Green European Journal: Eco-anxiety is increasingly recognised as a particularly prevalent psychological issue among young people. Is there any escape from the feeling that our world is changing due to the ecological crisis?

Nikolaj Schultz: I see eco-anxiety as part of a wider set of changes to the planet Earth and to our existential condition as human beings. Both are undergoing transformation. The term “land sickness” is my attempt to describe this nauseating, simultaneous double movement of the soil and the human. I’m not sure if it’s possible or desirable to offer “escape routes” from this situation; what I am trying to do is better understand these new conditions. We need a clearer idea of how our emotional and existential landscapes are changing. What does it mean to be a human being in an epoch in which the conditions needed to sustain life on Earth are disappearing? We need descriptions of what it is like to experience the “self” in a world that is shrinking because of our actions, habits, and ways of inhabiting it. What are the emotional registers at play in this situation?

Like Bruno Latour, I strongly believe in description, even if what we are trying to sketch out is the psycho-existential terrain of human beings. If we want to stitch this terrain back together, we should probably first collect its splinters and fragments.

In Land Sickness, you visit the French island of Porquerolles and come across an elderly woman driven to desperation by the erosion of her land, her home. Who is she, and what did this encounter show you?

The woman I met was born on the island. She explained to me that, while this land shaped her identity, there is no longer room for her on the beach because of erosion and mass tourism. She explicitly asked me to leave, because my presence and the traces I was leaving behind were forcing her off the territory where she belongs. This encounter shows that there is no escaping the Anthropocene. Whatever you do – eat, drink, dress, shower, travel – mirrors your entanglement with the unfolding climate catastrophe.

Will environmental conflicts draw the lines of politics in the years to come? You describe how such lines lie even within your family, with your future buried in your grandmother’s past.

Yes, I believe they will. The intergenerational aspect of this issue has landed straight in the middle of politics. As philosopher Pierre Charbonnier has shown, the climate situation is characterised by a modern disconnect between the world or the territory we live in and the one we live off. In the same way that certain groups live off other people’s territories, certain generations colonise other people’s present.

My grandmother’s generation, for example, lived in the present, but off the future. This is becoming increasingly visible with the threat to the material conditions of life of younger and future generations. This is why it makes sense that young climate activists are framing their battles in terms of generational struggle: the young are those who have witnessed the colonisation of their territory and their present. Their futures have been stolen from them.

At an existential level, this weighs heavily. In the same way as I unwittingly leave destructive traces behind me, my grandmother has become the bearer of a responsibility she did not know she was carrying.

She is part of a generation that, after the Second World War, fought to develop an economy that could secure freedom and affluence. She was sure that her descendants would embrace these values with open arms. But now, things have changed, giving her life a completely different meaning. She now realises that the horizons she believed in have become obsolete. Even worse, she knows that everything she fought for has trapped her descendants on a burning Earth. This is an existential drama, the depth of which is difficult to fathom. This is why I think it’s so important to describe the affective implications of this experience.

Environmental divisions and conflicts are starker on a small island like Porquerolles. Are the social and existential questions you analyse in Land Sickness present more generally?

Just like existential divisions on the individual level, geo-social conflicts are at play everywhere: indigenous peoples resisting land dispossession, activists in Germany opposing the expansion of coal mines, people in France fighting against the development of méga-bassines [massive water reservoirs], and so on. But I find island and coastal settings especially interesting. They formerly encapsulated the idea of distance, isolation, and freedom. Now, islands are among the places where climate issues are manifested most visibly and violently – in the form of rising sea levels, coastal erosion, biodiversity loss, polluted waters, and disappearing beaches.

Coastal areas have turned into “Anthropocene laboratories” that can teach us a great deal about what we have become, where we are now, and where we are heading. They are a petri dish for many of the dynamics of [Bruno Latour’s] New Climatic Regime – including intensifying socio-territorial conflicts and agonising existential divisions.

These aesthetic, social, and territorial conflicts are leaving their mark on our emotional landscapes, terrains of life, and existential modes of orientation.

Your work with Bruno Latour theorises a new class politics around the ecological crisis. Who and what is the “new ecological class”?

What we argue in On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo is that we are beginning to see the emergence of an “ecological class”, assembled around a collective interest in fighting against the destructive consequences of current production practices, and for the habitability of the planet.

On Porquerolles, a new type of division and conflict has emerged from the ecological ruins of the tourist economy. On the one hand, you have those who wish to maintain or develop the island’s tourism sector. On the other, there are those who are fighting the ravaging effects of tourism on the island’s habitability. This is a conflict between two distinct geo-social classes. The group fighting for the habitability of the island exemplifies what we call the “ecological class”. This emerging class is not simply fighting to take over the means of production or distribute profits differently; it has detected the damaging costs of current production practices and is working to safeguard the island and its ability to sustain life.

It is the responsibility of Green parties to represent the ecological class.

The Memo was intended to be read by Green party members and Green voters; it even says so on the cover of the original French edition. Are they the forces that will lead the new ecological class?

It is the responsibility of Green parties to represent the ecological class, to take part in its ideological and organisational development, and to present a political offer in line with its collective interests. But yes, the book is also meant for present and future Green party voters. It has been picked up differently by different people in different countries.

In France, certain groups within the Green party – which suffered an awful defeat in 2022 – have used the book to restart discussions on the party, its ideological foundations, the people it represents, and the alliances that should be made. In Germany and Denmark, the book has been embraced by climate movements and distributed among participants, including younger activists, as a starting point for organising their actions. German climate activist Luisa Neubauer has done a great deal of work with and for the book. So it seems that the idea of an ecological class has been picked up on two different fronts at least. Ideally, these fronts would cooperate more closely, especially in Germany, where there is a big conflict between the Green party and young environmental activists.

Land Sickness starts with a feeling of being trapped and ends with billionaires taking off into space. What does this mean for our politics?

Like the billionaires buying up climate-safe bunkers in New Zealand or elsewhere, these space cowboys represent an extreme example of the geo-social class struggle. Of course, they frame their space projects as a collective endeavour – a continuation of modern principles and politics. But to me, these efforts more closely resemble escapism.

The elites are going beyond the earthly limits of a climate-damaged planet, leaving behind the ideals of collective progress. They are abandoning the idea of a common, habitable world, sacrificing it on the altar of personal survival. At the end of the book, I try to sketch out a few individual and collective principles for staying together on a damaged planet. These principles can be most easily explained as doing the opposite to the space-conquering billionaires. They involve constructing a link between humans and the ecological conditions needed to sustain life, embedding society in local and planetary habitability. We need to approach the future in a reflexive manner, continuously mediating between the multiple forces and life forms that ensure the world’s habitability. This requires knowledge mixed with curiosity, attentiveness, prudence, and imagination.

Can we be free amid the ecological crisis?

I believe we have to stick with the concept of freedom, even if many ecological theorists consider it unfashionable or problematic due to its contemporary connotations. People’s emotional, existential, political, and aesthetic attachment to the ideal of freedom is too strong to simply leave this concept behind or think of it as an outdated fiction of the past. We need to stay loyal to the ideal of freedom but betray the hegemonic notions currently attached to it. Luckily, this is not impossible, because freedom has been understood, institutionalised, practised, and experienced in various manners and forms throughout history.

We need to develop an idea of freedom grounded in the earthly dependencies that allow us to breathe, live, and prosper. This kind of freedom is negotiated with the non-human forms of life that human societies depend on to sustain their lives. Freedom could be experienced as “being-myself-with-another”, where “another” includes forms of life that have traditionally been excluded from the realm of freedom. Of course, it will be difficult to institutionalise a new conception of freedom, and even more so to make it emotionally appealing. Like all other values, it must be nurtured. Yet we have no choice but to try.