4
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
qiiLilitalive dimension of life. It allows us to attend to the ways in which the
process of commodification extends into our relationships with each other and
with (lie natural world, reducing parents to ‘child-care providers’, the sick to
‘consumers of health-care’, and nature to patentable ‘genetic material’, A focus
on desire offers us a way to counter this emptiness with a desire for a
qualitatively new world of our own making.
Finally, focusing solely on need and survival naturalizes conditions of
ecological scarcity and destruction. When we lose sight of the qualitative
dimensions of life, we lose the ability to contrast the world that is to the world
that ought to be. We lose the ability to see and name the very institutions that
prevent society from becoming the desirable creation that it ought to become.
Paradoxically, focusing on desire allows us to expose the social mechanisms
that produce conditions of scarcity. Such a focus reveals the true solution to the
ecological division of labor: to challenge the political and economic institutions
that force the world’s majority to struggle to satisfy basic ecological and social
needs. Clearly, this challenge would entail a politicization of an ecology
predicated on a redefinition of need and desire as well as a transformation of
economic and political power. Not only would we have to rethink the quality
of our needs and desires, but we would have to explore new ways to meet
them within new social and political institutions.
Nature AncI DesIre: TowarcI
A New UNdERSTANdiiNq
As the contemporary ecology movement approaches the end of its third
decade, the ecological division of labor remains intact. What impedes ecology
from fulfilling its potential to transform institutions that fabricate social and
ecological need in the first place? Certainly, a primary cause of the ecological
division of labor is a global hierarchical system of political and economic
power which benefits the privileged who, in turn, keep the system in place.
Yet, in addition to this problem of social hierarchy, there is also a crucial issue
regarding how privileged peoples within advanced capitalist society frame
concepts of nature and desire.
Ideas about nature and desire stem from centuries of ideology that
support existing political and economic structures in the West. To a large
extent, we inherit our romantic ideas regarding nature from thinkers of the
colonial era. By the eighteenth century, Rousseau became the first in the West
to position the category of nature in explicit moral opposition to society,
describing nature as an exotic, eden-like state of innocence to which ‘man’
must emulate. Indeed, the nature we know and love in the West is largely bom
out of the colonial imagination. It is Diderot’s Tahiti where the colonizer fixed
his gaze upon an exotic other dwelling in an objectified realm of purity.