Earth Is Evil

Steven Swarbrick is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton and coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction.

• List of IllustrationsProvocationsPrefaceAcknowledgments1. Outside in the Ecological Machine2. The Earth Is Evil3. Zero-Waste Sex and Other Energy Fictions4. The Lost D5. Libidinal EcologyNotes

“As the world slides deeper into climate crisis, Steven Swarbrick boldly proclaims that we are still not yet thinking ecologically. The Earth Is Evil tackles our melancholic world of biodiversity loss, overflowing islands of waste, and calls for divestment from fossil fuels. Swarbrick’s wager: There is no organic whole to recover, the earth is evil, and it is our planet to lose. There is no better cinematic guide to the end of the world-and if we’re lucky, perhaps, the start of something else.”-Andrew Culp, author of A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal “A timely intervention in the field of environmental humanities, The Earth Is Evil offers a new way of apprehending the ongoing ecological catastrophe. Instead of melancholically yearning for the lost wholeness of the living world, Steven Swarbrick suggests that we fully recognize loss. Swarbrick’s use of film enables him to offer a genuine psychoanalysis of the Anthropocene, an eco-analysis of our troubled collective psyche.”-FrÉdÉric Neyrat, author of The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation