Timothy Morton

“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.”

“In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.”

“An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.”

“Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?”

“Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sor...”

“Bohm's 'ontological interpretation' was so called because of the bad rap the word 'ontology' has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.”

“Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.”

“When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.”

“One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.”

“Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.”

“The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.”

“An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trai...”

“Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.”

“It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness - not just in terms of PR for the science.”

“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.”

“Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.”

“Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?”

“Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.”

“Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.”

“Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.”