On a recent road trip of nearly two thousand miles up the Pacific coast of Mexico, I encountered more ‘big rigs’ than ever before. On many parts of the carretera, there were many more trucks than cars. And many more pulled two trailers than I had noticed in the past. Think NAFTA. It reminded me of a holiday trip from New Mexico to California on U.S. Interstate 40 a couple of years back, when I also noticed the crowding of big rigs. Long lines of semi’s with the occasional car trying to pass them on an uphill section of the highway where the big rigs are constrained by gravity. What does this tell us about our modern culture?
Too Much Stuff
Too much stuff results from too much marketing research and targeted advertising in a culture that associates personal identity with one’s possessions. We all need some stuff, and we also want more. But we never wanted nearly as much as the advertising industry learned at the beginning of the twentieth century to convince us we need now. George Carlin did a brilliant standup comedy routine many years ago on ‘stuff’ and our focus on our stuff as the essence of our lives; it has not lost any of its impact on our culture, if you are willing to reflect on what modern industrial-consumer life is all about. Consumption itself is a core social value.
Comedy expresses the ironies of life. George Carlin captured the absurdity of consumer culture by describing how attached we become to all that stuff most of which has nothing to do with living well. Comedy usually focuses on the intricacies of individual and group behavior. So, while a lot of George Carlin’s comedy suggests or points to the meaninglessness built into the complex system we call industrial civilization, he was not quite as explicit about the ‘big picture.’ On the other hand, it is all there for those who are willing to ‘look up’ and see those larger patterns.
The larger patterns are in fact the product of global shifts in the organization of human life that have been going on since the agricultural revolution, although they have accelerated dramatically in recent decades. The most dangerous trends now grow exponentially; they are self-amplifying—and terminal. The global changes that are the sources of today’s crises have been accelerating to the extent that we will soon experience the consequences of global trends reaching beyond tipping points that are likely to involve a rapid decline toward collapse of the whole system.
We are driving the Earth System toward collapse, and that collapse, having already begun, is driving the global corporate industrial-consumer economy of growth to its own collapse. We are culturally separated from our habitat, the living Earth System, all the while we are as dependent as ever on our relation to it.
Too Much Mobility
One of the earlier books I read on climate change was Climate Change and Society, by John Urry, a British sociologist. Published in 2011, Urry’s book emphasized what few have considered in any depth before or after. A major point of the book was that the advent of fossil fuels fundamentally changed human mobility, and enormously expanded the ability to move more than just ourselves, but almost everything else humans worked with or produced. On the surface of course, that all sounds like a positive development. The undiscussed implications are grave.
The more we moved, the more we destroyed. In the most basic sense, all motion involves friction. The movement of materials in the extractive (mining, drilling, and transport) involves a great deal of friction. That fiction also involves breaking things and damaging other complex systems, like ecosystems, the diverse habitats that support many living systems.
“Move fast and break things,” is not just Mark Zuckerberg’s cavalier juvenile motto for Facebook; it is the modus operandi of industrial civilization. It has reached the tipping point leading to a cascade of system failures and if allowed to continue without extreme intervention, will force the collapse of industrial civilization.
Where do we really need to go? And, do we really need to have all those plastic gizmos manufactured on the other side of the world and shipped to us for short-term use followed by sticking that stuff in a closet or overflow storage unit before being shipped off to the land fill?
Too Much Distance
The faster we move things, and ourselves, the further we tend to move them. I remember being fascinated as a student with the fact that as bigger roads and freeways were built, many people moved further from the city center. Even as the technologies of vehicles and freeways allowed faster driving—until the next cycle of overcrowding—the so-called commute time remained about the same. Los Angeles, of course, may be an exception up to a point, with its urban sprawl and extensive freeway system, and tolerance for long commutes.
Yet the general principle stands. People just do not tolerate spending more than an hour or hour and a half per day commuting between work and family. As freeways and roads become overcrowded and new lanes are added, more cars always seem to fill them to their previous density. Many of us are aware that if a technology is invented, it is assumed that we should use it. Faster-bigger is almost universally deemed better. Modern traffic could be an icon for the predicament of industrial modernity itself.
However, the alienation, disaffection, confusion, fear, anger, resentment, and violence of the end of industrial civilization epitomize the failure of the endless growth narrative. At the same time, most of us are wired into the ‘rat race’ of industrial modernity, defining it as if it were inevitable ‘progress.’ It is not.
Then, of course, there is international trade. A very big topic, here I will focus only on the consequences of distance and mobility. The modern shipping container, of course, facilitated standardized large-scale containment of goods for long-distance shipment. Ships were designed to stack and link them in large numbers on very large ships, which in turn consume large quantities of diesel fuel and spew equally excessive carbon exhaust.
Cheap labor allowed ‘outsourcing’ and shipping container technology allowed efficient transportation of all that stuff advertisers convince us we need. Be careful what you wish for. Consequently, international shipping expanded greatly, driving up carbon pollution as well as consumerism.
The point, of course, is that most of this is not only not necessary; it is no longer a viable way to operate economies. Today, given the continuing out-of-control growth of carbon emissions, transportation, production, consumption, and waste built into that system, we cannot afford the international trade regime. We need something smaller on a global scale.
Now, we must, for our own survival, minimize international trade and maximize the nearness of production of useful and important products to the destination where they will be put to use. This will cause all sorts of disruptions, but they will be only a small fraction of the disruption of life on our planet if we refuse to take this very different path.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 