Alex Greenberg responds at his blog here, including some thoughts about the terraforming of Mars: "Why bother?"
i've been busy lately with all sorts of random things, so sorry in advance for brevity/lack of clarity/lack of follow-up.
anyway, permaculture is interesting, wish i knew more about it. you seem to be using it here as a kind of rational middle ground between Zizek and Foster. i don't know Foster -- how is he 'eco-pessimist' by the way? -- but Zizek's position...i think you characterize it accurately here, but like i said before i think it comes down to his investment in a self-consciously antiquated idea of the enlightenment. the idea of 'nature' as foil to 'civilization' has been discredited over and over again for hundreds of years, but even though he does criticize it (again) he still relies on it to caricature (all) environmentalists as closet totalitarians.
the idea of immanent limits seems like a good starting point. it's probably the one generally useful idea that can be drawn from knowledge of humanity's inevitable extinction -- only someone with the irrational expectation of infinite progress could actually get neurotic about entropy in the cosmological or even planetary sense, as a given or a priori limit. it just so happens that dominant european (white male) thought (at least) since the enlightenment tends to presuppose that very thing, though without always admitting it. i wonder what about the self-justification of this discourse can in the last account serve as a justification for capitalist 'sustainability,' regardless of stated political positions -- maybe simply by the assumption of/desire for/aesthetic preference for an infinite future. by which i mean a future that infinitely continues, in theory or more concretely, whatever the writer likes.
is it possible to imagine a future that isn't just one more fantasy to be added to the shopping cart? how to do it without repeating the age-old conflict between probability and possibility, where 'probability' is simply a function of the writer's knowledge/power?
the rhetoric surrounding science fiction's challenge to fantasy and realism's denunciation of romance would be interesting to look at in this context.
Foster strikes me as an eco-pessimist -- in his Ecology Against Capitalism there's definitely a palpable sense that technological civilization is already pretty well doomed, and that the only solution is a severe draw-down of consumer culture. Which is as much Utopian as pessimistic, now that I follow that trajectory through to the end.
Is it possible to imagine a future that isn't just one more fantasy to be added to the shopping cart? I think this is a pretty hugely important problem for anyone who wants to take futurity seriously. I'm not sure there's a positive answer to it; it may not be possible.
What you say about sustainability in the context of an "infinite future" is also really interesting. It's like the bargaining stage of grief—okay, we can't grow forever, but can we at least last forever?
Since I haven't read a lot of Zizek's philosophy, I can't make a comment on it, and some of my friends love it - but I do know nonsense on stilts when I see it. This is nonsense on stilts:
"With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: Since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth’s ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth’s change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity’s survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology."
I don't know what "ecological scientist" he is talking about, or even what inherent instability is supposed to mean (humans are inherently prone to death, but if you hurry up the blessed event for someone who annoys you by means of a well placed butcher knife in the back, it is generally frowned upon). While Zizek refers to capitalism, he doesn't seem to have more than a highly abstract view of the organization of industrial production. And no sense of social costs, which is one way to look at ecological damage - the usual way. At the moment, the Mississippi river is full of bubbling crude not because it is inherently unstable, but because of a leaking storage vessel.
The governments of the developed countries long ago decided that the price system alone could not address the problem of the social costs of production, which is why every one of them has some kind of regulation regarding pollution. It is in this mixed sphere that the questions arise concerning the overflow of industrial wastes - either from production or from consumption - and the damage they do locally and internationally. One of the key controversies of the seventies was not freezing our ecology, but whether to build nuclear power plants in response to the oil shocks. It is not a question that can be decided by delving deep into the reactionary heart of ecologists, but rather, in terms of possible damages, costs borne not by those who profit from the power, but by third parties (taxpayers in the west, the unlucky inhabitants of regions the soviets targeted in the East) and the extraordinary nature of the risks involved. Actually, Lovelock, the Gaia guy, has recently praised nuclear power - Zizek would be so pleased! - but for the reactionary reason that it will inevitably go wrong, providing no go zones for humans - as those around Chernobyl - in which the former environment can recuperate, at the price of the birth of two headed wolf cubs and such.
Zizek's notion of what technology is is rather shocking, since it seems to recognize only one pattern of technology - that common since the industrial system in Europe, from around 1800 - when, of course, the question is about different systems of technology, not none at all. If I advocate going back to the horse instead of the car, I am not advocating a non-technological solution to the problem of transportation - simply one that seemed to be good enough for Osama bin Laden in 2001.
What is strange is that the paths to our present technostructure seems strangely frozen - our autos with the engines that were designed in 1900, our hydroelecticity and grid system from the 1930s, our housing patterns reflecting cold war fears of the 1950s, and our collectivized agriculture the culmination of a two century's war against the peasant waged around the world.
I wish Haloscan had a favoriting system so I could favorite that comment. Really great.
To respond to an old comment, I believe Zizek is fully aware of the social costs of industrial capitalism, however his argument is that addressing ecological disaster is not utopian. We may well save the world from global warming, who knows, but the catastrophe occurred centuries ago and it's called capitalism. Addressing ecology may well save lives and preserve many endangered ecosystems, but the mistake that ecologists make is thinking that is the balance between nature and capitalism that produces catastrophe when it is actually inborn in the system itself, even the greenest capitalism has horrendous implications for the poor. Why does technology lag behind, why hasn't civilization moved beyond these "frozen technostructures"? The easiest answer is to say utopia has no place in the imagination of capitalism, popular modern imagination can only conceive the world ending before, god forbid, real revolutionary change took place. This is why we're obsessed with green technologies but they almost never break out of these 'frozen structures.' If this isn't convincing look at the competing technologies of the 19th century, much mass public transportation and progress urban planning arose out of the social struggle of workers. This has all pretty much ceased to occur, and not due to lack of creativity or capacity, but due largely to ideological structures which have us convinced in suburban shopping oblivion ad naseum till total annihilation do we part.
Dear Gerry,
i found your blog through mariborchan and just wanted to point your attention to our website, which includes material you might find interesting. Incidentally, the theme of our first issue was 'nature & culture' - you can check it out on the magazine section of the website.
www.bedeutung.co.uk
all best regards,
Alex
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