Showing posts with label Timothy Morton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Timothy Morton. Show all posts

2023/06/20

Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment | Science and nature books | The Guardian

Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment | Science and nature books | The Guardian




Review
Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment


There are not too many ‘scary facts’ in this ambitious book, which draws on both Kantian philosophy and Star Wars to explain our relationship to the world


PD SmithSat 20 Jan 2018 19.59 AEDT





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From the outset, Timothy Morton is very clear about the kind of book he isn’t writing. This is not another “confusing information dump, slapping you upside the head to make you feel bad”. What he terms “ecological information delivery mode”, heavy in “factoids” and accompanied by a “guilt-inducing sermon”, is counterproductive. Deluging readers with scary facts about global warming, which is what most environmental writers do, is “inhibiting a more genuine way of handling ecological knowledge”. To understand the true gravity of the current situation we need “to start to live the data”.

At the heart of this immensely ambitious book is a radical critique of how we know and relate to the world around us. Morton argues that our scientific age is characterised by an epistemological gulf between objects and data: “things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way”. Critical of a scientistic approach to knowledge, he believes the world can be grasped only by moving to a viewpoint that is both experiential and reflexive. The observer needs to be part of the equation: “Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.”



In order to “live ecological knowledge”, Morton thinks we need to break through the “massive firewall” our Neolithic ancestors built between humans and non-humans some 12,000 years ago, as they began creating agriculture and theistic religions. Today we need to abandon the arrogance of anthropocentrism. In a memorable analogy, drawing on both Kantian philosophy and Star Wars, Morton observes that the idea of “mind melding with a non-human being” resembles the Force, an invisible field that permeates and binds everything. Sensing this “force”, the underlying connectedness of all things, is an experience Morton describes as “attunement”.

To read Being Ecological is to be caught up in a brilliant display of intellectual pyrotechnics. The playful seriousness of Morton’s prose mixes references to Blade Runner and Tibetan Buddhism with lyrics from Talking Heads and concepts from German philosophers. He doesn’t offer a plan to make society more environmentally friendly; instead, in what is an inspiringly idealistic book, he calls for a paradigm shift in our relationship to the world.

Being Ecological is published by Pelican. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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Pelican Books #17
Being Ecological


Timothy Morton

3.57
626 ratings94 reviews

'To read Being Ecological is to be caught up in a brilliant display of intellectual pyrotechnics' P.D.Smith, Guardian

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?

Don't care about ecology? This book is for you. Timothy Morton, who has been called 'Our most popular guide to the new epoch' (Guardian), sets out to show us that whether we know it or not, we already have the capacity and the will to change the way we understand the place of humans in the world, and our very understanding of the term 'ecology'. A cross-disciplinarian who has collaborated with everyone from Björk to Hans Ulrich Obrist, Morton is also a member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, a group of forward-looking thinkers who are grappling with modern-day notions of subjectivity and objectivity, while also offering fascinating new understandings of Heidegger and Kant. Calling the volume a book containing 'no ecological facts', Morton confronts the 'information dump' fatigue of the digital age, and offers an invigorated approach to creating a liveable future.

GenresPhilosophyNonfictionEnvironmentEcologyScienceClimate ChangeNature
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230 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2018
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Timothy Bloxam Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They are the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; and other books.




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Neil MacDonald
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February 8, 2018
This is a playful (in a very odd way) book about a serious subject (ecological crisis). Morton is a philosopher not a scientist. He is at pains to tell you there are no truthy factoids in the book. Rather, it’s an appeal that we should think about life, the universe, and everything in a different way. His style is folksy (or as folksy as you can get with object oriented ontology), and, like a mythic sprite, he delights in turning our “common sense” understanding of stuff upside down. His basic argument is that the way we think about ecology is distorted by the intellectual legacy of the hierarchical societies that came into being with the invention of agriculture. This legacy separates subject from object, the human from the non-human, spirit from body. In short, it’s anthropocentric patriarchy. When we see the environment as something we can operate on, we destroy the connection of everything to everything else. He feels most at home, not with a scientific grasping of the universe but with an artistic one, or even one of “enchantment” – “the aesthetic experience,” he says, “is about solidarity with what is given.” He is telling us how to care. And he reassures us, we already do. The parts, he says, are greater than the whole.

As play, I enjoyed the book’s deeply intellectual anti-intellectualism. As a writer, I enjoyed his turning the world upside down, his archaeology of thought. It was a wonderfully pleasurable artistic experience reading the book, a wander through a hall of mirrors. But intellectually, practically, politically I’m less sure how useful the book is (Morton, of course, would say I’m asking the wrong, utilitarian, question). The mirrors seem to go along with a fair amount of smoke. There are too many logical elisions – to take one example the statement “when you play a game like cricket or baseball, the ball arrives at your bat within a few milliseconds. That’s faster than your brain.” The elision here is between brain and conscious brain. Of course it’s not faster than your brain or you couldn’t hit it. Or, again, his argument that not knowing why a painting moves you is like not knowing why you should care about the environment, as if there was only one way to not know things.

Reading the book isn’t really the point though. Letting it happen to you is. Its object is to “re-confuse” us, in the hope that will re-attune us to our environment. Perhaps, you have to be a philosopher for this to work.

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Uroš Đurković
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February 13, 2021
OOO je, osim što izgleda divno šašavo, skraćenica za „objektno orijentisanu ontologiju”.
A izgled, u neku ruku, i ne vara: OOO je filozofski pravac 21. veka, koji pokušava da preispita odnos između subjekta i objekta u smeru afirmacije postojanja objekta kao takvog. Dakle, od Kanta u metafizici dominira tzv. korelacionizam, iliti (putem uzročnosti) potvrda objekta u svesti subjekta, dok predstavnici OOO smatraju da objekat ne samo što postoji nezavisno od subjekta (što, realno, u filozofiji i nije neka novina), već čovekova svest nema privilegovano mesto u poimanju sveta te predstavlja samo jednu od ravnopravnih mogućnosti. Takođe, OOO smatra da misao ne samo što nije jedini način pristupa svetu, nego nije ni najbolji, jer najboljeg pristupa nema. (Uostalom, pitam se ja, u odnosu na šta se može ustanoviti ovo stepenovanje, a da nije izvan same misli?) A budući da je istorija ljudskog roda neraskidivo povezana sa istorijom misli, tako da je čovek jedini posednik misli, a time i centar značenja i moći, OOO pokušava da napravi silovit odmak od antropocentrizma.

A zašto je ovo uopšte važno? Misao o odnosu subjekta i objekta temeljno određuje i ekološka pitanja. Timoti Morton, kao jedan od istaknutijih predstavnika OOO-a, uzbudljivo pokazuje različita gledišta koja uspevaju da uzdrmaju niz naizgled očiglednih predstava o prirodi. Njegova fenomenologija znanja je vrcava, neočekivana, a bujajući (anti)intelektualizam inspirativan. I više od praktičnih rešenja, Morton se bavi ekologijom kao diskurzivnim konstruktom i njenim posledicama na mišljenje. Međutim, ovde je mnogo reči posvećeno i faktoidima (tzv. „lažnim činjenicama”), aroganciji nauke, estetici (lepota je u datosti koja donosi prepoznavanje nečega što nisam JA i što, na neki način, proizvodi vreme), ali npr. i naizgled sofističkoj argumentaciji da je celina manje od skupa delova – budući da celina predstavlja jedno, a delovi mnoštvo (opet, to je vezano sa teorijom o hiperobjektima, ali o tome drugom prilikom).

Bilo kako bilo, ovo je jedna zaista i eklektična studija (električno-eklektična), tobogan za misli koji nagrađuje tamo gde se najmanje očekuje. A zaključak se može naslutiti: priča o ekologiji često upućuje na ono što nema veze sa ekologijom, a stalni imperativ da budemo saobrazni ekološkoj misli, treba da bude drukčije shvaćen: mi već jesmo, hteli to ili ne, ekološka bića. Od prirode se ne može pobeći.


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Anna
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January 14, 2023
One of the reasons that I read a lot is my enjoyment of many different types of books and topics. After decades of reading, I'm also pretty good at judging whether a book will be my kind of thing. Thus I rarely give one or two star ratings. In the case of Being Ecological, it's especially surprising because I've already read and enjoyed another book by Timothy Morton on the same subject, The Ecological Thought, as well as a book about his preferred philosophy, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Yet somehow I found Being Ecological so incredibly irritating that I would have left it unfinished had it not been the first nonfiction book of 2023. Abandoning it would have been such a poor omen for the year ahead that I pushed on.

It was not so much Morton's ideas that I had a problem with, although I am doubtful about many of them, but the way he explained them. The best hypothesis I can come up with about what happened here is as follows: Morton is an academic and talks about lecturing indifferent students in philosophy at one point in Being Ecological. So presumably he teaches, or has taught, generation Z. I've done so as well, not very competently, and can understand the urge to try and make your material more appealing to the youth. Could that be what he's attempting with this writing style?


In the beauty experience, there is some kind of mind-meld-like thing that takes place, where I can't tell whether it's me or the artwork that is causing the beauty experience: if I try to reduce it to the artwork or to me, I pretty much ruin it. This means, argues Kant, that the beauty experience is like the operating system on top of which all kinds of cool political apps are sitting, apps such as democracy. Nonviolently existing with a being that isn't you is a pretty good basis for that.

The first sentence is fine, but I cannot believe that the second is an accurate account of Kant. I also have no idea what 'cool political apps' even means. Whether such a style actually appeals to those under the age of 22 is a mystery, but I find this sort of thing pretty unbearable:


Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities. But this isn't enough. One way this becomes obvious is when writing grant proposals that sound like pleading. Please, please don't hurt me, Mr Funding Source, I'm a sort of educated PR guy who is going to decorate this boring cupcake of scientism with these nice human-flavoured meaning-candies.

Such metaphors explain nothing. His constant use of 'retweet' is likewise tiresome and seems unlikely to age well. The Ecological Thought was not written in such a manner, indeed my review comments on how clearly the ideas in it are articulated! Being Ecological starts out reasonably well, with some thoughtful stuff about truth and falsity not being a simple dichotomy, then unravels around ninety pages in. I did not follow this logic:


When you draw a set of things, the circle you draw around those things is always going to be bigger than the set, physically speaking. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to encompass them. But how a drawing looks isn't the same as what it logically means. If everything exists in the same way, that means that wholes exist in the same way as their parts, which means that there are always more parts than there is a whole - which means the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. It's childishly simple when you think of it this way. So how come it's so hard to accept?

Maybe because that explanation isn't very coherent? Surely the childishly simple implication is that a whole is equal to the sum of its parts, not less? This section is titled 'Not Your Grandaddy's Holism' which is cringeworthy. On pages 186 and 187, by which point I was really annoyed, Morton summarises his argument as 'it's fine not to give a shit and to leave your ways of thinking unchanged because you're already an ecological being'. I paraphrase, as it's articulated in a much more tiresomely whimsical way. The point is that Morton critiques the ways we talk about ecology in a straw-man fashion without providing anything useful to replace them with. This is all the more frustrating because he periodically makes a promising point like:


For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we have now is worth sustaining. It implies furthermore that 'continuing for a longer time' is a hallmark of success, which in turn implies a model of existing having to do with persisting, going on, being constantly present. But we've established that things aren't like that. So in the end the style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents, which are ironically more likely the way things actually are. It's not the case that things are just functioning smoothly until they don't. Smooth functioning is always a myth.


That is all very well, but I've read it before elsewhere actually used effectively in an argument. I'm really disappointed with Being Ecological. It provided me with no useful new ways of thinking about the environment, the style was deeply irritating, and I know Morton can do much better. I strongly recommend reading something else about ecological philosophy instead, such as The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, or indeed Morton's The Ecological Thought.
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René Bloemink
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September 5, 2018
When I stumbled upon some lectures by Timothy Morton, I was intrigued by his prospect of a different kind of thinking about being human at the brink of grand planetary changes by global warming. In 'Being Ecological', Morton tries to disrupt our usual way of thinking about it: the difference between nature and culture is non-sensical; everything is connected in intricate ways; objects are fuzzy and aren't fixed; we can't have any oversight on planetary issues because we're deeply involved in it; everything is ecology, even thinking about ecology, so we're already ecological if we like it or not.

In the first half of the book I was not sure if it was all common sense to me or that I didn't understand it at all. Morton's way of writing seems to be directed at achieving exactly this. Creating confusion, because everything radiates confusion. Morton writes like he talks: babbling, referencing, using unorthodox ideas and underexplained aphorisms. As a reader I really had to engage in a dialogue with the book - which is always a good thing in my opinion - but in second half of the book I found myself barely listening to the book without the desire of talking back.

I guess my takeaway from Being Ecological is that things are more complex and more connected to other things than what seems on the surface. Seeming, appearing, is laden with conceptual baggage and we can learn to see through our usual way of looking at things. We can take up a phenomenological stance towards things where we do not think we can obtain any kind of practical or intellectual mastery over it, but instead letting the things appear to us, like looking at a piece of art. In that aesthetic dialogue the object can appear anew, just like a psychedelic experience could provide. By the way, sometimes I feel that Object Oriented Ontology is a kind of psychedelic experience in the clothes of academic 21th century philosophy.

In the end, I was hoping that Morton would provide something that would really help in gaining a new constructive perspective on being human in 2018. Instead, he left me with the feeling of wanting 'something more'.

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I would like to recommend The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram in which he embraces a animistic/shamanistic/phenomenological perspective on what is to be ecological. It's about how the environment is always present in our experience, in who we are. That book is much more vivid and pronounced and maybe even accomplishes what this book by Morton is trying to achieve.

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Joris
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August 24, 2020
As a physicist and statistician, data and models are a natural way for me to understand climate change and the accompanying mass extinction of species. But I have had it all wrong, according to this book. Timothy Morton explains that it is unimportant and even dangerous to consume information if we don’t know how to think first (which we cannot). Knowing fact(oid)s such as the 1000 years it can take to decompose plastic in the ocean, or that we lose 13% of sea ice every decade are supposedly treacherous and distracting.

I agree with most of his ideas, such as the importance of understanding that humans are part of the biosphere, not ‘outside’ of it. Anthropocentric and monotheistic ways of thinking also do not help, they are part of the problem. However, these ideas are not new (to me at least?), and reading this book there wasn’t a moment I felt the paradigm shift in my thinking that I was hoping for. But maybe I was expecting too much after the pompous first chapters.

Morton likes to say he is different and the readers are wrong, and all 'classical' environmentalists and eco-scientists with us. But I can't help but think that Morton too had to be swayed by facts (or factoids) before believing or understanding something as massive as climate change. Surely, facts are not everything, but they help with the puzzle. As Morton explains near the end, green energy is plentiful, and if all energy were renewable we could waste it without shame or guilt and party like there is no tomorrow (pun!). How can you come to that conclusion if not with facts on the consequences of different energy sources? This book is in fact full of facts, but they are all assumed, already in the mind of the readers thanks to other sources of information.

Morton employs a direct style, almost like a stream of consciousness, that is sometimes hard to follow. It is written with an air of superiority that made me angry at times like a nihilist teenager with a patronising teacher. I guess that was the whole point, but he didn’t do enough to redirect my anger to get me to a higher level of understanding. A missed opportunity, as I don’t get angry very easily. The name dropping of philosophers and pop culture references is just that, name dropping.

Overall an interesting book about how we should deconstruct the way we think before we can tackle climate change (or any other global threat), but it doesn’t deliver on its promises and left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Lillian
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November 12, 2018
Have you ever found a book so good you felt a premature grief for when it would be over?

This book was that for me.

I like a short book. I like a book that gets to the point. What the book sets out to do on the first page is what the book does. And the first page took me from "oh björk recommends it" to "I cannot leave without this buying this €11 book".

It took everything in my power to not highlight and scribble in every page. The accessible and casual language made me feel engaged and excited to read and have my mind blown each chapter.

Did I mention it was a short book? Not only short but POLITELY SIZED paper back with a sexy cover that could very easily be shoved into a generously sized pocket and POLITELY whipped out to read in public. Book function and aesthetic matters to me.


As a philosophy student reading this, it satisfied alot of unresolved feelings I have on problematic key philosophers. Morton was able to reference their ideas without ignoring their some of their yucky connotations or contexts.

This is my favourite book. I can't wait to read more of his works and will be enthusiastically enforcing my loved ones to flick through this.

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Sven Krook
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July 5, 2022
Het gezegde "veel geblaat, weinig wol" komt in me op. Hij gebruikt veel woorden en benoemt vaak wat hij niet wil schrijven of bereiken. Hij zegt echter weinig naar mijn mening. Het kan zijn dat de boodschap is achtergebleven in de vertaling of dat het aan mij ligt maar de boodschap komt volgens mij niet veel verder dan "we zijn al deel van alles om ons heel en dus ecologisch".

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Rik-Jan Veldhuijzen
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January 28, 2019
I gave up on this book after having read about two-thirds of it.
Although I might agree with the main thesis of the book - Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) - and think it is a really interesting philosophy, Morton was not the guy to sell it to me.

This book was one big word salad, and most of the time I had no idea where he was getting. Maybe this rhizomatic way of writing was done on purpose, to make us feel OOO. In that case, I might not like it after all. Admittedly, radically changing the way in which people approach the world is not an easy task, maybe a quit to easily on Morton.

Anyways, I still feel like I did not understand where he was after. I do not know whether my poor philosophical capabilities are the terrible writing style are the cause of that. In either case, I think, it is still hard to read. Do not recommend.

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Zachary
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February 4, 2019
Timothy Morton’s attitude toward environmentalism is both essential and rooted in reductionist assertions, which makes this book rather complicated. On the one hand, he creatively applies to environmental concerns his philosophical approach to how we interpret phenomena, how we understand wholes and parts, and how we differentiate existence from presence in an accessible and popular style; on the other hand, he romanticizes non-hierarchical, pre-Neolithic human existence and somehow attributes all injustice and oppression to civic monotheism which, for more than ten-thousand years, has evidently ensnared us in its tendrils and made it difficult to think in new, more innovative and more just ways. While it is hard to pin down Morton’s thesis (since this book, albeit slim, touches on so much), his main claim is that the most ubiquitous form of environmental discourse at present—wherein scientists, philosophers, politicians, and activists “dump” massive quantities of information on a relatively uninformed public in an effort to persuade us all to act quickly and definitively to avoid climate catastrophe—impedes the very outcomes we desire most. These immense data dumps both reinforce the myth that climate catastrophe is imminent, rather than presently upon us, and the myth that we still have time to remake our society or restructure our economic behaviors—colossal tasks that still perpetuate our human lust for domination and control. This type of data dump discourse, Morton writes, is “exactly the opposite of what we need in order to comprehend where we are and why—to start to live the data.” The question that everyone asks in this mode of discourse—“so what can we do?”—“wants to see ahead and anticipate and know what to do, in advance. That’s what we can’t do,” Morton insists. “That’s exactly why all this happened.”

In the first half of the book, Morton takes pains to defend this thesis. He sketches why any so-called objective notion of truth is suspicious and, with a nod toward Stephen Colbert, defends a notion of truthiness. This may strike some readers as peculiar—why, when so many climate deniers impede efforts to address climate justice, should we rely less on facts?—yet Morton’s point is philosophical, and spot on. We can never entirely know an object: when we see or touch or bite into an apple, we access apple data, never the apple itself. We have no idea what it is like for a worm to tunnel into the apple, for instance, nor do we know each and every scientific property of any apple we eat. And even if we did have this data, we would still never know the essence of the apple, the apple itself. For Morton, there are other, less obvious objects that exist and are not entirely present to us: these he calls “hyper-objects,” such as climate, evolution, and the biosphere. He meticulously explains—in rather quirky, non-philosophical prose—why hyper-objects exist in the same way as apples, even if such objects contain many parts. One could think that the biosphere, for instance, insofar as it contains all lifeforms (Morton’s preferred term), is a whole, and that this whole exceeds the sum of its parts. People, apples, trees, rocks, etc. are all parts of the biosphere, yet the biosphere outstrips them all in its very existence. This, Morton persuasively demonstrates, is profoundly mistaken: the biosphere is an object like any other object, a phenomenon like any other phenomenon, and it exists in the same way and on the same level as any one of its smaller parts. While hyper-objects are massive in scope and thus distributed across vast time and space, they elude our efforts to know them fully for the same reason the apple eludes our attempts to know it and therefore control it. We can never access the biosphere or the climate fully, we are in fact parts of the biosphere and the climate, and yet the biosphere and climate are each smaller than the sum total of their respective parts. Once we have a handle on this, Morton believes, we can start to think and act in a more environmentally-conscious manner.

Part and parcel of Morton’s effort to reorient how we think about our relationship with what we call Nature (a term Morton in fact wants to dismiss, since it implies a radical distance between us humans and the environment in which we live, as if we could neatly separate those interconnected “realms” of existence), is his attempt to show how radically interrelated all objects are. He is up-front about the fact that such “web of life” discourse is ubiquitous and cliché, yet he aptly observes how so few people can explain what they mean when they repeat such platitudes. Morton nonetheless defends this rather kitsch axiom with recourse to thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. When we apprehend an object, he explains, there is never just the I, the subject, and the object, which passively awaits my contemplation. Each object is part of a manifold, a complex context or interpretive system wherein the object has various connotations and denotations and is used in a myriad of ways by countless different lifeforms. So while I, a human eater of apples, eat the apple, the worm, a tunneler of apples, tunnels into it, and the scientist, an observer of apples, observes its skin underneath a microscope. To push this further, whereas the apple is a source of nourishment and enjoyment for me, the forbidden fruit also exerts powerful symbolism in some people’s recollection of Genesis (nota bene: Genesis never states that the fruit is in fact an apple). Every object is a manifold, no object is just itself, and thus each object resists our anthropocentric efforts to manipulate it at will. We can never fully possess an object since an object always exists in a different way or for a different purpose in another context. With respect to environmental issues, the upshot of such manifold ubiquity is “explosive” interconnectedness that, in Morton’s view, levels out some “monotheistic” hierarchy of existence (a reductionist characterization, more on this later). To echo an earlier point, once we appreciate this “context explosion,” Morton believes, we can more successfully avoid the pitfalls of data-dump environmentalism mode and better appreciate the serious issues we face.

For all his deconstructive efforts, Morton’s project is ultimately constructive as well. He is, as noted, deeply suspicious of our “constant and very particular orientation to the future—what needs to be done. . . . You think future and you think radically different than the present.” Yet Morton wants to drive at a more fundamental, more existential, and less utilitarian reorientation toward the world that involves what he calls attunement, rather than plans for revolutions to remake society. When we are attuned to our environment, to creatures both biotic and abiotic, we relate to such creatures for “no particular reason.” This is a rather indistinct notion that Morton develops for most of the book; the essential point is, however, that each and every object and lifeform we encounter can speak to us, as it were, and that we should attend to this expression, relate to it, and let it determine us and our actions. In effect, Morton refutes the supremacy of Kant’s transcendental subject and re-enchants the nonhuman environment with the power to meet and confront us from a place of real, non-illusory alterity.

Morton does this with philosophical dexterity; for all his apparent mysticism, Morton is not a mystic, and the case he presents in this book is scrupulously philosophical. In attunement, we are “tuned” by what we encounter insofar as we can never, via our own efforts at perception, interpretation, etc., impose an exhaustive identity on an object, just as we can never determine its essence with any certainty. It exists outside of us and actively exerts power over us: art, for example, draws us in, captures our attention, reorients the way we approach other objects. “Art is telepathic—it’s spooky action at a distance,” Morton writes. He even wants to say that art and other objects temporalize us—that is, they literally provide us with time, albeit a more fundamental time than clock-time. “How it looks, how it feels . . . its mass, its shape—all that, which we could call appearance, is the past.” How the art will affect me, how it will prompt certain reflections and projections in me, how it shapes the way I look at it and other objects hereafter, when I see in some other object that which I see now, in this object—all this is the future. The present is “a sort of train-station” wherein past and future meet, “a kind of relative motion between . . . past and future. I call it nowness to differentiate it from a reified atomic ‘present’ that I actually don’t think truly exists,” Morton explains. To the correlationists—such as the post-structuralists, who maintain that what we say objects are are in fact cultural constructs, “discursive products of epistemic formations” or “concepts we project onto certain lumps of matter”—Morton responds that “there has to be a correlatee as well as a correlator: there is a violin sonata, not just a violinist.” To be sure, we do decide what is real to a certain extent, yet this does not also mean that the correlator, be it the Kantian subject, the Nietzschean will to power, or Dasein, is more real than the objects we encounter. We do not simply determine them; they too, speak to us and consequently determine themselves.

Morton seeks to rediscover and recover the non-violent, non-dominant attunement he believes pre-Neolithic peoples practiced in accordance with their environment, and herein lies one of the book’s major flaws. Not unlike some of the thinkers he admires, Morton paints with an unfathomably broad brush; it is not hyperbolic to say that he attributes most, if not all of our modern woes, and most certainly climate catastrophe, to Neolithic domestication and concomitant monotheism. When humans started to farm, they were subsequently forced to continue to farm in order to stay alive, and the institutional structures that materialized as part of this revolution in human history were hierarchical, oppressive, and rooted in systematic domination. Humans came to see the environment as mere mindless, plastic stuff upon which they could act unilaterally, heedless to how and whether matter could speak to them, summon them, and transform them, as it had in the pre-Neolithic era. Fortunately, the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and subsequent twentieth century thinkers rediscovered how objects are both what they are and how they appear to us, and particularly that how they appear to us betrays some sense of what they actually are. This development, coupled with deconstructive efforts from the likes of Jacques Derrida and others, upended the traditional, static-substance metaphysics that arose when Neolithic humans started to farm; deconstruction has thus helped us rethink dichotomies between the human and non-human, the conscious and non-conscious, the sentient and non-sentient. As per this narrative, Morton contends, a new, leveled-out metaphysics has resurfaced, one which resembles the pre-Neolithic attunement practiced by earlier humans. Morton calls this metaphysics the spectral plain, and a less violent, more playful, perhaps even more indifferent posture toward the lifeforms that inhabit this spectral plain is the mode in which we should attend to climate catastrophe and the earth system more broadly.

There are numerous elements of this narrative that are both historically accurate and philosophically persuasive. The metaphysics toward which Morton alludes is the best defense of non-anthropocentric eco-centrism that I have thus far encountered. And his analysis of care is, albeit unintuitive and at first ostensibly unethical, much needed at a time when “what to do” dominates and actively undermines our conversations about the climate crisis. Yet Morton’s story weirdly romanticizes pre-Neolithic humans and pretends as if no other humans for more than ten-thousand years have also practiced what he calls attunement. Moreover, Morton unpersuasively maintains that Christianity particularly excludes such an attitude and its concomitant metaphysics, which is patently not the case. The monolithic narrative wherein Christian philosophers inherited from Plato a stark mind-body dualism and an otherworldly metaphysical orientation is reductionist and historically imprecise, and Morton simply seems to accept this narrative rather than provide evidence to justify his wholesale rejection of Christian or any other “monotheistic” philosophy. One need only read Thomas Aquinas and other medieval thinkers to see how important sense-perception is in their metaphysics, and one need only peruse Book XIV of City of God for an explicit patristic rejection of the mind-body dualism purportedly apparent in Platonism (which, for some philosophers, is not so obvious even in Plato).

To be sure, orthodox Christian metaphysics is hierarchical, yet hierarchy need not entail domination and, properly conceived, can more appropriately attend to relationality between different types of creatures and objects. Humans are, after all, profoundly different than prokaryotes, which is not to necessarily say we are better than them, or that our interests should always come first; nevertheless, it is to say that I have a metaphysically different sort of responsibility to other humans than I do to the bacteria that cover my skin and live inside my intestines, with whom I do, as Morton wants to stress, collaborate on a daily basis. Moreover, it is just not true that a Christian hierarchical view of the creation is at its core otherworldly. When Morton cherry-picks a quote from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew—“Store up your treasure in heaven”—then explains that this “means you don’t need to worry so much about what happens down here, because it’s less real and less important,” he betrays a remarkably uncharitable and poor comprehension of creation metaphysics. As someone like Rowan Williams could inform Morton, an orthodox Christian view of the creation cultivates what Williams calls “a solidarity in creatureliness” that rejects the myth of self-creation and therefore dominance, which Morton likewise wants to unsettle. On a Christian view, the creation is not mindless, plastic stuff, even if, at the same time, it alone cannot provide the metaphysical fulfillment we all seek. Yet this latter accession need not—or rather should not, not ever—allay any Christian’s anxiety about what happens here, on earth, to the earth system. Just as God is utterly for the world—“God desires to be God for what is not God,” which is to be God, Williams explains—then we, in openness to the divine action, likewise strive to be for the world in the same way.

Consequently, monotheistic traditions—or at least the one with which I am most familiar—do not fit so neatly into the narrative Morton presents here; more importantly, they are not so hostile to his ultimate project as he seems to think. If we are to embody the non-calculative, non-dominant praxis that attunement reflects, we should attend to how other traditions and worldviews can inform, correct, or make more persuasive the case for such praxis. Grand, reductionist (and rather caustic) narratives of the history of “Neolithic” philosophy can only undermine this effort. Thus, while Morton adds so much to our impoverished environmental discourse, he needlessly excludes a whole host of helpful voices from such discourse. And this ultimately makes this book poorer than it otherwise could have been.
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Ben Thurley
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April 22, 2020
Morton's one big idea in this book (that we're already "ecological" just by "being") is wrapped in one philosophical framework (object oriented ontology - OOO) inflected with a slightly coy (at least in this work) Buddhist temperament and he'll be damned (or you will) if he's not going to drag you across a landscape of cool and coruscating philosophy/cultural studies to get that across. "You don't have to be ecological", he says in the book's final sentences (...spoilers...). "Because you are ecological."

His opening chapter, "Not Another Information Dump" is outstanding. He nails a mode of knowledge and communication – driven by anxiety and a sadly misinformed epistemology – that too often characterises environmental campaigning and discourse:
Ecological information delivery mode in the media seems most often to consist of what we could call an information dump.leading to what Morton refers to as a sort of "ecological PTSD."

Morton helpfully aims to take a step back and asks how is this discourse intended to be received? What kind of response is it aiming to generate? Are those responses desirable, or even possible? His OOO helps us see that the "factoids" this discourse generates cannot possibly help us to grasp a thing (any thing) in itself - let alone something as all-encompassing and all-consuming as "ecology" and its current crisis, "climate change". The truth of our ecological existence, he rightly says, is fundamentally ungraspable and never separable from our inherently contingent, subjective, partial realities.

I didn't find all the writing as accessible and there's much I disagree with. Maybe I'm just not cool enough, but I tuned out of a lot of his over-long chapter "Tuning"and though I thought his analysis of the ecological styles of immersion, authenticity, religion and efficiency was stimulating, by the time of the final chapter I was already tired of yet more references to The Simpsons and deconstructions of the concept of genre on iTunes. Oh, and a small side-note: Morton's contention that "free will is overrated" is based on a widely misinterpreted experiment.

Morton helpfully identifies and critiques the either-or/black-or-white thinking that generates notions of individual guilt in our current ecological crisis. He is, of course, right to point out that no one person caused the climate crisis and any individual's actions make only an infinitesimal contribution to our current disrupted and dangerous ecological state. Although, in an almost perfect encapsulation of his black andwhite (not black-or-white) thinking, he also – correctly – notes that "whatever evil is, it is an intrinsic aspect of oneself." It is, Morton declares, "the human species", not "sea turtles" or "the octopus species", that caused global warming.

It is in this dual performance of liberation from, and liturgy of, (a somewhat dispassionate sense of) personal guilt that I dramatically part ways with Morton. Certainly he attempts to defend himself from the charge of quietism or political indifference – though, to my mind, unsuccessfully. He identifies my urge to name a culprit or identify avenues for action to repair the world as part, if not the sum total, of the problem when it comes to thinking and acting ecologically. He is repeatedly scornful or dismissive of well-meaning but misguided attempts to ask "so what should we do?" at the end of every conference or discussion about ecology.

However, it is a matter of empirical analysis – which Morton largely eschews – to attempt to trace our current crisis to the actors and networks and processes that wield disproportionate power and influence in our fossil-fueled wealth-dream. It is not merely "the human species" – an abstraction Morton has already helpfully deconstructed – as opposed to "the octopus species" that has caused global warming. The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and who currently live bear no responsibility whatsover for our current ecological crisis. There are corporations with names and CEOs and boards and marketing teams and scientists on retainer – along with politicians and governments which are beholden to them – that have caused the crisis. But you will not read about them in Being Ecological.

I guess, I'd like to affirm Morton's holistic disengagement from, and critique of, the urgency of knowing certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways. It is helpful to think about the ways that our embodied existence is already an ecological one and admit that "we" (people like me) can unnecessarily create barriers to people recognising this for themselves. However, the question remains, if I can be ecological just by being, how am I to act ecologically in light of the actual ecology I exist within.

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From the United States
Pen Bay Person
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2018
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A must read for every rational, thoughtful person in the world!
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Joshua Chavanne
5.0 out of 5 stars We are all Ecological
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2018
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Worthwhile and thought-provoking.
Kind of inarguable
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From other countries
Laura
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2020
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My lecturer recommended this book to me and it was definitely a wonderful read! Morton explores very deep topics in an accessible way so if you’re worried that philosophy isn’t your thing or don’t want to waste your time reading complicated philosophical texts, you honestly have nothing to worry about!! Don’t get me wrong, this is still a deeply fascinating philosophical text but everything is written in a very inclusive way and all topics are explained very well. Morton manages to be funny while also teaching us about climate change etc, which I imagine isn’t an easy task at all! Also the music/pop culture references make it so much more fun/enthralling to read. Overall, I recommend it to anyone :)
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Duncan Spence
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for anybody who thinks about ecology
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2020
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Most philosophy in English is translated out of German, French, Italian, Latin, Arabic, Greek and so forth. Morton's is possibly the best philosophy written in English since Wm James or maybe even Adam Smith and David Hume. The analysis spans twelve and a half thousand years, extending the origins of the current crisis of western intellectualising to the first domestic enclosures of Mesopotamia, to the moment when human beings turned from hunting and gathering to building fences round fields and manipulating crop production. Everybody should read this book.
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Dominikus Heil
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a ‚must read‘!!!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2021
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This book is a game changer in the ecological discourse. I do not understand why there is not more of a public discussion about this groundbreaking work. If you want to really understand the issue at stake with this central issue of our time, buy this book!
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José Macaya
1.0 out of 5 stars En ningún momento entendí dónde quería llegar o cuál era su mensaje
Reviewed in Spain on November 20, 2021
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Sin duda me equivoqué al comprar este libro. Pensé que contenía algún enfoque novedoso sobre el tema ecológico, pero no tiene nada que ver con eso. Es un libro de filosofía, pero lo encontré deslavazado y sin rumbo. En ningún momento entendí dónde quería llegar o cuál era su mensaje. Veo que otros lectores lo apreciaron más, pero imagino que es porque no buscaban lo que yo esperaba encontrar, y se sintieron cómodos con el estilo divagante del autor
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Emilio Portal
5.0 out of 5 stars melting your phenomenological reconfiguration
Reviewed in Canada on October 22, 2018
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this book goes deep into the constructs that brought us to this catastrophe: the 6th mass extinction. morton provides a new and radical ontology and phenomenology that deconstructs notions of self and other, knowledge, property, politics, art and ecology. poetic and sublime.
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Libra
1.0 out of 5 stars What is this?
Reviewed in Canada on June 21, 2019
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I get that Tim Morton is knowledgeable, and wants to add to the plethora of books out there about global warming and ecological devastation. However, it would help if the reader could make sense of what he is writing.
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Shedman
5.0 out of 5 stars Veer your brain in new directions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2018
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Wonderfully challenging. Full of fascinating insights and concepts as slippery as fish. But a welcome change to so much ‘nature writing’ and very enjoyable.
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Margery Een
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, cosy and uncanny. Morton is a genius.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2018
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Stunning, cosy and uncanny. Morton is a genius. And it's short. Just go and read it. Then dissolve.
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2023/06/04

이찬수 - 몇 년 사이에 읽은 최고의 책 Being Ecological Timothy Morton

이찬수 - 최근 몇 년 사이에 읽은 최고의 책이다. Timothy Morton이라는 사람, "현재 지구에서 가장... | Facebook
이찬수
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최근 몇 년 사이에 읽은 최고의 책이다.
Timothy Morton이라는 사람,
"현재 지구에서 가장 핫한 철학자"라는 광고 카피가 그다지 과장되게 보이지 않는다.
 
모튼은 요새 핫한 이슈인 "객체-지향적 존재론"(그레이엄 하먼)을 기반으로 칸트와 하이데거를 비판적으로 수용하면서, 철학, 문학, 예술, 과학적 재료들로 인류세의 생태(적 연결성)의 문제를 천착해나간다.

그 상상력이 매력적이다.
 
다 읽고 나니, 모튼의 사유는 불교, 특히 화엄철학의 현대적 계승이라는 느낌이다. 하먼의 "객체-지향적 존재론"은 물론, 라투르의 "행위자 네트워크 이론", 모튼의 "저월"(이 책에서는 '하월'로 번역)과 "초객체" 등등은 가만 보면 불교권 사상가들이 서구식 철학을 수용해서 진작에 만들어놓았어야 할 사유 체계들로 보인다. 이 정도의 사유체계는 불교권 연구자들의 몫이어야 하지 않을까.
우리말 제목이 '생태적 삶'으로 되어 있지만, 원제는 Being Ecological 이다. '생태적이기' 정도...
게다가 그동안의 '생태'에 지구를 살리기 위한 인간의 윤리적 죄책감을 수반하는 경향이 있었다면, 이 책에서의 생태는 전혀 그렇지 않다. 인간과 비인간 사이의 관계성에 초점이 더 맞추어져 있는 정도랄까. 생태적 '삶'이라는 윤리적 의미로 알아들으면 도리어 논지를 해칠 것 같다.
아래는 생각거리 몇 문장:
"생태적 말하기에도 하나의 장르, 실은 여러 장르가 분명히 존재한다. 장르는 한 종류의 세계 혹은 '가능성의 공간'이다....장르는 까다로운 동물이다. 장르는 어떤 철학에서 대타자the Other라고 부르는 것과 관련이 있다. 타자(그것, 그녀, 그, 그들)는 그것을 직접 가리키려고 들면 사라진다. 나자는 ~에 대한 그들의 관념에 대한 나의 관념에 대한 그의 관념에 대한 그들의 관념에 대한 그녀의 관념에 대한 우리의 관념에 대한 나의 관념이다....
... 구글 검색은 적어도 한 가지 의미에서는 장르 관념과 관련이 되어 있다. 구글로 무언가 검색하는 것 자체가 '타자'가 그것에 관해 어떻게 생각하는지를 알아내는 것이다. 구글은 타자와 같다. 그것은 여러 기대들이 뒤얽힌 거미줄 같은 것으로, 우리 시야의 구석에 숨어있거나, 우리가 클릭할 시간이 없는 저 모든 링크의 이면에 숨어있다. 모든 링크를 클릭할 시간은 단연코 부족하다... 주뼛거리며 타자에 다가간다고 한들, 타자를 직접 파악할 수는 없다. 타자는 똑바로 응시하면 사라지지만, 그렇게 응시하지 않을 때에는 우리를 둘러싸고 있는 것처럼 느껴진다. 때로 그 느낌은 꽤 섬뜩하다."(13-14)
"생태적 의식은 의도하지 않은 결과가 일어난다는 의식이다. 어떤 생태정치는 의도하지 않은 결과가 발생하지 않도록, 모든 것을 전혀 깜박거리지 않는 방식으로 밝히려 한다. 그러나 그건 불가능하다. 사물은 내재적으로 신비롭기 때문이다. 그래서 그와 같은 생태정치는 괴물 같은 상황을 만들 것이다.... 그렇다면 도래할 생태사회는 약간은 무계획적이고 망가지고 절뚝거리고 아이러니하고 어리석고 슬퍼야 할 것이다. 그렇다. 슬퍼야 한다."(69)
"사물은 뫼비우스의 띠처럼 비틀려 있는 고리인데, 이 고리에서 비틀림은 어디에나 있고, 시작점이나 끝점도 없다. 나타남은 존재에 내재적인 비틀림이다."(79)
"한 단어의 의미는 다른 단어들의 다발에 의해 정의된다. 이것은 계속 이어진다. 우리는 그 단어들을 차례대로 찾는다. 계속해서 찾는다. 무슨 일이 일어날까? 아주 깔끔하게 원을 그리며 첫 번째 단어로 돌아가게 될까? 아니면 이 여정 자체가 뒤엉킨 나선형으로 보일까? 만일 우연히 첫 번째 단어로 돌아간다고 해도, 과연 그것이 원형으로 보일까? 내가 보기에는 그렇지 않다. 그리고 내가 보기에는 생명체가 어떻게 서로 연관되는지 고찰할 때도 이런 일이 벌어질 것이다."(94)
"다리뼈는 엉덩이뼈와 연결되어 있어. 엉덩이뼈는 의자 뼈와 연결되어 있고. 그리고 의자 뼈는 감옥 의자 공장 뼈와 연결되어 있어. 감옥 의자 공장 뼈는 유독성 폐기물 더미 뼈와 연결되어 있어. 유독성 폐기물 더미 뼈는 생물권 뼈와 연결되어 있지... "(116)
"환경적 접근이 개체보다 전체에 마음 쓰는 것이라면 동물권 접근은 전체보다 개체에 마음을 쓰는 것이라고 묘사할 수 있다.... 이 두 접근법은 비인간에 마음 써야 할 이유를 제시하려 애쓴다. 하지만 마음 써야 할 충분한 이유가 있다는 것이야말로 바로 큰 문제였다면 어떻겠는가."(143-144)
"아름다움 경험에서는 마음 융합 같은 것이 일어난다. 아름다움 경험을 일으키는 것이 나인지 아니면 예술작품인지 구분할 수 없을 것이다. 아름다움을 예술작품으로 환원하거나 나에게로 환원하려 하면 아름다움을 망치게 된다."(152)
"미래는 우리가 설계한 사물로부터 곧바로 창발한다....인간 뿐 아니라 만물이 시간을 유출한다"(156-7)
"모든 쿠키는 부스러진다. 그래서 쿠키는 쿠키일 수 있다. 사물은 내재적으로 부서지기 쉽다. 그리고 어떤 치명적 결함을 가지는데 이 결함은 그것이 존재하도록 허용한다."(164)
"가장 확실하게 과대평가된 것은 자유의지이며, 우리가 공존하기 위해서는 권리, 주체성, 시민권, 자유의지가 아닌 다른 일종의 화학물질이 필요하다"(167)
"생태적 의식은 기본적으로 서로 다른 수많은 시간성 형식이 있음을 깨닫는 것이다."(159)
모튼이 올라우프 엘리아손과 함께 작업했던 "얼음시계"도 인상적이고...(149~)
"악을 나와 분리된 것으로 보는 시선이야말로 악이다. 이는 온갖 환경주의 관점의 전형적이고 해로운 부작용이다. 칼 세이건이 '창백한 푸른점'이라고 부른, ... 이러한 히피 양식을 연출하는 태도야말로 저 악한 시선의 태도이다. 모든 해로운 것을 하나의 작은 점, 우주라는 거대한 사진 속의 하나의 화소, 무한한 경멸과 적대적 심판을 받는 하나의 위치 안에 격리하는 것이다. 진정으로 영적인 입장은 모든 악이 자신에 내재하는 한 면모임을 깨닫는 것이다."(256-7)
"수많은 생태적 말하기는 사실 석유경제적인 말하기이다. 사실 거의 모든 생태적 말하기는 결단코 생태적 말하기가 아니다. 생태적 말하기는 우리가 영위하는 석유경제로 인해 심각하게 왜곡되어 있다. 효율성과 지속가능성에 관한 모든 언어는 저 희소한 맹독성 자원을 얻으려는 경쟁에 관한 것이다."(264)
(이런 시각에서) "나는 이런 것을 세계의 종말이라고 하거나 이제 세계의 종말이 임박했다고 말하는 숙명론에 분연히 반대한다. 재미있게도 세계의 종말은 이미 일어난 일 같기도 하다. '세계'라는 말이 행동을 인도하는 일련의 안정적 참조점들을 뜻한다면. 니체가 신은 죽었다고 선언했듯, 우리도 세계가 죽었다고 과감하게 선언해야 할지도 모른다. 생각하고 행동하는 척도는 갈피를 잡기 힘들 정도로 다양하다. '세계'의 종말이 이미 온 것이다. 사실 다행스러운 일이다. 부정확하고 폭력적인 환상, 즉 소중한 생명이라는 환상, 인간중심주의라는 환상에 매달리지 않아도 되기 때문이다."(267)
"우리는 생태적으로 살 필요가 없다. 이미 생태적으로 살고 있기 때문이다. "(269)
(모튼의 가장 도전적인 입장은 지구가 인류세라는 '암울한' 시대로 들어선 데 대한 죄의식에 입각한 윤리적 대안 같은 것을 제시하지 않는다는 데 있다. 미래를 설계하는 그 대안이 도리어 미래를 죽일 수 있다는 의미에서인 것 같다. 우리가 이미 충분히 생태적이며, 그 생태적 연결성을 아는 것을 충분하다는 듯한(?) 입장이다. 이 부분이 아직 완전히 납득되지는 않는다. 좀 더 생각해봐야 겠다.)
번역은 전반적으로 훌륭해보이지만, 종종 달리 번역할 수 있지 않았을까 하는 부분들이 자꾸 눈에 거슬려서 원서도 구입했다. 원서와 대조하며 다시 읽어보면서 미진한 부분을 메꿔봐야겠다.
그나저나 이리깊은 책 표지를 저리 가볍게 만들어놓은 것은 장사속이려나...
그리고
'티머시 모튼'인가, '티모시 모턴'인가.., 번역서마다 표기가 제각각이라 인용할 때 혼란스럽다. 티머시 모튼이 좀 더 자연스러울 것 같기는 하지만...
#Timothy_Morton, #Being_Ecological #생태적_삶? #생태적이기 #화엄철학



All reactions:71You, Philo Kalia, 박길수 and 68 others


Philo Kalia
서양 사상가들의 새로운 이론 구성력은 대단하고 참 부럽네요

이찬수
심광섭 탁월한 서양사상가님께서 그렇게 말씀하시니 겸손이 지나치시다는 느낌이...^^

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영어책  Being Ecological


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생태적 삶 - 티머시 모튼의 생태철학 특강 | 모빌리티인문학 총서 47
티머시 모턴 (지은이),김태한 (옮긴이)앨피2023-01-31


























276쪽
책소개
브루노 라투르·그레이엄 하먼을 필두로 세계 지성계의 새로운 흐름으로 떠오른 신유물론, 그중에서도 하먼의 객체지향 존재론(Object-Oriented Ontology)의 생태학 버전 철학서이다. 미국 라이스대학교 영문학과의 석좌교수인 티머시 모튼은 현 철학계의 화두인 ‘하이퍼오브젝트hyperobject’(초객체)라는 말을 만든 장본인으로, “석유문화의 군사화된 세력에 맞서” 인류세 이후 인류의 모든 분과학문을 포괄하는 생태철학으로 세계적인 명성을 누리고 있다. 모튼은 묻는다.

인간과 자연(초객체)을 어떻게 구분하는가? 어디서부터 비인간, 비생명, 객체인가? 그 기준은 무엇인가? 모튼은 주체와 객체, 생명과 비생명의 경계가 점점 더 모호해지는 상황에서, 인간과 비인간의 관계를 어떻게 설정하고 어떻게 공존할지를 묻는다. 모튼에 따르면, 현재 인류의 최대 과제인 지구온난화는 “거대하고, 시간과 공간에 분산되어 있는 ... 수십 년이나 수백 년(실은 수천 년)에 걸쳐 일어나고, 지구 전체에 걸쳐 일어나는” 하이퍼오브젝트, 곧 초객체이다.


목차


■ 감사의 말

서론: 또 하나의 정보 투기가 아니다
이 책은 무엇을 다루는가
대타자가 우리를 지켜본다
우리는 누구인가?
사실을 직시하기
우리가 생태에 관해 말하는 법
생태적 PTSD
무언가 하기
사물 대 사물-데이터
진실스러움
우리의 관점을 그림에 포함시키기
“자연적”은 “습관적”이라는 뜻
왜 내가 마음 써야 하는가?
객체지향 존재론

1. 그리고 우리는 대멸종 시대에 살게 될 수도 있다
철-학
인류세의 현상
어떤 이에게는 정상, 다른 이에게는 재앙
효율이 아니라 사랑
자기의 실체에 관해 이야기하는 예술
어두운 생태학
집단에 대한 사고
자연 없는 생태학

2. ... 그리고 다리뼈는 유독성 폐기물 더미 뼈에 연결되어 있다
사물과 생각
으깨짐? 혹은 정확히 얼마나 연결되어 있는가?
세상은 구멍이 숭숭 나 있다
그물: 어디에 선을 긋는가?
종래의 전체론이 아니다

3. 조율
자유의지는 과장되어 있다
우리는 조율되어 있다
시간은 사물에서 흘러나온다
마법을 걸기: 인과라는 마술
완벽한 설계란 없다
조현이라는 방식
미개하게 행동하기
여러분이 낯선 사람일 때 사람들은 낯설다
으스스한 골짜기로부터의 탈출
X-생태

4. 생태적 사유의 짧은 역사
잠김이라는 양식
진정성이라는 양식
종교라는 양식
효율이라는 양식
편집증 작업하기
세계의 종말
결론 아닌 결론

■ 찾아보기
접기


책속에서


P. 27 우리는 그릇된 방향으로 운전을 해 왔고, 그릇된 방향을 바라보고 있기 때문이다. 그것이 바로 이 모든 일이 일어난 이유이다. 현재의 생태적 사실은 흔히 인간 행동의 의도하지 않은 결과와 관련된다. 그렇다. 어떤 차원에서는 우리 중 거의 대부분이 무엇을 하고 있는지 모르고 있었다. 그것은 주인공이 자신이 내내 적국의 비밀 정보기관을 위해 일해 왔음을 깨닫는 누아르 영화 같다. 접기
P. 59 하이데거는 흑백으로 엄격하게 구별되는 진실과 비진실 같은 것은 없다고 주장한다. 우리는 늘 진실 안에 있다. 늘 진실 안에 있되, 그 진실은 일종의 저해상도의, 즉 dpi가 낮은 제이페그jpeg 버전이고, 일종의 흔하고 공적인 버전, 즉 (서문에서 말한 스티븐 콜베어의 유용한 용어를 쓴다면) 진실스러움이다.
P. 95 (인간에게) 이례적인 관점에서 사물을 검토하면 사물은 기이해진다. 서술에 관점을 포함할 필요가 생긴다. 마치 영화〈 매트릭스The Matrix〉 주인공 네오가 손가락을 대면 거울이 끈끈하게 달라붙고, 손을 거두려 하면 거울이 벽에서 쭉 늘어나는 것 같다. 여기에는 대단히 깊은 이유가 있다.
P. 136 위계hierarchy라는 단어 자체가 사제의 지배를 의미한다. 생태적 행동의 틀을 이렇게 만들면 중력 우물로 제대로 빨려 들어간 것이다. 그 우물 아래는 그다지 생태적인 공간이 아니다. 여러모로 별 도움이 되지 않는다. 이를테면, 개인적으로 죄책감을 느낄 이유는 전혀 없다. 우리의 개인적 행동은 통계
적으로 그다지 의미가 없으므로. 접기
P. 158 우리가 지속시키고 있는 것은 정확히 무엇인가? 거의 1만 2,500년 이상 작동해 오면서 진공청소기처럼 모든 생명체를 빨아들인 농업적 시간성이라는 범용 배관이 아니겠는가? 그런 형판으로 설계하는 일은 마침내, 달리 말하면 이미, 인간에게도 피해를 줄 것이 뻔하다. 우리가 알고 이해하는 모든 것, 심지어 우리가 알 수도 볼 수도 없는 모든 것이 불가피하게 상호연결되어 있기 때문이다. 나치의 선전가 요제프 괴벨스는 문화라는 말을 들을 때마다 권총을 꺼내 들었다. 나는 지속가능성이라는 말을 들을 때마다 자외선 차단제를 꺼내 든다. 접기
더보기




저자 및 역자소개
티머시 모턴 (Timothy Morton) (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

미국의 철학자, 영문학자, 생태이론가. 옥스퍼드 대학 마들린 칼리지에서 영국 낭만주의 시인 퍼시 비시 셸리의 시에 나타난 음식과 섭생, 소비의 문제를 다룬 논문 “Re-Imagining the Body : Shelley and the Languages of Diet”로 박사학위를 받았고, 현재 미국 라이스 대학 영문학과의 리타 시 거피(Rita Shea Guffey Chair) 교수로 재직 중이다. 그레이엄 하먼, 레비 브라이언트, 이언 보고스트와 함께 ‘객체지향 존재론’(OOO)이라는 사변적 실재론의 한 갈래에 속하며, 객체지향 존재론이 생태학적으로 함의하는 바를 주로 탐구한다. 2013년에 출간한 『실재론적 마술 : 객체, 존재론, 인과성』(갈무리, 2023)은 모턴의 대표적인 객체지향 존재론 저서로 객체-객체 관계의 인과적 차원에 초첨을 맞춘다. 2016년작 『어두운 생태학 : 미래 공존의 논리를 위해서』(갈무리, 근간) 는 객체지향 존재론의 생태학적 함의를 탐구하면서 독자적인 “어두운 생태학”을 전개한다. 2021년에 출간한 『저주체 : 인간되기에 관하여』(도미닉 보이어와 공저, 갈무리, 근간)에서는 새로운 주체성에 관해 탐구한다. 그 밖의 저서로 Ecology without Nature (2007), The Ecological Thought (2012), Hyperobjects (2013), 『인류』(2017 ; 2021), 『생태적 삶』(2018 ; 2023) 등이 있다. 접기

최근작 : <실재론적 마술>,<생태적 삶>,<인류> … 총 57종 (모두보기)

김태한 (옮긴이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

한국에서 경영학을 공부한 후 독일로 건너가 자를란트대학교에서 정보학을 전공했으며, 귀국 후 동국대학교 국문학과에서 박사과정을 수료했다. 옮긴 책으로 《이 행성의 먼지 속에서: 철학의 공포》, 《생태적 삶》, 《조지 오웰 진실에 대하여》, 《모빌리티》, 《헤겔의 세계》(공역), 《자르토리스 부인의 사랑》, 《논술세대를 위한 정치이야기》, 《일상고통 걷어차기》 등이 있다.




출판사 제공 책소개
하이퍼오브젝트/대멸종 시대의 생태적 사고
칸트와 하이데거 총괄제작, 모튼 감독의 철학 영화

이 책에 대한 평가

강사님이 추천해 주어 정말 잘 읽었다! 모튼은 접근 가능한 방식으로 심오한 주제를 탐구하므로, 철학과는 거리가 먼 사람도 걱정할 필요가 없다!! 오해는 금물. 매혹적인 철학적 텍스트이나, 모든 내용이 이해 가능한 수준으로 서술되어 있다. 재미있게 기후변화 등을 이야기하기란 쉬운 일이 아니다. 음악/대중문화에 대한 언급은 독서를 더 흥미진진하게 만든다. 누구에게나 추천한다. _아마존 독자 서평

복잡하고 역동적인 세계에서, 각종 환경정책이나 조치가 유발할 수 있는 악영향을 최소화하려고 발버둥 치는 대신에... 더 다양한 독자들을 생태철학이라는 매력적인 장르로 끌어들이려는 노력을 기울인...모튼은 우리에게 불확실성을 받아들일 권한을 부여한다. _Massive

티머시 모튼의 평평한 존재론과 으스스한 골짜기 이론은 세상의 모든 객체를 용인하고, 더 나아가 무심히 공존할 수 있는 더 나은 미래를 위한 새로운 가능성을 제시한다. _닉 몬트포트(MIT 디지털미디어과)

윌리엄 제임스나 애덤 스미스, 데이비드 흄 이후로 영어를 글을 쓰는 최고의 철학자가 아닐까. 모튼의 생태철학은 현 서구 지성이 처한 위기의 기원을 메소포타미아 개간지로까지, 수렵과 채집을 하던 인간이 들판 주위에 울타리를 치고 농작물 생산을 조직하는 순간으로까지 확장시킨다. 모두가 이 책을 읽어야 한다. _아마존 독자 서평

현재 지구상에서 가장 ‘핫한’ 철학자
브루노 라투르·그레이엄 하먼을 필두로 세계 지성계의 새로운 흐름으로 떠오른 신유물론, 그중에서도 하먼의 객체지향 존재론(Object-Oriented Ontology)의 생태학 버전 철학서이다. 미국 라이스대학교 영문학과의 석좌교수인 티머시 모튼은 현 철학계의 화두인 ‘하이퍼오브젝트hyperobject’(초객체)라는 말을 만든 장본인으로, “석유문화의 군사화된 세력에 맞서” 인류세 이후 인류의 모든 분과학문을 포괄하는 생태철학으로 세계적인 명성을 누리고 있다. 모튼은 묻는다. 인간과 자연(초객체)을 어떻게 구분하는가? 어디서부터 비인간, 비생명, 객체인가? 그 기준은 무엇인가? 모튼은 주체와 객체, 생명과 비생명의 경계가 점점 더 모호해지는 상황에서, 인간과 비인간의 관계를 어떻게 설정하고 어떻게 공존할지를 묻는다. 모튼에 따르면, 현재 인류의 최대 과제인 지구온난화는 “거대하고, 시간과 공간에 분산되어 있는 ... 수십 년이나 수백 년(실은 수천 년)에 걸쳐 일어나고, 지구 전체에 걸쳐 일어나는” 하이퍼오브젝트, 곧 초객체이다.

신유물론의 생태학 버전
모튼은 음식과 록음악, 생물학, 양자물리학 등등을 모두 한 주제 안에 버무려 내는 철학자로 유명하다. 생태학이 인류의 모든 분과학문을 포괄하는 형세인 현 서구 지성계의 ‘트렌드’를 대표하는 학자이다. 모튼은 ‘자연’ 개념을 거부한다. 자연 개념은 인간중심적인 개념이다. ‘자연 없는 생태학’이 그의 지향점이고, 우리가 이미 생태적인 삶을 살고 있다고 말하는 것도 그 때문이다. ‘하이퍼오브젝트’(초객체)는 인류가 가늠할 수 없는 대상, 물질, 존재이다. 주체와 객체, 생명과 비생명... 인간과 자연이라는 이분법을 넘어서지 않으면, 인간과 비인간이 그물망처럼 서로 연결된 생태학을 사유할 수 없다. 객체지향 존재론은 객체와 물질의 실재성을 사유하는 새로운 물질론, 신유물론이다. 서구중심적, 주체중심적, 인간중심적 사고를 넘어서는 새로운 철학이자 생태학이 모튼의 지향점이다.

인간중심 철학에서 새로운 쾌락 중심의 생태정치로
19세기에 니체는 신이 죽었다고 선언했다. 이는 흔히 인간이 존재의 무의미를 직면한다는 의미로 받아들여지지만, 오히려 반대이다. 신의 죽음은 텅 비어 있고 황량한 황무지가 아니다. 말 그대로 생물들이 득실거리는 무서운 밀림이다. ... 모튼은 생태 의식이 만물을 지배하는 하나의 척도, 즉 인간중심적 척도와 관념을 뒤흔든다고 말한다. 생태적 의식이 의미하는 바는, 하나의 척도가 아닌 수많은 척도에서 윤리적이고 정치적으로 생각하고 행동하는 것이다. 우리는 인간 존재에 최적화되어 있되 다른 생명체에 지나친 피해를 주지 않는, 원활하게 기능하는 생물권을 가치 있게 여긴다. 이 원활함, 효율성이 현재 우리가 세계를 구성하는 방식이다. 그러나 오작동이나 사고를 허용하지 않는 효율성 양식과 달리, 실제로 사물들은 오작동이나 사고와 훨씬 비슷하다. 이 효율성의 궁극적 지평은 석유문화이다. 이 지점에서 모튼은 “새로운 형태의 쾌락을 확장하고 수정하고 개발하는” 생태정치를 이야기한다. 우리가 이미 경험 중인 빈약하기 짝이 없는 쾌락을 억누르는 것이 아니라, 석유경제 너머의 쾌락을 상상하자고. 인간중심주의라는 안락한 구역 밖으로 나가자고. 생태적 사회는 우리가 여태까지보다 훨씬 관대하고 창의적일 수 있는 세계라고. 다른 공생적 존재들과 얽혀 있는 공생적 존재인 우리는 생태적으로 살 필요가 없다고, 이미 생태적으로 살고 있다고. 접기


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2023/05/31

Deep ecology - Wikipedia

Deep ecology - Wikipedia

Deep ecology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and the restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas.

Deep ecology argues that the natural world is a complex of relationships in which the existence of organisms is dependent on the existence of others within ecosystems. It argues that non-vital human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting the natural order.

Deep ecology's core principle is the belief that the living environment as a whole should be respected and regarded as having certain basic moral and legal rights to live and flourish, independent of its instrumental benefits for human use. Deep ecology is often framed in terms of the idea of a much broader sociality; it recognizes diverse communities of life on Earth that are composed not only through biotic factors but also, where applicable, through ethical relations, that is, the valuing of other beings as more than just resources. It is described as "deep" because it is regarded as looking more deeply into the reality of humanity's relationship with the natural world, arriving at philosophically more profound conclusions than those of mainstream environmentalism.[1] The movement does not subscribe to anthropocentric environmentalism (which is concerned with conservation of the environment only for exploitation by and for human purposes), since deep ecology is grounded in a different set of philosophical assumptions. Deep ecology takes a holistic view of the world humans live in and seeks to apply to life the understanding that the separate parts of the ecosystem (including humans) function as a whole. The philosophy addresses core principles of different environmental and green movements and advocates a system of environmental ethics advocating wilderness preservation, non-coercive policies encouraging human population decline, and simple living.[2]

Origins[edit]

In his original 1973 deep ecology paper,[3] Arne Næss stated that he was inspired by ecologists who were studying the ecosystems throughout the world. Næss also made clear that he felt the real motivation to 'free nature' was spiritual and intuitive. 'Your motivation comes from your total view or your philosophical, religious opinions,' he said, 'so that you feel, when you are working in favour of free nature, you are working for something within your self, that ... demands changes. So you are motivated from what I call ‘deeper premises’.[4]

In a 2014 essay,[5] environmentalist George Sessions identified three people active in the 1960s whom he considered foundational to the movement: author and conservationist Rachel Carson, environmentalist David Brower, and biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Sessions considers the publication of Carson's 1962 seminal book Silent Spring as the beginning of the contemporary deep ecology movement.[5] Næss also considered Carson the originator of the movement, stating "Eureka, I have found it" upon encountering her writings.[6]

Other events in the 1960s which have been proposed as foundational to the movement are the formation of Greenpeace, and the images of the Earth floating in space taken by the Apollo astronauts.[7]

Principles[edit]

Deep ecology proposes an embracing of ecological ideas and environmental ethics (that is, proposals about how humans should relate to nature).[8] It is also a social movement based on a holistic vision of the world.[1] Deep ecologists hold that the survival of any part is dependent upon the well-being of the whole, and criticise the narrative of human supremacy, which they say has not been a feature of most cultures throughout human evolution.[7] Deep ecology presents an eco-centric (earth-centred) view, rather than the anthropocentric (human-centred) view, developed in its most recent form by philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Newton, Bacon, and Descartes. Proponents of deep ecology oppose the narrative that man is separate from nature, is in charge of nature, or is the steward of nature,[9] or that nature exists as a resource to be freely exploited. They cite the fact that indigenous peoples under-exploited their environment and retained a sustainable society for thousands of years, as evidence that human societies are not necessarily destructive by nature. They believe that the current materialist paradigm must be replaced - as Næss pointed out, this involves more than merely getting rid of capitalism and the concept of economic growth, or 'progress', that is critically endangering the biosphere. 'We need changes in society such that reason and emotion support each other,' he said. '... not only a change in a technological and economic system, but a change that touches all the fundamental aspects of industrial societies. This is what I mean by a change of 'system'.[10] Deep ecologists believe that the damage to natural systems sustained since the industrial revolution now threatens social collapse and possible extinction of humans, and are striving to bring about the kind of ideological, economic and technological changes Næss mentioned. Deep ecology claims that ecosystems can absorb damage only within certain parameters, and contends that civilization endangers the biodiversity of the earth. Deep ecologists have suggested that the human population must be substantially reduced, but advocate a gradual decrease in population rather than any apocalyptic solution[11]: 88  In a 1982 interview, Arne Næss commented that a global population of 100 million (0.1 billion) would be desirable.[12] However, others have argued that a population of 1 - 2 billion would be compatible with the deep ecological worldview.[11] Deep ecology eschews traditional left wing-right wing politics, but is viewed as radical ('Deep Green') in its opposition to capitalism, and its advocacy of an ecological paradigm. Unlike conservation, deep ecology does not advocate the controlled preservation of the landbase, but rather 'non-interference' with natural diversity except for vital needs. In citing 'humans' as being responsible for excessive environmental destruction, deep ecologists actually refer to 'humans within civilization, especially industrial civilization', accepting the fact that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived did not live in environmentally destructive societies – the excessive damage to the biosphere has been sustained mostly over the past hundred years.

In 1985, Bill Devall and George Sessions summed up their understanding of the concept of deep ecology with the following eight points:[13]

  • The well-being of human and nonhuman life on earth is of intrinsic value irrespective of its value to humans.
  • The diversity of life-forms is part of this value.
  • Humans have no right to reduce this diversity except to satisfy vital human needs
  • The flourishing of human and nonhuman life is compatible with a substantial decrease in human population.
  • Humans have interfered with nature to a critical level already, and interference is worsening.
  • Policies must be changed, affecting current economic, technological and ideological structures.
  • This ideological change should focus on an appreciation of the quality of life rather than adhering to an increasingly high standard of living.
  • All those who agree with the above tenets have an obligation to implement them.

Development[edit]

YPJ members in a greenhouse farm, for ecological cooperative farming in Rojava (AANES)

The phrase "Deep Ecology" first appeared in a 1973 article by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss.[3] Næss referred to "biospherical egalitarianism-in principle", which he explained was "an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restriction to humans is … anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves... The attempt to ignore our dependence and to establish a master-slave role has contributed to the alienation of man from himself."[3] Næss added that from a deep ecology point of view "the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species".[14] As Bron Taylor and Michael Zimmerman have recounted,

a key event in the development of deep ecology was the "Rights of Non-Human Nature" conference held at a college in Claremont, California in 1974 [which] drew many of those who would become the intellectual architects of deep ecology. These included George Sessions who, like Næss, drew on Spinoza's pantheism, later co-authoring Deep Ecology - [Living as if Nature Mattered] with Bill Devall; Gary Snyder, whose remarkable, Pulitzer prize-winning Turtle Island proclaimed the value of place-based spiritualities, indigenous cultures, and animistic perceptions, ideas that would become central within deep ecology subcultures; and Paul Shepard, who in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and subsequent works such as Nature and Madness and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, argued that foraging societies were ecologically superior to and emotionally healthier than agricultur[al societies]. Shepard and Snyder especially provided a cosmogony that explained humanity's fall from a pristine, nature paradise. Also extremely influential was Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, which viewed the desert as a sacred place uniquely able to evoke in people a proper, non-anthropocentric understanding of the value of nature. By the early 1970s the above figures put in place the intellectual foundations of deep ecology.[15]

Sources[edit]

Deep ecology is an eco-philosophy derived from intuitive ethical principles. It does not claim to be a science, although it is based generally on the new physics, which, in the early 20th century, undermined the reductionist approach and the notion of objectivity, demonstrating that humans are an integral part of nature; this is a common concept always held by primal peoples.[16][17] Devall and Sessions, however, note that the work of many ecologists has encouraged the adoption of an "ecological consciousness", quoting environmentalist Aldo Leopold's view that such a consciousness "changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it."[18] Though some detractors assert that deep ecology is based on the discredited idea of the "balance of nature", deep ecologists have made no such claim. They do not dispute the theory that human cultures can have a benevolent effect on the landbase, only the idea of the control of nature, or human supremacy, which is the central pillar of the industrial paradigm. The tenets of deep ecology state that humans have no right to interfere with natural diversity except for vital needs: the distinction between "vital" and "other needs" cannot be drawn precisely.[19] Deep ecologists reject any mechanical or computer model of nature, and see the earth as a living organism, which should be treated and understood accordingly.[20]

Arne Næss uses Baruch Spinoza as a source, particularly his notion that everything that exists is part of a single reality.[21] Others have copied Næss in this, including Eccy de Jonge[22] and Brenden MacDonald.[23]

Aspects[edit]

Environmental education[edit]

In 2010, Richard Kahn promoted the movement of ecopedagogy, proposing using radical environmental activism as an educational principle to teach students to support "earth democracy" which promotes the rights of animals, plants, fungi, algae and bacteria. The biologist Dr. Stephan Harding has developed the concept of "holistic science", based on principles of ecology and deep ecology. In contrast with materialist, reductionist science, holistic science studies natural systems as a living whole. He writes:

We encourage … students to use [their] sense of belonging to an intelligent universe (revealed by deep experience), for deeply questioning their fundamental beliefs, and for translating these beliefs into personal decisions, lifestyles and actions. The emphasis on action is important. This is what makes deep ecology a movement as much as a philosophy.[8]

Spirituality[edit]

Deep ecologist and physicist Frijof Capra has said that '[Deep] ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected because deep ecological awareness is, ultimately, spiritual awareness.'[24]

Arne Næss commented that he was inspired by the work of Spinoza and Gandhi, both of whom based their values on grounds of religious feeling and experience. Though he regarded deep ecology as a spiritual philosophy, he explained that he was not a 'believer' in the sense of following any particular articles of religious dogma. ' ... it is quite correct to say that I have sometimes been called religious or spiritual, 'he said, 'because I believe that living creatures have an intrinsic worth of their own, and also that there are fundamental intuitions about what is unjust.'.[25]

Næss criticised the Judeo-Christian tradition, stating the Bible's "arrogance of stewardship consists in the idea of superiority which underlies the thought that we exist to watch over nature like a highly respected middleman between the Creator and Creation".[14] Næss further criticizes the reformation's view of creation as property to be put into maximum productive use.

However, Næss added that while he felt the word 'God' was 'too loaded with preconceived ideas', he accepted Spinoza's idea of God as 'immanent' - 'a single creative force'... 'constantly creating the world by being the creative force in Nature'. He did not, he said, 'exclude the possibility that Christian theological principles are true in a certain sense ...'.[26]

Joanna Macy in "the Work that Reconnects" integrates Buddhist philosophy with a deep ecological viewpoint.

Criticisms[edit]

Eurocentric bias[edit]

Guha and Martínez Alier critique the four defining characteristics of deep ecology. First, because deep ecologists believe that environmental movements must shift from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric approach, they fail to recognize the two most fundamental ecological crises facing the world: overconsumption in the global north and increasing militarization. Second, deep ecology's emphasis on wilderness provides impetus for the imperialist yearning of the West. Third, deep ecology appropriates Eastern traditions, characterizes Eastern spiritual beliefs as monolithic, and denies agency to Eastern peoples. And fourth, because deep ecology equates environmental protection with wilderness preservation its radical elements are confined within the American wilderness preservationist movement.[27]

While deep ecologists accept that overconsumption and militarization are major issues, they point out that the impulse to save wilderness is intuitive and has no connection with imperialism. This claim by Guha and Martínez Alier, in particular, closely resembles statements made, for instance, by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declaring Brazil's right to cut down the Amazon Rainforest. 'The Amazon belongs to Brazil and European countries can mind their own business because they have already destroyed their own environment.' The inference is clearly that, since European countries have already destroyed their environment, Brazil also has the right to do so: deep ecological values should not apply to them, as they have not yet had their 'turn' at maximum economic growth.[28]

With regard to 'appropriating spiritual beliefs' Arne Næss pointed out that the essence of deep ecology is the belief that 'all living creatures have their own intrinsic value, a value irrespective of the use they might have for mankind.'[29] Næss stated that supporters of the deep ecology movement came from various different religious and spiritual traditions, and were united in this one belief, albeit basing it on various different values.[30]

Knowledge of nonhuman interests[edit]

Animal rights activists state that for an entity to require intrinsic rights, it must have interests.[31] Deep ecologists are criticised for insisting they can somehow understand the thoughts and interests of non-humans such as plants or protists, which they claim thus proves that non-human lifeforms have intelligence. For example, a single-celled bacteria might move towards a certain chemical stimulation, although such movement might be rationally explained, a deep ecologist might say that this was all invalid because according to his better understanding of the situation that the intention formulated by this particular bacteria was informed by its deep desire to succeed in life. One criticism of this belief is that the interests that a deep ecologist attributes to non-human organisms such as survival, reproduction, growth, and prosperity are really human interests. Deep ecologists refute this criticism by pointing out first that 'survival' 'reproduction' 'growth' and 'prosperity'(flourishing) are accepted attributes of all living organisms: 'to succeed in life', depending on how one defines 'success' could certainly be construed as the aim of all life. In addition, the plethora of recent work on mimesis. Thomas Nagel suggests, "[B]lind people are able to detect objects near them by a form of a sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine roughly what it was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat."[32] Others such as David Abram have said that consciousness is not specific to humans, but a property of the totality of the universe of which humans are a manifestation.[33]

Deepness[edit]

When Arne Næss coined the term deep ecology, he compared it favourably with shallow ecology which he criticized for its utilitarian and anthropocentric attitude to nature and for its materialist and consumer-oriented outlook,[34] describing its "central objective" as "the health and affluence of people in the developed countries."[3] William D. Grey believes that developing a non-anthropocentric set of values is "a hopeless quest". He seeks an improved "shallow" view.[35] Deep ecologists point out, however, that "shallow ecology" (resource management conservation) is counter-productive, since it serves mainly to support capitalism, the means through which industrial civilization destroys the biosphere. The eco-centric view thus only becomes 'hopeless' within the structures and ideology of civilization. Outside it, however, a non-anthropocentric world view has characterised most 'primal' cultures since time immemorial, and, in fact, obtained in many indigenous groups until the industrial revolution and after.[36] Some cultures still hold this view today. As such, the eco-centric narrative is in not alien to humans, and may be seen as the normative ethos in human evolution.[13]: 97  Grey's view represents the reformist discourse that deep ecology has rejected from the beginning.[13]: 52 

Misanthropy[edit]

Social ecologist Murray Bookchin interpreted deep ecology as being misanthropic, due in part to the characterization of humanity by David Foreman, of the environmental advocacy group Earth First!, as a "pathological infestation on the Earth". Bookchin mentions that some, like Foreman, defend misanthropic measures such as organising the rapid genocide of most of humanity.[37] In response, deep ecologists have argued that Foreman's statement clashes with the core narrative of deep ecology, the first tenet of which stresses the intrinsic value of both nonhuman and human life. Arne Næss suggested a slow decrease in human population over an extended period, not genocide.[38]

Bookchin's second major criticism is that deep ecology fails to link environmental crises with authoritarianism and hierarchy. He suggests that deep ecologists fail to recognise the potential for humans to solve environmental issues.[37] In response, deep ecologists have argued that industrial civilization, with its class hierarchy, is the sole source of the ecological crisis.[39]: 18  The eco-centric worldview precludes any acceptance of social class or authority based on social status.[3] Deep ecologists believe that since ecological problems are created by industrial civilization the only solution is the deconstruction of the culture itself.[39]

Sciencism[edit]

Daniel Botkin concludes that although deep ecology challenges the assumptions of western philosophy, and should be taken seriously, it derives from a misunderstanding of scientific information and conclusions based on this misunderstanding, which are in turn used as justification for its ideology. It begins with an ideology and is political and social in focus. Botkin has also criticized Næss's assertion that all species are morally equal and his disparaging description of pioneering species.[40] Deep ecologists counter this criticism by asserting that a concern with political and social values is primary, since the destruction of natural diversity stems directly from the social structure of civilization, and cannot be halted by reforms within the system. They also cite the work of environmentalists and activists such as Rachel CarsonAldo LeopoldJohn Livingston, and others as being influential, and are occasionally critical of the way the science of ecology has been misused.[3]

Utopianism[edit]

Eco-critic Jonathan Bate has called deep ecologists 'utopians', pointing out that 'utopia' actually means 'nowhere' and quoting Rousseau's claim that "the state of nature no longer exists and perhaps never did and probably never will." Bate asks how a planet crowded with cities

could possibly be returned to the state of nature? And ...who would want to return it there? ... Life in the state of nature, Thomas Hobbes reminded readers of Leviathan in 1650, is solitary, poor, ignorant, brutish and short. It may be necessary to critique the values of the Enlightenment, but to reject enlightenment altogether would be to reject justice, political liberty and altruism.[41]

Bates' criticism rests partly on the idea that industrial civilization and the technics it depends on are themselves 'natural' because they are made by humans. Deep ecologists have indicated that the concept of technics being 'natural' and therefore 'morally neutral' is a delusion of industrial civilization: there can be nothing 'neutral' about nuclear weapons, for instance, whose sole purpose is large scale destruction. Historian Lewis Mumford,[42] divides technology into 'democratic' and 'authoritarian' technics ('technics' includes both technical and cultural aspects of technology). While 'democratic' technics, available to small communities, may be neutral, 'authoritarian' technics, available only to large-scale, hierarchical, authoritarian, societies, are not. Such technics are not only unsustainable, but 'are driving planetary murder'. They need urgently to be abandoned, as supported by point #6 of the deep ecology platform.[43]

With reference to the degree to which landscapes are natural, Peter Wohlleben draws a temporal line (roughly equivalent to the development of Mumford's'authoritarian' technics) at the agricultural revolution, about 8000 BC, when "selective farming practices began to change species."[44] This is also the time when the landscape began to be intentionally transformed into an ecosystem completely devoted to meeting human needs.[44]

Concerning Hobbes's pronouncement on 'the state of nature', deep ecologists and others have commented that it is false and was made simply to legitimize the idea of a putative 'social contract' by which some humans are subordinate to others. There is no evidence that members of primal societies, employing 'democratic technics', lived shorter lives than those in civilization (at least before the 20th century); their lives were the opposite of solitary, since they lived in close-knit communities, and while 'poverty' is a social relation non-existent in sharing cultures, 'ignorant' and 'brutish' both equate to the term 'savage' used by colonials of primal peoples, referring to the absence of authoritarian technics in their cultures. Justice, political liberty and altruism are characteristic of egalitarian primal societies rather than civilization, which is defined by class hierarchies and is therefore by definition unjust, immoral, and lacking in altruism.

Links with other philosophies[edit]

Arne Næss stated that the main philosophical influence on his life and work was Spinoza. 'When I was seventeen I read Spinoza's 'Ethics' he said, '... I was inspired by [his] view of human nature or essence: our nature or essence is such that we are pleased at other's pleasure and feel sad about other's sadness. Kindness and love activate our nature; best of all, they activate all aspects of ourselves.'[45]

Peter Singer critiques anthropocentrism and advocates for animals to be given rights. However, Singer has disagreed with deep ecology's belief in the intrinsic value of nature separate from questions of suffering.[46] Zimmerman groups deep ecology with feminism and civil rights movements.[47] Nelson contrasts it with ecofeminism.[48] The links with animal rights are perhaps the strongest, as "proponents of such ideas argue that 'all life has intrinsic value'".[49]

David Foreman, the co-founder of the radical direct-action movement Earth First!, has said he is an advocate for deep ecology.[50][51] At one point Arne Næss also engaged in direct action when he chained himself to rocks in front of Mardalsfossen, a waterfall in a Norwegian fjord, in a successful protest against the building of a dam.[52]

Some have linked the movement to green anarchism as evidenced in a compilation of essays titled Deep Ecology & Anarchism.[53]

The object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton has explored similar ideas in the books Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2009) and Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016).[54][55]

Notable advocates of deep ecology[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up to:a b Smith, Mick (2014). "Deep Ecology: What is Said and (to be) Done?"The Trumpeter30 (2): 141–156. ProQuest 1958537477.
  2. ^ Barry, John; Frankland, E. Gene (2002). International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics. Routledge. p. 161. ISBN 9780415202855.
  3. Jump up to:a b c d e f Naess, Arne (January 1973). "The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A summary". Inquiry16 (1–4): 95–100. doi:10.1080/00201747308601682S2CID 52207763.
  4. ^ Interview with Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Naess Source:www.naturearteducation.org/Interview_Arne_Naess_1995.pdf www.rerunproducties.nl
  5. Jump up to:a b Sessions, George (2014). "Deep Ecology, New Conservation, and the Anthropocene Worldview"The Trumpeter30 (2): 106–114. ProQuest 1958534297.
  6. ^ Arne, Naess; Rothenberg, David (1993). Is it Painful to Think?. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 131–132.
  7. Jump up to:a b Drengson, Alan; Devall, Bill; Schroll, Mark A. (2011). "The Deep Ecology Movement: Origins, Development, and Future Prospects (Toward a Transpersonal Ecosophy)"International Journal of Transpersonal Studies30 (1–2): 101–117. doi:10.24972/ijts.2011.30.1-2.101.
  8. Jump up to:a b Harding, Stephan. Deep Ecology in the Holistic Science Programme. Schumacher College.
  9. ^ Margulis, LynnAnimate Earth.
  10. ^ Arne Naess 'Life's Philosophy - Reason & Feeling in a Deeper World' 2002 P6
  11. Jump up to:a b Sessions, George, ed. (1995). Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Shambala Publications. ISBN 9781570620492.
  12. ^ Bodian, Stephan (1982). "Simple in Means, Rich in Ends - A Conversation with Arne Naess" (PDF).
  13. Jump up to:a b c Devall, Bill; Sessions, George (1985). Deep Ecology. Gibbs M. Smith. p. 70. ISBN 978-0-87905-247-8.
  14. Jump up to:a b Næss, Arne (1989). Ecology, community and lifestyle: outline of an ecosophy Translated by D. Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 166, 187. ISBN 0521344069LCCN 88005068.
  15. ^ Taylor, B.; Zimmerman, M. (2005). Taylor, B. (ed.). Deep EcologyEncyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Volume 1. London: Continuum International. pp. 456–60.
  16. ^ Fox, Warwick. The Intuition of Deep Ecology., quoted in Devall, Bill; Sessions, George (1985). Deep Ecology. Gibbs M. Smith. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-87905-247-8.
  17. ^ Bohm, David (1980). Wholeness and The Implicate Order. p. 37. ISBN 9780710003669.
  18. ^ "We are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution," states Aldo Leopold; quoted in Devall, Bill; Sessions, George (1985). Deep Ecology. Gibbs M. Smith. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-87905-247-8.
  19. ^ McLaughlin, Andrew (1995). Sessions, George (ed.). The Heart of Deep EcologyDeep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Shambala Publications. p. 87. ISBN 9781570620492.
  20. ^ "There are no shortcuts to direct organic experiencing." Morris Berman, quoted in Devall, Bill; Sessions, George (1985). Deep Ecology. Gibbs M. Smith. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-87905-247-8.
  21. ^ Naess, A. (1977). "Spinoza and ecology". Philosophia7: 45–54. doi:10.1007/BF02379991S2CID 143850683.
  22. ^ de Jonge, Eccy (April 28, 2004). Spinoza and Deep Ecology: Challenging Traditional Approaches to Environmentalism (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy). Routledge. ISBN 978-0754633273.
  23. ^ MacDonald, Brenden James (14 May 2012). "Spinoza, Deep Ecology, and Human Diversity -- Schizophrenics and Others Who Could Heal the Earth If Society Realized Eco-Literacy"The Trumpeter28 (1): 89–101. ProQuest 1959176673.
  24. ^ "TOP 25 QUOTES BY FRITJOF CAPRA (of 60)"A-Z Quotes.
  25. ^ Arne Naess 'Life's Philosophy - Reason & Feeling in a Deeper World 2002 P8
  26. ^ Arne Naess 'Life's Philosophy - Reason & Feeling in a Deeper World 2002 P8
  27. ^ Guha, R., and J. Martinez-Allier. 1997. Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, pp. 92-108
  28. ^ "Bolsonaro declares 'the Amazon is ours' and calls deforestation data 'lies'"the Guardian. July 19, 2019.
  29. ^ Arne Naess 'Life's Philosophy - Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World' 2002 P6)
  30. ^ ibid
  31. ^ Feinberg, Joel"The Rights of Animals and Future Generations". Retrieved 2006-04-25.
  32. ^ Nagel, Thomas (1997). "What is it like to be a bat?": 172.
  33. ^ Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. p. 262.
  34. ^ Devall, Bill; Sessions, George. Deep Ecology: Environmentalism as if all beings mattered. Archived from the original on 2017-06-24. Retrieved 2006-04-25.
  35. ^ Grey, William (1993). "Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology"Australasian Journal of Philosophy71 (4): 463–75. doi:10.1080/00048409312345442. Archived from the original on 2001-04-14. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
  36. ^ Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous.
  37. Jump up to:a b Bookchin, Murray (1987). "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement"Green Perspectives/Anarchy Archives – via dwardmac.pitzer.edu.
  38. ^ Sessions, George, ed. (1995). Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. p. 88. ISBN 9781570620492.
  39. Jump up to:a b Jensen, Derrick (2006). Endgame, Volume 2.
  40. ^ Botkin, Daniel B. (2000). No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature. Shearwater Books. pp. 42 42, 39]. ISBN 978-1-55963-465-6.
  41. ^ Bate, Jonathan (2000). The Song of the Earth. p. 37.
  42. ^ Mumford, Lewis (1966). The Myth of the Machine — Technics & Human Development.
  43. ^ Jensen, Derrick; McBay, Aric (2011). Technics (excerpt from chapter "Technotopia: Industry")What We Leave Behind. Derrick Jensen. p. 234. ISBN 9781583229897. Retrieved August 5, 2021 – via derrickjensen.org.
  44. Jump up to:a b Wohlleben, Peter (2019). The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. David Suzuki Institute, Greystone Books. ISBN 9781771643887.
  45. ^ Arne Naess 'Life's Philosophy - Reason & Feeling in a Deeper World 2002 P9
  46. ^ Kendall, Gillian (May 2011). "The Greater Good: Peter Singer On How To Live An Ethical Life"Sun Magazine, the Sun Interview (425). Retrieved 2011-12-02.
  47. ^ AtKisson, Alan (Summer 1989). "Introduction To Deep Ecology, an interview with Michael E. Zimmerman"Global Climate Change. Context Institute (22): 24. Archived from the original on 2012-01-23. Retrieved 2021-08-05 – via Context.org.
  48. ^ Nelson, C. (August 2021). Ecofeminism vs. Deep Ecology. Dialogue, San Antonio, Texas: Dept. of Philosophy, Saint Mary's University.
  49. ^ Wall, Derek (1994). Green HistoryRoutledgeISBN 978-0-415-07925-9.
  50. ^ Levine, David, ed. (1991). Defending the Earth: a dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman.
  51. ^ Bookchin, Murray; Graham Purchase; Brian Morris; Rodney Aitchtey; Robert Hart; Chris Wilbert (1993). Deep Ecology and Anarchism. Freedom Press. ISBN 978-0-900384-67-7.
  52. ^ Seed, J.; Macy, J.; Flemming, P.; Næss, A. (1988). Thinking like a mountain: towards a council of all beings. Heretic Books. ISBN 0-946097-26-7.
  53. ^ Deep Ecology & Anarchism. Freedom Press. 1993.
  54. ^ Morton, Timothy (2009). Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674266162.
  55. ^ Morton, Timothy (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231541367.

Additional sources[edit]

  • Bender, F. L. 2003. The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology Amherst, New York: Humanity Books.
  • Katz, E., A. Light, et al. 2000. Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • LaChapelle, D. 1992. Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep Durango: Kivakí Press.
  • Passmore, J. 1974. Man's Responsibility for Nature London: Duckworth.
  • Clark, John P (2014). "What Is Living In Deep Ecology?". Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy30 (2): 157–183.
  • Hawkins, Ronnie (2014). "Why Deep Ecology Had To Die". Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy30 (2): 206–273.
  • Drengson, Alan. "The Deep Ecology Movement." The Green Majority, CIUT 89.5 FM, University of Toronto, 6 June 2008.

Further reading[edit]

  • Gecevska, Valentina; Donev, Vancho; Polenakovik, Radmil (2016). "A Review Of Environmental Tools Towards Sustainable Development". Annals of the Faculty of Engineering Hunedoara - International Journal of Engineering14 (1): 147–152.
  • Glasser, Harold (ed.) 2005. The Selected Works of Arne Næss, Volumes 1-10. SpringerISBN 1-4020-3727-9. (review)
  • Holy-Luczaj, Magdalena (2015). "Heidegger's Support For Deep Ecology Reexamined Once Again". Ethics & the Environment20 (1): 45–66. doi:10.2979/ethicsenviro.20.1.45S2CID 141921083.
  • Keulartz, Jozef 1998. Struggle for nature : a critique of radical ecology, London [etc.] : Routledge.
  • Linkola, Pentti 2011. Can Life Prevail? UK: Arktos Media, 2nd Revised ed. ISBN 1907166637
  • Marc R., Fellenz. "9. Ecophilosophy: Deep Ecology And Ecofeminism." The Moral Menagerie : Philosophy and Animal Rights. 158. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
  • Orton, David (January 9, 2000). "Deep Ecology and Animal Rights: A Discussion Paper"The Green Web.
  • Sylvan, Richard (1985a). "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part I". Radical Philosophy40: 2–12.
  • Sylvan, Richard (1985b). "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II". Radical Philosophy41: 1–22.
  • Tobias, Michael (ed.) 1988 (1984). Deep Ecology. Avant Books. ISBN 0-932238-13-0.