Towards a PostHumanist Ecology

Abstract

To say that nature is central to the nineteenth-century literary consciousness is to state the obvious. When Wordsworth, in ‘The Tables Turned’ (1798), demands that we ‘quit [our] books’, he is formulating the infamous ‘back-to-nature’ motto. Still, the author wishes to retort that, from an environmental point of view, Wordsworth’s request does not point in the right direction. In other words, it is not ecological to moralise about the necessity of paying close attention to nature. Humanist theories of ecology have traditionally concentrated upon the importance of preserving nature for the sake of humanity. Recent posthumanist theories of the environment, by contrast, emphasise the need to ‘decentre’ nature by placing it in the background, that is, in areas ‘surrounding’ the centre. There has been a critical shift, at the turn of the twenty-first century, from ‘deep ecology’ to ‘dark ecology’. This essay explores aspects of the latter and some of its affinities with European posthumanism.