5. Kierkegaard's Dark Ecology: The Quest for an Ethical Framework in the Face of Climate Catastrophe

In this paper I argue that Søren Kierkegaard's work provides a foundation for a necessary deep ethics framework suited for the conditions of the Anthropocene and the challenges of anthropogenic climate change. This analysis integrates Kierkegaardian philosophy with Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology, which describes contemporary ecological awareness as a profound, troubling darkness where the human is both the criminal and the detective regarding global planetary destruction. Traditional anthropocentric ethics is insufficient for responding to crises of such novel scale and "deep time," which requires accountability stretching across vast temporal gulfs. Through an interpretation of the Genesis narrative, I reconstructs Kierkegaard’s anthropogenesis to establish that responsiveness precedes accountability, creating an inter-generational freedom that allows the individual to act on an ethical demand now. This framework is temporally deep via the inheritance of response-ability and spatially deep through a non-anthropocentric restoration of the concept of nature as an inter-sectional ecology of both human and non-human life. Ultimately, this deep ethics is structured by Kierkegaard’s idea of contemporaneity, allowing for a response to the distant call of future generations without claiming full comprehension of their unknown reality. Wilde, Niels (2025). "Kierkegaard's Dark Ecology: The Quest for an Ethical Framework in Face of Climate Catastrophe", Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 307-328.