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Today every question is already the question of everything.
This paper contrasts what it schematizes as “ecological grief” with a broader, more common but conceptually elusive phenomenon of “Anthropocene horror.” “Ecological grief” was described in this issue's call for papers as “an emotional experience brought on by the actual or anticipated loss of cherished natural spaces, ecosystems, species, etc. caused by environmental change” (see Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018a). For the purposes of this exercise I take “ecological grief” to be grief for the loss or threatened destruction of a specific landscape, place or species, as opposed to what might be called “Anthropocene horror.” This phrase is used to name a sense of horror about the changing environment globally, usually as mediated by news reports and expert predictions, giving a sense of threats that need not be anchored to any particular place, but which are both everywhere and anywhere. “Anthropocene horror” is something familiar to environmental activists of various kinds but which is now being experienced by an increasing portion of the world population. This paper tries to articulate some of its most striking features.
In an earlier study, I suggested the concept of “Anthropocene disorder” (2015).1 My sketch of “Anthropocene horror” essentially reiterates that argument, but with the phrase altered to stress the affective aspects of the condition, especially its sense of powerlessness, in accordance with the overall focus of this issue of American Imago. The global environmental crisis (usually loosely called the “Anthropocene”) is being experienced as a source of many different affects for different people and contexts. Nevertheless, an emergent sense of “Anthropocene horror” (AH) seems distinctive enough for it to be worth trying to delineate as a specific affective spectrum, even if experience