(PDF) Globing the Earth

Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature Author(s): Ranjan Ghosh Source: SubStance , 2012, Vol. 41, No. 1, ISSUE 127: Globing the Earth: The New Eco- logics of Nature (2012), pp. 3-14 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23261099 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to SubStance This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature Ranjan Ghosh Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: "Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching." Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with /in nature all about encountering the spectre of the "unborn"—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "responsible for our rose"? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped, it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master.(Eiseley 1960:123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now what it is not? I agree with Michael Bess that nature is no longer a static, rigid taxonomy; it becomes protean, upwelling, a vital force erupting forth, proliferating, unpredictable, and metastasizing. We may actually be facing the most extraordinary frontier—the frontier of nature as an ultimately creative, responsive, and transformative power, which regards human beings simply as a trace that is overcome and left behind. (Bess 1999: 2) So what Bernard Charbonneau sees as human "freedom" (a version of natural dialecticism) is born out of seeing nature's otherness as a self: a deconstructed self emerging from thoughts about the "death of nature," a death that is a promise of a fresh lease on life—a postendism that tran scends imponderable thresholds. Understanding nature is challenging the disciplinization of thought; the environmental crisis is a crisis of thought leading to reflexive and transversal thinking. Nature is more than what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man; nature © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012 3 SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 Ranjan Ghosh is beyond the human will; it is also functionally multivalent, historically complex, and an ideological and paradoxical concept. We must appeal to the "pathologies of epistemology"—the disruption of the loops of communicative feedback between mind and matter, nature and culture. Nature has the opportunity to function within the argument that does not see "ideas of nature" as simply the "projected ideas of men," as Raymond Williams would say. New Nature, Deconstructed Nature, and Poetic Creativity So nature has become its own "other" and keeps looking at both in carnations (nature's other gazing on nature, and nature viewing its other growing out of her) with shock, nostalgia, acceptance and redemption. Bill McKibben in his book, The End of Nature writes: How can there be a mystique of the rain now that every [acidic] drop— even the drops that fall as snow on the Arctic—bears the permanent stamp of man? Having lost its separateness, it loses its special power. Instead of being a category like God—something beyond our control—it is now a category like the defense budget or the minimum wage, a problem we must work out.... What will it mean to come across a rabbit in the woods once genetically engineered "rabbits" are widespread? Why would we have any more reverence or affection for such a rabbit than we would for a Coke bottle?. ... Someday, man may figure out a method of conquering the stars, but at least for now when we look into the night sky, it is as Burroughs said: "We do not see ourselves reflected there—we are swept away from ourselves, and impressed with our own insignificance. ..." The ancients, surrounded by wild and even hostile nature, took comfort in seeing the familiar above them—spoons and swords and nets. But we will train ourselves to see those patterns. The comfort we need is inhuman (McKibben 1989: 210-217). With the burgeoning of the human population, the reality of a Na ture unviolated by humans seems a dim possibility. "Virgin nature" is a deeply problematized phenomenon. Walter Truett Anderson observes: There is no place on Earth—certainly not on an Earth whose sunlight filters through an ozone layer that has been accidentally altered by hu man technology—that is truly, as the saying goes, untouched by human hands. Indeed, all the things we do to preserve 'nature/ everything from wilderness management to endangered species legislation, are in one way or another human interventions. (Anderson 1987: 7) However, this comfort of the "inhuman" has made nature manifest in ways that are different from conventional understanding. Nature "un natured" is still nature. Interestingly, our understanding of nature has become even more anthropocentric than in the past. This anthropocen trist approach probably persists in a different way even where human intervention ironically fosters the perpetuation of nature. This nature, however, has lost some of its primitive diversity and seemingly inviolate independence. It is a human regeneration of nature—pastoralization SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 5 Globing the Earth with clear anthropomorphic ends—implying human continuity and the domination of nature for a human cause. Likewise, the exploitation of nature is for human advantage, and is more often about survival than obvious economic ends. Human "progress" has reached a momentum that is difficult to reverse, and the damage done to nature is irreversible and inexorable. Sequestering nature from human intervention is clearly impossible, hence the need to create a "new nature": a dynamic, functional nature, revised and devised—supported by human technology and made sustainable in the face of human growth and commercial exploitation. This lends a certain tension to the cataclysmic prospect of the "unborn" (phobic) incarnation of nature and the nature that is being "helped" in its birthing; this is an ecotechnical genesis—the one in the process of being born conflated with the "yet to be born." Green Politics and Nature The reality of the shift to more "green" conceptions of time, space, power, and control is irrefutable. The spectre of the "unborn" coupled with diabolical climatic predictions makes for an obsession with "green." We increasingly hear a "greenalect" with stable linguistic patterns and well invested power discourses that privilege even the pseudo-green over the non-green. Faced with a language of environment, an eco-logics of power and ideology, we are caught in a linguistic net, a green language, which, according to George Myerson and Yvonne Rydin, holds in place the practices of communication and arguing, but is itself continually pushed into new shapes—stretched and torn in places, made slack and compressed in others." This language, with its own inflections of power and values, is thus "a dynamic system of changing connections spread across society... busy with environmental arguing, competitive and collaborative, controlled and spontaneous. (Myerson & Rydin 1996: 7-9) Language-games and certain regimes of power and knowledge make for a "bureaucratic green" that can be considered, as Timothy Luke notes, "strategizing ecologically." He observes: Not only will mere territory or simple space be subjected to administra tive policing, now entire environmental processes, systems or balances will be managed to contain threats and project stability. It demands submission to formal codes of instrumental rationality capable of gener ating and judging elaborate statistical models assumed to be identical to and exhaustive of the substantive social, economic or cultural forms of environmentalized lifeworlds captured within their disciplinary grids. Ironically, such reasoning can only be reductionistic, instrumentalist, and destructive. Everything not disclosed by professional-technical methods of statistical standard deviation or mathematical multiple regressions can be crushed, ignored or distorted to fit the standardized uniform results that symbolic analysts desire to see on the expected slopes of statistical prediction. (Luke 1995:269) SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 Ranjan Ghosh In fact, the dialectical relationship that exists, as Lefebvre notes, "within the triad of the perceived, the conceived, and lived" impact on the ways in which the man-nature, overman-denature nexus is spatial ized (Lefebvre 1991: 39). The notion of "bureaucratic green" might raise issues of respatialization in relationships that are not just informed by a longing for unpoliced primitivism, but are rendered infirm by the pentagon of green globality, whose surveillance strives to territorialize every corner under a "green anxiety." Protecting and sustaining nature without letting go of many things that the techno-industrial world has delivered, will have a global agenda, whose planetary dimensions would reduce eco-negotiations to a dialogue between the "powerful few" and the "disempowered many." The hierarchy of nature-consciousness has two levels: consciousness without power (the majority) abuts decision-making power zealously confined to a minority. In this power-plexus, nature is the possession of a few, but doled, packaged and explained to the many. Proprietorship of nature in the late capitalist society has recursed to a pseudo-feudalistic understanding of space-power, where singulariza tion of interlocking domains leaves nature in fragments of consumption. Few will "form" nature, and the many will consume the "formed." With expertise as "intellectual partisanship" being valued and "knowledge societies" incommensurable with the populace, a particular vocabulary and analytical approach will exclude many. A new value system may not scrutinize the differences brought by the co-evolution of socio-cultural and ecological practices. Eco-governmentality, supported by communities of knowledge and strategic epistemologies, will produce a representation of space that is by no means innocent. Such spaces, though apparently dis interested, are produced from "strategic positions"—schematized within certain material and ideological persuasions. The complex monologics of green space can easily operate through technocratic expertise, which, representing particular interests, develops its own mode of production and dissemination of knowledge. But this architecturization of nature results in segregation, where only the technologically savvy would control the way nature would work. Bureaucratic greens will thrive on certain designs and policy injunctions. Natural resources megatechnically generated will translate into consum erables within certain structures of power and knowledge. The result is massive dependence of citizens on political dynamics underpinned by selective megatechnical domination. Institutionalized nature will have its open market, patent rights, service guarantees and an informationalized circuit of buying publics and techno-rich service suppliers. The transition from the organic to the biogenetic will leave consumers essentially with no choices: a complete surrender to a authoritarian system, which, in the SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 7 Globing the Earth word of Lewis Mumford, "gives back as much of it as can be mechani cally graded, quantitatively multiplied, scientifically sorted, technically conditioned, manipulated, directed, and socially distributed under su pervision of a centralized bureaucracy." Mumfordian machine-addicts are ready to relinquish their prerogatives as living beings: the right to be alive, to exercise all their organs without officious interference, to see through their own eyes, hear with their own ears, to work with their own hands, to move on their own legs, to think with their own minds, to experience erotic gratification and to beget children in direct sexual intercourse—in short, reacting as whole human beings to other whole human beings, in constant engagement with both the visible environment and the immense heritage of historic culture, where of technology is only a part. (Mumford 1970: 322). With certain civic virtues anachronized and a few patronized in a society laboring under the burden of the "unborn," societies are expected to unite on issues deemed common for collective sustenance. It becomes the call for a new "contract" that refigures earlier complexities of narratival and valuational divisions. It is seems unlikely that traditional folk prac tices to conserve and sustain nature will hold their own. Conservationist ethics will conflate the essential with the secular, the traditional with the modern. Does the ethics of the "unborn" with its dystopic exactions leave us with nostalgia for a past that we disclaimed for its prejudices, for its primitive simplicities? Values we thought were lost and not worthy of reclamation start embedding our consciousness; the "past" becomes a romance exploited at one's peril, as a caution, while the present's efforts toward a survivable future are underwritten by a sense of loss, by the plague of lost horizons. The new, aestheticized incarnation of the natural landscape leaves creative artists in an unpleasant crisis. The entire equation of art and na ture must be revised. The sources of creative inspiration will vary, with depictions of nature now and then diverging. The poem and its poesis will have a different circulation. Will the eco-logics of nature see a hegemon ized aesthetics of nature monopolizing debates on nature and landscape? Nature technologized and bucreacratized is nature that loses all control from locally mediated intervention. Do we then encounter a globalized nature? Does nature develop the sameness and repetitiveness that one associates with proliferating supermalls, where each country would start having nature mechanised with similar intent and result? But would that mean that nature would be static and devoid of its unpredictability and wildness? Can we really have a nature where conditions to flourish and sustain humanity are generated to continue its existence without surprises, reverses and aberrations? It is here that Keulartz sees the opposition SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Ranjan Ghosh between evolutionary ecology and system ecologists. Evolutionary ecol ogy conceives nature as less predictable and hence "less manageable and controllable. As Keulartz observes: Its view of nature is stochastic rather than deterministic. The importance of stochastic processes is also acknowledged by the nature develop ers, but only on the consideration that species that form part of stable ecosystems often fail to spread and are therefore liable to die out if they become trapped in an island situation owing to loss or fragmentation of territory. In order to keep these species "on the move" they have to be exposed (once again) to natural processes in the form of local catastrophes such as forest fires, storms, but also in the form of biotic dynamics such as grazing, sod cutting and prédation ....And wherever nature fails to do the job, the developers do not mind lending a hand, for instance by felling trees left standing by storms. The reasoning behind such practices is that while (stable) ecosystems remain the ideal and the touchstone, stochastic processes have to be "tolerated" insomuch as the "completeness" of these ecosystems is seriously dam aged. (Keulartz 1998:172) So nature now is caught between its unpredictability and a system atization effected through external means. The art of nature then works through both stochastic and deterministic processes where "harming" nature is not hurting it but allowing it to construct itself anew: préda tion can, at times, be production; deconstruction can generate ways to construction; decomposition can lead to reconstitution. My understanding that "culture wars" will be replaced by "nature wars" implies the resurgence of Garret Hardin's life-boat ethics, the NIMBY response ("not in my backyard") and in less harsh terms Paul R. Ehrlich's "triage proposals." This sets off the debate on justice and welfare economics. Would there be a unitary ground of existence, a uni tary ground of being? The prospect of the "unborn" delivers us into a space of green democracy where post-naturalist philosophy is invoked to reconsider the ideologies emerging out of what I may term "green hegemony." The survivalist urgency to stay green and, hence, lower the possibilities of climatic onslaughts, emboldens the green strand running though the fabric of democracy. However, the influence of green activists on the public sphere is sometimes imprudently monopolized. We see the spectre of a political philosophy that would administer society only on the basis of its eco-goodness. More than world-consciousness, this would be earth-consciousness and earth-directedness, keying our values into earth principles. Democratic government will have to work agreeably on green principles, with survival necessities dominating technological and industrial development. Green reason includes both radicalism and reformism, to bring about transformation and sustenance. This combines technocracy and humanistic values in a kind of calculus that legitimizes SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9 Globing the Earth progress with preservation and production. This is a difficult balance to strike. Somewhere the concept of human prosperity needs to change. The "unborn" will deconstruct our values in a post-industrial world, and the trading off in values that are strictly industrial and commercial cannot avoid a change in hierarchical priorities. Kraft notes: Although no-one is quite sure what an ecological politics might look like, a reasonable definition might suggest a polity in which individual behaviour and government policy making are fundamentally consistent with ecological principles. The various elements in which a system would have to be based on a similar set of values and would have to interlock more or less harmoniously. Within those parameters, the extensive political possibilities are still to be explored. There are surely many options beyond the rather grim authoritarian systems foreseen by some. (Kraft 1977:179-80) As part of "green racism," nature-pure zones will deny access to people who would like to migrate from green-impure territories (it will be no surprise to see a "green" angle to immigration laws discriminating the green-rich nation from its green-poor counterparts). Green colonization would precipitate a "land ethics" informed by a protectiveness of one's territory, while indigenization and assimilation will require tolerance and patience in cross-community dialogue. This problematizes the green politics in the public sphere with a different "passion and play" (Young 1987:75). Localization and local-specificities will divide people on green deliberation and yet, fortunately, unite them in the common purpose to save the earth. However, it must be admitted that globing the earth green would be far from being optimum and uniform. Andrew Dobson's observation can set a different conceptual rhythm to the discussion (Dobson 2000: 22). The principal features of the natural world and the political and social conclusions or prescriptions that have been drawn from them are: diversity toleration, stability and democracy interdependence equality longevity tradition nature as "female" a particular conception of feminism Ongoing extinction of species and the plundering inflicted on natu ral processes will clearly lead to a diversity that is less diverse and will perhaps interpret stability as a sustained attempt to stem progressive denudation. Democracy in its ideological limitations will be less nuanced; just as decisions about national security are more roundly endorsed than debated, the survival of mankind through reclaiming nature will govern the mood of democratic thinking. The "deliberation deficit" springing from monological concerns of human extinction will be apparent. How does that redefine toleration for the less-green and the non-green? Equal SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 Ranjan Ghosh ity, its dubious import aside, will be in a one-choice-no-exit democracy fundamentally and perseveringly green. But choices made and executed as part of a tradition of techno-green-blind growth will continue to inflect notions of stability and sustainability. Concerns expressed here come close to what Ophuls suggests as a return to "competence": The closer you are to the situation of a vessel embarked on a dangerous voyage, the greater the rationale for the rule of the competent few. But as the earth and its various territories approach more and more closely to a realization of the spaceship metaphor with each step toward the ultimate ecological limits, the highest degree of competence will become indispensable for effective rule, and even a democratic theorist might have to begin to echo Plato's Republic: the polity is a ship that must be commanded by the best pilots, or it will founder. (Ophuls 1974: 40) The possibilities of heading toward a "classic polity" that is nondemocratic and elitist are high; hence the prospect of the "unborn" must provide for a decentralization where politics and administrative authority can be questioned and revised. Green democracy, despite its prospective au thoritarian character where everything comes to be judged by its "green effect" will evoke participation and accountability, and the chances of negotiating with "incompetence" are expected to be high. If specialization is what informs powers of administration and the character of "talk" in public space, there will indisputably be forms of inexpertness contribut ing to our understanding of being-with and being-for nature. The swell in the general level of nature-consciousness can, if argued from the other perspective, generate more informed debate than is the case now. By the strength of this argument, green issues will be seen to govern the prog ress of a nation; however, in its inherent overdeterminedness, certain configurations of power and representation and some sensitive areas of ideological disjunctions will be difficult to avoid. Green democracy will have truths generated through experience, and greater negotiations with the liminality of the "unborn." I take issue with Weale and Bobbio's1 refusal to see direct and representative democracy as exclusive categories; rather, under the pres sure of the "unborn," each would complement and deepen the other's principles of functioning and understanding. Green pressure begets the operation of direct democracy primarily at the level of the local, which then influences the operative-nodes higher up the order. But this pressure consolidates to form a kind of supranational structure that representative democracy has to effectively negotiate and eventualize. The decentral ized public space and its obsession with nature-talk come through as a centralized machinery that might determine the prominent strands of national politics. Democracy in its avowed advocacy of inter-subjectivity risks getting caught in its own disabling game when talk has pathetic col lective concerns that are more survivalist than aesthetic or experimental. SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 11 Globing the Earth Will green issues determine the electoral nature of a liberal democracy? Will green issues caught in ideological warfare and interpretive cunning determine the representative government? Will the voting ritual of de mocracy make politics contingent on green-astuteness? Robyn Eckersley sees "bargaining processes" influencing decisions in liberal democracies where environmental protection depends on public interest advocacy that is able to "give a voice" to long-term, generalisable interests (for example, future generations) as well as the interests of non-human species. The members of this extended envi ronmental constituency obviously cannot vote or otherwise influence political decisions made by any given political community, yet their welfare can be directly affected by decisions made by that community. The confluence of green consciousness and democracy entails recon figuring some liberal rights discourses. In fact, the prospect of a green democracy will include both human and non-human rights as part of its "autopoietic intrinsic value theory." Eckersley rightly notes that Certain fundamental rights of non-human species (such as the right to exist) should be incorporated and entrenched alongside fundamental human rights in a constitutional bill of rights to ensure that they are not "bargained away" by a simple majority in Parliament. Indeed, this would seem to be the only way in which non-human interests might be incorporated into the ground rules of democratic decision-making. The upshot would be that any legislation, or any administrative or other decision, that authorised action that posed a threat to the survival of endangered species could be challenged as constitutionally invalid. (Eckersleyl996:170, 181) Thus, the concern to globe the earth "green" establishes an ethi cal discourse, an ecological rationality that calls for individual restraint and self-sacrifice. Emotions embedding this discourse may change if a certain possessiveness about staying and living green comes to domi nate all political discourses. We may expect the phenomenon of "green terror"—a new version of de-individualized moralism. Interestingly, the instrumentalization of such a green-centric discourse will not have much diversity to debate upon. Administrative policies will be established by green imperatives, while the threat of the "unborn" will be put to the use of self-serving politicians. Green discourse has the ironic ability to resist challenges to policy by meddling with contingencies within a pretense to scientific logic. The compulsive "green connection" risks becoming reductive and, hence, debilitating. The more sacred "green discourse" becomes, the greater the chances of it becoming violent. I see this as a form of "sacred violence." Would the world be more divided in its concerns about extinction and life in post-extinction? How does community-consciousness in India to protect tigers and the statist, localist and participationist endeavors that go with it align with preservationist efforts to protect penguins from ex SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 Ranjan Ghosh tinction in the Arctic? Would localization of concerns, based on a reductive and restrictive species consciousness, place the politics of green democracy under certain unfamiliar values? Ironically, such a consciousness might result in dividing the earth: globing the earth in green communalism. Also, the other school of green democrats might argue that species preserved locally and in certain enclaves of earth ensure that extinction is prevented in the long run. But economic, habitat and other consumptive pressures might result in serious imbalances of distribution and possession, with "species preservation" turning into "species war." With the progressive slipping of the green ground beneath our feet, are we threatened with having to decide on our preferences of preservation? I think we are on the verge of encountering the ethics of "conservational conflict." Eckerseley points out the need for an "ecocentric culture" crucial to our commitment to the "unborn" (Eckerseley 1992: 185). There is the need for a committed, informed argument on ecological ethos, rather than an uncritical surrender to the necessity of espousing one merely as a bulwark against grey times ahead. Green specialism can easily become a collective collapse into spirituality in nature, allowing a respite from the wrath of the nature-gods. Green specialism vouches for the exemplarity of the "green" in our understanding of the earth and the world. But such overreliance on green specialism might result in endowing nature with a spiritual existence and, hence, nature's wrath will not be seen with the necessary scientific rigor. Although the "spiritual" approach provides a different connection with nature, rationality of a different order needs to be in circulation within the public sphere. This rationality requires comprehensiveness and substantial rigor. Even if the very core of the public sphere becomes green, the diversities and nuances generated from community-specific and nation-affiliated persuasions can compli cate decision-making. However, pressures of survival call for greater modes and media of debate about nature—engagements that are both technophilic and technophobic. Hence ideological debates grounded in concerns to preserve nature might be less interesting and more sober, being less fracturai. If they prove uninventive, green-based talks might make innovative and challenging formations less likely to happen. Will that hamper spaces of creativity? The politics of sustainability, suggested as an effective medium to encounter the "unborn," has a certain iteracy, a certain monotony that scarcely allows anything stunningly innovative to get introduced. Experiments with nature happen in a different order, in different forms of enjoyments and consequences. The "unborn" induces such differences. But our inability to quite grasp or envision posterity has raised questions about our responsibility toward it. Does our going obsessively "green" make us truly responsible? Or do we need pragmatic resource SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 13 Globing the Earth management, based on technologies that would look into the cost, benefit and sustainability of future-oriented programs? One can have an uneasy agreement with David W. Pearce's views, in which sustainable devel opment "is seen to involve compensating the future for environmental damage being done now, and damage done in the past." He notes that "compensation requires the passing-on to future generations of a stock of natural assets no smaller than the stock in the possession of current generations" (Pearce 1991:214). But the character of this "stock of natural assets" can never be the same, and the "use-value" will vary with our con cept of communitarianism. So within the changing eco-logics, the future generation might just not value what the present thinks is essential to its upkeep. Perhaps the universality in our understanding of "green use" will not be left uninterrogated. Does this "green alert" then leave us with a smile or a grimace? Does this eco-management leave us within a tragic discourse, or in a certain comicality, arising from the unknowability of the unborn? Primitive nature left man with fewer options to explore and plunder her; techno-man became rich in options and pillaged nature at will. But the prospect of the unborn regresses man to a primitiveness of a different order, where options to "negotiate" with nature are pared down, leaving us with alternatives that only bolster our survival by keeping the sinking boat of nature afloat. Modern man in both stages is left poor— the first struggling to explore his riches, the second paying back for his blundering and plundering. (Note that 2010 was the hottest year in the history of the planet.) Is this a tragedy or a comedy—a way of seeing the comic in the face of a possible and tragic apocalypse? Such are the ways we globe the earth, which is more a process than an object. Somewhere we have lost the ontological assumption—an Archimedean point—that we have been successful in our efforts to make meaning about earth and to rationalize earth-consciousness. However, I sense a new earthiness of Earth, an earth englobed in colorful green. University of North Bengal Notes 1. See N. Bobbio, The Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); A. Weale, Political Theory and Social Policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). Works Cited Anderson, W. T. To Govern Evolution. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Bess, Michael. "Deconstructing Nature," Letters, Vol. 8, no. 1, (Fall 1999), 1-4. Berlin, Isiah. 'The Counter Enlightenment', in Isiah Berlin (ed.), The Proper Study of Mankind. London: Pimlico Press, 1998. Bobbio, N. The Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. SubStance #127, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 14 Ranjan Ghosh Dobson, Andrew. Green Politica Eckersley, Robin. Environmentalism State University of New York . "Liberal Democracy and the Ri and Democracy (ed.) Freya Mat Eiseley, Loren. The Firmament o Keulartz, Jozef. Struggle for Nat Kraft, M. "Political Change and ages. New York: Praeger, 1977. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production Luke, Timothy W. 'Between De Liberal Democratic Responses to Theory, 15,1995, 245-274. McKibben, Bill. The End of Natu Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of th Jovanovich, 1970. Myerson, George and Yvonne Ry UCL Press, 1996. Ophuls, W. "Reversal is the Law York: Praeger, 1974. Pearce, D. et al. Blueprint 2. Lon Weale, A. Political Theory and So Young, Iris Marion. "Impartialit Feminism as Critique. Minneap SubStance #127 This content downloaded from 3.6.61.80 on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms