"Sustainable Natural Resources" is a Three-way Oxymoron

To call forest and prairie and soil and rivers and breathable air resources means that they are considered to be objects for consumption.  The tension between consumption and sustainable needs no embellishment.  But what is really meant by sustainable in this context is that our parasitic consumption can be prolonged through regulation and control.  And as soon as a natural entity’s fitness—or continued existence—depends on bureaucratic regulation and control, the word natural no longer applies.  

Illuminating the Green Myth of Progress

Years ago I read a self-published treatise on recycling that I found on the shelf in my local community college library.  It was written in the mid-1970s.  I don’t remember the author or the name of the book.  The main thesis was something to the effect that recycling was a waste of time—and actually made things worse in the long run by allowing the status quo to continue to operate for that much longer on finite resource reserves.  The author gave an example based on aluminum recycling: there is content loss and degradation at the molecular level each time the metal is recycled.   So even if consumption didn’t increase and we were able to recycle every aluminum can produced, we would continue to need to extract resources for new metal to replace what is lost and to provide the energy necessary for the process itself.  But the worst part is that recycling feeds the illusion that we have solved the problem of finite resources when we have merely made slight alterations in the time frame.

CFL light bulbs might make a good contemporary example of this illusion.  CFLs “save energy” because they produce more luminescence per kilowatt than do incandescent light bulbs.  So by swapping out incandescents for CFLs we can burn less coal for producing light.  But we are still burning coal, so nothing is changed there.  And the mercury content of CFLs means that we have not made any headway in terms of reducing environmental heavy metal contamination.   But wait! Now we have LED lights that last far longer than even CFLs—some of which use an organic semiconductor!  Surely we are on our way to a bright and completely sustainable future!  Of course, LEDs still use energy, both in producing light and to manufacture.

Less of a bad thing does not magically transform it into something good.  So the coal supply lasts a bit longer.  So the industrial machine can grind away at the biosphere for a few more days, or weeks—or years even.  Where is the “savings” there?  Each day the machine is allowed to continue means another 100 – 200 species gone forever.  Entire species!   Each and every day!

Pull the plug today and there are 150 unique and irreplaceable life forms that will still be around tomorrow.  And maybe one of them is us.    

Community versus Collective

“But the primitive society is a community, springing from common origins, composed of reciprocating persons, and growing from within.  It is not a collective.  Collectives emerge in civilization; they are functional to specialized ends, and they generate a sense of being imposed from without.  They are objectively perceived, objectifying and estranging structures […] A collective has the form of a community but lacks the substance; it is involved with the concept “public,” which is not at all the same as the idea of the social.  The fully functioning, highly individuated member of society is the antithesis of the public man [sic.].”  --Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization.

A collective is a tool, a social technology, an organizational structure, a machine designed to facilitate the pursuit of ends—ends not necessarily shared in equal measure by each participant.  In that sense a collective is no different from any other bureaucratic institution, easily usurped and redirected by the power elite. Collectives are thus useful only in the short term, as a first line of attack, perhaps.

A community is an organic process.  It is not a tool for achieving ends.  It is its own end.  It is therefore immune to usurpation by power and cannot be redirected from without.  To be conquered it must be destroyed.  It is for this reason that the power elite so frequently resorts to genocide.

We need to be nurturing our evolved predilections for community.  Yes we are individuals.  But we are not autonomous and independent nodes in some abstract network.   Community is where the true strength of the primitive lies.  

Bad Manners

John Zerzan was critiquing a book about the negative impact technology has on our interpersonal interactions on his radio program last week.  The idea that we might actually work to limit technological mediation in our social world is, of course, a non-starter; instead, according to the author we should work to establish better manners.  A caller commented that there has indeed been a general deterioration of manners in our society as of late, and then went on to claim that manners are a separate issue from technology.  I think the caller was definitely right about the first part of what he said but wrong about the second.  There is a direct link between technology and the degradation of manners in our society—a link that can probably be traced all the way back to the intrusion of civilization and its requisite social stratification.

Industrial technology has become metaphor for us.  We think of each other in mechanical terms, as cogs and sprockets in the machine of civilization.  We treat people according their two-dimensional roles in the mechanical process rather than as multidimensional human beings.  When we play the role of customer, we demand obsequiousness from those playing the role of merchant.  We treat the person at the customer service desk with the contempt we have for the corporation.  We direct our frustration with the institution at the people the institution employs. 

Add to this the influence of our rapidly increasing dependence on electronically–mediated communication.  When we talk to each other through machines large pieces of the humanity of the communicative experience are lost.  It’s easy to be rude to a voice coming from a little plastic box or a string of words on a screen.

Manners are the rules of polite engagement among people.  They are superfluous in a society where people are reduced to “consumer units” in a global machine and personhood has been redefined so as to apply to mindless corporations.

Amtrak as Allegory

The train has jumped the track and is heading off the cliff.  The front of the train is already in the air.

Meanwhile the passengers in the back are arguing about the seating arrangements.  Although there are more than enough seats for everyone, it appears that a few of the passengers have claimed multiple seats for themselves while the rest are forced to sit three and four to a seat or to stand in the aisle.   Things are getting heated and it is only a matter of time before the passengers in the aisle revolt and force a more equitable redistribution. 

Only a matter of time...   

The Machine is in Our Heads (Part 2): Statistics Don’t Feel Pain

The conceptual frame that encases our social institutions, schools, governments, media—our very language in terms of our base metaphors—is derived from the goals of industrial mass production and the obligatory mass consumption that it entails.  Qualitative features of human wellbeing are recoded into quantitative terms and measured according to standards of mechanical output and efficiency.  Statistical indicators, proportions, averages—tools of Wall Street and corporate industry—have long replaced any reference to raw, qualitative human experience.  This frame reinforces the delusion of technological progress and disguises the unrelenting and progressive dehumanization and the deterioration in the quality of human experience that the delusion of progress engenders.

Consider the case of infant mortality, a statistic that is frequently used as a quantitative indicator of the quality of life.  Thanks to humanitarian international policy, modern medical technology, and the fruits of nutrition science—not to mention industrial agriculture—the global infant mortality rate is on the decline.  What does that mean?  From an industrial frame it represents a positive outcome: an increase in the overall quality of life.  However, a positive quantitative outcome in this case does not mean a reduction in human suffering because a decline in global infant mortality does not mean that fewer babies are dying.  In point of fact, more babies will die this year than died 10 years ago.  Or 25 years ago.  Or 100 years ago.   In point of fact, more infants will succumb this one year than in any given 30 year period prior to the agricultural revolution.

“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

Infant mortality is typically computed as the number of infant deaths per every 1000 live births.   Infant mortality worldwide stands at 44.13 per 1000 live births according to the CIA World Factbook. With a yearly global birth rate of just under 20 babies per every 1000 people, and a global population of 6.8 billion, there are, in raw human terms, 6 million infants who die each year. 

Human global population estimates for the Paleolithic range from fewer than 2 million to not more than 20 million.  Both birth rates and infant mortality were probably lower than they are now.  Women who survived to childbearing age were likely far healthier and more robust than women living today in the third-world.  And family planning takes on quite a different dimension when you are living in a small, interdependent, nomadic tribal group.  But, for the sake of argument, let’s use the numbers found in Uganda and Niger, the countries with the highest birth rates—over 50 per 1000 for Niger, and let’s take the country with the highest infant mortality rate, Angola, at 178.13 per 1000.  If we apply these numbers to the high Paleolithic population estimates, until the onset of large-scale domestication there were fewer than 200,000 babies who died in an average year  (Remember: the increase in global human population since the Paleolithic is a “byproduct” of “progress” in agricultural and industrial technology.) To frame this in the quantitative terms of industrial production:  there are somewhere between 30 and 300 times as many babies dying each year in our technologically advance modern civilization than died 10,000 years ago.             

If you measure suffering from a human perspective, according to the actual experience of individual human beings, technological “progress” brings more suffering, not less—and not just a little more!

But of course future technological “progress” will be able to fix all that…

Delusion (noun): a persistent false belief that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

The Machine is in Our Heads (Part 1): Drinking the Radioactive Koolaid

Today I heard someone extolling the virtues of nuclear power.  Nuclear power is “a step in the right direction” that provides a medium for us to “forge ahead” toward “positive outcomes.”  When I asked what was meant by “positive outcomes”—positive in what way, for whom, for how long—and what we might do with the spent fuel rods that will be poisoning the environment for longer than there have been humans on the planet, I was given an answer in kW-hours and long-term return on investment, and told that there have been “great strides” in converting spent radioactive fuel into relatively harmless “products” that can be “safely stored.”  Nuclear disasters like Three-mile Island and Chernobyl and past problems with fissile material storage and disposal were results of “mismanagement and a lack of foresight.”

Products?  Sure, why not?  Consumable output is the whole point of industrial production in the first place.  It’s right there in the word product-ion.  And safely stored?  What, for a rainy day? “Hey, we’re running low on spent fuel rods; could you run down to the supply closet and grab a couple?”    

But it’s the claim that nuclear “accidents” and past failures to secure nuclear waste were a result of mismanagement and a lack of foresight that is most disturbing to me.  The unquestioned belief that tomorrow’s technology (systems of management are a technology) will be able to compensate for the defects of today’s is a malignant side-effect of the delusion of progress.  Phrases such as step in the right direction, forge ahead, make great strides, achieve positive outcomes, and of course the term progress itself, are frequent players in the rhetoric that feeds this delusion. 

About next week's MLK holiday...

Passive resistance is an oxymoron.

Is "Green" Self-Eliminating?

Garrett Hardin, in his well-known Tragedy of the Commons included a section entitled “Conscience is Self-Eliminating” where he discussed Darwin’s insight that you can’t rely on human conscientiousness to control population growth because the tendency to act on conscience is a variable human trait.  The people who would act on conscience to curtail their reproductive behavior would pass this tendency along to fewer children, and the tendency to act according to conscience would be washed out of the population in just a few generations.  The potent irony with this is that the attempt to tap into our altruistic propensities would actually make things worse in the long run by eliminating those very propensities.  

Ironic and extremely counterintuitive.

I’m wondering whether there is a somewhat analogous dynamic in play with respect to “being green.”  Convincing people to “be green,” conserving gasoline, recycling, avoiding plastics, using energy efficient appliances, reducing consumption, etc., actually buys more time for the global industrial machine.  The more time the industrial machine is allowed to operate unabated, the worse off the planet will be when the machine finally implodes—the larger the dependent human population, the fewer remaining animal species, the more toxic the land, air, and oceans, etc.

Also, “green” behavior provides an outlet for the guilt people of conscience naturally feel over their complicity in the ongoing industrial holocaust.  In what ways might this guilt be harnessed if it were not for the corporate-sponsored mass-delusion that wearing hemp shirts, riding  a bicycle, and buying locally grown organic produce somehow magically helps save the planet?



I think that there might be more potent ways in which to assuage a guilty conscience.

Institutions Don't Bleed

I was recently listening to an administrator discuss the financial state of his institution.  It could have been any administrator in any institution—the fact that it was the chief financial officer of a small liberal arts college is only of minor relevance.  An unspoken and unquestioned premise behind his message was that the good of the institution outweighs the needs of the individuals whose accumulative time, labor, and assent are responsible for the institution’s continued existence.   Individuals are expected to sacrifice—or be sacrificed, if necessary—whenever the “needs” of the institution are in conflict with the needs of the individuals themselves.  This premise is so fundamental that no institution could persist without its tacit and unwavering acceptance.

But the premise is clearly indefensible.  Human beings have needs.  Institutions are abstractions, organizational tools designed to facilitate the ends of individuals.  It is always an open question as to whether the continued existence of the institution is in anybody’s best interest.  And that applies to governments, multinational corporations, and small liberal arts colleges in equal measure.

The inertia of the status quo appears to defy Newton’s laws, unassailable by any external force.  The persistence of institutions, governments, entire civilizations, rapidly becomes an end in itself, and the natural order of things is reversed: a useful tool in the service of human ends becomes human ends entrained to service the “goals” of the tool. 

To dismantle an institution that has ceased to serve human needs, to destroy—by violent means if need be—any tool that threatens our humanity is a moral imperative.