44.
The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

37.
The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.

where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative development. This incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy aver which it rules. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.

When a niche in a mature ecosystem is destroyed, the system does not simply wriggle a bit and settle into a new pattern with all the same niches, but different occupants.  It loses functionality in the same way that any complex organism loses functionality if you remove one of its organs or limbs or sabotage one of its endocrine reactions;  it may live, but it lives with a lesser capacity and more fragility.  It does not thrive.

Less than a mile from what is left of Chernobyl's ill-fated fourth reactor, a pair of elks is grazing nonchalantly on land irradiated by the world's worst nuclear accident. In nearby Pripyat, an eerie husk of a town where 50,000 people used to live before they were forced to flee on a terrifying afternoon in 1986, a Soviet urban landscape is rapidly giving way to wild European woodland.

Radiation levels remain far too high for human habitation but the abandoned town is filled with birdsong and the gurgling of streams forged by melting snow. Nobody thought it possible at the time but 20 years after the reactor exploded on 26 April 1986, during an ill-conceived "routine" Soviet experiment, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all.

The zone - an area with a radius of 18 miles in modern-day Ukraine - lives on in the popular imagination as a post-apocalyptic wasteland irreparably poisoned with strontium and caesium that would make a perfect setting for the next Mad Max movie. It is a corner of Europe associated with death and alarming yet nebulous stories of genetic mutation, a post-nuclear badland that shows what happens when mankind gets atomic energy wrong.

The reality, at least on the surface, is starkly different from the mythology, however. The almost complete absence of human activity in large swaths of the zone during the past two decades has given the area's flora and fauna a chance to first recover and then - against all the odds - to flourish.

[...]

Astonishingly, most of the animals, with the exception of the herds of wild Przewalski's horses brought in to gnaw on radioactive grass to guard against forest fires, appear to have returned to the zone of their own accord. The most recent count by the authorities showed that the zone (including a larger contaminated area in neighbouring Belarus) is home to 66 different species of mammals, including 7,000 wild boar, 600 wolves, 3,000 deer, 1,500 beavers, 1,200 foxes, 15 lynx and several thousand elks.

The area was also estimated to be home to 280 species of birds, many of them rare and endangered. Breeding birds include the rare green crane, black stork, white-tailed sea eagle and fish hawk. Wild dogs are also in evidence, though they are prime targets for wolves, a detail that prompted the American thriller writer Martin Cruz Smith to call his latest novel, which is partly set in the zone, Wolves Eat Dogs.

The only animal that appears not to have made a comeback is the bear. But ecologists say the return of large predators such as wolves is a sure sign that things are moving in the right direction.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article355805.ece

The acceptance and consumption of commodities are at the heart of this pseudo-response to a communication without response. The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely different pathological level, "the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence."