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.
Timothy MortonRead
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the juxtaposition of natural beauty and industrial decay.
Timothy Morton's quote paints a vivid picture of a landscape shaped by industrialization, yet simultaneously teeming with life and nature. It suggests that amid the remnants of man's impact on the earth—evident in the railway tracks and artificial lights—nature continues to thrive and adapt, symbolizing resilience and beauty even in a 'haunting' environment.
Themes
NatureIndustrialBeautyResilienceLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of environmental conservation, this quote can illustrate how nature endures and adapts despite human intervention.
More from Timothy Morton
All quotes →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.
Timothy MortonRead
The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.
Timothy MortonRead
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