According to Guattari, the three ecologies include the environment, social relations and human subjectivity. He argues that we are constantly bombarded by images, information, and data that we accept it all too passively, without questioning it or having our own subjective response to it. It’s almost as if we are conditioned to respond (by not really responding) a certain way and we do and this needs to change. For our purposes, he states that educational institutions should strive to achieve the permanent evolution of both practice and its theoretical framework. Guattari suggests that in order to avoid this passive and repetitive cycle, we ought to process the world through three lenses: social ecology, mental ecology, and environmental ecology, and they should not be three separate lenses since they overlap.

Guattari asserts that human relationships with the socius, the psyche, and nature are deteriorating because of damage and pollution, as well as the ignorance and passivity with which those issues are being confronted by individuals and irresponsible authorities. The limited nature of the technico-scientific power of humanity is obvious when nature kicks back (he gives the examples of AIDS and the Chernobyl disaster) and reminds us of our blatant ignorance towards it.

Guattari heavily criticizes capitalism and media and claims that governments and businesses are highly motivated by profit. He argues that we live in a time when along with animal species, words, expressions, and gestures of human solidarity are also disappearing. Consequently, our social lens needs to evaluate issues involving the Third World, child labour, and the struggles of women, the unemployed, immigrants, and the otherwise marginalized, whose troubles hide behind a cloak of silence. He claims that in today’s world, money drives us more than anything, but if responsible social and political practices are to be restored, we need to work for humanity, rather than monetary gain. Consequently, mental ecology demands that we re-evaluate the ultimate goal of work and human activities in terms of criteria other than those of profit and productivity.

He says he is not trying to propose a fully constituted model of future society, but arguing that we should use our expanded understanding of the whole range of ecological components to set in place new systems of value since a market system which regulates the distribution of financial and social rewards for human social activities on the basis of profit alone, is becoming less and less legitimate. A possible step in the right direction is to use computerization since it has unleashed the potential for new forms of exchange of value, new collective negotiations, whose ultimate product will be more individual, more singular forms of social action. We need to encompass practices which immediately profit no one individual entity, but contribute to the process of enrichment.

Guattari, F. (1989). The three ecologies. New Formations, 8, 131-148.