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the environment?
so there is this machinery called you that engages in these actions, let's call them verbs, that impact upon this collection of objects external to yourself. these objects come in a container. the container is the environment.
because this you-machine orients itself up/down left/right with respect to the collection of things that is the world, de facto the machine "you" thinks itself separate from the collection of things and the container in which they are positioned.
so the environment is separate from you. at the level of naive theory--the environment is separate from you and you are separate from it.
besides, when you look at what is outside you, you are separated from it by a vertical orientation that follows from what holds you eyes up off the ground, say. so clearly you are separate. because what you see is what there is and there's no particular need to worry about the ways in which what you see might be truncated. you know, limited.
so because what you see is what you get, it, the environment, becomes something about which you can have vague sentiments: i like the environment, i do not care about the environment: my liking for the environment passes through my aesthetic dispositions, which also contain my politics because this is america dammit and one's politics are in general a matter of aligning non-information about the world with one's sense of what looks or feels pretty; my indifference to the environment passes through my aesthetic dispositions which also contain my politics. because the environment is a spectacle about which one can gather types of infotainment that align with what one understands to be pretty, a pretty arrangement, and because in the states politics is aesthetics and so what one thinks pretty can be reinforced at every level, and because capitalism american style is grand in every way, it is possible that you, consumer, can compile heaps of infotainment that connect you, in your bourgeois isolation, to the Big Container, along any number of logics.
if you are inclined to want to see the possibilities of action, you can find information that says "action is possible"; if you are inclined to think action undertaken by more than one petit bourgeois Hero is communism, you can find information that persuades you of the correctness of that view.
because what matters is that your preferences be fed, not anything else. information and the aspects of the world shaped by them are all commodities and you, consumer, are all-powerful.
because the environment is something you watch on television or go to visit when you leave the city, it is a place where magic capitalism keeps it's tree or grass collections or a place where the ocean is arrayed so that you, who otherwise has no environment, can go look at it.
hello there environment.
what do we want to put in our environment, which colorform indicators of infrastructure do we want to put there, a sequence of large cupcake-shaped things we'll call nuclear reactors, a sequence of crosses on sticks we'll call windmills? which looks better?
sustainability is vague, but in general it refers to a practical orientation and it is hard to see a practical orientation.
sustainability is of a piece with a view of being human that does not recognize a distinction between the results of, say, neural network formation and functioning and their results in the mind--differences of scale and matters of translation are such that you do not see yourself as a system of living systems, but that does not mean you aren't. but you'd need information that was able to restructure something of your view of yourself to get to it. left to a "common sense" or naive viewpoint, the world is outside yourself and you move around in it.
sustainability is an aspect of a politics. a politics is an assemblage of information about the world and assumptions about actions that can or should be taken based on that information.
"the environment" is both experience-near and experience-distant. the more distant, the more mediated the relation. information mediates the relation. when you have a chat in a bar about "the environment" you are recycling information you have available, what you choose to remember, what you choose to suppress or forget. so in a conversation, you are recycling information and shaped by your aesthetic dispositions, but because you do not present the information, you are not accountable for the dispositions or the information.
cupcakes or crosses on sticks, then: which looks better?
i'll have another ale and an order of calamari, please.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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