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First published 2018
Text copyright © Timothy Morton, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Lyrics here from ‘Breathe’ by Pink Floyd © 1973,
Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd administered by BMG Rights Management UK Ltd.
Used by permission, all rights reserved.
Cover and book design by Matthew Young
ISBN: 978-0-241-27424-8
For Lindsay Bloxam and Paul Johnson
INTRODUCTION:
Not Another Information Dump
CHAPTER 1
And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction
CHAPTER 2
… And the Leg Bone’s Connected to the Toxic Waste Dump Bone
CHAPTER 3
Tuning
CHAPTER 4
A Brief History of Ecological Thought
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
‘Grass is hard and lumpy and damp,
and full of dreadful black insects.’OSCAR WILDE
Thank you so much to my editors, Thomas Penn and Ananda Pellerin, for their tireless help. In particular, thanks to Ananda for her incredibly detailed and insistently kind editing. Writing in the world of scholarship can be a very isolating affair, so I’m very grateful to have been seen.
Thanks to everyone I gave lectures to or who participated in seminars or workshops or dialogues in the last year. Those occasions are my lab, and I simply couldn’t think without them. Thanks to my Dean of Humanities at Rice University, Nicholas Shumway, whose support of me has been one of the miracles of my life. Thanks to my fantastic research assistants, Kevin MacDonnell and Randi Mihajlovic, whose invaluable work enriched this project so much. And thanks again to Kevin for assisting me in every respect; it’s not an exaggeration that I just couldn’t do my job without his unstinting and incredibly generous support. Thanks to everyone who helped in all kinds of ways, and especially Heitham Al-Sayed, Ian Bogost, Paul Burch, Federico Campagna, Olafur Eliasson, Björk Gudmundsdottir, Sofie Grettve, Lizzy Grindey, Graham Harman, Douglas Kahn, Jeffrey Kripal, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Edouard Isar, the Morton family (Garth, Jasmine, Charles and Steve), Yoko Ono, Sunny Ozell, Andrea Pagnes, Sabrina Scott, Priscilla Elora Sharuk, Emilija Škarnulytė, Verena Stenke, Marita Tatari and Cary Wolfe.
Special thanks to Yoko Ono for permission to reproduce part of her work THIS IS NOT HERE.
This book is dedicated to my cousin, the artist Lindsay Bloxam, and her partner, the artist Paul Johnson. Their genius is to suspend the heavy hand of judgement and open up the world to curiosity, wonder and lightness. We could do with a bit here in the realm of ecological thought.