Tim Morton to talk on Dark Ecology
Tim Morton of Ecology without Nature is to give a talk on Dark Ecology at the University of Wisconsin Center for the Humanities in Madison (for information and times: go here):
Dark Ecology: Philosophy in the AnthropoceneThursday,
October 18, 2012 @ 7:30pm
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L140
... from his blurb:
"In roughly 1790, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust, as a result of fossil fuel burning. This marked the beginning of what is now known as the Anthropocene, a distinct moment in which human history intersects decisively with geological time. In 1945, the Great Acceleration began, a logarithmic upturn in the momentum of the Anthropocene. A thin layer of radioactive materials began to be deposited in Earth's crust, thanks to the detonation of The Gadget in Trinity, New Mexico, and the subsequent deployment of the nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man.
The intersection of human history and geological time now means that no distinction can be drawn, no clear, thin bright line, between humans and nonhumans, or, in the old and now outdated (and mystifying, even dangerous) terminology, Nature. Everything-bonobos, Toyotas, plankton and toothpaste-are now on “this” side of history and social space. There is no “world” any more, no stable background against which human events seem meaningful. It is the end of the world not as an apocalypse, but as the loss of an illusion.
We are not living in the end times; this is the afterlife: we are already dead. We find ourselves caught in a reality from which we cannot extricate ourselves in a deep, ontological sense. The implications of the end of the world are the subject of this talk.
Morton is the author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota UP, forthcoming), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (forthcoming from Open Humanities Press), The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), and Ecology without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007), as well as many other books and essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music. He also regularly blogs at Ecology Without Nature."