It is characteristic of industrialism to make swift and thorough use of nature’s stored-up treasures and living organisms (called “resources”) without regard to the stability or sustainability of the world that provides them. The process is ratified by such industrial ideologies as humanism, which gives us the right; materialism, which gives us the reason; and rationalism, which gives us the method.
But it was not until industrialism grew into its high-tech phase, by virtue of the immense power multiplier of the computer, that this exploitation of resources escalated onto a new plane — one different not only in degree but in kind — creating that technosphere so immanent in our lives: artificial, powerful, global, and fundamentally at odds with the biosphere. What Thomas Carlyle saw as the economy’s “war with Nature” in the nineteenth century has, like all warfare, become vastly more thorough in the twentieth. That this has happened so quickly has prevented a true understanding of the fact and its magnitude, but it is undeniable, and undeniably tragic.
Voices of doom can be foolish and self-serving at times, and often misguided. But the array of such voices in recent years is so broad and so deep that it is no longer possible for us to disregard the approaching doom inherent in the war between technosphere and biosphere, a contest in which the bad news is, in short, that we are winning. Out of that array, I offer but two examples: In 1991 an international gathering of environmentalists met in Morelia, Mexico, and, at the end of a week of reports on the myriad threats to the earth, issued a declaration warning bluntly of continuing “environmental destruction” and stating, “Independently, but without exception, each participant expressed concern that life on our planet is in grave danger.” And in 1992 the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement endorsed by more than a hundred Nobel laureates and sixteen hundred members of national academies of science around the globe, proclaimed a “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” stating that present rates of environmental assault and population increase cannot continue without “vast human misery” and a planet so “irretrievably mutilated” that “it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” These are sober voices, not alarmist, not self-interested, and if their somber words have not received the attention they deserve and the actions they demand — have in fact been overwhelmed in the cacophony of a computerized culture — that affects their validity not a whit.
In every phase of its daily operation, the technosphere exacts environmental costs that are paid for by the biosphere. Some of these have become glaring, the stuff of headlines: resource depletion, typified by the loss of 26 billion tons of topsoil a year around the world, along with dwindling supplies of many essential elements, all of which, it is thought, will be exhausted within another generation or so; deforestation, which has so far laid bare two-thirds of the earth’s forested surface, is proceeding now at the rate of 56 million acres a year, and will effectively deplete the world’s old-growth forests in the next decade; pollution of air, water, ground cover, and soils, which has already (among much else) wrought havoc with the ozone layer, damaged significant sections of the oceans and the vital reefs within them, made half the world’s drinking water unhealthy or downright poisonous, and destroyed whole species at an estimated rate of five thousand per day in the last twenty years; and desertification, which has already turned three-quarters of the earth’s once arable land into barren and dehydrated waste, and now threatens an additional 8 billion acres around the world.
If the second industrial revolution we’re to be judged by the standards historians use for any revolution in human affairs, how would it fare? Has it brought more happiness than existed before? More social justice?
Some of the costs are less obvious: overpopulation, which has nearly doubled the world’s human stock since the computer revolution began in 1971, and will expand it to 7 billion as early as 2010; organochlorine poisoning from a wide variety of industrial chemicals, which has clearly affected both male and female reproductive systems worldwide and is thought to be the cause of a 300 percent increase in testicular cancer in men in the United States since 1983 and of a 42 percent drop in the sperm count of men throughout the industrial world; depletion of fishing stocks in every part of the world’s oceans, to the point that in 1994 thirteen of the world’s seventeen major fisheries were regarded as being in serious decline and not more than a decade away from exhaustion; and consumption of photosynthetic energy, the basis of all life on the planet, at a rate that now assigns nearly 40 percent of this basic global food supply to humans, leaving all other plants and animals to use the rest.
These and similar calamities have been well established over the last thirty years, surveyed and verified and presented to the world by various media, and some have even been made the subject of laws and regulations worldwide. But not one of them has been halted, nor even significantly slowed; as the Worldwatch Institute put it in 1993, there is not one life-support system upon which the biosphere depends that is not severely threatened and getting worse. The pace and range of the technosphere, it seems, is unstoppable, as if it had a will of its own that no public protest or restrictive rule or moral caveat could appreciably affect; as if it were literally unable to understand that the planet cannot perpetually absorb its wastes like some infinite sink, that the destruction of nature’s species and systems cannot proceed forever without bitter consequences. Before this altar to the god Progress, attended by its dutiful acolytes of science and technology, our modern society has presented an increasing abundance of sacrifices from the natural world, to the point where we now seem prepared to offer up the very biosphere itself.
This is not accidental. It is inherent in the machines with which this high-tech civilization has chosen to express itself — above all, the computer. Computers are designed to operate according to a kind of linear, fact-based logic, and to fulfill the scientific desire for understanding and ordering nature, ultimately reducing all its “secrets” to reductive analysis and manipulation; but, more than that, they are designed to give humans not merely analytical but physical control over nature, putting all its elements to human use wherever possible, altering its systems and even its species for human enhancement, ultimately changing its atoms to create new compounds and life forms for human aggrandizement. The fact that computers can go such a long way toward achieving what they are designed to do is stark evidence of the technological imperative at work: if we can destroy this only living planet, as John Von Neumann might have put it, we will.
One characteristic of the second Industrial Revolution that has no exact parallel in the first is the instability of global society. Not that early industrialism was without such global effects as impoverishment and warfare in far-flung lands, but because both population and development were on a much smaller scale, it did not create as great a degree of inequality and disparity, with the resulting social dislocations and bloody conflicts, as current industrialism has.
In the two centuries between industrial revolutions, the population of the world has grown from about 950 million (1800) to a projected 6.2 billion (2000), a species bloom of more than 650 percent, totally unprecedented in the earth’s history, and due almost exclusively to the products and priorities of industrialism. But even though the earth has been plundered repeatedly and increasingly to sustain this immense throng, there has never been enough to go around — or, put another way, there has never been the will to divide it equally. As of 1990 it was estimated that at least 1 billion of the world’s people live in abject poverty, and another 2 billion eke out a life on a bare subsistence level. Another 1.5 billion live modest lives on incomes below five thousand dollars a year, remaining part of the commodity economy but unable to accumulate enough land or wealth to leave anything to their children. And 1 billion people enjoy a dissipative life at various levels of prosperity, having what is called a “higher standard of living,” as measured by material accumulation and the prolongation of life, including two hundred billionaires and more than 3 million millionaires.
This inequality, an inherent consequence of industrialism, has been greatly increased rather than lessened since the advent of the second Industrial Revolution. Not only have disparities grown within every nation, they have grown between nations, as the industrialized states of Western Europe, North America, and East Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population, command 85 percent of the world’s personal income, leaving the other 4.5 billion people to divide the remaining 15 percent. The gap between rich nation and poor, already alarming at the end of World War II, has more than doubled since then; in 1960 countries of the North were twenty times richer than those of the South; in 1990 they were fifty times richer. And no amount of aid, trade, lending, or catch-up industrialization seems able to change or even to slow the rate of increase in that differentiation.
For forty years it has been the professed policy of the industrial West to try to close the gap by what it calls the “development” of the rest of the world’s nations — by which it means their adoption of industrialism and the thoughts, philosophies, practices, and products of the Western monoculture. The attempt has been a dismal failure. Westernization has indeed penetrated everywhere, with a resulting loss of cultural, linguistic, and social diversity and the destruction of age-old tribal and communitarian societies, but with minor exceptions the poor nations have not become rich. In fact, though it is kept quiet by the benefactors, there has been a continual net flow of money from the poorest nations to the richest, amounting to $19 billion by 1993. The actual products of “development” in these countries have been greater income disparities, increased emigration, a sharp rise in illicit trade (particularly drugs), a catastrophic growth of urban excrescences, repeated internal clashes and coups usually ending in military control, and everywhere an immense assault on natural species and systems that is destroying forests, farmlands, and fisheries at an alarming and unsustainable rate, all in the name of progress. “Development,” far from increasing wealth and happiness, has turned out to be a modern plague.
There is no chance that the rich-poor gap can be reduced by Western aid, global trade, or any other form of industrial expansion. This is because the industrial nations already consume almost all of the earth’s available treasures, and there is no way that the rest of the world, with it huge populations, will be able to live at that level as well: the resources simply do not exist. Nor could the earth’s environment, already so threatened, possibly survive an attempt to do so: if the billion-plus people of China, for example, were to achieve American standards of living, they would add 20 billion tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere each year, more than three times the amount now polluting the globe. Thus, the awful truth that lies at the heart of industrialism is that inequalities, within nations and between them, must exist and persist — in fact, must grow.
There is another, attendant truth: societies, singly and together, cannot long survive such inequalities without severe disruption. This is why in the last two decades so many countries have fallen into civil war, tribal and ethnic conflict, rebellion and revolt, civil unrest and sheer disintegration; why the number of wars and skirmishes being fought from 1990 to 1994 was greater than in any other period since the end of World War II; and why the number of refugees around the world has mounted steadily during this same period to an all-time high of at least 50 million people. Just how long it will be until these disruptions begin to spill across the borders into the major industrial countries, how long poor people will endure the death from hunger of forty thousand of their children every year without blaming those nations where obesity is a serious health problem, is an open question, but pending. Just how long it will be before the have-not castes of the developed nations, tired of receiving the thin pap from the hindmost teat and no longer pacified by alcohol, drugs, sports, TV, police, and religion, will direct their anger, and weapons, at the have-much castes is also open, also pending. But, due to the increasing disparities of the world, these questions are no longer unaskable.
If the second Industrial Revolution were to be judged by the standards historians use for any revolution in human affairs, how would it fare? Has it brought more happiness than existed before? More social justice? Democracy? Equality? Efficiency? Were its means benign, legitimate? Its ends valuable, consistent? At what price have its benefits been won, and are they sustainable?
The record so far is not very positive. The best that can be said is that it has increased material prosperity among the favored fifth, increased the flow of capital and information around the world, and enabled perhaps a third to survive to somewhat greater ages. Three-fifths of the remainder, however, are forced into an existence marked primarily by deprivation, often by wretched misery, probably at levels unknown to their people, however inequitable their past, before the twentieth century. Those who live at the top, with material power unparalleled in history, might be assumed to be happier than they were a generation ago, except that no social indices validate that assumption, and some evidence exists — increased stress, depression, mental illness, alcoholism, drug dependency, crime, divorce, occupational disease, political anomie — that seems to contradict it.
In neither its means nor its ends does this revolution make any pretense to nobility, nor does it lay claim to any vision much grander than that of prosperity, perhaps longevity — both of which have serious environmental consequences. By and large, its adherents would disclaim grand-sounding motives or methods, considering them irrelevant: enough that progress may be presumed meritorious, and material affluence desirable, and longer life positive. If industrialism is seen as the working out in economic terms of certain immutable laws of science, technology, and human evolution, then questions of morality hardly apply. Those who would wring their hands at this inequity or that injustice are missing the point, whether or not they are correct: all that matters is material betterment for as many as possible, as fast as possible.
Viewing the issue on its own terms, then, the question would seem to come down to the cost of achieving the second Industrial Revolution: whether it is already too high, or will soon prove to be. There are no two ways of answering that question: the cost, particularly in social decay and environmental destruction, has been unbearably high, and neither the societies nor the ecosystems of the world will be able to bear it more than a few decades longer, if they have not already been overstressed and impoverished beyond redemption.
“At the Altar of Progress” is excerpted from Rebels against the Future. © 1995 by Kirkpatrick Sale. It is reprinted here by permission of Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
— Ed.
