Ecology Of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature

by Chaia Heller

Examines the ecological impulse as a "desire for nature", a desire that emerges as people within industrial capitalist contexts respond to the personal and aesthetic, rather than the physical and political implications of ecological breakdown.

While exploring the historical causes of this romantic "desire for nature", Heller also offers a way to reconstruct ideas of both "nature" and "desire", drawing from feminist, anarchist and social ecological theory. She provides an activist response to ecological questions, linking the desire for a more meaningful and integral quality of life to the activist impulse itself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ecology, Feminism, Philosophy, Nature, Politics

204 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Chaia Heller is Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of The Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature.

Reviews

[Sølvi Goard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and holistic framework for thinking through social desire, overcoming thinking that others nature and holds it up as the place of retreat from industrial capitalism. Instead, seeing, embellishing the complexity and mutualism of the nature that we are already engaged in.

I've learnt a lot about how to think about desire from this.

***

Quotes/notes

Combining an individualized and capitalistic
notion of desire with an abstract and romanticized understanding of nature, we
engender a movement of people who long to return to a more pristine quality
of life by consuming artifacts and experiences that they deem ‘natural’.

ecological sensuality - alice walker
Here we see an expression of the desire to
be deeply related both socially and ecologically; a desire obstructed not by
‘modernity 5 or ‘humanity5, but by social hierarchy itself

Freud reconstituted the idea of Eros into an
energistic life force that must be repressed in surrender to a civilizing reality
principle. In the era of liberal capitalism, desire is often cast within energistic or
individualized terms, and it is usually framed in terms of scarcity, as the will to
overcome a particular deprivation, replacing desire with a particular object of
want that is external to the self .6 However, when we shake our theoretical
kaleidoscope slightly, we may reconfigure the idea of desire as a will to
express a potentiality that lies not outside of ourselves, but inside our very being

5 fingers of social desire
-sensual - desire to know
- associative- desire to know other
-differentiative - knowing self, knowing the world
-developmental - desire to become
-oppositional - desire to fight injsutice

Benjamin’s mutual recognition entails a unity in diversity. It implies a unity of
distinct selves based on independence and interdependence. In turn, it implies
a differentiation within association, a desire to maintain individual identity
while recognizing a connection to others. Together,
differentiative and
associative desire can form an erotic dance between autonomy, community,
individuality, and collectivity.

mujeres libres captacion y capatacion

socio-erotic

The ecological principles of mutualism, differentiation, and development
provide a set of criteria by which to measure the ethical validity of human
action. Again, as social ecology shows, humanity ought to further this trend
toward increasing mutualism, differentiation, and development and that, in
contrast, it is irrational to counter this evolutionary trend. We may assert that
the social desire to create cooperative institutions and social practices is ethical
and rational because such practices further the trend in natural evolution
toward ever greater levels of mutualism, differentiation, and developmental
complexity that provide the basis for natural evolution itself.

The desire to give names to places and species, represents our yearning
to translate the natural world into terms we can relate to, order, and know.
Unlike a capitalist desire to taxonomize species for the sake of control and
profit, a social desire seeks to name and distinguish species for the sake of
knowledge, pleasure, and ecological enhancement. Creative differentiative
desire is the yearning to sensitize ourselves to our relationship to the natural
world, to draw philosophical and aesthetic meaning from the patterns,
symmetries, and rhythms that continually unfold around us.

critical -> reconstructive -> illustrative

The idea
of nature can no longer be the “country home” of our desires, that place we
run to in our dreams, longing for escape from the pain and confusion of life in
the era of global capital. We must relocate the idea of nature within society
itself, transforming society into a ground in which we may build, collectively, a
new practice of both nature and community.

[Jeanne Lagabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je conseille fortement ce livre à toute personne qui s’interroge sur l’engagement social, environnemental et féministe, et même seulement l’un des trois, puisque cet essai magistral montre les liens inséparables entre les trois.
Après une brillante analogie (vous l’aurez compris aux choix de mes objectifs, j’ai adoré ce bouquin) entre l’amour courtois et notre attachement surplombant et romantique à la nature (en gros, un amour qui n’interroge par les mécanismes d’oppression/domination, et même qui s’en nourrit), l’auteure nous plonge dans un historique sur les différents mouvements sociaux et féministes, avec leurs apports et leurs manques.
On y lit également un vibrant plaidoyer pour l’anarchisme social, où coopération et désir social constituent tout à la fois les moyens et les fins d’une société qui travaillerait pour la justice sociale et environnementale sans oublier quiconque.

[Pierre-Olivier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heller synthétise avec merveille : écologie sociale, écoféminisme, démocratie, anarchisme, psychologie et psychanalyse dans cet œuvre magistrale. L’écologie sociale au quotidien se veut la subjectivisation des êtres humains dans le processus historique, la remise en perspective des hiérarchies, des institutions et des rapports de pouvoir dans nos sociétés contemporaine pour atteindre la vrai écologie, la libération de l’être humain dans la nature et la liberté. Se sortir de l’objectivisme passe premièrement par le remise en question de notre paradigme liberal relationnel avec la nature romantisé, naturalisé et essentialisé qui invisibilise la responsabilité de nos rapports sociaux hiérarchisés et de domination dans la superstructure du capitalisme. Le chapitre 4 sur les 5 doigts du désir social est magistral, totalement une stratégie et analyse psychologique du désir pragmatique et révolutionnaire. Une œuvre profondément agoraphile politiquement pour reprendre les concepts de Dupuis-Deri. Encore une fois l’analyse contextuelle sociale à travers l’intersectionnalité des luttes et de sont principe de complémentarité,de convergences et de ses effets cumulatifs se doit d’être appliqué à notre analyse de la réalité et mis en action comme outil de rationalité ontologique quotidienne. L’anarchisme comme méthodologie de transformation sociale , absolument. L’anarchie comme idéologie représentant mon idéal politique , indubitablement. Heller pousse l’écologie sociale de Bookchin au centuple dans ce livre , que je recommande.