The entire ordeal has swung wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous.

At first, there was the nightmarish direct gaze at the underwater wound. For weeks, our eyes were fixed on the hole at the bottom of the gulf spewing out crude oil - like a toilet gone mad, unstoppably throwing shit back up onto the surface.

This traumatic scene was followed by the ridiculous spectacle of the executives of the three companies involved in the Gulf oil disaster - BP, Transocean and Halliburton - tossing the hot potato of responsibility to each other.

During their testimony before the US Senate on 11 May 2010, BP blamed the disaster on Transocean who owned the rig, while Transocean claimed the work done by its own subcontractor Halliburton who poured the concrete was substandard, while Halliburton claimed that it was just executing the project planned by BP.

But the ordeal reached its lowest level when President Obama naively insisted a private company, no matter how rich, ought to pay the entire bill for the damage caused by this catastrophe. What was lacking in Obama's reaction was a preparedness to think past the narrow legalistic approach of punishing the culprit.

The fact is that the same accident could well have happened to another company. The true culprit is not BP (although, to avoid any misunderstanding, BP was certainly culpable), but the demand which pushes us toward oil production irrespective of environmental concerns.

So the proper response to this catastrophe is to begin asking the more fundamental questions about our way of life - to mobilize, in other words, the public use of reason. This is the task for all of us, since it concerns our commons, the natural substance of our lives.

The lesson of those recent ecological catastrophes is that neither the market nor the state can provide an adequate solution. Why? Because of the utter fragility of our situation. These catastrophes remind us of just how many things can go wrong.

Just think, for instance, of the common fear of flying. Many of us are haunted by the thought of how many parts of an immensely complex machine have to function perfectly in order for the plane to remain in the air. One faulty part can send the plane spiraling downward. This cannot but induce a form of panic.

Did not all of Europe experience something similar earlier this year? The fact that a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland - just a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth - can bring aerial traffic over an entire continent to a halt is a reminder of how insignificant, how fragile human life remains.

The immense socio-economic impact of such a minor geological outburst is a consequence of our technological development. A century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development frees us from the constraints of nature, and at the same time makes us hostage to nature's whims.

Therein resides the first lesson of the latest volcanic outburst. Our growing freedom from and control over nature - and indeed our very survival - depends on a series of stable natural parameters which we instinctively take for granted (such as temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply).

We can "do what we want" only insofar as we remain marginal enough, so long as we don't seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth.

The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with such ecological disturbances is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power: our increasing ability to transform our environment can destabilize the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth.

The fact that humankind is becoming a geological agent on the Earth indicates that a new geological era has begun - an era baptized by some scientists as the "Anthropocene."

With the recent devastating earthquakes in the interior of China, the notion of this Anthropocene has acquired a new actuality. There are good reasons to surmise that one of the main causes of these unexpectedly strong earthquakes was the construction of the gigantic Three Gorges dams nearby, which resulted in large new artificial lakes.

And so it would seem that something as primal as the earthquake should also be included in the scope of phenomena influenced by human activity.

There is, however, something deceptively reassuring about this readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment. We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We caused the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives.

What is truly difficult for us - at least, in the West - is to accept is that we have been reduced to the purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit and watch his own fate. To suppress the terror this evokes in us, we are prone to engage in a frenetic, obsessive activity - recycling paper, buying organic food, or whatever - just so that we can be sure that we are doing something.

And here we see at work in our attitude toward the environment variations of a typical form of fetishist disavowal. It goes something like this: "I know very well (that we are all threatened), but I don't really believe it (so I am not prepared to do anything significant to change my way of life."

And then there is the opposite form of disavowal: "I know very well that I cannot really influence the process which will lead to my ruin (like a volcanic outburst), but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something, even if I know it is ultimately meaningless."

The volcanic eruption in Iceland - like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - is thus a useful reminder that our ecological troubles cannot be reduced to our hubris, to a disturbance the balance of Mother Earth. Nature is chaotic in itself, prone to wildest disasters, to meaningless and unpredictable catastrophes.

We are mercilessly exposed to nature's cruel whims, and there is no benign "Mother Earth" looking out for us.

Risks are thus emerging everywhere, and we desperately rely on scientists to steer us through the hazards. And here, I think, lies the problem: scientists/experts are supposed to know, but they do not know.

The increasing scientific reliance of human societies has had two unexpected consequences: we are ever more reliant on experts for solutions to problem in the most intimate domains of our experience (such as sexuality or religion), but this reliance has transformed the field of scientific knowledge into an inconsistent and antagonistic arena.

The old Platonic gap between the plurality of opinions and a single universal truth has thus transformed into a terrain of conflicting "expert opinions."

The consequence of this non-transparency of our situation in no way diminishes the gravity of the ecological threat that we face. On the contrary, we should be even more heedful of the warning signs, since the situation is profoundly unpredictable.

The recent uncertainties about global warming do not signal that things are not serious, but that they are even more chaotic than we thought, and that natural and social factors are inextricably linked.

The real catch-22 that these ecological catastrophes can be put in this way: either we take the threat too seriously and take action which may appear ridiculous - or eve futile - in the future, or we do nothing and jeopardize human life itself.

But the worst of all solutions is that of a "middle ground," of taking some limited measures to avert catastrophe. In this case, we would fail whatever occurs.

There is no middle ground with regard to the current ecological catastrophe which threatens us, and all the half-hearted, restrained talk about precaution and risk control (for which Rupert Murdoch has become infamous) is utterly meaningless, since we are dealing with what - in the language of the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge - one might term the "unknown unknowns."

Not only do we not know where the so-called "tipping point" - the environmental point of no return - is, we do not even know what we do not know!

Perhaps the primary lesson to be learned is that humankind should prepare itself for a more "plastic," nomadic way of life. Local or global changes in environment may impose the need for unimaginably large scale social tranformations.

But one thing at least is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation will need to be invented.

And what about the immense changes in economy and consumption due to new weather patterns or shortages of water and energy sources? Through what processes of decision will such changes be decided and executed?

It is in response to these urgent questions that we should return to the four moments of what Alain Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. According to Badiou, what is demanded is:

STRICT EGALITARIAN JUSTICE: All people should pay the same price in austerity measures to some - that is, one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on.

TERROR: Ruthless punishment of all who violate imposed protective measures, including severe limitations of liberal "freedoms" on the part of serial environmental offenders.

VOLUNTARISM: The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of a large-scale collective decisions which will run counter to the "spontaneous" logic of capitalist development. It was Walter Benjamin who, in his "Theses on the Concept of History," insisted that the task of a revolution is to "stop the train" of history which is hurtling toward the precipice of global catastrophe.

THE TRUST IN THE PEOPLE: This is the wager that the large majority of people support such severe measures, and are ready to participate in their enforcement.

And here one should not be afraid to call for - as a kind of combination of "terror" and the "trust in the people" - the reemergence of that great figure of egalitarian-revolutionary terror: the "informant" who denounces the culprits to the authorities.

Slavoj Zizek is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and one of the world's most influential public intellectuals. His most recent book is Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010).