Earth–world–planet: Rural ecologies of horror and dark green criminology

Introduction

Since its initial proposal in the 1990s (Lynch, 1990; South, 1998), green criminology has focused the criminological gaze on a wide array of harms and crimes affecting humans, animals other than humans, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. Those working within green criminology have expanded our understanding of the effects, scope, and meaning of environmental harm(s) and broadened the space for a theoretical examination of the ways in which humans interact with the broader natural world, often to the detriment of the latter. More recently, Avi Brisman and Nigel South (2013, 2014) have called for the development of a “green cultural criminology”, a turn that seeks to orient the curious gaze of cultural criminology toward issues of environmental harm and its cultural dimensions and representation(s). These calls have primarily, so far at least, brought forth some criminological interest in visual depictions of the intersection(s) of culture and environment (see, generally, Carrabine, 2018; McClanahan et al., 2017; Natali and McClanahan, 2017), a tendency that illustrates not only an increased interest in cultural issues within green criminology, but also the simultaneous cross-pollination of visual criminology with green and cultural criminological variants.

This article, in some ways, continues that trend: I am concerned here with the various ways that rurality has been imagined and visualized as a landscape of horror, and the ways that rural landscapes like Appalachia animate the green criminological imagination. The article engages with ecocriticism in order to read those spaces as “dark” ecologies, pushing green-cultural criminology into conversation with philosophical frameworks which can inform eco-criminological readings of cultural productions. I employ a case study of Appalachian coal extraction and place it into conversation with horror cinema’s representations of the rural landscape in order to urge green criminology to recognize what we might think of as ecologies of horror and the horror of ecology.

I begin, then, with a brief discussion of the problem of mountaintop removal coal extraction in Appalachia. I then move into a discussion of the shared dialectical tensions central to the cultural-material space of the rural and the cultural field of horror. The article then describes some of the tropes and images that emerge from the visual register of horror in order to characterize and construct a unique image of extractive rural spaces. Finally, I consider some of the key questions surrounding green criminology’s epistemic and philosophical tendencies in order to suggest new modes of ecological thought that can offer green criminology new ways of thinking about the planet, culture, and harm.

Mountaintop removal in Appalachia

Despite their thematic differences, green and rural criminologies share significant connective tissue (McClanahan et al., 2017). While there are many ruralities and definitions of “the rural”, ¹ the one this article is centrally concerned with is the mountains of Appalachia. The coal-producing region of Central Appalachia, between the peaks and hollows of West Virginia, the rolling hills and bluegrass of central Kentucky and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, is home to some of the oldest mountains and most biodiverse hardwood forests in the world. Central Appalachia, though—West Virginia, Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, and Eastern Ohio—also hold the second largest recoverable coal reserves in the world. After over 100 years of underground coal extraction, mine operators in Appalachia, in the 1970s, turned away from the traditionally practiced forms of underground “deep mining” in favor of the emerging technology of mountaintop removal, an extension of surface strip-mining that promised the ability to substantially increase the raw amount of extracted coal while simultaneously greatly reducing the need for workers. Mountaintop removal entails the removal of up to 800 vertical feet of a mountaintop or ridge in order to access deep coal seams. Practiced extensively in the predominantly rural area of Southern Appalachia—primarily Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee—mountaintop removal is estimated to have impacted over 700,000 acres in the region, a figure assumed by geographers to understate the problem by as much as 40%. The processes required for mountaintop removal include clear-cutting, blasting, digging, waste dumping, on-site processing and loading of coal, and reclamation (Appalachian Voices, 2013; Fox, 1999).

Taken individually, each of these elements of mountaintop removal constitutes serious environmental harm. Old-growth forests are clear-cut, killing wildlife and damaging the natural landscape. Ridges are blasted as little as 300 feet from homes and neighborhoods, frequently cracking wells and foundations. Digging machines, called draglines, are brought in, replacing the natural landscape with machines up to 22 stories tall. The removed rock and soil, dysphemistically called “spoil” or “overburden” by coal companies, is dumped into valleys, burying streams and further harming remaining wildlife. Mined coal is processed on-site, creating leaking ponds of sludge or slurry that further damage the water table (Appalachian Voices, 2013; Fox, 1999). Over 500 mountaintops have been flattened, and over 2000 miles of streams have been buried. Each day those numbers increase.

Nature, environment, and dark ecology

From a criminological perspective, the ecological problems of extraction described above fall squarely under the purview of green criminology. Indeed, there is a robust body of work that considers both the ecological (see, generally, Natali and McClanahan, 2017; White, 2013) and social (see, generally, Carrington et al., 2010, 2011) effects of mining. The majority of work produced under the mantle of green criminology, though, has adopted traditional understandings of the “natural world” based on concepts of “green” “nature” that rise from an unbreakable adherence to notions of “environment”. The problems taken up in the present article, then, are not solely the ecological problem of mountaintop removal, but instead the philosophical, definitional, and semiotic problems of “green”. Definitional concerns and considerations are not the prime ambit of what we call green criminology; most green criminologists take as the objects of study specific forms and moments of harm, a task that does not always demand the sort of philosophical thinking called for here. Nevertheless, because green criminology is already concerned with philosophy (Halsey and White, 1998), problems surrounding the terminology of “green” (Halsey, 2004), and other central categories (see, generally, White, 2013), I contend that there is a need for green criminology to once again critically reflect on its employment of semiotic things like “nature”.

In part, we might challenge the primacy of western empiricism in green criminological thought, as it is in that epistemic tradition that “green” emerges as a category corresponding to romantic visions of “nature”. Such a rethinking has been signaled previously by strands of ecofeminist (Sollund, 2013), southern (see, generally, Goyes and South, 2017; Mol et al., 2018), and visual (see, generally, Natali, 2016; Natali and McClanahan, 2017) green criminology.

The task at hand, though, is to reflect on the linguistic and conceptual categories that maintain the primacy of romantic visions of “nature”, “green”, and “environment”. Following the observation by Raymond Williams (1976: 219) that nature is “perhaps the most complex word in the language”, Riordan (2004: 46) notes that the implication of the complexity of “nature” in Williams’ definition must not be forgotten. For Riordan, “nature” corresponds to an uncritical mode of analysis. As Timothy Morton (2013: 42), whose contributions to “dark ecology” inform much of this article, notes, “nature” and “environment” alike are simply comforting fictions. What, after all, do we talk about when we talk about nature? Is it purely the nonhuman world, all that is not “culture”? Contemporary conditions indicate that there is little or no “nature” left untouched by cultural practice, and so the binary implications and utility of the category begin to feel outmoded. In order to orient my own green criminological thought away from traditional conceptualizations of nature and environment, I make efforts following Felix Guattari (2005), to think instead in terms of ecology and, more granularly, ecologies.

Thinking in this mode requires attention to questions of subjectivity, culture, and relations. Ecocriticism ² offers a vantage point from which to locate cultural meanings of ecology and our place within it. With the emergence of new modes of ecocriticism closely informed by critical social theory, the field has coalesced around a critique of the relationships between subjectivity, culture, and ecology (see, generally, Bryant, 2008, 2011; Harman, 2011, 2012). Following that tendency, I employ cultural ecocriticism in order to consider the extractive zones of Appalachia as places configured by the relations of culture and ecology.

Importantly, as Helena Feder (2016: 1) describes, there is an element of intellectual “danger [in] a notion of nature that excludes culture and its role in ecological crisis”, and so green criminology should remain mindful of the ways that the nature–culture binary is implicated in ecological crises. We might also note the holistic uncertainty endemic to advanced capitalism, and that social conditions, relations, and crises are configured by ecological conditions, relations, and crises. Put simply, our ecological thought is not spared from the uncertainty and horror of late capitalism. It is from that basic starting point—the recognition of what we might think of as the always-already-there horror of ecology and the other endless horrors of capitalist subjectivity—that new ways of thinking about ecology emerge. We can also join Mark Steven (2017) in noting that horror and capitalism are inextricably intertwined in a relationship that plays out on the field of cultural production and representation. Here we can again locate the role of extractive capitalism in the production of the deeply internal horror of late-modern ecological experience (see, generally, Moore, 2011; Williams, 2010). Proponents of a new eco-imagination like Morton present compelling perspectives on the social, economic, and ecological interactions that condition and configure contemporary subjectivities. What Morton (2007, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2016) and others (see, generally, Latour, 2004; Serres, 2012) offer is a “dark ecology”, a component of what Cohen (2013) calls “ecotheory beyond green”.

Dark ecology, in many ways, is an outgrowth of ecocriticism in literary criticism and object-oriented ontology in philosophy. From its roots in literary criticism, ecocriticism operates as a mode of critical inquiry: texts are read as and for evidence of the ways in which we make sense of—and meaning out of—ecology (see, generally, Garrard, 2004). Noting that nature and environment have been historically employed as literary and linguistic devices to communicate various types and degrees of positive affect, dark ecology turns the tables by interrogating texts and other cultural scripts specifically for evidence of nature “in its toxic nightmare form” (Morton, 2016: 59): it seeks out, in cultural productions, the darker and less-inviting experience of ecology.

Dark ecological thought pursues what Levi Bryant (2013) locates as the central tenets of his “black ecology”: that ecological equilibrium is a myth of teleology, that placing culture outside of ecology privileges human subjectivity, and that ecology stretches infinitely beyond that which we can sensorily apprehend. It is in the sensorial apprehension of the material space in which we are immersed, though, that we experience our entanglement with the world, and from which visions of rurality and ecology emerge. A green criminology beyond green might locate in the new framework of dark ecology an opportunity to rethink the assumptions that limit the criminological imagination’s engagement-with and analysis-of contemporary conditions.

Returning to the definitional question of “nature”, dark ecology “invites […] us to think about our intimate interconnections” with not only verdant romantic nature, but also with darker ecological forms like “iron ore and radiation” (Sonic Arts, 2016). Dark ecology, though, can be more than a form of ecological thought and philosophy: it can also be a form of ecological vision articulated in cultural products. Reading ecology and its cultural representation through dark ecological thought offers a unique and timely opportunity to expand the horizons of green-cultural criminology. Eamonn Carrabine (2018) has recently described the ways in which the visual representation of rural landscapes has historically reflected idyllic notions of rurality while concealing, at times, the political and social dynamics of inequality and power. Thinking spaces like Appalachia in a dark ecological frame similarly requires consideration of the dynamics of the rural idyll: in some sense, dark ecological thought entails reading and knowing the non-idyllic landscape as equally present, valid, and meaningful as its idyllic counterpart. In the following section, then, I take up the topic of rurality, placing key concepts that inform rural and green criminologies into conversation with strands of thought recently emerging from critical philosophy and dark ecology.

Appalachian idyll and anti-idyll: The world-for-us, the world-against-us

Despite the harms associated with mountaintop removal, Central Appalachia is, in many ways, what is often conceptualized as a rural idyll, a pastoral and bucolic space and landscape of the sort envisioned and communicated in the fiction and poetry of writers like Thoreau and Wendell Berry, the nonfiction of Bill Bryson (see, generally, Bryson and Cook, 1998) and other writers of naturalist memoirs and travelogues, and the countless photographers and filmmakers who have used the visual landscapes of Appalachia as a backdrop. Here, the idyllic rural is constructed through the image of a pristine wilderness, a place to fulfil the human desire for a leisurely, adventurous, or labor-based connection to “nature”.

Bell (1997: 94) describes the rural idyll as characterized, “ever since there has been a distinction between the country and the city”, by the conceptualization of the rural as “an innocent idyll of bucolic tranquillity and communion with nature—a place to retreat from the ever-quickening pace of urban living and to join in with ‘authentic’, rustic community life”. While this description is fitting for all manner of rural social and environmental landscapes, it is particularly apt as a description of the unique mountain idyll imagined by popular culture. This version of rural Appalachia, with its arms, streams, and mountains open to fulfil the desires of those seeking a particular mix of leisure and (tame) adventure—or, in the case of Bryson and other fetishists of rurality, a mix of adventure and some sort of redemption—maps directly over what philosopher Eugene Thacker ³ (2011; see also Linnemann, 2017) calls the “world-for-us”, an imagined place that exists for the experiential pleasure of humanity. Thacker’s (2011: 4) “world-for-us” is the subjective world that “we interpret, that we give meaning to”, that we, as humans, are “at once a part of that is also […] separate” from humanity. Idyllic Appalachia exists in the social imagination first and foremost as a place for human recreation and enjoyment. The dangers and unwelcoming elements are likely ecological or animal—harsh weather, difficult trails, and even curious bears present, essentially, the limits of “horror” in this Appalachia. Leisure Appalachia as used by hikers and outdoorspeople, though, requires these elemental challenges. The rural idyll, or the world-for-us is, essentially a “green” ecology.

The world-for-us, of course, is not without its dangers; Thacker (2011: 5) notes that while the world-for-us is for us, it does not exist entirely “within the ambit of human wants and desires”. It is actually two worlds, in that it relies on a sibling, the objective “world-for-itself”, whose presence is essential to our enjoyment of the world-for-us. Here, though, it might be useful to alter Thacker’s terminology somewhat. While Thacker posits that the world-for-itself is a “world” that is at times necessarily hostile to humanity, in applying his framework in a consideration of ecology, the world-for-itself label can be a bit misleading—unless we accept the prospect that a world-for-itself would find its own destruction useful.

It can be useful, then, to reframe Thacker’s world-for-itself as a world-against-us, one that recognizes humanity, but that ultimately finds itself in opposition to human wants and needs. That is, a world that we create for ourselves by imagining it, but that nevertheless comes out hostile to “us”. Put simply, without the world-against-us and the challenges it promises, the world-for-us is less for us; it is the knowledge of the capacity of things to turn against us that makes the world-for-us so precious. Similarly, the rural idyll requires its own opposite, what Bell calls the “anti-idyll”. For Bell (2000: 7) that “doubleness” is made up of the competing interests of “desire and dread”. Applied to the material landscape of Appalachia, the two parts of doubleness are the material ecological parallels of desire and dread; we desire the idyllic Appalachia for us, and we dread the anti-idyllic Appalachia against us.

As Bell and Thacker describe, the idyll relies on doubleness and knowledge of its alternative, the anti-idyll. We might also here consider the assertions of dark ecology that despite the dominance of the myth of rural tranquility, more shadowy understandings of nature play a significant role in our relations with ecology, particularly in the ways that knowing “dark” natures challenge the limits of humanity’s mastery of the planet and provides desire by way of dread. Because the promise of rural adventure feeds so cleanly into the idyllic promise of the mountains—what, after all, is the essential “mountain experience” without a bear encounter, or a capsized canoe, or an emergency, so long as there is a happy ending?—there must be a cultural thread running opposite to the green idyll. This thread, the dark ecology of an anti-idyllic “world-against-us” can be located squarely in the literary, visual and cinematic forms of rural horror.

Rurality, ecology, and horror

Although a comprehensive definition of “horror” as a genre is outside the scope and scale of this article, a functional definition is necessary. Here I will note that I am considering horror to be that which aims to generate “fear or disgust in the audience in response to a supernatural or abnormal being that is perceived as threatening” (Bantinaki, 2012: 384). Like rurality, horror relies on a distinct “doubleness” as something that “cannot only repel […] [but] must also compel our attention” (Fisher, 2017: 17). At its heart, horror—whether the gothic horror of literature, the cinematic horror of the contemporary mediascape, the photographic horror of artists like Richard Misrach and others working in “new topographics” (Foster-Rice and Rohrbach, 2013), or the poetic horror of “weird” poetry (Joshi, 2008) and science fiction—relies on those dialectical tensions. The fundamental strength and efficacy of horror, for Thacker (2015: 6), happens in the moments of confrontation with the monstrous or otherworldly, moments that raise tensions between two ontological positions: was it real, or was it imagined? Similarly, Robin Mackay (2008: 4) locates horror in uncertainty, noting that “the overriding affect connected with what we ‘know’—but still do not really know—about the universe and our place in it […] [is] one of horror”. Freud found unheimlich, or “the uncanny” or “unhomely”, in the relationship between the “known and the novel and unfamiliar” (Freud, 2003: 124–125), while Mark Fisher (2017: 8–9) extends that interest and concern out of the uncanny and into the “weird” and “eerie”. Fisher locates in these modes a “certain apprehension” (“even dread”) that exists within the cognitive tensions between what we “enjoy and what scares us”, tying those unsettling modes to “the outside”, a category of space frequently employed by horror and linked closely to the material spaces of rurality (McClanahan and Linnemann, 2018).

While horror, then, exists first and foremost in the mind—it is a problem of subjectivity without much to ground it in the objective material world—it must be imagined in a material landscape, and those landscapes are frequently rural. What better setting, after all, for a genre that requires the dialectic of desire and dread than a landscape whose meaning requires the dialectic between desire (the idyll) and dread (the anti-idyll)? Here we can recall Bell’s “doubleness of the rural” and his assertion that the tense coexistence of desire and dread configures the rural, just as Fisher and others assert that horror is located in the tension between what we enjoy and desire and what scares us.

The cinematic subgenre of rural horror has a rich history that continues to both construct and reflect the cultural imagination of US rurality. As Victoria McCollum (2016: 1) describes, since the dawn of the urban–rural divide, the horror genre has “exploited the badlands of rural America”. Beginning with Deliverance, the 1972 film adapted from the 1970 novel by James Dickey, the mountains of Appalachia have been portrayed in rural horror as the site of unspeakable violence, visited upon wandering outsiders, in over their heads in a vicious place unpacified by the forces of order and civilization. While these portrayals of Appalachia are intensely problematic for their role in constructing the stereotypes that endure in the popular imagination, they also reveal some very real—and often uncomfortable—truths about Appalachia (and, more generally, rurality): despite the unreal monsters populating the landscapes of rural horror, the fear of rurality is grounded in the realities of ecological and social violence that condition places like rural Appalachia.

Landscapes of horror can be analogous to any material or conceptual space we can think or see, from the urban to the suburban, the cosmic to the rural. Among these landscapes, though, it is the rural that I am particularly interested in. I am concerned here with the various ways that rurality has been imagined and visualized as a landscape of horror, and the ways that rural landscapes like Appalachia animate the green criminological imagination. While conducting fieldwork in Central Appalachia ⁴ I regularly encountered landscapes, relations, and histories that rang out with the echoes of horror. In my experience in the rurality of Appalachia, horror was a near-constant thematic in the experiences of those I interviewed and interacted with. At times, it was the sort of uncertainty that merges ontology and economics in the subjectivities of late capitalism, as illustrated by a conversation in which a young West Virginia resident hoping for a job in the coal industry told me that, “[i]t’s scary trying to work here. I don’t know if I’m gonna get hurt or die, or if I’m even gonna make enough money.” At other times, the dread came from the material world of Appalachian rurality, as illustrated in multiple conversations about, for example, the ways that the extent and siting of environmental harm cultivated an atmosphere of fear: “[i]t’s real scary, even as a kid, to go to school when you know that there’s that big pond of coal slurry up on the hill” a life-long resident of West Virginia told me.

While the thread of the rural as a terrifying landscape runs through horror cinema since the 1970s, it functions as one side of a horror dialectic that places the anti-idyllic, world-against-us landscape in a mutually constitutive contrast with the idyllic rural and the urban/suburban world-for-us landscapes. That is to say, the rural is horrifying, in a cinematic sense, for both what it is and what it is not. In horror cinema, the rural is the rural because it is not the urban/suburban, and vice versa. While the anxious horror of urban and suburban life and landscapes is expressed in a visual language that reflects contemporary political anxieties relating to outsiders coming in (the home invasion fantasies of Funny Games (see, generally, Fiddler, 2013, 2017) or the political and cathartic violence of The Purge, or—perhaps most aptly—the horde-invasion fantasy of the vast majority of the wildly popular zombie genre), rural horror relies first and foremost on the sympathetic perspective of the terrified outsider. While the “rural” of rural horror can encompass fields, deserts, forests, and more, in the visual world(s) of horror, the rural can be taken most simply to mean that which is neither urban, suburban, or cosmic. The rural in horror cinema reveals itself through the use of certain atmospherics, aesthetics, and themes; Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example, is clearly rural horror—wide shots of the barren landscapes of rural west Texas abound, and the main barrier to escape presented to the victims is the vastness of the world in which their antagonist lives; in the rural, as in cosmic space, there is no one to hear you scream.

It is that component and motif of rurality—isolation—that gives rural horror its teeth. As noted above, the archetypical rural horror of films like Deliverance hinges on entry into a world that is not adequately inhabited—not for-us enough—to protect us from the violent urges of humanity or an ecology for-itself. In Deliverance and other films the horror is there, waiting in the wings, lurking in the shadows: it is an embedded feature of a material dark ecology. Similar visual and narrative use of an isolated rurality runs across much cinematic rural horror, from Deliverance to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Straw Dogs. ⁵ This body of images stands in sharp contrast with the images surrounding contemporary urban and suburban horror in which the horror is not in the landscape, but in its human inhabitants. In the urban horror of films like The Purge and the suburban horror of films like Funny Games horror does not wait, it arrives. This indicates a key distinction between “green” and “dark” modes of ecological thought: green ecological thinking finds horror visited upon ecology, while dark ecological thinking recognizes that horror—like coal, iron ore, radiation, or toxic metals—is always already embedded in the material landscape.

If the horror of The Purge and other examples of urban/suburban horror reflects contemporary political anxieties relating to immigration, economic collapse, crime, and insecurity, rural horror is frequently distinctly “about” anxieties relating to ecology and ecological insecurity, destruction, exploitation, and collapse. Even in early examples of the genre like Deliverance and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the source of the horror is not in the rural people who torment the protagonists, but instead in the forms of ecological exploitation and destruction that threaten the antagonists’ particular rurality. In Deliverance, a proposed dam not only gives the protagonist group the impetus for the trip—“one last chance to see nature”—it also gives their attackers something to be angry about. Similarly, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the family of murderers who systematically kill the hapless “city kids” engage in their brutality only after the sole local employer—an industrial slaughterhouse—is shuttered. For the family, this collapse not only destabilizes them economically, it provides them something to justify their application of the tricks of the slaughter trade to their human victims. While the divergent forms of rural and urban/suburban horror point to different sets of anxiety and fear, they each grant significant conceptual space to a social fear of crime, whether the (frequently) state–corporate crimes of ecological harm and ecocide, or the “street crime” of murder. What sets them apart, as noted above, is that rural horror locates its antagonists as part of ecology.

Despite the centrality of the rural in cultural productions of horror, and the centrality of horror to cultural and social perceptions of crime and harm, only a few criminologists have considered the intersection of horror and rurality. DeKeseredy et al. (2014) describe the prominence of the rural in horror cinema as evidence of a relationship in which rurality is constructed as horrifying owing to the ignorance of an outsider’s perspective that fails to fully comprehend the nuance of nonurban life. In these authors’ estimation, rural landscapes and life are not only constructed by horror, but misconstructed as horrifying: the rural is made horrifying by a process of “horrification” driven by media representations.

It is important, though, to consider an alternative understanding of the meaning, prominence, and appeal of the genre; what if, instead of the rural being made horrifying by media representations, the rural truly is horrifying? What if the horrifying reality of the rural is the result of the ways that those landscapes and people have been exploited and harmed by human activity and capital? While DeKeseredy et al.’s analysis is consistent with certain strands of critical criminology, and while on its surface it may seem to present an analysis favorable to the aims of green and green-cultural criminologies, it fails to apprehend the significance of the historical and contemporary effects of capital and its attendant social and environmental harms on the rural. Carrington et al. (2014) return to some of these questions, noting aptly that the fearsome “rural other” is only able to exist as a fundamental contrast to idealized “rural masculinities”: evidence of the dialectic of idyll and anti-idyll. Scott and Biron (2010), meanwhile, add that rural horror cinema often reflects an urbancentric projection of the rural other. Green-cultural criminology has already attuned itself to the ways that the ecologically destructive powers of capitalism are reflected in horror, as evidenced by Nigel South’s (2017: 555) assertion that the basis for ecological anxieties in horror is “real in terms of public health dangers, environmental harms and accumulating toxicity”.

When a contact I interviewed, quoted above, told me about how in his mind there was a thread connecting fear (“it’s real scary”) and the processes and effects of extractive ecological harm (“that big pond of coal slurry”), he revealed something essential about Appalachian experience: horror and dread are useful and necessary categories to understand contemporary rural subjectivities. As Morton (2016: 17) aptly notes, “ugliness and horror are important” in ecological thought and philosophy. Moreover, he asserts that only through thinking ecology in parallel with horror can we “create frameworks for coping with [ecological] catastrophe” (Morton, 2010: 17) of the sort that rural and extractive spaces have long faced. We should be cautious, then, in accepting the assertions made by DeKeseredy and others, who find that horror and dread are written erroneously onto the rural landscape in and by the cultural productions of cinema: not only are the ecological horrors of extractive geographies lived and real, thinking those horrors as part of a broader exercise of ecological thought lends itself to the development of “a more honest” eco-knowing that “lingers in the shadowy world of irony and difference” (Morton, 2010: 95).

Importantly, in the rural horror subgenre we can locate cultural expression and recognition of a dark ecological anti-idyll. We can also note, significantly, that the dialectical tension between desire and dread that gives horror its unique qualities is also at the core of our contemporary ecological relations. Outside the familiar boundaries of cinematic rural horror, though, what do the desired idyll and the dreaded anti-idyll look like? How might the rural world-for-us and the rural world-against-us appear intertwined in material ecologies? Here, we can return to the material and lived field of extractive Appalachia.

Visualizing worlds

In the popular imagination, the rural Appalachian idyll appears as a leisure landscape, ripe for human enjoyment and reflection, teeming with the promise of possible redemption through communion with nature or agricultural labor. It is a world that, although rugged, offers the challenges and opportunities that come, if we recall Bell, with “authentic retreat”. Here, the rural maintains its status as a site of primary production, with the product merely shifting from a material one (e.g. agricultural products) to a conceptual or affective one (e.g. meaning). As an inviting leisure landscape that offers or promises a communal relationship with nature, the Appalachian idyll as world-for-us looks, generally, something like that depicted in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

View from Kayford Mountain, July 2015.

I captured the image in Figure 1 while conducting fieldwork on a peak near Kayford Mountain, in West Virginia, in the summer of 2015. Kayford is an active mining area, with mountaintop removal operations dominating its topography. The image, as is the case with all photographs, only tells part of the story, though. The image is the world-for-us, divorced from its twin-opposite, the world-against-us. As part of this mutually constitutive pair, though, the opposing and imposing world-against-us is never far off. On Kayford, I had only, essentially, to pivot on my heels to capture its image, the extractive anti-idyll shown in Figure 2.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Alternate view from Kayford Mountain, July 2015.

The coexistence of these two images, captured perhaps five or seven days apart, is illustrative of three of the issues essential to this article’s concerns. First, both illustrate the competing ecologies of Appalachia: the verdant natural landscape, and the dark and barren extractive landscape. Despite their creation in what is relatively the same temporal moment, in these two images we can find a decoupled form of Walter Benjamin’s (1969; see also Auerbach, 2007) “dialectical image”: taken side by side, they illustrate significant historical change, a form of ecologically destructive industrial and political “progress”. Second, when taken in aggregate, these images illustrate two of the competing visual and conceptual worlds imagined in Thacker’s framework of “worlds” and Bell’s dualistic idyll/anti-idyll; these are the world-for-us and world-against-us, the idyll and the anti-idyll. Or, perhaps, these are “green nature” and dark ecology. Finally, these images reinforce the necessarily dialectic relationship between idyll and anti-idyll, for-us and against-us; without the first picture to inform the viewer of what should be, the second image, the horror of what is, is left unclear; we can only understand what is left by first understanding what once was. This prods at the central problem of extraction, whether Appalachian or otherwise—extractive industry is an ecologically subtractive force, in that it does not merely extract value and material, leaving behind an acceptable facsimile of what was, but instead subtracts from all it encounters (see, generally, Schnaiberg et al., 2002). In this subtraction, what is left behind is often left empty; in emptiness is ecological and existential isolation, and in isolation, again, is horror.

Horror and the extractive world-without-us

There is an emerging form of rural horror cinema that reckons with the surfacing of the new monsters of mountaintop removal and other contemporary ecological harms, a cosmically minded supernatural horror, with a temporal lineage traceable in one direction to the horrifying and unearthly “weird fiction” of HP Lovecraft, and in the other to the anti-natalist speculative philosophy and fiction of Thomas Ligotti (2010), the cosmic pessimism of Thacker, and the dark ecology of Morton, Bryant, and others. In the new modes of rural horror evident in films like The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Silent Hill (2006), The Ritual (2017), and Beneath (2013), ⁶ the locus of fear is a bigger isolation, one that does not necessarily mean we are alone, but only that we have no useful or fulfilling relations. Theirs is a cosmic aloneness, one that ranges from an ontological isolation and insecurity born from capitalist social structures (Williams, Morton, Bryant), an anti-natalist and pessimistic philosophy (Ligotti), and a pervasive feeling of the existence of a parallel universe indifferent to human survival (Lovecraft).

Uniting each of these philosophies is attention to the third component—following the “world-for-us” and “world-against-us”—of Thacker’s typology of conceptual worlds: the cosmic “world-without-us”. This world, for Thacker explicitly and for others implicitly, is the breeding ground of our deepest fears, the most horrifying of many horrors. It is a conceptual geography unconcerned with humanity—not for us, not against us, but without us in both conceptual and material terms. It can be a post-human world (although such a post-human version has never been depicted in any visual form, as even cinematic efforts at visually illustrating a post-human world, such as I Am Legend, tend to feature at least one human), and sometimes a parallel world, in the Lovecraftian tradition, that human explorers happen across through accident or alchemy.

In the case of the world-without-us of Appalachia, we have happened upon it by alchemy—the alchemical power of capital to make something out of nothing (or, perhaps more accurately, nothing out of everything). In Appalachia, the constructive power of capital that historically both exploited workers and, conversely, provided some sense of place and economic security, is now giving us a horrifying glimpse at the world-without-us, in which the limitations of human labor and meters of earthen cover are no longer obstacles to accumulation-by-extraction. The world-without-us is plainly evident in the dark ecology of spaces like Appalachia, as it creeps in the margins of the extractive site.

If, as Thacker describes, the world-for-us is the subjective domain of meaning and purpose (the “World”) and the world-for-itself/world-against-us is the objective domain of science, data, and materiality (the “Earth”), to what domain of knowing and experience does the world-without-us belong? Thacker (2011: 7) responds to his own categorical and definitional problem by noting that by necessity of his framework “there are other characteristics that are not accounted for, that are not measured, that remain hidden and occulted”, and that “anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total”. For Thacker, then, despite becoming visible at the margins, the world-against-us does not ever fully emerge. How could it, after all, reveal itself to humans when its very existence requires humanity’s nonexistence? For Thacker (2011: 7), the world-without-us is neither subjective World nor objective Earth, but instead the remainder, Planet, ⁷ a frame of understanding that “moves the scale out from the terrestrial into the cosmological”.

Once we begin to think in the terms of planet, we are urged towards the sort of dark ecology and object-oriented ontology proposed by Morton; the centrality of Earth, human claims to it, and humanity falls away, leaving behind only the horror of cosmic isolation: what Morton calls the loneliness and deep connection of dark ecology. In the ecologies of extractive Appalachia we encounter the assorted components of the emerging extractive world-without-us—a dark ecology whose denuded hills, valley fills, flattened peaks, poisoned streams, economic ruination, and schools in the shadow of the slurry pond are each constitutive of the true horror of extractive geographies. Extractive Appalachia, then—and other extractive geographies—is more emblematic of a dark ecology than of a green nature.

Darkening green criminology

Across visual and literary cultures we can find illustrations of Appalachia’s place in the social imaginary as a geography of horror, a dark ecology, or a world-against-us. While not always reflective or mindful of the ways in which the horror of extraction is a result of an uninterrupted history of capitalist ecological harm, violence, and exploitation, representations of the rural anti-idyll nevertheless reflect “real” dimensions of the lived experience of extraction. These representations of rural people and ecologies operate in a dialectic with their constitutive opposite, the idyllic world-for-us of the pastoral tradition. Both, of course, are “true” ruralities; this is the doubleness of horror—desire and dread—and the doubleness of the rural. Dark ecology demands that we flatten the planes of validity, that we locate reality in the dark as well as the green.

If our immersion in rural ecologies of extraction is made so intensely horrifying by the constant presence of the unknown, the precarious, what must that immersion be for the nonhuman beings and objects that constitute so much of our planetary ecology without the benefit of notions of scientific mastery? How might the salamander, the opossum, the stream, or the mountain “know” the horror of the mountaintop removal dragline? If green criminology is to reject the anthropocentrism it has long rallied against, it might begin by evaluating its approach to ontology and epistemology. The new paradigm of dark ecology offers some valuable insights into the ways in which we can—and the reasons we should—rethink our conceptualizations of “green” and “nature” as part of that process. While anthropocentrism is derided across the green criminological canon, the discipline’s framing of “nature” still often clings to the narrow binary of nature/culture and the ontological dualism of man-as-subject/nature-as-object. There is, though, rich opportunity in dark ecology (as well as object-oriented ontology and nonwestern cosmology) to rethink those binaries, to redraw the lines of the ecological sphere so that ecology contains culture and humanity. Dark ecology, for example, notes that “ecology does not privilege the human, it is not something beautiful, and it has no real use for the old concept of Nature” (Sonic Arts, 2016). Perhaps a starting point for a dark green criminology, then, is to reconsider the assumptions at the core of romantic western “nature” in order to open up new lines of inquiry and new modes of thinking ecology.

Significant work is already underway that nudges green criminology in some of these new directions, with calls for the inclusion and consideration of nonwestern perspectives (see, generally, Goyes and South, 2017; Goyes et al., 2017; Mol et al., 2018) that are, in some ways, antecedents to dark ecology (Rainforth, 2016). Explicitly feminist strands of green criminology, too, have made great progress in undoing—or at least seriously considering—the ways in which green criminology is conditioned by western, masculine, and Eurocentric tendencies (see, generally, Gaarder, 2013; Sollund, 2013). Sollund (2017), in particular, offers a critique that should be taken seriously and heeded as a starting point for a green criminology interested in resisting romantic notions of “nature”. Similarly, Donna Haraway (2016: 30) characterizes “human exceptionalism” and “Western [eco]philosophical” positions as “unthinkable” in the sense that they offer little or no contemporary utility. Here Haraway also draws attention to the affective mode of horror as a new way to think ecology: her analysis employs an imaginative feminist reconfiguration of the epochs of Anthropocene and Capitalocene, one that takes seriously the weird, the eerie, and horror. Following that, I have endeavored here to locate cultural expressions of the darkness of ecology in the field of horror.

Green criminology would do well to join these emergent positions and to continue to consider the problems of unreflexively adopting a western and romantic ecological and epistemological position that unwittingly privileges human desire even as it seeks to transcend and undo such privileging. Green-cultural criminology opens the door for serious criminological engagement with the colliding forces of culture and ecology as well as the affective experience of ecological dread expressed in cinematic horror. The work that remains to be done, though, includes rethinking those forces not as colliding, but as so intimately entangled that binary separation becomes impossible. If culture is rethought as not only reflecting but existing within the web of ecology, and if green criminology concerns itself with ecology as it should, then we can no longer maintain the binary implied in “green” nature. The problem, insofar as there is one, then again becomes “green” (a problem already taken up, from a different angle, by Halsey (2004) and White (2017)), as it carries the cultural weight of an affirmative ecological position, politics, and purpose.

The “green” in green criminology is positive, leaving little space for the negation and despair of “black”. Perhaps, then, green criminology would be well served by joining ecocriticism in undergoing a process of darkening, a process that Niall Scott (2014: 67–69) describes as having the potential to push beyond the teleologically formulated myths of ecological balance, purpose, and equilibrium; myths that, at their core, support reactionary and conservative “survival of the fittest” ideologies. Similarly, in his call for a “black ecology”, Levi Bryant (2013) describes green formulations of ecology as disturbingly analogous to the neoliberal capitalist fetishization of markets. Within criminology, Brisman (2015: 180) also takes up the issue of “green”, noting that the titular green in green criminology is, in practice, a “multicolored green”, thereby opening the door for a dark green criminology. Following these previous critiques and interventions, a green criminology tinted by dark ecology can make space for a more thorough consideration of “green”. Dark ecology and the object-oriented ontology from which it emerges, moreover, suggest the radical deprivileging of both human subjectivity and the nature–culture binary. In darkening its edges, then, green criminology can broaden the landscape of its analytical engagement with cultural forces that condition and affect the nonhuman, while at once working against the anthropocentric tendencies that configure global ecology.

If green criminology is to sustain its critique of capitalism and its ecological effects, I have argued, there should be a rethinking of the undarkened and binary green that we sometimes invoke, a redrafting of the circle so that it includes culture (all that is human) inside ecology (all that is). If we are to move green criminology beyond the romantic vision of “nature” and to abandon the last vestiges of our western anthropocentrism, we might begin with a difficult admission: to be immersed in the contemporary world, earth, or planet is not to be immersed in green nature, but to be immersed in a dark ecology of horror.