Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration

There must be a movement at least from A to not-A.

As well as pointing, in a highly politicized way, to society, critique points toward itself.

The point is not to attain any special state of mind at all. The point is to go against the grain of dominant, normative ideas about nature, but to do so in the name of sentient beings suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions.

an aesthetic state of meditative calm that we could then (falsely) associate with some sort of "ecological awareness.

But ultimately, theory (and meditation, for that matter) is not supposed to make you a "better person" in any sense. It is supposed to expose hypocrisy, or if you prefer, to examine the ways in which ideological illusions maintain their grip

My readings try to be symptomatic rather than comprehensive

picking up the vibrations of a material universe and recording them with high fidelity—inevitably ignores the subject, and thus cannot fully come to terms with an ecology that may manifest itself in beings who are also persons—including, perhaps, those other beings we designate as animals

consumerism is a discourse about identity

to keep one step ahead of the ideological forces that ecological writing generates