Earth thought 161 of 365: It's hard to know what makes machines into elements, for they are so unlike elements. So let me pose things this-a-way. Why are machines so un-elemental? You say, "because they are made". But love is made, and it's elemental.
Earth thought 162 of 365: Deleuze & Guattari take Artaud and cry of a "body without organs". As Peter Hallward has shown, the desire -fantasy, really- in all this is for a pure nothingness of spontaneous ...? What? The problem is that even energy is organized, and so too is movement, and any *thing* in existence. This is why Deleuze & Guattari are fundamentally anti-ecological thinkers, contra Manuel Delanda. The ecological is deeply organized, and any becoming is toward an "organ", for that is how life is. Funny our culture, when its high counter-culture, supposedly self-critical, is more like a T.V. fantasy than the reality of life on Earth.
Earth thought 163 of 365: Recently, the Alaotra grebe of Madagascar was declared extinct -yet another bird species, an increasing number. The causes are clear again -the incursion of humans into habitats, invasive species. So much so that it's starting to look like "globalization" should be called, really, "mass extinction". That pretty much shows you bad anthropocentrism in a snapshot. From the perspective of most of life on this planet, we are a mass extinction. From our own, "we are the world".
Earth thought 164 of 365: An "ethos" is Greek for a way of life. Sometimes, the word's translated as character. It's the root of our word, "ethics". But, as you can see, a way of life has broader connotations than "ethics" does. I believe that the way to think of environmental ethics is through an environmental ethos. This includes more than right and wrong, good and bad. It includes a sensibility and the orientation of meaning that expresses a wise relationship to the Earth. It includes beauty and ugliness, too. For instance, ugliness isn't the ugly duckling -or insect. It's the yearning of intellectuals for an abstract and otherworldly avant-garde, a kind of Dorian Gray veneer of sophistication under the rhetoric of modernism, post-modernism, critical theory -while underneath they betray an ignorance of the only world we know, one which far exceeds -in all domains of value- our own little "world". The teeming life of the planet.
Earth thought 165 of 365: Human rights were ill-conceived from their foundation, abstracting man from his ecological conditions. It was suggested that the Bubble -the state- was everything, maker or breaker of destinies. But the Earth's the maker or breaker of states. We cannot develop indefinitely once the Earth has limits -human rights never truly began from them. And it's no use expecting technology to catch desire -that's like making a problem for someone to fix. No, rights need to be thought from the *ground* up, which is why environmental justice is key to an adequate conception of human rights. Only when human rights are a tissue of Earth norms will they make sense. I don't *simply* have the right to all manner of developmental goods -and limitless child-bearing- when having it will sacrifice future generations and countless species of life. So: what should human rights be to respect the plight of the global poor (who often need many children, and need basic goods) while blocking the un-ecological fantasy of the utopian Bubble? And why should rights even be drivers? They bypass the local and the constitutional, even. They tend to the simplistic. I know all this sounds like scary, hard objection, but the Earth's limits will be scarier, hard fact. Island nations are already sinking underwater because of our "rights".
