Sunday Reading Part 1: Tim Morton on Disaster Ecology
by Adam Robbert
From THIS fine essay recently published:
9. The ideology and the rhetoric of ecological disaster, then, have nothing to do with actual ecology. They are “environmentalist” in the same sense as some ideas about gender are sexist. That is, they set up the environment as a metaphysical construct on a pedestal, torn down, built up, worshipped, admired as an aesthetic object, and so on. Aesthetic images of the environment are predicated on disaster: we are shown we want to avert it; we are compelled to imagine it vividly. This seems like a truism: recordings of whale sounds and Douglas Adams’s book Last Chance to See would not have appeared if human-caused extinction were not on the cards (see Works Cited). It is always unfortunate when reality coincides with fantasy. The trouble is not so much the quite legitimate wish to preserve species from dying out through human misuse. The problem is in the attitude engendered in the disaster narratives we keep telling ourselves. For at least one of these attitudes happens to provide some strong cement for the maintenance of an oppressive status quo.
10. If we are going to think ecology beyond capitalism, we shall need to think beyond disaster and beyond disaster speak. It would be preferable to refer to ecological difficulty as a “drag,” in both performative and work-related senses. Ecological difficulty will beset us for the long run, perhaps forever (whatever that means). And ecology is profoundly a view that accommodates display, performance, sheer aesthetic illusion (for example in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection), and so on (Darwin, Descent). Take the evolutionary notion of “satisficing.” A rabbit is not really a rabbit. It is not that a rabbit by any other name would act as nose-twitchy. All the way down, there is no rabbit, no rabbit flavored DNA. And all the way up: rabbits act like rabbits, and thus pass on their genome. This is called “satisficing,” a form of performativity (Dawkins 156). If a life form does its thing without dying, its descendant can keep whatever it does. The fact that homosexuals exist across a vast array of sexually reproducing life forms, for instance, indicates that evolution has no problem with them. In fact, heterosexual behavior floats on top of a vast ocean of cloning, transgender switching, homosexuality and intersexuality (Roughgarden). A genome could not care less if its vehicle acts like someone else’s idea of a rabbit. This includes having mutations that not all rabbits might have. There is no essence called race, or gender, or species—or environment. Thus there is no fixed gender against which “deviations” are measured as disastrous.
11. Ultimately, thinking ecology beyond disaster means thinking ecology without nature; and even thinking ecology without environmentalism. Looked at one way, evolution is a long history of disasters, such as extinction: which is to say, since disaster is everywhere, it is of no cosmic significance. Ecological awareness demands that we care for ourselves and nonhumans on time and space scales far in excess of the usual parameters, even if the parameters are based on modified forms of self interest that include greater numbers under the umbrella of “kith and kin” (Parfit, 355–357, 361, 371–377; Morton, “Hyperobjects” ). It just does not make sense to try and find self-interest-based reasons to care for a “hyperobject” such as plutonium 239, which has a half-life of 24 100 years: what a drag. The kind of excitement demanded by disaster tropology will not serve us well. We need something like Wordsworth with his adverse reaction to the “gross and violent stimulants” of his literary age (Wordsworth, “Preface,” 746).
I’m a little confused. Just reading the posted excerpt I’m wondering how notions of disaster have nothing to do with ecology. “Drawdown,” “overshoot,” “crash,” and “die-off are all ecological concepts that very much imperil the conditions of a healthy environment and vibrant community, which brings in an “environmentalist” focus that seeks to protest those destructive forces that undermine life-supporting relations.
It is well known that biodiversity builds resilient ecosystems, so I would further disagree that extinctions are cosmically insignificant. Human encroachment (industrial civilization’s perpetual growth) upon non-human communities is thus more than simply “a drag,” as it goes beyond mere “difficulty,” [which I see as simply the driving need to squeak out an existence in an atmosphere of dynamic obstacles (scarcity, predators...) and survive] but rather if that difficulty is alleviated through activities that are unsustainable and ultimately self-destructive, then I fail to see how “disaster-speak” is problematic. We are necessarily invested in our own lives and any cumulative threat should be taken seriously. Inevitable death is a “disaster” in the sense that it is mutually exclusive with life (presumably the lives of those who want to keep living), and so for humans to realize the magnitude of their effect, I see “disaster ecology” as not so much ideology and rhetoric, but a sound analysis of the consequence of human activity. Difficulty may be forever, but disaster implies a specific moment–in this case, the eventual collapse of unsustainable practices (globalization in its current form)–and therefore hints at an underlying reality: what we are doing is antithetical to nature, ecology, environment, and any other abstract signifier you want to give to matter/energy over time.
We are potentially working to end our own collective consciousness, and with it our perception of everything around and within us.
Hi Johnny,
Thanks for your well-thought response. I’ll try as best I can to respond via my own interpretation of what I think T. Morton is up to. I think at the most basic level, Morton is diagnosing a condition within environmentalism that is tied to certain (human) notions of aesthetics that are problematic for making real-world ecological changes. In this sense, there is a continuous coupling of the pristine quality of non-human nature with an apocalyptic “disaster-speak” that is always-already foretold by the human narrative of “pure” nature.
Both the disaster and the pristine reduce nature to its givenness to humans.
To be sure, though, the thesis is not that nature is something that only exists as a social construction (Morton is at great pains to overcome this humanist analysis) but rather that, by reducing nature to what is given to humans (as either aesthetic pleasure or existential disaster) we miss the central insight of ecological thinking — its not about biological distinctions between humans, ducks, and trees since, at a fundamental level, there is little that separates one from the other within a deeper, ecological view.
The task of generating thoughts and practices that resemble the ecological world in which we live thus have much more to do with inhabiting nonhuman scales and perspectives, rather than entertaining human-level fantasies about hollywood disasters. Clearly, oil spills, meltdowns, and extinctions are occurring right now (and they are disastrous to the fullest) but the manner in which these incidences compoundly effect mass species extinction and climate change generate a gap between the human, psychological experience of these things, and their actual reality. In other words, by focusing on disaster we implicate ourselves in a mode of thinking which closes itself off to the long-term temporal “drag” of geological events that will be unfolding for hundreds of thousands of years.
More than anything I think Morton is trying to get us to think ecologically by showing that the revelation of ecology means an encounter with long time scales and alien, nonhuman perspectives we may not be capable of thinking and yet must be attentive to in some meaningful way. In short, I think Morton and yourself definitely have the same goal in mind, though are perhaps attentive to different leverage points for change.