At the end of the world, there is no 'away'

"Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil pipe explosion, and his callousness made international headlines. Hayward said that the Gulf of Mexico was a huge body of water, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident....

When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waster away into some ontologically alien realm.

Ecology is now beginning to tell us about something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no 'away.'"

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

"Space is not what it used to be, but then it never was. Modern physicists and astronomers are convinced that there is no such thing as a truly empty space, an absolute vacuum corresponding to the metaphysical concept of nothingness. Whatever nothingness is, it is beyond scientific understanding...

On the contrary, they believe that so-called empty space is a frothing sea of quantum processes that on a cosmic scale manifests itself in the form of the dark energy that causes the universe to accelerate.

As pointed out by historian of science Gerald Holton... the opposite concepts of vacuum and plenum, and the struggle between them, can be followed through the history of natural philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to the present."

Helge Kragh, "Empty space or ethereal plenum? Early ideas from Aristotle to Einstein"

"...real nonhuman entities appear to humans at first as blips on their monitors. But they are not those blips."

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

Timothy Morton brings hyperobjects into view the only way possible: by bits and pieces, by showing the different points at which hyperobjects intersect with our awareness. 'As blips on their monitors.'

Morton focuses on global warming as the preeminent hyperobject and which defines our age. One of the points at which global warming is evident, beyond actual weather, is the effect on the notion of 'world'.

"Weather, that handy backdrop for human lifeworlds, has ceased to exist, and along with it, the cozy concept of lifeworld itself....Global warming is a big problem, because along with melting glaciers it has melted our ideas of world and worlding."

Though in other places Morton speaks of or implies a vacuum, the force of his book is his success at describing and explaining the plenum. There is no 'away.' What you do here doesn't stay here.

Yet he argues that the world - the lifeworld of the phenomenologist - goes away (!) as hyperobjects push their way into our awareness.

I haven't sorted this out, but looking closely at the constellation of plenum-vacuum-hyperobjects leads in all kinds of directions, including toward 'real nonhuman entities.'