Factories with tall black towers and billowing smoke, six lane highways jam packed with cars, fishing boats reeling in thousands of fish, and huge tractors over-tilling soil have become the iconic images of our current environmental crisis. According to these pictures, the technology we are using is one of the main factors in the degradation of our planet. Our readings this week suggested something different though: Technology is not the problem.
Love Your Monsters, edited by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, argues that technology is actually a critical part of reversing or at least slowing the negative impacts we have been having on the environment. Humans have been shaped by technology as much as humans shape technology — our opposable thumbs and upright posture came about because those traits helped us use certain tools. Technology has helped us create our world as we know it: it hasn’t been until recently, with extremely rapid technological innovations, that we have been experiencing more problems. In the titular chapter, “Love Your Monsters,” Bruno Latour compares humans’ creation of technology to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation of the Monster. He argues that our biggest sin is not the creation of technology, but not following through with the positive and negative consequences.
I found the argument about “knowledge workers” being too disconnected from the effects of their consumption especially poignant. In an education class I am taking, my class discussed the problem with schools producing students only trained for intellectual jobs. If the United States switches the purpose of education from producing knowledge workers to producing workers who can “claim some role in producing food, shelter, or even basic consumer products” (Location 163), there might be a reversal in how we relate to the technology we create. People in the West claim to be “environmentally conscious” by perpetuating consumerism: they buy Priuses, efficient appliances, and other “green” products to try to save the earth, when the West should actually scale back their consumption. We need to follow through on what we already have, and not just jump to the newest model in order to fully observe the effects we are having on the environment, and then innovate from there.
Technology is not the problem. It has just been moving so much faster than in the past that we haven’t been able to respond to the negative consequences. We need to follow through on caring for what we create.
Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus. Love Your Monsters Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. United States: Breakthrough Institute, 2011. Print.