🚀 go-pugleaf

John McCarthy writes:

>Humanity had to find a substitute for whale oil.  It will also need a
>substitute for petroleum.  Fortunately, we know more today about how
>to substitute for petroleum than our ancestors knew about how to
>substitute for whale oil.  Further substitutions are required, but,
>as I recall, the examples given by McGowen were peripheral to the
>standard of living.

The examples I gave were: high-quality wood, meat and fish.

Let's never forget that these things are "peripheral to the standard 
of living." 

This tells us much about the sort of world certain technological "optimists" 
would irreversibly condemn us to live in if we were fool enough to let them.
If they can't even care for *these* things, how much can they care for
less economically important species? 

We would have a world with plenty of power, plenty of machines, plenty of 
people, and not a shred of grace, living beauty, or comfort for the human 
spirit.  Not a civilization, but a technological barbarism. That is what 
McCarthy apparently means when he speaks of creating a "US standard of 
living" for a world of 30 billion. It's a political program, pure and 
simple, hiding behind a mask of false scientific objectivity. But the
masquerade is over.

No.  We aren't going to let it happen. The first limiting resource to 
be encountered will be the limit of our tolerance for the continued 
degradation -- in every sense of that word -- of our beautiful planet. 
From here on, we will choose a different future for our children, one 
that they will be able to share with all of life, in all its myriad forms. 

		*	*	*	*	*	*	

That future is worth infinitely more than any "substitutes" for it. The
technologies and technologists we need are those that will help us to
reach that future, not those that will help to make it forever unreachable: 
technologies that serve life -- *all* life -- not destroy it. Ecologically 
sane technology, not technological substitution gone insane and become 
technological supremecism.

The time of morally empty technology, driven by greed, limited only by 
derided threats of "doom", is over. The real challenge for technologists
is whether they can overcome the counsels of greed and fear and find within
themselves the moral purpose and strength to be able to just say "no" to
technological changes that take us ever farther from where we should be, and 
to seek out with all their intelligence the changes that will bring us, day
by day, year by year, sensibly closer to our heart's desire: our true home 
on earth, among our innumerable living kin, the tapestry of life rewoven. 

But can such technologists exist? Will they appear in the years ahead?

Just watch! 

------------
Alan McGowen

"Force the Spring." -- Bill Clinton