Certain environmentalists delight in proving that every catastrophe - even natural ones - is man-made, that we are all guilty, we exploited too much, we weren’t feminine enough. All this bullshit. Why? Because it makes the situation “safer”. If it is us who are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact Mother Nature is not good - it’s a crazy bitch. The fear is that this bad ecology will become a new opiate of the people. And I’m against the ecologists’ anti-technology stance, the one that says, “we are alienated by manipulating nature, we should rediscover ourselves as natural beings”. I think we should alienate ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency, the fragility of our natural being.

Certain environmentalists delight in proving that every catastrophe - even natural ones - is man-made, that we are all guilty, we exploited too much, we weren’t feminine enough. All this bullshit. Why? Because it makes the situation “safer”. If it is us who are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact Mother Nature is not good - it’s a crazy bitch.

The fear is that this bad ecology will become a new opiate of the people. And I’m against the ecologists’ anti-technology stance, the one that says, “we are alienated by manipulating nature, we should rediscover ourselves as natural beings”. I think we should alienate ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency, the fragility of our natural being.

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Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse - opinion - 30 August 2010 - New Scientist

(via Andrew Potter)