"I have no place to go, old friend": Narrating Anthropogenic Ecological Violence in Nathaniel Rich's "Hermie"

Nathaniel Rich’s “Hermie” offers a concise yet incisive engagement with environmental crisis, foregrounding its impacts on ecological systems and human subjectivities. This article argues that “Hermie” narrates anthropogenic ecological violence through immediate, visible, and directly identifiable forms of harm, while also conceptualizing this violence as the outcome of deeply entrenched economic, political, ethical, and cultural power struggles. Used here as a descriptive and analytical heuristic rather than as a fully systematized theoretical model, the concept of anthropogenic ecological violence provides a framework for examining the story’s representation of climate change, species extinction, coastal urbanization, water contamination, and waste management, as interconnected manifestations of ecological crisis. The article further contends that Rich critiques academia’s emotional and intellectual detachment from environmental destruction through a narrator who studies ecological problems yet remains materially and affectively removed from their consequences. By exposing the gap between knowledge production and ethical engagement, the story interrogates the complicity of both institutions and the subjectivities they produce, questioning how they often fail to intervene meaningfully in environmental crisis, instead displacing responsibility onto those least able to bear it. In doing so, it advances a critique of institutional dysfunction, challenging academia’s claims to responsibility as well as its capacity to respond to anthropogenic ecological violence, one of the most urgent crises of the present era.