Estok, Simon C.. The Ecophobia Hypothesis

Provocative, playful, and enlightening, Simon Estok’s The Ecophobia Hypothesis awakens us to ourselves with both compassion and wisdom about a psychological condition he calls ecophobia, which is also profoundly social, economic, and political.Estok defines ecophobia in his Introduction as “a uniquely human psychological condition that prompts antipathy toward nature”(1). Ecophobia, Estok also writes, can embody “fear, contempt,indifference, or lack of mindfulness” (1). It is, in a nutshell, an irrational fear of nature and a groundless hatred of the natural world human beings seem to have adapted and are suffering from whether they consciously recognize it or not. Seen as a serious condition that afflicts people from all walks of life in every human community from around the world, ecophobia gains even a deeper meaning and a dark ecological significance as it affects social systems and becomes a useful justification in the service of economic development at the expense of the natural world. Estok’s argument in this regard is quite convincing—that ecophobia also requires a definitive social investigation. Estok builds his theory of ecophobia on theories of rubbish ecologies, affect, and material ecocriticism, among many other related theoretical visions.

His analysis of waste in his final chapter, entitled “The Ecophobic Unconscious: Indifference to Waste and Junk Agency,”provides a palpable example of the ecophobia condition. Burying our garbage in landfills, and concealing what we bury by soil and grass, is a way of coping with the intensely ecophobic emotions garbage produces in us, a way of escape from what we abhor the most. Since we produce unimaginable amounts of waste in uncontrollable ways, Estok argues, why do we bury our heads in indifference instead of acknowledging the strong agency of waste in environmental degradation and our responsibility in overconsumption? If waste is a constant facet of planetary pollution, a constant ingredient of incapacitated landfills and, more importantly,a sustained aspect of our own lives, why do we have the tendency to think that the garbage we produce is somewhere outside of our mundane reality? Clearly, what we consider external is actually internal in our world, and we inhabit waste as it inhabits us. Estok offers the famous animation Wall-E, the American poet A. R. Ammons’s“Garbage,” and the South Korean poet Seungho Choi’s “Above Water and Under Water”as illustrative examples to explain the agency of waste in material-discursive terms.The representations of waste in this chapter serve as illuminating cases to alert us to our self-inflicted toxic reality. And I believe the readers will find this final chapter the most intriguing section of this eloquently written book. Estok makes us realize that it matters how our thoughts sculpture our reality; it matters what emotions we feel; it matters what ideologies thoughts and emotions engender; it matters what material practices they sustain. The reason why the uncanny agentic capacities of garbage produce ecophobia is because “the fear of garbage” becomes “the fear of its nonhuman (indeed, potentially human-threatening) agency—the core of ecophobia” (138). It is precisely this point that makes the ecophobia condition troubling. We all fear what cannot be predicted and controlled easily.

Although I have dwelled on the last chapter first, as I found it the most striking one, The Ecophobia Hypothesis develops truly captivating discussions on ecophobia condition in relation to political, ethical, and cultural issues in its other six chapters. In the first chapter, titled “Material Ecocriticism, Genes, and the Phobia/Philia Spectrum,” Estok offers a brilliant discussion on the tense intersections of ecophobia and biophilia. This chapter explores what Estok terms “genetic materialism” and “hollow ecology” pointing out how genes determine our relationship with nature. Estok is right in stating that this approach is controversial. Many readers may dispute the opening line of this chapter: “Ecophobia, like any other human behavior (including biophilia),is written into our genes” (20). For me, however, the most eye-catching statement here is Estok’s claim that the Anthropocene is the result of ecophobia (21) which, he insists, is a human epidemic so dangerous that it has resulted in the disruption of Earth systems, hence the name, the Anthropocene given to our age, or rather epoch as geologists prefer to call it. Estok also claims in this chapter that material ecocriticism “rejects the core of genetic materialism and its insistence that materiality of our genes is the sole source of everything we do and produce” (28). Although there was no mention of genetic materialism in the ecocritical discussions when Serenella Iovino and I have edited Material Ecocriticism (2014), it is an interesting point to stress. Material ecocriticism, after all, is about agentic matter in its biotic and abiotic forms as a site of creative becomings and dynamic expressions and considers this expressiveness as the defining property of all matter. In other words, material ecocriticism is the study of material agencies’ expressive dynamics, which we call storied matter and explore the narrative dimension of the material world in terms of stories. It is indeed far from genetic materialism even though we would also read genes as material agencies endowed with stories.

Chapter 2, “Terror and Ecophobia” is focused on images of terror as the determining factors of representing natural environments. Estok’s argument in this chapter is that the images of terror especially served by the media simply feed into the anthropocentric ideology that nature is something that must be fought and dominated. We read here that the “mainstream news offers frenetic and urgent reports, and the target audience seems to lap it up” (36). Triggered by dystopic images of nature, ecophobia emerges as collective indifference to the harm inflicted on nature. I find the contention about the fear of a loss agency quite well researched and expressed: “Fear of the loss of agency and the loss of predictability are what form the core of ecophobia,” Estok argues because “our primary responses, at least, to pain, death, and even sleep” (40) lurk in this territory. This chapter is like a preamble to Chapter 3, “Ecomedia and Ecophobia: Marketing Concerns,” which suggests that ecomedia should bring in ecophobia into their discussions in dealing with the worsening situation. According to Estok, ecomedia is like “a transmitter of ecophobia through its enmeshment with other rights-denying behaviors. The enmeshment of ecomedia with ideologies that have a proven record of marketability and consumption is indeed problematical” (54). The transition from this chapter to Chapter 4 on “From Ecophobia to Hollow Ecology” is also successfully accomplished, as the discussions now are tied to the Anthropocene issues.

In Chapter 4, Estok asks us to rethink our ethical entanglements with the natural world in terms of meat, its production and its consumption. He is right in claiming that climate change will get worse if we continue the destructive practice of industrial meat production and exploitation of animals. This chapter, too, slides cleverly into the next one, Chapter 5 on “Animals, Ecophobia, and Food,” and offers veganism as a solution to build more ethical relations with the nonhuman others. Chapter 6, “Madness and Ecophobia,” however, is totally on a new subject, madness, which Estok argues has been neglected in ecocritical discussions.He relates ecophobia to madness in the sense that our irrational fear of nature’s unpredictable agentic forces hinge on the borderline of madness.

In conclusion, when human relationships with biotic communities continue to get worse,understanding the ecophobic condition becomes even more imperative if we seek sustainable solutions to our increasingly complex ecological problems. The Ecophobia Hypothesis is therefore a timely book that will contribute significantly toward achieving this goal.