Q&A: Has nature always been strange? The ‘eco-weird’ unmakes the familiar

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tentacles reaching from the deep. Dark mold overtaking walls. A familiar forest suddenly becoming strange and threatening. These elements in literature, film and games define the “eco-weird,” a term coined by Penn State philosopher Brian Onishi to describe an emerging genre focused on the strangeness that can emerge from the ambiguity of the environment and humans’ experience of and relationship to it. 

Onishi, associate professor of philosophy at Penn State Altoona, and colleague Nathan M. Bell, a philosophy lecturer at Dallas College in Texas, recently published a book titled “The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Film, and Games” on the topic. Onishi explained in the following Q&A what the eco-weird is and how it may help individuals build resiliency in a changing world. 

Q: What is the eco-weird? 

Onishi: The eco-weird is an umbrella term used to describe the connection between environmental thought and weird fiction, game studies and film studies. Scholars previously had been publishing about environmental thought and weird fiction, but it didn't feel like there was any kind of organizing principle. So, that, in part, is what the eco-weird does. Scholars writing at the intersection of the weird and environmental thought can organize under this idea of the eco-weird. Nathan and I started the Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird, we had an inaugural symposium, and this work sent us on the path of publishing our most recent volume, “The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Film, and Games.” 

American author H.P. Lovecraft looms large in this genre because he has such a huge influence on weird fiction. Jeff VanderMeer is a newer author who has written a lot of different works. The first book of his “Southern Reach Series” was made into a movie called “Annihilation.” Somebody else that I have written a lot about, and gets written a lot about in our volume, is Algernon Blackwood. Algernon Blackwood was a British author and a contemporary of Lovecraft. His fictional worlds dealt explicitly with the weirdness of nature. Weirdness is somewhat broad, but really what we're looking at is the sense in which the world stops making sense. There's this moment out in nature or in relation to the environment where something is off.  

Q: Can you paint a picture of what the eco-weird looks like? 

Onishi: The weird is a little hard to demarcate very clearly, and that's part of it. Take Algernon Blackwood’s stories “Ancient Lights” and “The Willows.” In both stories, the protagonist gets lost in a setting that should feel familiar. In “Ancient Lights,” a surveyor is going out to look at a small area of woods. He's familiar with woods in general. He shouldn't be getting lost, but he goes into this small piece of land and finds himself completely disoriented. Part of what's happening here is that the environment that should feel familiar, and the familiarity that's born out of this kind of human-environment relationship, is one of domination and control. The surveyor says, I'm going to cut this wood down if I want to. The environment pushes back, in part, but pushing back in such a way that it's unclear if the trees are alive.

In “The Willows,” this becomes clear. The characters in this story are lost on the Danube River. Some of these characters, who are well-versed in exploring these natural areas, feel as though the plants are getting closer, but they can't prove it. There's no measurable quantity to it. And, so, it's this feeling, this weirdness of the environment creeping in, of acting outside of its nature, of showing itself in a way that we don't typically understand it to be and that generates this feeling of discomfort. The weird, and especially the eco-weird, is about those feelings that require us to depart the world that we thought was familiar. So, when the plants creep in, we have to take in the world differently than we did before.  

Q: What are some other examples of the eco-weird? 

Onishi: A contributor to “Call of the Eco-Weird,” Jonathan Newell, writes about the fungal turn in weird fiction, referring to how the fungal relates to mycelial connections. When you see a mushroom, you have to accept that there's a whole mycelial network underground, and the mushroom is just one bloom of that organism. You're actually walking along this whole mycelial network, and that shows the world as a kind of weird place. Author Aaliyah Whiteley has a book called “The Beauty,” and writer Sylvia Moreno-Garcia has a book called “Mexican Gothic.” These novels pull at that weird fungal aspect, too.  

Alex Garland's “Men” is a movie that depicts the weird in nature, as does an Icelandic movie called “Lamb.” As for table-top games, there’s one called “Eco Mofos.” It sounds like a silly game, but there's some really interesting work being done across this genre. 

Q: What does the eco-weird help us understand about ourselves and about being human? 

Onishi: The weird part of the weird is that it never gives us a clear answer but leaves us with a feeling of ambiguity. I think the hard part about the eco-weird is that it's, in some ways, not trying to give us answers but trying to get us to the point where we accept the world that we kind of understand is weirder than we thought it was. It’s trying to get us to understand that the familiar either is not as familiar as we thought or needs to be analyzed and thought through in such a way that the kind of ideas we had need to get thrown out the window. 

But maybe more than anything, the eco-weird is one of the best modes for understanding something like climate change. I teach a class focused on the ethics of climate change, and we go through all the science, and we talk about all the graphs, all the models, all of the ways that we know what to expect with climate change. And yet, every scientist will tell you that there’s always a level of uncertainty. And, so, I think that uncertainty in something like climate change maps very well to the ambiguity of the eco-weird.

The ambiguity of the eco-weird gives us tools to wade through these very murky waters, and to do so in such a way that we get habituated to not having a very clear answer, but kind of staying with this weirdness of the world and taking some cues from nature. What is happening? How can we manage ourselves, or imagine ourselves flourishing in this ambiguous world coming at us who knows when? We don't know. We don't know when the next extreme weather event will happen. We don't know when the next drought will happen. We've seen fires and droughts and hurricanes. We don't know when they're going to happen again. I think the eco-weird gives us that kind of insight and habituation to say there's something ambiguous about this, there's something weird about this, and we can take this up in fear and wonder at the same time.  

There are some studies out that suggest that horror, for example, gives us a sense of resilience. There was a study done — and co-authored by John Johnson, professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State Dubois — about how consumers of horror movies, books and games appeared more psychologically resilient during the onset of COVID-19. So, there's this sense in which the eco-weird might, in fact, give us a sense of resilience to this weirdness. We already accept that the world is weird. We already accept that the familiar is thrown out the window. If that's the case, then maybe we can be more resilient to the weird world that we're going to adopt.