Stop Digging

January 31st, 2007

Views: 434

Posted by ChrisG at 1:25 pm

It’s not unusual to hear the opinion, generally from right-libertarian types, that the foundation of an ecological mindset is a hatred of technology. Well, it’s worse than they thought, as most ecologically-minded types I know are, at bottom, secret Marxists: in other words, for them it’s not technology (imagined as some sort of hovering, malign, abstract entity) that’s the issue, but the means and relations of production in which it is embedded.

This attitude appears to be shared by the author of this piece, who responds to GWB’s exhortation to the USA to reduce petroleum use by 20% by using ethanol by making the by now (surely) brain-pulverisingly obvious point that trying to solve the problems caused by one non-renewable-resource-intensive sector of industrialised production by building up another non-renewable-resource-intensive sector of industrialised production is, well, really really stupid:

Farmers I have spoken to are enjoying the high prices but are worried about the long-term impact on agriculture. Particularly, farmers wonder what will happen if cellulose can be converted into fuel. They fear soil depletion when they do not have corn stalks and other waste to plow back into the fields. “Soil is a living thing,” a farmer from South Dakota told me. He feared that unscrupulous farmers would rely on heavier use of fertilizer (made from natural gas) as the farms produce motor fuel.

Yes, by ‘nonrenewable resource’, I meant ’soil health’. This constitutes what the ecologically-minded like to call a ‘technical fix’. By which is meant a solution to a problem formulated with an extraordinarily narrow focus, such that the problem itself appears like a tiny tumour to be excised from the otherwise healthy body of Capital. The problem is that, the narrower and less systemic the focus, the more easily obvious risks of unintended consequences are crowded out of the scene, particularly when these risks are likely to be borne by economically or politically marginal constituencies of people who can then be accused of ‘not understanding risk’.

Granted, Bush’s proposal, by being designed to fire off massive growth in corn-growing for ethanol, will probably have the consequences so beloved of marketarians in general – that costs of extraction will go down as processing corn into ethanol becomes ever more efficient. However, as monoculture becomes ever more profitable, then we wave goodbye to soil health, up the manufacture of fertilizers and import of the raw materials needed to produce them – and wave hello to more pollution and increased use of energy.

Still, as technical fixes go, it’s easily outstripped by the sheer blinding force of the tunnel-vision guiding this lunacy.