Timothy Morton is an enigmatic character. An English professor at Rice University, but one that specializes in ecology and the way it interacts with cultural issues, and a leading member of the object-oriented philosophy movement. Their latest book "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" explores how religion overlaps with science in strange and surprising ways, while another recent project involved working with Andrew Melchior of U.K. trip-hop collective Massive Attack and MIT's Kiyoshi Masui to make music about fast radio bursts.
They are also known — by their own admission rather embarrassingly — as "the prophet of the Anthropocene." We spoke to them ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, which takes place this weekend (Sept. 21-22), about how they got this title, what the Anthropocene means, and why we need to stop trying to define when it started and accept that we've been in it for millennia.
