In other words, our experience and belief in “control” is little different in the end than our current felt condition of “helplessness.” The only real difference at the moment is the concentrated visibility of the disaster, one that makes visible what is usually hidden – that our civilization exists by poisoning our world, by a concerted and organized effort to release toxic substances from confines where they are relatively sequestered for life to flourish, to a condition where we must come to mistrust the food that we eat, the air that we breath, the water that we drink. Rather than dispersed throughout the world – including the very molecular composition of our bodies – the spew allows us to see with unusual clarity the nature of our civilization. Yet we treat it as an exception, a momentary and controllable lapse, the fault of nefarious oil profiteers, rather than the rule, our “way of life.”
Rest of the excellent article, here.
1 comment:
And I'm stuck wondering: If environmentalists weren't so busy inventing and eco-Apocalypse (Global Warming), would they or would they not have seen the real and present eco-disasters that might more readily engulf us in the here and now? We seem to have diverted a lot of energy into arguing pointless stuff instead of keeping it real! Are we really so tone deaf that these guys have to go shrill to get heard? And then we miss the obvious stuff? I'm left as paused about the whole of this as I am with a feminism that seems to mean that instead of worrying about our daughters at 18... we now worry far sooner.
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