How does culture influence human relationships with the environment? In
Monstrous Nature and Representations of Environmental Harms
, green cultural criminologists Avi Brisman and Nigel South examine stories of monsters and disasters to address how the ways we depict and think about harms to the environment dissuade us from taking care of our planet and each other.
The authors use examples from popular culture, including Disney and Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to consider ideas about how the environment responds to people who cause it harm. Brisman and South identify and discuss three dominant and interrelated depictions of the relationship between humans and the environment: first, nature as
monstrous
or fear inducing; second, nature and the Earth (or parts of it) as
abject
; and third, the entanglement of nature and the
apocalypse
, wherein nature is contributing to the end of the world, with an end point sometimes conceptualized as one without humans.​
argues that such representations have material consequences. The authors make the case for challenging them so that we neither perpetuate them nor retreat into cynicism and defeatism about the future of our planet.