Morton writes from inside the ecological thought, not as its cheerleader or architect but as a latter-day Romantic. The great strength of this book is its genre inventiveness, and its main contribution is its performance of a thinking keyed to our time and place, a thinking with clear and immediate ethical implications. The Ecological Thought is crucial right now. -- Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder. -- Vince Carducci, College for Creative Studies
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University.
Morton writes from inside the ecological thought, not as its
cheerleader or architect but as a latter-day Romantic. The great
strength of this book is its genre inventiveness, and its main
contribution is its performance of a thinking keyed to our time and
place, a thinking with clear and immediate ethical implications.
The Ecological Thought is crucial right now.
*Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan*
Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and
Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the
ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed
before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his
forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the
humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which
Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its
erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought
is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.
*Vince Carducci, College for Creative Studies*
Timothy Morton has a unique take on ecology that challenges much of
the alternative consciousness that floats around on the periphery
of environmental circles. He offers a profound take on human
possibilities. To Morton, human society and Nature are not two
distinct things but rather two different angles on the same
thing.
*Tikkun*
By suggesting imaginative ways to resolve other crises, could
humanities scholars stave off the crisis engulfing their own
subjects? Morton proposes a future in which the venerable ideas of
"nature" and "environment" are so much detritus, useless for
addressing a looming ecological catastrophe. His book exemplifies
the "serious" humanities scholarship he makes a plea for. My head's
still spinning.
*Times Higher Education*
Morton's The Ecological Thought rejects the romantic concept of
nature as a passive foil to human action. The natural world, as it
turns out, is not something outside of us; or, put another way:
there is no difference between humans and our environment...He asks
us to engage in "radical openness" as a way of practicing "radical
coexistence," a state of being that we live even when we do not
think much about it...Morton's book allows us to see our stirrings
of sympathy for nonhuman beings such as strawberries as the
beginning of a recognition that we have all--people and plants
alike--lost long ago our presumed roots in an imagined natural
world.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
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