Washington, Oct (Andrew Kimbrell*)
-- Over 50 years ago, sociologist Jacques Ellul was
among the first to understand that we now live in a
new environment, the technological 'milieu'. While
our earliest ancestors lived fully in the natural
environment, and our most recent forebears in a more
social milieu, modern Western societies now live
primarily in the technological milieu.
For us it is the technological environment, not
nature, which is the immediate source of our
livelihood, food, energy, education, entertainment
and visions of progress. Our homes, workplaces,
transportation, entertainment, leisure, education
and government have all become integral elements of
the technological grid.
If we tally the time spent in cars, in office
cubicles, in front of TVs or computers, and using
telephones, palm pilots and all our other gadgets,
it is clear that we spend the vast majority of our
waking hours with technology and working for the
organisations, corporations and bureaucracies
required to run the vast technological system in
which we live. Each of us, more and more, lives in a
kind of technological cocoon in which much of our
action and communication is mediated through
machines.
And for some at least, the substitution of the
technological for the natural environment represents
an immense improvement for humankind. Author and
engineer Samuel Florman notes: 'I can see no
evidence that frequent contact with nature is
essential to human well-being.' Others, including
the respected scholar O B Hardison, have urged on us
'a faith in silicone devices that is analogous to
religious faiths'.
In recent years, however, the near messianic
confidence of the technophiles has been
significantly deflated. It has become increasingly
apparent that substituting the technological milieu
for natural environments is coming at an immense
cost.
The technological takeover has spawned cataclysmic
scenarios of destruction not even imaginable to
prior civilisations. As nuclear technology has put
all of humanity, and the Earth itself, on a computer
trip-line to Armageddon, our industrial technologies
have brought humanity face to face with the first
truly global environmental crisis in recorded
history.
Over the last two decades the public has been jolted
by revelations about impacts of our technology on
the biosphere that they had never suspected existed
- global warming, ozone depletion, species
extinction, deforestation, desertification.
Moreover, even as the technosphere exploits and
destroys the natural world, its inhuman pace
exhausts our emotional and spiritual resources. This
has led to an unprecedented shattering of our
communities, families, and psychological well-being.
The crisis over the technosphere's current
destruction of the natural and social milieu has put
the current generation in a 'technological dilemma'.
Much of the world's population has become fully
dependent on, and deeply addicted to, the
technological environment. Yet this technological
milieu is threatening the very viability of life on
Earth. It is becoming increasingly clear that
ultimately we cannot survive with our technology;
yet we can't imagine living without it.
In the early 1970s some saw this dilemma emerging.
Led by such prescient prophets as E F Schumacher
they began planning for the inevitable day when we
finally realised that survival required devolving
our technologies so that they better comported with
the animate and inanimate systems of nature.
A small but persistent movement began urging the
substitution of 'appropriate' technologies for the
mega-technological system which was rapidly
decimating creation and ourselves. Many of us in the
legal profession worked hard to institute laws and
regulations which limited or halted the advance of
harmful technologies. We all believed that in time
we would have laws that would adequately protect
nature from the uncontrolled technological
onslaught. We also began developing a more holistic
science that could move beyond mere mechanistic
thought and invention.
What many of us did not foresee was that the
economic and scientific elite had a very different
solution to the looming technological dilemma.
They too came to realise, albeit slowly, that
current technology is not compatible with life; that
the contradictions between the growing technological
milieu and laws of nature were ever heightening.
They, too, saw that a solution was urgently needed.
To deal with this historic dilemma in our
relationship with technology, they began a
breathtaking initiative. This initiative, however,
was not to change technology so that it would better
fit the needs of living things. Rather, they decided
to engineer life so that it would better fit the
technological system.
Technology was not to be comported with living
systems. Rather living systems were to be remade,
engineered at the genetic and molecular level, to
comport with the requirements of the technological
milieu. All of nature was to be subject to this
'techno-genesis'.
It is in this chilling context that the enormous
significance of the current revolutions in
technology can be most fully understood. Recombinant
DNA technology is the tool which allows engineers to
alter life at the genetic level so that it better
fits the technological milieu. (Nanotechnology
engineers nature at the molecular level.)
Genetic engineering, in fact, allows life to be
treated as technology. It is now possible to snip,
insert, recombine, rearrange, edit, program and
produce genetic material in much the same way as the
engineers of the industrial revolution were able to
separate, collect, utilise and exploit inanimate
materials.
Just as the factory system allowed for the
production of unlimited and identical amounts of
machines, so current advances in cloning are
attempting to produce industrial numbers of
identical life forms. Just as prior generations
initiated a patent system to encourage the
production of novel machines and products, so we are
now seeing the patenting of genetically altered
plants, animals and even human parts. Life forms
have now been redefined by the US Patent and
Trademark Office as 'machines and manufactures'.
With these capabilities and patenting incentives,
scientists and their corporate and government
sponsors have the potential of becoming the
architects of life itself, the authors of an ersatz
technological evolution designed to create new, more
'efficient' species of microbes, plants and animals
(including humans) which better comport with our
technological system.
Seen from this perspective, biotechnology becomes
the ultimate technological fix for the current
industrial system. Global warming is dealt with, not
by stopping pollution, but rather by genetically
engineering plants and animals to withstand the
temperatures and droughts resulting from climate
change.
Chemical pollution in agriculture is addressed, not
by reducing pesticide use, but rather by engineering
herbicide-resistant plants that can survive no
matter the volume of chemicals used. Spoilage of
food in our global food system is solved, not by
encouraging local food production, but rather by
genetically designing foods for longer shelf-life.
We do not change our factory-farm system to fit in
with the nature of animals: rather, we genetically
engineer our poultry and livestock so that they can
withstand the intensive confinement and multitude of
diseases endemic to the system. Species after
species is being altered to fit and better survive
in the technological milieu.
Of course the actual success of the Procrustean
engineering of life has been very limited. Even
successes bring with them myriad and unprecedented
environmental, economic and ethical concerns. But
the biotechnology's citadel of experts warns us that
limiting or interfering with genetic engineering
could threaten virtually all future technological
progress.
The repulsion that most feel about genetic
engineering is characterised as 'emotional' and
'unscientific'. We are assured that biotechnology
will be managed for us and for our good. We simply
must begin to accept the view that we, and all of
life, are just another form of technology.
As the New York Times stated in a lead editorial,
'Life is special, and human even more so, but
biological machines are still machines that can be
altered, cloned and patented. The consequences will
be profound but taken one step at a time they can be
managed.'
The technological milieu, then, is not merely
supplanting the natural milieu. Rather, it is fully
involved in techno-genesis - remaking life in
technology's image. Through genetic engineering,
life is being absorbed into technology, both
conceptually and at the genetic level. Unless
halted, this will forever bar a rapprochement with
nature. The natural milieu will have ceased to
exist.
Currently ensconced in our 'technological cocoons',
many of us have become oblivious to the ongoing
destruction and remaking of creation. This oblivion
ensures that we will stand by and passively allow
the massive and terrible experiment of the
technifying of life: allow the permanent loss of
creation. This cannot continue.
By personal and collective acts of will and
imagination we must reassert control over
technology. By acts of will we must break our
addiction to the technological system and free
ourselves from the techno-cocoons. We must take the
political, legal and organising steps to say 'no',
to halt these technologies before they are fully
disseminated and decimate nature.
We must also imagine an alternative future - a
biodemocracy future where the needs of nature and
all living things dictate what our technology will
be, and not a nightmarish future where technology
dictates the shape of creation and humanity. It is
only through such admittedly difficult work that we
can hope to heal and re-establish relationship with
nature and community. Given the scope and pace of
the technological takeover, the time for such action
is short.
(*Andrew Kimbrell, an attorney
in Washington, DC, is an ecologist and author of
The Human Body Shop and The Masculine
Mystique. The article first appeared in
Resurgence, No 214.) Return to
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