The Secret - and the environment
It shouldn’t be any secret to anyone that our physical environment is severely stressed by industrial civilization. I am not referring to global warming at the moment, but to the broader question of the physical results of human activity that impacts, changes, the place in which it occurs.
This characteristic of industrial activity is not limited to Western society, or to modern society. It seems clear that human industrial activity has always produced disregarded by-products. However, the sheer scale of industrial activity beginning in the late 1700s and accelerating continuously for nearly 250 years, so far, has had an effect far beyond earlier activity that we know of.
Air pollution, water pollution, what might be called future-pollution (meaning, things buried away “out of sight out of mind”) obviously can reach a level at which it becomes impossible to sustain life. But what should be equally obvious is that long before we reach that life-destroying termination, we can arrive at a place where we very much do not want to be.
Why should people have to buy clean water? Why should people have to treat their children’s asthma rather than have them grow up breathing clean air? Why should we have to live with an entirely new form of disease in which people become allergic to their entire environment, presumably because of an overdose of exposure to one or a combination of toxins? Why should rivers or lakes be dangerous to swim in because they have been polluted? The list of rhetorical questions could go on and on, but there is no need.
I am 60 years old. The world that I grew up in some ways seems like paradise lost. My father was a farmer. Our food was fresh, it was nutritious (if you except white bread), and no one dreamed of having to buy bottled water. I was the only child I knew with asthma. We had fewer things but much more unstructured free time than children appear to have today. And the point is, my parents could have said the same thing about me that I say about my children. Their lives had been lived in a world poorer but cleaner, healthier, and more wholesome. Assuming that this is not all nostalgia, and I really don’t think it is, this indicates a downward trend extending nearly a century at least.
I do not mean to pretend that society was perfect when I was born, or when my parents were born. Clearly, it wasn’t. If one needed any proof of so obvious statement, it would be that where we are today is a result of trends that originated in those times.
But — to say that those times weren’t perfect is not to say that they were better in some ways, and in some ways they were.
All right. So we have impacted land and sea, earth and water and air. What has been done, has been done. Where do we go from here? Specifically, keeping in mind The Secret, how do we concentrate on restoring our environment without doing so in a way that merely gives more energy to the problem?
Surely, visualizing the desired state. Surely, visualizing all components of society agreeing as a ground rule that we cannot destroy the platform upon which life depends. In practice, surely this means pooling the best thought, the best experiments, the most promising technologies, to rearrange the way we work so as to prevent or remediate environmental damage. (Now, there’s no use pretending that this can’t be done. It already is done. Industries have often found that when they treat their industrial waste rather than merely dispose of it, they find that they have been throwing away money.)
If we are going to solve the problem, we are going to have to jettison some baggage, and the first bit of baggage probably should be finger-pointing. Forget whose fault it is; the concept all depends heavily upon where the observer stands, and what the observer’s value system is. If there were such a thing as an objective view, that would be one thing. But given that all views are subjective, and given that good and bad come mixed, so that one accepts certain bad features in order to receive the good features, what is the use of blaming people? It makes them defensive, it distract your attention from real causes, and certainly it makes it less likely that anything constructive will be done.
Let us instead visualize the world we want. I, for one, want an industrialized world that is not destroying the natural world but complementing it. I want a world of many societies, all living prosperously, each conducting its own experiments according to its own values. I want the next phase of the Industrial Revolution to provide us with the results of technology without either technology-worship, or selective blindness to technology’s side effects — which amounts to the same thing. (A good example of what I have in mind is to be found in a book by Bill McDonough called Cradle to Cradle, which points out that the industrial revolution to date is incomplete, because it has not yet learned to manufacture without producing unwanted byproducts.)
It is striking how well people from different walks of life work together sometimes. Politics unfortunately produces great rewards for people addicted to the blame game. Let us concentrate on what we want, rather than who we think stand in the way, and trust the universe to give us more of what we concentrate on. Presumably the process will result in making sustainable design politically advantageous as well.