17 June 2017

This is one reason why my grandmother is muttering inside my head.

"There you are, turning the ignition of your car. And it creeps up on you. Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet. But harm to Earth is precisely what is happening. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, everything is interconnected".

Timothy Morton

Ph.D., Magdalen College, Oxford (1993)
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 160 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. 
Blog: http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Twitter: @the_eco_thought

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I often think of us, we humans, as the most successful failed species on earth. It's really unstoppable, this trajectory we are on. Even knowing that though, I still try to lighten my footprint.

Colette said...

Thanks for this. I like to think all the political evil that has happened in the West this past year has happened for a reason. To wake us up, and to embolden the next generation.

Roderick Robinson said...

I see the writer is from Magdalen College. One of the many trick pronunciations in English English. Do you need any help with this?

Sabine said...

Hah! I think I can handle it, after all I got married 35 yrs ago this week at Marylebone Register Office - and they don't like it when you cannot pronounce the name of the venue.

Roderick Robinson said...

Touché!