Guy McPherson’s most recent blog post over at Nature Bats Last garnered a lengthy response from me that I’d like to share and expand upon here.

Guy reviews Tom Blees’ book “Prescription for the Planet.“  While I haven’t read the book (and that’s partly the point), Guy cites some issues he has with it.  Namely, that Blees’ recommendations don’t call for any radical (root) change in the way things are done, but merely use alternative forms of the same (destructive) system.

Guy says:

Ultimately, Blees’ plan boils down to two “solutions,” both of them extremely suspect. First, he claims we can we can ramp up production of renewable energy systems and also fourth-generation nuclear reactors to keep the power on. Indeed, Blees claims our lives depend on electricity. As such, he dismisses the first two million years of the human experience. If our lives depend on electricity, it’s because we’ve abandoned a viable, durable set of living arrangements in exchange for endless opportunities to destroy the living planet. Second, Blees promotes the notion that boron-powered automobiles will keep us on the highways. And he thinks that’d be a good thing. After all, boron seems to be essentially limitless on this world. Just as crude oil seemed, not so long ago.

Indeed, Guy.

The rest of this post is my response, with some editing.

we need power

Welcome to the Machine

It’s not that I disagree with Guy’s sentiments, but it’s worth noting that he and I wrote our opinions (and you are currently reading them) on a piece of equipment that is an integral part of the “omnicidal technology” that we decry.

The roots of the culture of omnicide are not located in any single place.  They’re distributed through our culture.  This is true of any culture.  Culture, as accepted, shared values, is always self-policing.  Individuals within the culture accept it, and see anything that is different from the culture as “foreign,” and therefore also “dangerous,” or “threatening.”  They then seek to ostracize or destroy that foreign element – whether or not that makes sense.

The greatest example I can think of is the American Civil War.  Brother fighting brother, father against son.  It didn’t matter whether or not they were family, or that they loved one another (previously, at least).  What mattered was that they had become “the enemy” to one another, through a process of enculturation.  The Northerner accepted the cultural values of the North.  The Southerner, those of the South.

Beneath that lay the dominant drive of life – at any and all costs to expand, to become more (people call it a lust or desire for “power,” though that description seems flaccid to me).

The two forces combine.  The Southern father is now a foreigner.  A threat to the Northern son’s expansion – and not just his expansion, but his entire culture’s expansion – everything he stands for or represents…a force greater than he himself.  A fight to the death is the only option, it seems.

brother, can you spare a bullet?

Wherefore Art Thou, Culture?

The thing is, the roots, the seeds of the “omnicidal technology,” must already have existed in our culture from the beginning, in order to be able to sprout into their current form.  I don’t think they were “planted” along the way.  I think they were always present, like anything, just needing ideal conditions for their growth.

What happened?  How did “hard work” turn into “entitlement?”  How did the earth-consciousness of the small farmer turn into the money-consciousness of modern agribusiness?

Some values were (are) allowed to be stressed (or impressed), while others were (are) allowed to be suppressed.  How did those allowances occur, or how were those allowances coerced?

This, I think, is the appropriate starting-point.  Starting from a discussion of right/wrong tacitly concedes the ground that supports the undesirable state.  Once conceded, it is the “dominant system.”

Now (still) the dominant system, any energy put into it, is used by it (not singularly, but in a distributed fashion) to further its cause.

The “antagonist” must fight against an “agon.”  There must be a hero for the villain to fight.

I think these are clues to the way out.  Any argument that relies on something other – especially any argument that relies on reference to the current (read, dominant) paradigm – will only be used by the current paradigm.

What do you think?