Being Ecological - Hardcover

Morton, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262038048 ISBN 13: 9780262038041

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2018

Synopsis

A book about ecology without information dumping, guilt inducing, or preaching to the choir.

Don't care about ecology? You think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you.
Ecology books can be confusing information dumps that are out of date by the time they hit you. Slapping you upside the head to make you feel bad. Grabbing you by the lapels while yelling disturbing facts. Handwringing in agony about "What are we going to do?" This book has none of that. Being Ecological doesn't preach to the eco-choir. It's for you--even, Timothy Morton explains, if you're not in the choir, even if you have no idea what choirs are. You might already be ecological.

After establishing the approach of the book (no facts allowed!), Morton draws on Kant and Heidegger to help us understand living in an age of mass extinction caused by global warming. He considers the object of ecological awareness and ecological thinking: the biosphere and its interconnections. He discusses what sorts of actions count as ecological--starting a revolution? going to the garden center to smell the plants? And finally, in "Not a Grand Tour of Ecological Thought," he explores a variety of current styles of being ecological--a range of overlapping orientations rather than preformatted self-labeling.

Caught up in the us-versus-them (or you-versus-everything else) urgency of ecological crisis, Morton suggests, it's easy to forget that you are a symbiotic being entangled with other symbiotic beings. Isn't that being ecological?

About this title

Review:

Morton makes an admirable effort to expand the genre into something more appealing to a wide variety of readers...Instead of anxiously trying to troubleshoot all of the hypothetical ill-effects of proposed environmental action or policies - a futile effort in our complex and dynamic world - Morton gives us permission to embrace the uncertainty.

--Massive

From the Back Cover:

Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong?
Is there really any difference between 'humans' and 'nature'?
Does this mean we even have a future?

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and has been called 'The Philosopher Prophet of the Anthropocene' (Guardian). He has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach, Olafur Eliasson and Hans Ulrich Obrist and written several influential books including Dark Ecology and Ecology without Nature, as well as 160 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0262038048
• ISBN 13: 9780262038041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 172