The Serious Play of Being Ecological

Review of Timothy Morton, Being Ecological. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2018. The opening passage of Timothy Morton's latest book, Being Ecological, invokes an odd fantasy, for a book of that title: “Don't care about ecology? You might think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you.” (p. xiii) The fantasy that a book with ecology in the title might find its way into the hands of someone who doesn't care about ecology proposes a reader to whom Morton can promise “no ecological facts, no shocking revelations about our world, no ethical or political advice, and no grand tour of ecological thinking.” (p. xiii) In addressing what he calls our “indifference,” Morton provokes us to imagine ourselves as such a reader, tricking us into “peering under the hood of the ways in which we talk to ourselves about ecology.” (p. xxi) One of the startling claims of the book is that, “indifference to ecological things is exactly the sort of place where you will find the right kind of ecological feeling.” (p. 125) That this is a standard self‐help book move isn't obvious until the book ends, when we are reassured that (spoiler alert) we “don't have to be ecological. Because [we] are ecological.” (p. 157) Helping Everyman feel okay about ecology is really pretext for a tour of Morton's thinking about ecological thinking. Being Ecological is to date the most concise yet wide‐ranging, challenging yet accessible introduction to the manifold dimensions of the work of this philosopher determined to tackle ecology's fatal problem with style. Any ecophilosopher writing today will be compelled to ask why ecology is failing: Why, despite a global consensus about climate change, humans keep perpetuating what is widely regarded to be the Sixth Mass Extinction event, unfolding because of us. It's not for lack of understanding that we appear set on this march toward extinction. So what's gone wrong? Being Ecological asks us to take Morton's word for it that “agrilogistics” is to blame: a 10,000‐year‐old experiment with human settlement, prioritizing survival over quality of life. (p. 11) Rather, as a philosopher he's interested in the thinking behind what we do. And what interests Morton is not what we think but how we think it. Is there something about how ecology has done its thinking that hasn't been thought through? Or about how environmentalism thinks ecology? As Morton notes, “many forms of environmentalism aren't really very ecological at all.” (p. 147) It's style that ecology gets all wrong, and to style that we must look