Timothy Morton is one of the authors leading the new wave of environmentalism. The British thinker, whose latest work is provocative and extremely personal, takes it as a point of fact that the destruction of the planet is in process. Admired by the singer Björk and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the modernist London gallery Serpentine, Morton comes across as a punk creative, one who has kept up the fight against preconceived thinking. He is also one of the authors who has best described the anguish we feel every time we turn on our car engine or air conditioner, fully aware that doing so brings us closer to the end of our species.

The professor at Rice University in Houston, where he lives, has also penned a dozen books in which he speaks of climate change as something so massive that it defies comprehension (Hyperobjects), about how to inhabit the Earth once we have destroyed it (Hyposubjects), and even flights of fancy in which we attempt to flee from pollution in the Millennium Falcon, the spaceship created by George Lucas for his *Star Wars *saga (Spacecraft).

Throughout his conversation with EL PAÍS, which takes place by video call, he says that the abuse he suffered as a child explains his way of thinking. He also shares that recently, by way of the woman he married in 2023, he has found Jesus — “yes, in a certain way I found Jesus and I would like that to sound as stupid and corny as possible.” He has reflections to go around, as he makes clear during this interview.

**Question. **You analyzed an interesting concept, that of hyperobjects. Can you explain what they are?

**Answer. **A hyperobject is something so physically enormous and long-lasting that we can only experience it in minuscule portions. You can think about it, even come to understand it, but if you attempt to measure or calibrate it, you can only manage to do so in nearly insignificant. The biosphere in which we are born is a friendly hyperobject. A different kind is that of human interaction with artificial intelligence or global warming. You need massive processing capacity to be able to map all its impacts in real time.

**Q. **In the introduction to your last book,Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology*, *you say that hell on Earth is real. You blame oil, evangelical Christianity and white supremacy.

**A. **A fascist is someone who is sure they’re the good guy in the movie. But to be a good person implies being a little concerned that it will actually turn out that you’re the bad guy. When I say fascism, I’m referring to what I consider today to be the norm. It is nothing new, it’s been around for thousands of years. Before, it was the tyrants, the pharaohs. Today, they are not the exception, but the norm. And that’s because of the type of social structures we have created for ourselves, which are based on hierarchies of domination. The Australian researcher Luke Kemp calls these structures Goliaths. We live in an era in which we are causing tremendous damage to the biosphere. And that happens because the way we treat each other is the way we treat the rest of the planet.

**Q. **What is the hell you describe like?

**A. **The world’s religions have imagined that it is what they call life after death. Hell would be like a kind of eternal concentration camp. And it would be a place that is only for bad people. And Heaven would be the equivalent for good people. And this entire idea supplied the model for the United States, where I live, for example. Effectively, it is a massive concentration camp or a plantation that creates value through enslaving other human beings, and using non-human beings completely freely. Those who exercise this power are largely English-speaking white people. People like me, who to have their own paradise, have created hell for everyone else. And now we are all trapped in it. We live in a society of masters and servants, which is also a hyperobject.

When I was a child, environmentalism sounded like a utopian thing. Today, it’s like we’re all having a bad acid trip

**Q. **Is there any way out?

**A. **The first step is being able to see it. Realizing that we form part of this hell. And the only way out is to create a paradise. And to do so, you have to come together with others who also want to improve the planet. You can get together with two, five, six million, the number doesn’t matter. We have to get out of this global concentration camp logic.

**Q. **You are part of the OOO, or object-oriented movement, a school of thought that challenges anthropocentrism and argues that non-human objects have their own lives. Can you explain what the world looks like through that prism?

**A. **The OOO was created by four white people who started to deconstruct themselves. It’s a way of breaking with the Western philosophy by recognizing the soul of everything.

**Q. **In Dark Ecology, you reject the idea of a pristine natural world.

**A. **The mere idea of a virgin natural world is a violent dream, the fantasy of a pedophile. Its way of speaking romantically about nature is violence. If you want a world beyond rape, you can’t think in terms of perfection. Part of what I do is to explain that being an environmentalist implies dismantling racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia. To protect the Amazons, first you have to destroy the racism that dwells within you.

**Q. **How has environmental consciousness changed?

**A. **When I was a child, at the end of the 1970s, environmentalism sounded like a utopian thing, like an acid trip. Today, it’s like we’ve all been forced to take acid, and we’re having a bad trip. We have gone from a good trip to a horrible trip. And that began to happen about 15 years ago.

**Q. **Last November, the COP30 climate conference ended without being able to address the damage done by fossil fuels.

**A. **It’s like the coyote has fallen off the cliff, but he doesn’t realize he’s falling. They talk and they talk and they talk when the only thing that must be done is to destroy fascism. It is public enemy number one. And we have to reimagine the social space to create a better world for all.

**Q. **What do you think about young people’s new form of protest, where they throw paint on works of art to call attention to climate change or colonialism?

**A. **They have my complete empathy. They throw paint, which can be erased, and we emit carbon dioxide, which is going to destroy their lives. We are literally destroying children. I experienced abuse, I suffer from depression, I feel pain. Students write to me asking for help. Their own grandparents and parents created this world, they need someone to lend them a hand. I help them to scream.

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