Ecophobia, the Anthropocene, and the Denial of Death

In his influential 2009 essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” Simon Estok argues that ecocriticism’s engagement with “representations of nature” reveals the need to recognize “contempt for the natural world” as a “definable discourse” (203). Furthermore, he suggests that the prevalence of this discourse betrays what is perhaps a biologically innate aversion to nature: a complex of deeply irrational fears that animate our species’ relations with the nonhuman. Duly noting the conflict within ecocriticism regarding the vexed status of theory, Estok posits that theorizing ecophobia may productively unsettle an “increasingly orthodox ecocritical machinery,” resulting in “confluent theorizing,” not to mention the sorts of “methodological and structural definition some ecocritics seek” (203). Though controversy ensued after the publication of the essay in 2009, as he notes recently in The Ecophobia Hypothesis, “ecophobia studies has emerged as a scholarly field of inquiry” (58). The Ecophobia Hypothesis surveys research in ecophobia studies, breaking new ground in the field of ecocriticism by underscoring the explanatory potential of analyses of environmental problems that integrate research in the humanities with the biological sciences and the social sciences. In the book, Estok argues that any analysis of our environmental situation that discounts the evolutionary roots of ecophobia in our historical and contemporary dispositions toward nature will fatally compromise efforts to develop the cultural transformations required to meet the manifold challenges of life in the Anthropocene. As he succinctly states, “Analyzing ecophobia allows us to develop a polemical ethical paradigm within which to house our thinking about nature” (Ecophobia 70).