The Ecophobia Hypothesis

219 Pages·2018·6.425 MB·English

by  Simon C. Estok, Sophie Christman

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
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and by Routledge
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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
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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.
ה״ע ימא תמשנ יוליעל

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.