Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [91]
One MIT study calculated that no American, no matter how abstemious their lifestyle, could reduce their carbon footprint below 8.5 tons or their total energy usage below 130 gigajoules.35 Even if you beg for vegetarian scraps from town to town, societal things like roads, police service, fire departments, libraries, the courts, and the military are all carried out on your behalf. And those things require energy. To reduce the carbon footprint of the country—which is more than twice the global average—society as a whole has to change.
For that to happen, the presentation of a real alternative is necessary. In truth, the solar transcendentalists were too caught up with the Bombinduced apocalyptophilia of the time to present such a unified vision of a different society. Instead of organizing politically or socially, they were learning the “survival” skills that they almost seemed to darkly hope they would need in the postcivilization future. DeKorne held that
It is not, however, within the scope of this book to explore the almost insurmountable problems to be solved before our society could be expected to function within an ecologically sane frame of reference. Indeed, it is the author’s opinion that the last meaningful chance for a societal change in this direction was passed sometime just before World War II. At any rate, survival is now an individual responsibility, and it is to individual solutions that this book addresses itself.36
However, most solar transcendentalists drifted away from their intense stances on energy. Some returned to “straight society” whereas others looked for transcendence without the sun. Jim DeKorne moved on to “life’s greatest challenge: the soul’s Gnostic commitment to the Great Work of transformation—the impossibly perilous journey through the infinite maze of hyperspace.” He wrote a book on psychedelic shamanism and moved to Hawaii.37 By 1979 one contemporary historian observed that “Numerous 1960s activists had moved from protest politics to self-awareness.” Though some remained active fighting nuclear power, increasingly “looking inward seemed more fulfilling than changing the world.”38 Societal change by individual example had given way to a broader navel-gazing that left energy out of the picture. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president, it seemed all that remained of the solar transcendentalist movement was the popular memory of lukewarm solar hot water–heated showers and a few odd pieces of architecture.
Their legacy, however, is greater than it might appear.
chapter 19
Tools
VICE-GRIP PLIERS MAY SEEM a lowly object for veneration, but for the emerging group of appropriate technologists, they were material poetry. Stewart Brand’s description of them in The Next Whole Earth Catalog could be read with line breaks as a paean to timelessness:
A locking plier wrench
which grips and holds
with the size of the grip
adjustable.
Hold things hard without muscle,
hold things together,
hold things with just the right pressure.
Many’s the busted faucet you see
with a vise-grip biting it
as temporary handle.1
The vice-grip plier was a tool that let a person grab hold of the world the way it should be held. They could be adjusted to hold the world together, but without the sort of overbearing associated with modern technology. They were perfect for fixing the plumbing of the world. There was no improving on them. They were just right.
Steve Baer, a frequent Whole Earth contributor, loved them because they were objects that were not dependent on the infrastructure of the twentieth century. They might have been a fairly recent invention, but they could have been invented long ago. They could circumvent the regrettably immoral system of industrial production. “How exciting it is for someone today to come upon designs which answer needs that have existed for a long time, but which could have been explained