“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


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Ecological Thought Reviewed in Tikkun

...in the “Tikkun Recommends” section at the very back, also available online:

Timothy Morton has a unique take on ecology that challenges much of the alternative consciousness that floats around on the periphery of environmental circles. He offers a profound take on human possibilities. To Morton, human society and Nature are not two distinct things but rather two different angles on the same thing. We have been “terraforming Earth all along—now we have the chance to face up to this fact and to our coexistence with all beings,” he writes. The destruction of Nature is neither inevitable nor impossible—we have a choice. But we must recognize that the language of sustainability becomes a weapon in the hands of global corporations that would like nothing better than to reproduce themselves in perpetuity. Ecological thought, he writes, must conceive of post-capitalist pleasures: not bourgeois pleasure for the masses, but forms of new, broader, more rational pleasure; not boring, over-stimulating bourgeois reality, and not fridges and and cars and anorexia for all, but rather a world of being (as opposed to having). How to care for the neighbor, the stranger, and the hyper-object are the long-term problems posed by ecological thought. Ecological thought forces us to invent ways of being together that don't depend on self-interest.

I'm tickled pink by this very thoughtful and well designed review. Even hyperobjects get a mention!

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