Ecology and pacifism

The emergence of the environmental issue is primarily a manifestation of a systemic problem. It reveals, that is to say, the reality of the network of global interdependencies in which a modern society is inserted, and the society's fundamental inability to comprehend individual structures and processes of social life without taking into account the links between them. The sheer fact of the completed planetary interdependence makes it obvious that linear causality is no longer conceivable as a possible foundation of historical dynamic, and that we belong to systems where the circularity of causes entails the restructuring of cognitive patterns and of our expectations of reality. The environmental issue, moreover, brings the cultural dimension of human experience to the fore. It demonstrates that lying at the heart of the question of survival is no longer the problem of the expedient system of means (on which both goal-directed rationality and the calculus of political exchange are based), but the problem of ends – that is, of those cultural models which orient behaviour and on which daily life, production, exchange, and consumption structure themselves. No livable future can be imagined unless we change our social relations and the circulation of information before simply improving our technical apparatuses. Today, acting on things means acting on symbolic codes; effectively operating on things depends on the cultural models which organize our day-to-day social relations, political systems, and forms of production and consumption.