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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
ecology from a lofty romantic venture into an ongoing labour of love. Ecology
is as much about the drudgery of licking envelopes for a mass-mailing and
fighting to save an urban community center in the Lower East Side of
Manhattan as it is about saving a forest.
Once we let go of romantic conceptions of desire, we are free to explore
a social desire that rounds out our humanity, enticing us to become ever more
sensual, cooperative, creative, developmental, and oppositional. We may recast
our lives in social terms, recognizing desire as an anticipation of the pleasure
that comes from enhancing the satisfaction and efficacy of both ourselves and
others. Here, ecology becomes the light by which we scrutinize our everyday
lives; it is the voice through which we demand the power to bring forth a
world in which we may live the boldest and most social expressions of our
humanity.
An ecology of everyday life entails rethinking our understanding of
nature as well. Removing the idea of nature from its pristine and static display
case, we may see nature for what it is: a dazzling and dynamic evolutionary
process that continues to unfurl about us and within us. Once we are able to
locate ourselves within this evolution, we can begin to measure our everyday
lives as they are against what they could be if only we were free to actualize
our potential for such evolutionary coups as cooperation, creativity, and
development. Suddenly, the dull office job, the lonely neighbourhood, the
poverty, or even the unsatisfying privilege—all take on new meaning. Rather
than constituting a personal failure or a lack of will, our withered communities
and lives reflect an anti-social and hierarchical trend that has spread through
humanity like an industrial fire. By recognizing our minds, our hands, our
bones, and our hearts as part of natural evolution—as an evolutionary
inheritance—we become outraged by this fire, breathing it into our lungs,
transforming it into a moral outrage that is fuel for rational oppositional action.
Transcending romantic and individualistic approaches to ecology, we
may finally face the everyday questions of social and political transformation.
Ecology may then begin to strive to create the political pre-conditions for
. establishing an ecological society. While the notion of illustrative opposition
proposed in these pages offers a way to rethink such pre-conditions, it cannot
replace the need to build a wider revolutionary struggle. Instead, it provides a
way to broaden discussions of ecological issues to include the widest
revolutionary vision possible. That vision is one of direct democracy: the
passionate process through which citizens may claim the political power to
create a rational, ecological, and desirable society.
An ecology of everyday life is about reaching for this desirable society,
reclaiming our humanity as we reclaim our abilities to reason, discuss, and to
make decisions about our own communities. It is about looking into the
uncharted ‘‘wilderness” of democracy itself, that delicious, empowering, and
deeply social process through which we become a truly humane expression of
that nature for which we have yearned all along%