AT HOME WITH THE WEIRD: DARK ECO-DISCOURSE IN TANIS AND WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE

One of the most influential recent additions to critical environmental discourse has been Tim Morton’s concept of dark ecology, an approach to nature that rejects conventional ideas of sustainability and instead foregrounds a fundamental relationality between human and non-human materials, where life is always in-process (and thus cannot be preserved, so to speak) and where the many ecosystems that compose ‘the environment’ or ‘Nature’ are not separate from us, but rather ‘ooze uncannily around us.’ (2013: 143) Our relationship with nature becomes as intimate as our those with other people: strange, loving, depressing, endearing, ironic. This chapter introduces the concept of the dark-ecological podcast, characterised by emergent aesthetics of uncanniness, pervasive anxiety, bodily permeability, and a complex relationship to the ‘local,’ all explored with dark ecology in mind. (2016) Contemporary podcasts Tanis and Welcome to Night Vale serve as case studies, to identify resonances between contemporary podcast aesthetics and contemporary ecological philosophy, both of which seek to render a continuous ‘dark’ environment, where darkness comprises the uncanny and the cute, the intimate and the strange.