“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, March 4, 2023

That's a Confirm: Dark Ecology Is Having a Moment

 Well, I was guessing from the attention it was getting that Dark Ecology is now outpacing Hyperobjects as my most popular book. And a glance at the royalty statement I just received confirms it. By a lot. I would be curious to know why you think this might be. 

On the whole that word "dark" is doing a lot of work. It's talking to our moment. I wish it wasn't. 

I imagined writing a book with that title as the third part of a trilogy in 2005. Ecology without Nature, The Ecological Thought, Dark Ecology was how it was going to go. Blowing up the old paradigm, explaining a new paradigm and then deploying it was the very intentional plan. 

Hyperobjects, Humankind and Being Ecological were spinoffs from that trilogy project. Needless to say, like a lot of spinoffs they have a lot of good ideas in them and might actually be better books in lots of ways. 

In more detail, I think Dark Ecology is popular right now because it's talking to history and culture at all kinds of scales and thinking about "how this happened" and "what do to next." And because it has the flavor of a kind of psychodrama or pilgrim's progress into the darkness. The Dark Night of the Soul was a template. 

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