Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

TLDR

Ecologists typically treat the environment as a distinct entity, yet Morton contends that the concept of “nature” obscures and limits genuine environmental engagement. The study contends that eliminating the notion of “nature” is necessary for ecological criticism to advance authentic environmentalism.

Abstract

ENTHUSIASTIC ecologists might suspect, from the title of his book, that Timothy Morton is set on undermining their cause from within. Ecology without nature? Wouldn’t that be like, say, animal rights without animals? Or without rights? Those same devotees of nature would certainly want us to think—and to act—seriously with regard to the environment, to confront it and our relationship with it in a new, more responsible way. It might seem, again, that they will have no friend in Morton. As he astutely notes at the beginning of this book, the minute you point to and talk about the environment, it stops being that which is around, but unnoticed by, us; it stops being, that is, the environment. Certainly, Morton would not himself wish to be friends with all environmentalists: he is rightly critical of some types of hale-and-hearty nature-worship and has little time for so-called green consumerism. But it is just the point of the programme for ‘ecological criticism’ that Morton develops here that ‘nature’ must be got rid of for the sake of environmentalism. A monolithic, reified, and rhetorically reinforced concept of ‘nature’, so his argument goes, stands in the way of actual advances in ‘properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art’ (p. 1).