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THE JOY OF LIFE
organically rational expression of desire, for it afiows us to participate in
elaborating upon, rather than reversing, the evolutionary process itself.
TIhe DesIre For Nature REVisiTEd: TowARd A SociAl DesIre For Nature
If the rational expression of social desire strives to enhance social complexity,
then a rational social desire for nature would strive to enhance ecological
complexity as well. Instead of idealizing and preserving ‘pure’ peoples, times,
and places, a social desire for nature leads us to contribute to the diverse and
interdependent splendor of eco-communities, elaborating upon the subjectivity
in first nature by engaging in practices that enrich biodiversity, stability, and
complexity.
Exploring a social desire for nature offers a way to draw meaning out of
our sensual, associative, differentiative, and developmental relationships to the
natural world. It afiows us to point to what is meaningful in the idea of nature
without relying upon reductive notions of spiritus, energy or natural essences.
In an era in which social relations to nature are reduced to capitalist
commodification, we need a way to point to those aspects of our relationship
to natural processes that cannot and should not be reduced to relationships of
profit
and
production.
Moving
away
from
a
language
of
capitalist
rationalization, we need a way to describe the qualitative dimension of our
relationships to the natural world that are sensual, cooperative, creative, and
elaborative.
FivE DiMENsioNS Of TIhe Soc'iaI DesIre For Nature
To begin, a sensual desire for nature is the yearning to taste, touch, smell, hear,
and see the creative magnificence of file natural world. Unlike a romantic
sensual desire predicated on a people-free ‘natural purity5, a social-sensual
desire for nature appreciates what Donna Haraway refers to as a ‘cyborgian’
interplay between human technics and the natural world.17 In this way, a
sodal-sensual desire for nature is non-essentialist, a craving not for pure
essences of a bounded idea of ‘nature’, but instead, a delight in the delicate
phasing of natural evolution into the social.
When we stand upon a mountain, looking out, savoring the elegant
expanse of forest and plain, instead of relishing in the absence of humanity in
the vista, we may recognize our place in the scene, appreciating our potential
to glean sensual, philosophical, and aesthetic meaning from this evolutionary
process that unfolds before us. Any moment of desiring or loving the sensual
qualities of ‘nature’ is a deeply social act, located within social history as well
as within a wider natural evolution.
In
addition,
conventional
a
sodal-sensual
understandings
desire
of what
for
nature
constitutes
a
entails
‘nature’
stretching
worthy
of