ecology, there exists no neutral theoretical ground on which to articulate ecological claims. Instead, all beings always are already implicated within the ecological, necessitating an acknowledgement of coexistential difference for coping with ecological catastrophe that, according to Morton, "has already occurred." Closely related to dark ecology is Morton's concept of the 'mesh'. Defining the ecological thought as "the thinking of interconnectedness," Morton thus uses 'mesh' to refer to the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, consisting of "infinite connections and infinitesimal differences." They explain: The mesh has no central position that privileges any one form of being over others, and thereby erases definitive interior and exterior boundaries of beings. Emphasizing the interdependence of beings, the ecological thought "permits no distance," such that all beings are said to relate to each other in a totalizing open system, negatively and differentially, rendering ambiguous those entities with which we presume familiarity. Morton calls these ambiguously inscribed beings 'strange strangers', or beings unable to be completely comprehended and labeled. Within the mesh, even the strangeness of strange strangers relating coexistentially is strange, meaning that the more we know about an entity, the stranger it becomes. Intimacy, then, becomes threatening because it veils the mesh beneath the illusion of familiarity. Object-oriented ontology Morton became involved with object-oriented ontology after their ecological writings were favorably compared with the movement's ideas. One way that their work can be distinguished from other variants of object-oriented thought is by its focus on the causal dimension of object relations. Against traditional causal philosophies, Morton argues that causality is an aesthetic dimension of relations between objects, wherein sensory experience does not indicate direct access to reality, but rather an uncanny interruption of the false ontic equilibrium of an interobjective system. Causation, in this view, is held to be illusion-like or "magical," forming the core of what Morton terms "realist magic." Hyperobjects In The Ecological Thought, Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. They have subsequently enumerated five characteristics of hyperobjects: Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. Molten: Hyperobjects are