STEVEN HARTMAN AND PATRICK DEGEORGES “DON’T PANIC”: Fear and Acceptance in the Anthropocene It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end. —Michel Foucault (14) This article accepts the challenge issued by the publication of Simon Estok’s Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018) to extend theoretical discussion of the concept of ecophobia in current scholarly discourses of the environ- ment. It considers the wider implications of ecophobia in the process of human society-building into the Anthropocene, especially the deeply disruptive present era inaugurated by the Great Acceleration. As a thought experiment with a polemical edge, we present ecopho- bia as a trait that has been socially selected, culturally reinforced and amplified through societal institutions as a means of promoting human domestication through the state-making, civilizing process. We also suggest that the transition from hunter–gatherer communities to early agrarian states offers evidence of a kind of collective madness as evi- dent in the developing unsustainability of their agro-ecological built environments, compared to the resilience of non-state communities. We assert that the seeming success story of state sovereignty has resulted from the fact that the state has paradoxically presented itself as the most efficient “remedy” to the very forms of acute ecophobia it has structurally induced. The developments of capitalism and modern ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26.2 (Spring 2019), pp. 456–472 Advance Access publication June 27, 2019 doi:10.1093/isle/isz051 VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/26/2/456/5524015 by ASLE Member Access user on 22 August 2020