What does everyone else think? DRM
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I don't disagree, of course. But I think that most people conscious enough to see the social and political ravages of the corporate imperium are equally aware of the manifold ecological impacts. In my mind these are inseparable.
At the same time, I am not anti-development. Intimately conjoined with the very practical problem of how to form a revolution to change the corporate imperium, there is the problem of learning and making models of change that work in multiple directions concurrently: social justice as an ecologically sustainable economic system. I don't know how you do that or what it looks like.
These two goals are interlocked by default, since the corporate imperium completely suppresses both. However, the enlightened neoliberal answer is to focus on oppressive legalistic regimes that theoretically reach toward some ecologically better off world provided of course it can be made profitable---but that usually means at the cost of even greater social injustice. This either-or dilemma is usually pushed as the only alternative to the status quo. But I suspect the reason the two goals are presented as incompatible with each other and the existing framework, is that both together are probably incompatible with existing profit mechanisms. So to turn this equation around, would be to assert the necessity of social justice and an ecologically sustainable economic system and let the profit mechanisms find some other means of survival.
At the moment we live in the exactly opposite condition where both social justice and ecologically sustainable economies are sacrificed for the benefit of the usual suspects. Indeed, every conceivable goal and benefit is sacrificed for the profit of a few.
I think there are some models, but they are indirect, more of a style of thought than concrete proposals. One of them evolved in climbing. Here is a sketch.
By the late Sixties it was obvious that Yosemite climbs were doomed to destruction by being over used. The existing technology and climbing style depended on hardened steel pitons driven into cracks by the lead and then pounded out by the second cleaning the route. This process was physically destroying the routes.
So, several famous climbers of the era went looking for a different technology of protection and discovered British climbers were using `nuts' that were set into cracks and didn't damage the rock. The UK climbers had evolved this solution sometime in the fifties because their shorter, more heavily used local routes were already wearing out. Also, the rock itself didn't take pitons very well. The UK climbers took ordinary machine nuts of various sizes, milled out the threads and put a sling through the hole. The hexagonal shape of nuts could be wedged into cracks without destroying the rock and held better than pitons.
Dot, dot, dot, the US crew mainly Yvon Chouinard designed irregular hexagons with un-equal sides that wedged more easily than machine nuts. These hexcentrics became standard climbing gear by the Seventies. In the late Seventies, these were replaced with a trigger operated arrangement of semi-circular cams, called Friends. Friends could be inserted into cracks by pulling a trigger to rotate the cams into a smaller diameter span and then when the trigger was released the cams opened automatically wedging themselves into the crack. An attaching sling held a carabiner, and in turn the carabiner held the rope. These cams and sets of aluminum wedges, called wired stoppers became the standard hardware for climbing, and left the rock undamaged.
In addition to this technological evolution, there also evolved a mental or conceptual approach to climbing that maintained that rock climbing should leave the natural formations completely untouched for the pleasure of the next climber, and for the benefit of those who didn't climb at all. This ideal ruled out bolting, the use of concrete bolt anchors, in just about every instance except for belays or fixed rappel routes. This ethic didn't last long, but the technology at least sustained the rock, even in the absence of `clean climbing' standards.
During the Eighties, when `anything goes' for the greater glory of ego, ergo profit and acclaim, these clean climbing standards took a serious beating. Bolting routes (drilling holes and hammering in concrete anchors) which had been scrupulously avoided for ten years, became routine, under the catch all justification of `greater security'. With bolting, came an increase in expected climbing difficulty so that previously undo-able routes were done violating every ethic that had held sway in the previous era (sounds familiar, doesn't?). There is no doubt that climbing standards got a lot harder (and technically better), but the cost was pretty high on the environment.
Meanwhile various climbers took a different approach, increasing the difficulty and risk, by using no protection at all! No rope no hardware. Shoes, chalk, and skill. The most famous for this approach were John Bachar and Ron Kauk. Bachar blew away the entire idea of protected free climbing in the late Seventies by free soloing (no rope, no hardware) the Nabisco Wall, a three pitch route in Yosemite that combined a dead vertical wall, with wafer thin flakes and laser straight cracks (5.10c-5.11c).
About the same era, the turn of the Eighties, at the other end of the spectrum was Reinhold Messner who climbed all fourteen Himalayan peak over 8000 meters with no oxygen, some solo, others with one partner alpine style. Messner later went on to traverse Antarctica via the South Pole on foot. (He also claimed to have seen the Yeti. But what's few brain cells for the cause? Did I also mention he has no toes?)
What does this have to do with social justice as an ecologically sustainable economy? The goal is to combined a radical reductionism of technology, with an equally disciplined system of social organization. In this parallel, ordinary living becomes a kind of minimalist game to satisfy only the inescapable material needs while maximizing social equity for all. There is a critical place for technology, but of a very limited sort. Mainly it has to come down to a radical re-thinking of social orders.
It seems to me that it is almost always possible to do with less technology and its consequent environmental and social destruction, by re-thinking the kinds of human skills technology and its hierarchies of social order have supplanted. Just as it is possible to climb without protection, if you lower your grade and increase your skill, discipline, and training, it seems to me you can do something similar in principle on a larger scale. This requires altering the means of production by changing both the technology and the social organizations that reciprocally sustain each other---and brutalize both human society and the environment. This isn't a grand plan, but rather a kind of evolution of many different approaches that all share a common ethic.
Needless to say most climbers are not great models. Although some are, many are completely unaware of the history of the sport, its previous standards and ethics, and care only marginally if at all about their impact on the environment. The model refers to a particular era and style of climbing ideals that were superseded and mostly forgotten. But while they were current, they spared a great deal of destruction and demanded a different sort of understanding of the undertaking. After all, anything can be climbed with unlimited technical means. The ideal and the challenge was to use as little equipment as possible, in exactly the right way, with a primary reliance on skill.
Chuck Grimes