Peter Denton - Live Close to Home

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PETER DENTON

Copyright 2016 by Peter Denton

First Edition

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ISBN 978-1-77160-182-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-77160-183-2 (electronic)

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Contents

Preface

Make a list of words most used but least understood these days, and sustainability would be near the top. The basic consensus would be that sustainability is a problem in a global consumer culture where limitless human needs are pushing against the boundaries of what the Earth can provide.

This is seen as a problem without any immediate or scalable solution. We talk about taking steps toward sustainability, not achieving it. We want to believe that small-scale efforts, like recycling our plastic bottles, will make a difference, but set against the general wastefulness of a throw-away society, such efforts seem pointless. Success seems only local or temporary. It is easier to turn a blind eye, to pretend there is no problem at all, or to project the issues far enough into the future that sustainability becomes someone elses problem, not ours.

Five years ago, I decided to tackle this problem of sustainability head-on, to find a middle course between denial and despair.

As a historian, I knew that global consumer culture had developed over time. I began with the assumption that sustainability is primarily a social and cultural problem, not a scientific or technological one, with roots (and therefore solutions) in society and culture. Those roots are Western, European and Judeo-Christian; the colonial empires of the past 500 years were hardly accidental and the social and cultural foundations they laid were obvious.

Yet trading, piracy, slavery, warfare all the trappings of empire were not new in 1500. In some form, they are found in every civilization on record. Something shifted in Western society and culture from the Renaissance onward, however, that changed the trajectory of how people viewed themselves, how they lived together and how they saw the world.

What were the crucial choices that so radically changed our perspective over the past 500 years and led us into an unsustainable future? What different choices could we make to change course or restore balance? What reasons do we have to be hopeful, that what we do will make a real difference for enough people and in time?

My response to these questions led to a series of three books. This is the third. Each one deals with a different facet they can be read separately, but together they are intended to make you think more clearly about your life, your world and your future.

The presumption is that once you think more clearly about these things, you will find your own reasons to live differently. You will then share that change in perspective with the people you care about and within your community.

In Gift Ecology: Reimagining a Sustainable World (2012), I identified a preoccupation with mechanism as both the foundation of the achievements of Western industrial culture and its Achilles heel. The resulting imbalance, favouring the economics of exchange over the possibilities inherent in a gift, led directly to valuing everything (the Earth, other creatures and even ourselves) primarily in material and economic terms. We cant hope to solve the problem of sustainability by tweaking that game or playing it better we need to change the game itself. Exchange needs to be balanced by gift, just as economy needs to be balanced by ecology, all within a universe of relations.

In Technology and Sustainability (2014), I developed the first books prelude (On Ethics, Technology and Sustainability) into a demonstration of how we can change the game. Sustainability may be a social and cultural problem, but technology is a critical element. Technology is a product of choices it is neither accidental nor inevitable. We make choices for reasons and those reasons reflect our values, what we think is important. Technology, therefore, is in our heads, not our hands it is instrumental or applied knowledge, knowledge we use to do something. It is definitely not new; it is present in every culture at every time. Every civilization develops the technology it needs to survive or it doesnt survive.

You could say technology is what makes us human, but this also means technology is always under our control. We choose to develop and use it, every day all of us, all the time. We can work back from examples of our technologies to identify the choices that led to their development and use and then the reasons for those choices and the values behind the reasons. If we dont like the values we uncover, we have the power and the responsibility to change them and consequently change our reasons, our choices and finally our technologies.

Changing course toward a sustainable future therefore requires us to make better choices today than we did yesterday not necessarily great or amazing ones, just better ones, but made by all of us and not just a select few. History provides many examples of major shifts in society and culture that result from the choices of individuals rather than the actions of a group. We not only need to change the game, we can do it, just as it has been done before.

In the prelude to the second book (Stories Around the Cultural Fire), I observed that one of the oldest elements of culture is the story told around the communal fire, the moral story that passes values down from generation to generation and weaves the individual into community.

Today we may lack that communal fire, but we are still woven into community by moral stories that explain our place in the web of life. Our culture is unsustainable in part because the stories we have learned do not weave relationships between people and the Earth as they used to do. Our choices not only destroy the Earth but actually de-story it, which is far worse.

So I argued we need to change the story of our relationship to Technology from powerlessness to choice, from helplessness to responsibility. We need to understand and celebrate technology as the tool we use to create a better future, so long as our choices reflect values that sustain, renew and respect the Earth.