Sunday, November 12, 2006
Location: Bison Ranch, Alberta

I’ve been pretty critical of technology in past blogs potentially creating the idea that I’m anti-technology or that I don’t recognize all the benefits it provides. This is not the case, as I stand firmly behind technology and believe together with science it will provide us with many of the solutions to our current problems.

What I am against, or rather, what I am questioning, is the improper use of technology. Where was it we went off the rails with our creations, sending us headlong into a variety of progress traps? And why have we created so much technology that distracts us from the serious problems we face, rather than move us forward towards solutions? Even worse, we have created technology that is detrimental to human development, with the sole purpose of increasing bottom lines. And lastly, most importantly, is the question of how we have become increasingly dependent on a complex technological system, and are losing much of the knowledge that sustained human life for millions of years.

In my opinion, as we move into the future what will most likely occur is a reality built of both high-tech and no-tech. I feel the answers lay in us returning towards much of the traditional knowledge, sustainable practices and simplicity of the past, while at the same time, continuing to develop those technologies that truly make sense and actually improve our lives and the lives of those around us. The answer is not to turn away from technology and progress, but to recognize ‘true’ progress and not get pulled into something that sends us spiraling backwards, as we’re sucked into uncaring corporate agendas.

When I was up in Yellowknife I met a woman who was doing research in Lifecycle Analysis. Lifecycle Analysis, from what I understand, is the study of the complete lifecycle and the cumulative impact of specific objects. For example, what is big picture when it comes to something as ordinary as a plastic bag if you consider everything; raw materials, employment, toxins resulting from production, energy used in production, transportation, cost, usage, repeat usage, durability, recycling, end waste materials, waste transportation, end environmental impact, biodegradation. If we could see this information on product labels (which seems impossible), I think we’d probably make some very different choices regarding our purchases. There are so many hidden costs in the choices we make and only though investigation and educating ourselves will we begin to see the true consequences of our actions, both for ourselves and our external environment.

It’s important to recognize that our individual choices really do affect our reality. It’s hard for me to see this sometimes, but all of our choices, when taken together, do hold the power to either support huge uncaring multinationals or return us to a simpler healthier way of life.

Another set of quotes from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse,

Despite these varying proximate causes of abandonments, all were ultimately due to the same fundamental challenge: people living in fragile and difficult environments, adopting solutions that were brilliantly successful and understandable “in the short run,” but failed or else created fatal problems in the long run, when people became confronted with external environmental changes or human-caused environmental changes that societies without written histories and without archaeologists could not have anticipated. I put “in the short run” in quotation marks, because the Anasazi did survive in Chaco Canyon for about 600 years, considerably longer than the duration of European occupation anywhere in the New World since Columbus’s arrival in A.D. 1492. During their existence, those various southwestern Native Americans experimented with half-a-dozen alternative types of economies. It took many centuries to discover that, among those economies, only the Pueblo economy was sustainable “in the long run,’ i.e. for at least a thousand years. That should make us modern Americans hesitate to be too confident yet about the sustainability of our First World economy, especially when we reflect how quickly Chaco society collapsed after its peak in the decade A.D. 1110-1120, and how implausible the risk of collapse would have seemed to Chacoans of that decade.

All of us moderns—house-owners, investors, politicians, university administrators, and others—can get away with a lot of waste when the economy is good. We forget that conditions fluctuate and we may not be able to anticipate when conditions will change. By that time, we may already have become attached to an expensive lifestyle, leaving an enforced diminished lifestyle or bankruptcy as the sole outs.

- Jared Diamond

We have to realize that all of our money and technology is nothing without an ability to produce food, build shelter and create community. We have to remember that there have been many societies before us, and there will most likely be many more to come.

Peace,
D