“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, December 20, 2010

Why the Ire against the EPA?

Why the persistent hostility to the EPA from Republicans? It was created by NIXON for Christ's sake.

It's elementary really: to fund the EPA is objectively to cave to a left world view, in which I am directly responsible for others. I prefer Alphonso Lingis's and my reason: there is no other reason than that they exist. If you haven't read his work recently, you'll see it's chock full of environmental examples (such as a cigarette burning in a sequoia forest—you just put it out, without figuring out whether you lit it or whether you should). It's called the imperative and it's the first stirrings of an object-oriented ethics. Expect to hear more about it in my work. (I've already been running it in The Ecological Thought and lots of the Hyperobjects talks.)

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