Searching for truth in a post-green world.
Money quote right there. I'd probably be tempted to say this is because simply asking people to reduce their consumption does not work. People ignore you because there's no reward for the price of inconvenience it would introduce into their lives. Like it or not, a dollar more on the pump or an automatic 10% increase in the efficiency of a car or light bulb goes a much longer way than criticizing people's behavior all day. So you can look at this as a moralist's problem, an economist's problem, a scientists's or engineer's problem, but for some reason, the author holds no hope in any...I'm unsure if I agree or not with that defeatist sentiment...The Green Revolution is trumpeted by progressives as having supposedly “fed a billion people” who would otherwise have starved. And maybe it did; but then we had to keep feeding them—or should I say us?—and our children. In the meantime it had been discovered that the pesticides and herbicides were killing off vast swaths of wildlife, and the high-yield monoculture crops were wrecking both the health of the soil and the crop diversity, which in previous centuries had helped prevent the spread of disease and reduced the likelihood of crop failure.
The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behavior change, and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilization what it wants to hear. What it wants to hear is that the progress trap in which our civilization is caught can be escaped from by inflating a green tech bubble on which we can sail merrily into the future, happy as gods and equally in control.
It is a defeatist sentiment in many ways, but we actually are in a more dismal place environmentally than we can afford to be. It's not even 'if we continue at our present rate there will be serious consequences' any more. There will be serious consequences if we cut our rate of consumption in half. And we're not going to do that. I'm at work right now, so I'm going to be loose with sources, but while there are some interesting and hopeful advances on the horizon (the Tesla Roadster comes to mind) we are in a bleak place. We produce more trash than we can afford by far. And defeatist or not, it's a biological inevitability that species reach a plateau in their environment after they grow to saturation. While humans have certainly done a lot to extend what "their environment" means, there is no free lunch. There is no infinite energy supply. Entropy increases. A human plateau doesn't mean a slow decrease in population. It means mass starvation, increased aggression. It means a whole lotta trouble. I think the most amazing quote from the article was: What a succinct way to describe the dream of infinite progress.“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.
I'm inclined to doubt this assertion because Japan is currently going through a population decrease, and if you ignore immigration, so is the US. Neither are suffering from mass starvation, nor increased aggression. Now, with most organisms, you see booms and busts in populations because of slow or non-existent feedback population feedback loops. Indeed, computer models show that selfish genes dominate because there is normally no evolutionary incentive for life to limit reproduction. However, you still see widespread usage of birth control and other factors limiting the growth of human populations. Why? Education and the continued development of medicine. Most of us are intelligent enough creatures to be able to predict the effects of reproduction and for the first time in the history of man, we can take steps to circumvent the consequences of our primal instincts. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you're barely making enough money to support yourself, having a child will sink you into poverty. The author is quick to demonize STEM, but modern medicine, namely contraception, has induced a turning point in so many different categories of life. And it at least affords some humane opportunity for population control that doesn't involve eating the babies out of each others' cribs.A human plateau doesn't mean a slow decrease in population. It means mass starvation, increased aggression. It means a whole lotta trouble.
Thank you for this. I'm sure you didn't expect this, but I'm relieved at how much I love your contraception argument, because peak population has seriously worried me for some time. Fingers crossed the world holds out. No joke.
I bookmarked it, but it was late and I had so much talking to do on the internet and I was stuck in traffic and I have a headache and can we do this some other night, baby?
Very well written. I'd like to think we're not as close to the brink of disaster as he makes it sound! And, perhaps it's a bit self serving for the poet/environmentalist/nostalgist to argue that humans are not rational or logical. It would seem that the author is fighting for a definition of "human" which does not include the flexibility to learn & change.
I don't think he's arguing that we don't learn and change; I think he's arguing that we learn and change to benefit our technologies because we've become entrapped by them:It would seem that the author is fighting for a definition of "human" which does not include the flexibility to learn & change.
Advanced technologies ... created dependency; they took tools and processes out of the hands of individuals and put them into the metaphorical hands of organizations. The result was often “modernized poverty,” in which human individuals became the equivalent of parts in a machine rather than the owners and users of a tool.
I find that point to be the opposite of what I would naively think. Couldn't the argument easily be made that technology has freed human minds to ponder deeper, more meaningful issues? That we've simply abstracted the processes which we're very good at in order to think about the things we're not so good at? Admittedly, this article has given me a lot of pause. The scope is quite broad - there are a lot of things to consider here...