The environmentalist and former chairman of Greenpeace Wolfgang Sachs begins his book, Planet Dialectics, with a look at our planet from space, defining its boundaries and revealing our home as one of finiteness and a limited carrying capacity. This much we know already, surely. But he goes on, in amongst all the statistical critiques of western civilization, to use this idea of limits and boundaries to propose the only real solution to the ills of our species: intelligent self-limitation.
'As the dangers mount,' he writes, 'new products, procedures and programmes are invented to stave off the threatening effects of industrialism and keep the system afloat. Capital, bureaucracy and science - the venerable trinity of western modernization - declare themselves indispensable in the new crisis and promise to prevent the worst through better engineering, integrated planning, and more sophisticated models.'
This is exactly what the more astute members of the human race are saying, because they can see beyond the nonsense and the clutter. Jim Kunstler, in his book The Long Emergency, tells the same story: that the ecological crisis simply demands, not to take care of nature and recognize our limits, but to devise new ways of doing the same thing whilst optimizing the exploitation of nature (our own presumably included). Kunstler riles at such thick-headedness, and states quite unapologetically, that the orgy of excess is over, and that if people en masse do not start toning things down, then there will be blood, lots of it: from the land, the animals, the people.
'Calls for the survival of the planet', writes Sachs, 'are often, upon closer inspection, nothing more than calls for the survival of the industrial system'.
In one of the later chapters entitled 'Speed Limits' Sachs introduces what Aldous Huxley called the only real innovation of the 20th century, speed, and relates how it is 'speed' that has caused many of our ills.
'In the machine age,' writes Sachs , 'neither the body nor the topography defines a natural measure for speed. As a consequence, the modern idea that human motion was set on an infinite path towards ever increasing acceleration was able to take hold.' He understands from this, as I have iterated earlier, that through speed and conveyance, space is bludgeoned, effectively creating a 'new layer of reality' and a new 'perceptual space', one which has the tendency to blur the underlying reality, when it doesn't entirely blind you to it. In other words, we have floated off into a sort of fantasy land where our perceptions of underyling realities have been mutilated by the machine, and as a direct result, our consciousness is hindered and stunted.
'Generally speaking, the ecological crisis can be read as a clash of different timescales: the timescale of modernity collides with the timescales that govern life and the earth'.
Consequently, life (at large) and the earth are being constantly 'reduced' to meet the limited corporate objectives of a mechanically minded and speed-oriented world. 'The imposition of industrial time on natural rhythms', Sachs concludes, 'cannot be achieved without a staggering price.'
'The more speed outdoes natural timescales, the more environmental resources - at a rather exponential rate - have to be expended.'
Speed, Sachs acknowledges, like Keynes before him, has been the great con of the 20th century, promising to free up time that we can use on leisure, but actually doing the reverse: accelerating us into a space that we invariably fill in with more work. The result is a natural disempowering of the self and its connections, and the resulting existential distress that accompanies this.
'It is unlikely that a society that always moves in the fast lane can ever be environmentally or even socially sustainable'.
'The conclusion is inevitable,' writes Sachs: 'Whatever virtues justice might require in the world of today, the search for selective slowness surely figures among them.'
