Our Energy "Needs" Are Driving a Mass Extinction
Nuclear, fossil fuels, and renewable energy all cause major harm to ecosystems. Are we willing to accept these limits?
Two years ago, I was asked to write an introduction to a French-language translation of Langdon Winner’s 1986 book The Whale and the Reactor, which I have reproduced here. This is the first time this piece has been published in English.
Winner’s book, re-published by my friends at Editions Libre, explores themes of technology and society, contrasting the life of whales off the California coast with the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. This theme has important echoes today, as the North Atlantic Right Whale is pushed closer to extinction with each passing week due to the latest energy fad of a growth-addicted society: this time not nuclear, but rather offshore wind turbines along the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
If you’re new here, I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. If you want to follow this newsletter, you can subscribe. Almost all the writing I publish here is free, but paid subscribers support my writing and organizing, and receive occasional behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.
The writer Martín Prechtel often talks of the Tzutujil Mayan culture he was adopted into, and that community’s relationship with technology. He describes that, in their traditional ways, the production of a tool such as a knife was a grave and serious matter. Throughout the physical effort of creating the knife, mounting a handle, and sharpening the blade, and extending throughout its use, many prayers and lengthy and exhausting ceremonies were required.
The power of the knife, Prechtel says, requires a spiritual expense, a lengthy reflection and meditation on the origins of the materials, the intended use, the ramifications of the technology, and the proper mindset with which it is to be used.
The Tzutujil Maya, Prechtel says, didn’t invent bulldozers or aircraft carriers—not from any stupidity, but out of a cultural recognition of the costs (ecological, material, and spiritual) of such technologies.
The contrast between this approach to our physical tools and their impacts on the world around us and our communities could hardly be more different from the perspective on technology in modern civilization. Rarely do we ask the question, “should we invent this?” Even more rarely is that question answered with “no”—at least, not by the people with the power to influence the outcome.
Today, every new technology which can give military or business advantage is essentially automatically accepted. The ideology of progress has evolved from “manifest destiny” to “technological progress.” But the genocide and ecocide continues to underly the process of expansion. The Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan calls this “a sort of madness that is a god to people.”
Today’s technological priesthood does not worship a god in heaven, but rather a god found in machines and algorithms. It is a remote god, inaccessible to the average person, but for the priesthood, technology is more like an addiction: something both completely under their control and completely uncontrollable at the same time.
It is comforting to imagine that social choices are guided by benign people and institutions committed to the well-being of the human species and our planet. The reality is almost the polar opposite. Our society rushes into choices with little concern for their future ramifications. New technological innovations, from nuclear bombs and plastics to the internet, have drastically reshaped society and the ecology of our entire planet, and governments and society as a whole have exerted little control over these changes beyond reigning in some of the most obvious and easily mitigated harms. Regulation has proved completely inadequate at broadly shaping this trend.
Critics of capitalism, industrial society, and civilization have long brought attention to these issues in fields as broad as community activism, science fiction, and philosophy. Even comedy grapples with these topics. The author Douglas Adams famously wrote that "Humans consider themselves the smartest of creatures because they’ve invented digital wristwatches and nuclear submarines, and dolphins consider themselves the smartest of creatures because they NEVER invented any of those things.”
Corporations, investors, and engineers accelerate us headlong into new dangers with each new chemical they create, each gene they edit, and each new product that shapes our internal and external lives and leaves behind wasted land and wasted lives.
Langdon Winner’s 1988 book, The Whale and The Reactor asks these often-ignored questions, and attempts to create a structured critique of technology that can take root in academic institutions and society at large. “I am convinced,” Winner says, “that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually ask, How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build.”
A philosophy of technology is direly needed in our world. And not just in academia or fringe circles. This needs to be central to our social and political organizations moving forward, because, as Winner writes, “To an ever increasing extent, this [technological] order of things transcends national boundaries to create roles and relationships grounded in vast, complex instrumentalities of industrial production, electronic communications, transportation, agribusiness, medicine, and warfare.”
Technology shapes every aspect of our modern lives. Our political systems, food, entertainment, sex and relationships, communities, and everyday interactions are shaped, molded, and even controlled by technology. Therefore, we need a culture-wide philosophy of technology to reign in the engineers and CEOs of the world and ensure our future decisions are wise.
Many thinkers, for example, Lewis Mumford, have explored similar ideas. “To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves, ” Mumford wrote in his 1964 book Authoritarian and Democratic Technics. Mumford, like Winner and many others, understood that technological systems can and are evolving in directions that are antithetical to life on this planet.
As with other critics of what Derrick Jensen calls “technological escalation” (rather than the more commonly-used phrase “technological progress”), Winner sees that progress is a bankrupt idea. As technology has “advanced,” so has suicide; war; exploitation; ecocide; eating disorders; body dysmorphia; poverty and proletarianization; and a litany of other disasters.
There is no way to produce industrial technology without industrial devastation. Even the latest so-called “green technologies” require global trade, global exploitation, and global destruction of the land, air, and water.
In our book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and myself write that “The late social psychologist Erich Fromm, who escaped Nazi Germany to resettle in the U.S., describes sadism as ‘the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being.’ Is there a more apt description of industrial civilization? Its technology has emptied rivers, crushed mountains, damaged the climate, and broken the boundaries of the atom itself. And the end point of sadism is necrophilia, says Fromm, ‘the passion to transform that which is alive into something un-alive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.’”
Industrial technology is a war against the planet and ultimately against human beings. The great population ecologist William D. Catton, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, describes overpopulation as “theft from the future.” He tells the story of a village in Russia starving during a time of famine, but refusing to eat the seeds destined for next season’s crop. This the way of wisdom. Sometimes, present satisfaction must be weighed against future survival.
The same lesson can be applied to technology. This basic test, of our ability to forego comforts, extravagancies, and delights for the sake of the future is most simply captured in the “marshmallow test” of child psychology. But the test still uses a selfish measurement. The themes explored in this book require us to go beyond selfishness and consider future generations and non-human beings. This is the true marker of intelligence, and will determine whether our species leaves behind a thriving legacy of beauty, or a wasteland.
The most important moment in this book is in Chapter 10, where Winner describes the experience from which the book draws its title. He tells of taking a tour provided by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), the for-profit electric utility corporation that serves much of California, to the site of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station. “Below us, “Winner writes, “nestled on the shore of a tiny cove, was the gigantic nuclear reactor, still under construction…”
Then, Winner’s vision is juxtaposed with another sight: “out to sea,” he writes, “a California grey whale suddenly swam to the surface, shot a tall stream of vapor from its blow hole into the air, and then disappeared beneath the waves. An overpowering silence descended over me.”
The conservationist John A. Livingston asks, in his books, what will compel people to defend the planet. Is it good arguments? Facts? Science? Art? Books themselves? In the end, he concludes there is only one force that can truly change people’s value for the natural world in a fundamental way: that force, Livingston says, is the direct experience of nature.
Winner’s experience at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station is a testament to that lived human experience. It stands in stark contrast to what he terms “technological somnambulism,” the zombie-like shamble into a techno-dystopian future. We know where this future leads, thanks to (sometimes unintentionally) dystopian science fiction that explores potential futures, from Dune, Parable of the Sower, and The Matrix to Blade Runner, Oryx and Crake, and The Expanse. This is somewhat ironic, given Winner’s critique of “technopornographic” science fiction, a description that unfortunately characterizes too much of the genre.
The dystopian future is already here.
The author Arundhati Roy, describing the emerging technological fronts of AI, internet banking, digital identities, and mass surveillance, writes that “new technology could ensure that the world no longer needs a vast working class. What will then emerge is a restive population of people who play no part in economic activity—a surplus population if you like, one that will need to be managed and controlled. Our digital coordinates will ensure that controlling us is easy. Our movements, friendships, relationships, bank accounts, access to money, food, education, healthcare, information (fake, as well as real), even our desires and feelings—all of it is increasingly surveilled and policed by forces we are hardly aware of.”
In some ways, Winner’s book feels dated, but it is in a good sense. Many people today understand the problems of modern technological escalation. Almost everyone who has a smartphone or has used social media understands the addictive, totalizing, panopticon-like business model of modern mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Critiques of modern technology and the powers behind them are published relatively regularly in newspapers, film, podcasts, and blogs, although most of them are severely limited, only encouraging a greater regulation of business that actually assists these corporations in the long run.
What most people do not understand is the relationship between our technological society and the violence required to maintain it. The neoliberal Thomas Friedman, in a rare moment of clarity, once wrote in the New York Times Magazine that "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without MacDonald Douglass. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley's technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps."
Most people also do not understand how to turn awareness of these problems into concrete action to create a better world. We have no sense of our collective power and almost no organization in our communities. Winner begins to explore these topics in his book. “[T]he path to a lively citizenship,” he writes, “begins with the simple choice to ‘show up!’—to attend public meetings, to join public groups, to march in demonstrations, to speak up in civic gatherings, and to become active in groups that seek to address and improve the institutions and practices of community life.”
This is a good beginning. But we cannot oversimplify the problems we are facing. Technological escalation has our world on the brink. We’re in the midst of a global mass-extinction (more accurately, a mass-extermination) event. Income inequality is at record-high levels, both within western countries and globally. As small island nations sink under rising seas and species extinctions accelerate, environmentally driven conflicts and (un)natural disasters are creating millions of refugees.
Glaciers are melting, and thanks to industrial pollution, every mother has dioxin, the most toxic known chemical, in her breastmilk. New “benign” technologies like solar photovoltaics, electric cars, and wind energy turbines are receiving massive government subsidies, spawning a new generation of billionaires and leaving new swathes of ecological destruction. And even nuclear reactors, which Winner accurately describes as ecological and human disasters, are experiencing a comeback as people like James Hansen and George Monbiot advocate for them as a source of “carbon-free” energy.
The questions Winner asks in this book challenge us to begin thinking much more critically, and with more complexity, about the problems of modern technology, both new and that which we have grown up with. But fundamentally, this book and these times are a call to action. A philosophy of technology, in a world such as this, must not be a philosophy of cloistered academics. It must be a combat discipline; a philosophy of warriors.
It is for you, dear reader, to become one of those warriors.
Max Wilbert
Protect Thacker Pass land defense camp
Northern Paiute/ Western Shoshone Territory (Nevada, USA)
September 2021
This is sobering Max, so many good reflections in here. Thank you for this.
"Our society rushes into choices with little concern for their future ramifications.”
A far cry from thinking Seven Generations….