94 The World is a Meshy Place
Anna Greenwood; Rowan Cummings; Kyle Cipollone; Randy Garfield; and Kamal Singhani
The ecological thought is the idea that everything is interconnected, and has to do with society and our coexistence in the world. It has to do with music, culture, philosophy and literature. This thought process includes the ways we imagine ourselves living together, and everyone’s relation to each other and all other beings. An ecological thought process sees everything in the big picture: “[t]hinking in totality,” as Timothy Morton describes it.
All of our actions affect the planet and every other being that inhabits it. Thinking about these actions in totality, you can imagine what the impacts of them will be in the future, hundreds, thousands or even millions of years from now. One way to illustrate an ecological thought process is thinking of it in relation to the nature that surrounds us. In our modern society, nature has already served its purpose to us.
Time spent in Nature has long been seen as an essential element of human existence. We often view Nature as a tangible thing with the ability to bring us back to “a time without industry, a time without ‘technology’, as if we had never used flint or wheat” (5). It is our escape from our boring, confining, mundane lives of school, work, or anything else making our lives less than we think they should be. We idealize Nature and place it high upon a pedestal; so high in fact, that we are unable to ever reach it. Somehow, we have made it pristine in our minds; all clear blue skies, green fields, and singing birds. It is widely thought that true Nature is untouched by man and civilization, making it the perfect place to go when our rough and overly industrial lives become too much.
It is imperative to examine ecology without the romanticized notion of nature looming over its discourse. There are numerous instances of environmentalist movements that are primarily focused on preserving this idealized “nature” instead of considering what is actually best for the environment. For example, solar and wind farms are often rejected by communities because they don’t look “natural”. Instead of being concerned about energy preservation, the public is wary that these large industrial farms with “spoil their view.” Morton writes that this “is truly a case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology” (9). It’s because of instances like this that the human race will not be able to truly address the environmental realities of the planet without first eradicating this ideological perception of what is “natural” and “unnatural”. Industrial facilities are a part of the modern society in which we all exist.
Morton argues that in order to have a more honest, holistic perception and grasp on “the ecological thought,” we must reframe and accept the seedier sides of ecology. He calls for a new aesthetic called “dark ecology”. Dark ecology is the antithesis of the bright, sunny, straightforward rhetoric of