Book review: Being Ecological by Timothy Morton

From its opening page, Being Ecological (MIT Press, 2018; all page references to this edition) seems to situate itself as an ecological text of an unusual kind, stating that it does not aim to guilt its readers into ecological angst with weighty factoids and the information-dump approach, or “ecological information delivery mode” (p. 7), so often adopted by other authors. Timothy Morton, notorious for his ability to invert commonly held beliefs and understandings within the humanities, presents Being Ecological as his attempt to arrive at a more authentic and productive understanding of what he has called elsewhere the ecological thought and how to live with it (Morton 2012), rather than trying to guilt-trip us into ecology.