J.S. Dougless On ecofiction
Photo by Thomas Marquize
I’ve always loved a viral clip of Werner Herzog taken during Burden of Dreams. In it, Herzog is standing in his filming location, a verdant rainforest, looking miserable. He says, “Taking a close look at once around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”
This perfectly encapsulates an attitude about the natural world that I cannot understand. It’s the tendency to layer our human motivations onto plants and animals. We call a jaguar vengeful, a banana tree ambitious, and a poison dart frog murderous. Then we believe that, because of these human thoughts and feelings that we have imbued, we are justified in harming and conquering the natural world. It’s an attitude that has been explored for centuries from the point of view of the conquering human, and I’m frankly a little sick of it.
When I write in the eco horror corner of the vast ecofiction genre, I try to strip the natural world of human motivation. When you look at nature from this perspective, it becomes stark, gorgeous, and frightening. Our pets, the squirrels in our yard, the trees lining the street, the mountains that loom over us, all are inexorable and unknowable.
It’s difficult to face the fact that something you love does not share your motivations and emotions. No matter how many plants and animals we attempt to tame, we cannot understand how a goldfish views the world or how flowers feel when bees gather their pollen. Even when we pretend to understand, that understanding is spiced with a frightening unknowability. Is it a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder, or just animals and plants following their survival instinct? Or is something more sinister going on that our measly human brains cannot comprehend?
Our motives are as opaque to a tree as the tree’s motives are to us. And yet we are surrounded by them. Maybe one day, they will rise up. The little animals will leap from branches to our scalps, while mycelium breaks through the ground to wrap around our feet and drag us beneath the soil.
Who knows?
That’s why I love eco horror. Our imaginations can enter those dark spaces and poke at the possibilities. We can let the sap bleed out until something cohesive takes shape, letting it solidify in our brains, forever altering our perspective.
J.S. Douglas is a horror author living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, daughter, dog, and a growing collection of fish. She has short stories published in several magazines and anthologies. Her works most often address the topics she knows best: existential dread, ghosts, monsters, and the everyday horrors of existence. You can explore her published works and find her social media accounts by visiting her website, jsdouglaswrites.com.