What we now call ‘poverty’ is essentially a result of modern industrial civilization and colonialism. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most indigenous and traditional societies knew how to operate within the limits imposed by their local environment. Then capitalism, with its developing technology, shattered the integrity of intact cultures, forcing them to grow beyond their means, to become dependent on foreign powers and industries. Take Hawaii, for instance: it was once a fertile, self-sufficient paradise. Now Hawaii imports something like 90 per cent of its food and exports nearly all of its waste. The same process has taken place all over the planet. We must reverse it.
In our current economic system, profit is generated by everincreasing commercial activity. Because it is based on debt and inherently unstable, our economic system must grow constantly just to maintain itself. Our industrial system has a parasitic relationship with the Earth’s natural systems. In essence, we generate wealth by subtracting from the Earth’s natural capital.
Over the last decades, vast areas of the developing world, such as China and India, have adopted the Western model of industrial growth. These huge societies are beginning to come up against hard limits on their natural resources, much like the rest of the world. The challenge for us – the privileged elite in the highly industrialized societies, who have the leisure time to think about this stuff – is to develop a new model of industrial production, based on regenerative principles, then distribute it globally.
For a corporation to survive, it must keep selling more and more goods and services, increasing its market share and profit margins. Therefore, its products – from electronic goods to sneakers to IKEA furniture – must be disposable and replaceable. They must be designed to last just long enough so that the consumer will be willing to replace them with the next new models, without getting so annoyed that they change brands. The system forces excessive over-production – and not just for corporations. For individual entrepreneurs, creative artists or designers to survive in this system, we must constantly produce new things – books, jewellery, toys, snazzy clothes, DVDs – that only add to the burden under which the Earth is already groaning.
We find ourselves in a bind created by our economic system. While some corporations actively promote initiatives aimed at sustainability and social responsibility, these efforts inevitability fall short of what is actually needed for real resilience. Publicly traded corporations, even the ones with good intentions, are programmed to generate waste and externalize environmental costs.
The rapid development of a world-encompassing ‘technosphere’ appears to have been a natural extension of the potential of our species – a necessary stage in our evolution. In fact, most people believe that our industrial system has provided extraordinary benefits, improvements in health and lifestyle, for billions of people. When it works properly, the technosphere functions like a hyper-organic extension of our bodies. What do I mean by this? Let’s take an example.
When I visit my local cafe in the East Village, I find myself at the end point of vast, intermeshed systems of agriculture, manufacturing and transport; global networks of trade routes, supply lines, communications and financial data. The beans used to make my coffee come from Sumatra, Guatemala or Brazil. The cup might have been made in China. The oil used to transport the beans may have come from Russia or Alaska. In other words, the entire world is involved in the seemingly ordinary act of buying a morning coffee – an act we usually perform unthinkingly.
The invisibility of these vast networks that produce the objects of our daily lives is akin to the invisible cellular mechanisms that operate all of the time within our bodies, that maintain us in good working order. We don’t have to meditate on our follicles for our hair to grow, or concentrate on our hearts in order to keep them beating. We are continuously sustained in our existences by vast realms of the invisible and the unseen, by networks of coordination all around us and by cellular processes within, although we generally only consciously recognize our dependence on these processes when they break down.
If it is true that we are on the cusp of realizing ourselves as a planetary super-organism, continuously reshaping the Earth, according to our collective will and intention, then we must also think of corporations in a different way – as the most powerful creations we have woven out of our social technologies.
A corporation is constructed of legal code, financial data, branding insignia, mission and vision statements. In the abstract, a corporation is a streamlined, hyper-efficient engine for taking ideas and transforming them into material form, then distributing those tools, products and services across the world, at high speed. The world-spanning successes of companies like Apple, Nike, IKEA and Samsung are a testament to that power.
Corporations can be seen as the nascent organs in the collective body of humanity. An energy company functions like the circulatory system, spreading blood – fuel, electrical power – through the body. A sanitation company is like the liver or kidney. A media company is like the organs of perception which take in sense data, decode it and transmit it to the brain, so it can make decisions.
Corporations are artificial life forms that human beings have created and programmed, giving them sets of rules they must follow. We have built these artificial life forms to compete in a game that we also concocted, called the stock market. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, whose misuse of a spell creates a situation where he has to fight off brooms multiplying to infinity, we have lost control over our creations.
The problem is that we made mistakes, errors of design, in the way we defined the rules of our game. We gave the corporations one prime directive: to increase shareholder value, to maximize profit, which they will try to accomplish, no matter what. In this sense, you can’t totally blame a company like British Petroleum for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (although we can still hold its managers culpable), or Occidental for the atrocities it has committed in the Ecuadorean Amazon, or Dupont for the Bhopal disaster, or Apple for using conflict minerals that unleashed African genocide, or H&M for its exploitation of adolescent girls and young women in Asian sweatshops.
When you give the corporation the single directive to maximize profit, then that is what it will seek to do, even if it means undermining ecological restrictions, condemning workers to slave conditions, or buying armies of lobbyists to corrupt the legislative process to its advantage. We programmed its underlying system, its game machinery, so that it must seek to dominate and grow. This often requires cutthroat tactics. It leads naturally to monopolization, cronyism and patterns of behaviour that make sense for a corporation’s balance sheet but are destructive, sociopathic, for society as a whole. Glaring examples include the ways that tobacco companies obscured the evidence on lung cancer, or how energy companies have used massive campaigns of disinformation to hide the link between climate change and CO2, which they may have known about for a number of decades. Now, for the sake of our survival, we must change the underlying rules of the game.
If we conceive of humanity as a planetary super-organism, then we must consider how the organs of a body work with maximum efficiency to support the health of the whole. If corporations are the organs of the super-organism, then they should be reinvented as transparent orchestrations, responding to ecological necessity as well as human desire. When I project into the future, I tend to think we will need to abandon the distinctions between a public and private sector, eventually. There is no private interest within an organism: it must function efficiently, according to a unified intention. As a superorganism, we must do the same.
It is possible that the ongoing movement towards collaborative production that is open-source and peer-to-peer could provide the new social model for our future. As Paul Mason writes in Postcapitalism, we are experiencing an increasing tension between ‘non-market forms of production’ and traditional capitalism. ‘Technologically, we are headed for zero-price goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of “bullshit jobs”.’ The potential, Mason believes, is for ‘the abolition of the market and its replacement by postcapitalism’. If this is going to happen without massive dislocation and mass violence, it requires a designed transition.
People will always require goods and services, but these could be provided for them by a new social infrastructure, based on peer-to-peer systems for distributed manufacturing and resource sharing. Through an intentional redesign of our financial system, corporations could ‘evolve’ into self-governing systems based on open cooperation and resource sharing, designed to bring universal abundance. They would maximize our potential as a species, while minimizing waste and internalizing externalities, such as CO2 emissions.
In The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, Andrew Winston looks at climate change and resource depletion as opportunities for businesses to evolve their practices without sacrificing their bottom line. Optimistically quoting billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, who has described climate change as ‘one of the greatest wealth-generating opportunities of our generation’, Winston sees the ecological limits as new stimuli that will ‘propel innovation, new thinking, and new business models, which make a lot of money for the fast movers’. This is true, up to a point.
Winston outlines a number of strategies that will enable companies to navigate in a rapidly warming and ecologically deteriorating world. These include ‘fight short-termism’, ‘set science-based goals’ and ‘inspire customers to use less’. He reviews the ecological data honestly, and advises companies to build in resilience, redundancy and other safeguards against increasing instability, making it clear that the landscape for industry will be radically transformed in the coming decades: ‘Most companies and industrial sectors will change profoundly, or they will disappear. Without a “clean-coal” technological miracle, for example, the coal sector will be gone.’
The Great Pivot seeks to assure corporations that they can reinvent themselves for increasing profitability, even in a time of tumultuous transformation. ‘Revamping our built environment, our transportation infrastructure, and our energy systems – as well as reworking consumption and what defines a good quality of life – will be multitrillion- dollar endeavours with huge pots of gold for those who find the greenest ways to do it.’
Some corporations, like Unilever, portray themselves as leaders in this new transitional space. They study patterns of consumer behaviour, and build models on how these habits can be changed. However, the reality is that we require more than innovation in how businesses function. Fundamentally to transform the corporate system, mass consumerism and planned obsolescence must be replaced by different models. Eventually, we can generate abundance for all through regenerative technologies and cradle-to-cradle industries. This metamorphosis requires a paradigm shift in how value is exchanged, not just in how business operates.
The UN recently defined a new set of Sustainable Development Goals. Many of these goals are laudable – but there is a problem. One of the goals is ‘sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all’, hopefully resulting in a 7 per cent annual growth in the economies of the developing world. Unfortunately, considering our maxed-out resources and accelerating climate catastrophe, this seems impossible and even suicidal.
When I rack my brain for solutions to our current crisis, I keep returning to the belief that we must give up on the current model of sustainable development, based on ever-increasing GDP. At the same time, we can’t give up the project of enhancing the lives of people in poor countries and regions. Our goal should be to establish human beings in healthy regional communities that will be as selfreplenishing, resilient and autonomous as possible. Rather than seeking to fix a broken system, we need to design the transition to a postcapitalist society based on open-source, peer-to-peer collaboration, where everyone receives a basic income and shares scarce resources intelligently.
Development, by its nature, requires ever more inputs of energy and resources. Degrowth – a social and economic movement, launched in France – proposes that we reduce the scale of our activity in accordance with the limits of the planet. We would focus innovation on building systems that allow us ‘to live convivially and frugally’. But how can we implement the model of degrowth? How do we reach a form of postcapitalism that completely contradicts the current political-economic system?
In Capitalism and the Destruction of Life on Earth, originally published on Alternet, the left-wing critic Roger Smith argues persuasively that our capitalist industrial system is in a doom-spiral:
The engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is today a roaring, out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, drilling, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible resources to turn them all into ‘product’ while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons.
Smith sees our technical infrastructure as directly responsible for the crisis we have unleashed. It is hard to argue with him.
This much seems obvious: we are mortgaging our future to maintain an unsustainable, suicidal system, hyper-focused on maximizing shortterm gains for shareholders. Even the best companies are guilty. Take IKEA, for instance. The Swedish company recently earmarked one billion dollars for climate change initiatives, which seems to suggest that they care. But IKEA’s practices are, in themselves, environmentally destructive, and this massive bequest is also PR for them.
IKEA is the third-largest consumer of wood in the world, logging out forests from East Europe and Siberia. IKEA clear-cuts 1,400 acres per year of 200- to 600-year-old forest near the Finnish border, despite the protests of conservancy groups. IKEA succeeds by using the cheapest means of mass production, building disposable furniture out of particle-board, rather than durable, long-lasting items. Its business model – like that of almost every major corporation – is based on the ideal of producing disposable goods that must be frequently replaced. Planned obsolescence and extreme waste is built into the logic of their system.
As you may already know, the mining of rare materials for our smart phones and other disposable electronic goods has caused ecological and social disaster in West Africa, in the Congo and neighbouring countries. An estimated three million have died in wars and genocides fought over control of ‘conflict minerals’, to satiate the world’s lust for these seductive gadgets. When Western colonialists discovered sugar, the entire European continent became addicted to the stuff. They created the slave trade to make sure they had a steady supply of it. Today, we are equally addicted to our electronic gadgets, and equally unconscious about the suffering we cause by our addictions. In some ways, nothing has changed.
The disposal of electronic goods is another environmental nightmare. Much of our trash ends up in dumps in the developed world, where it disintegrates, leaching toxins into the soil. We can’t continue these practices. Our culture reveres Steve Jobs, posthumously, as a saint of technology, a kind of digital messiah. He was a brilliant man, but he was not a great humanitarian. He knew what was happening in West Africa – as well as in Asian factories with terrible conditions, where teenage labourers often committed suicide – but he didn’t make it his mission to stop it. He allowed this destruction and misery to continue, because it fed Apple’s profits.
Our industries currently threaten most forms of life on Earth. ‘At present, global manufacturing and production processes consume more than 220 billion tons of resources annually, all taken from the Earth’s “natural capital” – oceans, forests, plants, plains, soils, mines, and all other aspects of biodiversity,’ note the editors of Alternatives to Economic Globalization, put together by Jerry Mander. Our current form of accounting considers depletion of natural resources ‘beneficial to gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP) because they are indicators of increased economic activity. In fact, they ought to be considered negative factors, because they decrease the longterm ability of societies to sustain themselves.’ The ecological damage, depletion of resources and toxic pollution generated by companies require massive clean-ups or remediation projects. Taxpayers rather than corporations generally end up paying the bills, as the health of the planet deteriorates.
The alternative is to make planned obsolescence obsolete. All goods should be made as durable, as long lasting, as possible. They should be designed so they can be easily repaired, not thrown out. Electronic devices should be made from components that can be replaced when necessary, when an upgrade comes along. All products should also be made in such a way that they don’t contaminate the Earth. After reducing toxic emissions to a minimum, we will seek to eliminate them entirely. Companies can be made responsible for their products over their entire life cycle and be legally bound to recycle and reuse all of their elements.
An economy is, fundamentally, a way of shaping matter, energy and time, according to human intention. If we are going to survive our current predicament, we must redirect our intention, and reshape our financial system to move in a new direction. We need to stop overuse of natural resources, limit pollution, enforce an ethos of conservation and sequester carbon, and we need to do it now, before the situation becomes any more dire or irrevocable. As Roger Smith notes, we confront a stark choice between ‘emergency contraction’ and ‘ecological collapse’. This means quickly cutting back on manufacturing, distribution, unnecessary consumption, pointless trends in fashion and gadgetry. We should comprehensively refocus our industrial powers, only supporting innovation that helps to salvage, reclaim, restore, replenish, regenerate, degrow and downshift.
The billionaire entrepreneur Manoj Bhargava, who invented the 5-Hour Energy drink, is one of many innovators currently pointing the way forward. Taking the profits from his company, Bhargava built a research centre near Detroit, designing new sustainable products to address current world problems. These products that could be distributed across the developing world include a stationary bicycle that generates energy – one hour of pedalling produces enough energy to power a house for 24 hours. Bhargava has also constructed a smallscale desalination machine, the Rain Maker, which can be placed next to wastewater treatment facilities. The Rain Maker might provide a partial solution to mega-droughts in California, Iran and India. ‘The purpose of business, in the end, is to serve society,’ he has said. ‘I want to redistribute wealth in an intelligent way.’
We need more technocrats like Bhargava who are willing to use their capital to build sustainable solutions in all areas. At the same time, relying on wealthy entrepreneurs or ‘philanthro-capitalists’ is not a systemic or sustainable solution. One alternative model was explored by a group of young tech developers during COP-21 in Paris. ‘Late summer 2015, we have joined forces in a stunning French castle to prototype the fossil free, zero-waste society. Our ultimate goal was to overcome the destructive consumer culture and make open-source, sustainable products the new normal.’
A collaboration between the OuiShare network based in Paris and OpenState from Berlin, they called it ‘Eco-Hacking the Future’. Over five weeks, they developed 12 separate projects: new modular systems to provide solar power to remote events, zero-waste kitchens and easyto- build wind turbines. Among their projects was ‘snap-fit kits for urban agriculture’. The developers envision ‘a city where grey walls, rooftops and balconies are transformed into living ecosystems’. Their kits include ‘a chicken coop, vermicomposter, three plant beds, and two sorts of beehives’.
The great opportunity is to repurpose corporations, give them new goals, and use the incredible expertise and engineering genius they have amassed to address the social and ecological crises that may soon overwhelm us. One way to do this is to create innovations in corporate structures. The B Corp is a triple-bottom-line company that seeks to benefit people and planet while generating profit. Another new model is the flexible-purpose corporation, which is driven by its mission and doesn’t need to generate profit at all. That mission could be to find, develop and implement solutions that can be scaled rapidly as we confront the ecological emergency.
The possibility of a society where technology would free humanity to cultivate its creative powers and individuality was foreseen by visionaries like Oscar Wilde and Buckminster Fuller. The stunning prospect is that, even as we confront the potential for our own extinction, we also have the prospect of engineering a rapid transition to a planetary civilization able to create universal abundance for all. In The Zero-Margin Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin explores how the Internet has reduced the actual cost of reproducing non-material goods such as books, music, films and online education to zero. The same metamorphosis could take place with material goods and also energy. Renewable power could be reliably transmitted and stored through an Internet of Energy. Objects could be produced locally, via 3D printers, enabled by distributed manufacturing. At the same time, all industrial production could transition to a closed-loop model, where inputs lead to non-toxic outputs and all waste is recycled, following nature’s principles.
In Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, an environmental designer and a chemist, explore the necessary steps we would need to take to redirect our industrial system. The authors ‘see a world of abundance, not limits’. They ask, ‘What if humans design products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe that our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?’
As simple examples, McDonough and Braungart imagine producing compostable ice-cream wrappers, with seeds embedded in them, so they can be planted in the ground and produce a vegetable garden; vehicles might be constructed from hemp, or other materials that decompose naturally. They imagine all power provided by renewable sources, creating a virtuous circle where both people and nature would be able to thrive.
If we were to establish a worldwide industrial system that harmonized with nature, enhancing biodiversity and resilience, the super-organism of humanity would become a kind of ‘supernature’. We should make it our mission to create a hyper-complex planetary civilization perfectly integrated with the Earth’s ecology. If this seems impossible to achieve, perhaps that is because we are only now turning our focus in this direction. Many things that once seemed impossible have been accomplished by human willpower and imagination.
The prospect that we redesign all of our industrial systems following principles of biomimicry, imitating nature’s zero-waste manufacturing, is a new idea – and a great challenge for our immediate future. Biomimicry seeks to learn from the methods that nature uses to overcome challenges, and replicate its systems and principles, in ways that support healthy ecosystems. For example, while the silk that spiders make is stronger than steel, it is manufactured in a ‘biofactory’ without the need for smelting or gigantic vats of boiling sulphuric acid.
According to Janine Benyus, author and founder of the Biomimicry Institute, nature can be copied, by human designers, on the level of form and function, as well as on the level of process. ‘The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future,’ Benyus writes.
Velcro, for instance, copies the burrs of the burdock plant, which sticks to fabric. A new moisture-catching materia used in dry regions of Africa to trap early morning fog, took its design from the shell of the local beetle, containing hydrophilic bumps and furrows that concentrate moisture from the air. In every area of industry, we can learn from nature’s four billion years of research and development.
The mycologist Paul Stamets has pioneered the use of mushrooms for bioremediation, repairing the damage and pollution from industrial processes. Stamets calls mycelia ‘the Earth’s natural internet’, because of its ability to exchange information over long distances. He believes that vast underground fungal networks function like the liver in the human body, recognizing toxins and learning, through trial and error, how to neutralize them, break them down and ultimately convert them to food. Stamets has demonstrated the ability of mycelium to break down contamination from petroleum, pesticides, alkaloids and polychlorinated biphenyls.
‘Tomorrow’s industry will eat, digest, and secrete the things we need not just in imitation of living beings, but through the actual cells of living beings,’ write Alex Steffen and Jeremy Falludi in Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. ‘With the help of biotechnology, we can create pools of hacked bacteria that spit out hydrogen, tanks of tweaked fungus that convert garbage into methane, and vats of tame microbes that allow us to design machines and structures with natural materials that resemble shells and spider silk.’
There is potential as well as peril in biotechnology’s rapid advances. We must base the future development of such technology on a holistic, comprehensive approach, taking a long view of our relationship to the Earth. Learning from past mistakes, we must factor in the possibility of unforeseen impacts on the planet’s ecology, which can degrade human as well as animal health. We need to become not just smarter, but wiser.
As an urban bohemian who grew up in New York, I love my city’s rich cultural history and the myriad worlds that overlap each other here. When I walk around Manhattan these days, however, I have the eerie sensation I am wandering through a gigantic sand mandala – like those intricate patterns laid out by Tibetan monks which get wiped away once the ceremony ends.
For Buddhists, life is an ongoing teaching on impermanence. The ecological crisis is going to emphasize that principle until it becomes a collective realization. Our current civilization is not built to last. The more we realize this now, the faster we can begin to turn our attention to reinventing the systems, technical and social, upon which we depend.
We don’t know how long we have until sea levels rise to inundate many coastal cities. It could be as soon as a few decades. As we lose our urban centres, we will construct new ‘eco-cities’, to use the term of architect Richard Register. The cities of the future will have to be conceived as ‘scaffoldings for living systems’, according to ecological designer John Todd. Eco-cities will function as biodigestors and composters, places of self-sufficiency and abundance, where food is grown, energy is produced and waste is recycled on-site. Like coral reefs or beehives, the cities of the future should enhance the health, beauty and biodiversity of the local ecosystem. They should be designed for multi-generational communities, for bicycles and walking, for creative expression and participatory democracy.
We will face an ever-growing global refugee crisis in the next decades. We need to apply the hyper-efficiency of capitalist manufacturing and distribution – mastered by companies like IKEA, Walmart and Amazon – to an ecologically regenerative, systemic approach. We have the capacity to build durable, modular, carbon-negative housing units that can be shipped across the world, or potentially manufactured in each locality using 3D printers. In these instant settlements, people will need to grow their own food and produce energy on-site. A number of initiatives are already testing prototypes for modular houses that can be quickly assembled and easily shipped. One such project is ReGen Villages, pioneered by James Ehrlich, an engineer at Stanford.
ReGen Villages are self-sufficient communities. The houses come with renewable energy systems, battery storage units, composting toilets, rainwater catchments and insulation built into them. Food can be grown using aquaponic methods that preserve up to 85 per cent of water in a closed-loop system where ‘ammonia created from fish waste is converted from nitrites to nitrates through bacterial interaction’. Such ready-made, self-sufficient towns could be mass-produced and shipped across the developing world, or produced on-site via distributed manufacturing. They could be supplied to refugees as populations find themselves forced to settle further inland.
Much of the world is already suffering from a crisis of fresh water. Drought will become far more prevalent, and dangerous, in the next decades, as mountaintop glaciers cease to provide reliable sources of water for billions of people. Water use has tripled in the last halfcentury, and aquifers are running dry. To meet this crisis, we will require globally orchestrated efforts in water management plus a massive increase in desalination.
Desalination plants are proliferating across the world, with more than 15,000 of them now operational. However, as of yet, this technology is still flawed. Even Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, the super-optimistic authors of Abundance, admit that current desalination technology has fundamental drawbacks. The two main techniques – thermal desalination and reverse osmosis – require excessive energy and create toxic waste.
Thermal desalination boils water, and then condenses the vapour. In reverse osmosis, water passes through permeable membranes. ‘Neither is the solution we need’, note the authors.
Thermal desalination consumes too much energy for largescale deployment (about 80 megawatt hours per megalitre) and the brine by-product fouls aquifers and is devastating to aquatic populations. Reverse osmosis, on the other hand, uses comparatively less energy, but toxins such as boron and arsenic can still sneak through, and membranes clog frequently, reducing the lifetime of the filter.
Diamandis and Kotler look towards future developments of nanotechnology – such as devices that will use nanoparticles to filter out toxic materials in water and make the desalination process less destructive.
As a new development in the conservation of water, Diamandis and Kotler point to a new computer-assisted irrigation system installed in Spain, ‘designed to save farmers 20 percent of the nine hundred billion gallons of water they annually use’. The world is no longer unexplored territory; we now have the ability to follow the flows of raw materials and energy on a global scale.
Organic waste has a bright future. We have the capacity to develop nowaste processes based on nature’s template. Regenerative technologies that can be industrially scaled include the conversion of organic waste into biogas, which can be used for energy. This conversion process happens through anaerobic digestion, in which microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen.
Technologies based on anaerobic digestion convert manure, municipal wastewater solids, fats, oils and grease and so on into energy, burnt to generate electricity and heat, as well as natural gas and fuels for cars, trucks and planes. The residue includes nutrients that can be used for agriculture, as fertilizer. Sub-tropical countries – like Jamaica, and Haiti, where fast-growing vegetation produces large amounts of bio-mass – could generate their transportation fuels from wasted organic materials, without producing excess CO2.
Industrial Design and Aesthetics
The noble mission of design, now and in the future, will be to package the rapid transition we need, at all levels. We must collectively conceive of this social and technological transformation as a seductive, hip, glamorous adventure for us as individuals and for human society as a whole. We can use our industrial systems to produce circulating, selfregenerating systems for transportation, energy, water and nutriments, for clothing bodies and building homes, for converting our waste back into energy and food. In order for humanity to graduate from parasitic pariah to planetary partner, we must not only learn to consume better, but consume far less.
To make matters more difficult, we will have to undertake this transition at a time when we face intensifying stresses from natural disasters and depleted resources, along with increasingly desperate refugee populations. We still find ourselves hampered by the moral blindness and self-serving cowardice of political leaders, finance capitalists, fundamentalist despots and other power brokers. We also have to confront our own expectations of what the future is meant to bring us, and accept that we are in a new situation. This requires a willingness to surrender some of our cherished hopes and dreams.
Personally, I don’t think we can make effective changes until we understand how ‘subjectivity’ – the inner domain of human consciousness – is not something freely determined. Consciousness, identity, subjectivity are mass-produced by the corporate-industrial megamachine. Those who are designers and media-makers must be willing to intercede in this process and produce new ‘subjectivities’, shaping new patterns of behaviour and new values for the multitudes. Design and aesthetics will be crucial tools for accomplishing this.
Aesthetics and ethics have a functional relationship which influences consumer choice and impacts on the direction of industrial manufacturing. Design creates objects of desire. Advertising assimilates humanity’s collective yearnings for status, sex and success, and points them towards particular products and industries. The only way I can envision the type of systemic change of values, beliefs and habits that we need in a short timeframe is through the creation of a global marketing campaign coupled with, as Buckminster Fuller foresaw, a ‘design revolution’. A massive media blitz can give people a new vision of the good, the true and the beautiful. We have to make conservation, degrowth, post-capitalism, self-sufficiency, sharing resources, food growing, generosity and the virtue of necessity glamorous and fun.
We are faced with a difficult, intricate, seemingly close-to-impossible mission. So let’s accept it as our initiation, and even enjoy it in that sense. For a few decades, until we have converted to a regenerative society running on renewable fuels and closed-loop industries, people will have to find joy in self-sacrifice and contentment in having less. We must be willing to undertake difficult tasks for the benefit of the collective. To accomplish this transition, we need to overcome social inertia, break apart stagnant thought structures, and inspire the masses with new desires, values, habits and behaviours.
We find ourselves in a cliff-hanger. As the methane erupts and sea levels rise, a mass die-off could happen soon. On the other hand, if we change direction rapidly, the human family can reach a state of shared abundance. The goal is to build, distribute, scale exponentially and share new social and industrial technologies supporting resilience and local autonomy. Within a century, we could have rebuilt eco-cities and redesigned industries for future generations to live in harmony and in holistic communion with the planet.
I realize that many thinkers have argued passionately that our technological society has reached its apex – that it must give way to a new, more humane form of civilization that is, once again, smaller scale. ‘The high-entropy journey humanity has undertaken under the illusion of growth and progress does not have a future,’ writes Vandana Shiva, an activist who crusades against GMOs and for the rights of farmers in India. ‘We will have to change the road we are on, and we will have to change our goals. The goals cannot be set by reductionist science, industrial technologies and neoliberal economies. The goals cannot be narrowly defined as economic growth or consumerism. The goals have to be the preservation of the earth, her diverse species, and future generations.’
Wendell Berry, like many deep and dark ecologists, believes that technologists are feeding a cultural delusion when they argue that ever-more advanced technology can save us from the ecological crisis that technology has unleashed:
There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.
I understand Shiva’s pessimism, and I get why Berry dismisses our naive faith in futurist technologies, noting ‘the work now most needing to be done – that of neighbourliness and care-taking – cannot be done by remote control with the greatest power on the largest scale’. And yet, at the same time, I think the only way we can deal with the mass scale of the problems industrial civilization has created is to redirect and repurpose the infrastructure of manufacturing and industry which now spans the world, as well as make use of the power of media, design and social technology to transform ourselves as a species.
In the same way that corporations and media apply many psychological techniques to create ‘false needs’ in the population, we can use the media and elements of the corporate system to create and then spread replicable models of community, alternative economic systems and local forms of participatory democracy. Factories can mass-produce and distribute regenerative technologies and techniques in agriculture, energy production and so on. My vision is that we resolve the antithesis between indigenous cultures that were small scale and Earth-honouring and postmodern civilization, defined by corporate globalization, in a new creative synthesis, where traditional values and holistic principles are mass-distributed using the efficient supply chains of global capitalism.
We can apply our technology to support ecologically regenerative practices on all levels and in all areas. For example, if we improve desalinization technology, and have these plants powered by solar, we can create enough fresh water for everyone on Earth. We can do this, even as the mountaintop glaciers disappear and as sea levels rise to make a great deal of ground water undrinkable.
Our mission is to engineer a transition to a post-capitalist society in which everyone on Earth receives a basic subsidy. This requires redesigning our factories so that the by-products of manufacturing are no longer toxic but feed back positively into the ecosystems, just as all the products of nature do. We can rebuild coastal cities as inland ‘eco-cities’, designed to be models of self-sufficiency. We can relocate and resettle large refugee populations in self-sufficient communities where they produce their own food and energy. The Internet and mass media become tools to train the global population in direct democracy, permaculture and bioremediation, so we become stewards of our local ecology.
If we want to maximize our chances for near-term survival, we must undertake a systemic transition towards renewable power distributed through a globally decentralized grid. We also must shift our agriculture system away from industrial farming that depletes soil and is dependent on fossil fuels. We must relocalize a great deal of our food production, and resettle some urbanites in rural areas, retraining them to be farmers – small-scale farming can be improved by digital technology which helps organize supply chains and distribution systems.
No matter what we do, we will confront increasingly severe ecological crises over the rest of this century. Realizing that our world is becoming more precarious, we can transition to a system that enhances local autonomy, resilience and self-sufficiency. This will be the best way to protect our human family from intensifying crises.
At the same time, we need to develop a healthy scepticism and probably reject many types of futuristic technologies that could cause more damage to our already damaged world, such as nuclear energy and genetic engineering. I personally think we must reject the idea of geo-engineering as a quick fix that will allow us to continue on our current path. The most well-known geo-engineering proposal is that we spray sulphur particles into the outer atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, artificially cooling the planet. This could wreak further havoc on the climate and cause negative consequences for human health. It will also have to be maintained perpetually, as temperatures would skyrocket again as soon as we stopped emitting sulphur. It is not a good plan.
I can’t pretend the challenges we face are anything less than very intense. We may see the development of even greater forms of social injustice and wealth inequality, as automation eliminates millions of jobs while droughts and famines become endemic. Instead of this, we have the opportunity to take a different direction. We can establish a regenerative society that produces authentic security and is truly utopian, compared to what we have now. Increasingly, many thinkers see our potential to establish a new planetary culture based on ethically and ecologically viable principles, combining elements of capitalism, socialism and anarchism in a new political-economic operating system. This potential remains latent until we realize it.