The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment)

"The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of a dissatisfaction with the capacity of what has come to be termed "the biophilia hypothesis" to adequately account for the kinds of things that are going on in the world, things so extraordinary that we are increasingly coming to understand the current age as "the Anthropocene." Building on the usefulness of the biophilia hypothesis, this text argues that biophilia exists within a context that has not been adequately theorized. The Ecophobia Hypothesis argues that in order to contextualize 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, the complexities of 21st century representations of ecophobia, and of how imagining terror inter-penetrates with the imagining of an increasingly oppositional natural environment. Furthermore, this book confronts why ecomedia--a veritably thriving industry--is having so little measurable impact and where ecophobia fits into this equation, about scale and the ecophobic implications of speciesism, about the entanglement of environmental ethics with the writing of literary madness and pain. This work also investigates food and the ecophobic bases of industrial agriculture and meat, garbage, and about how current philosophies regarding waste need and sustain systemic and institutional ecophobia. This is a book about uncovering ecophobia and about making change" --