(no subject)
A discussion on facebook about vaccinations filled me with rage against anti-science liberal-hippies. So I wrote a thing. This is probably preaching to the choir and nothing new to most of the people on my friends list. But I just had to rant against anti-science liberal-hippies.
In the past couple years I’ve realized - people who grew up around the same time I did are starting to be in charge of the world, or at least parts of it.
On some levels, this is great. The world is once again full of My Little Ponies and ridiculously colored neon shoes. But on other levels, I wonder if we are taking the black-and white morality of our childhoods and using it to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Looking back at a lot of American children’s media from the 80s and the early 90s, there’s a lot of conflict between technology and environmentalism; a lot of false dichotomies. She-ra lived in the forest and rode a horse; her evil enemies were all about space ships and robots. In Fern Gully, the people cutting down trees are motivated only by ignorance and greed, and once one of them gets shown that cutting down trees is bad, they stop. Given the enormous amount of industrial waste that humans blithely put into the environment during the first 2/3 of the 20th century, I understand why the adults making media at the time told my generation that technology and the environment are enemies. But they got it wrong. Even if we all gave up the conveniences of modern living and decided to be rural hippies living off the grid, it wouldn’t help the environment. There are too many of us for that now. We need to be industrialized.
When I was 10 years old, my friends and I decided to raise money to donate to saving the rain forests. At the time, the phrase “slash and burn” meant to me “that thing that McDonald’s is doing to South American jungles so they can have cheaper meat and make more money.” To me, all the bad things that happened to the environment were purely the result of corporate greed. Many of them were, but certainly not all. At age 29, I went to Madagascar on my honeymoon, to see the lemurs. Lemurs are endangered because people slash and burn the forests. Are they slashing and burning the forests out of corporate greed? No, they just want more places to plant rice so they can grow enough food to survive. The people and the lemurs both need industrialization to happen. To help the planet, we need to help its people, and we do that with technology. I was super excited when I discovered Madecasse chocolate -- they’re one of the only companies in Madagascar that processes their cocoa beans into chocolate before it leaves the country. They keep jobs and production knowledge in Madagascar and also incentivize sustainable methods of farming. Industrialization and technology: we need them to help ourselves and the environment.
Technology is just a tool. Yes, it can screw up the environment. Put it can also prevent us from screwing up the environment, and undo some of the damage we’ve already done. Science is a tool. It can invent all sorts of terrible weapons, but it can also solve so many problems. Science isn’t the tree-killing machine from Fern Gully that destroys mother earth and her creatures. Science is the tool we pick up when we get to the end of Princess Mononoke, and we realize that both the forest gods and the people of Iron Town have a point. Forget about Crysta the fairy and her Fern Gulley friends. Unless we want to kill off a few billion people, we can’t be hunter-gatherers living in harmony with the land. Be like Prince Ashitaka - care for the earth while remembering that it’s good to have artificial heating, sanitation facilities, and all those other nice bits of civilization. Embrace science so we can develop ways to have those nice bits while doing as little harm to the other beings on earth as possible. Support universal access to birth control so there aren’t so damned many of us, and so that life is better for all of us. And if you read The Lorax, read this, too. http://archiveofourown.org/works/32076/chapters/42672
In the past couple years I’ve realized - people who grew up around the same time I did are starting to be in charge of the world, or at least parts of it.
On some levels, this is great. The world is once again full of My Little Ponies and ridiculously colored neon shoes. But on other levels, I wonder if we are taking the black-and white morality of our childhoods and using it to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Looking back at a lot of American children’s media from the 80s and the early 90s, there’s a lot of conflict between technology and environmentalism; a lot of false dichotomies. She-ra lived in the forest and rode a horse; her evil enemies were all about space ships and robots. In Fern Gully, the people cutting down trees are motivated only by ignorance and greed, and once one of them gets shown that cutting down trees is bad, they stop. Given the enormous amount of industrial waste that humans blithely put into the environment during the first 2/3 of the 20th century, I understand why the adults making media at the time told my generation that technology and the environment are enemies. But they got it wrong. Even if we all gave up the conveniences of modern living and decided to be rural hippies living off the grid, it wouldn’t help the environment. There are too many of us for that now. We need to be industrialized.
When I was 10 years old, my friends and I decided to raise money to donate to saving the rain forests. At the time, the phrase “slash and burn” meant to me “that thing that McDonald’s is doing to South American jungles so they can have cheaper meat and make more money.” To me, all the bad things that happened to the environment were purely the result of corporate greed. Many of them were, but certainly not all. At age 29, I went to Madagascar on my honeymoon, to see the lemurs. Lemurs are endangered because people slash and burn the forests. Are they slashing and burning the forests out of corporate greed? No, they just want more places to plant rice so they can grow enough food to survive. The people and the lemurs both need industrialization to happen. To help the planet, we need to help its people, and we do that with technology. I was super excited when I discovered Madecasse chocolate -- they’re one of the only companies in Madagascar that processes their cocoa beans into chocolate before it leaves the country. They keep jobs and production knowledge in Madagascar and also incentivize sustainable methods of farming. Industrialization and technology: we need them to help ourselves and the environment.
Technology is just a tool. Yes, it can screw up the environment. Put it can also prevent us from screwing up the environment, and undo some of the damage we’ve already done. Science is a tool. It can invent all sorts of terrible weapons, but it can also solve so many problems. Science isn’t the tree-killing machine from Fern Gully that destroys mother earth and her creatures. Science is the tool we pick up when we get to the end of Princess Mononoke, and we realize that both the forest gods and the people of Iron Town have a point. Forget about Crysta the fairy and her Fern Gulley friends. Unless we want to kill off a few billion people, we can’t be hunter-gatherers living in harmony with the land. Be like Prince Ashitaka - care for the earth while remembering that it’s good to have artificial heating, sanitation facilities, and all those other nice bits of civilization. Embrace science so we can develop ways to have those nice bits while doing as little harm to the other beings on earth as possible. Support universal access to birth control so there aren’t so damned many of us, and so that life is better for all of us. And if you read The Lorax, read this, too. http://archiveofourown.org/works/32076/chapters/42672