Slavoj Zizek: On Ecological Catastrophe

It is not only the continuity of History which is threatened today—what we are witnessing is something like the end of Nature itself.

– Slavoj Žižek,  Living in the End Times

The double trap to avoid is thus, on the one hand, to attempt to “de-ideologize” the issue, by reducing ecological catastrophe to a problem solvable by means of science and technology, and, on the other, to attempt to “spiritualize” it in the sense of New Age mythology. What both these approaches lack is a concrete social analysis of the economical, political and ideological roots of ecological problems. Science is necessary, but it cannot do all the work: it cannot show us how we should transform our lives, because such transformation has to rely on basic socio-political “normative” ideas of what kind of life we want to lead. We have thus to reject as insufficient a series of solutions which…