Terror and Ecophobia

Abstract

The resurgence of terrorism and the increasing violence of our climate has ratcheted up the tone of urgency and crisis defining representations of nature: one of the results of this is that terror and ecophobia often define twenty-first-century representations of nature. Estok argues that media and academic conflations of devastating natural events on the one hand with war and terror on the other reflect an ethics in which nature is a thing to be fought. Estok maintains that such a trajectory of thinking is counter-productive to environmentalism. The confluences between the imagining of terror and the imagining of the natural world result in increasingly extraordinary media representations of the natural world, representations that often perpetuate the very ethics of distance and domination that have long contributed to the growing environmental problems we face today. Imagining terror and nature together is unsustainable.