Re-Attachments Towards an Ecology of Presence

RE-ATTACHMENTS TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF PRESENCE dispositions I. It is said that eco-anxiety will be the afflic- tion of our generation. When the flow of catastrophic information on climate change resonates with the feeling that we are powerless to stop it, we are sent reeling. We become obsessed with anything that is within our control: zero waste, veganism, public transit for the poor, electric cars for THE FASHIONABLE the rich, greenways for good citizens, climate CRITIQUE on the left marches, and always the same refrain “we that individual actions are must pull together, as a society…” useless and that the only path forward is government intervention – does Through these acts we assist in a terrible not interest us any more transfiguration. Our genuine concern for than the guilt and sacri- the world is remade into a pathology, and ficial impulses typical of our desire to change it is channeled into activist groups. inert policies. The force of these proposed escapes emanates from the fact that we know we are bound to the rest of the living wor- The hypothesis that we ld. We are inhabited by a commitment to wish to elaborate, and defend what is sacred, and by the desire to bring to its full political conclusions, is situated at live somewhere other than in the middle of the level of inventing ways a sea of concrete, eating GMO vegetables of living in and against this and meat from industrial slaughterhouses. catastrophic era. Because The authenticity of our senses, the feelings the way forward is not yet running through us pushing us to act, to clear, we seek to open the find a way to live that doesn’t destroy life space to begin in what follows. but encourages it to flourish—are all trans- figured away through the spell of their hol- low escapes. While we celebrate the fact that hun- dreds of thousands of people feel this desire to act, committing themselves to changing their lives, stepping out of their comfort zones, and taking risks, we posit that this energy has thus far been diverted. We must recognize that the paving over of the world, the des- truction of all living things, and our growing inability to feed ourselves, are not incidental; they are political projects of dispossession in the service of wealth creation. Halting this project won’t be easy. Until now, our efforts have been captured by all sorts of pathetic solu- tions, as impotent as they are irres- ponsible, and nothing has changed. Facing this crisis, we are typically offered two proposals: on the one hand, the demands-based activist environmentalism, in which we urge our govern- ments to intervene; and on the other, an individualist environmentalism in which we modify our daily choices as consumers. These two forms of environmentalism dovetail in their effectiveness. Our objective cannot simply be to make our voices heard, seeking the ear of popu- lar opinion–everyone is already aware of the disaster. The media, engineers, politicians, and bosses are well-aware of the magnitude of the problem and each waits to turn it to their advan- tage. An ecological political practice must not settle for working to prevent climate change. The climate is already changing, as every heatwave and snowmelt, and every hurricane and forest fire attest. In either of their offered proposals, our ability to act is so limited that our actions have virtually no impact on the scope of the catastrophe. CLIMATE CHANGES are feedback cycles over the long term. Even if we stopped the production of greenhouse gases today, we would still have decades of violent climate change ahead of us. The question is not so much how to slow them down, but how to inhabit them. Climate change seems to open up two options for the economy and the government: it will either undermine their legitimacy or tighten their grip on our lives. In our moment, the outcome remains indeterminate. We believe that ecological struggle must be fought on two fronts, which are, in fact, inseparable. It must first disrupt the course of economic normalcy — the economy of the exploitation and the des- truction of living beings. Disrupt, and through forms of attack — blockades and reoccupations, strikes, and sabotage — it must also elaborate other ways of living. Forming attachments to places, and inventing other ways of being, new sensitivi- ties, and new relationships with ourselves and with others, which we hold dear and which hold us. And above all, learning to defend these relationships, a position which invariably will bring us back into conflict with the economy. We need to learn to organize ourselves on the basis of our needs and then gradually respond to collective questions that arise through the confluence of life and struggle, little by little, moving away from the functional separation specific to classical activism. The usual ecological positions suggest that activist efforts be situated at the level of values, on the ethical orientation of the action. But isn’t the task of ecological struggle ultimately about res- toring our presence in the world, our capacity to act in, and on, the situation: is this not then a question of our power? If this understanding is all too often lacking in classical environmentalism, it is clear to us that it is here that the pivotal point of ecological struggle is to be found. We understand action as a vector: ethics is its orientation, while power is its magnitude. The epoch imposes the orientation upon us; but it is only by re-centering what we call ‘power’ in the discussion that ecology can become, strictly speaking, political. An orientation without magnitude, an ethic without power, remains a moral. It does not concern itself with what it means to live well, nor does it attempt to act on the world. It is only inte- rested in designating what it does and what surrounds it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Understood in this way, a moralist logic does not result in experimentation or in seeking new ways of living in struggle, but instead results in affects and judg- ments that either comfort (I’m doing my part!) or induce guilt (we are the monsters...). It’s the difference between the judgement that owning a pick-up truck is the choice of a barbaric pollu- ter, and knowing that a truck is a tool to build infrastructure that will allow us to live differently. A tool that allows us to access the roads used for resource extraction, and to block the economy on the stolen lands we inhabit. It is the difference between feeling a sense of panic combined with the urgen- cy borne out of inaction, and knowing that all the components for a magical life are already there waiting for us — understanding that we are acting in the long term. WHAT DO WE CALL ‘‘THE AS EARLY AS THE 1960s, END OF THE WORLD’’? studies on the notion of the Is the end of the industrial ‘‘end of the world’’ revealed world the end of the world a distinction between those (as collapsology claims), apocalypses without an eschaton and eschatolo- or is the modern/colonial gical apocalypses. The Empire itself the realization eschatological apocalypses of many ends of worlds are the most culturally and through its creation of a historically widespread ‘non-world’–barren to the notions of the end of the senses and without defini- world. They see the end of tion? Rather than mobilizing the world as the herald of a nihilistic affects and calling regeneration of existence for another end of the world, — millenarianism, prophetic we frame this apocalypse decolonialism, and Judeo- Christian messianism. They as an ongoing process that are ends of the world that began with the coloniza- end, in a way. The apoca- tion of the Americas, and lyptic tone that characte- we want to be done with rizes western modernity this end of the world. Let — thematised as at once us imagine what this end of nauseating and absurd — the end of the world could of which eco-anxiety is only mean: in short, the restora- its most recent manifes- tion of this world made up of tation, typically produces a multiplicity of worlds. impressions of an end of the world without end, excepting the extinction of all species, which cannot, strictly speaking, be consi- dered an end. II. In order to surpass the current framework, in which crisis is simultaneously imminent and permanent, it is necessary to build a political ecology against a powerless environmentalism — a political ecology that can rise to the challenges we face. It must deconstruct the foundations of both citizen and state proposals; those that seek to ‘‘save the environ- ment”, as well as those that aim to control resources in order to better manage them, that is, to govern the disaster. HOW do you want to speak about ‘nature’ to the subjects formed by the metropolis, for whom the only non-human living things they perceive are either contrived lands- capes, pets who wait all day for their masters’ return, or the parasites they fear? They have learned from social media that to give up plastic straws is to save the turtles. This current disposition is what we call an “ecology of absence.” From this lens, one must protect Nature: an object out- side of us, made up of species and habi- tats that are distant and detached from our lived realities. The situation before us becomes a statistical one. They’re throwing figures at us: percentages of greenhouse gases, a degree centigrade more or less, or the number of species that are going to disappear.

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