Fear of Environmental Catastrophe

How Estok redefined ecophobia

Estok has done more than anyone to define and expand it, and he treats it as a spectrum rather than a state. The ecophobic condition can involve any of four attitudes to the natural environment, or any combination of them:

• fear
• contempt
• indifference
• simple lack of mindfulness Its genetic origins served the species in part, the fight-or-flight response among them, but the same condition has been of enormous service to growth economies and to ideological interests. Much of it consists of behaviour that was useful once and is destructive now, and some of it is a product of what apparently exponential growth is taken to require. It operates globally at both macro and micro levels, sometimes obviously and sometimes buried under what he calls the clutter of habit and ignorance.

How Sobel keeps the original sense

David Sobel, an environmental educator, uses the word closer to Will's original sense: fear of the environmental effects of human actions, running from oil spills to deforestation, which he describes as a helpless sense of dread about the future, where Solastalgia names the version felt about a place that has already changed. A study of ten to twelve year olds found 82 per cent expressing fear, sadness and anger about environmental problems.

Between them, Estok, Sobel and Roger Scruton have kept two incompatible meanings in circulation, one naming the dread and the other the disregard that produces it.

Why Estok links ecophobia to pandemics

Estok draws direct lines from the concept to COVID-19, on the grounds that pandemics are always environmental events. The current one followed from closer contact between humans and non-human animals, which itself followed from food sources shrinking and populations growing. Since ecophobia is in his account central to the environmental crises that produced those conditions, he argues that discussing the two together, theoretically, personally and politically, is overdue rather than fashionable.

Where it turns up on stage

Turkish folk theatre dramatises it directly, staging fear, anxiety and threat from the natural world in traditional plays that generally end with nature dominant. Eco-critics have found the same thing in Shakespeare, in Othello and King Lear among others, played to audiences intimately familiar with grain shortages, failed harvests, cold and severe storms. That was also a period of unprecedented exploration, possibly driven in part by those failed harvests and by the shortage of local fish, and the world was shrinking as a result. The monsters get read the same way: a plays' obsession with them unsettles the orders, hierarchies, values, rules and forms by which nature is defined.

What the fear costs climate policy

The Green New Deal, the policy grouping most recently represented by legislation Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced in the US House of Representatives, has been made harder to pass by the phenomenon, because voters let fear shape how they vote and the result is an absence of climate legislation. Political statements by President Donald Trump have been cited as an example of the sociopolitical effects, and critics argue that rhetoric of that kind narrows open discussion of climate policy. Which returns the word to where Will started it, in a newspaper column about politics.