Energy, “Ecotechnocracy” and Ecology

With the launching of the “energy crisis,” a new mystique has developed around the phrase “alternate energy.” In characteristic American fashion, this takes the form of ritualistic purification: guilt over the extravagant use of irreplacable energy resources, fear in response to the apocalyptic consequences of “shortages,” repentance over the afflictions resulting from waste, and the millenarian commitment to “new” techniques for achieving a stable energy system, i.e., “alternate energy.” The operational term here is “technique.” Whether one chooses to focus on Gerald Ford’s plan to afflict America with some 200 nuclear reactors by 1980 or Professor Heronemus’ plan to string the northern Atlantic with giant wind generators, the phrase “alternate energy” runs the grave risk of being debased and its radical content diffused of its serious social implications.

The trick is familiar enough. One intentionally confuses a mere variation of the status quo with fundamentally opposing concepts of life style, technology, and community. Just, as the word “state” was cunningly identified with society, “hierarchy” with organization, “centralization” with planning — as though the latter couldn’t exist without the former, indeed, as though both words were synonymous — so projects that reflect a shrewd reworking of established techniques and outlooks are prefixed by the word “alternate.” With this one magical word, they acquire the aura of the radically new, the different, the “revolutionary.” The word c energy,” in turn, becomes the solvent by which richly qualitative distinctions are reduced to the gray, undifferentiated substrate for a crude psychic, physical and “ecological” cybernetics — the ebb and flow, the blockage and release of quantified power. Accordingly, by dint of shrewd linguistic parasitism, the old in a seemingly “new” form becomes little more than an alternative to itself. Variety, qualitative difference and uniqueness, those precious traits of phenomena to which an authentic ecological sensibility must always be a response, are rarefied into a “cosmic” oneness, into a universal “night in which” (to borrow the mocking language of a great German thinker) “all cows are black.”

If energy becomes a device for interpreting reality on the cosmic scale of the Chinese Qi or Reich’s orgone, we will then have succumbed to a mechanism that is no less inadequate than Newton’s image of the world as a clock. I use the word “inadequate” advisedly: there is certainly truth in all of these conceptions — Newton’s no less than the Chinese and Reich’s — but it is a one-sided truth, not truth in its wholeness and roundedness. If Newton’s image was essentially mechanical, a vision of the world united in the ebb, flow and distribution of energy is essentially thermodynamical. Both reduce quality to quantity; both are “world views” in search of mathematical equations; both tend toward a shallow scientism that regards mere motion as development, changes as growth, and feedback as dialectic. Acupuncture and psychology aside, in ecology the Newton of this thermodynamics, or more properly, energetics, is Howard Odum. In Odum’s work, systems-analysis reduces the ecosystem to an analytic category for dealing with energy flow as though life forms were mere reservoirs and conduits for calories, not variegated organisms that exist as ends in themselves and in vital developmental relationships with each other. Ironically, far too many well-intentioned people who are rightly dissatisfied with the linear thinking, the despiritizing formulas, and above all, the mechanical materialism of traditional science have unknowingly turned to,its opposite face — a mechanical spiritualism that subtly betrays them with a different rhetoric to the very world view they have rejected.

In terms of outlook, the results of flipping from one face of the coin to the other — from mechanics to energetics — tend to produce an ideological omelet, as formless and scattered as the real article itself. Cosmic oneness achieved merely through energetics easily decomposes into an obsessive preoccupation with gadgetry. Here, the mechanical begins to subvert the spiritual. One cannot live in a universal night all the time. Even if the cows are black, there must be enough light to delineate them. Among many “eco-freaks” — and I can think of no other term to describe my sisters and brothers in the alternate technology community — daylight often means neither a mellow dawn nor a soft twilight but the harsh glare of high noon, when structural detail and technical proficiency become ends in themselves. Small domes graduate into big ones; horticulturists are lured by a burgeoning market for pure foods into a questionable form of organic agribusiness; solar collectors and wind generators acquire a certain technical precosity that finds its armor in the patent office. In itself, this development might even be valuable if it were the “spin-off” of a flourishing social perspective, distinctly critical of the entire social order, and formed by moral, spiritual, and ecological values of a clearly revolutionary character. But as long as energetics is the sole thread that unites outlook with practice, the “eco-freak” often drops into an eco-technocratic limbo in which means become ends and the end is simply technical proficiency at best — or a sizable income at worst. What I am saying quite simply is that, lacking a solidity of social ideas, an authentic ecological sensibility, a life-oriented outlook, and moral integrity, scientism and frankly capitalism overtly recolonize even the rhetorical ground which was claimed by mechanical spiritualism. If the dream that guides the “eco-freak” is held together by energetics, ecology with its broadly philosophical outlook that seeks the harmonization of humanity with nature dissolves into “environmentalism” or what amounts to mere environmental engineering, an organic approach dissolves into systems analysis, and “alternate technology” becomes technocratic manipulation.

The landscape of alternate technology is already marred by this regressive drift, especially by mega-projects to “harness” the sun and winds. By far the lion’s share of federal funds for solar energy research is being funneled into projects that would occupy vast areas of desert land. These projects are a mockery of “alternate technology.” By virtue of their scale, they are classically traditional in terms of their gigantism and in the extent to which they would exacerbate an already diseased, bureaucratically centralized, national division of labor — one which renders the American continent dependent upon and vulnerable to a few specialized areas of production. The oceans too have become industrial real estate, not merely as a result of proposals for floating nuclear reactors but also long strings of massive wind generators. And as if these mega-projects were not enough, Glaser’s suggestions for mile-square space platforms to capture solar energy beyond the atmosphere and beam microwaves to earthbound collectors would redecorate the sky with science- fiction industrial installations. Doubtless, many of these megaproject designers are well-intentioned and high-minded in their goals. But in terms of size, scale and ecological insight, their thinking is hardly different from that of James Watt. Their perspectives are the product of the traditional Industrial Revolution rather than a new ecological revolution, however sophisticated their designs may be.

Human beings, plants, animals, soil, and the inorganic substrate of an ecosystem form a community not merely because they share or manifest a oneness in “cosmic energy,” but because they are qualitatively different and thereby complement each other in the wealth of their diversity. Without giving due and sensitive recognition to the differences in life-forms, the unity of an ecosystem would be one-dimensional, flattened out by its lack of variety and the complexity of the food web which gives it stability. The horrendous crime of the prevailing social order and its industry is that it is undoing the complexity of the biosphere. It is simplifying complex food webs by replacing the organic with the inorganic — turning soil into sand, forests into lumber, and land into concrete. In so simplifying the biosphere, this social order is working against the thrust of animal and plant evolution over the past billion years, a thrust which has been to colonize almost every niche on the planet with variegated life-forms, each uniquely, often exquisitely, adapted to fairly intractable material conditions for life. Not only is “small beautiful,” to use E.F. Schumacher’s expression, but so is diversity. Our planet finds its unity in the diversity of species and in the richness, stability and interdependence this diversity imparts to the totality of life, notin the black-painted-on-black energetics of mechanical spiritualism.

“Alternate energy” is ecological insofar as it promotes this diversity, partly by fostering an outlook that respects diversity, partly by using diverse sources of energy that make us dependent on variegated resources. The prevailing social order teaches us to think in terms of “magic bullets,” whether they be chemotherapeutic “solutions” to all disease or the “one” source of energy that will satisfy all our needs for power. Accordingly, the industrial counterpart to antibiotics is nuclear energy, just as Paul Ehrlich’s salvarsan, the “magic bullet” of the turn of the century, found its counterpart in petroleum. A “magic bullet” simplifies all our problems. It overlooks the differences between things by prescribing one solution for widely dissimilar problems. It fosters the view that there is a common denominator to the variegated world of phenomena — biological, social, or psychological — that can be encompassed by a single formula or agent. A respect for diversity is thus undermined by a Promethean view of the world as so much “matter” and “energy” that can be “harnessed” to serve the maw of agribusiness and industry. Nature becomes “natural resources,” cities become “urban resources,” and eventually even people become “human resources” — all irreducible “substances for exploitation and production. The language itself reveals the sinister transformation of the organic into the inorganic, the simplification of a richly diverse reality into uniform “matter” to feed a society based on production for the sake of production, growth for the sake of growth, and consumption for the sake of consumption.

To make solar energy alone, or wind power alone, or methane alone the exclusive “solution” to our energy problems would be as regressive as adopting nuclear energy. Let us grant that solar energy, for example, may prove to be environmentally far less harmful and more efficient than conventional forms. But to view it as the exclusive source of energy presupposes a mentality and sensibility that leaves untouched the industrial apparatus and the competitive, profit-oriented social relations that threaten the viability of the biosphere. In all other spheres of life, growth would still be pursued for its own sake, production for its own sake, and consumption for its own sake, followed eventually by the simplification of the planet to a point which would resemble a more remote geological age in the evolution of the organic world. Conceptually, the beauty of “alternate energy” has been not merely its efficiency and its diminution of pollutants, but the ecological interaction of solar collectors, wind generators, and methane digesters with each other and with many other sources of energy including wood, water — and yes, coal and petroleum where necessary — to produce a new energy pattern, one that is artistically tailored to the ecosystem in which it is located. Variety would be recovered in the use of energy just as it would be in the cultivation of the soil, not only because variety obviates the need to use harmful “buffers,” but because it promotes an ecological sensibility in all spheres of technology. Without variety and diversity in technology as a whole, solar energy would merely be a substitute for coal, oil, and uranium rather than function as a stepping stone to an entirely new way of dealing with the natural world and with each other as human beings.

What is no less important, “alternate energy” — if it is to form the basis for a new ecotechnology — would have to be scaled to human dimensions. Simply put, this means that corporate gigantism with its immense, incomprehensible industrial installations would have to be replaced by small units which people could comprehend and directly manage by themselves. No longer would they require the intervention of industrial bureaucrats, political technocrats, and a species of “environmentalists” who seek merely to engineer “natural resources” to suit the demands of an inherently irrational and anti-ecological society. No longer would people be separated from the means whereby they satisfy their material needs by a suprahuman technology with its attendant “experts” and “managers”; they would acquire a direct grasp of a comprehensible ectotechnology and regain the power over everyday life in all its aspects which they lost ages ago to ruling hierarchies in the political and economic sphere.[4] Indeed, following from the attempt to achieve a variegated energy pattern and an ecotechnology scaled to human dimensions, they would be obliged to decentralize their cities as well as their industrial apparatus into new ecocommunities — communities that would be based on direct face-to-face relations and mutual aid.

One can well imagine what a new sense of humanness this variety and human scale would yield — a new sense of self, of individuality, and of community. Instruments of production would cease to be instruments of domination and social antagonism: they would be transformed into instruments of liberation and social harmonization. The means by which we acquire the most fundamental necessities of life would cease to be an awesome engineering mystery that invites legends of the unearthly to compensate for our lack of control over technology and society. They would be restored to the everyday world of the familiar, of the oikos, like the traditional tools of the craftsman. Selfhood would be redefined in new dimensions of self-activity, self-management, and self-realization because the technical apparatus so essential to the perpetuation of life — and today, so instrumental in its destruction — would form a comprehensible arena in which people could directly manage society. The self would find a new material and existential expression in productive as well as social activity.

Finally, the sun, wind, waters, and other presumably “inorganic” aspects of nature would enter our lives in new ways and possibly result in what I called, nearly a decade ago, a “new animism.” They would cease to be mere “resources,” forces to be “harnessed” and “exploited,” and would become manifestations of a larger natural totality, indeed, as respiritized nature, be it the musical whirring of wind-generator blades or the shimmer of light on solar-collector plates. Having heard these sounds and seen these images with my own ears and eyes at installations reared in Vermont at Goddard College and in Massachusetts at the research station of New Alchemy Institute East, I have no compunction in using esthetic metaphors to describe what might ordinarily be dismissed as “noise” and “glare” in the vernacular of conventional technology. If we cherish the flapping of sails on a boat and the shimmer of sunlight on the sea, there is no reason why we cannot cherish the flapping of sails on a wind rotor and the reflection of sunlight on a solar collector. Our minds have shut out these responses and denied them to our spirit because the conventional sounds and imagery of technology are the ear-splitting clatter of an assembly line and the eye-searing flames of a foundry. This is a form of self-denial with a vengeance. Having seen both technological worlds, I may perhaps claim a certain sensitivity to the difference and hope to transmit it to the reader.

If the current literature on alternate sources of energy is conceived merely as an unconventional version of the Mechanical Engineering Handbook, it will have failed completely to achieve its purpose. Mere gadgetry for its own sake, or in what philosophers call a “reified” form, exists everywhere and is to be desperately shunned. To be sure, one must know one’s craft, no less so in ecotechnology than in conventional technology. This is the burden (if “burden” it be) of the sculptor as well as the mason, of the painter as well as the carpenter. But in ecotechnology one must deal with craftsmanship in a special way. Overjnflated into a swollen balloon, it may well carry us away from the ground on which we originally stood, from our sense of oikos, the ecological terrain which initially shaped our interests and concerns. I have seen this occur among my sisters and brothers in the ecological movement only too often. Indeed, having received a considerable training in electronics decades ago, I also know only too well how insanely obsessed one can become with the unending, even mindless, improvization of circuit diagrams until one is as enamored by drawing, say, the electronic trigger for a nuclear bomb as for a television set. It is from people obsessed with reified technology and science that the EC recruits its weapons engineers, the FBI its wire-tappers, the CIA its “counter- insurgency” experts. Let us not deceive ourselves: “ecofreaks” are no more immune to “the man” from Honeywell and NASA than “electronic freaks” are to “the man” from General Electric and the EC — that is, until they have become ecotechnologists, informed by a deeply spiritual and intellectual commitment to an ecological society.

This means, in my view, that they are committed not merely to an “efficient” alternate technology but to a deeply human alternate technology — human in scale, in its liberatory goals, in its community roots. This means, too, that they are committed to diversity, to a sense of qualitative distinction, to energy and technology as an artistically molded pattern, not as a “magic bullet.” Finally, it means that they are ecologists, not “environmentalists, people who have an organic outlook, not an engineering outlook. They are motivated by a more sweeping drama than an appetite for mere gadgets and scientistic “curiosities. They can see the wound that opened up in society and in the human spirit when the archaic community began to divide internally into systems of hierarchy and domination — the elders constituting themselves into a privileged gerontocracy in order to dominate the young, the males forming privileged patriarchies in order to dominate women, lastly male elites collecting into economic ruling classes in order to exploit their fellow men. From this drama of division, hierarchy, and domination emerged the Promethean mentality, the archetypal myth that man could dominate nature. Not only did it divide humanity from nature into a cruel dualism that split town from country, but it divided the human spirit itself, rearing thought above passion, mind above body, intellect above sensuousness. When finally every group he from clan to guild — dissolved into the market placejungle of atomized buyers and sellers, each in mutual competition with the other; when finally the sacred gift became the avaricious bargain, the craze for domination became an end in itself. It brought us a formidable body of scientific knowledge and a stupendously powerful technology, one which, if properly reworked and rescaled, could finally eliminate scarcity, want, and denial, or one which could tear down the planet if used for profit, accumulation and mindless growth.

The authentic ecotechnologist knows that the wounds must be healed. Indeed, these wounds are part of her or his body. Ecotechnologies and ecocommunities are the mortar that will serve not only to unite age groups, sexes, and town and country with each other in a non-hierarchical society; they will also help to close the splits in the human spirit and between humanity and nature. Whether these splits were necessary or not to achieve the striking advances in technology of the past millennia; whether we had to lose the child-like innocence of tribal society in order to acquire the mature innocence of a future society, ripened by the painful wisdom of history — all of this is a matter of abstract interest. What should count when confronted by a technical work is that we are not beguiled from these immense themes — this sweeping drama in which we split from blind nature only to return again on a more advanced level as nature rendered self-conscious in the form of creative, intelligent, and spiritually renewed beings. To deal with alternate energy sources in a language that is alien to social ecology, to reify the literature on the subject as a compendium of gadgets — a mere encyclopedia of gimmicks — would be worse than an error. It would be a form of betrayal — not so much to those who have worked in this field as to oneself.