i finished reading Morton's Dark Ecology, after i picked it up at the library from the title alone, and though it certainly made me think i still don't know entirely how i feel about it. it's essentially a philosophy book, proposing both a background idea for how we got into the climate mess we made and a strategy for a possible way out.
i won't pretend i was able to follow along with every line of reasoning he makes. Morton presupposes a lot of familiarity with philosophers i've never read in order to build his argument so the constant calling to Kant, Hegel, Derrida, essentialism, subject vs. object, etc. tends to go over my head. the text itself is positively ribbed with references available in the Notes at the end, so many i couldn't begin to check up on them to try and evaluate the claims he's making lol.
but i think i did understand the big themes. like the idea that many many things, ideas, concepts in the universe are not cycles but self-perpetuating loops, like a Mobius strip. one of these we are stuck in is the "agrilogistic" strange loop formed at the beginning of agriculture and this has perpetuated itself in our way of interacting with the world, culminating in the current climate crisis. i don't know how i feel about this. there's a lot of nuance that i think is glossed over in here. i'm not a philosopher. i did really enjoy the weird feeling that comes from pondering the unjoinable gap between how things appear and how they are, and other thoughts and processes he characterises as having a Mobius-loop shape, the ouroboros.
the book works its way through the most common attitudes people fall into when dealing with living through our human-made ecological collapse, reading a little bit like that five stages of denial model. maybe the most important theme i picked up in this was encouraging people to see the land, the local ecology, the world, as themselves. he pivots cleanly away from the human needs vs. preserving nature angle by saying we need to be more selfish, more hedonistic, in the way that includes nonhumans. we don't do this by walling ourselves off from ecology anymore than we can do it by allowing the problems we made to continue as they are. fixing things would require a flexibility and playfulness, a willingness to simply try whatever, that would counteract and disrupt the inflexible agrilogistic institutions we can't seem to shake. it makes more sense in the book (sometimes), though i'm not a good enough writer to summarize it in a way that doesn't sound reductive. but as he says, people don't want philosophy these days, they want concrete solutions.
i thought the writing sounded a little smug sometimes. besides the dense philosophy references that make things so opaque for the average reader, he also throws in pop-culture and song lyrics and book quotes to make a point, in a way i found irritating but i guess it does fit with his "just play around" theme. probably all philosophers are not like this?
it's fun to pick up books i would never look for and that make me think about things i haven't tried to think about, so this was worthwhile for me. i don't think i understood it completely or saw all the implications of it. anyway the real treat in this book was this illustration of a muppet-faced ouroboros at the end of each chapter. you know.