We require toy political forms

Intellect is indeed an organ of extinction and that is not great. You can't snicker triumphantly about that. Like all autoimmune systems, intellectuality-depression reinforces itself. How does one sub-vert a self-reinforcing loop? To cast intellect away would be the absurd anti-intellectualism that is part of the problem, trying to return to some state of Nature defined by stripping "civilization" of its symbionts: intellect, plastic, cancer; and, beyond this, stripping the very loop form that provides the structure for beings. This is absurd because "civilization" is already agrilogistic scorched earth and retreat with the nonhumans airbrushed out. Stripping the human realm of its symbionts is... agrilogistics.

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An ecological politics based on guilt underlies "return to Nature" tactics. Basing politics on horror necessitates some kind of resignation tinged with Schadenfreude, wide-eyed and screaming while Rome burns. What mainly impedes ecognosis is the deadly seriousness; we require toy political forms that don't take themselves quite as seriously. A lifeform, an engineering solution, a social policy, another lifeform – they join together and become another type of toy, in a sort of ecological Lego. Not as models for some future serious form. Why? Because of interdependence, there's always a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There can never be The Toy, one toy to rule them all. Attempts to impose one system top down ahve consistently failed to feed as many people as a variety of smaller scale approaches.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 140-141