This issue, like the conference—‘Nature Crisis’—that it accompanies aims to limn and rehearse some of the issues that fall under the rubric ‘psychoanalysis and the environment’, a complex conjunction whose implications are multiple and difficult, as we come to terms with ‘living with the anthropocene’. As Tim Morton's paper indicates part of the crisis is the problematic categorical framework that we use to articulate both the realisation that something profoundly dangerous is in train as a consequence of human beings' way of inhabiting their worlds and the relation to ourselves that registers and disavows that realisation. The central concept of ‘nature’ needs to be rethought, programmatically for Morton in an ‘ecology without nature’ and a fortiori in an ‘ecology without the present’, where the temporality of nature as conceived in modernity has to be reformulated. His paper poses questions about how data derived from the sciences undermine the metaphysics of scientificity and the comforting illusions of the subject that thinks it exercises mastery through that scientificity. Margot Young pushes this questioning into psychoanalysis itself destabilising the founding binary that Freud appears to take over from the Enlightenment: nature / culture and its stronger modulation animal / human. Her rehearsal of this theme through the work of Roszak, Morton, Mortimer-Sandilands, Haraway and others raises issues about the primordial link between humans and this problematic other and what its ethical reconfiguration might be: grief, restitution, disidentification, desêtre and more might form the components of this post-psychoanalysis of the post-natural.
By contrast, Greg Garrard takes issue with the hyper-culturalisation of nature—specifically in sex and gender—that he sees as fashionably dominant in the humanities, and with it seeks another form of the incorporation of science into the thinking of the human and the cultural. His work stands in critical relation to Morton and Young, though the real objects of his ire are Butler, Foucault, Žižek, and queer theory. For him, queer needs green, but the inverse is more dubious.
From the somewhat abstract theorisations of these first papers, the dialogue between Joe Suart, Adrian Tait and Margot Young foregrounds the phenomenology of the second part of ‘nature crisis’, the
felt response to an imminent peril that can only be imagined in terms that seem both to deny its novelty and refuse its scale. Impotence and despair haunt this discussion of the irrationality of contemporary rationality and the rationality of our irrational responses. Sally Sales in a measured piece looks at the displacement of psychoanalysis to a rural habitus and finds material for reflection on idyll, everydayness and the symptomatology of the new urban inflections of the countryside. Paul Zeal looks to a psychoanalytic practice informed by other traditions—notably those of East Asia—as a way of overcoming the stasis that ensues from the revelation that damage is ineluctably tied up with our living the good life. And finally Ilric Shetland uses the work of the Victorian painter John Martin as a means to reflect on the meanings of the representation of apocalypse: both registration through nature of the work against nature, Martin's oeuvre is also made into a contemporary confirmation of the subject that could contemplate this and an intimation of the limits of that subject.