To unjustly summarize, he argues that traditional environmental thinking is inadequate for confronting our environmental crises. He criticizes--and rightly so--the usual hippy, Gaian, holistic thinking that pervades the eco scene. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis can be summarized as follows:
The Earth, James Lovelock proposes, behaves as if it were a superorganism, made up from all the living things and from their material environment.This is an intriguing and beautiful hypothesis (I do have a special reverence for Deadheads and Big Sur), and although there is some truth in the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thinking, we are left with devalued individual parts, e.g. particular human and non-human animals, plants, and abiotic systems. As one of these particular devalued parts, I think it's important to find a place for individual value. After all, each part within the whole is a whole itself. Or, obversely, each whole is also a part.
Here, Morton's ecological ideas tend toward an intimate, reductionist approach. Moreover, his central theme is the rejection of the idea of a so-called 'Nature' altogether. This is no idealist metaphysical rejection of the outside world. It is a rejection of 'Nature' as a thing-over-there, an object at a distance, that 'purple mountain's majesty.' This is what we usually mean when we refer to 'Nature.' Take, for instance, a 2008 survey by Joanne Vining, et al. in The Human Ecology Review. A typical respondent, breifly describing what is meant by 'Nature':
Trees, Animals, grasslands, wetlands, mountains. Never touched or altered by humans.Look at the rest of the survey. It's full of this. I would have responded exactly the same way. (The results of the survey reveal that, paradoxically, most people consider themselves to be part of Nature, yet consistently characterize Nature as something specifically non-human). Now, Morton is quick to remind us that he is not arguing against the importance of wetlands or suggesting that we should 'Drill Baby Drill!' Rather, he is unearthing (pun?) some of the fundamental attitudes that inhibit real ecological action.
Certainly, his critiques make real progress in the development of ecological thought. I'm currently reading his book, Ecology Without Nature, and I, being the authority on such things, recommend it highly.
Morton closes his article "Ecologocentrism," (SubStance. 37.3 (2008): 73-96.) with this:
In our age of ecological panic, what we are losing is precisely this sense of "nature" or "the environment" as an enveloping, nonhuman and/or non-sentient "world." This world provided a background to our foreground, offering meaningfulness precisely in its opacity . . . (23)If nature gave meaning in its opacity, what meaning are we left with when we discover it to be transparent? Indeed, when we discover ourselves to be transparent?
