That's Not Natural

Zizek makes a really good point; that "ecology" is a concept which likens "nature" to spirituality. Humans are not out of nature, we haven't been thrown from the garden. In fact if we took notice that the world is still our garden, that shit doesn't just disappear, then we might actually want to do something about it. As it is, when we consider ourselves as cyborgs or machines or somehow separate and above nature, then we can see our problems as also separate, and we look for some solution that isn't there, like moving to space.

If God is punishing you, it is still a universe of meaning. Reason has developed out of something, it is not enough to listen to your own thoughts for no amount of money. A universe of meaning equates the dollar amount of your time to your effort, a love triangle of fetish. A universe of meaning doesn’t do charity work for nothing, and if our shit disappears then we let it because it doesn’t affect us in our segmented space.

‘Space’—your personal space, private space, public, mental, ecological, social, natural, workspace etc.—is all one thing. The walls of your house don’t segment it or contain it. Your house is like a machine with pipes and lines in and out, or it’s like an organism. “Visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures in general, give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity. The space of a room, bedroom, house or garden may be cut off in a sense from social space by barriers and walls, by all the signs of private property, yet still remain fundamentally part of that space” (Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 87). In other words we all live in the same space, our boundaries are arbitrary, and they work to create a sense of property and ownership when in fact the world is a shared singular space.

Categorizing space into natural vs. unnatural (us) creates problems which we cannot fix until we realize that we’re all part of the same space, and moving off the planet isn’t going to save us. It might save some of the richer ones though.