Mr Timothy Morton’s more logical approach to ecology.

Don’t you feel terribly guilty about what you, a fossil fuel-guzzling human being, are doing to our beautiful planet? Well, you shouldn’t. Not according to the philosopher Mr Timothy Morton anyway, who has written a magnanimously ambitious book called Being Ecological that calls for a paradigm shift in our relationship with the environment.

Mr Morton, who counts Björk and Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist among his advocates, is not a fan of what one might call the evangelical scaremongering that is commonplace when we talk about ecology. Spooking somebody into self-flagellation over how much plastic they use by screaming at them about polar ice caps is not, it turns out, the best way to get them on side. “The way we do ecological debate has a problem,” says Mr Morton. When somebody starts talking about the environment, he says, they run the risk of overwhelming their listeners. “Talking to people [about ecology] shouldn’t be about slapping them upside the head and forcing everything on them. It immediately pushes people into defiance. So I thought why not write a book for people who don’t care, or who don’t think they care, or don’t want to care? And see if I can write it without preaching to them.”

At the heart of this goal is an attempt to stymie the tsunami of depressing realities that ecological debate discusses and focus instead on the ways we are connected to nature rather than the ways we differ from it. “If you can understand something, you’re responsible for it. We don’t need to force people to know that they caused global warming anymore; we just need to make them understand it more. It’s irrelevant now how we got into this situation; the question is how do we get ourselves out? We have to start chewing this thing a bit more.”

And chew it he does. Referencing Messrs Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and William Blake alongside Homer Simpson and Star Wars, Being Ecological deconstructs the ways in which we think about our environment, and provides us with an alternative way of looking at ecology without environmental horror stories. Mr Morton’s goal is to help us understand what we are doing to the environment, but in a way which doesn’t make us feel that we have to go and live in the woods, don a hemp smock, and forage for nuts and berries to justify our miserable existence.

Apocalyptic speak about the natural world doesn’t work, says Mr Morton, because of its similarities to priest-like fire-and-brimstone proselytising. “There’s a particular kind of religious mode that you can get into with ecological speech, and that mode has hoovered up as many people as it can hoover up on earth right now,” he says. What’s more, a lot of us assume that to be more ecological demands that we make drastic changes to our everyday lives (no more plastic, be a raw vegan, stop driving), but this mode of thought means we feel inherently guilty. “It seems to me that we’ve inherited this from religion, this idea of guilt and redemption that prevents us from realising that we’re actually part of this massive collective entity called the human species and furthermore we’re part of this even more massive entity called the biosphere.”

“The main problem with guilt from a political point of view is that it is scaled to individuals and one of my messages in this book is that you [as an individual] are not guilty,” says Mr Morton. “Please don’t think for one second more that you are the one that caused global warming to happen because actually when you started your car, what you did was statistically meaningless.”

Still, while we should eschew this mode of judging ourselves individually, we should also be conscious of how we as individuals relate to the natural environment around us, and start dismantling what Mr Morton calls the “massive firewall” that humans have built between themselves and animals. If we can get past that anthropocentric mode of thinking, he says, and realise that we are as much a part of the planet as everything else on it, then ecologically speaking, we’re going in the right direction: “Ecological awareness is being aware of yourself as well as the world.” What it is not, he says, is this “jaw-clenching desperation to be or do something totally different.” Being ecological starts, he explains, by realising that we already are ecological. Once we realise that, changing the world stops seeming so scary, and starts feeling possible.

Being Ecological (Pelican) by Mr Timothy Morton is out now

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