Eco-anxiety and the pathology of the normal: Prophetic attunement to ecological absurdity

Bower, Richard ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6443-4076 2026. Eco-anxiety and the pathology of the normal: Prophetic attunement to ecological absurdity. Environmental Ethics Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The philosophical and political implications of eco-anxiety amid anthropogenic climate change were explored, and the ways in which normativity and affect intersect under planetary collapse were examined. Drawing on critical psychology, collapsology, and absurdism, eco-anxiety was argued to be not a cognitive distortion but an affective epistemology—a mode of knowing-through-feeling that functions as prophetic attunement to the collapse of unsustainable norms. This argument was contextualized against scholarship that has established the rationality of eco-anxiety, and a distinctive philosophical account of the normative structures whose breakdown eco-anxiety discloses was offered. Therapeutic acceptance and wellbeing practices were scrutinized for their role in the individualization of distress and the perpetuation of a pathology of acceptance to a self-destructive system. In contrast, absurdism was posed as a generative framework fostering lucidity and ethical refusal. Ultimately, anxiety was repoliticized, normativity itself was identified as the problem, and a collective re-imagining of lifescapes toward new forms of care in collapse was urged.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Philosophy Documentation Center
ISSN:	0163-4275
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 June 2026
Date of Acceptance:	22 June 2026
Last Modified:	29 Jun 2026 10:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187770

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