This is where we should start feeling at home...
..NOT here.
I watched James Cameron's Avatar- full of big blue nobly savage aliens fighting the greedy little
pinkskins who killed their own mother, and are now coming after the blue folks'
mater deitas. So I had three major thoughts as the credits rolled, other than how
much cooler Stephen Lang was in Terra Nova. And what a better job that show did
of getting the basic message across; yes, Terra Nova was still mightily base
and clichéd, but it wasn’t downright stupid about it like Avatar was.
Firstly, that plugging their hair into animals was so
tangible.
Second, why? There
are several possibilities and they're all disturbing and annoying. Did
they do that to re-inforce the impotence and disavowal of humanity? Since we
have nothing so tangible in our own attitudes and relationship with ecology? What
are people going to think about why we don't, and can't do it? How is this kind of symbolism and
throwing a tangible middle finger in people's faces going to encourage them
*not* to 'kill our mother...' and for that matter we are not even killing the
Earth. We're ruining our ability to live on it, sure, but she was here long
before we came, and will recover and endure long after we go.
Third, humans are indeed less valuable than animals/other life, because we are irresponsible and unworthy beings. If we flourish another 50 years, all other life may go extinct. If we went extinct today, in 50 years all other life will flourish. We're 1% of earth's biomass but we consume over 25% of earth's photosynthesis (Rifkin 2009; Ponting 2007). But since we're here, we better figure out how to keep on being here.
You think plugging a ponytail into an animal is cool? No,
it's not. What is cool is that we can achieve far more, in a far less
outlandish and dream-like way, in our own home. Sadly, though, ecology is the new opium of the masses (Zizek 2008). What we expect from religion is some kind
of unquestionable, absolute authority. It’s true because God says it is, end of
discussion. Today, ecology is taking over this role. Whenever there is a new economic
paradigm or scientific breakthrough, the voice that warns us not to cross *that* line belongs to ecology (ibid). “Don’t mess with DNA, don’t open that
mine.” It’s a terrible transmogrification
of old ideas into new times.
Another popular myth is that the western world’s
technological, artificial environments are alienated from the natural
environment. We are not abstract veneers, but
rather, nature is our unfathomable home (Zizek 2008). Consider what I call the climate change crusade. Anyone with a
clue knows what danger we are in, so what are we doing about it? Obfuscating the issue with ideological crusades (Moore 2011). It is
an example of psychoanalytical disavowal. “I know that very well, BUT, I act
as if I don’t know.” So you know about climate change, maybe you watched a documentary, but when get in your car to drive round the block to McDonalds, you
don’t see any of this. So even if you know rationally what’s going on, what do
you do? Go to the site of a real ecological and human horror, such as
Chernobyl, and see what you take home. How capable are we to change the way we
live?
What we should do to confront the threat of ecological
catastrophe is not some new age druidism, back to nature roots-and-all, but on
the contrary to cut off those roots even more; more alienation from our
spontaneous idealistic nature. We should develop a much more abstract and
terrifying sensibility, where we see the world for what it is, finding our
poetry and spirituality in that. If not to create beauty in that, then an
aesthetic truth in things like rubbish, catastrophe, science, religion, and
pain, because that is how to truly love our world (Zizek 2008).
What is love? It is not idealisation. Everyone who has truly
loved anybody knows that you don’t idealise them. Love means you accept them
and all their failures, stupidities, ugliness; nonetheless the person is the
world to you, and makes your life worth living. You see perfection in
imperfection itself, and that’s how we should learn to love the world. We
should stop talking about science vs. religion, and talk about how we can stop
ideas like this dichotomy, and ideological disavowal, from infiltrating our
love for our world. Now is our last chance to get the future right (Wright 2005). True ecology loves all of this.
References
Cameron, J. (Director). (2009). Avatar [DVD Film]. 20th Century Fox.
Moore, P. (2011). Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. Beatty Street Publishing Inc.
Ponting, C. (2007). A New Green History of the World. Penguin Group, New York.
Rifkin, J. (2009). The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Penguin Group, New York.
Zizek, S. (2008). In Taylor, A. (Director & Writer). Examined Life. [DVD Documentary Film]. Zeitgeist film.
Pictures obtained from:
http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/news/does-avatar-steal-from-roger-dean/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/2011/apr/11/roath-rec-rubbish-sunny-weather
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/10/21/2719237.htm
http://deathofdurban.blogspot.com.au/2008/09/rubbish-rubbish-endless-piles-of-stinky.html
http://www.backfills.com/rubbish-art.php
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