ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: January 2025

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Ready for Some Threads?

View on Threads

I Just Switched from AAA to Allstate Car Insurance Because Black Lives Matter

...I had just found out that AAA discriminated against Black people during segregation, hence the Green Book that informed Black motorists of safe and good places and routes.

But look at what they just said! It's good.

View on Threads

An Important Letter

The good people who invited me to talk are being wonderful about it. You should know what's happening if you don't:

This Is Incredibly Important

...if you don't about it already, you really must.

Vought’s vision for OMB as presented in Project 2025 is “to basically change the plumbing so they can do whatever they want without any meaningful checks and balances” during Trump’s second term.

“I think that it's important to really make sure [Americans] understand what the plans are for changing the plumbing,” Olinsky said.

Saturday, January 4, 2025

...I'm not sure I could love the work of Samuel Palmer any more than I already do, but I'm willing to try. I just ordered this newish book about his work--I've loved it for so long, as long as I can remember. Age ten was probably my first encounter with his work, at the Tate Gallery in London. Before it was the Tate Britain...in 1978...

Friday, January 3, 2025

Writing a New Book

...and I'm writing it with Treena Balds. It's the sequel to Hell and it's called

PARADISE

Yes that's right. Because the true opposite of Hell is not Heaven. It's Paradise. This is argued very closely in the book.

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE