Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
In the early years of the ecology movement, the prevalent view held that only a cultural transformation that weaned humans from the cravings of industrialized desire could save the biosphere. The idea that technological solutions might substitute where political will to change is lacking was cast as a kind of opiate that would only sustain the addiction while worsening the underlying affliction. Lost time, rising temperatures and scientific advances are challenging that false distinction.
As Rudolf Bahro, an intellectual godfather of the Green Party in Germany, put it to me at his organic farmstead in rural Niederstadtfeld in the 1980s: “Only a cultural revolution that breaks the logic of the entire industrial system” could unravel the avarice of the Anthropocene blighting the planet.
“The crisis is not in the trees, but in us,” he declared. “The sense of environmental crisis merely reflects the inner crisis of man. The philosopher Martin Heidegger says we are alienated from the cosmos because we have forgotten Being.”
Bahro cited as his spiritual guide the 13th century Christian mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, who believed “each creature — human, animal, plant — is a ‘flash of grace.’ ‘The eternal light of God’ is not restricted to humans alone, but ‘is scattered on leaves throughout the world.”
Since Bahro’s time, soulless consumerist civilization has spread even further across the planet through globalization, outstripping the nascent cultural alternatives he envisioned might break its logic.
Want Not, Waste Not
In his plea of “want not, waste not,” Vaclav Smil echoes Bahro, though with far less faith in the capacity of humans to effect systemic change.
“Any emphasis on long-lasting quality or minimization of quantity or size goes directly against our social primacy of showing off to position ourselves in the cultural hierarchy,” the bluff materials scientist told Noema. Speaking of the wasteful cycle of discarding the last model of cell phones, other gadgets or cars for the latest one, he scolded that “we need to change the fashion and the style all the time because that is how we measure our identity. Here we run up against human nature, which is acquisitive and status conscious.”
Smil doesn’t mince his harsh verdict. “Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don’t matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don’t do it. … Sorry to say, but I just don’t see any global concerted action — it would cut to the very roots of today’s economic model of development.”
In short, the more banal the systemically ingrained ways of human nature are, the more intractable their exorcism.
The Fatal Lag
What is clear by now is that climate change is accelerating far faster than the pace of any overarching cultural transformation that could make a difference. Because of this fatal lag, there is no practical alternative than for technology to help fill the gap as its own orientation is reset.
Perhaps because he hailed from Communist East Germany, Bahro, unlike so many other deep ecologists, said back then: “I do not advocate a rejection of technology. The issue is not man’s tools, but the loss of a spiritual center.” Instead of using science “as insurance against nature,” he “agreed with Einstein” that “the ultimate aim of science is to establish trust in the order of the cosmos.”
From Planetary Deformation To Terraforming
This view tracks with how we have sought to frame the question of technology in various essays and interviews in Noema. Just as humans are not above and apart from nature, technology is not apart from us. It is not external to the human condition. Rather, it is technology that makes us human. Human becoming through the tools we invent to survive and thrive in the environment in which we are embedded is part and parcel of our evolution. Anthropogenesis is technogenesis.
Thus, aligning anthropo-technogenesis with “the order of the cosmos,” not repudiating technology, is the summons our evolutionary lineage is now called upon to fulfill. Just as the technological prowess of Sapiens has deformed the planet in a way that has produced the current climate crisis, so might technology imbued with a new eco-logic help “terraform” the planet in the opposite way? Some have called this potential “the Good Anthropocene.”
Shifting the impetus within technogenesis is an aspect of cultural transformation — not as a substitute for, but a vital complement to, the human element.
This contrasts with the anti-technological vision of deep ecology that leads into a cul de sac of stasis as the world moves on. If one visits the “arcological” village of Arcosanti that Paolo Soleri founded in the 1970s, it is disheartening to see how the future it was once ahead of has passed it by. There are still no solar panels, wind power generators or even double-paned windows. No longer a utopian beacon, the project is sustained by selling iconic cast iron bells to tourists. It’s Metabolist concrete structures are sadly deteriorating in the heat and swirling gusts of the Arizona high desert, as the metastasizing sprawl of Phoenix creeps in its direction.
As often noted in this space, we are only aware of climate change to begin with because of planetary-scale computation that expands our heretofore limited understanding of Earth systems. Renewable energy technologies from solar to wind, lithium batteries and electric vehicles have already significantly, if unevenly, dented dependence on the fossil fuels of the industrial age. In a recent Noema essay, Stephen Robert Miller surveys the vast range of geo-engineering efforts underway to influence the planet’s thermostat, including giant filters to capture carbon, reflective coverings over the Arctic and cooling chemicals inserted into the atmosphere — rightly questioning whether this might be playing with fire instead of putting it out.
The Accelerationist Mistake
None of this is to suggest that “salvation” will come from some technological silver bullet. The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as so-called tech accelerationists are prone to do, risks mirroring the mistake of deep ecologists who resist its promise.
“In complex systems,” Smil says, “there is never one thing that is decisive. We need to favor a multitude of approaches” — technology, geopolitical treaties, incentives to curb consumption, and the resilience and repair of natural systems — “rather than relying on any single (and purportedly perfect) solution.”
It is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket, Smil cautions. “If you attack a single problem, it will impact, say, 6% or 7% of what ails the biosphere. There is no single energy consumption area or environmental issue where, if you fix its problems, 40% of the emissions will vanish.
What we have are lots of small keys to get rid of 3% a year here, 6% there and so on. To assemble such an array of responses requires much more attention, much more consistency and much longer periods of devotion to the problem.”
Since these attributes are in short supply, Smil insists that any effort to repair planetary deformation through technology cannot be effective if it is solely focused on cutting downstream emissions or adapting to the consequences of climbing temperatures.
Here the perspective of deep ecology still resonates. We are only buying time if we don’t also address what drives the system — the upstream overconsumption that turns every want into a need that can only be satisfied through a net increase in the use of planet-warming energy. In the end, what we don’t do is as much a part of the equation as what we do.
