Eco-anxiety and environmental history: a forum

Abstract

Environmental historians, like others who study and write about the environment, have long worked with the emotional and psychological impacts of environmental change, including grief, anxiety, rage, and despair. But the increasing prevalence of ecological anxiety in recent years, prompted by new indicators of planetary distress, suggests the need for new histories which address humans as subject together with other species to these disruptions in earth systems. We suggest that disturbed earth systems demand histories that are more fluid and more expansive, and more aware of human vulnerabilities. We present several possible modes for these histories, approaching human vulnerability with the languages of emotion and mental illness and through acute affective responses to the production of historical narratives. What, asks each contribution, do we do with these anxieties and emotions? How do we write the psychological and affective dimensions of extreme climates and weather events in contemporary histories? Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, temporal and spatial scale are modulated through these case studies of emotional entanglements and vulnerability.