THE JOY OF LIFE
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The desire to give names to places and species, represents our yearning
to translate the natural world into terms we can relate to, order, and know.
Unlike a capitalist desire to taxonomize species for the sake of control and
profit, a social desire seeks to name and distinguish species for the sake of
knowledge, pleasure, and ecological enhancement. Creative differentiative
desire is the yearning to sensitize ourselves to our relationship to the natural
world, to draw philosophical and aesthetic meaning from the patterns,
symmetries, and rhythms that continually unfold around us.
In this vein, a developmental desire for nature entails wanting not only to
know, or differentiate particular ‘moments’ of natural evolution, but to actively
participate in this development in a complementary fashion, using ecological
technologies, art, language, and other social practices to elaborate upon the
trend toward diversity, complexity, and subjectivity. We may express this
developmental desire through creating ecological practices such as solar, wind,
and water power, or by practicing organic agriculture and edible landscaping
to enrich the eco-communities in which we live.
In turn, we express our developmental desire for nature not only by
expanding tire richness of the biological horizons around us, but by expanding
our consciousness as well. As natural evolution represents a trend toward
increasing subjectivity, humanity has the potential to further expand the
horizons of consciousness, by elaborating upon the idea of freedom itself.
Throughout history, emerging in tandem with the emergence of hierarchy,
surfaces the idea of freedom. Each act of writing, discussing, debating, or
theorizing about freedom constitutes an expression of the developmental
desire to widen the horizon of what we can know and think about what it
means to live with liberty and integrity. By striving to further differentiate ideas
of freedom, we bring human consciousness, evolving for thousands of years,
to new levels of complexity.
An OpposiTtoNAl DesIre For Nature: TowarcI An EcobqiCAl PoliTics
The current ecological crisis serves as a bitter reminder that our social desire for
nature must be translated into political action. It would be naive to believe that
a .simple ‘paradigm shift to a new set of understandings about nature and
desire could abolish social and ecological injustice. For flowing through and
around such understandings are social institutions of capitalism, the state,
racism, and patriarchy which shape particular ways that we relate to the natural
world as well as to each other. We need, then, to cultivate an oppositional
desire for nature, a rational yearning to oppose all institutions and ideologies
that are reversing the trend toward natural evolution by destroying biological
and cultural diversity and inter-dependence across the planet.