The Significance of the EU (comparing WRE and MMW)
Vaclav Smil, the author of Making the Modern World, and Paul F. Steinberg, the author of Who Rules the Earth, have similar views of what Europe is doing right environmentally and how their actions compare to the environmental actions of other countries. On page 88, Smil compares the amount of materials that the EU uses in comparison with the US, and states that they have similar metal consumptions, but the EU has a much lower demand for construction materials because they have a higher population density and a more compact transportation infrastructure (Smil, 2014). Although the United States has the same level of metal consumption as the EU, we still have a high demand for materials intended for construction use because the US population is more spread apart and in order for us to travel more easily to other parts of the country, we require a more lengthy transportation system. Plus, there are sections of the United States that are utilizing innovation in order to catch up to the more technologically savvy areas like San Francisco and Portland. In the last part of that section, Smil uses European data “to contrast national differences in resource productivities…” (90) as a means to set a statistical standard that other countries should aspire to and as proof that the production rates and material use that the EU has reached is achievable.
If you are to compare Steinberg’s sentiments towards the EU with Smil, you will find that they both believe that the EU is doing a lot of things right in terms of using physical materials and policies in order to benefit the earth as well as their citizens’ manner of life. Rather than focus on the statistical data of what EU excels in, Steinberg elaborates on their ability to work together as twenty-seven nations and have presidents and prime ministers from all of these different nations come together to form the European Council. This council uses their joint efforts to make political and economical choices that benefit every individual (Steinberg, 2015). The importance of Europe’s ability to rule over so many nations and still have everyone prosper among their individual nations exemplifies Steinberg’s ideal circumstances, to create an international powerhouse that has the ability to govern and lay down laws, whether they be environmental or economic, that every nation participating agrees with and benefits from, with an emphasis on unification.
How the World Works and the Manners of Achieving a Better Future (comparing AE and WRE)
There are many ways in which we, as humans, try to approach the way that we are allocating resources and planning for the future, something that both Steinberg and Leigh Phillips, the author of Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts, try to break down and synthesize. Phillip’s understanding of how people who believe in certain ideologies understand the concept of limited resources and how they are used is quite profound. Phillips believes capitalists to have a very nonchalant attitude concerning resource limits, as they must continue to produce at the rate they have been in order to not get beaten by their economic competitors, regardless if there are limited resources and if innovation will happen soon. On the opposite side of the spectrum there are green leftys, who strongly believe that there is an upper limit on the resources available to humans. Therefore, they have the mindset that we must immediately stop the mass overconsumption of resources that will run out soon. The obviously superior ideology in Phillip’s mind is socialism, as socialists are the middle ground of green left and capitalist thought. Socialists understand that there may be a limit to the resources available to us, but they prioritize innovation and democratic planning in order to never reach the point where there are no more resources left (Phillips, 2014). Although there are many ways to try and approach resource limitation, there is a hierarchy for what ideologies will apply the most effectively in the society we live in currently.
In Who Rules the Earth, Steinberg also shares the methods in which our society now does not make the most effective choices in the attempt to live in a “feasible world.” By feasible world Steinberg means a world where we hope to live in a world where substantial improvements in human and environmental conditions that are economically, technologically, and politically feasible in the near term, but given what we have got we could live practically and those aspirations are not out of reach, but he argues that we do not even live in a feasible world (Steinberg, 2015). There are four main reasons why we cannot live in even a feasible world, the first one being that information comes at a cost. This means that it takes a lot of effort and time to acquire all of the information necessary to make practical decisions. For example, LEED, a company working to make housing more environmentally friendly, does not have all of the information that they would want to give houses a green rating, and would therefore have to reach out to manufacturers for all of the data to be manually compiled and sorted through. The second barrier is that people do not always cooperate even when it is in their best interest unless there is some sort of incentive that will allow them to reap more then they have sown. The third barrier is that the organizations that we count on to make eco-conscious choices are not equipped to do so. This means that they try to apply old solutions to new problems or do not take into account the cost and benefits of new strategies. The final barrier is that our future depends on more than education and being morally sensible, but that power must be dislodged because according to Steinberg, collective power exploits weakness (Steinberg, 2015). This collection of what we are neglecting to do to better our society is the reason why we cannot live in a feasible world, much less an imaginative one. Unlike Leigh Phillips, Steinberg does not seem to believe at this point that there is any way for us to break those barriers, so we must settle for the next best thing, approximations through assessing the situations present.
The Role of Innovation and Human Influence on Nature in the Modern World (comparing MMW and The Problem with Purity)
While Smil believes in what humans should do, Richard White elaborates on what humans shouldn’t do in terms of the evolution of technology and nature and what role humans play in this dichotomy. Both of these authors’ concepts, in my belief work hand in hand as they tackle different sides of the same argument. Smil in his writings about materials and dematerialization presents solutions as to how relative dematerialization can be achieved. Relative dematerialization, according to Smil, can be achieved in four ways. The first is through gradual improvements that do not require new materials, meaning that we innovate with the purpose of creating technology that, for example, can run on less gas. The second way is through substitution of said material using lighter or more durable alternatives, like lighter soda cans and water bottles. Then there is more intensified recycling, and the final way to achieve relative dematerialization is through the introduction of entirely new devices that perform the desired function with only a fraction the mass (Smil, 2014). Smil suggests that humans play a large role in the molding of a more functional society while using innovations that are a lot more efficient than what is being used today. These four different manners of achieving relative dematerialization are, in my opinion, within reach but they require improvement and originality in order to be successful.
In White’s work The Problem with Purity, he breaks down people’s fear of the role of technology in nature and attributes said fear to stem from the horrors of global warming and the death of coral reefs to two world wars and the Great Depression, all of which were perpetuated by humans. But White believes that we absolutely cannot separate technology and societal norms from nature because they have influenced each other as well as our innovations. The solution that he presents to this problem is to change our mindset and do not bother trying to separate nature from society since we as humans have already done so much to cause the two to be inextricably linked. Take for example the portrayal of Bambi. Bambi is part of nature but Walt Disney gave the deer human characteristics, values and feelings, and therefore we have already aligned nature with culture (White, 2000). By accepting that nature and culture, society, and technology are all linked together, we are opening up the possibilities for improvement and innovation that can lead to ways for humans to exercise power and make changes for our future, knowing that culture equals nature, and nature is our culture.
Works Cited
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, Leigh. 2015. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: Zero Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=6OSOCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT30&dq=austerity+ecology&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEw5Phhq7PAhVjVWMKHYHqBn8Q6AEIJTAB#v=onepage&q=austerity%20ecology&f=false.
White, R. 2000. “The Problem with Purity.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 21: 211–28.