All Art is Ecological
- Sep 28, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★☆☆
After two reads, I’m still not sure if there’s actual brilliance here or if what’s going on is more like two drunks at a bar delighted with themselves about the brilliant conversation they think they’re having. Or it could be that philosophy and I mix like oil and water. There’s either an awful lot being said in All Art is Ecological or terribly little. The upside, I suppose, is that either way it all happens in just over a hundred pages.
The general gist, I think, is that this—the Anthropocene—is a remarkable time to be alive. It’s remarkable not because it’s all doom and gloom what with climate change and mass extinction and resource depletion etc. etc. but because we have the opportunity to engage with the world—with ecology—in a less rigid, less polarizing, more nuanced, and more inclusive way. To Morton, being ecological isn’t something someone wakes up and decides to do one day or something that takes specific focus or is embodied in certain actions and not others. We are all ecological because we are all part of this world, regardless of how apart from other people or other organisms we might feel. And the kind of care we think we need to have is often the wrong kind or directed in the wrong place, and if we cared just a little bit less—as in a more playful and less overwrought kind of care—our care might go a lot further and do a lot more good. Because the kind of care we’ve exhibited up to now hasn’t served the human race—or the rest of the planet—all that well.
As for how all this ties into art, well, I think that’s also about being less uptight: art does something to you whether you want it to or not, just as the environment does something to us whether we want it to or not. Just as we do something to the environment—our ecology—whether we intend to or not. Morton doesn’t talk about electric cars or wind turbines or solar arrays, but each of those improves something at the expense of displacing or degrading or depriving or reducing something else. In the end, he just wants to, as the back jacket succinctly states, “open our eyes to the idea that emotion and experience are the basis for a deep philosophical engagement with ecology.”
Outside of other philosophers, I’m not sure who, exactly, is interested in a deep philosophical engagement with ecology. I think lots of other types of engagement—personal, practical, spiritual, ethical—would be far more useful and beneficial to the self and to everyone and everything else. Anyone engaging in any way would be better than what is mostly going on. And though Morton seems to put in a dig at Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project (see my review of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays), I think they’re actually up to the same thing. Kingsnorth just says it in a way that I only needed to read once to understand.
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