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Does Eco-Politics Exist and Does it Have Need of a Philosophy? 19
time of evolution. This is an unparalleled event in the history of our
species, but it is not at all certain that it is a survivable one.
We deceived ourselves to the last second. We applied the term
“production” to the consumption of our natural and cultural heritage,
i.e., its mass transformation into waste; “prosperity” to joyless,
compulsive squandering; “rational resource management” to the chase
of profits; “progress” to man’s ever-growing dependence on technological
systems and logistical considerations. Since we have brought up our
children in this spirit for generations, they cannot even imagine how
they could live any other way. We have not changed our suicidal habits,
because we feared lest everything collapse, should we change. We
preferred to subjugate ourselves to the logic of the industrial system and
attempted, with even more production, with the introduction of even
cruder technologies with an even greater mass effect, stricter regulation
and ever more aggressive methods to keep everything just how it
currently is, even though we sensed that it cannot remain thus. With
this we squandered years irrecoverable from the perspective of the
survival of humanity.
All this sounds like an explanation intended for posterity, as though
I believed that there will still be a posterity that will be interested in
our explanations. However, to be honest, I do not have much faith in
this. Every year we consume about one and a half times the natural
resources and the capacity of sinks available to us. From where do we
take the rest? From our descendants. We are dissipating their future;
we are doing everything in our power that they not be able to live a life
worthy of man. Therefore, it is increasingly improbable that they will
have the patience, knowledge, free time, freedom and other luxuries
requisite for the study of lengthy linear texts. If they do, then they will
take notice of the documents from the final days of Western civilisation
as incriminating evidence at most.
‘This text is therefore addressed to those alive today and contains
ideas related to the unavoidable and already fatally overdue
transformation of the order of social coexistence. It takes as its starting
point that the ecological crisis threatening our world cannot be prevented
or alleviated based on the established wisdom of political philosophy
— apart from anything else, because the crisis itself is not “ecological —
the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystem is not the cause but the consequence
of the crisis of modern Western civilisation. It merely indicates the
untenability of the assumptions on the basis of which we have formed
our conceptions of true knowledge and the good life throughout a long