The Ecological Thought

by Timothy Morton

  Ecology exists in the thinking of Kant, who held that the human mind radically transcends its material conditions. When he imagines the power of the sublime to open our minds to the powers of reason, Kant envisions measuring a tree by the height of a man. The tree becomes a way of measuring a mountain; mountains measure the diameter of Earth; Earth measures the Milky Way. And the Milky Way measures what Kant calls the “the immense multitude of such Milky Way systems.”174 Soaring from a tree to the immensity of space like Milton, Kant performs the vastness of the ecological thought.

  Darwin muses on Kant’s amazement at the concept of duty—where did it come from, if the world is built on selfish competition? There must be a good reason for it. Perhaps in duty we glimpse the first stirrings of transpersonal, trans-species altruism. If humans are going to keep on going, we had better figure out how to transcend our impulses. There are too many books that worry about what “attitude” to assume toward “animals.” Try substituting “Jews” or “immigrants” for “animals” and see whether these discussions of “the animal question” still sound palatable. It would be better to have no attitude at all. The strange stranger is beyond attitude, beyond ontology. This is why the ecological thought flows past nihilism. The assertion “there is nothing” supposes an audience of at least one (other) being. The ecological thought subverts idealism, since the position from which we can be idealists is coexistence. 175 It flows under materialism, for though evolution is palpably algorithmic—“let the strongest live and the weakest die”—this doesn’t rule out the infinite responsibility of conscious beings to others.176 The ecological thought finds its way out of a labyrinth of beliefs. Worrying about whether we’re being stewards or tyrants or pilots of Spaceship Earth is window dressing. If we have a future, we will have decided to look after all sentient beings.

  This decision is not calculating or utilitarian. At its limit, it is love. The trouble with love is that it has a tinge of “evil” about it. Out of the universe of things, as I wrote previously, I select you. Let’s return to the beginning of Chapter 1. Isn’t this the trouble with “Earthrise” and Google Earth? Something lurks in the supposed innocence and wonder of “Earthrise,” something that Google Earth makes clearer. When I can see my mother’s fishpond in her garden in Wimbledon, London, from my desk in Davis, California, there no longer exists a world “over there.” What I see is what I wish to see: I can’t subtract my own desire to see from the parts of Earth I’m seeing. It’s like that scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds: we see the burning Bodega Bay from above, then birds begin to fill the screen, as if this supposedly neutral “bird’s-eye view” has been filled in with malicious intent.177 The bird’s-eye view selects Earth out of all the other places in the universe—there’s no place like home. This view is far from neutral—or worse, its very neutrality may be part of its evil. The decision to care for all sentient beings is an admission of the evil that is our big picture gaze. This is the soil in which dark ecology grows. Tree hugging begins to sound sinister, not innocent. Yet we have to go through this darkness. It’s the only way to grow up. If we don’t take responsibility this way, we’re stuck in an attitude we can never shake off, in the damaged and damaging attitude that gave birth to the ecological thought.

  3

  Forward Thinking

  The mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present

  Percy Shelley

  Environmentalism is often apocalyptic. It warns of, and wards off, the end of the world. The title of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring says it all.1 But things aren’t like that: the end of the world has already happened. We sprayed the DDT. We exploded the nuclear bombs. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the end of the world. Today is not the end of history. We’re living at the beginning of history. The ecological thought thinks forward. It knows that we have only just begun, like someone waking up from a dream.

  We’re responsible for global warming. Formally responsible, whether or not we caused it, whether or not we can prove that we caused it. We’re responsible for global warming simply because we’re sentient. No more elaborate reason is required. If you believe a more elaborate reason is required, consider the following:

  When you see a child about to be hit by a truck, do you protest, “I’m not directly responsible for her death, so I won’t help her”? When your house is burning down, do you say, “Well, I didn’t start the fire, so I’m not responsible for putting it out”? The big difference is that unlike the girl and the house, you can’t see climate. Climate isn’t weather. You can see weather, but not climate, in the same way that you can’t see momentum but you can see velocity. Climate is a derivative of weather. Very powerful computers using terabytes of RAM can barely model climate.

  You can’t really point to climate, but it exists. It doesn’t matter if it snowed somewhere, just as it doesn’t matter if a truck that’s about to run you down is slowing down or speeding up. If it has enough momentum to kill you, it’s going to do so unless you get out of the way. If you’re watching a little girl in front of that moving truck, you’re obliged to rescue her, for the simple reason that you can see her. In other words, simply because we’re sentient—let’s set the bar low to ensure that even snails and the snailiest humans are also responsible—we’re obliged to address global warming. No proof is required that we caused it—looking for absolute proof inhibits our response.

  This is tough: taking responsibility for something you can’t see. But it’s no tougher than taking responsibility for, say, not killing—you don’t have to come up with a reason; you just do it and figure out why later. That’s why it’s called an ethical decision. It doesn’t have to be proved or justified. You just do it. This doesn’t mean that your act is unconscious. By no means am I advising us just to do what we feel to be right. It means that one can act spontaneously and consciously. I’ll discuss this seeming paradox in a moment.

  Global warming denial depends upon and contributes to an idea of Nature not that different from a certain attitude to the child in the street or the burning house: “It’s over there—in some fundamental way, it’s not my concern.” Part of assuming direct responsibility for global warming will be abandoning the idea of Nature, an ideological barrier to realizing how everything is interconnected. Global warming deniers are like a man with a gun to someone’s head, saying, “Give me a good reason not to shoot this guy.” Do you give a good reason (“It’s right, it feels good, there’s a symbiotic web in which we’re immersed and you’re damaging it, you’re upsetting a natural balance ...”), or assuming you’re strong enough, do you just grab the gun?

  All the reasons in the world aren’t reason enough, from a certain point of view. This is why Søren Kierkegaard argues that the “ethical” position is a step up from the “aesthetic” one—in the aesthetic one, you do things because they feel nice or because they look nice. In the ethical one, niceness—or even rational soundness, which is perhaps also a kind of aesthetic order—doesn’t matter. In a perverse way, environmentalist arguments based on consequentialism (e.g., it makes you feel better to care for Earth) actually impede action, as we shall see.

  One implication is that it’s possible to be fully conscious and totally spontaneous, at the same time and for the same reasons. I disagree with Gregory Bateson, who asserts that the only good decisions are unconscious ones, an idea that sounds suspiciously, like “The only good woman is a dead one.”2 This disagreement affects our interpretations of a key moment in Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, explored in the previous chapter. What the Mariner performs with the water snakes isn’t just a random brain firing, nor is it even all that unusual, if we have the eyes to see it. Greeting a stranger is a form of “blessing unaware” (4.285–287)—we don’t know them when we say hello.3 “Unaware” doesn’t have to mean “automatically”—if it did, we would be at risk of an infinite regress, for who or what installed the “blessing software” that allowed this act to occur
automatically?

  The ecological thought spreads out in both time and space, but thinking big doesn’t contradict being intimate. A mesh that prevented us from imagining the strange stranger wouldn’t be a mesh, and vice versa. Ecology is about relating not to Nature but to aliens and ghosts. Intimacy presents us with the problem of inner space. Our intimacy with other beings is full of ambiguity and darkness. Strange strangers flow and dissimulate. If we edit out the ambiguity and darkness, we achieve nothing but aggression.

  The ecological thought is dark but not suicidal. The “into the wild” meme plays no part. Once we discover the void at our hearts, we can’t remain indifferent to the strange stranger. The discovery itself is a form of care. It is far more affirming to wake up in the darkness of the ecological thought than to continue dreaming of life destroyed forever. Eco-apocalypse is always for someone. It presupposes an audience. What kinds of sadistic “you asked for it” fantasies does it promote?4 To what extent does it leave everything the same as it ever was, the day before the day after tomorrow? It seems that for many people, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The more one thinks the ecological thought, the more one realizes that the “let it be” mentality (no human “interference” with the environment, no “anthropocentric” care for “animals,” and so on) is just the flip side of laissez-faire ideology. They look so different, but they are really the same thing seen from different sides, as if subject to parallax.5 The global banking crisis of 2008 should alert us (it even alerted Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan) to the truth that “let it be” economics is an ideological fantasy. Financial deregulation made the stock market appear “natural,” like a cloud. When it collapsed, it stopped being a “thing over yonder”—a reified process that just happens. America and the United Kingdom have left the era of “stuff happens” (how U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described looting and anarchy in the streets of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq).

  The ultimate horizon of ecology goes beyond capitalism, though capitalism will definitely pass through a green phase. In its junkie-like search for the next stock market high, capitalism will create a green bubble. But capitalism isn’t the terminus of four and a half billion years of replication. Capitalism marks only the beginning of thinking the ecological thought beyond our personal backyard. Versions of ecology adapted to serve the interests of corporations are temporary distortions. Capitalism shows only the truth of cooperation. Community we inherit; we have to choose cooperation. The factory system enabled workers to choose to cooperate with each other by throwing them together, turning them into replaceable parts of replaceable machines.6 We inhabit a gigantic network of interlocking mechanical structures that become increasingly detailed and increasingly global. Ever more intricate cages appear in which we can recognize each other as conscious beings capable of choosing. The first realization of a conscious being is that she has been asleep, in a cage. We must abandon a Romantic ecology of community. To imagine ecological society as community is to inhibit future cooperation, because “community” language appeals to fantasies about a historical moment before the idea of socialism had appeared.7

  Thinking cooperation widely and deeply is an obligation of the ecological thought. All strange strangers are already cooperating. In my hometown (Davis, California), there are thousands of crows who use the cars and streets as a nutcracker. They harvest walnuts from the trees that line a particular road; they fly up; when a car drives past, they drop the walnuts so precisely that they fall just in front of the oncoming wheels. There are monkeys in Delhi who should probably learn how to pay for their frequent bus rides (perhaps with fruit?). If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. A globalized world means that the awful charity song “We Are the World” includes the sentient beings, the coral, the trees.8

  I would smile to see chimpanzees walking dogs down the street and countries adopting ethical rules for the treatment of robots. I would enjoy a movement toward greater vegetarianism, as long as that doesn’t mean an increase in the furious, erotic hatred of the body that manifests in “veg-anorexia” and size zero clothing. I hope governments decide to cover every roof in the world with solar panels. I would like us not to ponder whether “animals” have rights but to respond to the demands of coexistent beings. Most of all I’ll be glad if the effect of the climate disruption crisis is not upgraded capitalism but a long hard look at why we’re alive and what we want to do about it, together.

  THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF EARLY ENVIRONMENTALISM

  Are there any signs in the artistic tealeaves? The title of this section parodies Fredric Jameson’s treatise, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.9 We may look back on postmodernism and decide that it marked the beginning of environmental global culture. Postmodernism was the moment at which global capital and the totally administered world made it impossible (in a highly toxic, negative, destructive way) not to detect the mesh. Postmodernism’s localism, the pastiche, the “micro-narratives,” point to something they refer to in their absence, a system (or is it?), a world (can we still use this word?), an environment—for want of a better term—stunningly vast and disturbingly decentered. In a world of “full spectrum dominance” and the colonization of the Moon and Mars, where does the environment stop—does that mean it’s not really an environment anymore?10 The logic of capital has made sure that the environment certainly isn’t what we have been calling Nature any more.

  Environmentalism and postmodernism appear to be opposites. One is “artificial,” the other “natural.” One is about human products, the other about nonhuman being. One involves buying organic; the other implies celebrating artifice. One likes integration and authenticity; the other likes disintegration and pastiche. Yet postmodernism and environmentalism are really two sides of the same historical moment. Take the music of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Early postmodern theory likes to think of them as nihilists or relativists, bricoleurs in the bush of ghosts. Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” features a repeated sample of her voice and a sinister series of recorded messages.11 This voice typifies postmodern art materials: forms of incomprehensible, unspeakable existence. Some might call it inert, sheer existence—art as ooze. It’s a medium in which meaning and unmeaning coexist. This oozy medium has something physical about it, which I call ambience.12 Anderson’s voice provides a taste of something that is disturbingly just “there.” Likewise, David Byrne’s and Brian Eno’s song “The Overload” talks of “A terrible signal, / Too weak to even recognize” (lines 1–2).13 The signal is either very weak, very frightening, or both. Its very weakness is what is terrible about it. It is a weird reminder of something that the domination of life forms has both uncovered and forgotten.

  Hiding in plain sight in postmodern art is the mesh. When we go into Giuseppe Penone’s room filled with bags of dry bay leaves at the Pompidou Centre, or look at the way Dan Flavin adjusts space with fluorescent light, or see the biomorphic, swelling sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, or hear the intense timbres of Eliane Radigue, we become aware of an environment. And because causality works backward, we can look back and see that what was eluding us was there all the time, in the space around the words of Mallarmé, in the huge swathes of color Turner paintings, in the way Japanese court music is so attuned to the space of ceremony that it seems to be listening to itself.

  Ambience points to where we are right now. We are here. Keith Rowe, guitarist of the free improvisation band AMM, says that silence in music is “un-intention.” The blank page, the open canvas, the gallery space, the silence (or quiet or, more properly, noise) around and within the music displays the medium in which and through which we’re reading, listening, looking, participating.14 Ambience is the extended phenotype of the poem, the way in which the text and the environment develop together—the “extended phenotext.”15

  In the spaces ambience opens up, we see history—Nature is just the reified, plasticized version. “Here” is a mesh of ent
angled presences and absences, not a foundational, localist, antiglobal concept. “Here” contains difference. Ambience points us to the here and now, in a compelling way that goes beyond explicit content—we don’t have to dig whales or mountains but can literally be here, now, with the artwork. And ambience opens up our ideas of space and place into a radical questioning.

  Capitalism has brought all life forms together, if only in the negative. The ground under our feet is being changed forever, along with the water and air. So along with the political radicalisms that seek to create new forms of collectivity out of the crisis of climate disruption, there must also be a rigorous and remorseless theoretical radicalism that opens our minds to where we are, about the fact that we’re here. This radicalism is almost religious in its passionate intensity.16 Perhaps postmodern art and philosophy were the heavy digging for the emerging ecological constellation. Yet the words “environment” and “environmentalism” aren’t right to describe this. First, in a world where we truly cared for what we now call the environment, there would be no need to point it out as such. We would be it in the most radical sense. Second, a religious vocabulary is risky: it might set up ecology as another kind of superbeing outside the mesh, outside the obvious impermanence and evanescence of reality.

  Is the ecological thought just a killjoy, then? What’s wrong with the “re-enchantment of the world”? There’s nothing wrong with enchantment. It’s the prefix “re-” that’s the source of the problem. This prefix assumes that the world was once enchanted, that we have done something to disenchant it, and that we can, and should, get back to where we once belonged. We simply can’t unthink modernity. If there is any enchantment, it lies in the future. The ecological “enchants the world,” if enchantment means exploring the profound and wonderful openness and intimacy of the mesh. What can we make of the new constellation? What art, literature, music, science, and philosophy are suitable to it? Art can contain utopian energy. As Percy Shelley put it, art is a kind of shadow from the future that looms into our present world.17