Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red

“How are we to think the anthropocene? Slavoj Zizek, in his review of McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red below, offers a comment on one of the most pressing questions of our time. For Žižek, Molecular Red provides some answers to the major fallacies of ecological discourse: “If there is one good thing about capitalism it is that under it, Mother Earth no longer exists.” On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter titled “Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism”. Here are its opening statements: Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill. … Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries. … Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world.[1]”