Illustration by Liana Buszka Text by Slavoj Zizek We should not simply oppose a principal life - dedicated to duty and enjoying our small pleasures.  Let's take today's capitalism. We have, on the one hand, the demands of the circulation of the capital which push us towards profit making - expansion, exploitation and destruction of nature and, on the other hand, ecological demands: let's think about our posterity and about our own survival, - let's take care of nature and so on.  In this opposition between ruthless pursuit of capitalist expansion and ecological awareness - duty, a strange perverted duty of course - duty is on the side of capitalism, as many perspicuous analysts noted. Capitalism has a strange religious structure. It is propelled by this absolute demand: capital has to circulate, to reproduce itself, to expand - to multiply itself. And for this goal, anything can be sacrificed, up to our lives, up to nature and so on. Here we have ...

By Rodrigo Cáceres In the English language (also in French and Spanish) there are several ways in which one can suppress grammatical agency . W ithin a sentence,   grammatical agency refers to the presence of the subject that carries out the action of the verb. For example: "She broke the glass" ⇒ "The glass broke" In the left sentence, one can identify the subject "She" who carries out the action. However, one of the ways in which we can suppress the subject is through the  passivization of a sentence. So, in the sentence to the right, the subject was effectively erased. In it, we might infer that one of two things happened: whether  "somehow"  the glass was broken  or "somebody" must have broken the glass. However, we cannot know which of those happened. Therefore, whatever or whoever is responsible for the act has disappeared. To make things really concrete, let's take a look at a statement from the IPBES (Intergo...

Photo by  Jelleke Vanooteghem  on  Unsplash By Rodrigo Cáceres In two previous essays, we used a specific linguistic term to analyse environmental discourse: the "mass noun". We defined it as "an abstract concept that generalizes and homogenizes an ensemble of entities". And we gave two examples of mass nouns: Humans and Natural Resources (the links will take you to each respective essay). Other examples of mass nouns are: nature and environment. Today I would like to shed some light onto the mechanisms by which mass nouns homogenize and generalize. Also, I would like to understand how they create  erasure patterns. An erasure pattern is a " linguistic representation of an area of life as irrelevant, marginal  or unimportant through its systematic absence or distortion in text" (Stibbe, 2015). If you remember, in those previous essays I used verbs such as "conceal", "hide" and "background". Let's start! S...

By Rodrigo Cáceres Yesterday I discovered a comic strip that left me a bit perplex... (You can take a look at it  here ). In the image one can read a scientist portraying his categorical message " We are destroying Earth" and to his right a government officer who asks "Could you kindly rephrase that in equivocal, inaccurate, vague, self-serving and roundabout terms that we can all understand?". Contrary to what you might think, I would like to prove you that the formulation "We are destroying Earth" is already a quite vague and imprecise way of framing environmental issues. For those who are familiar with environmental news and scientific papers on environmental issues (if not, you are welcome to take a look at mainstream environmental journalism), you might have noticed that almost all the time, the responsibility for environmental issues is attributed to a generic and indeterminate subject: "Humans", "Man"...

Each culture has its own unique view of nature, its own interpretation of what the world is made of. In the Comanche community in the United States, for example, there is a kinship link that connects humans to all that exists, to animals, plants and even to the very matter of which stars are made, since we all have a common origin. In our industrial societies, in contrast, nature is understood mainly by its utility: for us nature is not quite nature but it is above all a set of "natural resources". Similarly, ecosystems are not quite ecosystems, but they are above all a set of “ecosystem services” that we benefit from. What is nature? Is it our kin or is it a resource? Undoubtedly, the answers given to this question shape the ways in which nature is treated and how each society feels connected to it or tries to separate from it.  Language plays a fundamental role in this, because it is through words that we will provide a specific answer to this question. In other words, i...