For this issue I immediately wanted to speak with Timothy Morton, one of my favorite ecological thinkers, and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. When I read Timothy's book Ecology Without Nature, I gained a deeper understanding of how the modern world divorces the idea of nature from human beings. We tend to think of nature as trees and landscapes and animals and plants, things that are not human. At the same time, we think of cities, machinery and other man-made things as not part of nature. But the idea that human beings are somehow separate from nature is the root cause of our ecological problems. When I spoke with Timothy I noticed he was not speaking about nature in terms of forests, trees and animals. He was speaking about human nature and our human connection to reality.