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By Root 2362 0

‘Exponent Inc.,’ giving a talk on the importance of innovation and engineering to society, with an emphasis on ‘learning’ from history’s disasters. My heart pounded during the lecture, as I wanted to stand up like a magician and reveal to the tranquilized audience the well-disguised and tremendously destructive mythology that serves as the foundation for this culture. Of course, I couldn’t do this with the twenty to thirty seconds allotted to me in the Q&A session after the talk. So at the risk of appearing combative in front of my professors, I settled for these simple questions: ‘Has technology done more harm or good for human life, or more to the point, for life in general? And what metrics will you use in formulating your opinion?’

“I might as well have put the microphone to my ass and farted. He was baffled at the question, and probably wondered how someone could even think of asking it. His response was insulting, but typical: ‘You must not know anything about history! You must not know anything about what life was like two hundred years ago! Do you even realize what life would be like without technology? You have the equivalent of three hundred slaves working for you every day due to the advances made in technology over the last two hundred years. You have the benefit of three hundred slaves but without actually having slaves.’ The implication was that I was ‘ungrateful’ even to ask such a question.

“I was even more interested in the questions he didn’t answer than the one he did. First, he made no mention of whether technology is good for life itself. He simply ignored the human and nonhuman slaves the world over, as well as the fact that we’re killing the planet. Such topics are beneath consideration. In fact, they do not exist. And though he thought he didn’t answer my final question, about how we measure whether something is good or not, in fact he did: we can measure the success of technology with ‘an equivalent number of slaves’ approach. If next year, my life is such that I have an equivalent of six hundred slaves as opposed to my meager three hundred this year, well then, I have something to celebrate, don’t I? Meanwhile, I’ve become fatter and more clinically depressed while I strap on my jogging shoes and run in a circle for exercise (but not outside, of course, today is a red alert). What this means is that if we as a culture have chosen to value ‘enslavement’ in the most general and inclusive way possible, then we have done a tremendously good job implementing our design.”134

Several years ago I interviewed Jan Lundberg, founder of the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, “a diverse movement of grass-roots community groups, individuals, and businesses with the common goal of halting road-building,” because “a paving moratorium would limit the spread of population, redirect investment from suburbs to inner cities, and free up funding for mass transportation and maintenance of existing roads.” But there’s more to it than just roads. Phasing out massive fossil-fuel use, Lundberg says, is crucial not only to saving the earth’s climate, but to lessening the impact of the crisis that will occur when the world’s oil supply begins to run out. “The challenge before us all,” he writes, “is to survive an ecological correction unprecedented for our species. The correction will likely include an economic collapse and a conversion to subsistence activities and trading.”

Lundberg grew up around the oil industry. His father ran Lundberg Survey, Inc., a company that collected statistics on gasoline prices and industry trends. In 1973, just before the oil crisis, father and son began publishing the Lundberg Letter, which became the number-one trade journal for the oil industry and went on to predict the second oil shock of 1979.

After his father’s death in the mid-1980s, Lundberg quit the family business and directed his efforts toward energy conservation. By that point, Jan had realized that this culture’s “waste economy,” as he calls it, is unsustainable and the cause of massive environmental damage and species extinctions