W.A.S.T.E. Kritik

Fitter, happier, more productive,
comfortable,
not drinking too much,
regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week),
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries,
at ease,
eating well
(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats),
a patient better driver,
a safer car
(baby smiling in back seat),
sleeping well
(no bad dreams),
no paranoia,
careful to all animals
(never washing spiders down the plughole),
keep in contact with old friends
(enjoy a drink now and then),

The majority of ecological paradigms are premised on one flawed assumption: that expenditure can be eliminated from human/environment interactions. The attempt to repress all the unruly elements of life only results in the return of the repressed in a stronger and more insistent form. George Bataille, and after him Jacques Lacan, argued that negativity, loss, expenditure, sacrifice, and the beautiful were central and ineradicable elements of human life. Only an ecological politics that can embrace expenditure can avoid laying waste to the all that is nonproductive, even beautiful, in life.

will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall),
favors for favors,
fond but not in love,
charity standing orders,
on Sundays ring road supermarket
(no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants),
car wash
(also on Sundays),
no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate,
nothing so childish - at a better pace,
slower and more calculated,
no chance of escape,
now self-employed,
concerned (but powerless),
an empowered and informed member of society
(pragmatism not idealism),
will not cry in public,
less chance of illness,
tires that grip in the wet
(shot of baby strapped in back seat),
a good memory,
still cries at a good film,
still kisses with saliva,
no longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick,
that's driven into frozen winter shit
(the ability to laugh at weakness),
calm,
fitter,
healthier and more productive
a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

—Radiohead, “Fitter, Happier”

Biopolitics Kritk

They who are subjected to a field of visibility, and who know it, assume responsibility for the constraints of power; they make them play spontaneously upon themselves; they inscribe in themselves the power relation in which they simultaneously play both roles; they become the principle of their own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

—Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish

Since Michel Foucault showed how disciplinary power operated in any situation where individuals are forced to "assume responsibility for the constraints of power," we know that incentives for normalization are a far more insidious form of domination than the overt commands of regulation (Discipline & Punish). Today, one of the primary fields where people are called upon to police themselves in order to defend society from apocalyptic threats is the environment; ecology is the final frontier in the regulation of life, and the threat of this regulation's failure penetrates so intimately into our daily lives--the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ways in which we move around--that it is a small step from ecological self-sacrifice to an ecological fascism which demands that life itself be harnessed for our own protection and perfection.

Ecological Cartography Affirmative

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.

—Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking"

One of the fundamental problems in environmental policies today is that they legislate policies that are meant to work equally well across a pre-given area, whether a certain state or the entire country. This attempt to make nature fit into political cartographies not only leads to failed policy implementation, but it also promotes violent discourses and practices whose goal is to try and tame nature for human needs, a mindset at the political and cultural center of today's environmental crisis. This affirmative will call for a reorientation of political incentives for a national alternative energy architecture toward a bioregional perspective.