by Norm Reynolds
Bright Green, Viridian Green, Lite Green, Leaf Green, Dark Green? The immense social and technological implications of global warming have highlighted much more than just shades of meaning within the environmental movement.
Indeed, Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author, cyber guru, and founder/spokesperson for the Bright Green environmental movement, suggests that recognition of the significance and urgency of global warming may bethe only thing that his Bright Greens have in common with traditional environmentalists/dark greens.
According to Sterling, the hallmark of the bright greens is their enthusiasm for economic growth, consumerism, and technological innovation as the only viable solution to the immense social and environmental challenges of greenhouse gas fuelled climate change.
Dark Greens, in Sterling’s view, do not represent a credible response to climate change because society is not ready for, nor interested in, their pessimistic, technophobic, moralizing, often misanthropic messages about small-scale local cultures and economies that would put the brakes on – if not reverse – the tides of history.
The only way society at large is going to make the immense adjustments required is if those changes are attractive, glamorous, and seductive. Axiomatically then, society must become a shade of “green” that society will eagerly consume, and – in the words of Bright Green environmental futurist Alex Steffen – harness the engines of capitalism, high technology, and human ingenuity in creating the kind of sustainable future that people want and will accept.
Building on the writings of Steffen and Sterling, a Bright or Viridian Green platform has emerged that replaces the pessimistic call by traditional environmentalists for conservation and an end to growth with an effervescent faith in unlimited growth, based on the possibilities of abundant clean power and technological innovation.
Reflecting seventeenth-century modernist metaphysic and technological triumphalism, Sterling suggests that it’s time to abandon our ineffectual role as caretakers of the earth and embrace our rightful role as its masters.
In the Bright Green world, a sustainable system of consumption and production is not a matter of reducing the footprint of our activities on this planet but of transforming this footprint into a source of replenishment through a completely different system of closed-loop manufacturing.
These spokespersons for the Bright Greens make it clear that the new world view will be one that is completely free of spiritual or mystical overtones. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Sterling proclaims that cyber greens are winning, precisely because they are not about spiritual potential, natural beauty, justice, or any of the other outdated values of a now discredited environmental movement.
Clearly, the Bright Green hubris of Steffen and Sterling has not considered Albert Einstein’s disquieting definition of insanity as: “…doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Indeed, there seems little to distinguish Sterling’s Bright Green assertion that it’s time for humanity to embrace its role as masters of the Earth from Rene Descartes’ famous seventeenth-century vainglorious proclamation: “(My discoveries) have satisfied me that it is possible to reach knowledge that will be of much utility in this life; that instead of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can find a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behaviour of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us…we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature.”
Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his 2000 book, The Ingenuity Gap: How can we solve the problems of the future, suggests that technology, of itself, is not likely to solve the problems of what he calls the paradigm-shattering challenges of global warming. Starting from a deep appreciation of the complexities of the natural world and a substantial skepticism about both the adequacy of scientific knowledge and the capability of technology, Homer-Dixon points to a number of considerations that need to be accounted for before jumping on a supercilious bandwagon like that of the Bright Greens.
To those who believe that human knowledge and technological capacity is up to becoming masters in control of Earth’s complex and intricate ecological systems, Homer-Dixon points to the 1990s Biosphere 2 project, which received enormous funding to build and operate a human-engineered ecosystem in a greenhouse covering 1.3 hectares of land in the Sonora Desert of Arizona.
Designed by a heady team of ecologists and engineers, the enclosed artificial ecosystem included 3,900 species of plants and animals, a rainforest marsh, and sophisticated air, water, and waste management, as well as eight fulltime human occupants.
The project, which ran for two years, didn’t go well. To avoid a medical emergency, oxygen had to be pumped in. Carbon dioxide levels oscillated wildly. Nitrous oxide soared to levels that reduced biospherian synthesis of Vitamin B12 to levels that threatened to damage brains. Weeds like morning glory flourished to the point of needing constant management. Trees became brittle. Nineteen of twenty-three vertebrate species went extinct – as did all pollinators. Ants and cockroaches abounded. Despite almost unlimited material, energy, and intellectual resources, Biosphere 2 proved to be a sobering awakening to the limits of human knowledge and our capacity to manage the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce abundantly, and for free.
Homer-Dixon points out that our current attempts to predict and manage natural systems have been based on the simplistic and discredited idea of a natural balance and stability that hasn’t, so far, even been able to adequately predict the impact of keystone species and nonlinear thresholds. Even the apparent resilience of nature may be a trap that lulls us into believing the natural world is infinitely robust and abundant. Thus deluded, we can go on homogenizing ecosystems on a planetary scale and plundering forests, fields, rivers and fisheries.
One prominent underlying assumption of the Bright Greens is that human society – short of a massive shift in values – is capable of setting aside major struggles over wealth and power in order to focus on the single issue of a economic/technological response to a crisis so deep it will require profound changes in all human culture over a short time span. Clearly any project to change the direction of the global economic production must account for the scant success of the United Nations efforts, over the past 60 years, in bringing the nations of the world together to stop mass violence and violations of human rights.
While the Bright Green agenda asserts that technological innovation, along with unlimited growth and the guiding hand of stock markets, will solve the problems of poverty and hunger, along with the – up to this time – devastating environmental effects of industrialized society, there seems little evidence of those benefits so far. According to historical philosopher Ronald Wright, the world’s economy has expanded by 40 times over the past century, yet the number of people in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901; 25,000 people die every day from contaminated water alone; annually twenty million children are mentally impaired by malnutrition. Most discouragingly, the United Nations’ studies estimate that providing clean water, sanitation, and basic needs for earth’s poorest would cost less than what the US spends on its ill-thought missile shield. Recent successful attempts to subvert the Kyoto agreements by those committed to oil company interests seem to indicate that, even if the technology were capable of sufficiently reducing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, it will not be sufficiently developed nor deployed until there is a radical transformation of social/political values.
The issue on which the Bright Greens seem to be utterly confused is their claim that spirituality has no role in addressing the pressing environmental issues of our times. Clearly, the assertion that values like love, justice, equity, a sense of connection to other species and people are just the flotsam of an age passing, and that what people really want is lots more high-tech, sexy gadgets, is a profoundly spiritual statement about what matters, what is the purpose of human life, how we are related to the entirety of existence and what, in fact, is a moral life.
Ronald Wright, in his 2004 Massey Lectures-based book, A Short History of Progress, argues that this idea that material progress can entirely supplant the moral perspectives of past cultures has hardened into an ideology – a secular religion with a magical vision of the possibilities of unlimited growth that, like so many cultures before, will lead beyond reason to catastrophe. Wright examines the kinds of faulty environmental logic that led to the catastrophic collapse of Easter Islanders, Athenians, Romans, and Mayans before concluding the current social vision of a world run by the stock market is as mad as any other suicidally flawed cultural/religious delusion.
If, as the Bright Greens suggest, the vast majority of humanity only want more things, one has to wonder why there has to be such an endless barrage of advertising on television, radio, magazines, newspapers; on buses, billboards, the sides of buildings, everywhere with the ubiquitous message that whatever you have – it isn’t good enough. Jerry Mander in his book In the Absence of the Sacred, puts this argument most cogently: “None of these (market) benefits informs us about human satisfaction, happiness, security, or the ability to sustain life on Earth. Perhaps getting places more quickly makes some people more contented… but I’m not convinced. Nor am I convinced that greater choice of commodities…qualifies as satisfying compared with, say, love and friendship and meaningful work.”
A Bright Green world would not come into being in the absence of spirituality. It would simply insert its spirituality of high-tech consumer-focused greed and glitz for a dark green social/economic system that values institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, health care, our educational and legal systems by how much love, compassion, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity they inspire.
Deeply enamored of market mechanisms, neither Sterling nor Steffen seem to have considered that humanity might pay a high price, indeed, imaging our earth and ourselves to be inert bits of matter stuck together by a highly improbable but indifferent accident with no purpose higher than to consume things.
Leon Kass, in his intriguing and carefully weighed book, Toward a More Natural Science, argues for an inextricable connection between love for the natural world and respect for the inhering worth of the self: “(A healthy epistemology would) reawaken not only wonder and admiring delight at the given world, but also respect, awe, and gratitude; respect for the powers of living nature, awe before the mysteries of living nature, and gratitude for the unmerited–and, in the face of evolution, simply miraculous – privilege of our being here to experience wonder, delight, respect, and awe…Finally these attitudes and sentiments toward nature will nurture a truer self-respect – no longer one we simply manufacture for ourselves, but one that is ours by nature.”
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Norm Reynolds, a Unitarian Lay Chaplain and author of Song of the Sacred, has been an environmental activist in British Columbia for over thirty years.
Reading:
Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, foreword by Bruce Sterling, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Nov. 2006
Ross Robertson, “A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Envronmentalism for the Twenty-first Century,” What is Enlightenment, Oct.-Dec 2007
[From WS January/February 2008]