Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of all life and the importance of understanding our relationships with the environment.
Timothy Morton's quote highlights the profound realization that everything in our ecosystem is interconnected, urging us to recognize our relationship with various forms of life, both sentient and non-sentient. This interconnectedness fosters a deeper ecological thought that invites contemplation and promotes a sense of responsibility for the natural world and our place within it.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on environmental awareness, one might say, 'As Timothy Morton points out, the ecological crisis is a reminder of our interconnected existence with nature.'
More from Timothy Morton
All quotes →The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
Similar quotes
In the valley of the giants where the stars and stripes explode, the peaches they were sweet and the milk and honey flowed.
I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? ... The end of living and the beginning of survival.
If we are to save humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees.