The Serious Play of Being Ecological

Review of Timothy Morton, Being Ecological. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2018. The opening passage of Timothy Morton's latest book, Being Ecological, invokes an odd fantasy, for a book of that title: “Don't care about ecology? You might think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you.” (p. xiii) The fantasy that a book with ecology in the title might find its way into the hands of someone who doesn't care about ecology proposes a reader to whom Morton can promise “no ecological facts, no shocking revelations about our world, no ethical or political advice, and no grand tour of ecological thinking.” (p. xiii) In addressing what he calls our “indifference,” Morton provokes us to imagine ourselves as such a reader, tricking us into “peering under the hood of the ways in which we talk to ourselves about ecology.” (p. xxi) One of the startling claims of the book is that, “indifference to ecological things is exactly the sort of place where you will find the right kind of ecological feeling.” (p. 125) That this is a standard self-help book move isn't obvious until the book ends, when we are reassured that (spoiler alert) we “don't have to be ecological. Because [we] are ecological.” (p. 157) Helping Everyman feel okay about ecology is really pretext for a tour of Morton's thinking about ecological thinking. Being Ecological is to date the most concise yet wide-ranging, challenging yet accessible introduction to the manifold dimensions of the work of this philosopher determined to tackle ecology's fatal problem with style. Any ecophilosopher writing today will be compelled to ask why ecology is failing: Why, despite a global consensus about climate change, humans keep perpetuating what is widely regarded to be the Sixth Mass Extinction event, unfolding because of us. It's not for lack of understanding that we appear set on this march toward extinction. So what's gone wrong? Being Ecological asks us to take Morton's word for it that “agrilogistics” is to blame: a 10,000-year-old experiment with human settlement, prioritizing survival over quality of life. (p. 11) Rather, as a philosopher he's interested in the thinking behind what we do. And what interests Morton is not what we think but how we think it. Is there something about how ecology has done its thinking that hasn't been thought through? Or about how environmentalism thinks ecology? As Morton notes, “many forms of environmentalism aren't really very ecological at all.” (p. 147) It's style that ecology gets all wrong, and to style that we must look to find our way. Style, it turns out, has a deep connection with the science of ecology, since living in a scientific age “means that you can't achieve escape velocity from your phenomenological style.” (p. 21) That is to say, we are phenomenologically bound to the logic of how things appear to us, including the timbre or complexity of things. Scientific truth is “truthy,” not #RealPresident truth. It's the statistical, hard-to-see, massively-distributed-across-space-and-time nature of climate change (which Morton has famously dubbed a hyperobject) that makes the Anthropocene so dangerous and uncanny. Thus, “ecological awareness means thinking and acting ethically and politically on a lot of scales, not just one.” (p. 23) With human scale disabled, living with ecological data entails what Morton calls attunement rather than expertise. It means waking up inside the dream, since the “dreamlike quality is precisely what is most real about ecological reality.” (p. 16) Morton's rangy but captivating introduction (“Not another information dump”) emphasizes how different this book is from most books on ecology, promising to introduce us to “a world in which things can't ever be completely irradiated by the ultraviolet light of thought.” (p. xli) His first chapter, borrowing its title, “And you may find yourself living in an Age of Mass Extinction,” from David Byrne's 80s existentialist hit “Once In A Lifetime,” sets out the flavor of the present moment: Concepts familiar to readers of Morton, such as “Dark Ecology” and “Ecology Without Nature,” get a new beat in this remix. Morton wastes no time getting to the importance of beauty, as the platform app for mind's engagement with things. And to art, especially to “art that includes its environment(s) in its very form.” (p. 12) In an age when the biggest distortion of all is how extinction has been normalized, the way postmodern art such as David Byrne's song addresses an uncanny sense of dislocation is more ecological than the way Sierra Club calendars cater to our sentiments. The lack of a “smooth transition point between being one human and being part of the total population of humans” (p. 17)—summed up in the “paradox of the ecological age,” that “Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But [but] what you did will have huge consequences” (p. xlii)—runs through us like the rift between being and appearance that characterizes all things. Thus, Being Ecological expends much of its energy on teaching us how to think about things in its second chapter. Even an ecosystem is a thing, to which (following the school of philosophy with which he is most closely associated, Speculative Realism, and its Object Oriented Ontology) Morton refuses to reduce its parts. Wholes are dehiscent, bursting with parts, not more than but less than the sum of their parts. This “flat ontology” is more in tune with science, which “never claims that atoms are more real than tomatoes—it restrains itself from ontological arrogance.” (p. 53) The longest section of the book, “Tuning” (Chapter 3), addresses many of the challenges we face when we leave behind the “delivery mode of ecological advice,” with all its “shoulds,” to realize our nature as a thing among things. (p. xvii) Again, art is a primary access mode: the Rothko Chapel, or Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch, 80 tons of Greenland ice installed as the hours of a giant watch outside the Panthéon in Paris, during the COP21 negotiations. As Morton describes it, Eliasson's piece “emits time,” (p. 79) accessing its viewers as they access it, sucking their heat as it sends out waves of cold. How does one connect with data (“what is given”)? It is in the aesthetic experience of something like Ice Watch or Rothko's “gate-like rectangles of aubergine space,” (p. 112) Morton argues, that we find solidarity with what is given. When we open ourselves to enchantment, we realize the degree to which art designs our future. Ecological art can't simply be a representation. Art can help us excavate the uncanny valley into which we have put all the ambiguous lifeforms, neither entirely like us nor entirely different, opening rather onto a “spectral plain,” where our categories start to malfunction and where we might start to connect with the less charismatic, less “mega” fauna. (p. 125) In expanding our sense of beauty, we might expand democracy to include nonhumans. In the “Brief history of environmental thought” that concludes this volume, Morton confesses, “what happened to me when I was asked to write a book like this—I immediately conjured up a picture of Homer [Simpson] explaining Grand Funk Railroad to his bemused and embarrassed kids.” (p. 135) Thus, Morton offers, instead of a grand tour, instead of details about ecological ideas, a short series of “phenomenological reductions” (the “styles” of being ecological). (p. 139) Morton's own philosophical style, “finger painting” (p. xiv) as he calls it, can be reductive in a cartoonish way. But its bold outlines are effective in getting us to reexamine our own style. Morton's pop cultural analogies draw on Gen-X era artifacts (Buckaroo Banzai, anyone?) at the same time that his rhetoric seems to invoke a perceived Millennial indifference. It's unclear who the intended audience is. Half the time you feel you have just been let in on the philosopher's own efforts to talk himself down from caring too much. We can help ourselves, and by extension all the nonhuman others we are in thrall to, the book suggests, by caring a little less. Such playful care, less focused on sheer survival, is more likely to include more lifeforms in its concern. (p. 131) Morton confesses at the end that he has all along been seriously playful about the need to be playfully serious. As a self-help book for ecologists unable to take their eyes off the persistent chasm between what we do and what we are, and looking for ways to make ecological science more helpful, Being Ecological offers provocative reading for graduate and undergraduate students of the environmental humanities, for practicing ecologists, and for artists, musicians, and writers of all stripes, as well as for lay and non-academic readers. Morton brings the creative arts resolutely to the fore of conversations about ecology while asking ecology, in its styles of thinking, talking, and doing, to be more artful.