trade...Spice is not a balm, but an object of trade, a trope to be carried across boundaries, standing in for money: a metaphor about metaphor." Carrying this idea forward to the Romantic era, Morton critiques the manner in which spice became a metaphor for exotic desire that, subsequently, encapsulated the self-reflexivity of modern processes of commodification. Later, Morton edited Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820 (2000), a three-volume compendium of eighteenth century texts examining the literary, sociocultural, and political history of food, including works on intoxication, cannibalism, and slavery. They also edited Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (2004), a collection of essays that problematizes the use of taste and appetite as Romantic metaphors for bounded territories and subjectivities, while empirically interrogating the organization of Romantic cultural and economic structures around competing logics of consumption. Ecological theory Since 2009, Morton has engaged in a sustained project of ecological critique, primarily enunciated in two works, Ecology Without Nature (2009) and The Ecological Thought (2010), through which they problematize environmental theory from the standpoint of ecological entanglement. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton proposes that an ecological criticism must be divested of the bifurcation of nature and civilization, or the idea that nature exists as something that sustains civilization, but exists outside of society's walls. As Morton states: Viewing "nature," in the putative sense, as an arbitrary textual signifier, Morton theorizes artistic representations of the environment as sites for opening ideas of nature to new possibilities. Seeking an aesthetic mode that can account for the differential, paradoxical, and nonidentificational character of the environment, they propose a materialist method of textual analysis called 'ambient poetics', in which artistic texts of all kinds are considered in terms of how they manage the space in which they appear, thereby attuning the sensibilities of their audience to forms of natural representation that contravene the ideological coding of nature as a transcendent principle. Historicizing this form of poetics permits the politicization of environmental art and its 'ecomimesis', or authenticating evocation of the author's environment, such that the experience of its phenomena becomes present for and shared with the audience. Art is also an important theme in The Ecological Thought, a "prequel" to Ecology Without Nature, in which Morton proposes the concept of 'dark ecology' as a means of expressing the "irony, ugliness, and horror" of ecology. From the vantage point of dark