Book reviews Synthesis 1 (Fall 2008) 72 Morton, Timothy. Ecology: Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp.249. Aristotle has famously posited that "nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man" (Politics, Bk.1. Ch.8). This is an anthropocentric formulation that works under the assumption that nature is important and valuable to the extent that it serves humans. Ecology has long distanced itself from such man-centered views of the so-called "natural environment," going, at times, to the other extreme by considering, for instance, that (inanimate) nature must be revered because each plant or stone allegedly has a personal(ized) soul therefore it should be treated like a human person (traditional animism); or simply by emphasizing a spiritual interaction between man and mountain, the human and the non-human, revealed through national or tribal rituals and ceremonies (new animism). Thus, modern ecology seems to fall into the trap of either objectifying nature, which has devastating consequences or "subjectifying" it, that is, making it into something that, probably, is not―a subject. In Ecology: Without Nature, Timothy Morton reshuffles the ecological cards by disengaging from a discussion of the subject-object dichotomy in order to concentrate on whatever lies in-between, a hazy realm that he calls "ambience." "Ecological writing," he argues, "shuffles subject and object back and forth so that we may think they have dissolved into each other, though what we usually end up with is a blur" called ambience (15). The idea behind Morton's book is simple but strangely enticing. Environmental studies and ecological criticism place so much emphasis upon the environment that from a certain point on it stops being an "environment." By placing it at the center of all discussions and practices we remove it from its natural location, namely the surroundings or the margins. Likewise, nature, in Morton's view, is so persistently in the limelight today that it has, in a way, stopped being natural insofar as it has started to conjure metaphysical representations or notions like God or not so metaphysical (but not absolutely physical, either) concepts such as ecosystem. Nature, that is, as an umbrella term that oscillates wildly between the divine and the material hovers over things without becoming those things. Nature rather hides behind an endless series of metonymies, at the end of which it makes an impressive entrance: grass, mountain, air, heterosexuality...Nature. Morton believes that the only way to override the barren metaphoricity and abstractness of ecological thinking is to dispense with the idea of nature altogether. In other words, to have an ecological consciousness that does justice to nature, we will just have to, paradoxically, let go of...nature "as a transcendental term in a material mask," a term that "ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and life-forms" (14, 2). If nature is trivialized by our constant references to it, by abolishing not only the term but also its metaphysical representations, we become able to preserve its ineffable mystery, thereby doing justice to an ethical and ambient stance towards the environment, a stance that breaks with the norms of any environmental politics or program. The author draws upon a number of philosophers and thinkers ―Adorno, Kant, Lyotard, Freud, amongst others― to critique environmental ethics by questioning ecocritical aesthetics and more particularly the kind of environmental writing that claims to take us to the thing itself, raw nature as it really is, through a reproduction of the feeling of being united with nature. The cultural and historical platform upon which he elaborates the (non)concept of ambience is eighteenth to nineteenth-century British Romanticism. This is a rather risky thing to do, considering that Romanticism is almost by definition the culmination of the ego, the subjectal I that constitutes, rather than is constituted by, the world, an I used to flaunting itself against the fuzzy background of the surrounding atmosphere or natural environment. The author, to his credit, has decided to let his own writing as well as famous Romantic texts work against the grain and norms of Romantic aesthetics. This can be easily understood if we consider that his notions of ambience and ecomimesis privilege the dimension of encompassing space, which is a-temporal and definitely poles apart from the supposedly teleological nature of Romanticism that privileges time and the "sense of an ending" (to use the title of Frank Kermode's seminal book). Romantic poets have utilized the environment as a pretext for talking about themselves, a mirror that reflects back their own emotions or, better, a magnifying glass that enlarges those emotions. If Morton is correct, then, Romantic poets must be un-ecological, unless he has an ace up his sleeve and manages to prove that there are more things at stake in Romantic aesthetics than self-reflection and sheer subjectivity. In any case, he does sound determined to show the dark and absolutely ecological or ambient side of Romanticism by announcing that the time has come to engage