Uncanny Skies
Earlier this week, I found myself fixated on footage of red skies over Indonesia. Over the past week, videos and images from the Jambi province in central Sumatra depicted a deep orange or blood-red sky, a result of sunlight scattering through the haze of human-caused forest fires.
The Jambi province is facing a health crisis caused by air pollution, with clinics seeing a surge in patients, many of whom are children. The number of fires burning in Indonesia this year is growing at a rate similar to that of 2015, when the region experienced an unprecedented air pollution crisis termed the worst environmental disaster of the year. The carbon emissions from this year’s fires are also at a record high, with nearly a million people affected by respiratory problems.
These images depict a surreal and eerie sight, bringing into focus the deep strangeness of our current predicament. In an era where we apply digital filters to dial up the vividness of natural scenes, it seems uncanny to have to remind ourselves that there are no filters. This color palette seems more befitting of dystopic science fiction than reality.
In an essay about the sensation of uncanniness, Sigmund Freud wrote that “the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”. The German word for uncanny is unheimlichkeit, literally ‘un-home-like-ness’.
This view is echoed by the novelist Amitav Ghosh. In The Great Derangement, a book about climate change and literary imagination, he writes, “It is surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation
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