Being Ecological, with a New Preface by the Author

From ＂our most popular guide to the new epoch＂ (Guardian), a new edition of the book about ecology without information dumping, guilt inducing, or preaching to the choir.

Ecology books can be confusing information dumps that are out of date by the time they hit you.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, reissued with a new preface, 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 climate change. They discuss what sorts of actions count as ecological--starting a revolution? going to the garden center to smell the plants? And finally, they explore 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?

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach, and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology, Nothing, Hyperobjects, Realist Magic, The Ecological Thought, Ecology without Nature, among others, and 160 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design, and food.