Illustration: Anthony Colbert
Practising self-restraint and accepting our own mortality.
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HARD AS IT IS NOW to believe, as little as a decade ago the environment was seen as a crisis — a crisis that would require deep changes in our culture as well as our technology. Earth Day 1990 came hard on the heels of all sorts of shattering environmental news: the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole and the first signs of global warming. We were warned that we had perhaps a decade to change our ways or environmental damage would spiral out of control. For at least a few months, serious people seriously entertained the idea that something was wrong with the dominant paradigm of our society — the idea of endless growth and expansion. Time magazine named no Man of the Year for the first time in its history — instead it featured a Planet of the Year: our own. An accompanying essay concluded with these words (which could have come straight from some deep ecological manifesto): "Man must abandon the belief that the natural order is mere stuff to be managed and domesticated, and accept that humans, like other creatures, depend on a web of life that must be disturbed as little as possible."
But instead of a serious questioning of material culture, the decade just past has marked the greatest burst of materialism in our history. Ever since Bill Clinton announced his insight in 1992 — "It’s the economy, stupid" — we have been on a tear, watching goggle-eyed as the stock-market soared ever higher. The culture has had very little interest in humility and a great fascination with wealth. And instead of questioning technology and its role in our lives, we have instead become its fascinated devotees. In fact, a great many of the very same people who were marching at Earth Day 1990 devoted much of the past ten years to launching websites. To the extent that our leaders have done anything at all about, say, climate change, their efforts have been entirely technological. Indeed, they have attempted to turn the problem into an entirely technical challenge, one that need not lead any of us to reconsider our habits or aspirations.
Many of the physical results of this path are depressingly predictable. For instance, instead of reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the end of 2000, as both President Bush and President Clinton pledged to do, Americans will produce about 13% more CO2. But the cultural results are at least as striking. We now simply ignore even the possibility that we might rearrange our ways of living — even small increases in petrol prices, for instance, are seen as unbearably burdensome. The savviest observer of our politics turns out to be the former President Bush, who — on his way to Rio for the supposedly epochal Earth Summit in 1992 — declared that "the American way of life is not negotiable." Not with anyone else, and not, as it turns out, with ourselves. A moment passed. But it will not, perhaps, be the last moment.
WE ARE CROSSING HUGELY important thresholds, right now, in our lifetimes. This is a significant moment in history and probably the most anomalous and bizarre in the story of this species. I first tried to make this point with regard to global warming in 1989 — that by altering temperature humans were exerting control over everything that happened on the surface of the planet. The Earth that was photographed from outer space in 1969 is no longer the Earth on which we live. Our planet has a different temperature, more ocean, smaller ice caps, changed storm patterns. True, it has changed before in geological time, but this time we are responsible. But that is not the only threshold we are jumping across. The use of genetic engineering has spread like wildfire, to the point where 40% of fields in the us grow genetically engineered crops, where animal after animal has been cloned; where it is only a matter of time before we do likewise, and more, with human beings.
Now, on at least two more fronts, the same magnitude of change beckons. As computing power has grown exponentially, robotics and nanotechnology cross from the realm of science fiction into the realm of venture capital. Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, wrote an article (see Resurgence 208) where he talked about these technologies as a grave and urgent threat, in large part because, like genetic engineering, they have the potential to self-replicate. In so doing, we would leap across new barriers: in his words, "the replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavour."
Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier argued in response to the article that, though computing power grows, software is unlikely in the foreseeable future to make the risks Bill Joy outlined possible. Betting this way is unwise. It is worth remembering that in 1939 Niels Bohr ‘proved’ that you couldn’t use fission to make a weapon, and that in 1997 scientists said it would not only be difficult to clone humans, but unlikely that anyone would want to try. Now biologists indicate that there would be minimal difficulty in cloning a human and there are those who are willing to try.
The real danger comes with the success of these technologies, and not with their failure. Or, to put it another way, Joy argues that we do not have enough control over them to use them safely. Equally, the very idea of taking this much control over the world is unsafe for a series of moral reasons that boil down to the danger of changing who we are. For instance, the vision of robotics pioneer Hans Moravec is of a superior robot ‘species’, a self-replicating creature of superior intelligence. In his ‘nightmare’ scenario, these robots squeeze biological humans out of existence. His dream vision, and one celebrated by Ray Kurzweil in his elegy to ‘spiritual machines’, is that we will ‘merge’ with such robots, downloading our consciousness into their circuitry.
These visions may sound outlandish, but these are anything but isolated crackpots. They are doing the work; they have Moore’s Law of the exponential growth of computing power on their side, and they see no reason that such scenarios can’t be realized around 2030, when common computers will be a million times more powerful than they are today.
What if we succeeded in such tasks? The authors of these works are forthright in their acknowledgement that they foresee a ‘post-human’ future. They mostly celebrate that this future is an escape from the bounds of embodiment, but in fact we are talking about the end of our species as we have known it. A technological revolution, in the name of comfort, convenience and security, would free us from our bodies and transform everything around us to nothing more than artefacts of our desire.
WHEREAS IN THE PAST environmentalism has concerned itself with preventing degradation of nature, in the future it will have to try to prevent gratuitous ‘improvement’. To do so it will have to make a far broader cultural argument than it has made in the past. Whether we will still call it environmentalism, and whether it will draw its strength from the same places, is open to question. But the animating spirit will need to be a love for the world we were born into: both the physical world and the web of relationships, human and otherwise, that still survive here.
One of the oddest features of this new push is that it is coming at a time when, at least in the rich world, we have comparatively few problems left to be solved. We are not, needless to say, underfed. Our lives are not consumed in wearisome toil. The spread of public health measures allows most of us to live a natural span of years. In material terms we currently live in utopia as it has always been pictured. And the things that keep it from seeming like utopia? The violence, the stress, the lack of solitude and silence, the lack of deep relationships, the failing sense of purpose, the ennui — are these susceptible to technological cure? Or are they more easily treatable by reducing the technology we already have? Would this be a better world with mobile phones implanted in our jaws, or would it be a better world without them altogether? The very fact that we can ask the question suggests that we are not in dire straits requiring immediate and risky action.
Even the environmental threats that really do threaten us can be addressed largely with the technological resources we already have at hand: smaller cars, for instance, and buses, and bicycles. And what of the problems of the developing world? Would it not be selfish for the well-fed among us to deny them the possibilities raised by these developments? Joy, for instance, talks approvingly of the so-called ‘golden rice’, genetically engineered to express Vitamin A and hence aid those Asians who sometimes lose their sight because of deficiencies in that nutrient. But I recently spent time in Bangladesh and met a great many farmers who want no part of the golden rice, or any of the other hybrids being pushed on them. They point out that such crops require a monoculture, and hence pesticides, and hence the destruction of the dozens of plant varieties along the borders of their fields that once provided them with a full complement of minerals and vitamins. In fact, several studies now demonstrate that one effect of the Green Revolution has been to provide extra calories but at the expense of micronutrients.
It raises the possibility that the developing world would benefit more from sharing of calories and capital than it would from the exploration of these new technologies. At any rate, the restraint of people in the developing world should be noted: because of their fast-growing willingness to use birth control, demographers see population peaking within a couple of generations. The pressure to provide for an infinitely larger world is no longer on us, and should not drive our decision-making.
THE WORLD IS CLEARLY not in need of dramatic further improvements. There is tinkering around the edges yet to be done, perhaps, with scourges like childhood disease, but the conscientious effort to spread and share existing innovations could solve most of the problems we face. That said, it is enormously hard to turn off the thinking that spurs us on. For a very long time we were clearly improving the conditions of our life with technological progress, and hence the momentum behind that push is enormous. With one exception, what we have still to gain is trivial and not worth either the physical or spiritual risks of this accelerated grandiosity. That exception is death. And it becomes exceedingly clear, reading these theoreticians and prophets, that that is what the game is about. For all our lengthened life spans and more comfortable lives, we still die. And that is seen as unacceptable.
It is clear that these revolutionary technologies are being driven by people with immortality, or something very near it, on their minds. In genetic engineering circles, much talk in the last year has centred on the promise of longer lives. As Danny Hillis, a computer scientist, says, "I’m as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I’ll take it." One odd thing is that it is precisely this same class of thinkers — hyper-rationalist scientists, who have long sneered at religion as the refuge of the weak — who can’t face the fact of their own mortality. But clearly their own discomfort with mortality goes so deep that they will risk not only the dangers that come with genetic engineering, but even the loss of meaning that will attend this post-human future.
It is the ultimate flowering of consumerism, this ability to purchase immortality; and all who have read fairy tales should know enough to at least be wary of it. What does it mean to be human without dying? We don’t know. Perhaps, shorn of this gut fear, we would evolve into more benign and loving people — or perhaps become hubristic monsters. Whatever we would be, we would no longer be human: death is too much a part of our condition. Already our inability to think about death drives much of the craziness in our culture: the endless, expensive attempts to ‘support life’ in its final days, the crude industries like cosmetic surgery and the inability to see our old as elders with a role to play. And the promise of immortality is an undeniable lure: who knows for sure that they would not swallow that pill, take that nano-injection? But if we are to think reasonably about these new technologies, we have to think about what is really driving them. The coming environmentalism, or whatever it will be called, may have to offer a defence of dying as an integral and necessary part of life, a gravity we should not seek to finally escape.
WE HAVE COME TO picture our human society as if it were a species, ever-evolving towards some more advanced state. And of course we are a species — but we’re not actually biologically evolving at any great speed. In this light, the idea of humanity as an ever-evolving species is clearly a metaphor, an image. There are other images we could use instead. We could view our human culture, instead, as a single organism living out a single life span. A long life span, numbered in millennia, but one life span all the same.
From that point of view, inevitability takes on a different cast. A single organism does not grow forever, constantly gaining new capabilities, constantly commanding more terrain from all around it. It grows for a while and at some point it stops growing. Some signal — a receding tide of hormones, perhaps — shuts down its expansion. Some of those signals — the comfort in which we live, say — might convince us that we had grown enough. Some of those signals — the rising temperature, the equations suggesting that genetic engineering could get out of hand — might convince us that it was impractical to grow further. In fact, something a little akin to that seems to have happened in regard to human fertility: a billion different families, making individual calculations about how far they had progressed and about the difficulties of expanding further, seem to have dramatically slowed the planet’s demographic tide in a generation.
In our material lives, however, it’s another story. Full speed ahead, the more the merrier! Any slowdown in economic growth is unthinkable, which is one reason we dare not question new technologies. Saying no, plateauing, would seem to imply a kind of stagnation, which is an unpleasant word, especially next to the exciting idea of growth. If we view ourselves as a species, stagnation implies a kind of evolutionary backwater.
But there is another possibility. We could see ourselves, instead of stagnating, as maturing. In societal terms, maturation would mean stopping our relentless physical growth, both in numbers and in appetite: not doubling the sizes of our population again, or our houses, or our cars. Slowly rolling them back towards something more responsible.
Environmentalists must now grapple with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more. ‘Enough’ is a deeply subversive idea, but an equally resonant one as well — it echoes the ideas to which we pay lip service weekly in a million churches, mosques and synagogues. Many of us are stumbling towards maturity in our own lives and in our collective lives. Were it left to us to decide, we might well opt for stability, for deceleration.
THE IDEA OF A maturing society is utterly at odds with the reigning vision as enunciated by the technocratic elite. Last year, the Reality Club, a web forum for top-level scientists and thinkers, asked its members what the most important inventions of the last two millennia had been. The answers ranged from the telescope to the scientific method, from calculus to the steam engine, from the battery to the aeroplane. A fair number pointed to the printing press, because, in the words of one, it served as a prototype for the worldwide web. The largest number thought the computer was the most important innovation of the last 2,000 years.
At face value, this range of answers is correct: these technological advances have changed the world in the largest ways. But what is most interesting is the exuberance with which almost every respondent couches his or her nomination. Apart from a few dutiful references about the atom bomb, there’s very little sense of the dystopian nature of much of this progress. They are so deep in the project of expansion that they can’t consider any alternative. But one could imagine a slightly different list, perhaps compiled by thinkers a century hence, who look back on our own time and ask what the most important inventions were. Had we taken a turn in the direction of a mature, plateaued society, they might choose other things as the decisive inventions.
From the twentieth century, for instance, they might pick up the emergent science of ecology, the development of nonviolent civil disobedience, or the invention of the wilderness area. My point is that the seeds of other world-views exist within our present culture. To follow them would require that we act on the one uniquely human gift: our capability for self-restraint. We can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing. We can decide, for instance, not to deploy atomic, biological and chemical weapons. We can decide not to build ever-bigger cars. We can decide to reject immortality. The argument of inevitability is a cop-out. At least for the time being, humans retain the ability to decide otherwise.
The only point at which we will lose that ability is when we forget the world we were born into, and find ourselves living so thoroughly in these new utopias that we don’t find them odd, don’t feel the pull towards something deeper, more primal, and more interesting. That process is already underway: the natural world, for instance, seems to play a less important role in the life of each succeeding generation, who are more thoroughly suburbanized and screen-fed. Contact between human beings, except in the limited ways offered by the web, seems to be diminishing too.
Hence, for those of us who believe the world to be a sweet place as presently constituted, this is a moment of enormous danger: we live on the brink of a great forgetting. In order to remember, we need to conceive environmentalism much more broadly. It is more than a narrow quasi-scientific quasi-aesthetic concern with protecting parts of the process of planetary life. It could be the defence and expression of the things worth loving in this world: by that I mean art and I mean music, as surely as I mean backpacking. I mean our relationship with the divine and our relationship with other parts of creation. I mean all the joys that can flourish without the relentless material expansion foreseen by the various technologists. I mean the exercise of free will, particularly the freedom to say no, a freedom that will be lost in a world of self-replicating machines.
This environmentalism would celebrate all that goes with being alive. Not immortal — alive.
Extracts from a lecture given at the Tufts University.
Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and a fellow of the Harvard Center for the Study of Values in Public Life.
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