
Stacy Alaimo’s description of the agency of garbage is particularly use-
ful here: “There is something uncanny about ordinary human objects be-
coming the stuff of horror and destruction; these effects are magnified
by the strange jumbling of scale in which a tiny bit of plastic can wreak
havoc on the ecologies of the vast seas” (Exposed 130). Unpredictable and
uncontrolled nonhuman agency is troubling. The ecophobic loathes the
unpredictable. In its return of the unwanted, waste, Iovino has noted, of-
fers “the other side of our presence in the world, our absence made visible”
(“Naples” 340). Keenly alert to the onto-ecological foundations of waste,
Iovino insightfully observes that “waste is nature’s indifference toward
human civilization. In that it brings the products of culture back to their
140 The Ecophobic Unconscious
biological origin, waste is a nonhuman mirror of the human. By showing
the circular and continuous emerging of the nonhuman from what was
once human, waste gives us an unsolicited lesson in humility” (341). Rivers
of refuse, oceans filled with plastic,6 swollen and leeching landfills, toxic geog-
raphies of electronic waste (e-waste) in Africa and China,7 radioactive waste,
food waste,8 sewage, tailings from tar sands extraction (which involves strip
mining enormous swaths of Alberta’s boreal forests), medical garbage, litter:
it all adds up. The waste and garbage humanity produces is breathtaking, un-
fathomable, staggering; moreover, it is far from being passive stuff. It doesn’t
just sit there but rather manifests its presence in ways that we now understand
as threatening. Toxins kill (Figures 7.1 and 7.2).
Garbage is worrying precisely because it manifests the unpredictable
and potentially dangerous agency of a thing that we once controlled.
Stephanie Foote captures this well:

Garbage looks all used up, as though its story has already been fully
told. Once used up or discarded, any object—a broken radio, a Pop-
sicle stick, a torn shirt—is just trash. Drained of value, it seems to be
at the end of once-complex, once luxuriantly proliferating narratives
of pleasure or necessity.
(193)

Like the natural environments, such as American national parks and the
growing sites of global ecotourism, that Western societies imagined as

Figure 7.1 “
 Rowing in a river of garbage in Jakarta, Indonesia.”
Source: Madan, Planet Custodian www.planetcustodian.com/2015/11/04/8461/heart
breaking-pictures-show-childhood-being-spent-in-garbage.html.
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 141

Figure 7.2 A river of garbage in Beirut.

Source: Mohammed Tawfeeq, CNN www.cnn.com/2016/02/24/middleeast/lebanon-
garbage-crisis-river/index.html.

divinely created for their pleasure or necessity but that turn out to have
their own agency (unpredictable and potentially dangerous), garbage is
that dangerous thing that touches the ecophobic unconsciousness with an
agency that we want to keep at a distance from ourselves, thrown away.
Waste is taking on a new character in the 21st century, and, Thill notes,

waste and its impact have become a popular field for thinking about
possible futures, a vehicle through which science fiction tries to work
through its ambivalence about our desires to transcend the irreducible
messiness of time, space, and mortality, as well as our simultaneous
fears of being rendered obsolete in the new technological utopia.
(47)9

There is a growing consciousness that the history of relations with trash

is not sustainable.10 Waste is thus central to a growing corpus of ecopho-
bic apocalyptic visions that posit the polluted natural world as an angry
agent set on destroying humanity.
The insistent apocalypticism permeating mainstream media in the 21st
century has deep and important implications for how we understand
ecophobia. Véronique Bragard argues, for instance, “that the apoca-
lyptic imagination calls for not only a rehabilitated relationship with
nature that is threatened by industrial feats, but also a groundbreaking
relationship with waste and matter” (“Sparing” 479). It is an important
insight, and part of that groundbreaking redefining of our relationship
with waste must include an analysis of the increasingly sublime dimen-
sions we imagine with our refuse, which is becoming a thing of art, a
142 The Ecophobic Unconscious
thing represented by and representative of humanity. It is the subject of
poetry and the backdrop of films.
Wall-E, a film set hundreds of years into the postapocalyptic future, has
a grotesquely polluted world11 as its setting. Now abandoned to the ma-
chines and roaches that continue to clean it up, the Earth is an enormous
dump, and the humans (who apparently haven’t addressed the issues that
caused this problem) are now morbidly obese and have been evacuated by
the megacorporation Buy-N-Large to spaceship arks where they can en-
joy lives of pure consumption (spectatorial and culinary). We see quickly
that the environment and the problems in it that we have caused function
as nothing more than a backdrop to the main story, which is a kind of bi-
zarre boy (Wall-E) meets girl (Eve) love story, robotic and sanitized, and
without all of the exchanges of precious bodily fluids. The movie ranked
first in Time Magazine’s “Best Movie of the Decade,” but considering
its grim apocalypticism, it does nothing to motivate changes in ethical
relationships with our natural environment. Nor, in fact, is it really the
intent of the film to do so. But it does show two very important things:
first, and shockingly, it shows that we are content to sit and watch all of
this garbage as entertainment rather than to see it as a serious dystopic
trajectory; second, the appeal of Wall-E shows that this kind of thing is
acceptable to us in a way that, say, vivisection or coprophagy might not
be. Garbage is an acceptable part of the artistic endeavor. Both of these
examples reinforce the indifference of ecophobia.
In a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, Christopher Todd An-
derson suggests that “garbage exists on the border between the natural
and the artificial and, by extension, between human culture and wild
nature” (35). The artificial becomes inextricable from the natural: ex-
isting on the border, garbage edits the narratives of the natural, and
the agency produced evokes ecophobic attention. Anderson seems quite
aware of the claims about the inextricability of the natural and the arti-
ficial in our thinking, particularly in his discussion of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Anderson writes that Hanh

has noted the continuity between the pure beauty of a rose and the
rot of garbage, for their dichotomy exists “only when we look on
the surface. If we look more deeply we will see that in just five or six
days, the rose will become part of the garbage […]. The rose and the
garbage are equal. The garbage is just as precious as the rose.”
(Anderson 36, Hanh 96–97, as cited by Anderson)12

But if for Hanh, garbage and nature are inextricable, for Anderson, they
are clearly not fused, and there is what he calls “a fundamental ambigu-
ity” here and a specific point at which “the artificial product becomes
part of the natural landscape” (36). Fair enough, and the agency of a tin
can in weeds morphing from the status of litter and assimilating into the
environment is clearly important (and I’ll explore this agency in detail
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 143
below); we also need to consider the place of tin cans and weeds in our
thinking.13 They inhabit the same conceptual space, and it is for this
reason that we have no qualms at all tossing our junk away. It is why
we never gave a thought to space junk until we thought it could come
back to us in some destructive way. It is why we never gave a thought
to the waste from all of our nuclear tests until we thought it could come
back to us in some dangerous way. It is why we never gave a thought to
driving all our cars around, flying all our jets, and rumbling along in all
of our coal-fired trains until we thought it could all come back to us in
some harmful way. Anderson’s work is important because it pushes us
to think through “seeming dichotomies” (37), to understand that “var-
ious kinds of waste… raise fundamental questions about how we un-
derstand ourselves and our place in the natural world” (36). One of the
conclusions he reaches is that American literary treatments of garbage
(particularly in poems) explore “in often reverential terms how garbage
links our species to nature’s ecological cycles” and that works of poetry
dealing with garbage and waste

portray dumps, compost heaps, and other waste places as sites of

self-reflection and as unexpected emblems of spiritual and ecologi-
cal renewal. For poets seeking redemptive value and spiritual signif-
icance in what we normally consider to be repellent, garbage serves
as a meeting point of human culture the natural world, and the spir-
itual realm.
(37)

Anderson goes on to note, thus, that “garbage poetry maintains certain

attitudes associated with… the sublime” (38), that it indeed “shares a
kinship with concepts of the sublime developed by aestheticians, artists,
and writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (51).
The possibility that dirt is sublime is a particularly maladaptive new
twist in our relationship with waste. Patricia Yaeger suggests that “post-
modern detritus has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once
associated with nature” (327). For Yaeger, one of the results is that

an old opposition between nature and culture has been displaced

in postmodern art by a preoccupation with trash… If nature once
represented the before (creating culture as child, product, or sec-
ond nature) and if detritus represented the after (that which was
marginalized, repressed, or tossed away), these representations have
lost their appeal. We are born into a detritus strewn world, and the
nature that buffets us is never culture’s opposite.
(323)

The waste thrown “away” (into the rest of the world, the invisible world
we imagine outside of ourselves)—as Anderson, Yaeger, and many others
144 The Ecophobic Unconscious
know—fuses with that world it comes to inhabit. Waste is matter and
remains matter wherever we think “away” is, and its agency grows, mu-
tates, morphs: it is “a powerful type of matter that mutates, modulates,
transforms both humans and their habitat and needs to be studied in
its relationality” (Bragard “Introduction” 460). This agency sometimes
presents a threat to our survival, but it is the very unpredictability that
evokes knee-jerk ecophobia.
In its aesthetic condensation of the sublimity of postmodern detritus,
poetry provides an ideal lens through which to view the relationship
between garbage and ecophobia. Two very different poems, one “Above
the Water, Under the Water” by South Korean poet Seungho Choi and
the other “Garbage” by American poet A.R. Ammons, offer good rela-
tional angles on this matter. In her colossal and encyclopedic Ecoam-
biguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures, Harvard
professor Karen Thornber reads “Above the Water, Under the Water”
as an indictment of the blindness of people to what is beneath their very
eyes and claims that the poem “shows appreciating the nonhuman as
having little to do with protecting it; the text reveals how focus on far
away spaces at the expense of those nearby can even enable the destruc-
tion of the natural world” (290). This much is accurate, but Thornber
relates the ignorance of the tourists about the mess beneath the calm of
the lake to her larger thesis about what she calls “eco-ambiguity, the
complex, contradictory interactions between people and environments
with a significant nonhuman presence” (1). As I discussed in Chapter
1, this is a term that is at best deeply problematical. Even so, Thornber
claims that this phenomenon “appears more prevalent in literature from
East Asia than other textual corpuses” (3).
Choi’s poem, however, reveals something quite different: the dynamic
of trash burial and hiding that it exposes and brings to the surface, the
agency of waste matter that it reveals, and the popular complacency it
critiques do not seem to revel in ambiguity. It is a relatively short but
dense poem:

“Above the Water, Under the Water”

Seungho Choi
While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake
divers descend to the bottom of the lake
to recover a corpse,
and at the bottom a colossal tomb of garbage
with a fat belly that’s growing silently, steadily, bigger,
inside the muddy water filled with silt
in which are kneaded discarded fetuses and larvae
and some cats and dogs,
the belly of the colossal tomb of garbage that’s getting fatter
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 145
because it ate a shoe, broken plastic containers, pieces of vinyl, etc.,
a tomb that with time swells to a corpse-like body,
they see, small, melancholy pond snails, their intestines rotting,
poisoned by poison in the wastewater,
evidence of civilizations born on the waterfront
festering together with all kinds of untreated excrement
coming out the rear hole.
While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake
headed toward a recreation park
drunk on the view of the hotel and mountains surrounding
the lake.
(Choi 22–23, my translation)

물 위에 물 아래
최 승 호

관광객들이 잔잔한 호수를 건너갈 때

水夫는 시체를 건지러
호수 밑바닥으로 내려가
호수 밑바닥에 소리 없이 점점 불어나는
배때기가 뚱뚱해진 쓰레기들의 엄청난 무덤을,
버려진 태아와 애벌레와
더러는 고양이도 개도 반죽된
개흙투성이 흙탕물 속에
신발짝, 깨진 플라스틱통, 비닐 조각 따위를 먹고 배때기가
뚱뚱해진 쓰레기들의 엄청난 무덤을,
갈수록 시체처럼 몸집이 불어나는 무덤을
본다 폐수의 毒에 중독된 채
창자가 곪아가는 우울한 쇠우렁이를
물가에 발생했던 文明이
처리되지 않은 뒷구멍의 온갖 배설물과 함께
곪아가는 증거를
호수를 둘러싼 호텔과 산들의 경관에
취하면서 유원지를 향해
관광객들이 잔잔한 호수를 건너갈 때
(Choi 22–23)

The contempt and fear for waste is unambiguous, as is the ethics of

waste disposal that the poem describes. There is nothing ambiguous
about the disregard for nature, the indifference about its integrity
and rights, and the outright ecophobic contempt for its autonomy and
agency (each carefully controlled in the recreation park) that dumping
and pollution implies. It is not an ecoambiguous ethics that we observe
146 The Ecophobic Unconscious
but rather what is more properly understood as a lack of ethics due to
ecophobia.
Long before Thornber’s ecoambiguity hypothesis, Korean literature
professor Chanje Wu, in his Introduction to a translation of the poem,
comments on the proximity of waste that Seungho Choi describes: al-
though the bottom of the lake seems “thrown away” enough, there is
no “away”: “the world is not much different,” Wu explains, “from the
terrible industrial complex,” and “human civilization is festering in its
own poisoned waste-waters and drowning in its own cesspool” (xiii).
Proximal relations define the intensity of our ecophobic responses to
waste: “it is as if the real dread we feel about our own waste is not its
undesirable and ignoble presence, but the creeping fear that its unwanted
proximity to us somehow threatens to erase or disturb our very sense
of ourselves as discrete bodies” (Thill 29). Being close, waste threatens
our sense of integrity; being away, it allows us to make ourselves in our
own image, uncorrupted by that matter in which we have lost interest
or need. We continue to throw things away in the confident ecophobic
fantasy that such actions are even possible, that there is an invisible space
of nature that we don’t have to consider, without intrinsic value or rights,
but, by now, we should know better. As Véronique Bragard observes, we
“harbor fallacious fantasies that [waste] ceases to act on us once it has
been swept out of sight” (“Introduction” 460). Timothy Morton vividly
explains that there is no “away”: “we know better: instead of the myth-
ical land Away, we know the waste goes” somewhere (Hyperobjects 31).
Choi’s poem takes us there.
Written in the early years of South Korea’s rapid industrialization, the
poem is an early call to arms to resist not simply the mounting garbage
problem but to see waste itself as a part of society, a part with powerful
agency and material effects. This is a global issue, confined neither to
Choi’s Korea or Ammons’s United States. It seems wise, therefore, per-
haps to expand Patricia Yaeger’s famous comments in her “Editors Col-
umn” in PMLA about how “Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries dwell among sewers and local dumps: the machine graveyards
and toxic landfills that plump the heartland” (327). This plumping of the
heartland with waste, like the plumping of colossal tomb at the bottom
of Choi’s lake, the tomb whose fat belly grows steadily bigger, bespeaks
a shift in thinking, evident in both Choi and Ammons: in the works of
both, we see the sublimity of which Yaeger and Anderson speak.14
For Ammons, “garbage has to be the poem of our time because/ gar-
bage is spiritual, believable enough/ to get our attention, getting in the
way, piling/ up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and/ creamy white”
(8). There is no mystery here, no dead thing at the bottom that divers
are seeking to exhume from the filthy depths: no indeed. For Ammons,
garbage is a sign of hope, of re-making, of the possibilities of language,
recombination, and new life. Ammons stresses again and again the im-
portance of words:
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 147
a waste of words, a flattened-down, smoothed
over mesa of Styrofoam verbiage; since words were
introduced here things have gone poorly for the
planet: it’s been between words and rivers,
surface-mining words and hilltops, cuneiform
records in priestly piles; between clay
tablets and irrigated fields: papyrus in
sheets; vellum in Alexandria; hundreds of
temples to type and, now, networks of words
intricate as the realities they represent.
(74)

Words, like garbage, are human products, not to be underestimated.

Learned poets have said that Garbage: A Poem is not about garbage but
that it is about writing poetry. But this is clearly a view that trivializes
both the redemption of garbage that this long poem attempts and the
meaning of that redemption within the history out of which the poem
grows. This indeed is a poem about garbage and about the importance
of redeeming it, reconceptualizing it, of seeing it on the same level that
we see one of the most prized accomplishments of human civilization:
language itself.
Certainly, if one thing has come out of the enormous and growing
body of waste scholarship, it is that waste is both productive and dan-
gerous, spent but agential, rejected but inescapable and, most danger-
ously, all-permeable in our worldings. The intensity of disruptions of
order potential in waste is immense. Our very identities rest on what we
exclude as “not us,” and, as Barbara Creed has explained, “the body
protects itself from bodily waste such as shit, blood, urine and pus by
ejecting these things from the body just as it expels food that, for what-
ever reason, the subject finds loathsome” (Creed 9). Civilization itself
is created and preserved through the fantasy that we can keep waste
at a distance, dump it in a natural environment that doesn’t touch us,
doesn’t intrude on our organizations and codifications and divisions,
doesn’t trump our agency, doesn’t trouble our fantasy that we alone
have agential dominion. Disrupting our agency means destabilizing our
capacities to organize and define our very existence. Codifications and
divisions define urbanization and development, and waste is central to
these codifications.
For Yaeger, the artistic codifications of garbage are important and
point toward a new ecology: rubbish ecology. Yaeger asks, “If ecology
has been defined as the study of organisms and their environments and
has evolved to mean environmental preservation or conservation, then
rubbish ecology can be defined as the act of saving and savoring debris”
(329). She goes on to explain that
148 The Ecophobic Unconscious
While rubbish ecology and the aestheticization of trash may seem
counterintuitive (and at times unethical in a world where brown-
fields and colossal dumps swallow the poor), artists and architects
have embraced the globe’s junkyards as their own, often healing
them in the process.
(335)

Indeed, garbage may be sublime, then, but this raises another question:
doesn’t the sublime have implications that push in a direction quite op-
posite to activism, preservation, and conservation?
Mark Feldman’s opinion is that “for a rubbish ecology to be effective,
in terms of changing attitudes and behaviors, it must avoid the aesthetics
of sublimity. The sublime is an aesthetic of vastness and incomprehensi-
bility that fosters feelings of helplessness” (See Feldman, Works Cited).
For a number of 18th century philosophers, certainly the sublime evokes
more than simply pleasure. For Edmund Burke, the sublime is a source
of pain, deprivation, darkness, and solitude. For Kant, the sublime is
inextricable from perceptions of risk, peril, and discomfort. Yet these
in themselves do not necessarily foster feelings of helplessness. Indeed,
evidence seems to run the other way on this matter; humanity has been
most productive when faced with vastness and incomprehensibility. Be-
ing frightened is not the same as being paralyzed. And of course, the sub-
lime engages with ecophobia (easily the topic of another book in itself),
but it also relates importantly with issues about class and race. Anderson
speaks of how “to experience the sublime or to contemplate spiritual
mysteries in a garbage dump is to downplay one’s knowledge of the day-
to-day problems of waste management and environmental degradation”
(51). This distance from the day-to-day, this freedom from the mundane
and leisure from the urgent is a class and race thing.
Tightly entwined with what and where waste is are questions about
environmental justice. While mainstream media is fascinated with the
apocalyptic environmental aspects of waste, there is a relative dearth of
attention to questions about environmental justice in mainstream me-
dia (news, filmic, documentary, and so on) about garbage. Anderson
believes that literature itself, in fact, is often not concerned with such
issues:

The environmental justice movement has drawn attention to the so-

cial dimensions of environmental problems, but most garbage po-
ems say little about the unavoidable repugnance of garbage in or
near one’s home. We should remember that a certain socio-economic
privilege is inherent in thinking about garbage in aesthetic and spir-
itual terms, and poems of sublime garbage form a counterpoint to
the way garbage is experienced, for example, by the urban poor.
(52)
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 149
Yet both Ammons and Choi are concerned in their poems with the disen-
franchised, the poor, the oppressed—the victims and recipients of waste.
Ammons’s poetic organization of “Garbage” begins with a dedication
“to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers, wordsmiths—the transfigur-
ers, restorers” that is truly radical. Not only is he formally recognizing
the agency of nonhuman organisms, but he is suggesting an entirely dif-
ferent ethical interpretation on how we are to view the world. Ammons
is explicit in his message that we should not underestimate the power
and agency of garbage. Wherever it is, it continues to express itself. It
continues to haunt us. John Scanlan makes a similar point in his popular
On Garbage:

This is the fate of all things. Even burning the stuff doesn’t make it
go away—it just dissolves it into an atmosphere that sends it back
down with the rain. In fact, there is nowhere for our unwanted mat-
ter to go unless we export it to the heavens, but even then the debris
from space travel falls back to earth eventually (thousands of pieces
of it every year).
(166)

Junk returns. The return of plastic comes to mind. It is all over our oceans,
and these oceans feed us—and they feed us what we have fed them. Stacy
Alaimo explains that “the state of the oceans is dire” (“­Oceanic” 186)
and that a large part of this is the fact that plastic just doesn’t go away.
It continues to circulate. It circulates in the sea. It circulates through the
food system. We have plastic in our brains. It circulates as matter and as
narrative, and, though we like to think that recognizing agency and nar-
rative in matter is a very new materialist thing to do, Ammons was doing
it much sooner. His poetry on garbage raises the issue clearly:

tissues and holograms of energy circulate in

us and seek and find representations of themselves
outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling
and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these wet cells,
right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of
the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except
as spirit.
(21)
150 The Ecophobic Unconscious
We see here clearly the idea of the transcorporeality of matter.15 One of
the implications seems obvious, and it is a point that we’ve already seen:
there is no away. Material continues to move and act among, across, and
through bodies. Throwing stuff away means simply throwing it at other
parts of the system, differentially empowered parts.
Choi, too, very forcefully reveals sharp power differentials within this
system. The “tourists crossing the tranquil lake” (Choi 22, my transla-
tion) are entirely unaware of what is beneath them as they move across
the lake, supported, as they are, by the deceptively pretty water and
by the privilege of affluence and position that allows them to become
“intoxicated by the view of the hotels and mountains surrounding the
lake” (23, my translation). “While” they are crossing the lake, the poem
explains, “divers” are doing their job, and it is a dirty job—the recovery
of a corpse. South Korea is a heavily stratified society: the divers and the
tourists represent radically different classes.16
In North America (Canada and the United States), class stratification
seems but, in fact, is not much different. In South Korea, class stratifica-
tions exist on the surface and are clearly delineated in society; in North
America, it is perhaps less so—but it is still stratified.17 Brian Thill has
discussed “the class snobbery that has always been associated with those
who traffic in garbage” (41), showing that such a vocation clearly unveils
the fantasy of “away” for what it is, that trafficking in garbage is “the
job that places us most squarely back in the filth we would prefer to dis-
avow” (44). John Scanlan, too, seems to assume that the “we” who read
books are not the people who deal with garbage: “the development of
civilization removes us from encounters with the abject. Instead, we [em-
phasis added] leave garbage to be dealt with by others” (166).18 When
Choi raises the topic of class difference in relation to “a colossal tomb
of garbage […] that’s growing silently, steadily, bigger,” he importantly
links garbage with environmental justice.
Garbage is itself a thing of fear and loathing, is a marker of difference,
a tool for creating and maintaining inequality and dissimilarity—a pur-
pose to which people have used “Nature” itself (hence, unsavory com-
parisons of people to animals and so on). Both garbage and nature are,
in this way of thinking, things to be walled off, separated, kept “away”
from (and thereby defining) civilization. It is in their vast capacities to
disrupt what we define as order that garbage and nature are a threat.
Our ecophobic reaction to garbage is intimately cross-stitched with the
increasing maladaptative theorization of garbage as a sublime object of
our own creation, rather like Frankenstein.
The garbage that Ammons and Choi describe are clearly different,
within radically different historical contexts. Industrialization happened
very differently in Europe than in East Asia—much more wastefully
in the former than the latter. The “industrial revolution” in East Asia
was much later and much more efficient than in the West: “east Asia
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 151
successfully responded to natural resource constraints,” and while the
West “developed capital-intensive and resource-intensive technology
[…], the east Asian experience […] developed labour-intensive and
­resource-saving technology” (Sugihara 3856). While I certainly do not
want to diminish or ignore the significance of contextual differences, it
is necessary to understand that there are very substantial similarities in
how each poem writes human relationships with garbage.
In both Ammons and Choi, garbage is an object readers consume as
they tour through the scenes. Both poems produce the reader within a ver-
sion of what Brian Thill calls “toxic tourism” (73).19 Each poem engages
with this phenomenon, acting as a kind of toxic tour guide, with the read-
ers themselves becoming toxic tourists. The effect is a reiteration of gar-
bage as an object for viewing, consumption, and a kind of pleasure. With
a privileged class looking at garbage that it doesn’t have to live with, we
witness a version of the environmental racism displayed in both poems.
The ecophobia hypothesis seeks understandings of the confluent ways
in which anxieties, indifference, and irrational fears of difference play
out along a spectrum of otherness that in its broad sweep includes race,
class, environment, gender, sexuality—indeed, any and every category
of abjection. The hypothesis assumes that the ethics of exclusion perme-
ates and interpenetrates any and all categories of exclusion. Pivotal in
the matter of waste is environmental racism.
Environmental racism is both a national and global issue. Within the
United States, where the issue has perhaps received the most sustained
attention, poor and minority communities suffer inordinate exposure to
toxic practices and substances; 20 globally, it manifests in, as Rob Nixon
describes the matter, the “offloading [of] rich-nation toxins onto the
world’s poorest” (2). Environmental racism is front-and-center in ­Nixon’s
landmark Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon
begins with the truly remarkable confidential memo on the subject from
a confidential World Bank memo by Lawrence Summers:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste

in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up
to that…. I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly
under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low
compared to Los Angeles…. Just between you and me, shouldn’t the
World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries
to the Least Developed Countries?
(Summers, as cited by Nixon 1)

It is a shocking comment by the former Chief Economist of The World

Bank (an agency whose purported mission is to eradicate poverty) that
evidences both ecophobia and racism. Waste is a central player in both
ecophobia and racism.
152 The Ecophobic Unconscious
It is tempting to speak in universals about waste. Waste is waste, after
all, so why complicate it, one might ask. But we’ve all heard the comment
that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and it is important
to recognize the cultural valence of waste. In South Korea, for instance,
food waste21 has a very different history than in, say, the United States.
I’ve lived in Korea for more than twenty years and am amazed every
time I go back to Canada (my country of birth) at how profoundly back-
ward things are in “America.” With recycling at a level of sophistication
that makes North American recycling look woefully backward, Korea is,
nevertheless, in the middle of radically changing attitudes toward food
waste. If Chanje Wu is correct in suggesting (as I think he is) that Korea
was “breathless [in its] effort to catch up with the industrialized world”
(xi), my guess is that this does not apply to the matter of recycling—an
area in which, as I’ve said, South Korea is far, far ahead of America.
The rapid economic development of Korea—what has been called “The
Miracle on the Han” (Han Gang oui Geechock 한강의 기적)—has pro-
duced a kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the past, an indulgence in spending
and in the freedom to waste things—the kind of conspicuous consumption
and conspicuous wastage that perhaps characterizes all newly rich econ-
omies. A great many reports in the first decade of the 21st century con-
demn the wastage in restaurants—and even “the re-use of left-over food
in [Korean] restaurants” (http://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/06/­korean-
restaurants-still-recycle-left-overs/), and reports continue to appear.
At a conference in June 2016 in Amsterdam, Won-Chung Kim men-
tioned the ideal in Korea: “Food, once placed on the table in public
restaurants, is strictly forbidden by law for reuse, for hygienic reasons.
As such, left over side dishes are promptly discarded after each meal, and
contribute to a tremendous amount of food waste.” It is an ideal that the
Korean House of Representatives Lee Nak-won shares: “the re-use of
left-over food in restaurants is a serious issue,” he explains,

as it violates the trust of the consumers who go to them… those who

operate restaurants which handle food for our citizens must under-
stand their special responsibility and prepare a good environment
in their businesses… authorities must exercise proper oversight and
completely root out this problem.
(Scwartzman)

The ideal is one thing; the reality, however, is a bit different. There are a
great many websites that attest to the continuing problem of the re-use
of “panchan” (side-dishes)—re-use, not recycling. What these reports
rarely examine, however, is that food waste in South Korea, once an
indicator of freedom from the austerity of colonial and wartime pasts, is
bound up with matters of history, national identity, power, pride, resis-
tance, and many other things.
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 153
Obviously, the United States and South Korea have followed very dif-
ferent paths of development, and for a country so small and with such
a large population, problems can’t hide for long: throwing things away
means that “away” is probably closer than it would be in the United
States or Canada. The Seoul Metropolitan Area alone has 25.64 million
people (compared with the twenty million of the New York metro re-
gion), but it is twice as dense as New York. As Rob Nixon has famously
observed, there are changes that are too slow for us to perceive, things
that “occur […] gradually and out of sight, a violence of decayed de-
struction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence
that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). But if waste is one of
the forms of “slow violence” in the West, then it is certainly not quite so
in the Korea, away never being that far away on the Korean peninsula.
While it may be true, as the modern proverb has it, that “birds don’t
shit in their own nests” (a variant being the imperative “don’t shit
where you eat”), it is also true that birds often don’t shit very far from
where they nest. The guano of nesting cormorants leave the cliffs of
Vancouver’s Stanley Park entirely obscured, covered with a thick layer
that turns the cliff’s black face white. Birds shit everywhere. “Rome is
­Getting Buried in the Droppings of a Million Starlings,” runs a headline
in January 2016 (see O’Sullivan). Seoul, like countless other big cities,
tries to limit pigeon roosting with spikes and netting, their droppings
long recognized as a health and aesthetic issue. Birds produce waste.
People produce waste. All living things produce waste. Producing waste
is natural, is at the very core of life itself. What makes waste a core el-
ement of the ecophobia hypothesis is in how we conceptualize it, how
these ways of thinking produce material effects, and how these material
effects reinforce the very ways of thinking that produced them in the
first place. Unlike the other eight or nine million species on the planet
(perhaps with the exception of some cetacean species), humans genu-
inely fear agency in nonhuman sources, including the agency of garbage.
We, like any other species, like to keep our garbage away from our nests,
but unfortunately, in the Anthropocene, there really is no “away,” and
even as thinking about garbage is changing, it is not clear that the direc-
tion entirely avoids the Anthropocene’s problematic ethics. Einstein is
reputed to have said that “Problems cannot be solved by the same level
of thinking that created them.”22 To understand our ethical relation-
ships with the natural world, it is necessary also to understand how our
relationship with garbage is, essentially, maladaptive. Ecophobia must
be understood with attention to waste and to how we produce it—both
conceptually and materially.
In conceptually fusing waste and environment on an ontological level,
we parade fear and hatred of the agencies of nature and waste. These
agencies are isomorphically similar, and they are inextricable from each
other. I have shown also that the trend to elevate waste to the level of
154 The Ecophobic Unconscious
sublime object (at once the product of human industriousness and the
matter of the more-than-human world) discloses the lines of privilege
and prejudice along which we produce waste. It is imperative, therefore,
to see waste, as I have begun to show, both in terms of environmental
justice and environmental racism—both of which articulate concerns
about food production and food waste. Understanding how ecophobia
prompts environmental injustice (and environmental racism) produces a
more comprehensive and wider understanding of the mutually reinforc-
ing ethics that bring about oppression and suffering—social and envi-
ronmental. Understanding this is what the ecophobia hypothesis seeks.
Instances of ecophobia occur on different positions of the spectrum,
in both bold and ambiguous ways, enabling the hypothesis to be anal-
ysed through multiple means by transdisciplinary scholars in the social
sciences, humanities, natural sciences, performing arts, and film. Under-
standing ecophobia is about engendering responsibility. Acknowledging
the ecophobic condition is about moving toward E.O. Wilson’s origi-
nal sentiments and spirit of the biophilia hypothesis and away from the
dark, antagonistic, and exploitative responses and reflexive fears that
have increasingly come to characterize human interactions with the en-
vironment. The ecophobia hypothesis is about prompting action—from
concept to embodiment and practice—in everyday life. This action can
grow out of inquiries into genetic materialism and into our histories as
a species; it can grow out of analyses about mass media manipulations
of our deepest anxieties; it can grow out of our understandings that
meat-eating today is unsustainable and, at core, ecophobic; and it can
grow out of questioning how we conceptualize, understand, and rep-
resent our own psychology and how the ecophobic unconscious helps
us see and organize matter. Ecophobia is a spectrum condition at the
opposite end of the continuum from biophilia, and Sophie Christman
is astute to invoke Beethoven in regard to our grapplings with the size
and complexity of this continuum (see “Foreword” x–xi, above). The
ecophobia hypothesis conducts symphonies of scale and dependence, of
enmeshments and resistance, of biophilia and maladaptive behaviors,
and these are worth an ear—indeed, demand riveted attention.

Notes
1 The song reached number 2 in Canada (but only 76 in the United States).
2 At the outset, it seems necessary to be clear about the terms I am using here,
since trash, waste, garbage, refuse, and rubbish are clearly different words
with different meanings. In Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, ­William
Rathje and Cullen Murphy draw distinctions between trash, garbage, re-
fuse, and rubbish:
Trash refers specifically to discards that are at least theoretically dry—
newspapers, boxes, cans and so on. Garbage technically refer to ‘wet’
discards—food remains, yard waste, and offal. Refuse is a more inclusive
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 155
term for both the wet discards and the dry. Rubbish is even more inclu-
sive: It refers to all refuse plus construction and demolition debris.
(Rathje and Murphy 9)
While I certainly do not want to downplay or diminish the significance of dis-
ciplinary and definitional subtleties, for the purposes of my investigations here,
the terms are serviceable synonymically, and I often use them interchangeably.
3 I mean “tragic” here in the sense of the fall of a hero from a high place to a
low one as a result of some internal flaw. When we fall, it will be because of
our insatiable appetites.
4 As Doctor of Psychology John Grohol explains of the flight or fight response,
The evolutionary purpose of this response is obvious. In prehistoric
times, a person might have found themselves in a situation where a quick
choice has to be made. If the person had spent a lot of time thinking
about it, they may have become dinner for a lion or other animal. The
body’s fight or flight response, it’s theorized, took thinking out of the
equation so we could react more quickly—and stay alive.
As our bodies and minds have adapted and evolved to the changing times, the
threats have become less obvious—and sometimes they aren’t even real. Today,
our body can react to even perceived or imagined threats. (see Grohol https://
psychcentral.com/blog/whats-the-purpose-of-the-fight-or-flight-response/)
  Grohol goes on to note that “virtually any phobia can trigger the fight or
flight response.” An imagined threat from the agency of nature (including
notions behind compulsive use of hand sanitizers) is an example of one of
these phobias (ecophobia) about which Grohol speaks.
5 Relatively speaking, not much has been written on waste in literature, cer-
tainly little from a theoretical perspective. The most direct treatment of the
subject is Susan Signe Morrison’s book. Expansive in scope and detailed in
its support, this book looks squarely at literary representations of waste in
the Western (primarily English) canon with the explicit intention of reveal-
ing that “literature reflects the ways in which humans commonly perceive
waste” (3), how waste has long been marked as “other,” and what some of
the theoretical implications of this othering are in terms of environmental
ethics.
6 According to a report published by the World Economic Forum, “the ocean
[sic] is expect to contain 1 tonne of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025,
and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight)” (see “The New Plastics
Economy,” www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.
pdf). Whether true or not (questions about the research linger—see “Will
Plastic Really Outweigh Fish,” www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/will-
plastic-really-outweigh-fish-ocean-2050), the amount of plastic in the oceans
is staggering. Fish and birds eat it accidentally, and nano-plastics make their
way into our own cells.
7 Recycling of e-waste has become a thriving business, but it is dirty and
dangerous, as reported by CNN: “Much of the toxic pollution comes from
burning circuit boards, plastic and copper wires, or washing them with hy-
drochloric acid to recover valuable metals like copper and steel. In doing
so, workshops contaminate workers and the environment with toxic heavy
metals like lead, beryllium and cadmium, while also releasing hydrocarbon
ashes into the air, water and soil” (Watson, www.cnn.com/2013/05/30/
world/asia/china-electronic-waste-e-waste/index.html).
8 It is common knowledge by now that one third of all food produced for hu-
man consumption in the world gets wasted.
156 The Ecophobic Unconscious
9 It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the science and
the science fiction—for instance, the recent notion that scientists could use
giant machines to re-freeze the Arctic (see Zdanowicz) is real news, not a
movie plot. So too is the proposal to make vast deliveries of particles into
the upper stratosphere to reflect heat back into space and to thereby cool the
Earth (see Temple).
10 For a comprehensive look at the changing history of disposability in the United
States, see Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.
11 American poet A.R. Ammons coins the term “museums of our desecrations”
(85) in his long poem on garbage. It is a term that could aptly describe the
setting of Wall-E.
12 Decay and rot are important to the ecophobia hypothesis because they are
agency and excess overgrown and unpredictable. Literary treatments of rot
and decay clearly reveal the ecophobic unconscious. As I explain in Ecocrit-
icism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia, for instance,
The metaphors Hamlet uses are very telling. Whenever he talks about
difference, his thoughts eventually devolve upon some form of rot. For
instance, evil resides in excess, and people are bad only “By their o’er-
growth of some complexion, / […] / Or by some habit, that too much
o’erleavens/ The form of plausive manners…these men / […] / Shall in the
general censure take corruption/ From that particular fault.” (1.4.27–36).
The problem is not “one defect” or “particular fault,” since nobody is
perfect; the problem is the “o’ergrowth” of such a “complexion.” Excess
(and eventually rot), then, is the problem, and it is defined with natural-
istic imagery.
(86)
Rot is slowly receiving more and more ecocritical attention. In a fascinat-
ing exploration of “the myth if the California dream” (Weidner 237),
Ned Weidner reveals convincingly “how ecophobic olfactory imagina-
tions separate people across racial lines” (245). Weidner explains that
“paradise is generated by an ecophobic desire to safeguard people from
the dangers of nature, including its interpenetrating cycle of life and
death.” (251).
13 As I have explained in Ecocriticism and Shakespeare,
Common dictionary meanings have weeds as things that have no prac-
tical value to people (i.e., they do not produce edible materials or at-
tractive adornments or otherwise commodifiable products). Moreover,
weeds often express a parasitical relationship to other plants or their
food, making the weed’ stronger and killing the other plants or making
them weaker.
(36–37)
It is a worthless commodity with dangerous agency, an aberration or ex-
cess that inspires ecophobic violence—plucking, killing, poisoning. Weeds,
moreover, point to other ecophobic practices, such as the commodification
of nature (which weeds clearly threaten). Any kind of commodification of
nature is inherently ecophobic, in the same way that any commodification of
women is misogynistic and of sexual minorities, homophobic.
14 There is a danger here in normalizing waste, trivializing the enormity of
global garbage problems, and containing the potency and unpredictability
of junk agency.
15 Stacy Alaimo describes “transcorporeality” as follows:
 The Ecophobic Unconscious 157
Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the hu-
man is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines
the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately insepara-
ble from “the environment.” It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere
background, as Val Plumwood would put it, for the exploits of the hu-
man since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin– perhaps even
closer. Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that
the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as
a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their
own needs, claims, and actions. By emphasizing the movement across
bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections
between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indi-
cates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up
a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted
actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems,
chemical agents, and other actors.
(Bodily 2)
16 In Korea, the colloquial idiom (known among everyone) about what are
known in Konglish (Korean English) as “3D jobs” (dirty, dangerous, and
difficult) applies well to the divers of the poem. Tourists and 3D workers
don’t mix, the former often sustained by the labors of the latter. Tourism
functions in part as an effect of the ecophobic unconscious. Tourism and the
ecophobic unconscious normalize fantasies of static, postcard landscapes,
while conceptually burying the presences of natural agency and reifying rad-
ically unequal class structures. The ecophobic unconscious and class oppres-
sion intersect in this poem.
17 Having lived in Canada for three decades and South Korea for two, I assume
that I can see accurately on this matter. My own biological brother drives
a garbage truck. We don’t get on. We try, to be sure, but we have nothing
to talk about except our past; like most male siblings, we spent most of our
childhoods fighting with each other, so our talks about the good ole days
rarely end well. It is as easy to imagine my brother and I chatting affably in
a coffee shop as it is to imagine Choi’s tourists and divers (waste retrievers of
a sort) doing so.
18 Scanlan goes on to note the environmental racism and classism that attends
“our” notions about garbage:
The social significance of refuse collectors, like garbage itself, largely
eludes our attention. Like the wastes and mess they look after they are
degraded because, according to Michael Walzer, their relationship to
dirt, waste and garbage “makes them the object of disdain and avoid-
ance”; we “impose… patterns of behaviour, routines of distancing, that
place them in a kind of pale: deferential movements, peremptory com-
mands, refusals of recognition.
(Walzer 176; Scanlan 176)
19 Thill explains that “‘toxic tourism’ […is] an ostensibly progressive notion
that brings people into devastated communities on ‘toxic tours’ […], tours
of toxic sites as a kind of negative sightseeing, a method for cultivating envi-
ronmental advocacy” (73). The problem with this idea, as Thill explains, is
that “we are meant to survey the damage wrought by the very unromantic
forms of waste that actually destroy lives on a daily basis through the slow
violence of unemployment, poverty, overpolicing, and gentrification” (73).
158 The Ecophobic Unconscious
Not coincidently, Thill is also talking about “ghetto” tourism as an analo-
gous phenomenon. They are, he explains, “two sides of the same coin” (73).
Indeed, waste is central to environmental justice.
20 Robert Bullard explains that “Industrial toxins, polluted air and drinking
water, and the siting of municipal landfills, lead smelters, incinerators, and
hazardous waste facilities have had a disproportionate impact upon people
of color, working class communities, and the poor” (Bullard 319). The Flint
Water Crisis and Love Canal are two of the more prominent American ex-
amples of environmental racism.
21 Much of the research into waste has been centered on food waste. While
it has not been the primary object here to discuss food waste, the topic is
immensely important, and there are indeed many monographs on the topic.
Tristram Stuart’s Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (2009) is
prominent among these. It discusses the issue in terms of overproduction
and storage issues—namely, that too much food is produced in fully de-
veloped countries and simply cannot be adequately stored or transported.
Among developing countries such as Pakistan, Stuart maintains that har-
vesting and cultivation are the big problems and that simply growing more
food isn’t the answer (especially if it can’t be harvested). What is particularly
valuable in this book is how it draws together the topics of food, waste, and
the racial and cultural implications of corporate global capitalism, how the
devastated local industries in places such as India are the direct result of
policies of waste and racism, comments as germane today as the day Stuart
wrote them nearly a decade ago. Jonathan Bloom’s American Wasteland:
How ­A merica Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can
Do About It) is another prominent set of analyses. It describes poignantly
how since the Depression, “we have trained ourselves to regard food as a
symbol of ­A merican plenty that should be available at all seasons and times,
and in dizzying quantities” (Publishers Weekly review, backflap)—a situa-
tion not unlike post-War Korea.
22 There is debate about what Einstein said exactly—or even, whether he, in
fact, did say anything—on this topic (see also the blog at http://icarus-falling.
blogspot.kr/2009/06/einstein-enigma.html). Whatever the source or exact
original, the idea here is important. In more contemporary vernacular, we
need to think outside of the box.
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Index
“Above the Water, Under the
Water” (Choi) 15, 144–146, 149,
156n16, 156n17
Abram, David 25, 80–81, 90n5
Ackerman, Diane 56–58, 73n4
activism 49, 74n9; ecomedia and 53,
55; hollow ecology of 78; narrative
science and 54–55; see also
ecomedia, effecting change through
Adams, Carol J. 103–104
adaptive behaviors 155n4; ecophobia/
biophilia spectrum and 24, 25, 31;
obsolescence of 24, 25, 34n14; see
also maladaptive behaviors
adaptive force 21
Admirable and Memorable Histories
Containing the Wonders of Our
Time (Goulart) 126
adventure-nature genre 66
Aftermath: Population Zero
(television series) 66
Agamben, Giorgio 39
agency 27–32, 33n4, 84; genetic
materialism and 28, 31; intra-actions
and 27, 34n17; through agribusiness
112–113; tragedy and 45, 46
agency, loss of 9–10, 18n19, 21–22;
climate change and 31–32;
connections between patriarchy
and 95; fear of 15, 40, 48; by mad
people 125, 134n11; terrorism and
31–32; tragedy and 10
agency, nonhuman 25, 33n3, 50, 79,
133n6, 148; material feminism
and material ecocriticism on
22, 41, 90n5; of nature 16, 124,
134n11; see also nonhuman
animals
agency, of garbage 136–153; “Above
the Water, Under the Water,” 15,
144–146, 149, 156n16, 156n17;
Garbage: A Poem 15, 143, 146–147,
149–150; see also waste
agential images 13, 36, 51n1
agential realism 22
agentic capacity 79
agentic matter 79
Age of Stupid, The (film) 54, 55
agriculture 84; agribusiness 95,
96, 107–110, 112–113; diversity
destruction 95, 111; Monsanto 107,
110, 112–113; Pollan and 96–98,
110, 115, 116n10; see also food;
meat production
Ahn, T.K. 87
air travel 52, 62–63
Alaimo, Stacy xi, 41, 139, 149, 156n15
Aldrin, Buzz 65
ALECC (the Association for
Literature, Environment, and
Culture in Canada) 4
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 39
Allderidge, Patricia 126
All Over Creation (Ozeki) 96, 107,
108–109
American exceptionalism 46
American isolationism 38
American Psychological Association
1, 12
American Wasteland: How America
Throws Away Nearly Half of Its
Food (and What We Can Do About
It) (Bloom) 157n21
Ammons, A.R. 15, 143, 146–147,
149–150, 151, 156n11
amygdala xiv
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,
The (Fromm) 8
Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton)
121, 129
Anderson, Christopher Todd 15,
142–143, 146, 148
184 Index
Anderson, Kip 116n9, 116n12
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of
Food Life (Kingsolver) 99, 114
animal agriculture see meat
production; nonhuman animals
animal experimentation 101
Animal Manifesto, The: Six Reasons
for Expanding Our Compassion
Footprint (Bekoff) 102–103, 116n9,
118n23
Animal Planet/Discovery Channel 66
animal rights 79–81, 100–101; see
also meat production; nonhuman
animals; vegetarian- and veganism
animals see nonhuman animals
Anthropocene x–xi, 11; boring
ourselves 53, 73n4; capitalism
and 86; definition 83–84, 90n2;
ecomedia and 14, 52, 53, 57;
ecophobia reproduced through
concept of 57, 78, 84, 89; meat and
14; paradox of control vs. influence
84–85, 91n10; problems of concept
83–87, 88–89, 91n15; scale and 14,
78–79, 83–86; term used 21, 57,
78, 86, 90n1, 90n4; waste and 136,
137, 153
Anthropocene and the Global
Environmental Crisis: Rethinking
Modernity in a New Epoch
(Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne)
91n10
anthropocentrism 33n7, 37, 47, 84,
90n5, 91n9
Anthropozoic Era 78, 90n2
antipathy see indifference
anti-Semitism 29
anti-smoking movement 67–68,
76n29, 85
anxiety xiii, xiv, 7, 9, 41, 150; agency
and 32, 92, 139; see also fear;
phobias
apocalyptic discourse 38, 141
“Are Jews Smarter?” (Senior) 30
Aristotle 40
Armstrong, Franny 55
Armstrong, Neil 65
artificial intelligence (AI) 91n13
Åsberg, Cecilia 56, 57, 75n18, 75n23,
84; capitalism and 86; scale issues
and 79
Ashkenazi Jews 29–30
Association for the Study of Literature
and Environment (ASLE) 2, 58
atomic bomb test 112
attention spans 56, 74n13, 133n5
Atwood, Margaret 96
autism 95, 115n6
aversion to nature xiv, 9, 39, 47,
52, 72; harm and 23, 37–38;
modern life encourages 57; see also
indifference
avoidance xiii, xiv, 9, 23, 70, 157n18
Babb, Lawrence 128
Bacigalupi, Paolo 96
backlash effect 99, 117n17
Barad, Karen 22, 34n17, 90n5
Barbas-Rhoden, Laura 6
bare life concept 39
Bass, Rick 99
Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 138
Beard, Michael 20, 32, 33n1
beasts, mad people compared to
126, 131, 135n21; see also literary
madness; madness; nonhuman
animals
Beck, Ulrich 48
Before the Law (Wolfe) 134n15
Bekoff, Marc 102–103, 115, 116n9,
118n23
Belsey, Catherine 125, 127
Benjamin, Walter 51n8, 59
Bennett, Jane 43, 90n5
Benthan, Jeremy 118n24
Bernheimer, Richard 129–130
Berzonsky, Carol L. xi, xii
bestiality 131
Bethlem Royal Hospital 123,
126–127
Beyond Ecophobia (Sobel) 10–11
biological basis of behavior see
genetics
biomobility 108
Biophilia (Wilson) 22
biophilia hypothesis x, xii, 2, 47,
82; genetic materialism and 8, 9,
12, 22, 28, 31, 32; introduction
and definition ix–x, 8, 9; “surface
ethics” and 33n5; see also
ecophobia/biophilia spectrum
biophilia hypothesis, problems of
8–9, 12, 24, 28, 58, 70; ecophobia/
biophilia spectrum unrecognized
9–10, 16, 22; Katcher and Wilkins
81–82; as limited explanation for
human behavior 2, 8, 12, 14, 22,
58, 70; nonhuman animal treatment

82, 90n8; Shepard and 81; see also
ecophobia/biophilia spectrum
Biophilia Hypothesis, The (Wilson
and Kellert) 9, 82
biophilia spectrum see ecophobia/
biophilia spectrum
biophobia 17n6
“Biopolitics and the Critique of
Neoliberalism in El corazón del
silencio by Tatiana Lobo” (Barbas-
Rhoden) 6
bioregional eating 97, 99, 117n16
biosemiotics 27, 32
biosphere refashioning 86–87
biotic communities x, 1, 80
Black, Shameem 104, 105–106
Blakley, Johanna 63–64, 77n39
Bloom, Dan 59
Bloom, Jonathan 157n21
Bonneuil, Christophe 11, 91n10
Borradori, Giovanna 39
boundaries: adversarial 36; erased by
natural disasters and acts of terror
48, 49–50; between fact and fiction
72, 104, 106–107; of humanity,
madness as outside of 125, 128;
national 37, 38; natural/artificial
borders 142; scale and 79
Bragard, Véronique 138, 141, 146
Brayton, Dan 46
Brereton, Pat 56, 75n17, 77n38
Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called
the Suffocation of the Mother, A
(Jorden) 127
Brooks, Peter 55
Buell, Lawrence 47
Bullard, Robert 158n20
Burke, Edmund 148
Burton, Robert 121, 129
Bush, George W. 36
Bush Administration 60
Butler, Judith 46, 124
Canada 150, 153
capitalism 75n23, 85; dismemberment
and 104; global food economy
and 79, 92, 93, 95–96, 104, 109,
111; Klein on 64, 70, 76n24, 85,
86; model relies on ecophobia
85–86; scale and 85; as symptom as
opposed to cause of climate change
64, 75n23, 86, 91n15, 111–112;
veganism as threat to 93
“Capitalocene” (term) 86
Index 185
carbon footprint 52, 53
Carroll, Joseph 25, 27
Carruth, Allison 111, 114, 118n28
carrying capacity 21
Carson, Rachel ix
Catching Fire (Collins) 96
Chaudhuri, Una 79–80, 87
children 23, 74n15, 82, 103, 139
China 76n31, 92, 110, 140
Choi, Seungho 15, 144–146, 150, 151,
157n17
Chopra, Shiv 113
Christman, Sophie 58, 70, 91n13, 154
Chronicle of Higher Education, The 99
Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) 94,
115n4
Clapp, Jennifer 94–95
Clark, Timothy 12–13, 18n22, 89
classism 16; see also social class
climate change: GM food and
109–110; scale of effects 31, 78, 79,
83, 84, 88–89; waste and 137
climate change, capitalism and see
capitalism
climate change, ecophobia as
cause ix, xi, 2, 12, 46, 83; Deyo
on 58; ecophobia as obsolete
adapative strategy 24; Gaard and
ecofeminism 57, 64, 73n3; meat
production and 14, 23, 73n8, 78,
91n12, 92–93; media reproduces
ecophobia 36, 53
climate change, human’s responsibility
for xi, 70, 83, 84
climate change, meat production and
14, 23, 73n8, 78, 91n12, 92–93;
vegetarian- and veganism and 98
climate change, media representations
of 32, 59, 60, 65, 66, 96; Christman
and Kaplan on 70; hot water tanks
and 77n34; terror narratives and
35, 43
climate change, reversing 14;
consilience and 88; COP21
agreement 52, 73n2; developing
strategies for 53, 55; ecophobia
as obsolete adapative strategy 24;
feasibility of 20–21; gender and
feminism and 72; legislation for
76n31; technological fixes 156n9
climate change denial 12, 56, 58, 84,
115; similarity to tobacco industry
67–68, 76n29
“Climate Change Fiction” (Cli-Fi) 59
186 Index
climate change narratives 59;
ecophobic ethics and 36; fear and
35; ineffectiveness of xi, 35, 55;
numbness as response to xi, 35,
73n5; terror narratives 35–36, 37,
38, 40–45, 47–50; see also terror
and climate change narratives
climate change scholarship: Berzonsky
and Moser xii; Chakrabarty 91n15;
Christman and Kaplan 70; Deyo 58;
food’s absence from 118n25; Gaard
57, 64, 70, 73n3, 117n22; Klein
66–67, 70, 85, 86; Koneswaran
and Nierenberg 23; MacGregor
72; Malm and Hornberg 88, 90n4;
Marshall 56; McEwan 20; Moser
73n5; obfuscation of 67, 76n29;
Singer and Mason 109–110; Swim
xii; Trexler 88–89
“Climate of Ecocinema, The”
(Christman and Kaplan) 70
CNN 74n8
CO2 emissions 64, 74n8; see also
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
Cochran, Gregory 29–30
Cold War 112
Collins, Suzanne 96
colonialism 113
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures
and Politics of Local Foods
(Nabhan) 98–99, 114
compassion fatigue 14, 55, 67
connectedness 87
consilience 88
consumption 136
continuous partial attention 56,
74n13
control see agency
Conway, Erik 76n29
COP21 agreement 52, 73n2
Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 15
Cornyetz, Nina 106
Corrupt to the Core (Chopra) 113
Cowspiracy (film) 116n9, 116n12
Creating a Climate for Change
(Moser) 73n5
Creed, Barbara 147
critical animal studies 78, 90n3
Critical Animal Studies (McCance)
90n3
Cubitt, Sean 65–66, 68–69
Culpeper, Nicholas 122
culture 20; Ashkenazi Jews and 29;
genetic materialism and 26–27;
see also biophilia hypothesis;
genetic materialism
Culture and Media: Ecocritical
Explorations (Murphy) 60
Curran, Kevin 134n15
Curry, Alice 6
Curtin, Deane 100
Daish (ISIS) 37, 118n29
D’Amato, Paul 28–29
Darwin, Charles xiii, 21, 26–27
Davidson, Tonya 85
Day After Tomorrow, The (film) 57,
60, 61, 73n7
“Death of Nature and the Apotheosis
of Trash, The; or, Rubbish Ecology”
(Yaeger) 138
“‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’:
An Essay on Gothic Nature”
(Hillard) 5
deforestation 92–93
Derrida, Jacques 125–126, 134n12
de Tocqueville, Alexis 38
“Development of the Literary
Werewolf, The: Language,
Subjectivity and Animal/ Human
Boundaries” (Franck) 6
Deyo, Brian 58
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition
(DSM V) 16n1
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition
(DSM IV) 11
Diamond, Jared 13, 85–86
DiCaprio, Leonardo 55, 61
diet see food; meat production;
vegetarian- and veganism
DiLeo, Jeffrey R. 42–43
Dimock, Wai Chee 35, 40, 45, 49
Dionne, Craig 120
dirt 138–139, 143
disability 119, 123, 127; see also
madness
dismemberment 104
disposability, concept of 139; see also
waste
distance 42; see also scale
diversity 21, 109; agribusiness
destroys 95, 111
Diversity of Life, The (Wilson) xii
docudrama genre 55
domestic landscapes 121–122
Don’t Even Think About It (film) 55

Double-crested Cormorant 12
Douglas, Mary 15, 138, 139
Dr. Faustus (Marlowe) 15
Drift (McGoran) 96
drought 37
Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 126
du Laurens, André 131, 135n21
Duvernay, Alvin 54
Eagleton, Terry 10, 40
Eating Animals (Foer) 98,
101–102, 115
Ebert, Roger 53
ecoambiguity 33n7
Ecoambiguity: Environmental
Crises and East Asian Literatures
(Thornber) 33n7, 143–144
ecocriticism xi, 2–7, 17n11, 47;
activism and 43, 104; ecofeminism
and 19n26, 96; food and 96,
99–101, 104, 114; gender and 89;
as interpretive analysis 61–62;
madness and, scholarship deficit
in field of 15, 119, 131; material
ecocriticism ix, 22, 24–28, 32, 41;
tragedy and 44
Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (Estok)
122, 133n6, 156n12, 156n13
Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture:
Biology and the Bildungsroman
(Feder) 25
“Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror”
(Estok) 35
Ecocriticism on the Edge (Clark)
18n22
Ecocriticism Reader 99
ecofeminism 57, 66, 69, 76n30,
77n38; Clark and 18n22, 89;
ecocriticism and 19n26, 96; see
also feminism and feminist theory;
Gaard, Greta
Ecogothic (Smith and Hughes) 5,
17n10
ecogothic studies 5–6, 17n10
“Ecological Martial Law”
(Heinimann) 7
Ecologies of Affect (Davidson, Park,
and Shields) 85
“Ecology and Man—A Viewpoint”
(Shepard) 81
ecomedia 13, 35, 52–73; ecomedia
studies 69, 73n1, 79; ethics and
52, 56, 59–60, 61, 69, 75n17; meat
production and 96–99; narrative
Index 187
science and 55; see also terror and
climate change narratives
EcoMedia (Cubitt) 68, 69
ecomedia, effecting change through:
activism and 53, 55; ecophobia
theory’s exploration as crucial to
58–62, 63–65, 69–72, 73n3, 73n4,
73n5, 75n18; food and 55, 73n8,
77n39, 96–98; hope and 56–58,
72; marketing vs. legislation 67–68,
76n31, 76n32; measuring impact
63–64; personalized narrative and
63; Pollan and 97
ecomedia, indifference and 54–55,
66–67, 72, 142; overexposure and
backlash effect 56, 63; through
confirmational content 55; see also
indifference
ecomedia, marketing and 53, 63,
66–67; hope and 56–57; problems
of 54, 55, 73n7; through narrative
science 54–55
ecomedia, reproduction of ecophobia
through 53, 54–55, 59–61,
72; gender and 52, 54, 55, 60,
61, 70–71, 77n38; Hollywood
capitulation and 60–61, 73n7;
patriarchal structures 55, 74n11,
77n38
Ecomedia: Key Issues (Rust, Monani,
and Cubitt) 69
ecophobia, irrationality of 1, 16n2
Ecophobia, Politics of, Michael Bates
ecophobia, term use and definition
xi–xii, xiii, 1, 133n7; Brayton 46;
Clark 18n22; criticism of 2–7,
22–23; ecogothic studies and
5–6; Estok, ix, 18n20, 18n22;
introduction of 2, 10–11, 18n20;
Lynch (“biophobia”) 17n6;
madness and 124; psychological
7, 10, 16n1; Sobel 10, 11, 18n20;
van Tine (“gaeaphobia”) 11;
Will 10
ecophobia/biophilia spectrum xi–xii, 1,
9–10, 16n4, 154; adaptive behaviors
and 23–24, 25, 31; biophilia as
common to all animals 16n1,
23–24; ecomedia and 59; ecophobia
as unique to humans xv, 16n1, 20,
23–24; genetic materialism and 22,
24, 31, 32, 81–82; nonbiotic nature
and 82
ecophobic personification 54, 74n9
188 Index
ecophobic unconscious 55, 136; see
also waste
ecopsychology field 11
eco-suicide xii
Ecozon@ (journal) 6–7
effecting change: repetition and 80,
103, 118n23; see also ecomedia,
effecting change through
Egan, Gabriel 22–23
Einstein, Albert 153, 158n22
electric cars 76n33
electronic waste (e-waste) 140, 155n7
11th Hour, The (film) 53, 55
Emmerich, Roland 60
empathy 23
energy conservation 77n34
Environmental Crisis in Young Adult
Fiction: A Poetics of Earth (Curry) 6
environmental ethics, madness and
121, 124, 129–130, 131, 132
Environmental Ethics and Film
(Brereton) 75n17
Environmental Imagination, The
(Buell) 47
environmental justice 148, 153
Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) 61, 75n19
environmental racism 151, 153,
157n18, 158n20
epigenesis xii, xiii, 30–31, 33n2,
34n19; see also genetic materialism
erotophobia 17n12
Estok, Simon C. ix, xi–xii; dissertation
18n20; Ecocriticism and Shakespeare
122, 133n6, 156n12, 156n13;
“Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror,”
35; “Narrativizing Science”, 75n23;
Robisch and 2–7; “Spectators to
Future Ruin”, 63; “Theorizing”, 2–7,
12, 17n11, 17n12
ethics 20, 75n17, 77n39, 79;
American-style 110, 111–112, 115;
changing 65, 68, 70; ecomedia and
52, 56, 59–60, 61, 69, 75n17; of
exclusion 37–38, 150; expanding
circle of 41, 71, 80, 82, 89, 125;
genetics and 26, 31; GM food and
109–110, 112–113; hate speech
and 76n32; hollow ecology and 78;
madness and 121, 122–123, 124,
125, 129–130, 131, 132; morality
20, 62–65, 100; nonhuman animals
and 78–80, 89, 90n6; reproduction
of ecophobic 52, 53, 59–60, 145;
“surface ethics,” 33n5; waste
and 137, 139, 145, 153; see also
biophilia hypothesis; ecophobia/
biophilia spectrum
ethics, meat production and 14, 78,
97–98; Adams 103–104; Bekoff
103; as central to patriarchy
and industrialization 92, 93,
94; expanding circle of ethics
80, 89; feminism and 89; Foer
98, 100–101, 102, 117n21; Fromm,
Harold 99–101, 117n21; legislation
and 85, 102; My Year of Meats 104,
106; Nabhan 98–99; Pollan 97–98;
Polyface Farm 97, 98, 115, 116n11,
116n12; Singer 101
ethnocentrism 37
Evolution in Four Dimensions
(Jablonka and Lamb) 30–31
exceptionalism 37, 40, 46
Expression of Emotions in Man and
Animals (Darwin) xiii
extinction 31; Great Oxygenation
Event and 86–87
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Foer) 42
fact and fiction 104, 105, 115
factory farmed meat see meat
production
fast food restaurants 96, 116n7
fear 5, 35, 103, 130, 131; as biological
instinct xi, xiii, xiv, 8, 34n12, 137;
Darwin on xiii, xiv; of dirt and
bacteria 17n5, 137; of foreign
121–122; of loss of agency and
unpredictability 15, 40, 48, 128; of
waste 15–16, 137–138, 145, 150,
153; see also anxiety; ecophobia,
term use and definition; phobias
Feder, Helen 25
Feder, Lillian 125, 129–130, 132
Feldman, Mark 148
Felman, Shoshana 122, 126, 134n13
Felski, Rita 46
feminism and feminist theory 27,
71, 72, 75n18, 135n20; Darwin
and 26, 27; material feminism
22; meat eating and 96, 103–104;
scale-framing and 89; see also
ecofeminism; Gaard, Greta
Fermi, Enrico 112
Fish, Cheryl 104–105
Fisher, R. Michael 7

Five Man Electrical Band 136–137
flashpoints 49, 51n8, 114
Foer, Jonathan Safran 42, 98, 101–102,
115, 117n21
Fogazzaro, Antonio 6
food 14–15, 19n25, 92–115, 118n25;
agribusiness 96, 107–110, 112–113;
distribution and overproduction
94–95, 110; ecomedia and 55, 73n8,
77n39, 96; ecophobia theory’s
exploration as crucial to 103,
114–115; food security 96, 110,
111, 114; global food economy 92,
94–95; GMOs 95, 96–97, 107–113,
118n29; hunger and 95, 110; local
97, 99, 117n16; nutrition industry
97, 116n10; patenting 110, 111,
112; as personal 77n39, 114–115;
rights to produce 113–114; seasonal
94, 115n5; standards 95; waste
74n8, 95, 96, 116n7, 140, 151–152,
155n8, 158n21; see also agriculture;
meat production; vegetarian- and
veganism
Food, Inc. (film) 77n39, 98, 101
Foote, Stephanie 140
foreign landscapes 121–122
fossil fuels 57
Foucault, Michel 122, 126, 133n9,
134n10
Franck, Kaja 6
Freud, Sigmund xiii
Fromm, Erich 8
Fromm, Harold 99–101, 114, 115,
117n19, 117n21
Frost, Robert 45
Future is Wild, The (television series) 66
Gaard, Greta 7, 17n12, 19n26, 70,
73n3; climate change root causes
and 57; on Food, Inc. 98; on
Fromm 117n19; on vulnerability of
women 64; see also ecofeminism
gaeaphobia 11
Galeano, Jorge 111
garbage, term defined 154n2; see also
agency, of garbage; waste
Garbage: A Poem (Ammons) 15, 143,
146–147, 149–150
Garrard, Greg 2–3
gay marriage 43
Gemenne, François 11, 91n10
gender 54, 89, 127–128; male hero
18n19, 55, 60, 61, 74n11; misogyny
Index 189
22, 33n4; see also ecofeminism;
feminism and feminist theory;
women
genetically modified (GM) food 95,
96–97, 107–113, 118n29; see also
food
genetic basis of ecophobia ix, xi,
1, 8–9, 12, 16; importance of
understanding 22, 25, 31, 81
genetic determinism 26
genetic materialism 12–13, 20,
25–32; Ashkenazi Jews and 29–30;
criticism and fear of 26–27;
epigenetics concept and 30–31;
ethical choices and 31; hollow
ecology ignores 22; other factors
affecting 27–31; superabundance
and 21
genetics: biophilia and 8–9, 22, 28,
81; epigenesis and xii, xiii, 30–31,
33n2, 34n19; eugenics and 109,
118n27
geopolitical borders 37, 38
Gibbens, Anthony 48
Gibson, Clark C. 87
Gilman, Sander 30
Gladwin, Derek 6
Gonder, Patrick 58, 75n16
Goode, Abby 6
Gore, Al 55, 61, 64
gothic nature 5
Gottschall, Jonathan 26, 27
Goulart, Simon 126
government as antihero 60
Grandjeat, Yves-Charles 7
Great Oxygenation Event 86–87
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions:
from air travel 52; duration of
human activities producing 84;
from internet servers 64; from meat
production 34n9, 73n8, 91n12,
92–93
“Green is the New Black: Ecophobia
and the Gothic Landscape in the
Twilight Series” (Parmiter) 5
Green Media and Popular Culture: An
Introduction (Parham) 63, 71
Gregg, Melissa 49
Groeneveld, Sarah 6
Grosz, Elizabeth 21, 26, 27
Hamilton, Clive 11, 91n10, 91n13
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 156n11
Hanh, Thich Nhat 142
190 Index
hard science 8
Harpending, Henry 29–30
hate speech and hate crimes 71, 76n26
Head, Lesley 84
Hedrén, Johan 56, 57, 75n18, 75n23,
79, 84, 86
Heerwagen, Judith 25
Heinimann, David 7
Heise, Ursula 47, 48, 61
Heston, Charlton 65
heterosexism 64
Hilbeck, Angelika 95
Hillard, Tom 5
History Channel 66
hollow ecology x, xiv, 22, 78, 83
homophobia 10, 11, 22, 55
hope 56–57, 72
Hornborg, Alf 83, 87–88, 90n4
horror studies 5, 17n10
hot water heating 77n34
Houser, Heather 5
Hroch, Petra 83
Hughes, William 5
Human Age, The: The World Shaped
by Us (Ackerman) 56–57
“Human Alien, The: Otherness,
Humanism, and the Future of
Ecocriticism” (Iovino) 119
humanism 38, 41
humanity, limits of 123, 133n5
humanness 38–39, 128, 134n15; bare
life concept and 39
humility 57
hunger 95, 110
Hunger Games, The (Collins) 96
Hurricane Katrina 38, 44, 51n10
“Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics
in Sociobiological Perspective”
(Williams) 24
hyperobject concept 22
hypocrisy 96, 116n8, 116n9
hypotheses 2, 7–11
hysteria 127, 128
I, Robot (film) 91n13
“I’m a Stranger Here” (Five Man
Electrical Band) 136–137, 154n1
immediacy 55, 74n10
in-betweenness 49
Inconvenient Truth, A (film) 55
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s
Manifesto (Pollan) 97
indifference 8, 17n14, 18, 34n12;
ecophobia/biopilia spectrum and
xi, 1, 9, 12; of nonhuman animals
21, 24, 86; as precondition to
violence 23, 37–38, 100; waste and
136, 139, 140; see also aversion to
nature; ecomedia, indifference and
individualism 85, 104, 118n24, 136
International Commission on
Stratigraphy 90n1
In the Shadow of No Towers
(Spiegelman) 42
intra-actions 22, 27, 34n17
invisibility, waste and 139
Iovino, Serenella ix, 17n12, 25, 28, 32,
119, 139
Islamophobia 36
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment 3, 4, 5,
19n25, 99
isolationism 38
Jablonka, Eva xii, 30–31
Jorden, Edward 127
Kakutani, Michiko 101–102
Kant, Immanuel 148
Kaplan, E. Ann xii, 32, 35, 40–41, 70
Katcher, Aaron 82, 90n8
Kazanjian, David 51n8
Keetley, Dawn 5–6
Kellert, Stephen 9, 23–24, 70
Kenner, Robert 98, 101
Kerridge, Richard 135n20
King Lear (Shakespeare) 41, 46, 120,
131, 135n22
Kingsolver, Barbara 99, 114
Kirkus Review, The 99
Kistiakowsky, George 112
Klein, Naomi 64, 65, 66–67, 70,
76n24, 85
Kolbert, Elizabeth 83–84
Koneswaran, Gowrii 23, 34n9
Korea 113, 152, 157n16
Laing, R.D. 120
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 21, 33n2,
34n19
Lamb, Marion 30–31
Landscapes of Fear (Tuan) 7–8, 121
language and literary idioms: Garbage:
A Poem 146–147; nonhuman
animals, comparisons using 126, 131,
134n14; see also literary madness
“Learning How to Die in the
Anthropocene” (Scranton) 83

Lecky, William E.H. 80
Lee, Charles T. 39
Lee Nak-won 152
legislation: anti-smoking 67–68,
102; climate change policy 76n31;
ecophobic 111–112, 118n29;
effectiveness of 102; liberty and
67–68, 85
Leopold, Aldo 23, 50
Lewontin, Richard 25
liberty 65–68, 70, 76n25, 26, 91n13;
legislation and 67–68, 85
Liberzon, Israel ix, xiv
Liede, Alfred 132n4
Life After People (television series) 66
Light, Andrew 41
Literary Animal, The: Evolution and
the Nature of Narrative (Gottschall
and Wilson) 26
literary criticism 24–25, 47, 88
literary madness 120–126, 132n4;
definition 124–125, 133n8;
Derrida and 125–126, 134n12;
Foucault and 133n9, n10; idiomatic
descriptions 119–120, 126,
129, 131; monstrosity and 122,
123, 124, 130, 131, 133n6; in
Shakespeare 120–121, 122, 124,
127, 128, 129, 132; silencing and
125–126, 134n10, 134n11, 134n
13; see also madness
literary theory 62
Literature of Waste, The: Material
Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter
(Morrison) 137–138, 155n5
Liu, Xinmin 58
locavore diet 97, 99, 117n16
loss of agency see agency, loss of
Louv, Richard 74n15, 82, 103
Love, Glen 25
Lyman, Howard 116n9
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 127–128
MacDonald, Michael 126
MacDonald, Scott 61
MacGregor, Sherilyn 72
Mackenzie, Louisa 2–3, 16n2
MaddAddam (Atwood) 96
madness 119–132, 133n7; Bethlem
Royal Hospital and 123, 126–127;
definition 124; environmental
ethics and 121, 124, 129–130, 131,
132; fear of foreign and 121–122;
hysteria and 127, 128; idiomatic
Index 191
descriptions 119–120, 126, 129;
monstrosity and 122, 123, 124, 130,
131, 133n6; nocturnal behavior
and 131, 135n22; as nonhuman
and animalistic 119, 124, 126–127,
130–131, 132n1, 135n21; otherness
and 125, 126; scholarship deficit
15, 119, 131; in Shakespeare
120–121, 122, 124, 127, 128, 129,
132; silencing 125–126, 134n10,
134n11, 134n13; “wilderness
zone” thesis 119; Wild Man myth
129–130; witchcraft and 127–128;
see also literary madness
maladaptive behaviors xi, xii, xiv,
136; ecophobia/biophilia spectrum
and 2, 23–24, 52–53; waste and
143, 150, 153; see also adaptive
behaviors
male hero 18n19, 55, 60, 61, 74n11
Malm, Andreas 83, 87–88, 90n4
Malombra (Fogazzaro) 6
Mannon, Ethan 3–4
Markegard Family Grass-Fed Farm
116n12
marketability of ecophobia 8–9,
22, 37, 47. See also ecomedia,
marketing and
Marlowe, Christopher 15
Marshall, George 55, 56
Martin, Randall 121
Mason, Jim 77n39, 101, 109–110, 114
material agency 22; see also agency
material ecocriticism ix, 22, 24–28,
32, 41; see also ecocriticism
Material Ecocriticism (Iovino and
Oppermann) 25, 28
material feminism 22; see also
feminism and feminist theory
McCabe, Janet G. 75n19
McCance, Dawne 90n3
McCarthy, Cormac 39, 96
McCarthy, Gina 75n19
McDonald’s 71
McEwan, Ian 20, 25, 31
McGoran, Jon 96
McKusick, James 6
McMurry, Andrew 58
McVay, Scott 9
Meadows, Donella 104
meat production 14–15, 19n25,
22–23, 55, 71, 73n8; antibiotics
and hormones in 95, 104; climate
change and 74n8, 78, 91n12;
192 Index
consumption and social class 92;
dismemberment and 103–104;
Eating Animals 98, 101–102,
115; ecomedia on 96–99; GHG
emissions from 34n9, 73n8, 91n12,
92–93; grain required for 110,
116n7, 117n13; My Year of Meats
96, 104–107; omitted from climate
change discussion 104; Polyface
Farm 97, 98, 115, 116n11, 116n
12; speciesism and 97–98, 103;
unsustainability of “ethical,” 97,
116n12; waste in 74n8, 96, 116n7;
see also ethics, meat production
and; food; vegetarian- and
veganism
media, mainstream 35, 36–37,
44, 76n25, 96, 105; nature
representations in 13, 42, 139–140;
waste representations in 15, 148;
see also climate change, media
representations of; ecomedia; terror
narratives
Meeker, Joseph 10
Mehan, Uppinder 42–43
Meyer, Stephenie 5
Miall, David 62
misogyny 22, 33n4
Mitchell, W.J.T. 13
Mockingjay (Collins) 96
Moe, Aaron 6
Monani, Salma 65–66, 69
Monsanto 107, 110, 112–113
monstrosity, madness and 122, 123,
124, 130, 131, 133n6
Moore, Jason W. 86
morality 20, 62–65, 100; see also
ethics
Morrison, Susan Signe 137–138,
155n5
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona 6–7,
17n11
Morton, Timothy 4, 5, 22, 90n6,
91n9, 146
Moser, Susanne C. xi, xii, 73n5
Muiderslot 50, 51n10
Murphy, Bernice M. 5
Murphy, Cullen 154n2
Murphy, Patrick 60
Murray, Gilbert 40
Museums of Madness (Scull) 126
Mystical Bedlam (MacDonald) 126
My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 96,
104–107
Nabhan, Gary Paul 98–99, 114
Namdaemun 50, 51n10
narcissism 53
narrative science 54–55
“Narrativizing Science” (Estok) 75n23
National Geographic Channel 66
nationalism 113
natural disasters 49; ecomedia on 54,
60; naming of, and subjectivity 41
“Natural History of Ashkenazi
Intelligence” (Cochran and
Harpending) 30
nature deficit disorder 75n15, 82, 103
Neely, Carol Thomas 124, 128, 132n1
Neimanis, Astrida 56, 57, 75n18,
75n23, 84; capitalism and 86; scale
issues and 79
neurology, fear and xiv
Newman, Karen 122
new materialism 28, 79
New Orleans, Louisiana 50, 51n10
news see climate change, media
representations of; ecomedia;
media, mainstream; terror
narratives
“New Study Says Climate Change
Helped Spark Syrian Civil War”
(Holthaus) 37
New York Magazine 30
New York Times 83, 101
Nichols, Ashton 6
Nichols, Bill 45
Nierenberg, Danielle 23, 34n9
9/11, 35, 38, 39, 50
Nixon, Rob 44, 53, 56, 65, 79, 151, 152
nocturnal behavior of madness 131
nonhuman animals x, 34n9; agentic
capacity of 79; bare life concept
and 39; biophilia in 16n4, 23–24;
farm animal industry 23, 34n9, 55,
73n8; invisibility of 80–81, 85, 89;
legal standing of 134n15; madness
and 119, 124, 126–127, 131,
132n1, 135n21; omission of, from
discussions about environmental
destruction 85, 89; pejorative
idioms featuring 126, 131,
134n14; pollution and biosphere
refashioning by 21, 86, 137, 153;
relatedness and 87; speciesism
16, 97–98, 103, 106, 134n14;
see also agency, nonhuman; meat
production; vegetarian- and
veganism

novel form 104
numbness and immobilization 67,
148; ecomedia and 53, 73n5, 73n6;
terror and climate change narratives
and 35, 36–37, 40, 41–42, 44, 49;
see also indifference
nutrition industry 97, 116n10
objectification 104
Odds Against Tomorrow (Rich) 31
Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (Pollan)
97, 115
On Garbage (Scanlan) 149
On Human Nature (Wilson) 20
Oppenheimer, J. Robert 112
Oppermann, Serpil ix, 4, 25, 28, 90n5;
backlash and 99, 117n17
Oreskes, Naomi 76n29
Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development
(OECD) 92
Orians, Gordon H. 25
Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 96
Ostrer, Harry 30
Ostrom, Elinor 87
Othello (Shakespeare) 120, 122, 132
otherness: madness and 125, 126;
nonhuman animals and 79–80, 90n6;
silencing and 125; waste and 155n5
Ottum, Lisa 6
Oxford English Dictionary xiii
Ozeki, Ruth 96, 104–107
pain 40
Palumbo-Liu, David 106
Parham, John 63, 69, 71
Paris Climate Accord 91n11
Park, Ondine 85
Parmiter, Tara K. 5
Parrino, Maria 6
partiarchy 77n38, 90n7, 95, 104, 107;
see also capitalism
Paster, Gail Kern 129
Peers, Edgar Allison 132n1
penguins, Chinstrap 21, 24
peripeteia 40
Perlmutter, David 115n6
personal connections 130, 135n20
personifcation of nature 60, 141;
gendered/sexist 45, 72, 74n9
pesticides 116n6
phobias ix, xiii, xiv, 8, 17n5; definition
1, 12, 16n1; see also fear
physical science xii, 8, 87–88
Index 193
Pickard, Richard 4
pillage and scorch development 12
Pitt, Brad 54
Plait, Phil 86–87
Planet of the Apes (film 1968) 74n11
Plant Horror (Keetley and Tenga) 5–6
Plato 2
PMLA (journal) 138, 146
“Politics of Ecophobia, The” (Will) 10
Pollan, Michael 96–98, 110, 115,
116n10
pollution x, 15; created by nonhuman
animals 21, 86, 137, 153; from
e-waste recycling 155n7; GHG
emissions 34n9, 52, 64, 73n8,
84, 91n12, 92–93; in ocean 140,
155n6; in space 65, 76n27; in
Wall-E 142
Polyface Farm 97, 98, 115, 116n11,
116n 12
population size 21, 153
post-9/11 narratives 13, 35, 36,
38–40, 42–43, 93; see also terror
narratives
Posthumus, Stephanie 3, 16n2
Postlethwaite, Pete 61
“Postscript on Biosemiotics”
(Wheeler) 27
practical change 53
pre-trauma concept 40–41
Price, Cheryl Blake 6
privilege 148
protein 98, 117n15
proximity 40, 42, 143; meat
production and 97; of waste to
habitat 153; see also scale
Pruitt, Scott 61, 75n19
psychology xii, 119–132
Psychology of the Emotions (Ribot) xiii
Ptashne, Mark 31
Puar, Jasbir 43, 51n7
Publisher’s Weekly 99
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(Douglas) 138
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics,
Desire (Gaard) 7
“Queer Ecology” (Morton) 5
queer theory, terror and 51n7
racism 10, 16, 22, 33n4, 64; ecomedia
and 55; environmental 150–151,
153, 157n18, 158n20; nonhuman
194 Index
animal comparisons 134n14;
Othello and 121, 122; terror
narratives and 36
Rathje, William 154n2
refuse, term defined 154n2; see also
waste
Reiger, Branimir M. 133n8
renewable energy 57, 76n33
Reno, Seth 6
repetition, effecting change through
80, 103, 118n23
reproduction and superabundance 21
restraint 98, 117n14
Rethinking Tragedy (Felski) 46
Ribot, Théodule xiii
Rich, Adrienne 18n22
Rich, Nathaniel 31
Rigby, Kate 7, 89
Ringelberg, Kalli Elizabeth 123
Risch, Neil 30
risk theories 48, 112
“River Notes from the Montana
Flathead Reservation: An Update on
the ‘Ecological Indian” (Grandjeat) 7
Road, The (McCarthy) 39, 96
Robin, Marie-Monique 111
Robisch, S. K. (Kip) 2–7, 10, 22
Rolston, Holmes, III 41
rot 142, 156n11; see also waste
“Rotting Fish in Paradise:
Putrefaction, Ecophobia, and
Olfactory Imaginations of Southern
California” (Weidner) 7
rubbish, term defined 154n2; see also
waste
rubbish ecology 147–148
Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage
(Rathje and Murphy) 154n2
Ruddiman, William F. 84
Rural Gothic in American Popular
Culture, The: Backwoods Horror
and Terror in the Wilderness
(Murphy) 5
Rust, Stephen 65–66, 69, 73n1
Salatin, Joel 97, 98, 115, 116n11,
116n12
Salkeld, Duncan 124
Samoilova, Gulnara 38
sanitization 17n5, 137, 139
Sansay, Leonora 6
scale 40, 78–89; of agentic capacity
79; of animal abuse 14, 80, 85,
89; capitalism and 85–86, 91n15;
changing concepts of 85, 87,
88–89; of climate change’s effects
84; climate change understandings
and 83, 88–89; consilience leads to
reimagining 88–89; ecomedia and
55–56; expanding ethical circle 41,
71, 80, 82, 89, 125; perception of
55–56, 79, 83, 85, 89; of pollution
137, 140; proximity to nature
82; proximity to tragedy 40, 81;
spatial 79, 82; temporal 55–56, 59,
74n10, 79
scale-framing 79, 82, 89
scale of human influence see
Anthropocene
Scanlan, John 149, 157n18
Scarry, Elaine 40
science: ecophobic unconscious belief
in 136; physical/social xii 8, 87–88
science narratives 54–55
Scranton, Roy 83
Scull, Andrew 126
seasonal eating 94, 99, 115n5
Secret History; or, The Horrors of St.
Domingo (Sansay) 6
seeds, terminator gene in 108–109, 113
seed saving 108
Seeds of Death (documentary) 113
Seigworth, Gregory 49
Senior, Jennifer 30
September 11, 2001, 35, 38, 39, 50
sexism 10, 16, 23, 33n4, 106;
capitalism and 64; ecophobia’s
marketability through 54, 73n7;
male hero role 18n19, 55, 60,
61, 74n11; misogyny 22, 33n4;
nonhuman animal comparisons
134n14; personifications of nature
and 45, 72, 74n9
Sexual Politics of Meat, The: A
Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
103–104
Seymour, Nicole 58
Shakespeare, William 15, 120–121,
122, 124, 129, 134n15; madness
and 120–121, 122, 124, 127, 128,
129, 132
Shepard, Paul 81, 87, 123
Shields, Rob 85
Shin, Lisa M. ix, xiv
Shiva, Vandana 95, 107, 112, 114
Shukin, Nicole 108
silencing 125–126, 134n10,
134n11, 134n13

Silent Spring (Carson) ix
Singer, Peter 47, 77n39, 101,
109–110, 114
Slovic, Paul 48, 73n6
Slovic, Scott xii, 4, 19n25, 58, 73n6
Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor
(Nixon) 151
small farmers 111
Smith, Andrew 5
Smith, Bruce 84
Smith, Jeffrey 110
Sobel, David 10–11, 18n20
social class: classism 16; garbage and
150, 156n16, 156n17, 156n18;
meat and 92; pollution and 158n20
social issues 73n3
social science xii, 87–88
Solar (McEwan) 20, 31
South Korea 150, 152, 153
space junk 65, 76n27
speciesism 16, 97–98, 103, 106,
134n14; see also nonhuman animals
species leaping 108
“Spectators to Future Ruin” (Estok) 63
Speth, Gus 85
Spiegelman, Art 42
Spira, David S. xiii
Stallybrass, Peter 128
Starosielski, Nicole 69–70
Statue of Liberty 65
Stein, Rachel 108–109
Steiner, George 40
Stolen Harvest (Shiva) 107
Stone, Linda 56, 74n13
Stoppani, Antonio 90n2
St. Paul’s Cathedral 50, 51n10
Stuart, Tristram 14–15, 158n21
sublimity 148
suffering 40, 100, 101–102
Sullivan, Heather 139
Summers, Lawrence 151
survival strategies see adaptive
behaviors; maladaptive behaviors
sustainability 71
sustainable citizen concept 91n13
Sustainable Media: Critical
Approaches to Media and the
Environment (Starosielski and
Walker) 69–70
Swim, Janet K. xii
Syria 37
Szabo-Jones, Lisa 92
Szasz, Thomas 127
Index 195
Taylor, Jesse Oak xi
Taylor, Matthew A. 4–5
Teaching Climate Change in the
Humanities (Siperstein, Hall, and
LeManager) 118n25
Tenga, Angela 6
10,000 Year Explosion, The (Cochran
and Harpending) 29–30
terminator genes 108–109, 113
terror, veganism as 93
terror and climate change narratives
14, 32, 35–51; bare life concept
and 39; Daish and 37, 118n29;
fear and 35, 40, 43–44, 46–47;
interdependence of 35; isolation
and exceptionalism and 37–39, 46;
loss of agency and unpredictability
and 40–41, 46–47, 48; numbness
and 35, 36–37, 40, 41–42, 44,
49; overexposure to 41–42, 44;
personalized narratives of 42;
post-9/11 narratives 13, 35, 36,
38–40, 42–43, 93; pre-trauma and
41; responses to trauma and 39;
risk theory and 48; siege perception
43–44; speed of events 44; tragedy
and 35, 40, 44–46
Terrorist Assemblages (Puar) 43
“Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent
Openness: Ecocriticism and
Ecophobia” (Estok) 2–7, 12,
17n11, 17n12
theory: ecocriticism and 99;
Estok-Robisch controversy and 2–7;
phobia of 117n17
Thiher, Allen 131
Thill, Brian 138, 139, 141, 149, 151,
157n19
This Changes Everything: Capitalism
vs the Climate (Klein) 65, 70,
76n24, 85
Thomas, Keith 126, 130, 131
Thornber, Karen 33n7, 144, 146
time, concept of 49, 50
tobacco industry 67–68, 76n29
Tomorrowland (film) 52, 53
tourism 151, 156n16, 156n19
tragedy 18n19; definitions 10, 40, 45,
50; new tragic theory 46; pollution
and 137, 155n3; scale and 35, 40,
44–46, 45; tragic theory 35, 40–41,
44–46
transcorporeality 41; definition
156n15
196 Index
transvaluing nature 87
trash, term defined 154n2; see also
waste
Trexler, Adam 31
Trinity atomic test 112
Trump, Donald 23, 76n25, 115,
134n14
Trump Administration 91n11
Tuan, Yi-Fu 7–8, 34n12, 121, 129
2012 (film) 60–61
Ulrich, Roger 22
“Unconscious, The” (Freud), xiii
United Nations 73n8
United States: American
exceptionalism 46; American
isolationism 38; food power of
110–111, 118n28; food waste in
151, 152, 153; meat consumption
in 92, 105–106, 110
unpredictability 48, 73n7, 120, 143;
fear of 15, 40, 48, 128; terror and
climate change narratives and
40–41, 46–47, 48
“Unsettling the Environment”
(Groeneveld) 6
Upstream Color (film) 58
US Food and Drug Administration 111
van Tine, Robert 11
Vaughan, Hunter 73n7, 75n20
“Vegans and the Quest for Purity”
(Fromm) 99–101, 117n19
Vegan Studies Project, The (Wright)
14, 93, 115n2
“Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating
Trees in Fin-De-Siècle Fiction”
(Price) 6
vegetarian- and veganism 14,
19n25, 74n8, 91n12; ethics and
101–102; Fromm and 99–101;
judgments toward 93, 99–101,
115n2, 117n19; legislating 85;
protein argument 98, 117n15; as
threatening to dominant paradigm
93; see also food; meat production
violence 13, 43–44, 53, 71, 89
virtual reality 59, 82
Walker, Janet 69–70
Wall-E (film) 136, 142
Walzer, Michael 157n18
war 13
war on terror 36
waste: “Above the Water, Under the
Water,” 15, 144–146, 149, 156n16,
156n17; “awayness” and 139,
143, 144–146, 147, 153; conflated
with dirt 138–139; danger of
140; disposability concept and
139; electronic 140, 155n7; food
74n8, 95, 96, 116n7, 140, 152,
155n8, 158n21; Garbage: A Poem
15, 143, 146–147, 149–150; in
meat production 74n8, 96, 116n7;
natural/artificial borders of 142;
normalizing 156n14; as other
155n5; research and literature
deficit 148, 155n5; rot and decay
in literature 156n11; social class
and 149–150, 156n16, 156n17;
as sublime 147; term defined
154n2; unpredictability of 143;
Wall-E and 142; see also agency, of
garbage
Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its
Outcasts (Bauman) 138
waste infrastructure x, xiv
waste production 12, 15, 17n4
Waste: Uncovering the Global Food
Scandal (Stuart) 158n21
water 73n8
Watson, James Robert 38
Way We Eat, The: Why Our Food
Choices Matter (Singer and Mason)
109, 114–115
weapons of mass destruction 49
weather events: extreme 84; in King
Lear 120–121; natural disasters
41, 49–50, 54, 60; see also climate
change
Weber, Elke U. 48
weeds 156n13
Weidner, Ned 7, 156n11
Weis, Tony 92, 93, 116n9
Weisman, Alan 66
Wheeler, Wendy 27, 29, 32
White, Hayden 129
“Whose there is there there?
Queer Directions and Ecocritical
Orientations” (Mortimer-Sandilands)
6–7
Wild Man image 129–130
Wild Men in the Middle Ages
(Bernheimer) 129–130
Wilkins, Gregory 82, 90n8
Will, George F. 10, 11
Williams, George 24, 28

Williams, Raymond 46
Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula 63
Wilson, E. O. xii, 20, 88
Wilson, E. O., biophilia concept by
2, 47, 82, 154; Fromm, Erich and
8; genetic materialism and 12,
22, 28, 31, 32; introduction and
definition ix–x, 8, 9; “surface
ethics” and 33n5; see
also biophilia hypothesis,
problems of; ecophobia/
biophilia spectrum
Windup Girl, The (Bacigalupi) 96
Winerman, Lea xiv
witchcraft 127–128
Wolfe, Cary 79, 134n15
women 23, 54, 64; ecomedia and
74n11; hysteria and 127, 128; meat
eating and 103–104, 105–106;
nonhuman animal comparisons
134n14; witchcraft and 127–128
Won-Chung Kim 152
Woodbridge, Linda 135n22
“Woodshed, The: A Response to
‘Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’”
(Robisch) 3
Index 197
Wordsworth and the Green Romantics:
Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth
Century (Ottum and Reno) 6
World According to Monsanto, The
(film) 111
World According to Monsanto, The
(Galeano) 111
World Bank 151
World War II 112, 118n28
World War Z (film) 54, 73n7
World Without Us, The (Weisman) 66
Wright, Laura 14, 93, 115n2
Wu Chanje 146, 152
Y2K 133n5
Yaeger, Patricia 15, 138, 143, 146,
147–148
Year of the Flood, The (Atwood) 96
Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural
Theory, The (Garrard) 2–3
Yılmaz, Zümre Gizem 58
Zeder, Melinda 84
Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making
of Poetry (Moe) 6
zoos x