Literary Latitude

The “Ecological Uncanny” is a particularly insightful and evolving concept within the environmental humanities, drawing upon psychoanalytic theory to illuminate our complex relationship with the natural world in an era of unprecedented environmental change. At its core, the Ecological Uncanny can be defined as the sense of profound unease, defamiliarization, and even dread that arises from the recognition of formerly familiar and seemingly stable natural environments becoming strange, alien, or threatening due to ecological shifts and crises, particularly those induced by human activity. It is a re-emergence of the “unhomely” (Freud’s unheimlich) within what was once considered our most fundamental “home”—the natural world.

To elaborate further, let us unpack this concept through various scholarly lenses:

1. Rooted in Freudian Uncanny:

The concept borrows heavily from Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche). For Freud, the uncanny refers to that which is simultaneously familiar and foreign, homely and unhomely, eliciting a feeling of unsettling familiarity. It often involves the return of the repressed—something that was once known and perhaps even comforting, but has been hidden away or forgotten, only to resurface in a distorted or unsettling form.

In an ecological context, this means:

• The Familiar Becoming Strange: Our traditional understanding of “nature” as a stable, predictable, and external backdrop to human existence is shattered. Landscapes that once provided solace or seemed immutable (e.g., a serene coastline, a lush forest, predictable weather patterns) begin to exhibit erratic behaviors, undergo drastic transformations, or reveal hidden dangers (e.g., rising sea levels, unprecedented wildfires, extreme weather events, emergence of new pathogens). This defamiliarization induces a sense of the uncanny.
• Return of the Repressed: The ecological uncanny brings to the surface our repressed awareness of humanity’s deep entanglement with the natural world, as well as the consequences of our anthropocentric exploitation. What we have pushed away—the inherent interconnectedness of all life, the fragility of ecosystems, the destructive impact of industrialization—now returns to haunt us in the form of palpable environmental crises. It reveals the “nature” we thought we had mastered or externalized as something intimately intertwined with our own being, and now, alarmingly, profoundly altered.

2. Amitav Ghosh and the “Environmental Uncanny”:

A significant proponent in bringing this concept to the forefront of literary and environmental discourse is the acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. In his non-fiction work, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh frequently invokes the “environmental uncanny” to explain the representational challenges of climate change in contemporary fiction. He argues that the scale and nature of climate change—its slow violence, its unpredictable extreme events, its intertwining of the mundane and the catastrophic—defy conventional narrative structures.

Ghosh highlights how statistically improbable events (e.g., record-breaking storms, heatwaves, droughts) become commonplace, creating a reality that is both “unfamiliar” in its intensity and “familiar” in its recurrent presence. This normalization of the extraordinary is precisely what constitutes the uncanny experience in the Anthropocene, making it difficult for fiction to capture its full existential and emotional weight.

3. Philosophical and Posthumanist Dimensions:

The Ecological Uncanny also resonates with broader philosophical movements within the environmental humanities, particularly those aligned with speculative realism and posthumanism.

• Beyond Anthropocentrism: It challenges the anthropocentric worldview that positions humanity as separate from and superior to nature. When nature reveals its agency and its capacity for radical transformation, it destabilizes our perceived control and highlights the ontological equality, or at least the profound interdependence, between human and non-human entities. This can evoke a sense of humility, but also profound anxiety as our privileged position is undermined.
• Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology” and “Hyperobjects”: While not explicitly coining “ecological uncanny,” Timothy Morton’s work, particularly in Dark Ecology and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, provides a robust theoretical framework for understanding the conditions that give rise to this uncanny feeling. Morton argues that ecological awareness is inherently “dark” or unsettling because it confronts us with “hyperobjects”—phenomena like climate change, nuclear waste, or global warming that are massively distributed in time and space, defy our direct perception, and are viscous, molten, and non-local. These hyperobjects are so vast and interconnected that they challenge our cognitive and emotional capacities, leading to a sense of the uncanny as we grapple with their pervasive yet elusive presence. The “mesh” of interconnectedness, as Morton describes it, means that everything is inextricably linked, and this radical intimacy can itself be uncanny, collapsing boundaries we once held dear.

4. Literary and Cultural Implications:

For literary scholars, the ecological uncanny offers a powerful analytical tool for examining contemporary narratives, poetry, and drama that grapple with environmental crisis. It allows us to explore:

• Defamiliarization in Landscape Description: How authors employ narrative techniques to portray landscapes that are no longer comforting or stable, but rather subtly or overtly disturbing, reflecting the profound ecological shifts.
• Emotional and Psychological Responses: The diverse range of human emotional and psychological responses to environmental degradation—from anxiety and grief (solastalgia) to a sense of displacement and cognitive dissonance.
• The Collapse of Boundaries: How narratives explore the blurring of lines between nature and culture, human and non-human, and the everyday and the catastrophic, thereby reflecting the uncanny nature of the Anthropocene.
• New Narrative Forms: The emergence of experimental and radical narrative forms that attempt to convey the pervasive, yet often invisible, influence of ecological changes.

In essence, the Ecological Uncanny is a critical concept for understanding the contemporary human condition in an era of ecological precarity. It is the chilling realisation that our “home” planet is no longer entirely familiar, and that the consequences of our actions are returning, often in unsettling and unforeseen ways, to disturb our sense of security and belonging.