The Ecological Thought TIMOTHY MORTON HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2010 Copyright© 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morton, Timothy, 1968- The ecological thought I Timothy Morton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04920-8 (alk. paper) r. Ecology-Philosophy. I. Title. QH540.5.M66 ZOIO 577.01-dc22 For Claire Contents Acknowledgments IX Introduction: Critical Thinking I I Thinking Big 20 2 Dark Thoughts 59 3 Forward Thinking 98 Notes r37 Index r6r Acknowledgments A big thank you to David Simpson, my distinguished colleague, David Robertson, and Margaret Ferguson, Chairs of the Department of English at the University of California, Davis: they've created a flourishing envi­ ronment for me. I owe a debt of immense gratitude to Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press, for believing in me. Lindsay gave inspiring and learned advice and transformed the last two years into the most pleasant and educational writing stint of my life. Thank you to Tsoknyi Rinpoche, who influences my thinking in ways too many to enumerate. And thank you to Gerardo Abboud, fortaking a group to Tibet in Fall 2007. Profound thanks are due to this book's two anonymous readers. I'm grateful to David Clark forhaving read a draft. Marjorie Levinson helped me clarify my thinking immensely. Dimitris Va rdoulakis kindly com­ mented on the manuscript. David Robertson likewise gave encouraging and valuable advice, and so did Vince Carducci. The project received gen­ erous support from UC Davis's Publication Assistance Fund. Thanks to my graduate students, especially Andrew Hageman, Laura Hudson, Eric O'Brien, Chris Schaberg, Rachel Swinkin, and Clara Van Zanten. I'm grateful to the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK), and in particular to Greg Garrard and Tom Bris- tow forhosting their and my first videoconference keynote speech in July 2008, low on carbon and high on philosophical exchange; to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS University, and in particular Benjamin Morris and Bradon Smith; to the International Association for Environmental Philosophy; Amy Green­ stadt and the Portland Center for Public Humanities; Gerry Canavan and the Polygraph crew at Duke University; Deborah Elise White at Emory University; and Stephanie Lemenager at UC Santa Barbara. Thanks to Vince Carducci for inviting me to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Fall 2007. Thank you to Ann Greer forproviding a home away from home in London in Spring 2008. Thanks to Warner/Chappell, Alfred Publishing and the Richmond Or­ ganization, for granting permission to reproduce lyrics by Roger Waters forthe Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the album Meddle (EMI, 1971), in the epigraph for Chapter 2; © Copyright 1971 Wa rner/Chapell and the Richmond Organization (TRO-© Copyright 1971 (Renewed), 1976 (Re­ newed) Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New Yo rk, NY). Used by perm1ss1on. Thank you to my terrific research assistant, Sara Anderson. Thanks to Ron Broglio, Kurt Fosso, and Ashton Nichols, collaborators on a stimu­ lating Romantic Circles blog on ecocriticism; and to readers of my blog ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Thank you, too, Ruth Abbott, Sha­ hidha Bari, Jeremy Braddock, Nathan Brown, Patrick Curry, John Davie, Fran Dolan, Elizabeth Fay, Svein Hatlevik, Caspar Henderson, Srecko Horvat, Douglas Kahn, Peter King, Claire Lamont, Mike Luthi, Glen Mazis,Jacob Metcalf, Colin Milburn, Jasmine Morton, Ava Neyer, Derek Parfit, Arkady Plotnitsky, Kate Rigby, Michael Rossington, Scott Sher­ show, Jane Stabler, Ted Toadvine, Robert Unger, Karen Weisman, Patri­ cia Yaeger, Michael Ziser, and Slavoj Zizek. A heartfelt thank you to my wife, Kate, who as ever thought, walked, and talked this project through with me. All the errors herein are my responsibility alone. I dedicate this book to my daughter Claire. Thinking about her takes me into realms of the unspeakable, just like the ecological thought. They are realms of unspeakable love. Infinity overflows the thought that thinks it Emmanuel Levinas The Ecological Thought Introduction: Critical Thinking The ecological crisis we faceis so obvious that it becomes easy-for some, strangely or frighteningly easy-to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up. We usually think of ecology as having to do with science and social policy. But as the poet Percy Shelley said, regarding developments in sci­ ence, "We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know." 1 Ecology seems earthy, pedestrian. It's something to do with global warm­ ing, recycling, and solar power; something to do with quotidian relation­ ships between humans and nonhumans. Sometimes we associate ecology with fervent beliefs that are often explicitly religious: the Animal Libera­ tion Front or Earth First! To the extent that we don't yet have a truly ecological world, religion cries aloud in a green voice.' But what would an ecological society look like? What would an ecological mind think? What kinds of art would an ecologically minded person enjoy? All these ques­ tions have one thing in common: the ecological thought. 2 THE ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT As the success ofthe 2008 Pixar masterpiece Wall•E demonstrated, the question is on everyone's mind: what is ecological awareness?3 How do we restart Spaceship Earth with the pieces we have to hand? How do we move forward from the melancholy of a poisoned planet? Wa ll•E begins several hundred years into the future, with the depressing scene of a little garbage-compacting robot piling skyscraper-high towers of human detri­ tus. There's something wrong with "his" software, something that mani­ fests as an obsessive collecting. It looks like he's searching for some key to humanness among the Rubik's Cubes, the video of Hello Dolly, the tiny sprout in a flowerpot. Wa ll•E happily shows that the "broken" software, the mental disorder of the little robot, is the viral code that reboots Earth: this time around, we evolve from memes, not genes. Yet isn't his obsessive compulsion, so like a manifestation of grief (from where we sit in the cinema at least, spectators to future ruin), exactly our situation right now? How do we begin? Where do we go from here? Is that the sound of some­ thing calling us from within the grief-the sound of the ecological thought? The ecological thought is a virus that infects all other areas of thinking. (Yet viruses, and virulence, are shunned in environmental ideology.) This book argues that ecology isn't just about global warming, recycling, and solar power-and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and com­ passion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with capi­ talism and with what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amaze­ ment, open-mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion, and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with race, class, and gen­ der. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence. Like the shadow of an idea not yet fully thought, a shadow from the future (another wonderful phrase of. Shelley's), the ecological thought creeps over other ideas until nowhere is left untouched by its dark pres­ ence.4 Darwin trusted the theory of evolutionary impermanence so much INTRODUCTION 3 that he was prepared to suspend his disbelief in continental permanence, although in his day there was no tectonic plate theory.5 Such is the force of the ecological thought. As one philosopher put it (see this book's epi­ graph), "infinity overflows the thought that thinks it."6 You could think of The Ecological Th ought as the prequel to my previous book, Ecologywithout Na ture. What must I have been thinking in order to realize that in order to have "ecology," we have to let go of "nature"?7 You can't make a prequel until you have made the "original" movie. In some strong sense, the ecological thought rigorously comes afterward-it is always to come, somewhere in the future. In its fullestscope, it will have been thought at some undefinedfuture point. You findyourself caught in its tractor beam (it's like a mathematical "attractor"). You didn't mean to. You must have been thinking it all along. But you had no idea. The eco­ logical thought sneaks up on you from the future, a picture of what will have had to be there, already, for"ecology without nature" to make sense. Like archaeologists of the future, we must piece together what will have been thought. Ultimately, the ecological thought surpasses what passes for environmentalism. It thinks otherwise than small-minded, and big-minded, manipulation. It goes beyond thinking "How many other living beings must we kill in order to be around next winter?" It goes beyond "What­ ever is, is right."8 It goes beyond "Let it be, let it be."9 It goes beyond self, Nature, and species. It goes beyond survival, Being, destiny, and essence. Yet like a virus, like the lowest of the lowest (are they even alive?), like the tiny macromolecules in our cells, in our very DNA, the ecological thought has been there all along.