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

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.”