Does technology make us all richer? Certainly in one sense poor people today have a lot more than poor people did 100 years ago.
Watch out for Nye's use of the word "liberal." He is using it in an economic history sense--technological/economic liberals believe that technological progress and economic growth are good things. In that sense most political conservatives are technological liberals and some political liberals are not technological liberals.
Nye is using liberal to mean pro-technology (as in economic liberalism)
Is technological progress and economic growth always a good thing? Most of you probably automatically answer yes, but in this chapter you need to stop and think about that.
Is technological progress/growth always a good thing?
- almost everyone believes we have gained more than we have
lost
- are there examples where technology does harm, technologies we don't want?
- Are we happier than people were 200 years ago? Are our cities more pleasant place to live than they were 200 years ago (in terms of layout, not sanitation)? If so, why do people like to live in historic districts?
- what have we lost as a result of technological progress?
- privacy
- time--we are busier
- we have lost the value of many skills
- customer service
- community--people living nearby know what is going on and help each other out
- appreciation for what we have
- simplicity
- Our rivers are probably healthier than they were 30 years ago, but they are certainly less healthy than they were 150 years ago.
- What we think of as natural often isn't natural--eg. the beautiful view may only be visible because trees were cut down
- In the Clemson area, the forest that was here before the land was cleared for agriculture will not grow back--farming led to the loss of so much topsoil that the shortleaf pines that used to be the dominant tree don't grow well here any more
- do we want an environment that is independent of people or a
garden--an environment changed to please us
- one way to look at environmental issues is to look at how human beings are harmed
- another way is to look at what is lost
one thing that is being lost is
wildernessthe root meaning of the word
wilderness is uncontrolled (while technology is ways of controlling our
environment)
- in contrast to a farm which is controlled nature
- by its history, the word wilderness means the place of wild beasts
- southern European languages don't even have words for wilderness
- the word was not significantly used in English until it was used in translating the Bible
- in the U.S. wilderness is managed and often has fire roads
- people want to visit the wilderness, and they have an impact
on it, so for example areas are set aside for camping to minimize that
impact. But if wilderness is land unmodified by humans then it
isn't wilderness any more.
- 33,000 people live in the 368 square miles of Dartmoor National Park in England and over 90% of the land in the park is used for farming. Yet the high moor is described as the last true wildernesses left in England today.
as we control nature more and more there is the danger we will turn wilderness into something like a zoo
do we lose something then?
technological progress may mean environmental loss
- what is the cost of pollution--can directly cause economic loss
- health effects of pollution
- are we happier or better people if we get to enjoy nature?
- there are things we can learn from nature
Questioning the harm done by technology is not new:
- Thomas Carlyle: men have become mechanical
- Henry David Thoreau criticized the direction in which
civilization was
going:
- "To have done anything just for money is
to have been truly idle."
- "Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. " Walden
- "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." Walden
- "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
- "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract
our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end."
- "Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! "
- "What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut
ditch of a free, meandering brook."
- "How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. "
- John Muir's ideas came from trancendentalism--nature
is a mirror reflecting the Creator
- "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. "
- "Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's
blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the
big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so
burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden
year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of
life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make
you truly immortal. "
- In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. -- John of the Mountains
- Against the building of a dam in a valley near Yosemite:
"These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to
have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes
to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam
Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and
churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart
of man."
- "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the Universe." -- My First Summer in the Sierra
- preserve special wilderness areas
- later you get zoning--preserve some balance of how we use the land inside towns and cities
- we are willing to have regulation to create a nicer environment
- the depression caused people to question technology
- 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair: "Science Finds--Industry
Applies--Man
Conforms." --there's technological determinism
- people mostly saw technology as a good thing but now and
then came face to face with the negative impacts
- Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, 1962
- pesticides were a great success story
- would it be a good thing to make mosquitoes extinct?
- harm was not so much to human beings as to birds
- galvanized public opinion
The
use of technology makes our production more efficient
spinning in Georgia
Are we ready to face limits?- increased productivity in agriculture is one measure of how technological progress makes us richer--for each person employed in agriculture our technological agriculture produces enough food to feed more and more people.
- factories make more at lower cost and with fewer workers
- working conditions in the U.S. hit a low in the 1890s but then improved:
- wages were being cut, sometimes 20% at once, in many factories in the 1890s
- immigration meant a surplus of workers and immigrant workers often were afraid to press for better conditions
- work days were still often 12 hours
- the new big companies resulted in a new class of extremely rich families (eg. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Vanderbilt), sometimes called Robber Barons. The workers felt that all the benefits from the new technology were going to the rich, while the poor were getting poorer
-
child labor was widely used ( photos )
spinning in Georgia
- demands for reform began with the progressive movement--the
government should protect workers and consumers
- But then low unemployment during World War I (1.4%) meant that workers got what they wanted without radical fights--by 1919 almost 50% of workers had 8 hour day
- by 1920 many workers could afford consumer goods made cheap by mass production, including automobiles
- in the 1950s predictions were common that by the end of the century people would work less than 30 hours a week and have more vacation time and be able to retire younger. This was a prediction that existing trends would continue. Technology would continue to take away the burden of work
- irrigation leads to the build up of salt in the soil which makes it unfarmable
- our farming practices result in the cumulative loss of topsoil
- global warming, due both to the internal combustion engine and much of the generating of electricity, is predicted to result in an increase in sea level of 6 to 10 meters in the next 100 years--what would the effect of that be on coastal cities like Charleston?
- we do have the idea of preserving wilderness and open space before it is gone
- we accept limits on hunting and fishing
- we haven't fully absorbed the idea that the world can absorb only so much pollution
- related area--rationing medical care (example: until the late 1980s if you were over 50 you generally weren't eligible for kidney dialysis in England)
- are we going to run out of oil
- look at known reserves and calculate when that will run out
- we are about at the peak, production is going to start to decline
- some people say there is a lot more oil that we can discover and learn to extract
- oil is still a finite resource (except according to one weird theory)
- consumption keeps going up so we are using it up faster and faster
- U.S. has 5% of world's population and uses 25% of the world's oil
- 20% of the world's population uses 80% of its energy
- consumption cannot continue to increase indefinitely--we don't face that