CULTURE AS HELL
It is almost impossible to address the environmental crisis of the planet without referring to nature. In our contemporary minds there is an almost basic and addictive need to seek and identify something that existed before and beyond our minds, a reference able to anchor the moral and aesthetic qualities of something greater than us: a longed-for paradise, made unavoidable by human desire, condemned to a fantasy. In the exercise, hell emerges and becomes a synonym for the search, and therefore, a synonym for culture. There is no way to speak about the world and its ecology outside of the human condition, there is no object without subject, there is no nature without our thinking on it.
If we agree on this premise, the environmental crisis can be understood as the result of only one of two things: 1) a self-destructive process embedded in us as a biological species, perhaps even a genetically engineered code to limit our life span on the planet (nobody is able to imagine humans in 200 years, let alone in a geological time scale), like a meteorite doomed to crash into the planet (perhaps these are the ecological mechanisms that keep life flourishing across the galaxy); or 2) an emerging force of creation, a genetically engineered code for innovation without an expiry date, whose purpose would be systemic, serving as the most recent device for planetary renovation and a tool for expanding the biology of Earth. Just like the meteorite, but instead it flies away from us, assembled as an artistic bullet propelled by technology and poetics towards the ever-expanding universe.
Nature, however, as the dreamt condition of purity freed from the nasty humans, also becomes an impossible thing, an imaginary place that nobody is able to imagine and where everything is solved without solvers: the good origin and the mystical hidden treasure of life, without us. In that sense, nature –– which is becoming the most inspirational guide for environmental awareness –– will also be our demise, since that human desire created by ourselves and our guilt is not just a potential set of principles to review our ecological position on Earth, but a device that propels us towards the isolated place of culture, the only place we know as a species. In doing so, we destroy our human nature.