Ecological Gyre Theory
vortextual thinking
after the ecologic turn

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crisis: Social, Environmental, Institutional ANU Humanities Research Centre Annual Conference, December 2019

We’d like to start this presentation with a whale living in the North Atlantic. A minke whale, named Pequod, born 40 years ago. Throughout his life he managed to survive whaling, the 1988 Odyssey oil spill, orcas trying to suffocate him. Eventually, our whale grows old. One day, diving beneath the surface to feed, he finds he is unable to muster the strength to resurface for breath. Trapped, weakening, our whale slowly suffocates and dies. Although Pequod’s density will lead him to the sea floor, at present he bloats with gases, which pull him back to the surface, amongst the trash and waste brought together in the great pacific garbage patch. Our Pequod becomes a meal for sharks, birds and other fish.

Ecological Gyre Theory operates as both object of study and method of study, one reflective to our current critical context.  In presenting our theory we work across, around and into contemporary ecological and Anthropocene discourse to reframe possibilities of knowing and being within a vortextual frame. Located within wet/sea ontologies, the gyre is volumetric space, a vessel for reworlding and, in a Guattarian fashion, transversalising between epistemologies. As a methodology, ecological gyre theory endorses volumetric thought within a tidalectic view, as terrestrial fixity/dialectics is countered by whorling forces that both enable and produce destabilised possibilities of being. Further, we propose it as a way to make sense of and work within that which remains, eddies, flows and whorls amidst continued acceleration and destabilisation.