"Dark Ecology," a Review

"The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as catastrophe." -Timothy Morton

Climate Collapse, or Anthropo-Implosion?

Dark Ecology, my
edition's cover

With the normalization of the internet, there comes the proliferation of information and its ease of access. In tandem with this internet age has come the current concern surrounding global warming and the effects it will have not only on our ecologies, but us ourselves. Currently, we have already passed several points of no return in terms of saving out planet from warming, and now leading climate scientists are still looking toward mitigation rather than prevention. Even then, prospects are still dim: the petrochemical industry is still chugging along, so much so that the fossil fuel consumption has increasedrather than decreased. Secondly there is the problem of global food production, and its leveling of local ecosystems into monocropped fields prone to blight and nutrient deficiency. Instead if assisting in curbing these chronic issues, both the state and media have remained complacent in the destruction of our planet. Rather than tackle capitalistic origins of this current crisis, they go after the individual: eat less meat, drive less, don’t use plastic straws—you’re the cause of climate change, not corporations.

In short, neoliberalism has failed us, and the price of such failure will be the collapse of civilization (something that is already happening for indigenous communities and islanders). Coming part and parcel with this is a new brand of environmental nihilism that’s seemed to permeate the current climate culture. This nihilism is in fact so pervasive that recently there has been the attribution of all sorts of names to it: eco-anxiety, climate depression, and eco-grief, just to name a few. This depressive nihilism can imbue one with a What’s the point? sort of attitude toward climate change. It seems that the apocalypse is inevitable, so why try to change anything?

This is the milieu I’ve found myself in time and time again, and which Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology attempts to mitigate. Here, Morton offers a pathway toward hope in an otherwise hopeless culture of climate-collapse writings. But unlike more utopian pieces, Dark Ecology’s hope doesn’t lie in the myth that we can still somehow save ourselves from this wicked problem. Rather, the hope is in rethinking what it means to be a species, what it means to be a global force, and what it means to be in the Anthropocene.

I Am (in) a Strange Loop

"Ecological awareness is a loop because human interference has a loop form, because ecological and biological systems are loops. And ultimately this is because to exist at all is to assume the form of a loop." -Timothy Morton

The infamous ouroborous found
all in the book

Dark Ecology is divided into three separate “threads,” each ending with the image of an ouroboros. Which makes sense, as loops are abound in this book. Loops of logic, of being. Feedback loops. Strange loops.

Now what exactly are these loops? I can’t quite say, because whenever Morton describes their nature his language is similar to that of a loop: a long and winding journey that ultimately brings the reader nowhere but back to where they started. In fact, it’s such language that does some of the greatest detriment to the genius at the bottom of this book. Morton’s writing can be best described as haphazard, which is bad when you also throw in his pop culture references, and even worse when you consider his penchant for creating new terminology with only vague descriptions. It is on this front that Dark Ecology seems to bring out the worst of critical theory’s tropes, which is really unfortunate because this is one of the critical theory texts I’ve read that’d I think would be most beneficial if written for laymen.

But perhaps my criticism in this aspect is just a bit too harsh. After all, one of the main goals of this book is helping to reader gain a sense of what Morton calls ecognosis—and hey, what’s a gnostic awakening if not confusing? He tackles some complex questions here, questions that not only challenge temporalities and scales but blow reality as we know it out of the water completely, so I guess it seems only a little understandable that reading such challenges would cause a fair sense of befuddlement. Nonetheless, the third “thread” of Dark Ecology is a near-unreadable nightmare because of the reasons stated above. Walking away from it I felt like I could have stopped at the second thread and missed few things of import.

The Big Green Monster

"Agrilogistics promises to eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction—social, physical, and ontological—by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds and by reducing existence to sheer quantity." -Timothy Morton

Morton to one side

If I had to take a wild guess at how many terms in this book Morton made up himself, I would say two dozen or so, maybe a little less. The vast majority of this new terminology in my opinion adds little to what is being discussed in the book (for example, was it really, really necessary for Morton to compare stages of climate grief to layers of chocolate?). But those few that do make an honest contribution, well to call them important is an understatement: they are absolutely groundbreaking.

Aaaand Kripal to the other

Let’s look at one of these right now, the most important of the important ones: Agrilogistics. This is one of the few concepts that Morton defines clearly and coherently, and he defines it thus: “a specific logistics of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent and that is still plowing ahead. Logistics, because it is a technical, planned, and perfectly logical approach to built space.” To borrow another of Morton’s terms, agrilogistics is a hyperobject, a construct so inexplicably huge that it exists both within and outside of our temporal awareness. It is the operating system by which the Neolithic was initiated—an operation of eliminating contradiction and reducing ecology into a quantifiable use-value. As Morton argue in the Dark Ecology, it is the logic to rule all logics, the bringer of not only agriculture, but the man-nature divide as well, and that divide’s inevitable consequences: the Anthropocene.

The idea in and of itself should be enough to put Morton on the required-readings list of literally anyone interested in ecocriticism, and from its epicenter branch out, like tentacles, several other concepts which carry heavy theoretical significance: arche-lithic, easy-think substance, ecognosis, and of course, dark ecology. The discourses generated by these all coalesce into the final statement of the book, that it is by seeing and rejecting the agrilogistic model that we can work toward a multispecies solution to climate collapse.

The Mental Labyrinth

"'Civilization'" was a long-term collaboration between humans and wheat, humans and rock, humans and soil, not out of grand visions but out of something like desperation." -Timothy Morton

Before Morton, I had only ever read works by one Rice professor (despite Houston itself being so close to where I call home): Jeffrey Kripal, a religious studies professor with an avid interest in religious experiences and…alien abductions. Kripal was a weird read. Morton was a weird read. So it shouldn’t have come as too much a surprise when I encountered citations of Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift in this book. But I was surprised, in a good way.

I was a kid when Hurricane Rita came through and tore up the gulf area of Southeast Texas. My family, we evacuated to my uncle’s place up in Marble Falls, arriving sometime shortly after the opening of the town’s fall festival. There was a corn maze there in the shape of Texas, and in the maze were eight different “towns” to visit, each town being a signpost with a hole-puncher chained to it. You were given a card and were supposed to traverse the maze and get your card punched once at each of the towns, then upon leaving the maze you won a free drink. It wasn’t like a regular maze where you go out one side and come out the other, then: here the beginning was the end, and the goal wasn’t to make it out the other side, but to discover everything you had to before going back the way you came.

That’s what reading Dark Ecology made me think of. That maze, the idea that I wasn’t trying to hurry and finish it so much as I was taking my time getting my bearings on everything I needed, no matter how long that took. I was working assiduously to punch-in all the major concepts.

I finally did come out of the maze that is Dark Ecology, and I did so with quite a few new concepts under my belt. I didn’t complete my punch card, though, even if I got close. I never won my free drink. But the analogy end there. The thing about the maze is its only open one month of the year, then closed the other eleven.

Dark Ecology, though. It never closes. It’ll still be there waiting for me when I’m ready to go back in, and deep down I know that someday I will be ready.