INTRODUCTION
3
number of people in the U.S. cannot afford quality organic produce enjoyed by
middle and upper-class peoples, nor can they afford the time, cost, equipment,
or transportation to take pleasure in the vistas of ‘nature’ by vacationing in
national parks—no matter how much they might like to.
Each community, rich or poor, has its own struggle for quality of life.
Activists in Harlem fight for a clean and beautiful neighborhood park for their
children to enjoy, while also organizing campaigns for dean air. In turn,
intrinsic to indigenous struggles for ecological sustainability are attempts to
protect meaningful cultural practices that are also threatened by capital-driven
poverty and ecological devastation.
By reducing the ecological agenda of others to issues of need, ecological
activists miss the opportunity to redirect their own desire for an ecological
quality of life in a more radical direction. In fact, the desire for an ecological
way of life among both poor and privileged peoples carries within it the
nascent demand for an ecological sodety, a demand that has potentially
revolutionary implications. For, once we collectively translate this desire into
political terms, we are able to challenge a global system that immiserates most
of the world’s inhabitants, forcing them to forgo their desires, lowering their
ecological expectations to the level of mere survival. Keeping a desire-focus
within the ecology movement keeps our demand for satisfaction, vitality, and
meaning alive, invigorating our ability to envision a socially and ecologically
desirable sodety.
What is more, a needs-focused agenda directs our attention away from
the qualitative dimensions of everyday life that are so crudal to ecology.
Ecological activists need not repeat the same errors committed by the old left
which emphasized issues of quantitative need over matters of qualitative
desire. Marx believed that a universal condition of material need caused all
sodal strife and injustice. Accordingly, Marx asserted that after material inequity
was abolished through the revolutionary process, sodal relations would be
automatically improved, restoring quality of life to realms outside of labor as
well. Marx could not have antidpated the degree to which capitalism would
invade and erode the realm of home and the everyday in the post-war era.
Again, for Marx, it was primarily the sphere of work that was poisoned with
alienation, and it was there'that he placed the locus of his theory.
The sixties brought a needed challenge to Marxist theory. Groups such as
the Situationists in France, as well as sectors of the American New Left
expanded their focus to address the encroachment of capitalism into everyday
life. The New Left’s emphasis on such qualitative domains as sensuality, art,
and nature stood as a response to Emma Goldman’s apocryphal warning to
Marxists decades before: “If I can’t dance, in your revolution, I’m not coming.”
As these movements illustrated, a focus on desire keeps our eyes on the