Nature as Ideology

In what follows, we suggest that ecological thinking stands to benefit in significant ways from theories of violence. Conventionally, when we think of environmental degradation or damage, we think of nature as the "object" of a violence perpetrated against it, chiefly by human activity taken in its totality, and that it is therefore the role of environmental consciousness to prevent or reduce this violence, specifically by changing how we relate towards that object. And yet, as soon as we consider this nominally "environmental" relation between the human and the natural world, we are already caught up within the dimensions of intra-human violence and conflict. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their essay "The Death of Environmentalism," suggest this when they ask:

What do we worry about when we worry about global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn't our focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster preparedness? Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced agricultural production? If so, shouldn't our focus be on increasing food production? Is it the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario suggests, world war? (2004, 14)

None of these problems are merely "environmental," and, as the authors argue, are for this reason regarded as extra-ecological by many environmentalists, who prefer to address the scientific specificity of the damage to the [End Page 153] natural world. But this places us in a sort of intractability, the greatest symptom of which, perhaps, is that environmentalism has, since the 60s, become increasingly a "special interest," whose goal is to effect small-scale policy and technical changes, rather than something related to the "big questions" of philosophy, ethics and cosmology. The more we attend to the natural world as something to be protected from the violence of human technics, the more we are thrown back into the midst of this technicity and its specific violence.

We can suggest, here, a sort of "antinomy of ecological reason." While any politically engaged ecological criticism must recognise the fact that it is capitalist society, taken as a global totality, that is responsible for environmental damage, this damage itself expresses purely socio-economic divisions; according to the World Bank's chief economist, seventy-five to eighty percent of the damage associated with climate change will be experienced by developing countries, despite the fact that they are responsible only for (at the very most) one third of greenhouse gas emissions. As such, are we dealing with a strictly political or ethical problem, or does it remain entirely undecidable as to which (Canavan, Klarr, and Vu 2010, 5)? As Michel Serres suggests, current ecological conditions are such that what is "at stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively" (1995, 4), yet we do not know on what basis this collectivity or this totality can be said to exist. Or, rather, we know it only negatively, in terms of its destruction.

It is necessary to reconceptualise, beyond this negative mode, the violence invoked whenever we speak of environmental damage. This first of all requires re-considering what is meant by "nature." The critique of environmentalism suggested by Shellenberger and Nordhaus is that conceiving of a metaphysics of nature as, in Timothy Morton's words, an objective "'thing'...that is 'out there' beyond us," external to the concatenation of intra-human dependencies, is to ignore the very ecological relations that already characterise the specifically human or socio-political realm (2007, 183). In this sense, nature, as conceived by environmentalism, is the ideological object par excellence, in the sense that it is conjured up out of the web of intersubjective, social interactions in order to ground those interactions in some extra-social element.

When it comes to thinking of the damage caused to the environment, then, there is an ideological distortion of what we mean when we speak of the subjects and objects of violence. We can follow Slavoj Žižek...