Ecophobia, the Agony of Water, and Misogyny

Extract

Ecophobia is central to promoting the sense of human particularity—corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual—that has enabled incredible accomplishments for our species. Our porous corporeality is fundamental here, and as locus, gauge, and conduit for both our self-assurance and our fears, the body is the site through which ecophobia takes meaning and expression. Resisting ecophobic impulses means moving away from the sense of particularity and exceptionalism we maintain, away “from the entrenched notion of humanity’s privileged status as if it exists outside of earth systems” (Oppermann 143–44). One of the ways to achieve this, as Stacy Alaimo has put it, is by “thinking across bodies.” So doing “may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (2). It is precisely such agency and the intimacy of the threats it offers that often evokes the maladaptive response of ecophobia, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in our complicated responses to rot and slime—significant at least in part because these responses are a disturbing playground of ecophobia and misogyny.