“Society is a madhouse without doors and windows”
| From Wwoof SerbiaIn today’s technological society everything is under control, everything must be managed, and even the “environment” (which is a technocratic term for nature in the Orwellian Newspeak). “Wilderness” is subjected to special “protection techniques” of national and international agencies. Whom do they protect it from and what is the purpose of their protection? Is it protection against the greedy corporations, industry and developers with their bulldozers and excavators, or maybe against us, ordinary people? Who, in the end, use and benefit of that “wilderness”? What socialites hunt, drive jeeps and build ski resorts there, and later sell those “pleasures” to others? More important than the social divisions and inequalities in access to nature as a property and “resource” is the question: How does the average person in mass society feel about nature, where is its place in our collective consciousness? How is it possible that treating nature as a “factor of production” and “an enormous reservoir of stored energy”, content of exclusive goods and services and background of media spectacle, has become widely accepted and commonplace? |
Breaking from immediate, vital relationships with the communities of living beings in nature and progress of specialization and division of labour among men, stand for the famous beginning of agricultural and industrial civilization. Since then, with each new generation, people experience nature all the more mediate, increasingly distance themselves from it, isolate and sterilize dead environments in which they live, work, consume, and have fun. Danger, dirt and chaos lurk behind the walls of comfortable flats, schools, hospitals and prisons! The driving force of that deviation, in which terminal phase we live today, is the feverish urge for establishing control and domination over the nature. The fields which were once the habitats of thousands of plant species, are now covered with a single industrial monoculture. Lined up in columns and rows like an army, selected, modified and chemically treated for generations, these plants are the reflection of people’s situation, as well.
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