More Hilly Love Songs: Towards Theorizing Eco-Anxiety

Abstract

Eco-Anxiety has appeared in media and academia more frequently in recent years because climate change, global warming, degrading ecological systems, melting glaciers and other environmental issues are real concerns and threatening challenges in our contemporary world. These have serious impacts on mental health and overall well-being of human as well as non-human life on our planet. Eco-Anxiety describes such phenomenon along with other related terms like ecological grief, solastalgia, climate anxiety, eco-nostalgia, eco-anger and so on. In order to settle the conceptual overlapping among these terms and make the concept of Eco-Anxiety theoretically sounder and more working, this study contends to maintain that Eco-Anxiety is not simply related to the ‘future fear’ of ecological catastrophe, but it is more inclusive and comprehensive concept that relates to the fears of future, grief and mourning over current ecological concerns and sorrows of the past disasters. Thus it has the potential to describe and cover almost all related phenomenon that is otherwise put under separate headings like climate anxiety, ecological grief, solastalgia etc in previous discussions. Eco-Anxiety is a multifaceted term and has several perspectives including psychological, philosophical, physiological, moral, eco-psychological and sociological. This conceptualization of Eco-Anxiety makes it more significant as a literary theory that can be utilized for the critical reading of eco and environmental literary texts as well as war literature that also projects violence done to non-human world. Thus it will be more supportive for literary research and academia contributing to the field of Ecocriticism.