The Way We Talk About Nature Is Getting Weirder

“The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it,” the cultural theorist and critic Mark Fisher wrote in his 2017 book, The Weird and the Eerie. Strange phenomena call our attention to the sprawling nature of time and our own insignificance. Think of H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient sea beast in “The Call of Cthulhu,” emerging improbably into the present. Think of Jeff VanderMeer’s breathing “tower” in Annihilation, with its life-forms that defy scientific understanding. Think of the wildfires in Spain that brought weather extremes to unexpected places. Think of the near-unfathomable rupture of a global pandemic.

The way we talk about the natural world is getting odder. In the early days of the pandemic, sightings of wild animals in cities and rideshare scooters abandoned in waterways prompted the , with its suggestion that human inactivity that question assumptions about our connection to nature. Some depict plants communicating with people telepathically, while others imagine people’s moods influencing planetary collapse. Such premises insist that we are to our environments than we tend to believe. As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilk’s , argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature—and, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other.