Extract from Curtis White’s We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data
My last three posts
regarding environmentalism were taken from Peter Dauvergne’s
‘Environmentalism of the Rich’, and they put me in mind of some
of the things Curtis White had to say in his book ‘We, Robots’.
I highly recommend you check them out first. You can find the extracts from Peter Dauvergne’s book here:
I highly recommend you check them out first. You can find the extracts from Peter Dauvergne’s book here:
Part 1 - WeNeed a Politics of Hope
Part 3 -
Environmentalism:It’s Complicated…
This post also includes a shorter quote from an old post which also has a YouTube link to a sample it reminded me of about Butte Montana. You can find the old post here:
Alternatively, you could always go straight to the YouTube video. Here’s the link:
YouTube: Butte Montana
***WARNING*** Not for the faint of heart!
Curtis White does not mince words...so strap on in...it’s going to be a bumpy ride…
Welcome to My World-Bot
“At present,
environmentalism is not so much a set of values as it is a menu of
strategies for compromising those values (assuming they’re
remembered at all). Honestly, what values ground any form of
cap-and-trade? What values ground our commitment to the idea that
global warming will be solved if we can reduce atmospheric carbon
dioxide to 350ppm?
Environmentalism is about deal making in a moral abyss. The advantage in this is that because it’s concessions have taken the place of it’s values, it is able on occasion to declare victory and walk away from the wreck.
Environmentalism’s greatest victory in recent years is that it has gained near universal recognition for the concept of sustainability. But what exactly is sustainability?
Sustainability is, of coarse, the Good. That “of coarse” is our first clue that what we are really talking about is a very successful piece of ideology. When sustainability is invoked—as it is persistently invoked by environmentalists, the media, politicians, and corporations—we are expected to bow down.
Rare is the person who dares to speak against it. (Tea Party conservatives duly noted and excepted.)
Nevertheless, sustainability’s claim to being the Good is a lie. What it is, in fact, is the most recent example of moral shuffling in the West’s efforts to confront the problem of our ‘relationship to nature.’ The idea that we should be one with nature is rarely allowed more than a brief mention. How has this come about?
In the late nineteenth century, beginning with the parks and conservation movements, the problem of nature was taken from the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, and the self-made mystics (like our own John Muir) and put in the hands of the biologist. We began thinking of nature as a complex system. An ecosystem.
It was this movement from nature philosophy to science-based ecology that made the idea of sustainability possible. Even the saintly Aldo Leopold made a contribution to this. He was a scientist first and foremost, interested in describing natural systems. Leopold’s way of thinking about the natural world was in the end mechanistic.
He wrote, ‘To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.’
He thought of nature as a ‘biotic mechanism.’ Walt Whitman he was not.
Of coarse, it is not Leopold’s science that his readers admire in him; it is his loving attention to the details of the natural world. In this he was Whitmanesque. Ironically, it is exactly this ‘loving attention’ that ecological science is incapable of accounting for. The philosophical and spiritual poverty of ecology comes to this: its empirical realism cannot explain how we humans can be sufficiently independent of nature in order to love it. Ecology cannot account for ‘care.’
Is the caring gaze that observes how the ‘rough beaked hawk..drops like a feathered bomb into the marsh’ also a part of a ‘biotic mechanism’? Is Aldo Leopold’s ‘attention’ a feat of biological engineering? If not, then we obviously need something beyond science-based ecology to account for it. Because, in the end, it is exactly our loving awareness of the natural world that is the point. This awareness does not stand at a distance from the hawk; it is self-conscious of the whole: man, nature, and the cosmos as one.
Leopold described the human urge to economic development as a kind of dying from it’s own ‘too-much.’ Were Leopold here today I think he would have to be told that we are presently dying from the too-much of ecology, and certainly the too-much of sustainability.
For what science allows in the concept of sustainability is this: nature's system can be integrated with the system of corporate industry. That's the story and the ideology of sustainability. Sustainability is an effort to integrate ecological thinking with the very industrial practices that put nature in peril in the first place.
No longer is industry a ‘dark satanic mill.’ Rather, it is a perverse utopia of the forests and the factory as one. Henceforth, we’re told, it’s going to be a green collar world. As a recent television advertisement explained it: ‘Where is a perfect world of clean water and air, no landfills, and 100 percent recycling?
A Subaru plant in Indiana!
Even better, according to Living PlanIT: in the future, cities will not only be “green,” they will themselves be ecosystems of industry, commerce, residence, and open green space. If a manatee floundering in petroleum begs to differ, well, let him! But the courts will find that aquatic mammals ‘lack standing.’
With all this in mind, it is clear why it might be tempting for environmentalism to declare victory and walk away.”
~Curtis White, 'We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data'
Environmentalism is about deal making in a moral abyss. The advantage in this is that because it’s concessions have taken the place of it’s values, it is able on occasion to declare victory and walk away from the wreck.
Environmentalism’s greatest victory in recent years is that it has gained near universal recognition for the concept of sustainability. But what exactly is sustainability?
Sustainability is, of coarse, the Good. That “of coarse” is our first clue that what we are really talking about is a very successful piece of ideology. When sustainability is invoked—as it is persistently invoked by environmentalists, the media, politicians, and corporations—we are expected to bow down.
Rare is the person who dares to speak against it. (Tea Party conservatives duly noted and excepted.)
Nevertheless, sustainability’s claim to being the Good is a lie. What it is, in fact, is the most recent example of moral shuffling in the West’s efforts to confront the problem of our ‘relationship to nature.’ The idea that we should be one with nature is rarely allowed more than a brief mention. How has this come about?
In the late nineteenth century, beginning with the parks and conservation movements, the problem of nature was taken from the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, and the self-made mystics (like our own John Muir) and put in the hands of the biologist. We began thinking of nature as a complex system. An ecosystem.
It was this movement from nature philosophy to science-based ecology that made the idea of sustainability possible. Even the saintly Aldo Leopold made a contribution to this. He was a scientist first and foremost, interested in describing natural systems. Leopold’s way of thinking about the natural world was in the end mechanistic.
He wrote, ‘To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.’
He thought of nature as a ‘biotic mechanism.’ Walt Whitman he was not.
Of coarse, it is not Leopold’s science that his readers admire in him; it is his loving attention to the details of the natural world. In this he was Whitmanesque. Ironically, it is exactly this ‘loving attention’ that ecological science is incapable of accounting for. The philosophical and spiritual poverty of ecology comes to this: its empirical realism cannot explain how we humans can be sufficiently independent of nature in order to love it. Ecology cannot account for ‘care.’
Is the caring gaze that observes how the ‘rough beaked hawk..drops like a feathered bomb into the marsh’ also a part of a ‘biotic mechanism’? Is Aldo Leopold’s ‘attention’ a feat of biological engineering? If not, then we obviously need something beyond science-based ecology to account for it. Because, in the end, it is exactly our loving awareness of the natural world that is the point. This awareness does not stand at a distance from the hawk; it is self-conscious of the whole: man, nature, and the cosmos as one.
Leopold described the human urge to economic development as a kind of dying from it’s own ‘too-much.’ Were Leopold here today I think he would have to be told that we are presently dying from the too-much of ecology, and certainly the too-much of sustainability.
For what science allows in the concept of sustainability is this: nature's system can be integrated with the system of corporate industry. That's the story and the ideology of sustainability. Sustainability is an effort to integrate ecological thinking with the very industrial practices that put nature in peril in the first place.
No longer is industry a ‘dark satanic mill.’ Rather, it is a perverse utopia of the forests and the factory as one. Henceforth, we’re told, it’s going to be a green collar world. As a recent television advertisement explained it: ‘Where is a perfect world of clean water and air, no landfills, and 100 percent recycling?
A Subaru plant in Indiana!
Even better, according to Living PlanIT: in the future, cities will not only be “green,” they will themselves be ecosystems of industry, commerce, residence, and open green space. If a manatee floundering in petroleum begs to differ, well, let him! But the courts will find that aquatic mammals ‘lack standing.’
With all this in mind, it is clear why it might be tempting for environmentalism to declare victory and walk away.”
~Curtis White, 'We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data'
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