Technology

I have just returned from Ouray, Colorado, as spectacular a mountain setting as can be found in many places around the world.  The men of European descent who first came here in the late 1800s didn’t come to appreciate the mountains.  To them the mountains were just a resource to be raped and abused for their desires.   To most at this period in history, nature was simply something to be dominated and improved.  Under the heavy makeup of winter snow, the pristine appearance is serene, but underneath that makeup are the resulting ravages of thousands of men who toiled to extract the earth’s riches without any regard for what the area would look like in later years.  Hillsides that have been washed away, tailings tips still visible along the mountain slopes, and the old wooden mining camps still litter this now romanticized period of settlement.   Barely a century later, the people who now come to appreciate natures beauty and enjoy the mountains look past the ravages of those that came long ago.  Times change and peoples’ minds change (for most at least).  Colorado is not the hell hole that was seen as a barrier to ‘progress’ but now serves as a recreational mecca for millions.  Many of the main rivers in the areas that were heavily mined now run yellow, green and murky brown instead of the pristine clear mountain waters the indigenous peoples enjoyed.  There is one feature of Coloradoan mountains enjoyed throughout all Coloradoan history; the numerous hot mineral springs issuing from below ground.  This story repeats all over the world.  Only for many it is still a new story with vast mining operations devastating the lands around them.

Before we condemn those, who would rape the land in the name of business profits, we need to do a little introspective on ourselves.  After all, we are the ones quite happily letting this occur.  The consumer mindset and worldview conveniently ignore the global devastation that occurs so that we can have all the technological toys of our modern age.  The number of minerals we need to make our consumerist lifestyle work requires an ongoing digging up of the earth’s resources.  The increase of modern electronic technology has only served to increase the mining that goes on around the world.  Even the words I type on the computer are not benign – the computer is a complex system built with a myriad number of minerals and chemicals (many rare and toxic).  If we’re to talk sustainability, we need to do much more than recycle, reduce, and reuse, the mantras used by environmentalists all around the planet.  I come back to the same idea time again and again.  We need to change our whole worldview of how we live.  I don’t foresee our technology going away and humanity going back to some mythical simple golden age of low technology.  Technology is here to stay (barring some catastrophic event that erases humanity’s memory of a technological past at which point sustainability would be a moot point).  One of the first steps must be to move past ‘planned obsolescence’ within our consumerist worldview, where our technology is meant to break or become obsolete quickly.  In the 1950s with the rapid increase of technology, many people in the MDCs achieved a wonderful level of comfort and convenience.  The technology was robust and lasted.  That was a problem for growing businesses.  If people had a specific item, they need not buy another one.  The advertising industry became the main thrust for generating a newer worldview of use and throwaway, or generating peer pressure to buy newer (and better?) replacements.  One only has to look at today’s iPhones to see this ridiculous worldview in action.  Even if you still own an older model of technology, such as a computer or cell phone, you find that even though the item is still functional, the support programs are updated such that they will not function on the older system.  When an appliance needs repair in the MDCs, it is cheaper to buy a new item than to repair it.  There is a niche market at the moment where good local repair shops are actually repairing items as a stand against hyper-consumerism and the mentality of waste!

Mike Crow, President of Arizona State University, gives a simple overview of how our technology works – we heat, beat or treat minerals to make the things we desire, and we keep extracting more and more minerals.  To be sustainable we need a different way of looking at technology and our relationship to it.  In the MDCs we have continuing expansion of technology and profits generated that benefit the upper third of society, while the middle third stagnate in their lifestyles, and the lower third struggle to live day to day.  A social stratification has been generated.  The LDCs seeing model lifestyles on television and social media see only the perceived benefits and not the major drawbacks.  So the mindset of consumerism is merely expanded to the LDCs and the system of elite control continues.  If most of us look closely at what has happened in just the last 70 years, we see not just a new technological world, but a world where the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is growing exponentially – and at the heart of much of this is how we use and live with technology.  To be continued…….