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How to Cite: Corstorphine, K. (2019) ‘Don’t be a Zombie’: Deep Ecology and

Zombie Misanthropy. Gothic Nature. 1, 54-77. Available from:

https://gothicnaturejournal.com/.

Published: 14 September 2019

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‘Don’t be a Zombie’: Deep Ecology and Zombie Misanthropy

Kevin Corstorphine

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which the Gothic imagination has been used to convey

the message of environmentalism, looking specifically at attempts to curb population

growth, such as the video ‘Zombie Overpopulation’, produced by Population Matters,

and the history of such thought, from Thomas Malthus onwards. Through an analysis

of horror fiction, including the writing of the notoriously misanthropic H. P. Lovecraft,

it questions if it is possible to develop an aesthetics and attitude of environmental

conservation that does not have to resort to a Gothic vision of fear and loathing of

humankind. It draws on the ideas of Timothy Morton, particularly Dark Ecology

(2016), to contend with the very real possibility of falling into nihilism and hopelessness

in the face of the destruction of the natural world, and the liability of the human race,

despite individual efforts towards co-existence. It examines cases of such despair, such

as the diaries of Columbine shooter Eric Harris, whose extreme contempt for humanity

spilled over into deadly violence. Lovecraft writes in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) of a

‘bland optimism’ as the only alternative to nihilistic horror in the face of forces larger

than ourselves, referring to humanity as a whole. Pointing to Morton, and to Donna

Haraway’s notion of the ‘Cthuluscene’, this article argues that radical empathy and

shared kinship might instead point the way towards the urgent change that is needed.

Sir David Attenborough, in a 2013 interview with the Radio Times, states that ‘We are a plague

on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change;

it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population

growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now’

(Telegraph, 2013). Attenborough is one of the world’s most important popularisers of

environmental thinking, and of course speaks with first-hand authority about the state of the

planet, having travelled extensively to film the diversity of plant and animal species on Earth.

His avuncular presence on the BBC is well-loved, and makes this bleak warning all the more

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potent. This is an almost Biblical prophecy of apocalypse, although the implied revenge is

associated with that of nature, rather than God. The language used is highly evocative of the

Gothic, with a ‘horde’ of destroyers threatening the safety of the planet and of ourselves –

although the threat, of course, is ultimately none other than us.

Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013), in their collection EcoGothic, make a firm

connection between Gothic fiction and environmentalism, arguing that the Gothic mode is

crucial to this discourse:

‘Debates about climate change and environmental damage have been key issues

on most industrialised countries’ political agendas for some time. These issues

have helped shape the direction and application of ecocritical languages. The

Gothic seems to be the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties and

provides a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism,

ecocritical theory and political process.’ (p. 5)

In line with this way of thinking about the relationship between fiction and urgent political

debates, this study will bring together overtly Gothic fiction, the science of population theory,

and cultural criticism. Key to this will be the Gothic vision of environmental apocalypse put

forward by Attenborough and other commentators who, I argue, put forward a ‘zombie

misanthropy’ that likens human behaviour to that of the brain-dead creature of myth and of so

much modern fiction. Darryl Jones (2018) points out that ‘zombification has become one of

our major metaphors for thinking through the contemporary scene and our own individual

helplessness in the face of vast economic forces which we may feel are inimical to the good

life, or of the seemingly inevitable environmental catastrophes brought on by those forces’ (pp.

57-58). The ways in which the zombie is used as a metaphor to dehumanise others will be

discussed through an examination of contemporary environmental discourse. The ways in

which this tips over into misanthropy will be illustrated through comparisons with the hatred

of humanity espoused by the Columbine killer Eric Harris. It will be located in the portrayal of

cosmic horror found in the short stories of the most notoriously misanthropic author of the

Gothic, H. P. Lovecraft, and the roots of this world view examined in the writing of population

theorist Thomas Robert Malthus. Like Lovecraft and Malthus, most contemporary

environmental thinkers indulge in speculation about what the future will entail if we do not

change our ways. This speculation, at its worst, can lead to fear and revulsion, and even a sense

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of utter hopelessness. Ways out of this trap, however, are possible by shifting our perspective

on what ‘nature’ actually is; something suggested by literary critic-turned environmental

theorist Timothy Morton, whose work on ‘dark ecology’ will be integral to the present

argument.

There can be no doubt that we are in a state of environmental crisis and facing a

crossroads. Although many might nod and agree with Attenborough’s doom-laden

proclamation, the real implications of limiting population growth are hard to accept. Potential

measures might involve Government control, such as China’s one-child policy, which ran in

its strictest form from 1979-2015, and infamously involved forced abortions as well as fines

and other punishments. Alternately, it might involve ‘softer’ methods, directed mainly at

developing countries and conducted by NGOs. One such organisation is Population Matters,

which proposes several practical ways of bringing birth rates down. These measures include:

‘getting contraception used where it’s needed’, ‘challenging assumptions about family size and

contraception’, ‘lifting people out of poverty’, ‘women’s empowerment’, and ‘exercising the

choice’ (Population Matters, 2018). Only the last point focuses on the developed world,

whereas the previous ones aim to bring other nations up to the standard set by prosperous ones

in terms of the cultural and social issues of contraception and women’s rights. First world

countries, however, lead the world not only in terms of social progress, but in overconsumption.

Both developing and developed countries need a shift in attitude, according to Population

Matters, but the focus shifts from wider-scale development in the former to personal ethical

decisions in the latter. Citizens of developed countries are granted a power of agency lacking

in developing ones, and this agency is held up as the primary goal, particularly for women,

whose capacity to choose dictates the numbers of children that are born. A natural connection

is made that when women have this capacity to choose, they will choose to have fewer children.

Looking at broad-scale statistics, this assertion does indeed seem to be valid. Population

Matters’ website uses statistics from 2008, stating that:

‘According to the UNPD’s

2008 Revision, the population of most developed

countries is expected to remain almost unchanged, at 1.28 billion, but that of

less developed regions to rise from 5.6 billion in 2009 to 7.9 billion in 2050,

with a tripling of numbers in some of the poorest nations. Net migration from

The United Nations Population Division.

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developing to developed countries is projected to average 2.4 million people a

year.’ (Population Matters, 2010).

Migration might seem to be less relevant, but Population Matters, while noting an opposition

to discrimination, broadly oppose mass migration on the grounds that it causes an increase in

the population of the destination country and reverses the trend towards ageing populations and

falling birth rates, thus causing a net increase in global numbers. Furthermore, these migrants

increase the populations of developed countries, which already have a disproportionately high

level of consumption of natural resources.

These are difficult issues. Even if we accept that the goal of reducing the global

population is an unconditional good, an immediate conflict is set up between the claims of

feminism and individual liberty on one hand, and the rights of developing nations to reject what

could be seen as neo-colonial policies on the other. The opposition to mass migration has much

common ground, if not from the same ideological basis, with xenophobic and far-right political

movements. Nonetheless, the stakes are high, and the warning is clear. The threat to all

sustainable life on Earth is such that any effective means of dealing with it might have to

involve a radical restructuring of how we view ourselves and our place on the planet. Human

rights and concerns cannot, in such a vision of the future, remain at the centre of decision-

making about the environment. Such a way of thinking, in fact, might involve casting humanity

as the villain. This is exactly what Population Matters do in their 2016 short film, Zombie

Overpopulation, uploaded to video-sharing website YouTube as well as appearing on their own

website. Zombie Overpopulation presents the viewer with a familiar set of images. Shambolic

human figures shuffle across an urban landscape, intent on consuming everything in their path.

These particular zombies do not seem to attack people (who are absent), but instead destroy

non-human animal life and drink all of the available water until there is none left. It is, of

course, a less-than-subtle allegory for human behaviour towards the environment. It is narrated

throughout by Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Anthony Stewart Head, who ends the film with a

series of stark facts about overpopulation before advising the viewer, ‘Don’t be a zombie. Use

your brain. We all have a choice about how many babies to have and how much we consume’

(Zombie Overpopulation, 2016). The choice of Head for the role of narrator is apposite, even

beyond his association with the Gothic supernatural. His character in Buffy, Rupert Giles, is a

‘Watcher’, who has the responsibility of guiding the ‘Slayer’. The presence of his voice gives

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the listener the assurance of his wisdom, while simultaneously placing them into the role of the

‘Chosen One’ who must fight the forces of evil.

This is without doubt a Gothic vision of human existence, which presents us with a

vision of a monstrous ‘other’ in the form of the zombies. The monstrous other in this scenario,

however, is humanity, and the basic drive of the human race to consume, in order to continue

to live. This is not just consumption, of course, but overconsumption: the modus operandi of

the zombie. Fred Botting (1996) has famously suggested that ‘Gothic signifies a writing of

excess’ (p. 1) and associates this with the figure of the tyrannical villain who emerges as the

antagonist of the genre in the late eighteenth century. Gothic, however, remains a mode that

presents excess in order to draw limits. Botting (1996) argues that: ‘Gothic fiction is less an

unrestrained celebration of unsanctioned excess and more an examination of the limits

produced in the eighteenth century to distinguish good from evil, reason from passion, virtue

from vice and self from other’ (p. 5). If overconsumption itself is the villain in the case of

Zombie Overpopulation, and if this is the current state of humanity, then we are urged to seek

a sense of the proper limits in order to be saved. This imperative, of course, appears in the

film’s message: ‘don’t be a zombie’, the narrator advises. The way to avoid this is by exercising

the right choices, which in this case means limiting the production of children and the

consumption of natural resources. It is tempting to read this moral message in the older

language of sin, specifically the deadly sins of lust,

greed, and gluttony. Writing on Bram

Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Carol A. Senf (1997) discusses Van Helsing’s warning that to fail in

their fight against the vampire would mean the heroes being turned into creatures like him:

‘Becoming like Dracula, they too would be laws unto themselves—primitive, violent,

irrational—with nothing to justify their actions except the force of their desires’ (p. 428). This

is exactly the situation warned against by Zombie Overpopulation, where the only way to avoid

becoming a ‘zombie’ is to exercise restraint and thoughtful planning in terms of contraception

and consumption. This also echoes George A. Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, which

specifically parodies consumer capitalism by having the undead mindlessly congregate around

a shopping mall, in an imitation or lingering memory of their habits whilst living.

It would be unfair to imply that Population Matters are anti-sex, given their strong pro-contraception stance.

Nonetheless, the message involves an exhortation to moral responsibility and sensible foresight in the sexual

realm. The concept of unplanned pregnancy and childbirth is unimaginable in its horror here.

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The challenge of overcoming human instinct and desire—of fighting our more

‘zombie’-like propensities—is an ancient moral question, and radical solutions have been put

forward in the form of religion. The challenge of deep ecology, however, is even more radical.

Deep ecology attempts to think about the world from a point of view that is so radically

dispassionate as to remove the relevance of human perspective, refocusing the question on

nature as important in itself, rather than as mere ‘environment’ for humans. We need to think,

as Morton proposes, on a global scale, and on a global timeline. How, though, can the global

scale be articulated in human terms? Morton proposes an environmental dilemma as

illustration. No one, when starting their car, intends to destroy other species on Earth, yet the

resultant pollution and rise in global temperature does. If one person chooses not to drive on

the other hand, then their gesture is so small compared to the greater mass of humanity that it

makes no difference whatsoever. We are part of a larger species that has an undeniable impact

on the environment, yet are individually insignificant. This is no longer a moral question, but

one that renders morality and thus human agency meaningless:

‘Thinking the human at Earth magnitude is utterly uncanny: strangely familiar

and familiarly strange. It is as if I realize that I am a zombie – or, better, that

I’m a component of a zombie despite my will. Again, every time I start my car

I’m not meaning personally to destroy lifeforms – which is what “destroying

Earth” actually means. Nor does my action have any statistical meaning

whatsoever. And yet, mysteriously and disturbingly, scaled up to Earth

magnitude so that there are billions of hands that are turning billions of ignitions

in billions of starting engines every few minutes, the Sixth Mass Extinction

event is precisely what is being caused. And some members of the zombie have

been aware that there is a problem with human carbon emissions for at least

sixty years.’ (Morton, 2016: p. 35)

Morton’s use of the zombie metaphor is an even bleaker one than we have seen in either Dawn

of the Dead or Zombie Overpopulation. In both Romero’s cinematic universe and in the world

view of Population Matters, individual humans can use their brains to combat the zombies,

which threaten to assimilate the living into their unthinkingly destructive ranks. In Morton’s

‘dark ecology’, however, we are placed into context as part of a wide and interrelated

ecosystem from which we are inseparable. It is dark, rather than deep, because we are

connected to even that which is non-living. As he writes elsewhere (2010), ‘we need to live up

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to the truth of our desire to animate the dead’ (p. 267). Morton’s new term, ‘dark ecology’,

takes deep ecology even further. It removes the conception of nature as object, and places

human existence within its scope.

A fascination with the return of dead humans as monstrous destroyers, to stretch

Morton’s imagery, speaks to a lingering awareness that we are only part of this wider system,

and that it is one in which our very existence carries with it the necessity of our own negation.

We consume in order to push this awareness away. Ernest Becker (1973) influentially argued

that civilisation is the result of a ‘denial of death’ (the title of his book), and in Escape from

Evil (1975), added that that money, in particular, ‘is the human mode par excellence of coolly

denying animal boundedness, the determinism of nature’ (p. 82). James K. Rowe extends this

critique of capitalism in a 2016 essay, claiming that:

‘Fantastical efforts to escape natural finitude by endlessly accumulating wealth

are, ironically, undermining the environmental preconditions for modern life.

As accelerating climate change has us teetering on the edge of the Holocene,

there is heightened urgency to understand the driving forces behind consumer

capitalism, the economic system that has prevailed over the great acceleration

in ecological impact since 1950.’ (para. 3)

It is here that we find ourselves returning to Attenborough’s evocative description of humanity

as a ‘plague’. The claim is certainly catchy, and made many headlines at the time, yet it is

difficult to reconcile this forthright misanthropy with Attenborough’s sense of genuine wonder

at the natural world and passion for communicating this to other humans. If we lack the capacity

for choice, as bacteria do, then there would be little point in his mission of spreading this

reverence for nature. This is an attitude born of frustration and anger, much like Bill Hicks’

(1997) famous description of humanity as ‘a virus with shoes’ (np), which contrasts sharply

with the comedian’s more general vision of a world without conflict, prejudice, and oppression.

It is no wonder, though, that frustration results from the sense of powerlessness inherent

in the destruction of the Earth on a large scale. It is not just that our will is frustrated, but that

it is irrelevant, to think within the framework of deep ecology. When Arne Naess introduced

the term ‘deep ecology’ in the early nineteen-seventies he was, as Alan Drengson (2012) points

out, ‘characterizing an existing grassroots movement, rather than simply stating his personal

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philosophy’ (para. 4). This is important, because deep ecology can then be seen as emerging

from a genuine reaction to both environmental destruction and the failures/limitations of

modern environmentalism. Drengson (2012) also specifically addresses the question of

misanthropy, noting that although some supporters of the movement have indeed been

misanthropic in their statements at times, ‘supporters of the deep ecology movement are not

anti-human, as is sometimes alleged’ (para. 5). Even when Arne Naess and George Sessions

(1984) go so far as to put together a manifesto in the shape of ‘The Deep Ecology Platform’, it

remains committed to human ‘rights’, albeit in a very different form than we are used to. They

claim in their first principle that: the well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life

on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value).

These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes’

(Naess & Sessions, 1984: para 1). Humanity is not necessarily in opposition to the nonhuman,

but quite the opposite is proposed. In fact, this preservation of the nonhuman may actually

increase the quality of the human experience: ‘the flourishing of human life and cultures is

compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman

life requires such a decrease’ (Naess & Sessions, 1984: para. 5). What is decoupled here is the

association of human ‘flourishing’ and relentless economic growth with its attendant increase

in population and consumption per capita. Instead, Ness and Sessions (1984) argue: ‘The

ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent

worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living’ (para. 7). This would

also involve an increased value being ascribed to the diversity of people and cultures on Earth.

Deep ecology aims to learn from, rather than reject, the lessons of aboriginal peoples who do

not subscribe to the logic of capitalist growth, what Morton (2016) calls ‘agrilogistics’ (p. 42).

As Drengson (2012) notes, ‘while industrial culture has represented itself as the only acceptable

model for development, its monocultures destroy cultural and biological diversity in the name

of human convenience and profit’ (para. 6).

In this way we see a false dichotomy set up between environmentalism and human

progress. The direction that progress might take, or rather the definition of what qualifies as

progress, is the real issue at stake. Deep ecology involves a deep pessimism, not about

Morton’s point of origin for our current age of Environmental destruction, or what we might term the

Anthropocene, is twelve-thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. There, the birth of agriculture and a

specific focus on maximising yield of crops, as well as domesticating animals for the same purpose, came to be

the dominant model for what we think of as ‘civilisation’, despite its failures through the millennia.

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humanity itself, but about the adequacy of the current human way of looking at the world.

Before Morton’s ‘dark’ version of deep ecology, Sessions (1987) had already argued that

ethical questions themselves are insignificant compared to the scale of the problem facing the

environment. He suggests that ‘the new ecological world view challenges Western ethics and

calls into question the metaphysics of the modern world view’ (p. 118). Science, in this

formulation, cannot be the shining technological saviour, because it offers merely newer and

better ways to manipulate the natural world, when what is needed is a paradigm shift towards

a recognition of our interconnected place in a web that connects human and nonhuman life.

Michelle Niemann (2017) discusses a more recent set of principles, ‘The Uncivilisation

Manifesto’, (2009) by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, who write as part of their larger

Dark Mountain Project. As she notes, ‘the manifesto attacks “the myth of progress”, the related

myth that humans are separate from nature, and mainstream environmentalism, which they

argue has been co-opted by capitalism’ (p. 254). Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) begin with the

proposition that the coming catastrophe cannot be averted; indeed we are already living through

it. Niemann contrasts this with the preaching tradition of the Jeremiad, which warned the

congregation of what would happen if they did not change their sinful ways. The Dark

Mountain Project (and dark ecology more generally) suggests embracing the ‘guilt and

helplessness’ (Niemann, 2017: p. 254) that results from this acceptance that we exist in an

irreversible age of extinction caused by the human race (the Anthropocene). The first two

principles of ‘The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation’ make this clear:

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us

are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will

face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be

reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’

(Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009, Section IV: para 12).

This is not hopelessness, but merely a rejection of faith. It is a call not so much to action, but

to attitude: an ideological shift is needed. The Dark Mountain Project takes as central Sessions’

claim that the problem lies in the way that we look at the world, rather than individual ethics.

Accordingly, the third principle emphasises storytelling:

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3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling

ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation:

the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our

separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we

have forgotten they are myths (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009, Section IV:

para.12).

Kingsnorth and Hine subscribe, as does Morton, to the idea that language and storytelling

function in a way that is analogous to a computer programme, or to use a word more apt in the

context, a virus. The solution is to change the code, and ecocriticism, and indeed ecologically-

minded art, emerge as something more akin to an ethical hacking of the cultural script, rather

than a straightforward appeal to our reason. It is for this reason that The Black Mountain Project

is an artistic one. It envisions an art that does not take itself seriously in order to entertain, but

one that playfully engages with the making of a new reality. Morton (2016) puts forward a

similar vision of play, contrasting its creative potential with that of Google’s famously laid-

back workplace, which ‘hassles its employees with serious playfulness where what we want is

playful seriousness’ (p. 116.). In other words, we would be best served not to nihilistically

distract ourselves from what is happening to the Earth (of which we are a continuous

component), but to face up to the harsh reality, or ‘darkness’, of ecological awareness with a

playful and joyous creativity.

Nihilism, Lovecraft, and Malthus: Fear at Earth Scale

This paper began by making links between misanthropy and the claims of deep ecology.

Ecocritical thinkers like Morton have pointed ways beyond the potentially nihilistic

consequences of thinking on a planetary scale. The temptation, however, remains potent. The

examples we have seen borrow from horror fiction, and so it is appropriate to turn to this fiction,

specifically that of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose massive contribution to fantasy fiction

is only rivalled, and perhaps overshadowed, by the scale of his misanthropy. Lovecraft’s

relevance is shown by the critic Donna Haraway (as discussed later), calling for the age of the

‘Chthulucene’ (Haraway, 2016: p. 101). Lovecraft’s loathing of humanity, and certain racial

groups in particular, links together the set of attitudes seen elsewhere in this discussion, and

goes some way to diagnosing an aesthetics of green misanthropy. The author Michel

Houellebecq (2005), often noted for his own misanthropy, summarises Lovecraft’s attitude as

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‘absolute hatred of the world, in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in

particular’ (p. 57). It would, however, be more accurate to talk here about the human world,

and indeed the ‘modern world’ might well be associated with the idea of the Anthropocene.

Houellebecq sees value in adopting Lovecraft’s philosophical position, while rejecting his

racism and hatred of sexuality. What happens, however, when we take hatred of the modern

world to its absolute conclusion? This is the nihilism of the terrorist.

Such terrorist nihilism was seen on the day of the Columbine High School Massacre in

1999. The motivations of the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were soon linked in

a kneejerk media response to their alleged tastes, notoriously the band Marilyn Manson and

the videogame Doom (far from unusual interests, given the existence of millions of fans of

both). Harris does indeed seem to have used WAD files (a Doom level editor, and popular

hobbyist activity) to recreate his neighbourhood, but did not limit himself to violent fantasies,

as he wrote in a school essay: ‘many times I have made levels with absolutely no monsters or

guns in them. I have created worlds with beautiful, breath taking scenery that looks like

something out of a science fiction movie, a fantasy movie, or even some “eldritch” from H. P.

Lovecraft’ (Kass, 2014: p. 58). It would be foolishly reductive to reduce, as some did, this

complex incident to an enjoyment of specific pop cultural products. It did not, however, happen

in a vacuum, and Harris’ violent hatred of the modern world, while not stemming from

Lovecraft in any direct way, shows the same kind of thinking that happens when nihilism and

misanthropy collide. In his journal, Harris writes, ‘the human race isn’t worth fighting for, only

worth killing. give the Earth back to the animals, they deserve it infinitely more than we do’

(Harris, 1998-99: para. 5). He also fantasises about killing the whole human race: ‘just thinking

if I want ALL humans dead or maybe just the quote-unquote “civilized, developed, and known-

of” places on Earth. maybe leave little tribes of natives in the rain forest er [sic] something’

(Harris, 1998-99: para. 9). He indulges in racist rants, although in an inconsistent way that at

times includes a hatred for the ‘white’ race. The only consistent thread of argument is a

conviction that human beings are hypocritical, worthless, and deserve to be destroyed.

Lovecraft, too, held racist views, and they are now generally acknowledged to have

gone beyond the commonplace assumption of white supremacism that characterised his time,

place, and class. These include a specific fear of Africans (and African-Americans) and non-

English speaking immigrants, which clearly indicate a reactionary response to the Great

Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North, and to the waves of immigration

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from Europe, both of which were occurring early in his writing career and continued

throughout. Houellebecq (2005) points out that it was when Lovecraft left the town of

Providence, Rhode Island, and moved to New York, ‘that his racist opinions turned into a full-

fledged racist neurosis’ (p. 105). Pointing to a now-infamous 1924 letter to Frank Belknap

Long, where Lovecraft uses particularly racist language, Houellebecq claims that ‘this is no

longer the WASP’s well-bred racism; it is the brutal hatred of a trapped animal who is forced

to share his cage with other different and frightening creatures’ (p. 106). In this world view,

other people are reduced to something less than human, even something monstrous. His vision

in this letter (quoted here by Houellebecq), is almost indistinguishable in style from his fictional

prose, and describes a scene that would not altogether be out of place in the zombie fiction

discussed earlier:

‘The organic things—Italico-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful

cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were

monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal;

vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and

slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and

doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea

unnamabilities […] From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry

away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the

collectively devastating.’ (Houellebecq, 2005: pp. 106-107)

Lovecraft combines an incredibly broad range of imagery that includes decay, disease, and the

primitive (the pithecanthropus was considered at the time to be a kind of ‘missing link’ between

humans and non-human apes). What is most striking is the way in which all individuality is

lost in a hateful portrayal of one monstrous face. This is the essence of true racism, but is also

so ludicrous as to almost transcend it. As Houellebecq (2005) points out, the description of the

‘Italico-Semitico-Mongoloid’, for example, is essentially meaningless: ‘the ethnic realities at

play had long been wiped out; what is certain is that he hated them all and was incapable of

any greater specificity’ (p. 107).

Lovecraft describes a common fear of his day: that immigration and race-mixing would

lead to the decline of Western nations. L. Sprague de Camp identified this idea in Lovecraft’s

thinking in his 1975 biography of the author, noting the popularity of belief in the division of

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humanity into the separate races, of which the Aryan is superior. De Camp notes that Lovecraft

was a keen reader of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,

translated into English from the German in 1912. Chamberlain rails in particular against the

mixing of supposedly superior and inferior races to create ‘mongrel’ races. As de Camp (1975)

points out, ‘these delusions were popularized in the United States by Madison Grant (The

Passing of the Great Race, 1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against

White World Supremacy, 1920)’ (p. 97). De Camp associates Lovecraft’s reading of these

books with his belief, certainly in his early years, in the superiority of the Aryan race and his

own membership of this group. He claims that this allowed Lovecraft, who never really

managed to live up to any of his academic or career ambitions, to feel special: ‘if he could

succeed as an individual, at least he could belong to a superior breed of man’ (de Camp, 1975:

p. 99). There is, then, a desire for purity, as if the world could be cleansed of its flaws through

the avoidance of miscegenation. Lovecraft continually returns to hybrid creatures as a source

of horror, most famously the monstrous Cthulhu. When the narrator of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’

(1928) discovers a bas-relief representation of the thing, he declares ‘my somewhat extravagant

imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature’

(Lovecraft, 2008a: p. 205). This, however, is merely an impression from the carving, as the

thing itself ‘cannot be described’ (Lovecraft, 2008a: p. 223) because it is so alien that it seems

to contradict the very laws of nature. When a group of terrified sailors plough through the

creature with their ship it bursts into a foul gas, only to end up ‘recombining in its hateful

original form’ (Lovecraft, 2008: p. 224). This is reminiscent of the 1991 action film Terminator

2, where the time-travelling killing machine, the T-1000, is frozen and shattered into pieces,

before recombining to continue its pursuit of the human protagonists. The horror comes from

the fact that these enemies cannot be destroyed. This is also the horror of the zombie, and as

Morton (2016) suggests in Dark Ecology, the horror of the realisation that we are a part of the

monster while simultaneously having no power to do anything about it.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Lovecraft might want to step back from the world,

as constructed by his racially-tinged consciousness, and to imagine himself superior. There is

no doubt that this hybridity is racially charged. S. T. Joshi (1990), discussing Lovecraft’s

monstrous creations, notes that ‘if subhuman creatures are cases of individual decadence,

hybrids are symbols of a racial degeneracy still more horrible because vastly more widespread’

(p. 221). This is a horror that cannot be contained. In this context, Joshi quotes from Lovecraft’s

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short story ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (1927), which is worth repeating here (with a slightly

different selection of text) because of the way that it demonstrates this racialised threat:

‘Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor […] The population is a hopeless tangle

and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one

another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far

distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the

lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the

harbour whistles […] From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the

blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky.’ (pp. 150-151)

It is curious that Lovecraft associates environmental squalor with the ‘horror’ of this mingling

of people, represented by the sound of their different dialects. The ‘oily waves’ and ‘grimy

piers’ speak of modernity and industrialisation, although Red Hook, positioned in Brooklyn on

the Upper New York Bay, was indeed massively polluted in the early twentieth century, before

the introduction of the 1972 Clean Water Act and the subsequent Red Hook Water Pollution

Control Project (NYC Department of City Planning, 2014: p. 14). This is simultaneously a fear

for humanity, and a disgust at the human race. As Joshi (1990) notes, ‘Lovecraft does not offer

humanity much hope in the end: we shall either be wiped out by those unassailable nuclei of

aliens on the fringe of our civilization or destroy ourselves through repeated miscegenation’

(p. 227).

There is not much room here for choice. It is easy to see Lovecraft in the position, as

Houellebecq (2005) describes it, as displaying, ‘the brutal hatred of a trapped animal’ (p. 106).

This is the same kind of hatred shown in Eric Harris’ journal (1998-99), although his thoughts

are tinged with a kind of environmental consciousness that is as vague and simplistic as his

racial thinking:

‘we arent GODS. Just because we are at the top of the food chain with our

technology doesnt mean we can be “judges” of nature […] I think we are all a

waste of natural resources and should be killed off, and since humans have the

ability to choose... and I’m human... I think I will choose to kill and damage as

much as nature allows me to so take that […] only Nature can stop me. I know

I could get shot by a cop after only killing a single person, but hey guess the

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fuck WHAT! I chose to kill that one person so get over it! Its MY fault! not my

parents, not my brothers, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer

games, not the media. IT is MINE! [sic].’ (para. 10).

Harris is adamant in his assertion of free will, even as he plans his destruction of human will

through murder and suicide. This is clearly the rambling of a severely disturbed young man,

but his choice of language is revealing. Human civilisation is portrayed as simply being ‘a

waste of natural resources’, and ‘nature’ is invoked as something much larger that does not

involve a consideration of human moral values. It is, according to Harris, in his ‘nature’ to kill,

and the possibility of society’s influence is completely rejected. It is through this desire to be

free of a corrupt society, and to act with impunity, that Harris feels a comradeship with the

Nazis. Fascism offers a way out of the tangled complexity of politics, and racial purity offers

a sense of identity and belonging that can all too often be lacked. Lovecraft found horror in this

complexity and represented it through his monstrously hybrid creatures. To transfer this onto

the real world, however, is dangerous territory, and territory which Lovecraft came close to in

some of his sentiments. Morton (2007), writing on deep ecology, warns against the temptation

to simplify. Nature, he argues, is not ‘over there’ (p. 19); it is not something detached from the

reality of our existence. Whatever ‘nature’ might be, human existence and culture are

inseparable from it, as is the fact of our own death and the death of our species. We should not,

however, wish for these to come about. An overly fond wish for death, he suggests, is ‘a

warning to deep ecology: if we aestheticize this acceptance, we arrive at fascism, the cult of

death’ (p. 205).

Such a potential line of thinking springs from the work of Thomas Robert Malthus, the

most famous and influential advocate of the reduction of population growth. An Essay on the

Principle of Population, published in 1798 and expanded in 1803, argued that unchecked

human population growth would inevitably outstrip resources, leading to various types of

natural misery, with famine chief among them.

To prevent this misery, Malthus argues that

preventative measures should be taken. Over the years, his name has become a byword for

misanthropy, with the adjective ‘Malthusian’ used to describe any kind of pessimistic attitude

The later term ‘carrying capacity’ appears in the mid-nineteenth century to describe this limit on natural

resources in a given area. Population control groups commonly use this to refer to a hypothetical maximum

human population on the Earth as a whole.

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towards population growth.

Malthus himself would not have identified as a misanthrope,

claiming instead the goal to reduce human suffering. Claiming that a check to population is

inevitably necessary in nature, he suggests that, ‘it was better that this check should arise from

a foresight of the difficulties attending a family and the fear of dependent poverty, than from

the actual presence of want and sickness’ (Malthus, 2018, Book IV, Chapter I: para. 3). As with

Zombie Overpopulation, the goal is to reduce human suffering through a targeted and

intelligent strategy of limiting numbers. Nonetheless, an unhappy legacy of Malthus’ thinking

has been a callous indifference to the plight of the poor. In an article marking the end of China’s

one-child policy, Matt Ridley (2014) traces the influence of Malthus, claiming that he ‘thought

we should be cruel to be kind to the poor, lest they have too many babies’ (Ridley, 2014: para.

7). This claim is not strictly true, but there is no doubt that this interpretation of Malthus,

particularly his implication that overpopulation should be curbed by moral restraint, led directly

to an official indifference to the suffering of millions. We might look to Charles Trevelyan,

who blamed the 1845-49 Great Irish Famine on the laziness of the people, or Winston

Churchill, who blamed the 1943 Bengal famine on the overbreeding of Indians.

As evidence for this ideology, Ridley points to a section of Malthus’s expanded version

of his essay, where the following passage appears, suggesting that because overpopulation

inevitably leads to death by famine, we should avoid famine by actively encouraging disease:

‘[W]e should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede,

the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too

frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously

encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary

habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people

into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should

build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in

all marshy and unwholesome situations.’ (Malthus, 2018, Book IV, Chapter V:

p. 1)

See, for example, thirty-six references to ‘Malthus’ or ‘Malthusian’ in a relatively short pro-population growth

essay by journalist Brendan O’Neill: ‘Our Brave New World of Malthusian Madmen’ (2010), published on the

overtly anti-Malthusian website Sp¡ked.

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What Ridley does not note is that this is an extremely disingenuous section of Malthus’ essay,

where he deploys a sarcastic tone, along the lines of ‘well, we’re letting famine happen, so why

not plague while we’re at it?’ The target of his barb is this failure to curb population, with

specific reference to a moral argument that has been made elsewhere for early marriage (if

people marry later, his reasoning goes, then they will have fewer children). As Gregory Bungo

(2003) argues, this is ‘an extreme statement of what he believes would be a consistent policy

for people who think that early marriages are conducive to good morality. He is not describing

what he wants to occur — he is satirizing the proponents of early marriage’ (para. 3). Bungo

compares this to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), where Swift makes the famous

(and brutally ironic) suggestion that poor Irish people could benefit by cooking and eating their

excess children. In all these cases, the imagery is consistent, and consistent too, with

Lovecraft’s description of the overcrowded and filthy Red Hook district. Disease, horror, and

inevitable death are attendant on overpopulation.

Despite this overly straightforward reading of Malthus (which is far from the first time

this has happened), Ridley makes important links to Western green thinking, and how it was

Western environmentalism, rather than Chinese Communist ideology, that directly influenced

the implementation of the one-child policy. In fact, despite the human rights abuses the policy

entailed, many thinkers are beginning to reappraise the policy from an environmental

standpoint. Sarah Conly (2015) writes in The Boston Globe that the policy was implemented

in a heavy-handed way in terms of forced sterilisation and abortions and argues that its other

ill effects such as sex-selective abortion and the consequent gender imbalance can be blamed

on sexism rather than the policy itself. She continues: ‘the idea that people should limit the

number of children they have to just one is not, I would argue, a bad one, for the Chinese or

for the rest of us’ (para. 2). A paper published in 2017 in the prestigious journal Demography

led to calls for its withdrawal, notably by demographers Wang Feng and Cai Yong, due to the

fact that the author, Daniel Goodkind, goes some way towards backing up the Chinese

government’s claim that the policy led to four hundred million avoided births, rather than

dismissing this as propaganda, as is the standard Western view (2017: p. 1375). This argument,

however, is about whether or not China has done what it has claimed. There is increasingly

little dispute about the idea that if the policy has indeed lessened population, then from an

environmental standpoint this is a moral good. This is in contrast to the population optimism

proposed by Ridley (2014), who claims that economic growth and technological development

are our best hope, and that populations tend to balance out when reaching enough prosperity

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(para. 8). This moves towards a debate about human nature: are we indeed a ‘plague’ on the

Earth, or will the human potential for both rationality and compassion make us its saviours?

Conly (2015) argues that we must be cautious:

‘Of course, things might change. Maybe technological fixes will save us, ending

our unsustainable depletion of natural resources and our contributions to climate

change. When we speak of the future, we can never be completely certain. But,

at present, when the probability of harm is high, and the damage in question is

great, we have no right to risk the danger. Certainty isn’t required […] It’s new

for us to think of something as immediately joyful as childbearing as harmful,

and it’s hard to change our ideas when we are confronted with new

circumstances. This is natural. Natural, but dangerous.’ (para. 22)

Both the media understanding of overpopulation and the academic appraisal of solutions

present a dichotomy that is hard to avoid. The future is indeed uncertain, and speculation tainted

by either pessimism or optimism.

Lovecraft (1928) recognised this in his famous opening to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, where

he suggests that science will not save us, but will eventually reveal the truth of the universe,

and that this will be overwhelming in its horror:

‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind

to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst

of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The

sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but

some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such

terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall

either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace

and safety of a new dark age.’ (pp. 201-202)

This concept is a brilliant one, but however it may be shaped by Lovecraft’s own pessimism

and misanthropy, it is also a literary device designed entirely to set up the appearance of

Cthulhu and the rest of his pantheon of fictional monsters. Lovecraft’s racism and fear of

modernity doubtless inform his fiction, but are not its purpose. This contrasts with something

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like Zombie Overpopulation that draws on shared cultural imagery in order to advance its

polemic. There is another telling phrase used in the story: the narrator claims that theosophists

have guessed at the truth, but present it ‘in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked

by a bland optimism’ (Lovecraft, 2008a: p. 202). ‘Bland Optimism’ is exactly how a deep

ecological perspective views the hope that technology and human ingenuity will save the

planet. In contrast to this, Gothic imagery is deployed in order to shock us out of this

complacency.

It is in adopting such a Gothic tone that ecological thinking tends to reach a wide

audience. This device was used by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), which is widely

regarded as the ‘birth’ of ecocriticism as we know it and depicts a dystopian future without

birdsong. It continues with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which uses the

language of warfare to warn of mass starvation in the near future. William and Paul Paddock’s

Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive (1967) goes so far as to suggest a system

of triage that in the future would see starving nations such as India abandoned to their fate. The

crossover between scientific speculation and science fiction is nowhere more obvious than in

Ehrlich’s introduction to the SF collection Nightmare Age (1970). Under the heading ‘Eco-

Catastrophe!’ he imagines a future where the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s fails

and leads only to further starvation, world chaos, and eventually global warfare. As William

Yeatman (2017) points out, however:

‘In real life, these green revolutionaries—led by Norman Borlaug—saved as

many as a billion lives. Simply put, Ehrlich’s vision of the future, which he

based on appeals to his scientific knowledge, was the exact opposite of what

occurred. His vision is apocalyptic; reality was a story of human progress.’

(para. 5)

Nonetheless, this saving of lives can yet be viewed as a negative development, if we take a

misanthropically green view. The environmental apocalypse is only deferred. So where to go

in this future? It is curiously appropriate that the futurist thinker Donna Haraway (2016) has

turned to Lovecraft, albeit obliquely, in her call for a ‘Chthulucene’ to replace the

Anthropocene (p. 101). Here she changes the spelling to move the connection away from

An esoteric philosophy popularised in the United States by Helena Blavatsky in the late nineteenth century.

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‘Lovecraft’s misogynist racial nightmare monster’ (p. 101) and towards the ancient Greek term

Chthonic, or those things related to the underworld, which she identifies with the Californian

Pimoa Cthulhu spider. The spider lives under stumps, and also possesses long legs, which are

reminiscent of the tentacles emerging from Lovecraft’s creature. We should view ourselves as

connected, she argues, by webs or by tentacles, and adopt a radical rejection of

anthropocentrism that would have us ‘make kin, not babies!’ (p. 102). Thus, although we

should not subscribe to the top-down hierarchies that have characterised movements such as

China’s one-child policy, we nonetheless should make part of our living on Earth a

commitment to reducing the numbers of our species for the good of all.

Critics like Haraway and Morton recognise that we are already living in an environment

which has been substantially destroyed by human activity, yet neither suggest that should

inevitably lead to misanthropic nihilism. It is yet possible to engage with the Earth as the living

part of it we are. If we are to succeed it will not be through viewing nature as a Gothic villain,

or alternately by casting ourselves in the role. Gothic fiction, however, can force us to recognise

these extremes of thinking about our place in Earth’s ecosystem. Are we the monstrous villain,

mindlessly consuming and destroying, or can we face up to the moral responsibility thrust on

us by the nature of our species, which has set itself up as master of the planet’s destiny? The

former view is tempting, and even if we take the latter, we are dragged back to a hopeless

nihilism by the impossibility of working together as one. As Morton (2016) points out, when

we see ourselves as we truly are, as part of an uncontrollable whole, then the experience is

terrifyingly uncanny, or rather, he writes, ‘it is weird’ (p. 1). The only solutions are tyranny,

violence, or at least the yearning for cataclysmic destruction. This is a Gothic way of looking

at the world, and it is in this very recognition that this represents an excess of pessimistic vision

that we may reach a position of nuance where we can avoid a continued destruction of the

environment without indulging in moral inhumanity. If this is a question of cultural

programming then we need to urgently replace the narrative, and the stories we tell could not

be more crucial.

Morton amusingly rejects Haraway’s term, while acknowledging her a friend, writing: ‘Sorry Donna, It's Not

the Cthulhucene. Cthulhu is a being that doesn’t link shit in its tentacles. Cthulhu means shit doesn’t matter at

all. I'm sticking with Anthropocene.’ (Morton, 2016). Here Morton rejects the spelling variation and admits to

his irritation with critics who reject ‘Anthropocene’ as a term.

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BIOGRAPHY

Kevin Corstorphine is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Hull. He has

published on Gothic and horror authors including Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard

Matheson, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King. His interests focus on space and

place, including haunted houses, gendered and racialised spaces, memory, trauma, and the

repressed. He convenes a module on American Gothic at Hull which examines the relationship

between American national identity and the Gothic imagination. Together with Laura

Kremmel, he is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018).