Timothy Morton on Peak Nature
I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Timothy Morton’s writing over the past few months, mostly on his blog Ecology without Nature. I came across his work because he wrote a little bit about artist Judy Natal’s project Future Perfect, which I admire. I came across Natal’s work because she was part of an event organized by another project of interest, SP Weather Station (for whom I’m doing an upcoming Weather Report). These chains of discoveries happen all the time, and sometimes I like to keep track of them.
Over Christmas I was given one of Morton’s books, Ecology without Nature, and as I show here, his way of thinking about climate, ecology and humanity really resonates with me. Initially, I thought maybe it was just me, but in the last few weeks I’ve seen his ideas and writing popping up in other places. A few days ago I came across a piece he wrote for Adbusters while I was idly browsing my facebook feed, and I just discovered he was recently interviewed on Bad at Sports. I’ve yet to check out the Bad at Sports interview, but I read the Adbusters piece, Peak Nature, while I was on the train today. I’m still digesting it, but I’ll pull out a few passages that stuck with me. This one is great:
You are walking on top of lifeforms. Your car drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earth’s crust is distributed bacterial excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms.
He goes on to suggest that, in our era of global climactic shifts, we can no longer use the idea of “weather” as a dependable constant upon which to watch our lives play out. He sees our increasing awareness of our changing climate as a collapsing of foreground and background, engendering a dissolution of the concept of “horizon”, a clever but also apt use of a visual art metaphor (although we prefer to say “far ground” in my beginning drawing classes!):
If there is no background – no neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climate – then there is no foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground!
It’s refreshing to read philosophy that feels so directly tied to issues that I’m working with, both in the studio and in my day to day struggles with own ecological niche. One more for the road (of course these are all better in context!):
Let’s think about one way in which global warming abolishes the idea of a horizon. This would be the timescales involved – yes, timescales in the plural. There are three of them. We could call these, in turn, the frightening, the horrifying, and the petrifying.
1) Frightening timescale. It will take several hundred years for cold ocean waters (assuming there are any) to absorb about 75% of the excess CO2.
2) Horrifying timescale. It will then take another 30,000 years or so for most of the remaining 25% to be absorbed by igneous rocks. The half-life of plutonium is 24,100 years.
3) Petrifying timescale. The final 7% will be around 100,000 years from now.
There is a real sense in which “forever” is far easier on the mind than these very large timescales, what I call very large finitude. Hyperobjects produce very large finitude, scales of time and space that are finite and for that reason humiliatingly difficult for humans to visualize. Forever makes you feel important. But 100,000 years makes you wonder whether you can imagine 100,000 anything. It seems rather abstract to imagine that a book, for instance, is 100,000 words long.
