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“DON’T PANIC”: Fear and Acceptance in the Anthropocene

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isz051

1759-1090

Steven Hartman, Patrick Degeorges,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man's insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world's end. —Michel Foucault (14) This article accepts the challenge issued by the publication of Simon Estok’s Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018) to extend theoretical discussion of the concept of ecophobia in current scholarly discourses of the environment. It considers the wider implications of ecophobia in the process of human society-building into the Anthropocene, especially the deeply disruptive present era inaugurated by the Great Acceleration. As a thought experiment with a polemical edge, we present ecophobia as a trait that has been socially selected, culturally reinforced and amplified through societal institutions as a means of promoting human domestication through the state-making, civilizing process. We also suggest that the transition from hunter–gatherer communities to early agrarian states offers evidence of a kind of collective madness as evident in the developing unsustainability of their agro-ecological built environments, compared to the resilience of non-state communities. We assert that the seeming success story of state sovereignty has resulted from the fact that the state has paradoxically presented itself as the most efficient “remedy” to the very forms of acute ecophobia it has structurally induced. The developments of capitalism and modern science have reinforced the seductive narrative of human triumph in the war against nature that was originally predicated on the civilizing state itself. In the present phase of the Anthropocene, however, the terminal insanity of this project is revealed. A deep and intractable sense of foreboding, bordering on panic, has taken hold, except where denial and escapism provide a temporary alternative. Ancient Pan is not dead, and he is returning with a vengeance. Panphobia stems from a perhaps bitter awareness that the war against the Earth could never have been won because we don’t simply live on the Earth: we are the Earth.