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The problem of climate change seems to be a distinctly industrial problem. Because of our increasing ability to understand the world through science, we’re able to use that understanding to our benefit and build technology that abstracts us away from the physicality of the world. A laptop, for example, is about as far from the natural state of the world as you can get. It’s a product of a vast global process of gradually turning earth into not earth.
The point that seems important to note is that you can optimize the hell out of that distillation process, but it will always produce byproducts that weren’t originally part of the ecosystem (you might also consider the final product—the laptop—a byproduct in this sense.) Simply by making anything, you make “waste.” The further abstracted the thing is from its origin, the more waste it will create.
That waste is not just carbon dioxide. It’s the rock that’s left over from mining cadmium, the trees cut down to create the mines and factories, the energy used in factories, the people’s lives dedicated to standing on an assembly line, the money spent on litigation around IP patents… it’s mind bending to consider the scale of the supply chain for just one final product is. At every step there’s waste—physical, environmental, economic, mental, spiritual.
So when I see solutions to this problem that frame the problem as one of optimization, or global-scale laws aimed at reducing pollution or carbon emissions, it doesn’t seem to me like the core problem is being addressed. These feel like cop-outs; ways of keeping the fancy toys we have now and trying to prevent the climate from changing that much. They’re industrial solutions to problems of industrialization. As a result, they’re almost always exclusively focused on reducing the measurable outcome: carbon. The other sorts of waste and damage to communities and people aren’t really addressed, probably because they’re not measurable and therefore the magic of technology can’t “fix” them. The solutions presented to cutting carbon seem to take us to a techno-utopia where climate change is slowed through strong regulation and top-down environmental management that’s done by modeling the planet as a kind of machine that must be kept running. But the planet is not a machine, and we aren’t separate from it[1]. The closer we get to the natural state of the world[2], removing abstractions, the more obvious this becomes.
All this might be nice in theory, but there’s only a certain amount you can do without a laptop. In some sense, we’re tied to this particular way of life; it’s been decided for us. The state of the world is such that living highly abstracted and industrial lives is a necessity in that the options presented make it so (maybe it’s not this bad, but for the sake of making this a harder argument let’s suppose it is.)
The key, I think, is to not just blindly accept it, but rather to pick and choose the parts of the industrialized world that benefit you and that you are okay with the implications of owning or taking part in. I own a laptop, a phone. I try to grow some of my own food, as much as I can. We’d like to live in a way where we’re not dependent on supply chains for food, water, energy, thinking about living in communities and places that don’t rely so heavily on highly abstracted industries.
It’s for this reason that I’m a big fan of the principal of locality[3]. The idea being to prioritize acting locally, within a context you can see and feel physically to act in the best way you can (Wendell Berry writes a lot about this[4] in regards to agriculture.) In this way you also avoid the problem of waste produced by highly abstracted processes. I once went to Chipotle and they messed up my order and put steak instead of chicken—to remedy the situation they threw away the entire bowl and started fresh. What a massive waste! Had I not gone to Chipotle I would have saved a meal’s worth of food and all the waste associated with creating it. We could continue going to Chipotle and demand that the government pass a comprehensive food waste act that prevents them from such behavior, or we could make our own food (or, once we’ve become pros, both.) One solution solves a single problem but keeps the otherwise inherently wasteful system, the other is holistic, avoids waste, and also gives us the satisfaction of cooking our own meals. I’ll tend to the local solution[5] in most cases.
Last updated Fri Jan 14 2022 in Berkeley, CA
2: https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Chief_Seattle_Speech.pdf
4: https://futureland.tv/christian/entry/139433
5: /thought/minimize-physical-abstractions.gmi