I'm talking this week at Florida International University. The title of my talk:
ECOLOGY IN THE TIME OF HYPEROBJECTS
In this lecture, Timothy Morton asks us to consider what he calls “hyperobjects”: entities such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space, subject to temporal distortion, nonlocal, phased and “interobjective.” Hyperobjects appear in the human world as a product of our thinking through the ecological crisis we have entered.
The ecological crisis is best thought of as the time of hyperobjects. Why? Because this is the moment at which massive nonhuman, nonsentient entities make decisive contact with humans, ending various human concepts such as “world,” “horizon,” “nature” and even “environment.” The existence of hyperobjects poses a number of problems for ecology and philosophy, from theories of self-interest to deep ontological questions.