26
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
to kill Earth”), the GLF attempts to legitimize its claims by assuming the
authoritative voice of the human technocrats they so condemn.
Of course most ecologically minded peoples do not present such
extreme dictums for self constraint. Pleas for total reproductive restraint stands
in sharp contrast to Stonyfield’s reasonable request for individuals to turn off
lights when leaving a room. Yet a common theme pervades the thinking of
such romantics for whom true love can only be demonstrated by constraining
the desire to defile nature. According to the romantic, the betrayal of nature
results from a refusal of individuals to restrain themselves by failing to curb the
tendency to
consume,
reproduce,
pollute,
and waste inherently scarce
‘resources’. However, we must ask ourselves, is environmental degradation a
mere betrayal of nature caused by the failure of individual self-constraint? Or is
this degradation caused by a system of social institutions which allow a
privileged few to denigrate and betray most of humanity and the rest of the
natural world?
The environmental call for individual self-constraint implies a pessimistic
view of society’s potential relationship with nature. It suggests that our
relationship with the natural world is inherently predicated on a repression of
an inherent desire to destroy, rather than to enhance, natural processes. The
idea of love as self-constraint reduces the idea of love to a holding back, or to
a repression of a destructive desire rather than as an articulation of a social
desire to participate creatively in natural and social processes. Thus we fail to
see that we can actually cultivate new desires to create a just society where
there would be neither helpless ‘ladies’ nor helpless ‘mother natures’ to protect.
Privileging the idea of self-constraint obscures the idea of society’s potential for
rational ecological self-expression necessary for creating a world free of social
and ecological denigration.
Romanic ConceaIment: REVB\liNq
Tk NoThiNqNESS Of Tk
Banana
While allowing people to lighten their anxiety about ecological problems,
consumer ecology is predicated on romantic concealment. Just as the knight’s
idealization of his lady conceals his underlying desire to maintain his own
social privilege, the idealization of pure commodities conceals consumers’
(often unconscious) desires to maintain their own privilege within a global
capitalist economy. The mythology of a pure commodity based on consumer
and producer protection and constraint conceals the deeper reality of a
grotesquely immoral economic system which is sucking the very life out of the
planet, along with over ninety percent of its inhabitants. Puritanical consumers
who can afford to buy costly ‘ecologically friendly’ commodities can retreat
into the discrete world of consumer heaven, where they are absolved of the sin
of impure consumption. Focusing on the content of consumption allows