In his recently translated Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber describes ecological relationality as essentially erotic: Ecology is “every description of reality that understands it as an interconnected system of reciprocal inspiration, dependency, penetration, and the persistent search for freedom,” and that “centers on the principle of erotic attraction” (Weber 2017, 7). Weber's definition of ecology brings forward a set of related questions that this essay aims to historicize: How have the descriptive practices of ecologists produced this understanding of eros as both a drive for connection and—even more importantly—a striving for freedom and autonomy? How does erotic, ecological description function, on the page, across the screen, as it finds footing within the epistemologies of modernity? What does an erotic ecology look and feel like, and how might it also instruct this form of seeing and feeling? For Weber, the stakes of these questions...
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