Hurry slowly

Hi everyone.

Several people have been wondering what the plan is, as in: “What the heck are we supposed to do now?!” Clearly we live in an ecologically volatile age. Global warming is happening. We may well be in the midst of the sixth mass extinction on this planet. And so on.

What a perfect time to sit back, reflect, and think.

I mean that very sincerely.

Aristotle declared that contemplation was the highest form of praxis; I agree.

While addressing the environmental crisis head on is absolutely necessary, there is also an ideology of speed, that separates action from reflection, doing from contemplating. We must resist this ideology.

This is a problem. The sky really is falling!

Chicken little is right—but let's not be headless chickens. There is nothing more dangerous than justifiable speed.

Environmentalism and capitalism are the same in this: they both keep asserting “Just Do It!” at the tops of their voices.

What's an introspective, introverted, humanities theory-head to do?

Marx said that philosophers had up until now interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. I agree with Slavoj Zizek that maybe it's okay to interpret right now. Interpret in addition to changing...

One of the things that modern society has damaged, in its ecological destruction, has been thinking. Slowly, gently, we need to put thinking together—maybe for the first time.

(Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Trinity: Because you've never used them before.)

So yes, of course—more solar, more wind, less carbon, more rights for animals, pause the fishing, fight environmental racism, interrogate global capitalism, and on and on and on...

But also—hesitate, slow down, carefully. Derrida's main advice to his students: decelerate. Feel the grief. Go through the sadness. (More on this later—some of you are interested in this topic, and so am I.)

Now we need to distinguish this slowing down from the easy-wipe version of Heidegger that's out there...maybe that requires a whole different post.

For now, here's a couple of lines from the Introduction to Ecology without Nature:

It sounds like a perverse joke. The sky is falling, the globe is warming, the ozone hole persists; people are dying of radiation poisoning and other toxic agents; species are being wiped out, thousands per year; the coral reefs have nearly all gone. Huge globalized corporations are making bids for the necessities of life from water to health care. Environmental legislation is being threatened around the world. What a perfect opportunity to sit back and reflect on ideas of space, subjectivity, environment and poetics. Ecology without Nature claims that there could be no better time. (10)