Overview

In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does 'Nature' exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought. In three concise chapters, Morton investigates the profound philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an emerging awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of deeply interconnected life forms - intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity. A 'prequel' to his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007) , The Ecological Thought is an engaged and accessible work that will challenge the thinking of readers in disciplines ranging from critical theory to Romanticism to cultural geography.

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9780674049208

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Reviews

By suggesting imaginative ways to resolve other crises, could humanities scholars stave off the crisis engulfing their own subjects? Morton proposes a future in which the venerable ideas of nature and environment are so much detritus, useless for addressing a looming ecological catastrophe. His book exemplifies the serious humanities scholarship he makes a plea for. My head's still spinning.--Noel Castree Times Higher Education (09/08/2011)

Morton's The Ecological Thought rejects the romantic concept of nature as a passive foil to human action. The natural world, as it turns out, is not something outside of us; or, put another way: there is no difference between humans and our environment...He asks us to engage in radical openness as a way of practicing radical coexistence, a state of being that we live even when we do not think much about it...Morton's book allows us to see our stirrings of sympathy for nonhuman beings such as strawberries as the beginning of a recognition that we have all--people and plants alike--lost long ago our presumed roots in an imagined natural world.--Natania Meeker and Ant?nia Szabari Los Angeles Review of Books (05/09/2012)

Author Information

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University.

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