Problems & Solutions

As a child, I was inspired by the space program of the Kennedy era. I loved science fiction, I was a prodigy in science as well as the arts, and I studied hard science before obtaining an engineering degree. But as I matured and gained experience with both nature and society, working in the field with biologist and anthropologist friends, I became aware of major historical fallacies underlying and undermining all the institutions of our dominant culture, and saw at first hand the widespread, ongoing destruction to local communities and natural habitats caused by technological innovation and exploration. Specialization ensures that engineers and other technologists are relatively uneducated in the broader context of the systems into which they introduce their creations; instead, they accept without questioning the historical fallacies of the dominant society, relying on these fallacies to rationalize and justify their work. Consumers, equally victimized by historical fallacies and misdirected by media, eagerly embrace the stimulation and personal power offered by new technologies, turning their backs on the social systems and natural ecosystems they need in order to thrive.

2 • My Experience With Rockets, Robots, and Engineering

I used to be an astronaut, a spacewalker on the International Space Station…I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station…The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me…To me, the city lights below represented human energy and hope. Most people work hard to better their own and their families’ lives by struggling to get a bit more than they have. It’s a laudable impulse; it’s what got us out of caves and into villages, towns, and cities. This process has propelled civilizations forward: art, philosophy, engineering, and science all came from the cities where people interact, discuss, argue, and push the human reach a little further. (Piers Sellers, The New Yorker, 2016)

Like many boys, I grew up reading science fiction, and like most Americans, I was inspired by the space program of the Kennedy era. My father was a rocket scientist who became a rocket engineer, and like him, I excelled in science and math. At the age of 12, at home, I built a laser from scratch. But I also excelled in – and loved – the arts, and in my adolescence, as the 1960s ended in cultural revolution and disillusionment with science and technology, I was torn by inner conflict between the arts and sciences.

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I started college in fine arts and philosophy at the University of Chicago, but at the age of 20, financially dependent and insecure, with the national economy in recession, I switched to hard science – physics, chemistry, computer science, earth and space science – with a focus on advanced mathematics. However, I was still working at minimum wage and living in poverty, and desperate for some kind of career, I eventually transferred to a nearby engineering school.

After finishing my B.S., I moved to California to complete a Master of Science degree at Stanford in mechanical engineering, specializing in dynamics, the science of motion and change, which involved especially challenging mathematics. My graduate advisor and mentor had achieved international renown by reformulating the classical equations of motion for the computer age, and had become one of the heroes of the emerging science of robotics. But he’d also done groundbreaking work for NASA, and together we developed a novel technique for the difficult deployment of synchronous satellites into a low earth orbit.

But I was still writing and making music and art, and at that point, the artist in me had had more than enough of that left-brain dominance. Henceforth, I would give all my heart to the arts and exploit that engineering degree only when necessary to pay the bills.

As it turned out, those bills would never let me get away from engineering and engineers. I worked part-time, sporadically, for an engineering firm over more than a decade, in a role that was regulatory instead of technical, so I could stay out of the “critical path” of responsibility and preserve my precious free time. And then I reinvented myself as a creative professional in the internet industry, and found myself working with computer engineers.

Those engineers have turned out to be good people – well-intentioned, conscientious, sometimes even idealistic – and many of them have become my friends. I hope they will bear with me as I challenge beliefs they hold dear. Although I’m deeply critical of how technologists think, it’s nothing personal – as you will see, it’s actually an indictment of our entire society. And ultimately, it’s an indictment of my own career as a designer of the screens that prevent us from accurately experiencing nature and society in meaningful context.

3 • Blindsided: Brave New Heroes

From robots to medicine to space travel, 2015 was a huge year for science and technology. Tell my daughters at least every month… This is the most amazing time in all of human history to be alive. (Computer engineer, Facebook, 2016)

One Saturday night, I put on a jacket and walked through central Stockholm…I talked with Sebastian, a grad student from somewhere he described as “like Westeros from ‘Game of Thrones.’…Sebastian’s hero was Elon Musk, whom he had never met, but whom he considered a model human being. “I really think I’d take a bullet for that guy,” he told me. (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 2016)

After the idealism of the Kennedy administration was followed by a failed war and revelations of environmental destruction and social dysfunction, the space program declined for decades, while robots quietly began filling our factories and hospitals, out of sight and out of mind. As I became immersed in the arts and the exploration of nature, I more or less forgot about science fiction and assumed that the bankrupt fantasy of space exploration was over and done with.

But suddenly, during the past couple of years, science fiction technology has returned with a vengeance, and with a boost from free enterprise. Billionaires promoting robots and rockets have become culture heroes. Billionaire engineer Elon Musk is like a god to millenials, and many of my own peers seem to believe that people like him can save the planet. Musk competes with fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page of Google, and Paul Allen of Microsoft to commercialize space and make us a “multi-planet species.” I didn’t see that coming, and it disturbs me more than anything else in our brave new world.

Most engineers are problem solvers. Due to the specialization and compartmentalization of our society, they normally don’t get to formulate, or even to choose, the problems they solve. They just want a challenge – any challenge.

But most engineers grow up on science fiction, and if you give one a billion dollars, he may set out to create the future of robots and space travel that he’s been dreaming of since childhood. That’s exactly what the tech billionaires are doing now – without ever being asked to, and without ever asking the rest of us if that’s what we want or need.

4 • The Power and the Glory: Rationalizing Desire

Musk and other billionaires can easily come up with justifications for their projects, because the world faces problems which are vast and nightmarishly complex, leading to endless confusion and controversy over proposed solutions. Engineers say that robots will improve well-being by liberating people from unpleasant or dangerous labor and by making their lives safer, more comfortable and convenient. Space travel will offer a safety valve for terrestrial population growth, reducing conflict and consumption of natural resources. Musk even proposes that he’ll move everyone to another planet so the earth can recover from the failed engineering of previous generations. And of course, it’s long been accepted in Anglo-European society that our destiny as a species is to continually explore, advance, and expand, to reach our farthest frontiers and our highest potential.

As my academic career revealed, science and technology are thoroughly interdependent, but often with divergent purposes. Science claims to study the complex physical world, unrestrained by practical applications, with the ultimate purpose of fully understanding and explaining nature. Engineers, by contrast, are only concerned with building things that work, in the here and now. Their goal is not to understand complex natural systems, but to replace them with predictable, manageable machines, manufactured materials, and engineered habitats. They begin with imaginary models that simplify reality, making assumptions about what is important and what can be ignored, without ever needing to understand the full context of their problems. And billionaires don’t even need a problem. They’re just trying to make their fantasies come true.

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The unquestioned intersection between science and engineering is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Scientists provide simplified models of nature and an insatiable demand for quantitative data; engineers further simplify the models and use them to design data-generating machines, which scientists then use to refine their models and their questions, leading to the demand for more data and better machines. More and more, science becomes the study of abstracted mechanical data shaped by the machines provided by engineers, rather than the investigation of nature in its meaningful natural context. And as a result, our knowledge of the world becomes more and more instrumental, more oriented toward manipulation and exploitation.

…for subjects that are incredibly complex…the connection between scientific knowledge and technology is tenuous and mediated by many assumptions — assumptions about how science works …about how society works…or about how technology works …The assumptions become invisible parts of the way scientists design experiments, interpret data, and apply their findings. The result is ever more elaborate theories — theories that remain self-referential, and unequal to the task of finding solutions to human problems. (Daniel Sarewitz, The New Atlantis, 2016)

We all suffer when the fantasies of futurists are unleashed in society and in natural ecosystems, neither of which they have studied or seriously tried to understand. Even the smartest and best-educated advocates of technology have simply accepted the word of other specialists about what the world needs. And then they try to make that fit with their science-fiction fantasy of the future.

“Technology will solve our problems.” This is an expression of faith about the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past…But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don’t…New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problems that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems…Most of all, advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20^th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that’s why we’re in the situation in which we now find ourselves. (Jared Diamond, Collapse)

5 • The Cultural Baggage of Tech

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Despite their passion for the future, technologists – like most of us – remain mired in unquestioned fallacies which are centuries, or even millennia, old.

It is surprising to discover, on the basis of empirical research, that human rationality is not at all what the Western philosophical tradition has held it to be…Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious…Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of–or even consciously aware of–their reasoning…Every thought we have, every decision we make, and every act we perform is based upon philosophical assumptions so numerous we couldn’t possibly list them all…. (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh)

5.1 • Anthropocentrism and Dominion

As European society advanced in wealth and power during the so-called Renaissance, its highest principle became humanism, secular society’s unquestioned acceptance of the Biblical mandate of “man’s dominion over all the earth.” In humanism, “man is the measure of all things.” By contrast, traditional subsistence cultures accept humans as mere participants in complex, mysterious ecosystems in which all other natural entities have equal importance, knowledge, and wisdom. Dominance – dominion – is implicit in Anglo-European society’s anthropocentrism, providing moral sanction for its often violent conquest of the world, and its ongoing environmental destruction and replacement of natural ecosystems with engineered habitats. In its ultimate delusion, the fallacy of anthropocentrism enables technologists like Elon Musk to imagine that the universe itself is a construct of the human mind.

To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. (Lyn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet)

Aristotle’s scala naturae…runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular pastime of cognitive science, but I cannot think of a single profound insight it has yielded. All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms’ Umwelten. (Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?)

We continue…to assume without question our superiority to other species. Our technology is our evidence to support this assumption….Consider the beast that lives on the land, feeds itself by killing the fleetest of animals without using weapons, and survives the severest of weather without any of the technological crutches that we see as necessities. In the niche of the lion, we are not its superior…. (Harley Shaw, Soul Among Lions)

5.2 • Urbanism and Alienation

In the quote that opens my personal story above, astronaut Piers Sellars celebrates the common assumption that urbanization, the abandonment of “caves” for cities, has “propelled civilizations forward: art, philosophy, engineering, and science all came from the cities.” But despite the popular illusion of the prehistoric “cave man,” few humans have ever lived in caves, most humans have always lived in villages, and cities are never founded by artists, philosophers, engineers, or scientists. The primary function of cities is always to concentrate human wealth, power, labor, and consumption of natural resources, so that cities dominate the surrounding rural communities and habitats which produce the natural resources they depend on.

The European Renaissance, like other periods of increasing human wealth and power, saw the rise of city-states and larger urban-based political units in which urban elites managed both labor and resources to their personal advantage. Their increasing wealth led to the rise of merchant and professional classes which could also exploit rural producers to provide both raw and manufactured goods to each other and to elites.

Increasingly distanced from the rural production of natural resources, urban consumers became increasingly alienated from nature and the subsistence lifestyle. Losing touch with their origins, they began to feel themselves superior, citing the luxuries which economic exploitation brought their way. Since their only familiarity with subsistence living came in the form of the degraded communities they dominated and exploited, they began to view subsistence living as primitive and miserable, resulting in a vicious cycle of disrespect, abuse, and rural-urban migration.

Historian Theodore Roszak eloquently exposed the fallacies of urbanism in his book Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society:

…the city comes into existence by withdrawing people from the primary production of their life needs–fuel, food, raw materials. Those who leave the land must draw upon the labor of others…If those of us who belong to its culture and economy could see ourselves in the full perspective of urban history, we would recognize that we constitute the oldest imperial interest in the world–the empire of cities, incessantly forcing itself upon the traditional, the rural, the wilderness at large….Whatever holds out against us–the peasant, the nomad, the savage–we regard as so much cultural debris in our path…Today, all decisions that are being made about the future of our planet are being made in cities by city brains. We take it for granted that this should be so.

The vast infrastructure that supplies the basic needs of urban consumers is hidden from their sight and omitted from their worldview. Food is trucked in from distant farms, since nearby real estate is too “valuable” for farming. Water may travel hundreds of miles in canals and pipelines from distant reservoirs. Clothing and building materials from anonymous locations halfway across the globe miraculously appear in urban emporiums. Energy to run their myriad machines – mostly hidden in industrial zones and the “utility” rooms of homes, apartments, and workplaces – comes from distant power plants. Waste is piped or hauled to processing plants or landfills sited in poor neighborhoods or undesirable rural sacrifice zones.

Think of the life-sustaining traffic that must come and go between the source and the use of the goods that feed us, warm us in our homes, clothe us. Think how costly it is merely to remove our daily wastes. In the midst of this busy apparatus, we who fill the cities begin to look like so many million astronauts, hermetically sealed into some strange science-fiction vehicle that is constantly dependent on life-support systems of enormous expense and complexity.

5.3 • Linear Time and Progress

You can’t turn back time. (Popular expression in Anglo-European society)

Also during the European Renaissance, with the emergence of science, the advance of technology, and the expansion of the merchant class, as more and more people became alienated from their subsistence in natural ecosystems, the peasant’s traditional dependence on natural cycles was replaced in the towns and cities by a linear view of time. History, the official narration of phenomena considered important by the urban power structure of the dominant society, began to validate the notion of progress, the relentless improvement of society and human welfare.

…the idea of history is itself a Western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat, the formulation of experience as outside of nature and the reduction of place to location…Its most revolutionary aspect was its repudiation of the cyclic pattern of events, its insistence on the truly linear flow of time, and its pursuit of its own abstract, self-confirming truth as opposed to indicators and signs in the concrete world. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness)

Divorced from the seasonal, cyclical nature of subsistence, the work of the growing merchant and professional classes was linearized into project schedules defined by human milestones rather than natural phenomena. Although consumer society retains vestigial seasonality in holidays, vacations, and sports, important projects may begin or end at any time during the year. And electric lighting frees people to do anything at any time during the day or night, leading to unhealthy individual schedules conflicting with biological rhythms and disrupting the social support of one’s family and community.

Science achieved the ultimate reduction of the complexity of temporal phenomena to the one-dimensional variable t in the Newtonian equations of motion, which became accepted as an explanation of all phenomena of motion and change. Since scientists – along with merchants and the aristocracy – could rely on lower classes to provide their basic needs, they were free to “transcend” the cycles of nature that dominated subsistence cultures and focus on continual innovation, the abandonment of tradition through revolution, and forward progress to an ever more glorious “future.”

The expression “you can’t turn back time” confuses complex, diverse natural phenomena with the man-made notion of progress. Linear time is not natural time, it’s engineered time. Subscribing to progress takes us farther and farther away from natural cycles and healthy living. Yes, dominant societies and technologies increase in power, just as humans mature physically. But these are temporary advances, followed by decline, death, and replacement. We deny and ignore natural cycles at our peril.

5.4 • Individualism and Free Enterprise

Yet another emerging value of the European Renaissance was individualism, the gradual prioritization of individual wants and needs over those of the community. With the rise of capitalism and the merchant class, individualism became enshrined in the sacred principle of free enterprise, which would ultimately unleash the progress of technological innovation. Subsistence communities, in which everyone is responsible for providing basic needs and dependent on the nonhuman mysteries of natural ecosystems, tend toward communalism and cooperation, but stratified, individualistic societies liberate individuals to compete for resources and power, and to accumulate surplus resources and power over others, leading to conflict and the decline of social support networks, and resulting in hierarchical, dysfunctional communities which attempt to manage their members’ behavior via coercion and punishment.

While Moderns are preoccupied with “finding themselves,” the Amish are engaged in “losing themselves.”… Uncomfortable to Moderns, who cherish individuality, losing the self in Amish culture brings dignity because its ultimate redemption is the gift of community. (Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture)

To the ecological balance [of traditional African society], there corresponded another in the field of human relations…Individuals might have rights, but they had them only by virtue of the obligations they fulfilled to the community…The good of the individual was a function of the good of the community, not the reverse. The moral order was robustly collective. Out of this came its stability, its self-completeness, its self-confidence in face of trials and tribulations. (Basil Davidson, The African Genius)

The recognition of symbiosis as a major evolutionary force has profound philosophical implications. All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

5.5 • Exploration and Imperialism

Community values were then replaced by corporate values as European individualism elevated irresponsible deadbeats into heroes during the Age of Exploration, the Heroic Age of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration, and the newly revived Space Age. Media, one of the main pillars propping up Anglo-European society, used propaganda to convince us that Exploration is just as essential to our identity as Innovation. But historical investigation reveals that the acclaimed explorers – from Columbus to Shackleton – have abandoned their responsibility to family and community, consuming precious resources from back home, experimenting with new technologies in distant pursuit of corporate profits and national advantage in places out of common sight, where they could plunder ecosystems and trash habitats without community oversight.

Conservation biologist Michael Soule has pointed out that “the most destructive cultures, environmentally, appear to be those that are colonizing uninhabited territory and those that are in a stage of rapid cultural (often technological) transition.” (Gary Paul Nabhan, Cultures of Habitat)

The impacts of exploration on these distant places, often already inhabited, included the spread of disease and invasive species, the degradation or destruction of native ecosystems, the expansion of imperialism, and the establishment of colonies to dominate and exploit native peoples and habitats. The “Frontier,” romanticized in so many books and movies, tends to be dominated by violent sociopaths like the British outcasts who “won the west” by terrorizing Native Americans, committing atrocities to rival or exceed those of the 21st century Islamic State. What we think of as the ideal of Exploration has always been the tragic vanguard of imperialism and the expansion of Anglo-European dominance.

The very essence of the frontier experience lies in the extent of its resources, and when resources are boundless, why conserve them or even utilise them efficiently? The principal goal is to exploit them as quickly as possible, then move on. It is this frontier attitude to resource utilisation that lies at the heart of much capitalism, and which presents such a challenge to conservationists today. (Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples)

Our God expelled us from the Garden of Eden and forced us to wander the Earth…We worship the voyages, the explorers, and the very trails that carried us into new lands. Our discoveries in science and technology are an extension of this biblical mandate, and even though science has long since parted from religion, scientists still, unconsciously, follow the values of the biblical mandate–the values of exploration, discovery, creation, invention–the values of technology. (Douglas Preston, Talking to the Ground)

5.6 • Reductionism and Mechanism

The material universe, including living organisms, was a machine for Descartes, which could in principle be understood completely by analyzing it in terms of its smallest parts….The belief that in every complex system the behavior of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its parts is central to the Cartesian paradigm. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

The 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes has become famous for popularizing the view of nature as a machine assembled from elementary particles and forces. The popular form of his natural philosophy is encapsulated in the terms reductionism – the view that complexity arises from simple building blocks and can be understood by reductive analysis – and mechanism – nature as machine. In this view, physics, the study of elementary particles and forces, is the foundation science, followed by chemistry, building upwards in complexity to the earth sciences, life sciences, and space sciences, all of which are explained by means of their underlying physics and chemistry.

People’s image of science is unfortunately often based on physics and a few other fields with similar methodologies. Scientists in those fields tend to be ignorantly disdainful of fields to which those methodologies are inappropriate. (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Reductionism and mechanism were embraced and institutionalized into the structure of science because they were instrumental – they enabled the building of machines that in turn enabled Anglo-Europeans to pursue their Biblical mandate of dominion over all the earth. As science spread, reductionism and mechanism solidified into the unchangeable departments and faculties of thousands of universities and research institutions, the careers of millions of professionals, trillions of dollars of investment, and hundreds of years of habit.

The great shock of twentieth-century science has been that systems cannot be understood by analysis. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole….Accordlingly, systems thinking concentrates not on basic building blocks, but on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is ‘contextual,’ which is the opposite of analytical thinking. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

During the radicalized 1970s there was a brief movement in academia to reject reductionism and mechanism and replace them with “systems thinking,” a more holistic science that studies phenomena in meaningful context, as opposed to the reductive approach of isolating elements which can more easily be manipulated. But meanwhile the computer revolution, and the parallel revolution in genetics, were proving anew the awesome power of reductive science to achieve dominion over all the earth, and all opposition was swept aside.

…in the old paradigm physics has been the model and source of metaphors for all other sciences….physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. However, this is still not generally recognized today. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

5.7 • Invention and Innovation

Change was not regarded as an automatic good by the Greeks. They preferred stability, and were suspicious of alteration. It is therefore not surprising to find that as the large cosmopolitan cities of the Hellenistic age replaced the small-town poleis (city-states) of Greece, Greek writers began to stress the superior virtues of the older agricultural life, when even town dwellers could have farms within walking distance, and people were closer to the land. (J. Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations)

As stratified European kingdoms developed into empires, and then into nations in which hereditary aristocracy shared power with the merchant classes, technological innovation became institutionalized as the primary tool of modern man’s dominion over nature and less advanced societies. Whereas subsistence societies with their strong communal bonds might control technology and prevent its abuse by individuals, dominant societies saw technology as an unequivocally positive force and strove to accelerate innovation and free it from all controls and limits, under the protection of free enterprise. Inventors – Leonardo da Vinci, Gutenberg, Edison, Tesla – became a new form of hero.

By carefully restricting the use of machine-developed energy, the Amish ‘have become the only true masters of technology.’…By holding technology at a distance, by exercising restraint and moderation, and by accepting limitations and living within them, the Amish have maintained the integrity of their family and community life. (John A. Hostetler, Amish Society)

Critic Neil Postman summarized much of the historical baggage of Anglo-European technology in his book Technopoly:

The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century…the great stress placed on individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistable resonance in the political sphere….Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition….Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization….Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost.

The United States, a former British colony which remains dominated by ethnic Anglo-Europeans and their history and culture, took over the mantle of Technocracy that began in the European Renaissance:

…the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose. To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification….

As a child, I briefly fell under the spell of nuclear technology, which according to engineers offered a future of “unlimited cheap energy.” But by examining our history, Postman and Jared Diamond revealed that a new technology never functions purely as it is designed to function. Designed using models which simplify or ignore the complexity of natural and social systems, a technology is released into society and nature, where it begins an unplanned, unanticipated life of its own:

There can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like the armed forces, or airline companies or banks or tax-collecting agencies…But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people?…Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subject to more examinations; are increasingly mystified about the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children.

5.8 • Statism and Coercion

The world that we take for granted, divided into nation-states, was an invention of European imperialism that took shape in the 15th through 20th centuries. First, the monarchies of Europe established global empires, sending out their commercial agents – the “heroic” explorers – as scouts, followed by armed extractive enterprises like the Spanish Conquistadors and the British East India Company that conquered distant societies and imposed Eurocentric governments on their colonies. Then, the European monarchies underwent revolutions during which they gradually became “democratic” nations, and finally, their worldwide colonies rebelled and established Eurocentric nations of their own, resulting in the current “post-colonial” world map.

But throughout human history, societies defined by nation-states have been vastly outnumbered by an endless variety of decentralized regional societies composed of subsistence communities which were often egalitarian and governed primarily by consensus. In this broader context we can see that nation-states, like the earlier monarchies, are based on the coercion of citizens by means of a political hierarchy culminating in the central authority, whether king or president. Whether democracy or oligarchy, the act of bringing many communities together under a central authority replaces local consensus with remote coercion by a minority of powerful elites.

Throughout the greater part of its evolutionary history, the human population of Africa has lived in relatively small groups, demonstrating that people are perfectly capable of living peacefully in small communities for millennia without establishing cities and states. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history has been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states. (John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent)

In an oligarchy, the elites are self-perpetuating and citizens unrepresented. In a democracy, a majority of citizens has limited ability to choose some of the ruling elites, resulting in coercion of minorities by majority rule. Under both paradigms, an individualistic culture like that of Anglo-Europeans will increase inequality, because in an individualistic culture individuals are permitted and encouraged to compete and accumulate unlimited wealth and power. Both paradigms are unstable and unsustainable, resulting in the life cycle of nations and empires, from birth and expansion to final collapse and disintegration. Meanwhile, highly resilient subsistence communities like the Amish may succeed in retaining enough of their autonomy to avoid destruction by the dominant society, resisting the coercion of nations and the coercive behavior that condemns centralized societies.

5.9 • Media and Misdirection

In our youth, we begin to develop our worldview – a framework for our knowledge of the world – in school, which is organized around the pillars of Anglo-European culture: anthropocentrism and individualism (Humanities), linear time and progress (History), reductionism and mechanism (Science), statism and coercion (Civics).

But from our earliest childhood until our death, we’re also bombarded by information from media, formerly consisting of newspapers, magazines, books, movies, radio and TV, but now primarily delivered via the screens of networked devices. After our formal education ends, the media take over, perpetuating all the fallacies of the dominant culture.

What we think of as media are actually technologies that have been developed in Europe during the past millenia. The “news” media we look to for current information about the world are organized not only according to the Anglo-European paradigms described above, but, because media providers are businesses, the information provided by media is carefully edited in order to attract more and more of our attention.

Rather than providing meaningful, useful information on the health of our local community, habitat and ecosystem, media direct our attention to distant, central authorities, reinforcing a vicious cycle in which local communities are neglected and rendered increasingly dysfunctional. Media develop and maintain a cultural hierarchy which validates stars, celebrities, and the competitive, hierarchical state culture. Rather than meaningful social and ecological topics, newspapers and news websites are structured around national politics and celebrities, national and international “disasters” involving human deaths and suffering in distant places, corporate games (“sports”), business, and entertainment, misdirecting our attention to topics we have no control over. This is a business strategy which increases our anxiety and helplessness while threatening that if we stop watching, we will miss some new stimulation or danger.

This mythic commitment to continuing economic growth is such that none of our major newspapers or newsweeklies considers having an ecological section equivalent to the sports section or the financial section or the arts section or the comic section or the entertainment section, although ecological issues are more important than any of those, even more important than the daily national and international political news. The real history that is being made is interspecies and human-earth history, not nation or internation history. (Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth)

But even when the media deliver information which is relevant to our lives, the supply chain – photography and videography, interviews, electronic transmission, authoring, editing, and screen display – strips away the original, multidimensional context which could enable us to accurately interpret the information. We are left with unverifiable, undigestible “news bytes.” This is why, as media proliferate, so does misinformation. And because all of society is misled by the same fallacies, this is nearly as true in specialized media – for example, scientific and environmental reporting – as it is in mainstream media.

5.10 • A Perfect Storm of Fallacies

Working together, the Anglo-European fallacies of anthropocentrism and dominion, urbanism, linear time and progress, individualism and free enterprise, imperialism and exploration, reductionism and mechanism, statism and coercion, media and misdirection, accumulated as our unquestioned historical baggage, ultimately ensuring that technological innovation would become one of the highest values of our dysfunctional society, amounting to an addiction on both the individual and societal levels.

6 • Humbled By the Mysteries: Discovering Context in Ecology and Anthropology

Normal human beings are blind to anything they’re not paying attention to….That means it’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place….because they can’t consciously experience the raw data, only the schema their brains create out of the raw data….Normal people see and hear schemas, not raw sensory data. (Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation)

I shall never rest until I know that all my ideas are derived, not from hearsay or tradition, but from my real living contact with the things themselves. (Goethe, Italian Journey)

My education, like most peoples’, consisted of ever-increasing loads of book learning designed to instill the paradigms of Anglo-European culture, including the fallacies described above. But I was fortunate to enter college during a cultural revolution, when “Question Authority” was not just an empty motto on a bumper sticker. Radicalized mentors, like the pastor of my hometown church and my college sociology professor, encouraged me to question and challenge everything the dominant culture tried to show me or teach me. So I kept my eyes and mind open.

As time went by and I fell in love with the desert, hungry for knowledge about its native ecosystems and peoples, I re-engaged with science – but a different kind of science – field biology and anthropology – which often resists reductive and mechanistic analysis. I learned about nature and society not by reading books or following media, but by joining cutting-edge research in the field. And my biologist and anthropologist friends, and the ecosystems and societies we’ve studied together, began to expose the fallacies of anthropocentrism, linear time, progress, individualism, statism and coercion, while revealing the ultimate context for human knowledge and wisdom: the infinite complexity and mystery of the natural world which has created and sustained us.

In the computer model of cognition, knowledge is seen as context and value free, based on abstract data. But all meaningful knowledge is contextual knowledge. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement. (Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth)

6.1 • Natural Ecosystems

All true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of men, in the great solitudes; and it can only be attained through suffering. Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the mind of man to that which is hidden from his fellows. (Inuit hunter Igjugarjuk, recorded and translated by Knud Rasmussen)

…the part of the plant that we think of as the apple tree is, in fact, a fairly insignificant part of the full plant….In some ways, the tree really seems to be at the bottom of its enormous root system….a plant’s real beauty, its true purpose, might not lie aboveground….To know the land for what it is, to find its heartbeat, to expose its soul, you have to go underground where it lives and breathes…worms, through their actions, substantially change the earth. They alter its composition, increase its capacity to absorb and hold water, and bring about an increase in nutrients and microorganisms. In short, they prepare the soil for farming. They work alongside humans, extracting a life from the land…When the worms reached for fallen leaves and twigs around their burrows, they were selecting the best material available. They evaluated, they experimented, they made decisions. (Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved)

Whereas the achievements of technology suggest to many that science is rapidly converging toward the final understanding of nature, and laboratory scientists make ambitious claims based on their observations of phenomena isolated from their natural context, field scientists know that the more deeply you investigate nature, the more questions you raise. And science’s Anglo-European baggage and innate conservatism ensure that your questions will be biased, so that for generations you may miss important phenomena. This past summer, I stumbled upon an exciting new field of biology addressing a complex terrestrial life form, a diverse community of organisms, whose ecological significance is yet to be determined. Yet it was long ignored, partly because it exists humbly beneath our gaze, at ground level, and develops over a time scale beyond human perception.

When I launched my Pictures of Knowledge project, trying to figure out my purpose here on earth, I didn’t take anything for granted. I began by analyzing our basic needs as humans, and where those resources and services came from. You can’t begin to grasp what keeps us alive, and what keeps us healthy, without immersing yourself either in subsistence living or in ecological field work. This immersion forces us to abandon our anthropocentrism, our linear view of time, our reductionism and mechanism, and the hubris that deludes us into thinking we can control or reinvent nature.

Although scientists now understand many details of the ways ecosystems work, most urbanized Homo sapiens do not value the services ecosystems deliver. The average city dweller, for instance, has no idea what is involved in supplying his or her food and has a mental picture of environmental hazards that often ranks them in reverse order of their seriousness….” (Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures)

Ethnobotanists like my hero, Gary Paul Nabhan, have revealed how the presence of wild, unmanaged habitat surrounding farmland is essential for the diversity and resilience of food species that we ultimately depend on, as wild species like pollinators and insect predators do their ecological work, and genes flow across the wild-domestic interface, enriching the diversity and hardiness of cultivated crops.

Anglo-European anthropocentrism began with the Biblical mandate of man’s dominion, and continues in the present with a long series of unproven assertions about human superiority and exceptionalism. Scientists who study animal behavior and cognition are in process of invalidating all of these assertions. What is left is the acceptance of “might makes right” through which members of dominant societies validate themselves and their actions.

Field biologists begin to recognize that each species has its unique Umwelt – a perception of the environment that we can’t detect or measure, but is essential to that species’s success. Therein lie the limits to reductive science and human understanding. We rely not only on other species, but on entire nonhuman ecosystems, to produce the food and other basic resources we need. Businesses and factories may keep us alive for a while, but they don’t keep us healthy in the long term. The more we try to engineer the ecosystems that, for example, provide our food, the more vulnerable we become, because natural systems embody the knowledge and wisdom of countless other entities that are beyond our comprehension and are necessary for ecosystem resilience and adaptation to changing conditions.

6.2 • Healthy Societies

I grew up on my grandfather’s farm where two of his sisters, aged 18 and 19, are buried due to TB, only a few hundred meters from my backyard. For me, growing up and entering the world as an adult carried the hope that those sorts of trivial losses of human potential – and the subsistence existence that my family on both sides experienced – would one day be forever banished. (Computer engineer, Facebook, 2015)

There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven’t produced stable communities well adapted to their places. (Wendell Berry, Orion, 1993)

Beneath the veneer of civilization, to paraphrase the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and animal, but the human in us who knows the rightness of birth in gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich nonhuman environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural history, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness)

We ate our bread in the sweat of our brows, entirely happy with our choice, and thankful to be free from that voluntary slavery which most accept in order to earn a living…we were earning our living in the most delightful and interesting way we could imagine, and would not be likely to complain of attendant labor. (Chapter 8, Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, Harlan Hubbard)

Misled by the fallacies of Anglo-European history, the computer engineer quoted above mistakenly conflates disease with subsistence living. Disease isn’t a problem in subsistence societies – it’s a problem of urbanized states, with their industrial agriculture, landscape engineering, concentration of wastes and broad transportation and distribution networks. I grew up in a healthy, long-lived family and community that had succeeded at farming and was proud of its hard work and track record. The last farmer in my family was my grandfather Carson, and the only thing that ended the tradition was that all of his six daughters married city people. This wasn’t a failure of subsistence culture – it was a failure of an individualistic society obsessed with competition and innovation. The members of the Amish community to the south of us supported each other in their farming way of life, rejecting the economic competition and technological innovation that encouraged my family and community to migrate and disintegrate, and today the Amish in my home county continue to thrive, whereas the non-Amish community is an empty shell, rife with drug addicts on welfare and disability.

Despite the misconceptions of people like astronaut Piers Sellers, humans did not uniformly “advance” from miserable caves to glittering cities. If you want to understand what makes a society healthy, you need to study healthy societies – humble societies, often obscure or unknown to us, that successfully care for their members and habitats, avoiding some of the myriad problems of our own society. Anthropology forces us to abandon the hubris of our cultural exceptionalism, the unacknowledged assumption that might makes us right. Listen to anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in The Old Way, a book about the Ju/wasi of southern Africa:

I remember my disappointment upon learning of a professor of zoology who visited the Ju/wasi briefly as a guest/consultant of the Harvard group. While there, he evidently quizzed the people about the natural world and then returned to tell his fellow academics that the Ju/wasi “knew almost as much as we do” about the plants and animals…the professor missed the fact that when it came to matters of their own environment, the Ju/wasi knew considerably more than we do.

The process was essentially the same for every person and started early in life, not by sitting at the feet of some elder who imparts bits of wisdom by telling stories…but by accompanying adults, watching what they did, overhearing their talk, and participating when possible…By these methods, young people absorbed a body of knowledge that their ancestors had been accumulating since the rain forests withered, the knowledge that would help each generation reach reproductive age in good condition, ready to educate the next generation. Thus, over the millenia, inaccuracies were filtered out, leaving the oldest and purest scientific product–solid, accurate information that had often been put to the test.

I…feel that I saw the most successful culture that our kind has ever known, if a lifestyle can be called a culture and if stability and longevity are measures, a culture governed by sun and rain, heat and cold, wind and wildfires, plant and animal populations.

And these lessons from subsistence cultures of North America, South America, and the Pacific Ocean:

The Amish…have succeeded simply by asking one question of any proposed innovation, namely: “What will this do to our community?” That, to me, is an extremely wise question, and most of us have never learned to ask it. If we wanted to be truly progressive, if we were truly committed to improving ourselves as creatures and as members of communities, we would always ask it. (Wendell Berry, in Orion)

The Piaroa view competition as leading to cannibalism. They feel that competition over resources and over the power to transform the resources of the earth into human goods is the primary force producing human violence. (University of Alabama Department of Anthropology, Peaceful Societies Project)

Tikopoia Islanders inhabit a tiny island so far from any neighbors that they were forced to become self-sufficient in almost everything, but they micromanaged their resources and regulated their population size so carefully that their island is still productive after 3,000 years of human occupation. (Jared Diamond, Collapse)

Truly sustainable societies don’t pursue increasing power and mechanization through technological innovations like electric cars and wind farms. They maintain their resilience to respond to environmental challenges by adapting – minimizing their dependence on technology so they can rapidly change their way of life – instead of trying to control their environment through engineering.

Members of sustainable societies don’t continually strive to “better their own and their families’ lives by struggling to get a bit more than they have.” They focus on sustaining their well-being under stable conditions – consistently caring for their members and habitat from generation to generation – and adapting to crises, protecting their members during transitions to a new form of stability. They operate on a small, face-to-face scale, engaging active adults in a reciprocal, restorative subsistence ecology. Individuals submit to the welfare of the community, decisions are achieved by consensus rather than coercion, individuals are prevented from accumulating wealth or power over others, aggression is suppressed, and elders accumulate and perpetuate long-term wisdom for adapting to environmental or external crises.

Although the cultural norms of Amish life circumscribe personal freedom, they also lift the burden of choice from the back of the individual. They liberate the individual from the incessant need to decide. In Amish culture, the burden for success and failure leans on the community; in the modern world, the weight of success and failure rests on the individual, who may lack the support of a durable group. (Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture)

A bureaucracy that places pupils together within narrow age limits and emphasizes science and technology to the exclusion of sharing values and personal responsibility is not tolerated. The Amish appreciate thinking that makes the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When human groups and units of work become too large for them, a sense of estrangement sets in. When this happens the world becomes unintelligible to them and they cease participating in what is meaningless. (John A. Hostetler, Amish Society)

What I’ve come to think of as the true foundation sciences – ecology and anthropology – can humble us with their revelations, but shouldn’t frustrate or threaten us. They can give us new respect for our mysterious world and our non-human partners that help keep the ecosystem functioning. They can shift our focus from the fantasies of a manufactured, human-dominated world to the infinite and much richer complexities of a world we share with the rest of nature, where we accept our limits in order to thrive within them.

7 • Vicious Cycles of Engineering and Technology: How Dominant Societies Fail

In its broadest form, technology simply refers to the making and use of tools. Humans are not alone in this; other animals also make and use tools, but without the destructive and self-destructive impacts of human technologies. At what point in cultural evolution does technology become dangerous and destructive?

7.1 • The Engineering of Habitat

One idea that’s popular among radical environmentalists, conservation biologists, and critics of civilization is the notion that agriculture was invented in the Middle East 11,000 years ago, enabling the accumulation of surplus food and the growth of communities, leading to centralization of power, hierarchical civilizations, and the gradual destruction of nature as growing societies expanded and consumed more habitat. So, these people see agriculture as our first and biggest mistake. Of course, this misconception is itself based on the fallacies of linear time and progress. In traditional societies, rather than an irreversible innovation, agriculture is always part of a varied, adaptive toolkit for subsistence, available to be used or abandoned as the environment changes.

To modern people, dams, timber, and great cities are part of the vision of paradise, engineers are priests, and the forces of nature are mere puzzles with certain solutions. (Carolyn Servid and Donald Snow, The Book of the Tongass)

Recent excavations have revealed that engineering, not agriculture, is what brings down civilizations. The engineering of habitat – not just our homes, but the environment that produces our subsistence – is the fatal mistake:

Angkor – which Chevance and Evans describe as ‘an engineered landscape on a scale perhaps without parallel in the preindustrial world’…was an urban center extending over nearly 400 square miles…The sheer ambition of the Khmer kings, their re-engineering of a jungled landscape into an urban one, sowed the seeds of destruction…Over time, the artificially engineered landscape almost certainly led to topsoil degradation, deforestation and other changes that drastically reduced the capacity to feed the population and made Angkor increasingly difficult to manage. (Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian, 2016)

For us, habitat engineering begins with local and regional infrastructure projects like roads, canals, dams, and bridges, and develops into national and global interventions like factory farms, industrial mines, oil and gas fields, power plants, railroads and shipping lines, superhighway networks and airlines, pipelines and transmission corridors and undersea cables, communications networks and satellites, and of course the ultimate engineered habitats: cities. These structures and systems are always reductive and mechanistic, hugely wasteful of energy and material resources, and ultimately unsustainable.

Human beings, the Greeks thought, tend to violate the order of the universe whenever, in their pride, they try to make major alteration in what is already present in the natural environment. Canals across isthmuses, for example were strongly discouraged because they would have made islands of what were naturally peninsulas. (J. Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations)

Anthropocentrism, combined with statism, marshalled the onslaught of technology against nature, ensuring that a world of robust, diverse natural ecosystems would be transformed into a machine for supplying human needs. In the anthropocentric delusion of members of dominant societies, including engineers like Elon Musk, the world is thus a man-made place containing islands of nature called parks and preserves, which are believed to be sufficient for our recreational and spiritual needs:

dominant-universe

By contrast, sustainable societies recognize their dependence on unmanaged, unengineered natural ecosystems, and live within their limits:

accurate-world

7.2 • Vicious Cycles

Why do dominant societies engineer their habitats and pursue technological innovation, and how are these behaviors so destructive?

anthro-individualism

First – combining anthropocentrism and individualism with competition, statism, aggression, dominance, and coercion – individual comfort, convenience, power and security are elevated over the health of the community and habitat. This leads to two parallel processes:

Engineering of natural habitat (diverse ecosystem) for sole human use (urbanization and industrialization)
Innovation of technology to meet goals of individual comfort, convenience, power and security

Habitat engineering leads to growing population, which in turn leads to increasing hierarchy and centralization of power, resulting in increasing inequality and lack of accountability of leaders for the consequences of their actions. And growing population adds a feedback loop, requiring even more habitat engineering, stretching ever farther outward to regional and even global networks, in a vicious cycle.

In an additional parallel process, habitat engineering for human use results in declining quality of habitat and basic resources (air, food, water, etc.) – not only from pollution, but also through the elimination of beneficial wild organisms essential for our healthy biota – and much of this damage occurs in distant locations, out of sight and mind, preventing the accumulation of useful knowledge and wisdom.

Technological innovation results in new technologies empowering youth and disempowering elders, leading to the declining role of elders, declining communal memory and contextual wisdom, and increasingly dysfunctional communities.

In parallel, innovation in a money economy leads to commodification of resources and social services, isolating individuals as consumers, leading to the breakdown of social networks, declining quality of social services, and increasing consumption of natural resources by isolated individuals who would otherwise be able to meet their needs socially.

One of the most destructive results of technological innovations like the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane is increased human mobility, which enables and encourages individuals to become isolated from their families and communities, so that families and communities break down and individual health declines as we become dependent on machines rather than the rich, contextual face-to-face communication, touching, and physical sharing we need.

The increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of elites, resulting from habitat engineering, added to the increasing community dysfunction resulting from technological innovation, combine to reduce the quality of social services (emotional support, healthcare, childcare, justice, wisdom, etc.) available to the disempowered and disadvantaged majority.

…the industrial household was, by virtue of its isolation and insecurity, a savagely competitive bundle of self-interest that neatly reinforced the fierce aggressiveness of the capitalist market place…Still today, the troubled families that come to pieces all about us are reeling in those great winds of change. They are pitted against the brutal historical fact that wherever the industrial city takes over, it comes, not to preserve families and strengthen community, but to erect cities, assemble a work force, build an economy. And for that, it needs power at the top and helpless human fragments at the bottom. (Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society)

The declining quality of habitat and basic resources resulting from habitat engineering and isolation of consumers from social support, combined with the declining quality of social services resulting from both engineering and innovation, combine to produce a general decline in human health and an increase in conflict, especially in distant locations where resources are extracted, out of sight and mind, for the benefit of urban consumers in dominant societies.

These problems place an even greater demand on technological innovation to further increase individual comfort, convenience, and security, feeding back to the beginning in a vicious cycle, until conflict becomes violence, suffering, and death – all resulting from an anthropocentric, individualistic, statist worldview and value system.

8 • Engineering Without Understanding

8.1 • Unquestioning Idealism

Idealism, whether of the pastoral peaceable kingdom or the electronic paradise of technomania and space travel, is…a normal part of adolescent dreaming, like the juvenile fantasies of heroic glory…The difficulty for our time is that no cultus exists, with its benign cadre of elders, to guide and administer that transition. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness)

Like the rest of us, most engineers are specialists, cogs in the machinery of society, doing work that is determined by someone higher up. Like most of us, engineers unquestioningly inherit the Anglo-European cultural baggage. Like the rest of us, some are selfish or cynical, while others are idealistic. But like most of us, engineers have no experience with field ecology or anthropology, and as a result, have little or no understanding of society or its context in nature. Like astronaut Piers Sellers, they mistakenly conflate the historical fallacies of anthropocentrism, urbanism, progress, individualism, exploration, reductionism and mechanism with the realities of nature and human society.

Tech evangelists Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil carry the Biblical fallacies of anthropocentrism and dominion over nature to new heights. Musk exhorts us to fulfill our “destiny” as a “multi-planet species,” transcending the natural limits of terrestrial ecosystems through space travel and habitat engineering. Kurzweil promotes life extension technology to transcend the natural biological processes of aging and death.

As in all fields, some technologists are more ambitious than others, and more adept at business. Some time ago I read a profile of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded biomedical technology company Theranos as a teenager. Ms. Holmes is an engineer-entrepreneur like Elon Musk. What struck me about the profile was her emphasis on the importance of living a “life of purpose,” an expression she had picked up from her father. I thought, “That’s one of those loaded cliches that ambitious people use as some sort of private code – what the hell does it mean to her?”

It eventually appeared that to the Holmeses, a “life of purpose” meant making an impact on society at a high level, by acquiring wealth, power and influence. Apparently a simple farmer, or a classroom teacher, has no purpose in this world. Theranos initially skyrocketed to short-term success, then began to crash and burn as it underwent criminal investigation by the government for irresponsible or unethical practices.

The vast bulk of scientific research undertaken by the biotechnology companies is subject neither to peer review–the accepted norm anywhere else in science–nor available for publication. (Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution)

8.2 • Medical Technology: The Ultimate Rationalization

Medical technology, the ultimate rationalization of progress, is an outstanding example of innovation without understanding. The ostensible goal of medicine is to relieve suffering and save lives, and the most vaunted result of medical innovation is the reduction of infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy in affluent societies. Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook pledges to “rid the world of all disease” via scientific research and medical engineering.

But historically, disease is largely a byproduct of urbanization, technological innovation, statism, and imperialism. Concentration of pollution and waste makes cities an unhealthy environment, and industrial agriculture breeds new diseases and reduces the quality and diversity of our diet. Epidemics are nurtured and spread by the increase in human mobility facilitated by technology, statism, and imperialism. Assistive technologies like the automobile and industrial food processing degrade health and fitness, triggering epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and cancer, and consumerism results in epidemics of stress disorders, depression, drug addiction, and Alzheimers. Medical technology is a band-aid on the dysfunction of dominant society; healthy societies don’t need it, because they focus on raising caring providers rather than needy consumers.

In natural ecosystems and subsistence cultures, death is the necessary passage in the cycle of life that transfers resources to others, particularly the young. We should live just long enough to pass on our knowledge and wisdom to those who are prepared to use them for the welfare of the community. To live longer is selfishness.

A 50 percent mortality rate among the newborn is a gift of life and health to the survivors. The modern medical reduction of that rate is an enormous alteration in human biology that we, as a species, may not be able to afford. The birth rate in hunting-gathering societies is kept down by a variety of means, including contraception and induced abortion…small families appear to be superior in terms of quality of offspring and likelihood of survival…. (Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game)

In the context of an aggressive, coercive society with a reductive, mechanistic worldview, medicine becomes warfare: the war on polio, the war on cancer, the war on diabetes, the war on obesity, and even the war on aging.

Medicine is about disease, not the patient. And what the patient knows is untrustworthy; what the machine knows is reliable….we see the emergence of specialists–for example, pathologists and radiologists–who interpret the meaning of technical information and have no connection whatsoever with the patient, only with tissue and photographs…Nature is an implacable enemy that can be subdued only by technical means; the problems created by technological solutions (doctors call these “side effects”) can be solved only by the further application of technology. (Neil Postman, Technopoly)

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, puts it like this: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”…an economic analysis published in June 2015 estimates that $28 billion per year is wasted on biomedical research that is unreproducible. Science isn’t self-correcting; it’s self-destructing. (Daniel Sarewitz, The New Atlantis, 2016)

In Health Shock, Martin Weitz cites the calculations of Professor John McKinley that more deaths are caused by surgery each year in the United States than the annual number of deaths during the wars in Korea and Vietnam…We also know that, in spite of advanced technology (quite possibly because of it), the infant-survival rate in the United States ranks only fourteenth in the world, and it is no exaggeration to say that American hospitals are commonly regarded as among the most dangerous places in the nation. (Neil Postman, Technopoly)

Medical scientists are only recently becoming aware of the importance of wild organisms found in soil, and microorganisms found in healthy bodies, to our health – organisms which are eliminated by the engineering of urban habitats and the technological “war on disease.” And whereas immersion in natural, unmanaged ecosystems restores and sharpens our minds and bodies, assistive technologies and engineered environments weaken and degrade our abilities and senses – with repetitive stress, allergies, artificial memory, air, noise, and light pollution.

Focusing on individual welfare at the expense of community, ignoring the broader impacts on society and ecosystem, expensive technology – inevitably biased toward elites – artificially prolongs unproductive lives, consuming a disproportionate amount of limited natural and social resources, and increasing inequality and conflict. The science and technology of life extension represent the ultimate selfishness.

Saying that technology makes life better is like saying that money can buy happiness. You shouldn’t need data or statistics to recognize the naivete in that. Anthropocentric, individualistic societies which pursue habitat engineering and innovation become increasingly dysfunctional, losing the unity which could restrain their members from abusing technology and taking advantage of each other. In our society, a “man of action” generally turns out to be a man of hubris, selfishly pursuing a goal without trying to understand its context.

9 • Robots: Weakening and Killing Us, Threatening Nature and Society

My grandfather said the white man would create something in his own image. I’m not sure, but I think he meant the image of a human mind, put into one of these super-powerful computers…It’ll be a mind in a machine, and you’ll lose control. Like you’ve lost control of all your inventions, the atom bomb, gasoline, electricity, cars. (Navajo woman, quoted in Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston)

Many engineers dream of a world filled with robots. Robots are machines designed to replace human labor, or to extend human labor into realms humans can’t easily reach, for example the inside of the human body, or distant, hostile environments.

This discrepancy between difficulty and danger is our civilization’s signature, from machine guns to atomic bombs. You press a pedal and two tons of metal lurches down the city avenue; you pull a trigger and twenty enemies die; you waggle a button and cities burn. The point of living in a technologically advanced society is that minimal effort can produce maximal results. Making hard things easy is the path to convenience; it is also the lever of catastrophe. (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 2015)

Because robots are designed to work without direct human manipulation or control, they must be programmed by someone. Hence they embody the worldview, assumptions, and biases of the programmer, who is typically an engineer – without ensuring any accountability of that anonymous designer for the end result.

Human labor is sustained by the energy found in food. But as machines, robots require and consume electrical energy, which comes from a vast, unaccountable global network of factories and other infrastructure, involving massive amounts of waste and pollution, from the toxic elements used in batteries to transmission losses in powerlines and heat losses in turbines and power plants.

As noted above, the pursuit of individual power and convenience – which includes the replacement of human labor with robotic labor – is one of the fundamental mistakes of dominant societies. Mass production in factories is an alienating, destructive practice whether performed by humans or robots. It should be reduced and eliminated, not made easier through automation. But when humans perform factory tasks, they tend to be more accountable for their consumption of natural resources, since they can see how materials from all over the world are assembled into consumer products.

An equally fundamental argument against robots is the importance of labor to human health, both individual and social. Reliance on assistive technologies like autonomous vehicles weakens us and makes us prone to disabilities like obesity, as well as launching us on a vicious cycle of individualism and social dysfunction. Commuting long distances for work or school is an unhealthy practice we should work to reduce and eliminate, not make easier and less social with self-driving cars.

…the truth is that the work ordinary people do in traditional societies remains a thoroughly dignified and intrinsically engaging use of life….In premodern society there is no such thing as “unskilled” labor; there are no workers who exist simply as the routinized adjuncts of machines or assembly lines; there is no one, below the level of the privileged orders, whose life’s work is a scam or a boondoggle. (Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society)

Working the soil keeps one close to God; hard physical labor is good in itself. Farming helps to hold the family together, living and working as a unit in a way that would not be possible if the members worked away from home. (Carolyn Meyer, Amish People: Plain Living in a Complex World)

The ambitious field of artificial intelligence, which aims to guide the cutting edge of robotics, relies on the Cartesian fallacy of the brain as machine, isolated from its social and ecological contexts. No human can survive on the basis of individual intelligence; we need the minds of our community as well as the unknowable intelligence of our ecosystem partners to sustain and to adapt to new challenges. Intelligence isn’t assembled from neurons, synapses, or even individual brains – it evolves in the larger social and ecological context.

Robots are being developed by dominant societies, which are characterized by their aggression and use of violence to coerce weaker communities into submission. And the greatest danger of robots to humans is in surveillance and warfare. Covert drone warfare, practiced by our government, is the form in which robots first became widely known in our society. Rather than demanding an end to this, civilians have eagerly embraced airborne drones as toys and photographic aids.

The ecological threat of robots may be even greater than their danger to humans. Like transoceanic shipping, the railroad, and the automobile, which have devastated native ecosystems and changed global climate, triggering mass extinctions and threatening civilization, robots extend the destructive power of humans to a much broader realm, threatening wildlife in uninhabited parks, preserves, and wilderness areas, on glaciers and polar ice sheets, to the depths of the sea, and to microscopic flora and fauna. People who consider themselves nature lovers think nothing of disturbing wildlife with drones, in order to get spectacular pictures and videos of nature.

10 • Space Exploration and Colonization: War on the Sky

What we dominant societies think of as “outer space”, populated with worlds to conquer, begins as the sky of people in more humble, sustainable, subsistence-based societies. Rather than worlds to conquer, traditional peoples see the all-powerful sun and moon, dominating the natural cycles we depend on for our subsistence, the wind and clouds that renew our habitat, the birds, bats, and insects that teach us and feed us. The night sky is sacred space, reflecting myths and legends that bond people to their heritage and to each other, reminding them of the wisdom of their ancestors, and thrilling them with the Great Mysteries.

Sending even small numbers of people and machines into space requires tremendous amounts of energy generated by consuming terrestrial resources and damaging terrestrial habitats and ecosystems. The financial investment required can only be provided by national governments and huge corporations, and the explorers who are sent into space become agents of empire who abandon their homes, families, and neighborhoods, furthering corporate agendas rather than the welfare of their communities. Space exploration and colonization are imperialism – the aggressive expansion of dominant societies.

The reality of exploration: lunar landing site with “toss zone” for trash. Traditional societies honor the moon’s influence on our lives in rituals and festivals; our “advanced, pioneering” society litters it with 400,000 pounds of trash, including over 70 abandoned machines and 69 bags of urine, feces, and vomit.

The “outer space” we learn about from telescopes, rockets, and space probes is like the “matter” we learn about from the atom smashers of particle physics. It’s engineered space, decontextualized space, dead space that teaches us nothing about how to live healthy, successful lives on earth.

The colonization of space not only requires the destructive consumption of massive terrestrial resources in “getting off the ground,” it naively assumes that the habitat of humans can be created from scratch in an extraterrestrial environment. As noted above, humans can’t engineer a healthy habitat for themselves – healthy human habitats are created and sustained by an infinite diversity of nonhuman creatures whose roles and functions are beyond scientific understanding and management. Habitat engineering is the fundamental mistake of dominant societies, and the creation of new habitat from scratch can only be conceived by people who have no experience with subsistence living or field ecology, and no understanding of the natural, unengineered, unmanaged ecosystems that produced us, and that we need in order to thrive. The colonization of space is perhaps the most naive and arrogant project ever devised by alienated human minds.

11 • What We Can Expect

Blockbuster movies romanticize space exploration and the heroism of explorers and colonists. Even if a movie shows a dystopian future, the technology, and even the violence, are exciting and fun to watch. My local library engages kids by teaching them to program computers and work with robots. The media decry the shortage of women coders in the computer industry, pressuring male-dominated tech companies to hire more female workers. General-interest magazines with the widest circulation regularly devote entire issues to tech, innovation, and “genius” inventors. Pundits continually emphasize the importance of science and math curricula in schools, and parents worry that their kids will not be competitive enough in the tech-dominated job market. Technology which is designed for military use in surveillance and weaponry is then sold to, and unquestioningly accepted by, civilian consumers – sometimes, as in the case of drones, in the form of insidiously destructive toys for children and adolescents.

Technology is especially pernicious in its exploitation of the young, who lack the experience, knowledge, and wisdom to evaluate and reject or use it responsibly. Technology, embedded in rampant consumerism, seduces the young by offering them unfair power over their elders, addicting them to devices which further isolate them from human contact and alienate them from nature. In this vicious cycle, elders gradually cease to function in society, since the same process has previously alienated them from even older generations.

Even without the addition of new innovations like rockets and robots, non-reductive sciences like climatology, ecology, and sociology struggle to catch up with and understand the damage being done by older technologies. As Jared Diamond noted, innovation creates more problems than it solves. One of the worst, least studied, and most ignored results of 20th century innovation is the unfolding catastrophe of microplastics in aquatic environments, but the production and use of plastics just keeps accelerating and threatens to persist as long as human-caused climate change.

The bottom line is that even if we could convince technologists that their fantasies are not solutions to our problems – and that we neither want nor need them – we’re not going to stop billionaires from forcing those fantasies on us. Tech is cool – it seduces us with power, convenience, and stimulation. Even a dystopian future seems cooler than the slower, less exciting world of our parents and grandparents. Our individualistic society rewards ambition and greed and rejects any restraints on individual consumption. Robots and space travel are supported at the highest levels of our society. The only thing that will stop them will be their own failure, and the best we can do is to seek and cultivate ecological and social refuges here on our home planet, in which our children may be able to survive the catastrophic impacts of exploration and innovation.

Where do the little people of the world turn when the big structures crumble or grow humanly intolerable? At that point, it becomes important for us to know what a political and intellectual leadership devoted to the big system orthodoxies will never tell us: that there are small alternatives that have managed to bring person and society, spiritual need and practical work together in a supportive and symbiotic relationship. (Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society)

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Nations Fall, Communities Rise

Saturday, January 28th, 2017: Problems & Solutions, Society.

In childhood, our schools taught us the version of history told by the victorious conquerors: the myth of progress from savage, superstitious tribes to civilized, scientific democracies; the heroic quests of explorers, colonists and pioneers seeking freedom from oppression and a better life; the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln freeing the slaves, modern medicine conquering disease, the democratic Allies saving the world from fascism, the environmental movement saving the planet, and science and technology making our lives safer and easier and liberating us to seek our highest potential as individuals.

Now that we’re adults, the corporate news media – romanticized as the “free press” – demand our full, uninterrupted attention to the President and his national power structure, threatening that if we turn away, we risk apocalypse. And urban consumers, dependent on the massive support systems governed by those talking heads, believe in the threat. The media predict what consumers want to hear, and consumers rejoice. Then the media report the opposite, and the shocked and saddened consumers return to the same sources, now seeking solace, enlightenment, and guidance. Consumers come to believe they have actual, important relationships – however dysfunctional – with strangers they will never meet, who are known only as talking heads on the screen.

Peaceful societies like the Amish of North America, the Piaroa of South America, the Ju/’hoansi of Africa, the Rural Thai of Southeast Asia, and the Ifaluk of the South Pacific, are burdened with none of these misapprehensions. They know their existence is always subject to disruption by external powers beyond their control, but they remain self-sufficient, independent, and vigilant, and they have learned to adapt to crises peacefully, avoiding conflict and migrating away from it when necessary.

Likewise, minorities with a history of persecution know better than to depend on kings or presidents for survival or salvation. The self-sufficiency of the North American Anabaptists is the result of generations of violent persecution in Europe. Mormons encourage self-reliance and often require their children to learn indigenous survival skills. And while the Black Panthers were seen by the centralized power structure as violent revolutionaries, the majority of their work consisted of peacefully providing social, health, and subsistence services to their local communities.

Consumers’ dependence on the centralized nation-state derives from their belief in the nation-state as a bastion of security and stability, and their fear of chaos and apocalypse should it collapse. But this is a myth perpetuated by the power structure. A reality check on history shows that the nation-state is continually destroying itself and its environment. The United States was founded in violence: the conquest of Native Americans, a revolution against the British, the establishment of borders and the defense of them. The story of its growth to a world power is the story of traumatic conversion of resilient rural subsistence communities to cities full of isolated, vulnerable consumers, and the continual, ongoing destruction of healthy natural habitat and its replacement by toxic industrial tracts and urban sprawl. Consumers remain mostly unaware of this, since they seldom leave the city and are habituated to artificial environments.

During the Third Reich and World War II, the democratic Allies allowed fascism to spread and failed to prevent the Holocaust – nor did they save the world from fascism; they increased the devastation with a world war and millions more deaths, while the Nazi regime and the Japanese empire self-destructed through hubris, militarism, and overextension. Likewise, the democratic nation-states of Western Civilization pursued a policy of imperialism leading to the Rwandan genocide, and after more than a century of “progress” and “enlightenment,” the same nation-states failed to prevent it or stop it while it was happening.

The myth of societal collapse and apocalypse stems from the misrepresentation of the European “Dark Ages,” the misnamed period after the collapse of the Roman Empire which was in reality a Golden Age of local freedom and autonomy after centuries of oppression by the imperial nation-state. Citizens of modern democratic nation-states blame the ongoing failure of Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria on religion and superstition, whereas these failed states are themselves the artificial inventions of the European democracies. The destruction, misery, and refugee crises resulting from these societal collapses demonstrate the ultimate vulnerability of urban populations and the danger of depending on centralized, hierarchical power structures.

When the citizens of Western nations begin to sense their own vulnerability and begin to fear the apocalypse, they manifest their naiveté in dysfunctional movements like libertarianism and prepping – fallacies common to even the wealthiest and most powerful citizens. These ideologies result from historical Anglo-European competitive individualism and widespread ignorance of anthropology and ecology, holistic sciences which reveal the superiority of communal societies. When centralized societies collapse, people who selfishly hoard resources and weapons to defend their families are doomed to repeat the cycles of self-destructive violence, whereas people who cooperate and peacefully nurture their local communities, adopting the lessons of the peaceful societies, are likely to thrive.

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How the Middle Class Destroys the World

Tuesday, January 31st, 2017: Problems & Solutions, Society.

The Accountability Problem

You depend on many resources, products, and services to survive and stay healthy and happy: clean air and water, nutritious food, clothing, shelter, heating, cooling, communication, transportation, healthcare, and security. Do you know where all these things ultimately come from?

If not, how do you know whether someone or someplace is being harmed to provide for your basic needs?

The urbanized middle class – the bourgeoisie of Marxist theory – is considered the foundation of stable, peaceful society in the modern nation-state, and it’s what the lower classes aspire to. I was raised to join the middle class, and all my peers are raising their kids to be middle class – who wouldn’t?

But whereas the foundation of traditional societies is the local workers who provide basic needs, the modern middle class consists of consumers who depend on a global network of products and services that is so complex it is virtually untraceable and unknowable – and hence unaccountable.

In fact, you don’t know whether someone or someplace is being harmed to make your lifestyle possible.

How the Middle Class Destroys Society

Intimidation, Punishment, and Slavery

The security of the middle class depends on a nuclear arsenal capable of rendering the planet uninhabitable, a global military empire intimidating and sometimes practicing covert warfare against foreign civilians, a largely covert arms industry dominated by U.S.-based multinational corporations, and a domestic security apparatus resulting in mass incarceration of citizens, who are largely hidden away from public access in high-security prisons.

Military bases, defending the economic empire of American consumers, are imposed on the populations of much less powerful, economically disadvantaged societies, resulting in intimidation, economic dependency, and resentment.

Defending the middle class: Pakistani children killed by U.S. drone strike:

The U.S.-dominated global arms industry profits from violent conflict and human suffering:

U.S.-made weapons commandeered by ISIS:

Throughout history, traditional communities practiced restorative justice, which helps the victim and heals society. But middle class consumers depend on the punitive justice system of the modern nation-state, which harms society without helping the victims. The punitive justice system and its prison network reinforce ethnic and racial inequality, perpetuate domestic slavery, and foster social dysfunction.

Growth of the U.S. prison system during the past 40 years:

Work crew at Angola Prison, Louisiana:

Economic Imperialism

The middle class consumer lifestyle is sustained by mass-produced products and services made affordable by large corporations and long-distance distribution networks exploiting economic inequality. Products are manufactured, and services are directly provided, by blue-collar laborers whose labor is generally valued far less than that of middle-class consumers, and who live in poor neighborhoods with a lower quality of life. Middle class waste products are transported to, and imposed on, poor neighborhoods for processing and disposal.

Since major products like food, fuel, clothing, phones, computers, appliances, cars, and building materials are typically manufactured in poorer foreign countries from components and raw materials which in turn come from other, even poorer foreign countries, workers sometimes live and work in virtual – or even actual – slavery. And the supply chain for consumer products is virtually untraceable.

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Raw materials for consumer products needed by the middle class come from distant rural communities all over the planet, where workers and their families endure dangerous conditions, toxic environments, war, or slavery:

Mining for the electronics industry in the Congo:

The urban middle class depends on services – housekeeping, childcare, food service, transportation, repair and maintenance, waste disposal, etc. – provided by lower-class workers living in poor, often gang-dominated, neighborhoods.

Gang members in East Los Angeles:

Social Division, Fragmentation, and Isolation

A college education, one of the defining requirements of the middle class lifestyle, is intended to lead to a professional career, freeing the consumer from manual labor.

Thus the primary function of “higher education” is to train young people to become office workers – people who work indoors at a computer, an inherently unhealthy artificial environment – and to condition them for a consumer lifestyle which is dependent on a disadvantaged lower class of manual laborers and service providers and the destructive global network of manufacturing and distribution. Higher education is an integral part of the vicious cycles in which dominant societies deteriorate from generation to generation.

Middle class youth are generally expected to leave home for higher education, then to migrate again, possibly multiple times, in pursuit of a professional career. The move to higher education deprives them of their roots and deprives their family and home community of their social services; henceforth they are “floaters,” generally uncommitted to any local, face-to-face community. They rarely get to know their neighbors, and become temporary members of cliques of similarly isolated peers, without the intergenerational commitment and accountability that ties real communities together.

Technologically-assisted communications – email, texting, voice phone, and social media – likewise encourage the dispersion of individuals from their families and communities of origin, by allowing an impoverished form of remote interaction that takes the place of face-to-face interaction. Without the support of extended family and a tight-knit community, urban consumers fall prey to stress disorders and mental health problems such as depression, self-medicating and enriching the multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Thus are communities fragmented and disempowered, and individuals isolated and rendered vulnerable, by education, mobility, and communications media.

How the Middle Class Destroys Natural Habitats and Ecosystems

Habitat Destruction

The media have taught urban consumers that climate change is the biggest threat to our environment. But habitat destruction, which often results in species extinction, is the primary form of ecological damage resulting from the middle class consumer lifestyle. Climate change is only one long-term form of habitat destruction – other forms are much more catastrophic in the near term.

Urban Sprawl

Urban sprawl, providing housing for the middle class and the blue-collar workers they depend on, is one of the most extreme forms of habitat destruction, in which productive ecosystems are completely destroyed and replaced by machines and impermeable surfaces which concentrate wastes and toxic materials, increasing erosion and spreading the damage to the surrounding areas.

Since cities are dependent on a network of infrastructure delivering resources from the surrounding countryside and other distant trading centers, their damage extends outward globally to infrastructure and industry located out of sight and out of mind.

Industrial Wastelands

Industrial sites such as dams, mines, commodity farms, and factories, created to provide resources for consumers, also completely destroy productive natural ecosystems, replacing them with concentrations of toxic materials.

Tesla “gigafactory” destroyed a large area of wildlife habitat in the Nevada desert:

Infrastructure Barriers

The infrastructure required to deliver resources to urban areas and facilitate communication and mobility between them results in transportation and communications corridors which become toxic wastelands and barriers to wildlife.

Toxic Innovation, Toxic Materials

The continual improvement of middle class comfort and convenience through technological innovation results in a short product life cycle and rapid obsolescence. When obsolete products are discarded, few are recycled, and many, such as batteries and electronics, add toxic materials to the environment. Innovation is incredibly wasteful.

…high-tech products are usually composed of low-quality materials–that is, cheap plastics and dyes–globally sourced from the lowest-cost provider, which may be halfway around the world. This means that even substances banned for use in the United States and Europe can reach this country via products and parts made elsewhere….They can be assembled into, say, your treadmill, which will then emit the “banned” substance as you exercise. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)

One of the most revolutionary scientific inventions of the past century was disposable containers which were intended to be dumped in landfills after a single use. As time went by, these containers came to be made almost exclusively of plastics, which take centuries or even millenia to degrade. Since the 1950s, the use of plastics has accelerated, especially by the middle class, in the form of food packaging, shopping bags, clothing, storage containers, disposable water bottles, phones, toys, furniture, appliances, cars, etc.

As these items age and erode, often imperceptibly, into the environment, they break down into microscopic particles or “microplastics” which spread throughout aquatic and ocean environments and are ingested by wildlife, interfering with animal and plant life cycles in unpredictable ways. The microplastics catastrophe is just beginning and may eclipse other problems we are now more concerned about.

Microplastics disperse in the aquatic environment:

Microplastics damage aquatic life:

Toxic Mobility

Technological advances in human mobility – travel and distribution by land, water, sea, and air – ensure the rapid spread of disease and invasive species, accelerating ecosystem damage and habitat destruction worldwide. Most destructive species are spread accidentally, but many are introduced intentionally: rabbits in Australia as a source of meat, pythons in Florida and bullfrogs in the American West by irresponsible pet owners.

This map of global ship traffic shows how invasive species have been spread from continent to continent historically, as nations and empires have used technology to enrich themselves and subject native ecosystems to collateral damage:

Container ships delivering products and raw materials to American consumers also bring destructive invasive species:

Scientists estimate that technologically-enhanced human mobility has historically delivered 4,300 destructive invasive species to the U.S., ranging from Burmese pythons driving native species extinct in Florida to nutria destroying native habitat in Louisiana, from feral hogs devastating ecosystems in the South to European starlings starving native birds nationwide. The economic cost of damage by invasive species in the United States is estimated at $120 billion per year and will continue to grow as a result of technological innovation increasing human mobility.

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years, and during that period, like most residents, I came to accept a landscape dominated by invasive plant species as “nature.” Invasive eucalyptus trees covering the hills, invasive ice plant along the coast, invasive yellow star thistle blanketing the inland meadows. It was only after I moved to southwest New Mexico, far from the coast and its ports, that I began to experience relatively intact, and far more diverse, native ecosystems.

Cheatgrass, an Old World species introduced to North America in the 19th century, has spread across most of the U.S., displacing native plants, encouraging destructive wildfires, reducing the nutrient quality of rangelands, and impoverishing native ecosystems.

Contemporary distribution of destructive Asian cheatgrass:

Rangeland devastated by fire after cheatgrass invasion:

Asian zebra mussels have been spread across North America by boaters since the 1980s:

Crayfish encrusted with zebra mussels:

Energy Consumption

Technological innovation and consumers’ insatiable demand for gadgets ensures ever-accelerating consumption of energy, resulting in increasing destruction of natural habitat for mining, manufacturing, and the siting of energy production. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy require oil fields, mines, raw materials and manufacturing for plant components, industrial sites for energy plants, and disposal sites for toxic waste. Solar and wind energy require mines, raw materials and manufacturing for plant components, industrial sites for energy plants, and disposal sites for toxic waste.

This solar power plant in the Mojave Desert destroyed many square miles of wildlife habitat and continues to kill thousands of birds and pollinators:

False Hopes of the Middle Class

Politics

The centralized nation-state is made possible by a hierarchy of wealth and power. It functions primarily to enrich and empower elites, and is inherently destructive. And when the fundamental institutions of society – the ecological and social values and practices – are destructive, as described above – then political reform is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Middle-class society depends on the global economic and military empire maintained by the elites, and to give these up would be class suicide for either group. To paraphrase Karl Marx, politics is opium for the masses.

Green Energy and Electric Cars

So-called “green” energy is an industry like any other. Its function is not to save the planet, its function is to enable middle class consumers to continue consuming more and more energy with their devices – devices which rapidly become obsolescent and are discarded and replaced, devices whose operations add waste heat to the environment, devices which concentrate toxic materials in the environment, devices which harm society in many ways, some of which have been described above.

Electric cars are machines assembled from thousands of components whose global supply chain is untraceable, via a manufacturing process and distribution network which are energy-intensive and wasteful just like that used to produce conventional fossil-fueled cars. The function of electric cars is not to save the planet, it’s to perpetuate the already destructive mobility of middle class consumers while making billionaires even richer.

Recycling

As technological innovation accelerates, more waste is produced. The vast majority of our waste is not recycled, and when it is, recycling degrades the quality of the materials. It also requires more energy and labor on top of that required to manufacture the original products. So recycling increases our already destructive consumption of energy.

As we have noted, most recycling is actually downcycling; it reduces the quality of a material over time…the high-quality steel used in automobiles…is “recycled” by melting it down with other car parts, including copper from cables in the car, and the paint and plastic coatings…Downcycling can actually increase contamination of the biosphere. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)

Space Colonization

Some tech billionaires, and many engineers and science fiction fans, believe that we should, and will, save the planet we’re destroying by abandoning it to colonize other worlds. This fantasy results from their ignorance of ecology and human social behavior. Who gets to emigrate? Middle class American consumers? Agribusiness billionaires? Mexican farm workers? ISIS militants? It’s our dysfunctional behavior that’s destroying the earth – transplanting that behavior to another world solves nothing.

Even if some colonization happens, it won’t be sustainable. A healthy environment for humans isn’t engineered from scratch, by “terraforming” another planet. It evolves with the participation of uncountable wild organisms in a terrestrial ecosystem, and humans adapt to it just like their nonhuman partners. This is the only planet we have, and it will survive with or without us.

There is some talk in science and popular culture about colonizing other planets, such as Mars or the moon….But the idea also provides rationalization for destruction, an expression of our hope that we’ll find a way to save ourselves if we trash our planet. To this speculation, we would respond: If you want the Mars experience, go to Chile and live in a typical copper mine. There are no animals, the landscape is hostile to humans, and it would be a tremendous challenge. Or, for a moonlike effect, go to the nickel mines of Ontario. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)

To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. (Lyn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet)

How Local Providers Renew the World

Producers Not Consumers

Dominant, large-scale, centralized societies are destructive by nature. They have their own life cycle and exist primarily for the short-term benefit of the rich and powerful. They are not successfully managed or reformed for the benefit of local communities and ecosystems. The best we can do is minimize our dependence on them, transitioning from globally-dependent consumers to locally-accountable providers.

The best we can do for the earth and its people is to become successful producers and providers of basic needs for our local communities, conserving and re-using as much as possible of what we do consume, learning to do all this sustainably, and sharing what we learn so that future generations will succeed as well as us.

Local Heroes

Wherever we live, we can usually find people and organizations that are focusing their efforts on providing locally for local needs: farms, food co-ops, childcare centers, healthcare clinics, restorative justice services, churches, etc. These are the groups and people we should support and emulate, to rebuild our communities and thus take the load off the rest of the world.

Small-town farmer in New Mexico shows school kids how corn is re-seeded:

Urban youth learn to serve their community with restorative justice in Kansas City:

Traditional aboriginal skills are needed by the community to adapt to environmental crises, from crop failure to fire, flood, and war.

Students learn to process meat from an animal they killed on an indigenous skills course in Utah:

Peaceful Societies

While our dominant society destroys itself, there remain many little-known peaceful societies that offer the best hope for a sustainable future of humanity. These societies exist in the margins where they have been more or less successful at resisting the dominant society’s destructive impacts, perpetuating time-tested traditional practices and adapting to crises while our society continues to innovate and engineer itself to death. They are our best teachers.

Amish farmers in North America resist the destructive effects of technological innovation:

Unlike American middle-class consumers, the Piaroa of South America manage their natural resources communally and sustainably:

Instead of leaving their families to learn to be office workers and consumers, Ju/’hoansi children of southern Africa join their parents on foraging expeditions, learning to be providers for their community:

Like whales and other ecosystem partners, the Ifaluk of the South Pacific fish communally:

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The Real Virus

Friday, March 27th, 2020: Problems & Solutions, Society.

Addiction and Misdirection

Throughout the day, every day, news media urgently demand our attention to the latest crisis, and like sheep, like puppets, many of us drop what we’re doing to breathlessly follow the unfolding narrative.

Statistics: thousands of cases, hundreds of deaths. Predictions in the millions. Authorities split into two sides: “We must take this seriously to avoid a catastrophe!” vs. “We must get people back to work to avoid economic collapse!”

Statistics are by their very nature stripped of their real-world context. What do they mean? People don’t stop dying from war, domestic violence, old age, car accidents, “normal” diseases – but we only get statistics on the crisis. Where did these statistics come from? What extenuating circumstances already existed? What else was going on at the same time? What assumptions were made by those collecting and processing the data?

But those questions would require us to think, and in the consumer model of the news media, just like in the world of the drug pusher, we’re not supposed to think about what we’re consuming. We’re supposed to react, because it’s the reaction that keeps us addicted. The news doesn’t inform us, it alienates us. In a crisis, statistics are used to manipulate us, to immobilize us in front of our screens. The important thing is to remain enslaved to your favorite device, consuming energy, in a state of helplessness.

The people – citizens of the state, consumers of the media, literally addicted to their screens and the hysterical media narrative – echo what their favorite authorities have said, face to face and through social media. “Millions will die! We must take this seriously!” But what can we do as individuals, as statistics? Very little. Like children dependent on their parents, we look to our remote, unaccountable leaders in the hierarchical organization of the state, and again, as with climate change, this new crisis becomes yet another opportunity to attack the other side, the side which is not doing the right thing. The other side’s leaders are causing this crisis! They’re not taking this seriously enough! Or, it’s a hoax, a plot, they’re taking it too seriously! Yet again, we are divided and outraged.

Meanwhile, away from the media’s misdirection – out of sight and mind of our media addiction – our economy, our lifestyle, our society, our culture continue to destroy nature and humanity. Our global infrastructure of mines, factories, and shipping consumes natural ecosystems and habitats wholesale. Our global exploitation of cheap labor, enforced by our worldwide military empire and our foreign proxies, destroys traditional communities. The devices we’re addicted to, on which we follow this hysterical narrative, are destroying people and nature in distant places, through their consumption of the earth’s energy, their consumption of nonrenewable raw materials, their consumption of exploited and sometimes enslaved labor.

Statistics, sheep, puppets. The emperor has no clothes. This is the real crisis. We are the real virus.

Closed System

From early childhood, our schools indoctrinate us in the propaganda of the state: the narrative of the freedom-loving Pilgrims, the wise Founding Fathers, the revolutionary Constitution, our precious Democracy and its heroes, from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Kennedy. And as we advance through the educational system, our cultural conditioning broadens to encompass the classical legacy of our European forbears: Western Civilization, from the philosophical and democratic Greeks to the orderly, civilized Romans, creators of the language we still employ in both law and science. To the European flowering of arts and sciences from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. And the generous role of European culture in spreading enlightenment and democracy throughout the primitive, superstitious Developing World.

Of course, our society’s failures clearly invalidated this narrative in the 1960s and 1970s, and that era’s Counterculture identified most of its fallacies. But according to our hindsight, the Counterculture was a failure, because it never offered an alternative paradigm that would preserve the lifestyle, the “standard of living,” to which we’ve become accustomed. Some people did try communal living and went “back to the land,” but they lacked the skills and/or sociocultural unity to persist, and the juggernaut of consumer culture ultimately overcame their idealism.

In the late 1990s, authorities increasingly drew our attention to another sociocultural failure: climate change. I joined a friend in dinner discussions between the “intelligentsia” – successful white professionals, graduates of elite universities – that again questioned the foundations of our culture.

Like the earlier Counterculture, we again found fault with most of the dominant paradigms of Western Civilization. But again and again, we fell short of condemning the whole shebang, the entire edifice of what used to be called the Establishment. We got stuck on one essential institution, and one undeniable accomplishment: the saving of lives through medical science and technology.

These people (with me as the lone exception) unanimously believed that all the failings of our cultural legacy are redeemed by the statistical increase in life expectancy and reduction of infant mortality achieved by Western Medicine. Hey, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, okay? The important thing is that the baby survived!

A great irony of this conclusion is that the host of these discussions had a doctoral degree from Stanford, the home of Paul Ehrlich, celebrity author of The Population Bomb, and was inspired by Ehrlich’s thesis of overpopulation as our most pressing crisis. Overpopulation which is partly driven by modern medicine’s increase in life expectancy and reduction in infant mortality. Our greatest achievement, simultaneously causing our greatest problem? To paraphrase Freud, technology has increased the quantity of human life, while degrading its quality.

These people fancied themselves critical thinkers, because they’ve always been told that critical thinking is one of the key components of their liberal educations. But critical thinking is only as good as the knowledge it has to work with. And where do we get this knowledge? Almost none of us is working on the front lines of original research, extracting raw data and analyzing it, turning it into conclusions for peer review. Our knowledge comes primarily from our favorite authorities in the media. Ultimately, our “critical thinking” consists only in choosing between one authority and another. We’re sheep, following the leader.

To make things worse, both we and our leaders are participants in a closed system. The propaganda we’ve all been raised with obscures the reality that our society has become dominant by conquering, suppressing, and often erasing the cultures that could offer us alternatives to our failed values and institutions, and solutions to our problems. Our social discourse takes place in total ignorance of these alternatives.

The Ecology of Death

In natural ecosystems, the death of individual organisms is an essential event in the cycle of life and fertility. Each organism’s body is another organism’s food. The more science we do, the more this fundamental principle is reinforced. We die so that others may live.

But driven unconsciously by the Judeo-Christian mandate of man’s dominion over nature, European science repeatedly tries to prove that humans stand apart from the rest of nature, that we are the pinnacle of natural evolution, with our big brains, our “consciousness,” our reasoning, our languages, our technologies. Despite growing evidence that other animals share our “achievements,” and that our differences are quantitative rather than qualitative, that evidence remains confined to specialist discourse, and most of us are still taught that humans are exceptional. To people like the life-extension advocate Ray Kurzweil, humans should be immortal, and our death is a simply another problem to be solved by science and technology.

Many if not all traditional societies – those alternatives that we’ve conquered, suppressed, and ignored – recognize death as an essential, sacred event in the cycle of life. The events and phases of that cycle are what keep the cycle turning: birth, the learning experiences of the child, the adult’s roles as conceiver of new life and provider to the community, the elder’s role as steward of the wisdom needed to address crises. And death, the necessary return of one’s body to the ecosystem and one’s space to the community. This is why traditional societies haven’t developed our advanced medical technology. Not because they’re inferior and need our help, but because they’re often wiser and more successful than us at thriving on earth.

Let It Come Down

I often remind friends that I’ve spent the past 40 years waiting and hoping for our society to collapse. Some friends agree with me that our society is destroying the earth. Yet in a crisis like this, driven by a hysterical media narrative, many of them are victims of their media addiction. They forget critical thinking and become avid consumers of daily statistics, reflexive followers of their favorite media authorities. They forget that statistics are unaccountable, and media authorities are agents of the state, upholders of a failed paradigm. As citizens of the state, content to participate only as anonymous statistics, we surrender control of our lives to distant leaders we know only as talking heads on a tiny screen.

We forget that our economy, the Growth Economy, is consuming the earth. We forget that we Westerners live in bubbles of affluence and comfort – that worldwide, poor people suffer to provide us with the products of our “progress” and innovation. We only want things to get back to normal, so we can resume our “important” jobs within the machinery of this rapacious economy. We want our kids back in school to continue absorbing the same propaganda we were raised on, to prepare for their own “challenging, fulfilling” jobs within the destructive machine.

I hear serious people earnestly proclaim “Millions will die!” and “This country will never be the same again!” – their point being, our leaders must do something about this NOW!

And as always, I respond: Let go of this fantasy that you’re part of something big and wonderful that needs to be saved. It’s not your country – it never has been. It belongs to the rich and powerful. What you think of as your country is the Evil Empire. Despite its many seductive attractions, your culture is implicated in all the depredations of that empire. Your society will collapse – if not now, eventually – and that will be a good thing both for humans and for the earth.

Diseases are part of life, part of natural cycles. People sometimes die of diseases. Diseases are a natural regulatory mechanism in ecosystems. People are animals who live in natural ecosystems, whether we’re aware of it or not. The more intimately we participate, the more we collaborate in balance and harmony with our natural partners – wild organisms – the more we thrive. The more we rely on technology to save lives, save labor, and empower us, the more alienated and vulnerable we become.

Pandemics are caused by imperialism and globalism – the unaccountable dominance and exploitation of traditional societies by modern states, along with the global transportation networks that states use to maintain their dominance. Pandemics are caused by overpopulation, which results from our scientific and technological innovation: our artificially enhanced agricultural productivity, our medical increase in life expectancy and reduction in infant mortality.

This pandemic, this virus, won’t be the one that brings our society down. Despite the media hysteria, it’s simply not virulent enough. The vast majority of coronavirus cases experience minor symptoms and survive, and will end up suffering more from preventive measures than from the disease. The truly nightmarish epidemics of the past – the Black Plague, Cholera – as well as newer ones like Ebola – are still with us, and are capable of much greater mortality, and much worse suffering. We’ve only temporarily outsourced them to the traditional communities we and our proxies in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa are exploiting or trying to destroy.

Ultimately, by engineering to prevent death, by isolating individuals from risk and danger, we make ourselves weaker, more vulnerable. Like all the wars perpetrated by our aggressive, competitive, domineering society, the scientific and technological war against disease is a war against nature, a war we can’t win.

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News Media and the Public Discourse: A Menagerie of Blindness and Misdirection

Saturday, June 20th, 2020: Problems & Solutions, Society.

A Menagerie of Blindness and Misdirection

Whack-a-mole, submissive sheep, blind as a bat, red herrings, and sacred cows. There’s no shortage of animal metaphors to describe our behavior and our public discourse in a heterogenous society repeatedly shocked and increasingly divided by the revelations of the news cycle.

Whack-a-Mole

Whack-a-mole: a situation in which attempts to solve a problem are piecemeal or superficial, resulting only in temporary or minor improvement

News headlines: Black people are victimized by systemic racism in the police!

Public discourse: Government must do something about police brutality and racism now!

Weeks earlier: Global pandemic is spread by travel and physical contact!

Public discourse: Government must do something about the pandemic now!

Weeks earlier: Young people say we must do something about climate change!

Public discourse: Government must do something about climate change now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: Supreme court nominee is a sexual predator!

Public discourse: Government must reject this nominee now!

Weeks earlier: Government is separating immigrant children from their families at the border!

Public discourse: Government must stop this separation now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: White supremacists are rallying nationwide!

Public discourse: Government must stop racism and white supremacists now!

Weeks earlier: Opioid addiction is a national emergency!

Public discourse: Government must stop opioid use now!

Weeks earlier: Terrorists kill tourists worldwide!

Public discourse: Government must find a solution for terrorism now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: Powerful men in the movie industry are sexual predators!

Public discourse: Bring these men to justice now!

Weeks earlier: The President colluded with a foreign power to win the election!

Public discourse: Impeach the President now!

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how the news media keep us in a constant state of crisis, leading us by the nose, focusing our attention exclusively on a single problem for weeks at a time, then moving immediately to the next headline issue while the previous is forgotten, in most cases without any solution ever being reached. In this endless cycle, we news consumers and citizens of a centralized, hierarchical state are helpless whiners, powerless children continually demanding that our parental leaders fix things for us. If we reflect on this phenomenon, we can only conclude that it’s a messy but essential aspect of progress in a democracy, as we try to stay informed and hope the democratic process will finally work for us.

Led by the Nose

Virtually no one questions the need for nations and national governments. From earliest childhood, we’re taught that we belong to a great country, the purpose of which is to protect us and give order to our lives, from cradle to grave.

But the size of nations, their population and geographical expanse, requires a centralized, hierarchical government. We take this for granted, along with the fact that as citizens, the government knows us primarily as anonymous statistics.

We accept that we can’t know directly the members of our government, nor can we see, hear, or feel what’s going on in our country outside our local neighborhoods. We rely on the “press,” and with the advance of technology, the “news media,” to keep us informed about our leadership and the world around us.

But in order to maintain independence from government – the “free press” – and a measure of objectivity, the news media have evolved as a private-sector institution. Individual media outlets from Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp to PBS, NPR, and Democracy Now! operate either as businesses in the capitalist economy, delivering ad-sponsored information as a consumer product, or as nonprofit organizations, funded by the rich – wealthy individuals and their philanthropic foundations.

In either case, news entities must compete for our attention in the market. And news media must filter the news for us, taking the infinite number of stories available in the world at any time and selecting only the handful they believe will draw the biggest audience. And they all march in lockstep, delivering the same headline stories out of fear they will lose audience to their competitors. Thus all news providers have studied us and learned in detail how to manipulate us for their own agenda, for what they believe is best.

As can be seen from the whack-a-mole litany of stories above, the news media are eminently successful. They keep us hooked, leading us around by the nose like so many sheep, from week to week. In our public forums, from family and neighborhood gossip to online social media, at any given time, what most of us will be reacting to and talking about will be the latest crisis in the news media.

Blind Spots and Sacred Cows

In the “whack-a-mole” of our news headlines and public discourse, some topics seldom if ever arise, either because of sociocultural taboos, because they’re not considered interesting enough to be competitive in the rapid news cycle and the media bid for our attention, or because they represent universally-held core beliefs.

Progress: A History of Violence

We’ve all been indoctrinated in the story of our culture and society, tracing it back to the Ancient Greeks. It’s a history of violence, of the growth of nations and empires by violent conquest, the violent establishment of Eurocentric colonies on other continents, the oppression, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples, and the destructive exploitation of natural habitats. But we’ve been taught to view this history as “progress,” in which the incessant wars, the colonialism, slavery, and exploitation, are simply natural growing pains, mistakes which we leave behind as we advance toward a better future for all. Europeans and their colonial powers justified their violence against traditional societies and indigenous people by painting them with a broad brush, portraying them all as warlike savages to be pacified and improved by European civilization.

Believing in progress, we tend to ignore our history, assuming that the past consists only of problems we’ve already solved. We’re taught that we are a fundamentally peaceful society, so we’re always surprised by exceptions to this, and rather than questioning our fundamental values and institutions, we seek “band-aid” solutions that don’t threaten our comfortable way of life.

But violence begets violence, and the harm, the injustice we’ve done in the past is never truly repaired. It lingers, generation after generation, in the communal memories and behavior of races and cultures we’ve conquered, enslaved, and displaced: the natives of former European colonies, including our own, and the descendants of slaves imported from Africa.

Competition, Dominance, Coercion, and Aggression

Aggressive, competitive behaviors have been so deeply embedded in our culture and institutions that we take them for granted and rarely even notice them. We honor competition in our organized sports – we consider sport to be an institution that brings us all together for good, clean fun, regardless of our beliefs, religious or secular, liberal or conservative. Competition, dominance, and coercion are legitimized in our Constitution and laws, and competition is the fundamental value in our “free market” economy, grounded in the small, local businesses that most of us treasure. Even in science, competition is enshrined in the Theory of Evolution. We never consider that our competitive bias may be causing many of our problems.

Europeans romanticize warrior culture, believing that war is a noble venture fostering courage in young men. When we look at other societies, we look for warrior culture whether it is there or not. Americans’ stereotype of Native Americans is the brave, fierce Sioux warrior, feather headdress streaming as he charges into battle. New Age mysticism has adopted the notion of the “spiritual warrior” from Buddhism, and the women’s movement romanticizes “warrior women.”

Industrial Society and the Consumer Economy

Where do our basic needs – air, water, food, clothing, shelter, energy, etc. – come from? How are they produced and delivered? What is their quality? Are they sustainably produced, is the source habitat being protected, are the providers well taken care of? In our industrial society, mines and factories, including factory farms, operate around the clock, across the globe, to supply our basic needs, which are ever-increasing as we adopt more and more labor-saving devices, from computers and smart phones to robots and self-driving cars.

Consumerism itself – the notion that all human needs are commodities to be bought and sold – is rarely even acknowledged, let alone questioned, in the media and public discourse. This is bound up with our belief in progress: producing and providing your own needs is backward and primitive – civilization elevates us above all that. In our society, producers are usually ignored, whereas consumers have “rights.” Even Karl Marx, in his advocacy of labor, was a firm believer in progress, industrial society, and consumerism.

The industrial underpinnings of our civilization are virtually never questioned in our news media or public discourse, except in isolated instances like environmental disasters – Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez – and labor scandals like Apple and Foxconn. But the production and delivery of our basic needs continually consumes massive amounts of nonrenewable resources, poisoning or destroying distant habitats and threatening the health and safety of distant communities.

What about the vast, global infrastructure that enables our mobility, the distribution of raw materials, products, energy and information, our water supply, and the removal and treatment of our waste? The superhighways, powerlines, pipelines, dams and aqueducts, ports, tankers, cargo ships, railroads, and satellites overhead? We only hear about infrastructure when it fails spectacularly, as in the case of big earthen dams or poisoned urban water supplies, and then it’s seen as an isolated environmental problem, not a failure of our way of life.

Affluent white people strive to live far from mines, factories, and waste processing facilities, so they can forget that these loud, dirty, smelly facilities even exist. The provision of our basic needs is “mere subsistence,” and through civilization and progress we rise above that, to enjoy the civilized arts and sciences. We don’t want to hear about what it takes to maintain that high standard of living.

The Military, Espionage, and Law Enforcement

We take “intelligence,””security,” and “defense” for granted as essential institutions of nations. But few of us ever acknowledge that as a global superpower, our nation maintains a global military empire, with hundreds of bases imposed on other countries. We live in denial of the nuclear arsenals that could render our entire planet uninhabitable. None of us is ever informed about the covert operations of our government, at home or abroad, except in rare cases that emerge long after the fact.

Countless times, American as well as foreign citizens have been spied upon, falsely incriminated and punished. Our private-sector arms industry is one of the big three multinational business sectors, distributing deadly weapons across the globe, including to terrorist groups that then use them against us and our allies. We take it for granted that we need these violent, coercive institutions, and their ongoing operation is never reported on in the news unless there is a momentary scandal or a new war starting somewhere. In those cases, we only want our lives to get back to normal so we can forget about our real spies, armies, and arsenals, and enjoy the fictional ones in our books and movies.

We romanticize the lone police detective in his search for truth, the spy as globe-trotting sophisticate, and the brave, selfless warrior defending our freedom. But in reality the police are there to control the unruly poor and the racially undesirable, and spies and soldiers exist to protect our empire abroad.

Justice, Punishment, and Incarceration

We take it for granted that those who commit violence or otherwise break the law must be punished, and in extreme cases removed from society through incarceration. This is the foundation of our justice system, and we are never exposed to non-punitive, restorative alternatives that may exist, or may have existed, in smaller, weaker societies that have been conquered and dominated by us. The operation of our justice system is only reported on in rare cases of scandal or crisis, and in those cases, we only want our lives to get back to normal so we don’t have to think about it.

For good reason, courts and prisons scare us. Unless we’re lawyers, most of us don’t even want to think about them. So the only glimpse most of us get is in fictional TV shows and movies. The fiction is not the reality. As outrageous as some of those shows are, the reality is much worse. Studies show that less than 6% of people jailed by the police are ever brought to trial – the rest are forced by prosecutors into plea deals that result in punishment without any form of judicial or peer review. In general, our justice system delivers anything but justice, because nation-states are inherently unjust, and the underlying values of our society are unfair.

Red Herrings

While much of what’s important is left out of the news cycle, there are some issues that repeatedly arise in our news media and public discourse. These are issues that are consciously or unconsciously calculated by the media to trigger emotional responses in their audiences. And over and over again, they distract us from their root causes in our fundamental values and institutions.

Racism and Diversity

As racially-biased police brutality moves temporarily into the media spotlight, Blacks and idealistic young people march in protest, and liberals react by reluctantly, ashamedly acknowledging that they may not yet be adequately “woke.” And conservatives react by again claiming that white people are actually being unfairly discriminated against, and racism is a myth.

But to both sides, racism is a complex, amorphous topic, intimately dependent on and embedded in the history of European imperialism. Racism was predominant in ancient Greece and Rome, and on the rare occasions when Native American, Latino, and Black prisoners are brought to court rather than sentenced extrajudicially, they’re typically tried in the ostentatious, intimidating architecture of imperial Greece and Rome, and the language of our law is the language of the Roman Empire.

The imperialists of the European Enlightenment, including artists and scientists, were motivated by racism in their conquest and appropriation of native societies and cultures in the Global South. Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, is the language of science, and white scientists continue to exhibit implicit racism as they isolate themselves in the all-white enclaves of their profession. After all, white Europeans developed science, and European empires brought civilization to brown-skinned natives. We may no longer call them primitive savages, but the assumption of superiority lingers unconsciously.

Traditional indigenous societies always have neighbors who are culturally or racially differentiated, and even societies that are relatively peaceful view their neighbors in ways that we would find racist, for example stigmatizing their neighbors’ diets or physical build.

The difference between these peaceful societies and ours is not that one is racist and the other tolerant, but that one – ours – is inherently violent, and the other is inherently peaceful. In peaceful, cooperative societies, the “other” may be gently teased, yet generally respected for their differences, but is never attacked.

One of the biggest red herrings in our culture is diversity. Native Americans didn’t embrace the diversity of Europeans in their midst as a benefit – we’d invaded them, perpetrated genocide, stole their land and their livelihoods, and displaced the survivors onto barren reservations. Black people, brought over from Africa as slaves, didn’t volunteer to be part of our great “melting pot” of cultures. The Asians and Latin Americans who have streamed into our country for centuries, opening the ethnic restaurants we’re addicted to, didn’t come here because they love being around white people and wanted to be part of a diverse community.

When affluent white liberals talk about diversity, they don’t mean integrating their safe neighborhoods. They love ethnic restaurants but don’t want brown neighbors. They don’t include blue collar workers or poor white trash in their vision of diversity.

What we celebrate as our society’s diversity is actually the tragic result of imperialism. We forced people off their traditional lands – that’s why we have cultural and racial diversity. Our heterogenous, pluralistic society is not the sign of progress toward global peace and tolerance. It’s a festering calamity born of centuries of aggression, oppression, and exploitation. The Rwandan genocide, the result of European imperialism forcing conflicting ethnic groups together in a “diverse” nation, shows what our “progress” is really capable of.

Humans thrive in small groups unified by shared beliefs, values, and goals, not in heterogenous masses with conflicting behavior and worldviews. Communities and societies thrive by forming a cohesive, distinct identity which is most clearly distinguished from that of their immediate neighbors, and neighboring societies are naturally vocal about their differences. In violent, competitive pluralistic societies like ours, in which distinct communities are forced together involuntarily by politics and economics, there is always tension between them, with the potential for sudden or systemic conflict and violence.

Terrorism

Terrorism is what happens when violent subcultures have been systematically oppressed by imperial powers…and then, unsurprisingly, strike back in violence. As noted above, we live in denial that our culture is imperial, and that it’s violent by nature – we ignore our violent history and coercive institutions and believe we are progressing to a peaceful norm.

Many weaker societies have been harmed by us but have not responded with violence. But in our news media and public discourse, the focus is always on the violent reactions – the Al-Qaeda and ISIS – and we are always shocked that people would want to hurt us. We tend to conclude that particular cultures – specifically Islam – are inherently violent, ignoring our own history of violence, our past conquests of Arab and Islamic societies, and our continuing interference, including “regime change” – in Middle Eastern cultures, governments, and economies.

The U.S. and its allies, particularly Israel, have practiced state terrorism since their very beginnings, in the brutal conquest of indigenous people and traditional societies. The atrocities of ISIS that have so horrified us in the news media were actually exceeded in 18th and 19th century America, perpetrated on indigenous people by American citizens known as “rangers” – the namesake of Texas Rangers, Army Rangers, and the Ford Ranger truck. These terrorist vigilantes were sponsored by the U.S. government. During the 20th century, the U.S. sponsored state terrorism in Central America, in which hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were tortured and killed. And since 2001, American Presidents have conducted covert terror campaigns against rural communities in the Middle East and Africa using missiles fired from remote-controlled drones, killing an unknown number of civilians, including women, children, and elders.

Our government has always practiced terrorism against its poor and minority citizens, from the anti-union labor massacres of the 19th century to the bombing of Black activists in the 20th. And the inherent violence of our European legacy is borne out in domestic terrorism, church bombings and mass shootings perpetrated by white supremacists.

Immigration

Accepting our childhood indoctrination in the structure of our society, we never question the need for national borders and controls on immigration. Because we live in ignorance or denial of history, we forget that these borders were imposed by our government for political and economic purposes, in violation of natural ecological regions and the territories of indigenous societies, causing permanent stress and tension in border communities and forcing traumatic disenfranchisement, migrations, and alienation.

Virtually all nations outside Europe were originally created by Europeans as colonies, often in disregard of traditional boundaries. European institutions were put in place, and when these colonies gained their independence, the institutions remained and their native leaders were trained at European universities, where they were indoctrinated in European culture. This is as true of the U.S. and Australia as it is of Mexico or Nigeria. Every country in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Middle East remains a European colony in all but name. The Eurocentric leadership of former colonies continues to oppress and persecute their surviving indigenous populations.

In the past, we imported slaves across our borders, and our political, military, and commercial oppression of foreign populations continues to drive waves of refugees and immigrants toward our borders, but we seldom acknowledge this. People of European ancestry are invaders in the Western Hemisphere, and even after centuries we remain colonists on indigenous land, failing to adapt sustainably to native habitats and ecosystems.

Unaware of how our global empires have forced people off their native lands, conservationists and population activists sometimes blame immigration for overpopulation. Thanks to our biased educational system and our misdirecting media, the most educated among us are often the blindest.

Gun Violence

Mass shootings are a recurring theme throughout our history, yet we continue to fail to identify their source in our aggressive, competitive, coercive culture. We continue to celebrate physical competition and dominance in our sports, and we crave violence in our entertainment – our most popular movie franchises are Star Wars and The Avengers.

When mass shootings occur, our only solution is gun control. But the right to bear arms against government tyranny was a fundamental value of our English founding fathers, which they institutionalized in the Bill of Rights and passed on to their descendants. So on the rare occasions when gun control is implemented, it is bitterly opposed and never lasting or fully successful.

Climate Change

Like many themes in our public discourse, climate change is a coded, emotionally-charged euphemism that accompanies a cultural and political divide in our society. When liberals talk about climate change, they use it confrontationally, to attack climate change deniers. They take it to mean a multitude of destructive human-caused changes in global climate due to carbon emissions which primarily come from the use of fossil fuels. But when mentioning climate change, liberals generally also imply particular solutions: transitioning to so-called “green” or renewable energy, which implies the electrification of industries and products which previously relied on other forms of energy. To liberals, climate change implies both a general technological problem and specific technological solutions.

To conservatives, climate change represents yet another controversial theory, perhaps a conspiracy or a hoax, by means of which liberals threaten our traditional way of life.

The irony is that taken literally, climate change is acknowledged by all. The weather constantly changes, and everyone recognizes trends in their local region. What is ignored by both sides is the underlying historical, social, and anthropological context for human-caused climate change and the proposed solutions. And both sides lack an adequate understanding of climate science or alternative energy technologies, which are actually anything but green or renewable.

The anthropocentric bias of European cultures ensures that we are more concerned with impacts of climate change on humans than on the rest of nature. When we talk of the “environment,” what we generally mean is the physical surroundings of most humans: their cities, their urban neighborhoods, their homes and workplaces. Our first priority is always going to be to secure the safety and comfort of these non-natural, artificial environments, our fortress from which we view nature as a hostile force.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg naively urges us to “stand behind the science,” unaware that the industrial application of science – petroleum technology and the internal combustion engine – is something that caused the problem to begin with. Climate science represents only a tiny minority of all scientific research, which is mainly conducted for government and industry, in pursuit of capitalist and imperialist agendas.

And climate science is yet another of the reductive sciences that have triumphed over holistic science since the 1970s. We all talk about our carbon footprint, blaming climate change on fossil fuels, rather than acknowledging the broad complex of exploitative, destructive behaviors that are degrading nature and destroying our planet: our imperialistic expansionism, our industrial infrastructure, our accelerating demand for mobility, comfort, convenience, power, and speed that are cumulatively increasing our consumption of nonrenewable resources and spreading toxic waste and invasive species. Many of these factors overlap with climate change, but in the news cycle and the dumbing down of public discourse, climate change has become the only “environmental issue” that most of us are aware of.

The fundamental problem is neither climate change, nor carbon, nor fossil fuels. The fundamental problem is not a specific technology, but our overall way of life, our values, our institutions, accumulating in Europe and its colonies over thousands of years.

Democracy and Fascism

Whenever one of our leaders exhibits autocratic tendencies, liberals and idealistic young people can be depended on to cry “fascism!” and bemoan the eroding of our “precious democracy.” But democracy and fascism have come to be defined as flip sides of the modern nation state. In either case, the machinery of the state – the bureaucracy, the military, the economy – is much the same, and citizens have no role in decision-making.

We trace our notion of democracy to the ancient Greeks, and our notion of a republic or representative democracy to ancient Rome. Of course, neither were egalitarian. In ancient Athens, the slave-holding male gentry, a minority of the population, voted directly on both leaders and major decisions that affected the entire community. That was our archetype of democracy.

Majority vote is a notoriously unstable and unfair form of decision-making and electing leaders. Peaceful societies maintain small, accountable, face-to-face communities in which leaders can be chosen and decisions made via the unanimous consensus of all members – a much more fair and sustainable solution than our “precious democracy.”

“Liberty” and “freedom” are fundamental, universal American values believed to be at the foundation of our society and economy. But in the public discourse, they become vague, emotionally-charged euphemisms that imply the use of violence to defend individual rights. Peaceful societies exercise firm restraints on individual behavior, by group consensus, to ensure the welfare of the community. Unlike us, they understand that since humans are a social species, individual welfare only results from strong, healthy communities.

Poverty, Hunger, and Disease

Poverty and hunger were the primary targets of President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs in the 1960s, and the suffering of “developing nations” continues to inspire idealistic young people and guilty billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

But the poverty, hunger, and disease of indigenous and poor populations in former colonies have been directly caused by European and American imperialism, and are continually exacerbated by Eurocentric governments and our military and industrial operations. First Europeans conquered their societies and territories, then supported European businesses in the takeover of their productive lands, driving the people into urban slums. These newly poor people ended up living in squalor and vulnerable to disease.

After independence, European institutions and Eurocentric leadership remained, and as the former imperialists rushed to put a band-aid on the problem by feeding the poor and treating their diseases, we enabled population explosions that lead to overconsumption of resources. And finally, ignoring our role in the historical process, we view these poor third-world societies as the main culprits in the overpopulation of the earth. Why can’t they be enlightened like us?

Like most of our buzzwords, poverty is relative. In our capitalist consumer society, we pity people who get by with less, whether voluntarily or not. Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we behave as if happiness is a commodity that can be bought. We believe money and technology are the solutions to every problem. Some of the happiest and healthiest people I’ve known are those who consume the least, and thrive in what others call poverty. And some of the unhealthiest are those caught up in the rat race of conspicuous consumption.

The world doesn’t have a poverty problem, it has a wealth problem. Global poverty only exists because of capitalism and imperialism, which lead to economic inequality. The lifestyle of the wealthy depends on exploitation of the poor, mostly in foreign countries where they are out of sight, out of mind. A minority is wealthy because many others are disadvantaged. And even the middle and lower classes in affluent societies depend on products and services that are affordable because they come from poor regions and depend on cheap labor.

Peaceful societies are egalitarian. Despite the rhetoric of the wealthy, white Founding Fathers, nations are by necessity hierarchical and generate economic inequality, which, alongside other causes, generates suffering, conflict, and violence. Our individualistic society, with its Horatio Alger myth that anyone can get rich, pits us against each other and victimizes the people who provide our products and services.

Space Exploration and Colonization

Among all the contentious, divisive stories that regularly make the news, space exploration is one topic that’s supposed to truly unite us, something we can all be proud of, the achievement that offers us hope in our future despite all the problems that challenge and divide us. We in the “advanced” nations proclaim space exploration as a noble effort that all humans can share in with pride, regardless of race or creed, wealth or poverty.

Expansion of our species into space is considered an inevitable consequence of the Progress we take for granted. But in our much-denied historical context, progress has involved the violent conquest of new territories and indigenous societies and the appropriation and exploitation of their resources. Exploration, in the European sense and the sense we now apply to space, is the vanguard of imperialism. First the brave white explorers use their advanced technology to travel to remote places, where they establish a beachhead. Commercial enterprises follow, to extract natural and human resources for the enrichment of their investors back home. Military forces accompany the businesses, to protect them from the natives. Colonial governments are set up to control surviving native populations, followed by white colonists who gradually displace the natives until they believe themselves the natives and the original natives the ungrateful outsiders.

Space, like the Antarctic continent, may lack indigenous populations. But like Antarctica, space is merely another target for exploitation by our aggressive, out-of-control consumer society, a place in which imperial powers can compete for advantage. And as in the exploration of Antarctica, space can only be reached by exploiting resources back home to build and power the vessels of exploration. The earth is sacrificed to get to space.

Science is used as a justification for exploration, but science is never purely a search for truth. The more expensive the exploration, the more science is guided by capitalism and imperialism. Space exploration teaches us nothing about how to take care of our habitats and communities on earth, which is by far the most important thing we need to figure out.

Humans evolved as part of natural, terrestrial ecosystems. We continue to thrive only with the help of our non-human partners in these ecosystems, which fill the gaps in our knowledge and perform services we may not even be aware of. Naive and ignorant space enthusiasts like Elon Musk believe in the myth of human exceptionalism: the misperception that as the pinnacle of natural evolution, humans deserve to expand throughout the universe.

Alienated from nature, proponents of space exploration are unaware that evolution has no pinnacle, and humans have no more knowledge or wisdom than our nonhuman partners. Space enthusiasts mistakenly believe science knows enough to manufacture “life support systems” from scratch, to “terraform” other planets, transforming them into human habitat. But only terrestrial organisms can create our habitat, and we need to submit to their nonhuman wisdom.

Humans are neither superior nor sufficient; our knowledge, skills, and wisdom are not enough. We need our wild, native, terrestrial ecosystems, and we thrive by practicing restraint, living within our limits. Exploration is part of expansionism. Space exploration and colonization are imperialism, plain and simple, the doomed products of hubris and aggression.

Think Locally, Act Locally

Whereas conservatives tend to reject intervention in foreign affairs, the specter of climate change has renewed the commitment of liberals to globalism. But as we can see from our analysis of news media and public discourse, we simply lack the accurate information to think globally.

The global way of thinking is just another conceit of imperialism. We first-world people who have the luxury to consider ourselves global citizens have the illusion that we know what’s going on everywhere, but we don’t even come close. Our news media leave out almost everything that’s really important, and traveling to learn about distant places is a wasteful luxury that can only give us snapshots.

Even our science betrays us – we only know the “planet” through expensive machines like spacecraft, airplanes, and scientific instruments, tools of the capitalist, imperialist elites. These instruments filter out context and leave us with decontextualized data which is only useful in our misguided, doomed attempts to engineer nature and society. The “planet” is a presumptuous first-world fantasy.

The only societies that live responsibly are those that tend to their local habitats and communities, ignoring the follies of the larger world, but keeping an eye out for threats that can be avoided. Many threats are unavoidable. The juggernaut of civilization has trampled and obliterated many sustainable societies. That’s the nature of humanity, and like most stories in the news, it’s not an edifying one.

No matter how many or how often moles pop up in the news to be whacked, people still cling desperately to what they believe are the benefits of their culture and their nation, partly because most people fear change, partly because they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated, but also because instead of valid alternatives, the filtered, curated news media keep showing them apocalyptic failures – the chaos of places like Syria and Libya. Compared to that, a nation of gun-toting racists seems like paradise.

Our local environment is the only one we can truly know. The more we can disentangle ourselves from the larger, inadequately known world outside, with its destructive infrastructure, greedy empires, and misdirecting news media, and the more we take responsibility for our own needs, the better we can take care of our communities, and the happier and healthier we will be.

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Problems & Solutions

Contents

1 • Overview

2 • My Experience With Rockets, Robots, and Engineering

3 • Blindsided: Brave New Heroes

4 • The Power and the Glory: Rationalizing Desire

5 • The Cultural Baggage of Tech

5.1 • Anthropocentrism and Dominion

5.2 • Urbanism and Alienation

5.3 • Linear Time and Progress

5.4 • Individualism and Free Enterprise

5.5 • Exploration and Imperialism

5.6 • Reductionism and Mechanism

5.7 • Invention and Innovation

5.8 • Statism and Coercion

5.9 • Media and Misdirection

5.10 • A Perfect Storm of Fallacies

6 • Humbled By the Mysteries: Discovering Context in Ecology and Anthropology

6.1 • Natural Ecosystems

6.2 • Healthy Societies

7 • Vicious Cycles of Engineering and Technology: How Dominant Societies Fail

7.1 • The Engineering of Habitat

7.2 • Vicious Cycles

8 • Engineering Without Understanding

8.1 • Unquestioning Idealism

8.2 • Medical Technology: The Ultimate Rationalization

9 • Robots: Weakening and Killing Us, Threatening Nature and Society

10 • Space Exploration and Colonization: War on the Sky

11 • What We Can Expect

The Accountability Problem

How the Middle Class Destroys Society

Intimidation, Punishment, and Slavery

Economic Imperialism

Social Division, Fragmentation, and Isolation

How the Middle Class Destroys Natural Habitats and Ecosystems

Habitat Destruction

Urban Sprawl

Industrial Wastelands

Infrastructure Barriers

Toxic Innovation, Toxic Materials

Toxic Mobility

Energy Consumption

False Hopes of the Middle Class

Politics

Green Energy and Electric Cars

Recycling

Space Colonization

How Local Providers Renew the World

Producers Not Consumers

Local Heroes

Peaceful Societies

Addiction and Misdirection

Closed System

The Ecology of Death

Let It Come Down

A Menagerie of Blindness and Misdirection

Whack-a-Mole

Led by the Nose

Blind Spots and Sacred Cows

Progress: A History of Violence

Competition, Dominance, Coercion, and Aggression

Industrial Society and the Consumer Economy

The Military, Espionage, and Law Enforcement

Justice, Punishment, and Incarceration

Red Herrings

Racism and Diversity

Terrorism

Immigration

Gun Violence

Climate Change

Democracy and Fascism

Poverty, Hunger, and Disease

Space Exploration and Colonization

Think Locally, Act Locally

Archives

Topics