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Is History on Anyone’s Side?
John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report
…This particular [post] was inspired in part by the last paragraph of a blogpost by Sharon Astyk, whose writings on the crisis of the industrial world are among the best out there. The post, “Depletion, racism, and paving the road to hell,” focuses on a side of peak oil very few people like to talk about – the pervasive themes of race and class that run through so many of its current narratives, offering starring roles in dramas of survival only to middle-class whites, while relegating the poor and nonwhite to walk-on roles as victims in mass graves or members of the ubiquitous rampaging mobs of survivalist fantasy. While I have my disagreements with some of her stances, it’s a good post, and it points out issues that have to be addressed if the ideas discussed in this forum are ever to be more than the mental games of a privileged class with no better use for its time.
But then there’s the last paragraph, and the passage that brought me to a dead stop: “[T]he one bright spot in this future is that peak oil and climate change represent the greatest hope for reallocation of wealth and justice in the world.”
That’s an astonishing statement, and the fact that similar statements can be heard all over the peak oil community is one of the more astonishing things about it.
After all, Astyk is not exactly the only person who thinks that the crisis of industrial society is “the greatest hope” for social change. She may not be pleased to hear that the same hope guides Nick Griffin, current head of the British National Party. The BNP, for those who don’t keep tabs on the far end of British politics, is an extremist party of the far right that advocates, among other things, “repatriating” nonwhite people from Britain to their (or their great-great-great-grandparents’) country of origin. It would be hard to find a wider political gap in today’s world than the one between Griffin and Astyk, and yet both think that peak oil is on their side.
They’re not alone in that belief, either. Find a political or social movement far from the mainstream these days and odds are you’ll find it proclaiming that peak oil will put the future they desire into their waiting hands
(5 June 2007)
The Empire of Crime
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
We carry its marks, but the machine age is dead to us — oh, the assembly lines roll on in Mexico, the coal stacks still smoke in China, giant container ships still ply the seas bringing cars and appliances and laptops and clothes, but the ability to shock and disorient that the machine age once possessed is gone from the world of pretty much everyone with the hardware to read this.
We feel no more historical vertigo considering the Machine than we do the Dawn of Agriculture, and few if any of us wake up in the morning with a sense of deep angst about the move from hunting and gathering to sowing and reaping. There may be, as Gary Snyder says, no such thing as a post-agricultural civilization, but we already live in societies that take agriculture so much for granted that we feel those who live by any other means to be nearly alien. The same will very soon be just as true for industrialization.
…Really, what we ought to worry about (and hunger for) are those new facets of our time that we’re just now gaining the insight to both fear and desire.
Emerging technologies, like nanotechnology and biotechnology, ought to worry us in their potential to be used stupidly, carelessly or with evil intent, yes.
But more importantly, all that we believe to be solid is melting into air, again. The world in which we live will no more last out our lives than the ice box, buddy whip or telegraph delivery boy outlasted theirs.
We live in a deeply networked, interconnected world, a world where the leapfrogging of technology is mingling with the annihilation of distance to produce a world which not only feels different, but runs by different rules.
…We’re used to thinking of humanity and nature as opposed, but again, the new reality is a paradigm rift in which we are both responsible for learning how to properly manage the planet (since we’re already engaged in planetary management, altering its climate and curating its biodiversity: we’re just doing it badly), and for bowing to natural forces, patterns and designs to grow a successor to the old model of industry which will now respect and work with and like nature. Or we can just drive the whole bus off the cliff.
Even that most central pillar of modernity — consumerism — is changing. The kinds of transformations that await us on the other side of one-planet living I suspect may feel unrecognizable when seen from the perspective of the Twentieth century: products delivered as services, producer responsibility, zero-waste standards, strategic consumption, reputation economics, supply-chain activism, even, possibly, the end of ownership as we know it. There is a very good chance, I suspect, that being a highly networked, affluent megacity dweller in the next decade will be as culturally distant from being a well-off suburban industrial manager as that was from being a prosperous village grain-miller operating his own windmill. Again, this will probably be a good thing.
(7 June 2007)
Preaching the gospel of green
Trevor Boddy, Globe & Mail
… By and large I concur with almost every strategy for carbon use reduction, sustainable energy, and more thoughtfully conceived communities I heard proposed through a manic week filled with plenary nostrums and rubber-textured – but “Ocean Wise Initiative-approved” – B.C. halibut banquet.
But it is not this food or even the sustainability principles that have turned in my gut ever since. What I find increasingly irksome is evidence from all three events that the environmental movement is taking on the vehemence, rhetorical techniques, and most of all, the doctrinal and self-righteous moralizing of a religion in-the-making. Let me explain with vignettes from all three B.C. events.
The David Suzuki evening turned SFU’s Wosk Centre into something like a Baptist revival meeting for the gathered architects, engineers and construction clients who were his audience. With Dr. Suzuki at the lectern become-pulpit, the May 29 event was one big in-the-round collective admission of environmental guilt, the walls ringing with calls for green salvation.
Dr. Suzuki spoke solely in parables, packaged bites of green truths and corporate sins; there was no argument here, no gathering of facts and principles, but rather a string of emphatically-announced acts of faith. “How many of you have taken the pledge?” Suzuki boomed out, referring to his program of ten points citizens can start on their own to make a sustainability difference. Only a few hands quivered up, then Dr. Suzuki declaimed “That is pathetic!” Predictably, a few engineers took the audience mike to make the pledge, their green conversion seemingly complete.
(8 June 2007)
The Thing About Technology
Dave Pollard, How To Save the World
The thing about technology is that, since the dawn of the human species, every technology we have introduced has ultimately, and inadvertently, made things worse. That statement sounds categorical, so let me explain.
The human species is not very well endowed with natural gifts for survival. Compared to most other creatures, we are slow, clumsy, earthbound, and lacking in both fur and claws. Prior to the ice ages, we managed to do quite well regardless, largely by sticking to our natural habitat (the tropics, mostly tropical rainforest), eating mostly vegetarian, and using our unusually large brains and unusual ferocity to compensate for our lack of physical gifts.
With the onset of the ice ages, however, life for us (and most other life) became quite quickly more difficult. Our solution was to invent (usually copying models from nature) technologies that extended our speed, agility, ability to fly, ability to stay warm, and ability to find and hunt prey. Each of these technologies improved our short-run ability to survive, but each unintentionally created huge, intractable long-term problems:
* The invention of the arrowhead and knife allowed us to kill and tear the flesh of, large mammals. This provided an abundant source of food. It also ultimately led to the extinction of these large mammals, and produced as a consequence the first true famines.
…We’re in a constant race to keep up, and political, economic and media propagandists keep telling us we’re winning, that ‘good’ technology has outpaced and will outpace ‘bad’ technology. But we cannot win this race. All technologies have unnatural consequences that are unpredictable and readily exploitable. It is not in our nature to understand and preempt the dangers that any new technology can introduce (just look at the untested ingredients in our unprocessed foods, the recalls of improperly tested drugs and foods deliberately poisoned for profit, the tens of thousands of chemicals introduced into our air, water, food and homes with no knowledge of their long-term effects). The Precautionary Principle (which says ‘don’t do anything unless there is compelling evidence it will cause no harm’) is a brilliant idea, but one that is preposterously impossible to enforce — it is contrary to everything we do, everything we believe in, and everything our modern systems are built on.
And we’re just getting started with technology’s ‘promise’. In the next few years, new technologies like these will be introduced (because they can, and because there’s a human market for them):
* Robots designed to wage war, with no moral scruples, and quite possibly with biological parts
* Freak animals grotesquely bred to ‘grow’ replacement, harvestable human organs
…We will initially express revulsion at these technologies, because they don’t seem to have any positive or popular function. But then we’ll shrug and realize that they are just extensions of technologies developed for ‘good’, and that if there’s a ‘market’ for them, or if the propagandists developing them can argue (as they will) that their end purpose (portrayed in glowing, or urgent, terms) justifies their unsavoury means, we will simply insist that, like factory farms and foreign torture prisons, they be kept out of our sight and mind, so we don’t get stressed about them.
A couple of years ago I gave up believing that top-down political or economic changes, or spontaneous social revolutions, will save us from ourselves. They never have. But I’ve always had a soft spot for innovative technology. In the short run, it can work wonders. It’s like the addictive painkillers taken by the terminally ill — for awhile, everything seems wonderful, but then the pain is back with a greater vengeance, and you need even more, of a different, stronger drug because you’ve built up a resistance to the old one. The one that worked for awhile is now worse than useless, because it longer has any effect, yet you’re still addicted to it. It’s no longer enough.
It’s never enough.
(4 June 2007)
