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Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics Paperback – September 15, 2009

by Timothy Morton (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 34 ratings
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In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.

Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."

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  1. Print length
    264 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Harvard University Press
  4. Publication date
    September 15, 2009
  5. Dimensions
    6.12 x 0.7 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0674034856
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0674034853
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Rigorous and unsettling, Timothy Morton's book is a vividly realized critique of the political and ethical meanings of "place" and "space." Steeped in philosophical and literary history, Ecology without Nature is a profoundly convinced and convincing intervention, calling as it does for a more intellectually robust and politically supple environmentalism, one much better suited to the realities of twenty-first-century life. A more thoughtful reflection on the future of dwelling together in a vulnerable world would be hard to find.”―David L. Clark, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

“Morton demonstrates that because most ecocriticism assumes nature/environment as a concept, most ecocritics perpetuate the assumptions of the literature that they purport to critique. He argues that nature is an arbitrary rhetorical concept whose modern origins can be traced to Romantics writing during the Industrial Revolution--essentially, that ecocriticism fetishizes "nature." He contends that a "really deep ecology" would let go of the idea of nature because it marks the difference between "us" and "it." Drawing on writers from Adorno to Zizek, and considering literature and art from the 18th century to the present, Morton offers a complex, important, and often playful argument that lays the groundwork for new directions in ecocriticism.”―G. D. MacDonald, Choice

“We’re in the sh**. We have to face it and learn to live with it. That’s a basic idea in dark ecology, which Timothy Morton outlines in his book Ecology Without Nature...Dark ecology has a realistic take on the human state without resorting to false optimism or fatalistic tones of apocalypse. It also requires people to take control, and not lay down in the mud with blind faith of staying above the surface without ever drowning. When we realise our connection to the rest of the world, we understand that our actions reflect all life on the planet...Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking. Or even the death metal, since it shares a goth sensibility that focuses on the dark.”―Kasino A4

“Ecology Without Nature offers original and important critiques of ecocritical theory, in particular through its analysis of the legacy of Romanticism and the paradox of dualism that pervades much ecological writing. Its occasionally irreverent style and embrace of kitsch make it an enjoyable read, even when the associationist organization and technical terminology require the reader to slow down. However, this slowing down is exactly what Morton recommends for ecocritics as we enter the twenty-first century and the increasingly urgent demands of “this poisoned ground” where Morton calls us to stand.”―Janet Fiskio, Environmental Philosophy

From the Inside Flap

In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press; First Edition (September 15, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674034856
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674034853
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.12 x 0.7 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 34 ratings

About the author

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Timothy B. Morton

Timothy B. Morton

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One of the most influential philosophers on earth? Apparently: http://www.thebestschools.org/features/most-influential-living-philosophers/

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.

Morton has written Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Open Humanities, 2021), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 270 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 11 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. 

https://www.patreon.com/timothymorton

http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

Twitter: @the_eco_thought

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
34 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jordan Wright
5.0 out of 5 stars Timothy Morton opens the door for reimagining the doors we ...
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2014
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Timothy Morton opens the door for reimagining the doors we could/might/can imagine through. I do not care if that makes any sense.
4 people found this helpful
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Christopher Schaberg
5.0 out of 5 stars In Praise of Slow Reading
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2013
I was lucky enough to be a student in one of Timothy Morton's graduate seminars at UC Davis in 2003 when he began working on Ecology without Nature, and it was simply a thrill to meander along with Prof. Morton through such a maze of literary, cultural, and philosophical texts--all to undo our most basic and, well, 'natural' conceptions of what Nature is (and isn't).

The seminar was nothing short of an adventure, and this spirit of adventure is reflected in the book that it became. And yet it's an adventure that involves a lot of doubling back and dispelling of illusions along the way. In other words, the maze quality remains: it is a book for slow readers, for a kind of patient searching that opens up many unexpected paths as you go. The method of Ecology without Nature is subtle and profound: Morton builds a vocabulary for reading ecologically, at the same time that he relentlessly strips Nature of its aura--or at the very least, Morton reveals how and why that aura came to be in the first place.

This book is key reading for anyone interested in matters of environment, ecology, aesthetics, nature writing, and even travel writing. It provides both an eclectic history of a trans-disciplinary motif, and it also makes convincing arguments for why we might do well to be wary of this motif (i.e., Nature with a big N).

Ecology without Nature is sort of a trick title: it's not so much a eulogy as a wager, or a question posed about what happens when we think about 'ecology' without the baggage of 'Nature'. (The answer, or a really a set of interlinked answers, appears in Morton's passionately written prequel, The Ecological Thought.)
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David Williams
2.0 out of 5 stars Post-modernism rediscovers sin
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2013
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To read Timothy Morton's "Ecology Without Nature" is to be slapped in the face, not with the content of his argument but with the style of his writing. Although for some reason he begins denying that his is a postmodern book written in postmodern prose, the opposite is evident to anyone who flips through and tries to work through the dense undergrowth of his prose. It comes as no surprise that he rejects association with the po-mo crowd but embraces deconstruction and Derrida, as if these had nothing to do with each other. Such contradiction runs rampant through the text, not hidden at all but celebrated as if establishing the deconstruction-ness of it all. And, as if to justify the writing style, Morton also cannot resist dropping the name of every philosopher he tripped (sic) over in grad school, those familiar and those unknown.
Perhaps we deserve this, but do we need it? Morton says yes, that Ecological writing, which he refers to with the neologism "ecomimesis," is too grounded in the romantic assumption that we humans can somehow, perhaps through literature, identify with the otherness we call "nature," thus Morton's critique of the "ecomimetic illusion of immediacy" what he also refers to as the "beautiful soul syndrome." His text is more a negative attack on the assumptions of romantic nature writers than the construction of an alternative. What is deconstruction if not a universal acid that deconstructs even its own efforts? So how could he create anything of any use, other than as a critique of the romantic assumptions running rampant?
In this, I am sympathetic to his argument even as I am repelled by his condescending voice. I see it, to some extent, in the tradition of William Cronon's critique of the idea of wilderness as far too romantic.
Yet why write in a voice that creates a wall between the text and the reader, since the point of writing is to communicate? Like any po-mo deconstructionist, Morton loves to throw around the word "commodity." Perhaps this is what such language is, the commodity of the graduate school and the tenure-track professor trying to establish his (or her) credentials in the hierarchical aristocracy of academia, entrance into which requires the possession of such a tongue?
I can imagine grad students trying to prove themselves worthy poring over the complexities inherent in every other sentence like medieval supplicants trying to approach the mysteries of the mass chanted in a Latin they did not know. It is a symbol of a world which seems full of knowing and mystery and wonder inside of which the holy of holies hides, revealed only to the inner sanctum of the priesthood.
Thus, we get a paragraph that begins "Ecomimetic ekphrasis sits in an oblique relation to the text," as indeed does the intelligent reader. What to make of: "This jetztzeit or nowness is an intense signifying atmosphere that erupts out of the `homogeneous empty time' of official reality, even when the ideological machinery is running smoothly."
Despite the modern and post-modern feel of his ramblings, what Morton cannot completely hide is his rediscovery of the pre-modern religious idea of "sin." No, not sex, but the reality that we are all trapped in this illusion of a text from which we cannot escape. That every attempt to get from "I" to "Thou" fails because we cannot escape ourselves. Hence Emily Dickinson:

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be -
Attended by a single hound
Its own identity.

That we cannot escape from ourselves into some blessed other we call Nature, the heart of the book, is thus an ancient tale retold many times, and in much clearer style. Back in the 60s, Norman O Brown said quite clearly, "The Fall is into language." Outside of the text is not, as Derrida said, nothing, but a void which to us is holy terror, not grace. Morton has brought us stumbling full circle back to the Old Testament: "In the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom."
70 people found this helpful
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paullloydsargent
3.0 out of 5 stars So I'm inclined to follow folks like Haraway, Alaimo
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2015
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Spoiler alert: as with so much Object Oriented Ontology-centric (OOO) output over the past decade or so, we're all just stardust. I dunno--that's not quite fair. I think the new materialists are on to something, it just seems to me to be much older than it is "new" and questions of ethics and, say, "uneven development" (from [urban] political ecology) or inequity in environmental risk and toxic burden (well examined in enviro justice lit) are not mere philosophical debates where I live: the still-oozing birthplace of the petrochemical industry and the Superfund site. So I'm inclined to follow folks like Haraway, Alaimo, Bateson, Braun, Parikka, and (albeit a mishmash of methods by) others who name names and point fingers. I mean, we can basically name the top 100 companies that have left us with the toxic morass that passes for "landscape" in the 21st century--and that's long before we even get to "debating" climate change. Looking for a way to talk about "nature" as separate from the cultural is not a new project within academia (or, in my little corner of the debate, art)--despite even my own desire to escape into "wilderness" at every turn, even after millennia of everyone from Aristotle to Ruskin to J.B. Jackson, Spirn, Bateson, Cronon, Harvey, Haraway, Parikka, et al have collapsed that bnary for at least the past 30,000 years.

I guess OOO just leaves me cold at the end of each text I encounter and I have to agree with Ursula Heise's critique of Morton (not of 'Ecology,' to be clear, but from her review of 'Hyperobjects,' yet I still find it fitting): his "seamless transition from the subatomic realm...to the cosmological realm of the extremely large without any discussion of the fact that theoretical physicists have found it very difficult to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity theory" is messy, discomfiting, at best. At worst, these just feel like thought games to me and, well, when I can quite literally (that is, not at all metaphorically) step out of my house and scoop up a glass of Bateson's "ecology of bad ideas," I can't help but feel--at the elemental level? at the level of cellular mutation?--an urgency missing from Morton's thoughtful but ultimately not "Silent Spring"/"Limits to Growth" enough text. But maybe I'm just a downer.
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2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2015
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2 stars is appropriate
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Top reviews from other countries

chris milsom
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully rich writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2024
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Although literary roots underpin many of the arguments, ideas are developed into wonderful rich, thought provoking and original directions that demand we reassess our assumptions about our present and future. Highly recommended - we should all read this book - and Timothy Morton's other writing
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Claire Franny
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2018
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Book is good but cover is maybe on wrong, the actual text is back to front and upside down... not sure if it’s deliverate or not. Readable so not worried.
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Gord McKenna
1.0 out of 5 stars Impenetrable prose
Reviewed in Canada on January 2, 2011
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Morton has managed to put together a couple hundred pages of writing that is so flowery and obscure, reading through the introduction, I'm not sure what he is writing about.

For example, "One of the basics problems with nature is that it could be considered either a a substance, as a squishy thing in itself, or as an essence, as an abstract principle that transcends the material realm and even the realm of representation. ....Substantialism tends to promote a monarchist or authoritarian view that there is an external thing to which the subject should bow. Essentialism, on the other hand, has its champion in Immanuael Kant. The sublime thing can never be represented, and indeed, in certain religions, says Kant, there is a prohibition against trying (Judaism, Islam). This essentialism turns out to tbe politically liberating, on the side of revolutionary republicanism." P16).

So if you are enlightened by 200 pages of this kind of prose, then this is the book for you. I prefer the writing of Bill Cronon and others on humans as part of the ecosystem and the difficulties of defining "nature" and hence some of the philosophical problems with the basis of environmentalism which trips us up daily. These texts are an easy and enjoyable read. We'll need to wait for another author ot help us understand ecology without nature.
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