|
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek,
New York: 1974 ISBN 0061219800, Page 9
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is
that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one
extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has
continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and
colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with
ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come
down to the water to cool my eyes.
Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History Of The
Senses, New York: 1990 ISBN0394573358 Page 17
The senses don’t just make sense of life in
bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels
and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern. They take contingency
samples. They allow an instance to stand for a mob. They negotiate and
settle for a reasonable version and make small, delicate transactions. Life
showers over everything, radiant, gushing. The senses feed shards of
information to the brain like microscopic pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
1996 Wilson, Edward Osborne, In Search Of
Nature, Washington, ISBN 1559632151, Page 57
If one of these ants were a six-foot-tall
person, it would be running along those trails of pyrazine at a pace of
about 3:45 minutes per mile. That’s about the current human world record.
At the end of the trail, after running roughly the distance of a marathon,
it would pick up a load of 300 pounds or ore and carry it home at the
slightly slower pace of 4 minutes per mile. Upon reaching the nest, it
would climb down through the galleries and chambers of he nest for a
distance of up to one mile before depositing its leaf load.
Foster, Catherine Osgood, Terrific
Tomatoes 1975: ISBN 0878570942, Page 2
Among all the available microorganisms that
inhabit soil, those that derive nitrogen from the air are especially
useful. There are so many of these nitrogen-fixing and other kinds of
bacteria that you can expect a billion in each gram of soil, some at rest in
the spore stage and others at work getting energy from the carbohydrates,
fats, or proteins of the organic matter they live on and decompose. One
kind converts organic nitrogen to ammonia; another converts ammonia to
nitrites; and another changes nitrites to nitrates, the form in which plants
can use nitrogen.
There are also actinomycetes, occurring 15 to
20 million per gram, little organisms halfway between bacteria and fungi.
They are what give newly-turned soul in the spring that fresh earthy smell.
They are at work in the soul and in compost piles helping to decay the raw
materials into soft, dark humus.
Along with these are fungi, in quantities of
about a million per gram, with a larger structure than the other organisms,
often with a whole maze of tiny threads that stretch up unto cellulose, for
instance, and decompose it. In addition, the population of soil creatures
includes yeasts, one-celled protozoans, and the microscopic plants called
algae which, if they have some light, can work on the carbon dioxide of the
air and change it to organic matter as higher plants do.
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THE NATURAL STEP NEWSLETTER - SPRING
2000 -- 10 Mar 2000
System Condition Four -- Technical
From a systems perspective, natural systems are
inherently efficient. Unfortunately, human systems today are not. This is
where people have a lot to learn from the planet. The challenge is for
people to understand the local conditions and boundaries of a given
environment and then to find ways to design and use the resources within
that environment. Dr. George Basile, Senior Scientist at The Natural Step
US, explains, "There is opportunity in system condition four for people to
work with and within the system - to be efficient in the same way a tree is
efficient. A tree throws off branches and leaves, blows off water and
oxygen, and finally falls flat and sprawls on the ground. Yes, it makes a
huge mess, but a tree is still efficient within the system because the
'waste' it produces is used as a resource for something, or someone, else.
We can shift from linear models of infinite resource use and infinite growth
to cyclical models of infinite transformation and change. This is how
nature works."
For many companies, an important step is
redefining their products as services. For example, someone selling lamps
might come to realize that what they are actually selling is light. In most
cases, this new perspective makes the prospect of redesigning products and
operations more appealing. It typically makes throwing out the "stuff" that
supplies your service seem like a bad idea. In all cases, it opens,
enables, and encourages innovation and creativity. In doing this, companies
can make a stronger connection between their businesses and the rest of
humanity and the living systems we are imbedded in. Companies come to see
their business as in some way helping to meet human needs -- which often
brings the concepts of fairness and equity into the equation.
Howard T. Odum, Power In Ecological Systems,
Environment, Power, And Society, New York: 1971 ISBN 0471652709
Page 90
We find the efficiency of gross plant
production to be about 2 percent....
Casey Walker, “Interview with Charlene
Spretnak,” Wild Duck Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, Winter 1998.
We continue to take the “immense bribe” of the
Megamachine,” as Lewis Mumford put it thirty years ago: the absorption of
every human activity into the technological realm by seductive assurances of
ever-increasing ease, power, and abundance. We seem oblivious to the
dependence being created. Now that we have pocket calculators, few people
master or remember basic arithmetic. Now that we have “spell-check,” young
people see no need to master spelling. Industrial arts classes, where boys
and (at long last) girls learned the pride of accomplishment that comes from
working with one’s hands and natural materials, have been replaced in most
schools with computer labs. Many young people can push a button on a
microwave oven but cannot cook at all. Social skills and various subtle
benefits of human interaction are also in decline, as growing numbers of us
spend more time each day talking to machines than people— and as children
who log a great deal of computer time exhibit shyness and withdrawn
behavior.
My point about technology, in the book, is that
it’s neither evil nor value-free. Rather, the design of every new
technological device reflects our cultural history. An awareness of that
history is essential if we are to recognize dangerous tendencies and chart
an eco-socially wholesome future. Failing that, we’re vulnerable to all the
Empower-the- Autonomous-Individual hype that basically lets everything else
go to hell—and, in the bargain, diminishes to pathetic proportions the
individual’s full experience of being.
Marx, Leo. The Domination of Nature and
the Redefinition of Progress. Page 203
A culture’s belief in Progress, put
differently, derives from (and refers to) that distinctively modern kind of
social change made possible by acquiring from the realm of nature the
unprecedented power to establish a steadily increasing domination of nature.
Macy, Joanna R., and Molly Young Brown.
Coming Back to Life Canada: 1998. ISBN 086571391X, Page 39
We have studied the Earth and the cosmos,
attempting to discover the essential building blocks of life that we might
manipulate them into more efficient mechanisms to provide for our wants and
needs. We have acted as if we could know and control the world from the
outside, as if we were separate from it. We came to think of ourselves as
made of better stuff than the animals and plants and rocks and water around
us. And our technologies of the last centuries amplified disastrously the
ecological effects of that assumption.
Marshall D. Sahlins, Evolution And
Culture, Michigan, 1960: ISBN 0472087762 Page 20
One common notion of progress can be dismissed
out of hand. Most of us have a tendency to equate progress with efficiency,
which is not altogether surprising because this idea is peculiarly
appropriate to a competitive, free-enterprise economy. But an organism’s
thermodynamic efficiency is not a measure of its general evolutionary
status. By efficiency we usually mean some ratio of output to input; thus
in rating a machine’s efficiency we divide the output of work by the input
of energy. Analogously, a measure of the thermodynamic efficiency of a
living thing would be the amount of energy captured and used relative to the
organism’s own expenditure in the process of taking it. But suppose we know
the efficiency of an organism as an energy-capturing machine; the use to
which the efficiency is put remains unknown. Is it put into build-up of
higher structures or into more numerous offspring, each of which
concentrates a relatively low amount of energy. The implication is
inescapable: an organism can be more efficient than another and yet remain
less highly developed.
Elizabeth Sawin, “Dead Zone Economics,” The
Sustainability Institute, October 1, 2002.
www.sustainer.org/pubs/columns/10.01.02Swain.html
The headline in the August 16 issue of Science
magazine is ominous—“Dead Zone Grows.” To the right of the headline is a
map of the Gulf of Mexico. And drawn on the map, hugging the shoreline, is
an irregular green stripe. This is the Dead Zone, and area of the Gulf
where oxygen levels are so low that most marine organisms—including crab and
shrimp—cannot survive. A primary cause of the problem is fertilizer runoff
from farms in the Mississippi River watershed. The runoff stimulates algae
blooms. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and decompose, using up
oxygen in the process. This year the Dead Zone is bigger than ever before
-- 22,000 square kilometers—an area larger than New Jersey….
Farmers—like all entrepreneurs in free-market
systems— compete to stay in business. And the terms of that competition are
well defined. Who can produce the most grain for the least cost of labor,
land, machinery, and inputs? The farmers who are the best at maximizing
this equation—the most “efficient” farmers—are the most likely to stay in
business. As the “least efficient” farmers and farming practices disappear,
farming as a whole becomes more and more efficient. This has brought
enormous innovation and gains in productivity. Yields of corn have risen
from about 30 bushels per acre in 1940 to around 120 bushels per acre
today….
The kind of efficiency that determines whether
a farmer earns a profit and manages to hold on to his land is a very
particular efficiency. It is the efficiency of producing just one thing—a
crop—with the frugal use of a few things—labor, land, equipment, and inputs,
like seed and fertilizer. There is nothing in this equation about producing
health in the Gulf of Mexico or about being frugal with water quality. In
the equation that determines who survives in farming, the Gulf of Mexico is
invisible. And that is why the Gulf of Mexico has a Dead Zone and why that
Dead Zone is growing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is
nothing in our current definition of efficiency that is a natural law. We
could re-orient our thinking to expand what we reward. We could begin to
think of clean water or regenerating soil as products of farming in addition
to wheat and barley. Many European countries have done just that. Farmers
and farmland are seen as producing beauty, water purification and
biodiversity as well as crops, and government programs offer payments for
these other kinds of productivity.
Sam Keen
There were fish before there were fishermen,
indigo buntings before ornithologists, and a whole earth before a Whole
Earth Catalog.
Havel, Vaclav. The Art of the Impossible.
New York: 1994. ISBN 0676970494
I am increasingly inclined to believe that even
the term “environment,” which is inscribed on the banners of many
commendable civic movements, is in its own way misguided, because it is
unwittingly the product of the very anthropocentrism that has caused
extensive devastation of our earth. The word “environment” tacitly implies
that whatever is not human merely envelops us and is therefore inferior to
us, something we need care for only if it is in our interest to do so. I do
not believe this to be the case. The world is not divided into two types of
being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the
universe—they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of
which we are but a part, though a unique one.
I believe that the devastation of the
environment brought about by the communist regimes is a warning to all of
contemporary civilization. I believe that you should read the message
coming to you from our part of the world as an appeal to protect the world
against all those who despise the mystery of Being, whether they be cynical
businessmen with only the interests of their corporations at heart, or
left-wing saviors high on cheap ideological utopias.
Both lack what I would call a metaphysical
anchor, that is, a humble respect for the whole of creation, and a
consciousness of our obligation to it. If parents believe in God, their
children will not have to go to school wearing gas masks, and their eyes
will be free of pus.
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation And The
Gospel Of Efficiency, Massachusetts: 1959 Page 127
Lord Kelvin, he declared, was once asked how
water power development at Niagara Falls would affect its natural beauty;
His reply was that of a true engineer: ‘What has that got to do with it? I
consider it almost an international crime that so much energy has been
allowed to go to waste.’”
Sut Jhally v. James Twitchell, From Stay
Free! issue #16.
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/16/twitchell_text.html
I see a great deal of advertising and
commercialism as being the articulated will of consumers rather than the air
pumped out by commercial interests. Let's take an example where you seem to
hold all the cards. Take De Beers' diamonds campaign. What is more
ridiculous than the browbeating of men into buying utterly worthless hunks
of stone to make Harry Oppenheimer and his descendants wealthy?
Here's this company saying that if you want to
be successful in courting women, it requires two months of your salary.
Isn't this an example, from your point of view, of power from the outside
compressing human freedom and desire? Yet as hideous as it is--and I think
it the most hideous of advertising campaigns--there is something in it that
speaks deeply to human beings in moments of high anxiety--namely, how to
stabilize a frantic period of time. You stabilize it by buying something
that all logic tells you is ridiculous and stupid, at a time in your life
when you are the least able to afford it, when it is the most wasteful
expenditure, and the cruelest exploitation in terms of how these stones are
mined. And they're completely worthless. I mean, at least Nike makes good
shoes! You would say, "Boy, I rest my case," but I say, "Is there any other
explanation?" The explanation, I think, is the need to make ceremony, to
fetishize moments of great anxiety. You can actually see them colonizing
these moments later in life; now they're saying the ten-year anniversary or
the twenty-year anniversary demands a whole new panoply of these otherwise
worthless stones.
Guardini, Romano. Letters from Lake
Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human race. Michigan: 1994.
ISBN 0802801080 Pages 13 and 16
In the sailing ship we had a natural existence,
for all the presence of mind and spirit in the situation. We had our being
in a natural culture. In the modern steamer, however, we are in an
artificial situation; measured by the vital elastic human limits, nature has
been decisively eliminated. Once there was an order, a living space, which
made possible a human existence in a specific sense. On the steamer that is
no longer present. We can no longer be seafarers in the first and special
sense in which seafaring is a basic form of human existence filled with its
own content. The crew members of a liner are not essentially different from
employees on the assembly line of a factory....
In all manual work we find the primal
phenomenon of culture that is human but close to nature. Now compare the
smithy with our factories and their electric machines. And compare
carpentry and bricklaying with concrete or prefabricated housing. Compare
the work of the cabinetmaker or wheelwright with the division of labor at a
Ford factory, which breaks down the products into small parts that are
produced in vast numbers daily.
In the former we have culture, a work of mind
and spirit, yet still close to nature. In it we are creative and stand
breast to breast with the things and forces of nature. Here we are human in
the deepest sense of the term. But this human culture has almost
disappeared. We no longer have wheeled vehicles pulled by animals, with all
the vitality that is in them and around them, but automobiles.
Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations,
Book one, Chapter 1
www.bibliomania.com/NonFiction/Smith/Wealth/Bk1Chap01.html
To take an example, therefore, from a very
trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very
often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to
this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade),
nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the
invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion),
could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and
certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is
now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is
divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise
peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third
cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the
head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it
on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade
by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a
pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations,
which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in
others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen
a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where
some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But
though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated
with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make
among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound
upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons,
therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a
day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand
pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a
day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without
any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly
could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that
is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four
thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of
performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their
different operations.
Like most of my generation, I was brought up
on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being
a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired
a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment.
But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have
undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the
world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and
that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite
different from what always has been preached….
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain
number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many
pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an
invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins
are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.
In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would
take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on
as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The
men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go
bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown
out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other
plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In
this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all
round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more
insane be imagined?
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America,
New York: Avon Books, 1977 Page 7
The terms exploitation and nurture, on the
other hand, describe a division not only between persons but also within
persons.... Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the
characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner
to be a model exploiter, and a model nurturer, I take the old-fashioned idea
or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the
nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard
of the nurturer is care.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and civilization
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934, Page 359
Le Play once asked his auditors what was the
most important thing that came out of the mine; after one had guessed coal
and another iron and another gold, he answered: No, the most important thing
that comes out of the mine is the miner.
Thompson, William Irwin, The American
Replacement Of Nature, New York, 199: ISBN 0385420250,Pages 68,
133-4
We will have this polity of mediocracy in which
imagineers manipulate images for the electropeasantry as long as we have
television as our dominant form of communication. It will do no good to try
to create some new Amish Lancaster County in which there is no TV, for that
quaint space will only become yet another movie set of heritage and
tradition in the midst of the vast electronic polity. It will only be when
television is superseded by some new technology of communication, just as
television superseded print, that we will have a new noetic polity created
by the new means of communication. When that happens, humanity will
probably look back upon the age of television as a dark age....
If light can be both wave and particle, so can
humanity, for it seems to me that the mankind of hominid males also contains
two profoundly true but opposed human beings, and that each comes equipped
with its own light and shadow. One is immanental, and sees divinity within
the pattern of connectiveness of Earth, animals, and women. The other is
transcendental and sees Earth, animals, and women as an imprisonment of
spirit and cosmic mind. One wants in, the other wants out. One is a wave
which, because of its own infolded order, feels itself to be in resonance
with everything. The other is a particle, which because of its limited
self-definition feels alienated and alone and wishes to have power over the
others that impinge on its self-inflicted boundaries. For the sake of a
working distinction, let’s call these two types of human males the poet and
the engineer.
The poet loves ambiguity, complexity, and the
lingual, erotic play with words; the engineer loves logic, manual systems of
control, and computational machine codes of one meaning only. The poet
loves to hang out with women, to listen to them, sleep with them, smell
them, taste them, and all without benefit of chemical additives of
deodorants, perfumes, mouthwashes, and feminine hygiene douches. The
engineer locks onto object fixation and stimulating fetishes; a perfume or a
sexy costume can trigger his response, but his excitement is as evanescent
as it is artificial, for no sooner is he hydraulically relieved of the
pressure to ejaculate than he begins to feel the need of getting back to
work with his fellows, be they in the lab, the office, the pub, the gang, or
the country club.
The poet likes things that are slow,
contemplative, rich, dark, complex, soft, wet, and moving. The engineer
likes things that are hard, fixed, and gleamingly stainless-steel bright.
Where do these two different systems of erotic fascination come from? From
toilet training? Or even earlier with hospital births in which the entire
institutional power of the hospital descends on the infant to scrub him with
chemicals and package him in detergent-smelling fabrics so that he can be
encased in glass and steel and set in a wheeled vehicle that is moving away
from that vulva, a vulva that is not seen as a Georgia O’Keeffe flower but a
wet and repulsive female mess from which he may have emerged but now
distance himself with as much technology as possible? In a technologically
assisted birth, we are brought forth by scalpel and forceps and, perhaps,
learn to bond at once with these tools of bright and stainless steel. In a
natural birth, we are massaged into life by a vagina and are awakened to
consciousness by lips moving across our face and sliding down the length of
our entire body.
AtKisson, Alan.
Believing Cassandra. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green
Publishing 1999.ISBN 1890132160,
Pages 14 and 25
In one of several articles
concerning the book [Limits to Growth], Time magazine
described it as written in "restrained, nonhysterical, at times almost
apologetic language," and noted with sadness that "the study closes almost
every escape hatch." Technology would solve the resources problem only to
exacerbate the pollution problem. Efficiency could reduce pollution, but
that wouldn't stop population growth from running rampant and using up all
the land for growing food. "There is only one way out," says the report:
"economic as well as population growth must be stopped cold some time
between 1975 and 1990 by holding world investment in new plant and machinery
equal to the rate at which physical capital wears out."
Efficiency and clean-up
technologies did make it possible to reduce emissions of various kinds --
but growth in population and affluence erased many of those gains while
increasing unforeseen forms of pollution such as greenhouse gases and
ozone-layer destroyers.
There are no limits to Development. The way we
live can always be made better: more beautiful, more inventive, more
creative, more efficient, more fulfilling. Technologies can be radically
and continuously improved. Humans can learn, change, adapt, and evolve,
often with astonishing rapidity. We can repair most of the damage we have
caused, restore some of what has been lost, reinvent the systems on which we
depend for survival. We have transformed ourselves and our civilizations
many times in the past, at both large scales and small; we are doing so now;
and we will do so over and over again. Since there is no limit on
humanity's capacity to evolve, Development can go on virtually forever.
Gorner Peter, “Simplicity, efficiency of
bull calf clones moves society closer to human cloning” Chicago Tribune,
01/07/2000
They’re called Tommy, Andy, Timothy and Anthony
- the first initials spell TATA, for the genetic control region of their DNA
- and they are rambunctious clones of a world-famous Japanese bull. But the
simplicity, efficiency and elegance behind their creation moves society a
giant step closer to human cloning, and it’s happening much faster than
anyone predicted. The four bull calves, ranging in age from 7 to 9 months,
unveiled last week by the University of Connecticut and the Kogashima Cattle
Breeding Development Institute in Japan, indicate how biologists are
overcoming technical difficulties that once seemed insurmountable.
“The results of the experiment say that age is
not critical. If you extend it to humans, it may mean that a couple who
can’t get pregnant by any other means has an option,” said Dr. Mario
Capecchi, a genetics pioneer at the University of Utah who wrote a
commentary about the experiment in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences…
.
“It took the Scots 300 tries to clone Dollie
the sheep. So that was 1 in 300; it wasn’t in the ballpark of being able
think about human cloning. But the efficiency with these bull calves was 1
in 10, even though two of the calves died shortly after birth. It’s not
perfect. What would we think about a procedure where the kids could die
afterward?
“But in just a few years, the numbers have
dropped from 1 in 300, to 1 in 10. If it gets to be 1 in 2, then what? As
soon as the probability reaches the same level as normal conception, then
from an ethical point of view you have to find another argument”….
Shephard, Paul “Virtually Hunting Reality in
the Forests of Simulacra” in Soule, Michael E., and Gary Lease.
Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction. D.C.:
1995 ISBN 1559633107, Page 17
The postmodern constructionist view is that all
texts, reports, narratives are but descriptions -- focused chatter about an
unknowable external world, psychobabble, webs of words that serve as
ammunition in struggles over who dominates whom. But Derrida, Lyotard, and
other deconstructionists have about them the smell of the coffeehouse, a
world of ironic, patronizing remoteness in which the search for generality
and truth would be an embarrassment. Moreover, somehow justified by the
deconstruction of nature are the theme parks, malls, and other virtual
simulations of originals that create a world easier to control, a world
where imagination is the only real landscape and where denial replace even
disengagement and relativism. The loss of contract with nature, a biophilic
deprivation, must lead to pathology. But other animal species, because they
have no words to confuse themselves, are not so deluded.
Kunstler, James Howard Home from Nowhere,
New York, 1996: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684811960 Page 85-6
The artifact replacements for these rural
things in the form of a suburban housing subdivision turn out to be rather
paltry. They end up acting more as sinister barriers to other living
patterns, leaving us in a kind of neurobiological slum. There is the
numbing undertone of the lawnmowers in their ceaseless battle to discipline
the monoculture of grass. There is the sound of radios and the smell of
soapy water evaporating on warm asphalt as the cars are washed in the
driveways. The odor of pesticide wafts off the rose bushes, making us
shudder with intimations of cancer or mutant offspring. One is neither in
nature, nor in an authentic human community (which is also in and of
nature). This unreality turns out to be very costly. Maintaining the
artifice of millions of little cabins in the woods like these causes a
tremendous amount of what we call environmental damage, meaning it disrupts
or destroys existing patterns in nature, and lately it does so at a scale
that begins to threaten the larger intersecting patterns of the organism
that constitute our planet.
A more optimistic view of technology, for
instance, might pose the great advances of our time as the prelude to an
evolutionary leap that would permit us to live much more equitably among
other living patterns. Almost all the damage we’ve caused has occurred in
the past 200 years, nanosecond in geological time. Our great-great-
grandchildren may look back at these crude industrial centuries as some
ghastly stage of human development like puberty, complete with all the
physical disfigurement and idiocy that we associate with puberty.
Cooper, Gail. Air-Conditioning America.
Maryland: 1998. ISBN 0801857163, Page 2
For years both the pleasant and the irritating
aspects of opening windows were inevitably linked, for the weather has
always been something admittedly beyond human control. That is why we still
laugh at Mark Twain's joke that "everyone talks about the weather, but no
one does anything about it." Yet with the appearance of air conditioning,
the technical community began to take seriously the idea of creating a
man-made indoor climate -- the mechanical reproduction indoors of the best
aspects of the weather outside. At last, engineers argued, human beings
would be in control. We could -- and some argued that we should -- close
our windows forever.
McKibben, Bill. “Out There In The Middle Of
The Buzz.” FORBES ASAP December 2, 1996 Page 107
Electronic communication, for the first time,
makes culture ubiquitous. Almost nobody read books five hours a day, or
went to the theater every night. We live in the first moment when humans
receive more of their information secondhand than first; instead of relying
primarily on contact with nature and with each other, we rely primarily on
the pre-chewed, on someone else’s experience. Our life is, quite literally,
mediated.
Kunstler, James Howard, The Geography Of
Nowhere, New York, 1993, ISBN 0671707744, Page 131
The road is now like television, violent and
tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings
and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles and hour and
forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not
celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We
don’t want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not
rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time,
and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because
everyplace looks like noplace in particular.
Wilson, Edward Osborne, In Search Of
Nature, Washington, 1996: ISBN 1559632151, Page 119
It is notable that the phobias are most easily
evoked by many of the greatest dangers of mankind’s ancient environment,
including tight spaces, heights, thunderstorms, running water, snakes, and
spiders, but are rarely evoked by the greatest dangers of modern
technological society, including guns, knives, automobiles, explosives, and
electric sockets.
White, Richard. The Nature of Progress:
Progress and the Environment.
Mainstream environmentalism, however, has never
really demanded deprivation, at least from its supporters. It, in the best
progressive tradition, often only seeks to make consumption more efficient.
Environmentalism has been, and remains, a largely middle-class and
metropolitan movement. And, as Samuel Hays has argued, it has represented
not a rejection of consumption, but a new aspect of it. In saving the
earth, middle-class environmentalists also opened it up for their own
leisure activities. Wild lands no longer consumed for their ore, timber, or
energy are now consumed as sources of experience: hiking, skiing, rafting,
photography. It would be hard to read a magazine such as Outside or an REI
or Eddie Bauer catalog as a rejection of consumerism and consumption. And
as organized groups, environmentalists assert a privileged claim to valued
resources.
The environment becomes analogous to an
orchestra made up of numerous different instruments—and there is a score for
the orchestra to play, but there is no concert hall. Instead, they have to
play out in a very busy street. Between the conductor being arrested for
obstructing traffic, the string section getting flattened by a truck, the
percussionists running for their lives, and a touring mariachi band deciding
to sit in, whatever emerges from the surrounding din will probably have only
a chance resemblance to what the score intended.
Sagoff, Mark. The Economy of the Earth.
New York: ISBN 0521341132 Pages 28-9
Our environmental goals—cleaner air and water,
the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, and the like—are not to be
construed, then, simply as personal wants or preferences; they re not
interests to be “priced” by markets or by cost-benefit analysis, but are
views or beliefs that may find their way, as public values, into
legislation. These goals stem from our character as a people, which is not
something we choose, as we might choose a necktie or a cigarette, but
something we recognize, something we are.
These goals presuppose the reality of public or
shared values we can recognize together, values that are discussed and
criticized on their merits and are not to be confused with preferences that
are appropriately priced in markets. Our democratic political processes
allow us to argue our beliefs on their merits— as distinct from pricing our
interests at the margin.
Sagoff, Mark. Carrying Capacity and
Ecological Economics. Pages 28-9
Moreover, the so-called carrying capacity of
the earth for human beings is not a scientific concept and cannot be
measured by biologists. It is an elastic notion depending on social,
economic, industrial, and agricultural practices.
Morality teaches us that we are rich in
proportion to the number of things we can afford to let alone, that we are
happier in proportion to the desires we can control rather than those we can
satisfy, and that a simpler life is more worth living. Economic growth may
not be morally desirable even if it I ecologically sustainable.
Advances in technology may one by one expunge
the instrumental reasons for protecting nature, leaving us only with our
cultural commitments and moral intuitions. To argue for environmental
protection on utilitarian grounds— because of carrying capacity or sources
raw materials and sinks for wastes— is therefore to erect only a fragile and
temporary defense for the spontaneous wonder and glory of the natural world.
Roodman, David Malin. Harnessing the
Market for the Environment. New York: 1998. ISBN 0393318524,
Pages 71 and 155
Not only does a modern combine harvester, for
instance, let one pair of hands do the work of many, it also works most
economically on large fields. Technologies like these contributed much to
the rapid fall in the number of U.S. farms since 1930. Similarly, factory
trawlers as long as football fields are leading to the demise of whole
fishing towns.
The automation threat to jobs and communities
does not end there. Industries that do not automate as fast as the rest of
the economy will shed jobs as surely as those that do. This is because the
more efficiently other industries use workers -- that is, the more income
they generate per hour of labor employed -- the higher pay those workers can
demand. Resource-intensive industries with low worker productivity will
eventually find themselves outbid by other industries. Unless they get more
subsidies, they will have to scale back operations. This process of drawing
labor to its most valuable use -- essentially one of creative destruction --
is precisely what has diversified and enriched industrial economies over the
last two centuries. For better or worse, it is not easily resisted….
Economists usually argue that governments
should allow environmental harm just up to the point where the costs to
society begin to outweigh the economic benefits. But environmental
problems, like most important issues, involve more than costs and benefits:
they also involve values and vision, rights and wrongs. Yet if the crime of
pollution pays, cost-benefit analysis endorses it.
Callicot, Baird, J. Earth’s Insights: A
Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian
Outback. California: 1994. ISBN 0520085590 Page xvii
As the environmental movement has arisen these
past two decades, the environmental crisis itself has deepened.
Paradoxically, a majority of Americans describe themselves as strongly
committed to the environment, yet our soils, water, air, and countless
species of plants and animals degrade and disappear at catastrophic rates.
Globally, population has doubled and natural resources have been cut in half
in only fifty years.
The crisis cannot be resolved simply by making
present arrangements more efficient, although that would help. Our
political and economic systems are based on obsolete notions that the
environment is an infinite storehouse of raw materials for industry, as well
as a bottomless container for waste. These assumptions are about as
accurate as the long-held belief that the world is flat, yet they endure as
the source of everyday behavior. Examples of this blind denial come before
me everyday as a state senator in Sacramento.
Environmental law has made a difference for
advocates, but less so for living ecosystems. California forestry law, for
example, mandates “maximum timber productivity” as the official policy
goal. If you are an ancient redwood tree on our North coast, “maximum
productivity” means a death sentence. A 700-year-old redwood has no
intrinsic value apart from the price it will command as the deck of a
condominium.
Brooks, David. “Cell Phones Naturalists.”
UTNE Reader March - April 1999 Page 76
My main problem, though, was that I brought to
REI a set of false presuppositions. I thought that if you were the type who
wanted to go out into nature, you would want to be natural. You’d be a
woodsy sort of person who likes to get away from the pollution and
artificiality of civilization and find spiritual cleansing in the
wilderness. In short, you’d value nature, not high-tech wizardry. You’d
aim for anti-commercial simplicity, not flashy consumer connoisseurship....
Back at REI, however, the culture war between
the party of the machine and the party of nature is obsolete. The people
here are simultaneously pro-technology and pro-nature. Seattle is one of
the most technologically advanced cities in America and also one of the most
technologically advanced cities in America and also one of the most
environmentally aware. No matter how conservative or libertarian the people
in suburban Seattle may be on economic matters, they are environmentalists
through and through. And the equipment at REI seems to have reconciled
nature and economic development. Today, after all, the machine in the
garden is a cell phone in the forest. In the postindustrial era, technology
and nature no longer seem such rivals. We are now seeing the emergence of
the Cell Phone Naturalists (a phrase I owe to National Public Radio’s Julia
Redpath), who are technologists, capitalists, and environmentalists all at
once. Cell Phone Naturalists are optimistic about material progress, as
were the materialists yore. But they don’t see society as a giant mechanism
run according to rational, comprehensible laws, as their techie predecessors
did. They don’t think mechanistically at all. Instead, they think
organically, like romantics.
David G and Carol P. Myers. Wealth and
Well-Being. New York: 1992. ISBN 0380-715228 Page 39
This may be a surprise, but in the University
of Michigan’s national surveys what matters more than absolute wealth is
perceived wealth. Money is two steps removed from happiness. Actual income
doesn’t much influence happiness; how satisfied we are with our income
does. If we’re content with our income, regardless of how much it is, we’re
likely to say we’re happy. Strangely, however, there is only a slight
tendency for people who make lots of money to be more satisfied with what
they make. It’s true: Satisfaction isn’t so much getting what you want as
wanting what you have. This implies two ways to be rich: One is to have
great wealth. The other is to have few wants. “Peace in a thatched
hut—that is happiness,” says a Chinese proverb.
Berger, John, Pig Earth New York,
1979: ISBN 0394512685 Page 208
When a peasant resists the introduction of a
new technique or method of working, it is not because he cannot see its
possible advantages—his conservatism is neither blind nor lazy—but because
he believes that these advantages cannot, by the nature of things, be
guaranteed, and that, should they fail, he will then be cut off alone and
isolated from the routine of survival.
Leider, Richard, Repacking Your Bags,
California, 1995: ISBN 1881052672 Page 3
I’m a walking advertisement for a Patagonia or
L.L. Bean catalogue. But of course, I have to be. As expedition leader,
I’m responsible for the entire group. So, in addition to the required
group-size first aid kit, I’ve also been sure to bring along items that will
make our trek not just safe, but enjoyable. I’m no Boy Scout, but I
certainly subscribe to their motto, “Be prepared.” And I have made it a
point to be prepared for just about anything.
As we walk along, Koyie keeps glancing at my
pack. Time and again, I see him mentally comparing the heavy load I carry
with his own, which consists of nothing more than a spear and a stick used
for cattle tending. Eventually we get to talking about my backpack, and he
expresses his fascination with seeing its contents. Pleased at how
impressed he appears to be, I offer to show him my stuff. I look forward to
letting him see how carefully I’ve prepared for our journey and how ready I
am for anything.
The opportunity presents itself late that
afternoon as we are setting up camp near another boma. Proudly, I commence
to lay out for him everything in my pack. I unsnap snaps, unzip zippers,
and un-Velcro Velcro. From pouches, pockets, and compartments I produce all
sorts of strange and wonderful items. Eating utensils, cutting devices,
digging tools. Direction finders, star gazers, map readers. Things to
write with and on. Various garments in various sizes for various
functions. Medical supplies, remedies, and cures. Little bottles inside
little bottles inside little bottles. Waterproof bags for everything.
Amazing stuff!
At length, I have all the gear spread out. It
looks like that photo they always have in the centerfold of the great
explorer article that shows everything necessary for a successful trip to
the farthest reaches of the planet. Needless to say, I’m pretty satisfied
with my collection.
I look over at Koyie to gauge his reaction. He
seems amused, but silent. I understand. Surveying the items arrayed about
us, I don’t know quite what to say, either. Finally, after several minutes
of just gazing at everything, Koyie turns to me and asks very simply, but
with great intensity: “Does all this make you happy?”
Cox, Michael W., and
Richard Alm. The Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We
Think. New York: Basic Books 1999. ISBN 046504784X
Page 7
TABLE 1.1 The World
Through Rip's Eyes
|
ITEM |
1970 |
MID 1990s* |
|
Average size of
new home (square feet) |
1,500 |
2,150 |
|
Average
household size (persons) |
3.14 |
2.64 |
|
Average square
feet per person in the household |
478 |
814 |
|
New homes with
central heat and air-conditioning |
34% |
81% |
|
New homes with a
garage |
58% |
87% |
|
Housing units
lacking complete plumbing |
6.9% |
2.3% |
|
Homes lacking a
telephone |
13.0% |
6.3% |
|
Households with
computer |
0% |
41% |
|
Households with
no vehicle |
20.4% |
7.9% |
|
Households with
two or more vehicles |
29.3% |
61.9% |
|
Households with
color TV |
34.0% |
97.9$ |
|
Households with
cable TV |
6.3% |
63.4% |
|
Households with
two or more TVs |
30.7% |
72.8% |
|
Households with
videocassette recorder |
0% |
89% |
|
Households with
answering machine |
0% |
65% |
|
Households with
cordless phone |
0% |
66% |
|
Households with
computer printer |
0% |
38% |
|
Households with
camcorder |
0% |
26% |
|
Households with
cellular phone |
0% |
34% |
|
Households with
CD player |
0% |
49% |
|
Households with
clothes washer |
62.1% |
83.2% |
|
Households with
clothes dryer |
44.6% |
75.0% |
|
Households with
a microwave |
<1% |
89.5% |
|
Households with
a coffeemaker |
88.6% |
99.9% |
|
Households with
dishwasher |
26.5% |
54.6% |
|
Households with
vacuum cleaner |
92.0% |
99.9% |
|
Households with
frost-free refrigerator |
<25% |
86.8% |
|
Households with
outdoor gas grill |
<5% |
28.5% |
|
Mean household
ownership of furniture |
$2,230 |
$3,756 |
|
Mean household
ownership of appliances |
$943 |
$1,547 |
|
Mean household
ownership of video/audio products |
$308 |
$2,671 |
|
Mean household
ownership of jewelry/watches |
$728 |
$1,784 |
|
Mean household
ownership of books and maps |
$731 |
$1,074 |
|
Mean household
ownership of sports equipment |
$769 |
$1,895 |
|
Mean household
net worth |
$86,095 |
$126,843 |
|
Median household
net worth |
$27,938 |
$59,398 |
|
Vehicles per 100
person aged 16 and older |
53 |
94 |
|
Work time to buy
gas for a 100-mile trip (minutes) |
49 |
26 |
|
Annual visits to
doctor |
4.6 |
6.1 |
|
Per capita
consumption of bottled water (gallons) |
<1 |
11.1 |
|
Americans taking
cruises (millions) |
0.5 |
4.7 |
|
Air-travel miles
per capita |
646 |
>2,260 |
|
Per capita
spending on sporting goods |
$60 |
$213 |
|
Recreational
boats per 1000 households |
139 |
173 |
|
Manufacturers'
shipments of recreational vehicles |
30,300 |
281,000 |
Huber, Peter W. Hard Green. New
York: 1999. ISBN 0465031129, Page xxv
The Softs maintain that efficiency is
environmentally frugal. They believe that human privation promotes
environmental wealth, even if they rarely dare say so directly. Softs are
sure that efficiency alone will do much to save the environment: efficient
furnaces and cars, efficient refrigerators and lightbulbs, even efficient
trash, trash so efficient it is transformed back into valuable resources by
the magic of a Soft Green recycling truck. They believe in trickle-up
environmentalism, the notion that what you save in your more efficient
refrigerator will become savings at the power plant, which will become
savings at the coal mine.
Hard Greens don’t believe a word of it. To our
eyes, the Softs’ efficiency crusades are a useless distraction at best and
positively harmful insofar as they divert attention and promote a false
illusion of green progress. In their endlessly meddlesome crusades for
efficiency, the Softs are peddling the ecological equivalent of Thin Thighs
in Thirty Days. The energy saved on a more efficient refrigerator trickles
all too easily into a larger one, just as the calories saved with a diet
Coke generally trickle into a brownie. Efficiency is not frugality.
Forcing efficiency upon consumers does nothing to make them more frugal,
except insofar as it makes them poorer. And it is not poverty that makes
people green. It is wealth.
Overfishing Imposes A
Heavy Toll By WILLIAM J. BROAD and ANDREW C. REVKIN
New York Times,
July 29, 2003, Section D1 – Science Times, Pages 1-2
Most of the earth's surface
is covered by oceans, and their vastness and biological bounty were long
thought to be immune to human influence. But no more. Scientists and marine
experts say decades of industrial-scale assaults are taking a heavy toll.
More than 70 percent of
commercial fish stocks are now considered fully exploited, overfished or
collapsed. Sea birds and mammals are endangered. And a growing number of
marine species are reaching the precariously low levels where extinction is
considered a real possibility.
"It's an incipient
disaster," said Richard Ellis, author of "The Empty Ocean." A rush of
recent studies, reports, books and conferences have described the situation
as a crisis and urged governments and the industry to enact substantial
changes.
Behind the assault, experts
say, are steady advances in technology, national subsidies to fishing fleets
and booming markets for seafood. Demand is up partly because fish is
considered healthier to eat than chicken and red meat.
Directed by precise sonar
and navigation gear, more than 23,000 fishing vessels of over 100 tons and
several million small ones are scouring the sea with trawls that sweep up
bottom fish and shrimp; setting miles of lines and hooks baited for tuna,
swordfish and other big predators; and deploying other gear in a hunt for
seafood in ever deeper, more distant waters.
Flash freezers allow them
to preserve their catch so they can sweep waters right to the fringes of
Antarctica. The trade is so global that an 80-year-old Patagonian toothfish
hooked south of Australia can end up served by its more market-friendly
name, Chilean sea bass, in a San Francisco bistro.
Seafood industry officials
say overfishing and disregard for environmental harm peaked a decade ago.
They point to the spreading adoption of gear that avoids unintended catches,
acceptance of quotas and other limits, and agreements to conserve
ocean-roaming fishes like tunas.
"We now have a better
understanding of the limitations of the resources," said Linda Candler of
the National Fisheries Institute, an industry lobbying group. Federal
fisheries officials note that although 80 American fish stocks have serious
problems, restoration plans are in the works, and other stocks are
rebounding. The North Atlantic swordfish is often cited as a sign of
success. After limits were imposed four years ago, it has now largely
recovered.
Pietro Parravano, who
trolls for salmon out of Half Moon Bay, Calif., said fishery critics tended
to overlook damage done by pollution and destruction of coastal wetlands.
"It's not just our activity that's leading to this decline," he said. "If
fishermen are doing something wrong, they're willing to adapt."
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