Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme

Abstract

This chapter examines two examples of what could be called “apocalyptic ecogothic,” both based on the premise that trees are intelligent and have decided to remove human beings from the earth for the sake of planetary equilibrium: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) and the recent graphic novel The End (2018) by Swiss cartoonist Zep. While both texts give nature more agency, intelligence, and autonomous consciousness than earlier ecogothic narratives, they also tend to erase racial and gender diversity from their imagined futures. The chapter thus concludes that there is a racial unconscious which haunts the apocalypse meme so important to ecological movement and the environmental imagination.