Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology by Alexis Madrigal

Author:Alexis Madrigal
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, History
ISBN: 9780306819773
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

The solar transcendentalists drew from a wide range of sources for their philosophies. There were the deep American antitechnological roots of Thoreau and there were the popular philosophers of the day like Reich. Anarchist writer Murray Bookchin’s human-scale technology ideas stewed with economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small-Is-Beautiful mantra. The apocalyptomania of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb cross-pollinated with the home-spun, quirky optimism of Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog. Farrington Daniels’s buttoned down solar research mingled with Buckminster Fuller’s all-night bull sessions about energy transformations. In magazines like Rain, Amory Lovins’s nuanced and technical “soft energy path” arguments shared space with primers on how to build composting toilets, grow organic kale in the city, and mend your blue jeans.

Over it all, the imaginary contrails of ballistic missiles flying between Moscow and Washington made the ideological differences of the world’s superpowers seem secondary to their union in adhering to the industrial system with its dependence on science, machinery, and high technology. Heading back to the land, singly or in communes, provided a way out of the Communist-Capitalist divide, allowing for a rejection of government and authority generally, regardless of their position on the control of the means of production. To hell with the both of you, back-to-landers said.

“Communism is essentially ‘people’s capitalism’—and, as an economic system, it is not inherently more ‘ecological’ or less damaging to natural systems than capitalism is,” DeKorne wrote in The Survival Greenhouse. “Neither system is adequate to cope with the real problems we face.”32

The political system seemed hopeless. The world was on the verge of destruction and the governments that should have kept it alive were asleep at the switch. In the face of all that, perhaps concentrating on developing one’s consciousness while vainly hoping that the world would see that a more ecological way of life was possible or preferable made sense.

For a world of local environmentalism, individual action made sense because it’s comparatively easy. Serious change can be accomplished without the difficulties of large-scale organizing or global politics. The story of Bolinas, California, is a classic example of a successful small-scale effort to make environmental change. A group of dedicated, ecology-minded residents banded together to fight the introduction of a sewer system. It might seem an odd target, but led by Whole Earth Catalog contributor Peter Warshall, they realized that the waste infrastructure was a key pinchpoint that could stop future development in the area. “If you put in a large-volume wastewater pipe, that allows development. If you constrict the size of the pie or the extent of the infrastructure octopus, you can’t have development except for septic tanks,” Warshall recalled.33 The Bolinas gang was chronicled in the film The Town That Fought to Save Itself.34 To this day, the city remains a beautiful place.

But what if there is a global problem that requires nearly all the world’s citizens to work together? What happens if we need to cut global carbon emissions by something like 80 percent? What happens if, to preserve the biodiversity

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