Landkrank

Nikolaj Schultz is regarded as a trailblazing sociologist of the younger generation. Land Sickness is the title of his essay about humanity’s condition in the era of climate change. A young man gets sick from the anxiety that his contemporaries define with the word “climate crisis”. He suffers as much from the heat in Paris as from the consequences of tourism on an idyllic Mediterranean island. What he experiences raises existential questions about the responsibility of everyone to come to terms with the ethical and ecological problems of the Anthropocene.

After an introduction to his essay Land Sickness, Nikolaj Schultz shares his thoughts in discussion with Rosie Goldsmith about the background to the lines of conflict between city and country.
 

Nikolaj Schultz
b. 1990, is a sociologist. He is a research fellow at the University of Copenhagen. With the late Bruno Latour, he is the author of On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (Polity Books, 2022). Recently published: Land Sickness (Polity Books, 2023).

Brilliant meditations about the connectivity of the planet, the inescapability of the Anthropocene and direct experiences of the collapse of the climate. Bruno Latour advised me: it is important to read Nikolaj Schultz. He was right.
Hans Ulrich Obrist

You can read Land Sickness as a sad book, but I find it radically hopeful. Here, in the darkness, in our own personal darkness and also in the pain of the world, we become honest. Here, the myths fly open and everything that’s finely polished. And it’s only from here, from the genuine darkness, that it can become brighter. What a promise!

Luisa Neubauer, Fridays for Future