Environmentalism is over. The time for setting aside a portion of our awareness, efforts and resources to maintain a nominal sense of the primacy of nature, to try to save the planet, is over. The mindset persists: we haven't given up on the still-unsolved material and ecological problems. Rather, environmentalism has diffused into the matrix of civilization. At the same time, its potency has decayed, like the weak guilt that accompanies but ultimately allows indulging an addiction. The language of reducing environmental impacts has become a deception, a tool for ensuring the steady continuation of the very trends it was meant to push back against.
How do we make our way in the desert of decayed language? How do we communicate that there's still a real need for fundamental shifts in our ways of life—communicate in a manner that doesn't undermine the very possibility of that change?
1.
To my knowledge, the concept of environmental protection would not exist outside the context of an environmentally threatening industrial economy. In this context, the planetary environment has generally been thought of as a finite system in a state of approximate equilibrium, with some finite capacity for resilience. Unrestrained human industrial activity is then an intervention that disturbs and harms the environment. It's a model that's accurate enough to account for real problems like fishery collapse, acid rain, anthropogenic climate change, etc.
Slavoj Žižek
says that this view underlies a mystification of ecological problems; that it is "a secular version of the religious story of the fall." There can be two answers: that we are part of nature—there is no fall—or that there is no nature. (To be clear, he answers that there is no nature.)
The first answer is very compelling for a lot of folks, and Žižek is right to identify an ideological current that can be traced to a mystified ecology. Much can be said about the worldview in which we're "one with nature," but I just want to point out that it has very directly informed some responses to the global material crisis. There's the dream of "going back to nature" to a retro-utopian world as it was before industrialization, which still has its determined off-the-grid adherents. And there are movements to revitalize the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples, promoting proven ecologically effective practices. Some truly marginalized people work hard to embody these ideas, and I have the utmost respect for them.
I want to compare those proposals with another popular way to frame the global material crisis: that our methods of production, consumption, transportation, etc. are not correctly designed to render economic activity free of harm to the natural environment, and that it's possible to redesign them. For some people, including many of the folks that I work with, this framing leads to the visionary goal of transformative technological and social change (evolution, or revolution), which eliminates the negative environmental effects of the industrial economy.
I can't generalize about all people who believe in a future fueled by renewable energy, built using cradle-to-cradle renewable materials, underpinned by green design or biomimicry... But if I had to guess, I would say that such people think we have something to learn from nature through science, and that by putting scientific insights about nature into practice, we can create the verdant future. Therefore, I suggest that both the former, more mystical visions and the latter, more technocratic vision, share a sense of achieving fruitful coexistence with nature. This is basically Žižek's first answer: a reconciliation, after the fall from grace due to human hubris.
Yet, these two kinds of visions differ as greatly as possible on their approaches to something very deep at the source of environmental problems: a global economy based on industrialized consumerism. A self-sufficient subsistence farmer wants nothing to do with that, while a photovoltaic technology visionary would leverage it to sell everyone their own clean solar power source. What I'm getting at is that the narrative of co-existence with nature doesn't imply just one "right" approach to the fundamental problem of the global order.
In other words, being "one with nature" probably isn't the mythical salvation we're seeking. For the many other deep problems besides environmental ones (e.g. poverty, oppression, brainwashing), I would suggest that resolving the dualism between humankind and nature enters only obliquely, or even tangentially, into imaginable solutions.
2.
The environmentalist narrative is limited, but maybe it's still useful for getting people to deal with pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and related crises. That was probably true for a while, early in the "Silent Spring" era. And it would be ridiculous for me to deny that there has been progress toward ecologically safer industrial systems, and improvements in public awareness and effort.
But over time, the environmentalist plea has undergone a semantic drift. We now see environmentalist language and ideas used boldly, and even legally owned, by the very actors who profit from the most ecologically destructive activities. What has occurred more broadly, in the middle ground between the BPs of the world and the local "green" dry cleaners, is that environmental protection has become a normative element in the construction of meaning. All that the environmentalists needed to do was establish that green is a virtue, if you can afford it; capitalists followed quickly with the corollary that you're being good by buying this product, even if it's really just slightly less bad.
And that's why environmentalists need to constantly fight to keep their language relevant (e.g. by diligently producing scientific criticism of every bogus green claim on the market), to keep it from simply supporting normative inaction.
Completing the semantic push-pull, scientific materialists who share the vision of green technology constantly must respond to a demand to express their messages in terms of market economics. To be most persuasive, they must intertwine the message of sustainability with the fiction of the consumer economy. Environmental protection is being reformulated as a way of valuing ecosystem services: the wetlands aren't just sitting there, they're providing a water filtration service that's worth a certain dollar amount on the market. I've seen several talks by the authors of the landmark book "Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice," and the two points they always seem to push the strongest are: it's science; and it will make money.
3.
Sustainably or not, through the process of living we take what we can from the universe, and we make from it something of our own.
At some point since the emergence of homo sapiens in the holocene, a notional boundary between nature and humanity was established, and it is now being dismantled. The same can be said of notional distinctions between humanity and technology, or technology and nature. The current geological epoch is unofficially being called the anthropocene. (To me, this makes it clear that the concept of "nature conservation" is obsolete.) Did the line between humanity and nature gradually move all the way from one side to the other, or is it more like the line between past and future: an abstraction from our way of seeing, but technically inexplicable and illusory?
Žižek thinks we should throw out the idea that we are rooted in nature, and forget the imperative to cultivate our connectedness with the balanced whole of ecology. From what I understand, this is because the idea of a natural equilibrium—the idea that "the existing world is the best possible world"—is false in the first place; and because this false idea has become a conservative ideology, a force that resists change. Let me try to tease apart this tight argument, because I find some of it troubling.
I'm not troubled by the falsehood of the self-sustaining optimized equilibrium of nature, but I'm slightly disappointed that Žižek calls this "the implicit premise of ecology." The ecology that he talks about sounds more like the "Gaia hypothesis" of Lovelock and Margulis, and he is probably referring to popular environmentalist ecology that has abstracted simple, compelling ideas from the science. I'm no ecologist, but I thought we had already realized that the earth is in a constant dynamic non-equilibrium state. We know that the conditions of this planet are subject to global and often catastrophic change due to biogeochemical, solar and cosmic processes. Among those processes are the evolution of biological life (which radically changed the chemical composition of the earth's crust and atmosphere), and the evolution of technology (which is doing that again).
But recognizing that "nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes" does not, to me, mean that we can't learn anything more from ecology. Actually, that
is something we've learned from ecology. We now have to look at the favourable, human life-supporting environmental conditions in the holocene epoch as an inherently impermanent condition, and we can ask any number of non-mystical questions about how to continue to support biological life in the next epoch.
The dominant ecological ideology is problematic, Žižek says, because it is "the voice which warns us not to trespass against an invisible limit." I agree that any ideology (e.g. religion, capitalism) deserves to be scrutinized, but if Žižek's challenge here is that there is no idealized nature and therefore there are no invisible limits, then I think he's mistaken. There may be no mystical nature, but there are
theoretical planetary system thresholds, in effect invisible limits predicted by science, that correspond to the boundary conditions outside of which the system rapidly becomes hostile to human life. In other words, I see a scientific justification for the conservative role of environmentalist thinking: we
actually cannot simply accept any change to the earth system as simply a matter of course, or else we may
actually perish.
I've now placed myself in the dubious series of people who have claimed scientific justification for ways of thinking that could be seen from another angle as ideology. But I have to stand my ground, because science is the way I'm best equipped to communicate the need for radical shifts toward sustainable modes of living.
4.
Godfrey Reggio's film Naqöyqatsi is a beautiful documentation of the disappearance of that vanished sense of nature, and the complete transformation of reality through technology. I find it incredibly inspiring, although it is by no means an easy film to watch.
What I'm trying to offer with all my tiresome critical energy here is a way to dig out the last green offshoot of the trampled environmentalist movement, and transplant it into a more fertile substrate of ideas. The word "radical" comes from the Latin word for root,
radix. Radical action needs space to grow, and I want to transpose the environmentalist ethic from enclosed "nature" into the treacherously imaginative space where we must now struggle and work creatively to build a better world order.
