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.
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
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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.