Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are.

The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Morton (Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice Univ.; Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World) doesn't reject the notion that the Earth is in an Anthropocene geologic epoch, when the planet is geologically profoundly impacted by human activity. Yet he focuses on its continuity with the Holocene, or as he calls it, the agrilogistic, epoch-differing from the present only in matters of degree-when, some 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers became farmers and settled into the tilling and gouging of the earth. Morton spells out an "ecognosis," or ecological awareness that is not only dark depressing, but dark uncanny, and-working through multiple stages of depression-dark sweet, like chocolate. He advises taking the long view, but in a surprisingly hopeful concluding thread advocates playful subversive politics in the present. VERDICT The journey through this book is philosophically dense, weaving the teachings of Immanuel Kant, Jacques -Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Charles Baudelaire, to name but a few, and best approached by readers with a rich background of the subject. For readers with the chops to take them through the undergrowth, this is a rewarding hike.-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., -Crystal Lake, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Morton (Hyperobjects), a philosopher and professor of English at Rice University, attempts-with mixed results-to poetically jump-start a searching reevaluation of philosophy, politics, and art in light of the current ecological crisis. The book is strange, and some may find it decidedly uncanny. In and through its looping prose, he argues that there are strata of acclimatizations that must be made in mind, body, and soul for humans to come to "ecognosis": the knowledge that our very conception of nature might be what is destroying it. In a stream-of-consciousness style, Morton weaves together scientific and humanistic perspectives to craft a text that argues that the current ecological crisis is linked to a "logistical `program'?" that has been present in human systems since the Stone Age. "Dark ecology" is the recognition that the changes that must be made involve melancholy, irony, unsettling joy, and ultimately radical transformations in the ways humans conceive of, and live in, the universe. Morton commands readers' attention with his free-form style, but some may find it as repellent as it is compelling. Morton extends his previous work to offer a seismically different vision of the future of ecology and humankind. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Morton (English, Rice Univ.) continues his "object-oriented" philosophical and semantic consideration of ecology, in which he uses the concept of a loop and the ouroboros (a circular symbol of a snake or dragon devouring its tail--a symbol for the infinite) and "darkness" to examine how humans view and think about ecological awareness, the Anthropocene, and ecology. Based on the Wellek Lectures he presented at the University of California, Irvine, Morton asks readers to consider how humans think and feel about the Anthropocene and its name, how humans (individually and as a species) caused the Anthropocene, and how "agrilogistics" have been a major factor in climate change and loss of biodiversity. He continually refers to the interconnections among and between human feelings and how these feelings change as individuals think about and realize the intended and unintended consequences of actions for survival. With touches of humor, bits of information drawn from literature (ancient Latin and Greek), and plenty of philosophy, Morton takes readers on a strongly philosophical and semantic tour of "the darkness and light" of human interrelatedness with the biosphere. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty. --Susan T Meiers, Western Illinois University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. His books include Ecology Without Nature (2007); The Ecological Thought (2010); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013); and Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013); and he has published more than 150 essays on ecology, philosophy, art, literature, music, architecture, and food. He has collaborated with several artists, including Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, Emilija Skarnulytė, and Pharrell Williams, and blogs regularly at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.