Some More Dark Ecology

...the book is in a loop form so that the preface is at the end, and this is how it starts, or ends, or something:

The ecological era we find ourselves in—whether we like it or not and whether we recognize it or not—makes necessary a searching revalua- tion of philosophy, politics, and art. The very idea of being “in” an era is in question. We are “in” the Anthropocene, but that era is also “in” a moment of far longer duration.

What is the present? How can it be thought? What is presence? Ecological awareness forces us to think and feel at multiple scales, scales that disorient normative concepts such as “present,” “life,” “human,” “nature,” “thing,” “thought,” and “logic.” Dark Ecology shall argue that there are layers of attunement to ecological reality more accurate than what is habitual in the media, in the academy, and in society at large.

These attunement structures are necessarily weird, a precise term that we shall explore in depth. Weirdness involves the hermeneutical knowingness belonging to the practices that the humanities maintain. The attunement, which I call ecognosis, implies a practical yet highly nonstandard vision of what ecological politics could be. In part, ecog- nosis involves realizing that nonhumans are installed at profound lev- els of the human—not just biologically and socially but in the very structure of thought and logic. Coexisting with these nonhumans is ecological thought, art, ethics, and politics.