8
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
The ‘radical ecologists’ I address and critique in these chapters are my friends,
fellow activists, students—and myself, as I, too, continue to work to transcend
trie epistemological and institutional constraints this society imposes upon a
world we are all trying so desperately to transform.
Throughout trie eighties and nineties, I recognized a need for privileged
people active within such movements to be more critical about the way they
approach ecological issues. Focusing on trie trials and tribulations within the
radical ecology movement, the chapters in part one were written in an attempt
to encourage others in trie movement to consider trie historical and political
forces that lead their ecological activism in a romantic or individualistic
direction. These chapters treat ecology as a discussion that is constrained by
systems of racism, capitalism, sexism, and state power; a discussion in which
activists must locate themselves in reference to questions of social privilege and
power.
I wrote trie middle set of chapters in an effort to expand our current
vocabulary for discussing desire within progressive movements. Dismayed by
what I saw as a reduction of desire to romantic and individualistic terms, I
decided to explore trie cooperative impulse within social anarchism, feminism,
and social ecology to uncover a more ‘social’ expression of desire that I believe
draws out a cooperative sensibility within ecological discussion. The second
chapter in trie section is an exercise in thinking through what it means to be
sensual, creative, and dynamic, appealing to the metaphor of the ‘erotic’ to
point to different facets of social desire. I wrote this chapter in response to a
tendency among radical ecologists to counterpose questions of intuition and
reason or spirituality and rationality. I wanted to explore the possibility of
transcending this dualism by using a different metaphor for conveying deeply
meaningful social and ecological experiences that are marked by both emotion
and rationality.
Finally, the last section brings together trie idea of social desire with a
new understanding of nature drawn from social ecology. Positing desire as
social, and nature as ‘natural evolution’, I explore a ‘social desire for nature’: a
desire to create cooperative social and political structures to establish a society
that allows people to participate constructively in natural evolution. To ground
an ethics for a ‘social desire for nature’, I look to Bookchin’s natural
philosophy, concluding that a rational desire for nature entails trie decision to
create an ecological society based on direct democracy. Finally, I explore a
framework for thinking through how to enact such a social desire for nature,
illustrating a way to reflect a broad political and revolutionary vision within
particular ecological and social struggles.
My purpose is to be both critical and reconstructive,
illustrating
limitations in our ecological thinking while offering insight into how to