It is imperative, when acting from one’s ethical sensibilities, or hankering for conditional propitiousness, to remain grounded in craftsmanship.

Author and philosopher Christopher Manes states: “Technology confronts the world, forces it to do things it wouldn’t do naturally. Craft belongs to a humbler, more ancient relationship with nature…Craft fits human needs into the existing landscape…technology attempts to alter and deny landscape at an ever accelerating pace with no recognition of nature’s limits.” I would go on to promote that craft is an agency for creation that is heedful to the limits of its resources and their ecological provenance.     

The progression of technology has indeed accelerated, offering convenience and expedience to the tasks and avocations of our everyday lives.  However, the evolution of technology has left a lucid trail of debris, destruction, and annihilation (e.g. CFCs, depleted uranium, automobiles, airplanes, routine international trade, computers, plastics, endocrine disrupters, pesticides, vivisection, internal combustion engines, fellerbunchers, dragline excavators, televisions, cell phones, and nuclear [and conventional] bombs). The ascendancy of technology has violated and imperiled oil and other energy sources, water sources, and food sources (not to mention it has been culpable for genetic transmutation of crops and trees: i.e. tomatoes spliced with fish genes, fish spliced with human genes, cotton with larval genes, trees vacant of lignin [picture a human being without a skeletal structure] pesticidal seeds, ad nauseam).    

Over the last 70 years annual pesticide use has gone from zero to more than 500 billion tons worldwide. How much sense does it make to poison our own food?   

Technological advancement (viz. technomania) has been responsible for forced and violent dissolving of traditional communities in order to access mineral-rich lands; it has been responsible for cancers and other degenerative ailments (while ironically providing novel remedies and cures for specific ailments that, well, nature has provided all along). And let’s not forget Zygmunt Bauman’s book Modernity and the Holocaust – which is quite the indictment of the modern industrial rationalistic scientific instrumentalist perspective. And industrial technology has been culpable for the assault on ecosystems that pervade the far reaches of the planet, undermining the homes of species and cultures of remarkable complexity.  

Migratory birds are in inexorable decline.
Honeybee populations are in inexorable decline.
Whale populations are in inexorable decline.
Siberian tigers are in inexorable decline.
Rainforests are in inexorable decline.
Potable water is in inexorable decline.
Amphibian populations are in inexorable decline.
The Eastern Lowland gorilla is in inexorable decline.
Traditional, vernacular communities are in inexorable decline.    
There is more plastic in the planet’s oceans than there is phytoplankton.

Ultra-sonar blasts, used by the U.S. Navy and for seismic surveying for oil beneath the ocean swells, are killing whales. Sonar causes gas bubbles to form in the whale’s blood, fatally damaging their livers and kidneys. The fact that schools of hundreds upon hundreds of whales no longer impede the passage of seaborne ships brings me to tears. When is enough truly enough?

Year after year, technological contrivances and their byproducts are discarded profligately into the planet’s waters, ground, and air (e.g. landfills, greenhouse gas emissions, illegal dumping, fluoridation, spent uranium holding tanks, et al.) – destabilizing the complex system that supports life.  With its dependency on fossil fuels and mineral ores (extracted and refined at devastating costs to natural communities) continued, wanton technological advancement will be responsible for the loss of one-third of all species on this planet within the next 40 years. Michael Soule, the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology, says, “For all practical purposes vertebrate evolution is at an end… only large mammals left in another decade or two will be those we consciously chose to allow to exist.”  

The anthropologist Marvin Harris warned that as the industrial bubble expands “its skin becomes thinner.” And it will pop.  

Whether technology of “civilized” proportion has been implemented for practical purposes or recreational purposes, it is not sustainable, and essentially has only been of practical use to humans (and of course not all humans) as a way to pander to a Western ethic, or Transcendental ethic, proclaiming, “certain obligations hold true everywhere at all times for all people.” Omniscience and omnipotence, a (delusional) desire that has emerged from the Western philosophia perennis canon, is the ultimate (delusional) goal of a static and technologized world.

Philosophy aside, technology has become the hallmark of modern societies and contemporary economies, and deeply imbedded in a culture of extraction, hyper-exploitation, and a lack of reverence for natural realities that circumscribe us. There is no doubt we are about to find out what it means to overshoot our physical limits, as we’ve invested an entire history of thought and actions into a way of life that is deleterious and unsustainable.

Essayist, author, and critic Wendell Berry wrote in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine on the topic of Peak Oil:

To deal with problems, which are after all inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work. It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits.

Vermont artisans know intimately this convivial relationship between their handiwork and the natural landscape that offers its consent in the creative process, and the importance of offering reciprocity.   

It is fatuous and irrational for people to advocate technology as a solution to the problem of exponential growth and for achieving sustainability. We hear often that technology is a hopeful option for survival and sustainability, and that if we just keep trucking along, advancements in science will resolve our plight. This strikes me as frightening; there is already a plethora of realistic, pragmatic choices to make, and actions to employ, that will benefit not only the human species but the ecosystems that harbor the complex webs of relationships that affect our lives positively– and they do not require the “aid” of modern technology. These choices and behaviors include large-scale moderation, self-limitation, and a halt to many conventions that are perceived as “healthy” for a "civilized" life.   

We know that burning fossil fuels to support industrial culture alters global climates, acidifies the oceans, and creates dead zones where no sea life can thrive, and that burning fossil fuels is responsible for cancers and other respiratory ailments caused by particulates, mercury, sulfur dioxide, lead, and more (there are 14,000 deaths biweekly in the U.S. from preventable cancers). And yet the baleful impacts felt by millions of humans and non-humans alike as a result of poisoning our only atmosphere and our only sources of water are not good enough reasons to stop burning fossil fuels. Instead they are put to us as reasons to continue scientific exploration in search of solutions to these problems.

In fact, the monolith that is technological advancement can only stand upon the plinth that is cheap energy resources and an annual growth trajectory of 3 percent to 4 percent. In psychology this would fall pretty damn close to perseveration. No wonder the dominant culture is so insane.   

It’s similar to the behavior of heroin addicts: the incessant, self-afflictive abuse of a toxic, detrimental element to maintain an ephemeral feeling of satisfaction, ironically maintained by the counterforce of denial – upping the dose more and more. Until finally, chagrined with one’s dirty habit, one turns to methadone. “As long as the hospital is sanctioning my methadone I’m not an addict; I’m a person under care…” Still that denial. Still that chemical attachment. Let’s face it: addicts who really kick the habit get sick before they get better. They sweat out their woes in a state of ungovernable catharsis, contorting with spasms and cramps, enduring the screaming fantods and until suddenly – voila! They remember how to live again!

And better yet, they live without chemical dependence – and they return to their families and friends.    

Weaning ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels will not be easy or effortless. It will be a painful process through which we will need to turn to each other and to our land bases for support. But kicking the habit is vastly preferable to overdosing.

Furthermore, the argument that science will present synthetic options to substitute for the natural resources we continue to deplete is asinine. This is proven with Liebig's Law, also known as the Law of the Minimum. Richard Heinberg sums up the law well in his book Powerdown:

“Every species has a list of requirements for survival – water, temperature range, degree of salinity of water, degree of acidity or alkalinity of soil, food of a certain nature, so many hours of sunlight, and so on." Liebig's Law elucidates that even if all factors are “optimal” it takes only the lack of one requirement to erode an organism's ability to survive. Heinberg goes on to note: "This puts a tough burden on humans' attempts to completely manage a fully artificial environment."

My exegesis of L’s Big Law takes the form of a question: What is the reason for this giant circus? Seriously; we have proof that acephalous cultures lived peacefully for hundreds of thousands of years without monotheism, science, government, corporations, bureaucracy, TVs, automobiles, industrial modes of production, et al – so what’s our deal? What is it we are striving for through all of this destruction and aimless development?    

Even if, fortuitously, science prevails and a cheap energy source is discovered to supplant our reliance on fossil fuels, what then? Self-aggrandizing economics will surely use it up, continue to dismantle the planet’s resources for other innovations and contrivances, and exponential growth will continue. An important fact one must ponder is that energy comes from matter, and matter is finite. Without self-limitation, the quest for energy will be a perpetual concatenated tail-chase, exhibiting severe nocuous, deleterious, and annihilative repercussions over and over again. And again. And again.   

Peak Oil should be a matter public interest, and a matter of sustainability for the inhabitants of this planet – especially or our communities. Our options for handling the decline in cheap energy sources are found in choices of moderation and self-limitation, community solidarity and education. The belief that science will provide new technologies to help us endure nature's response to our profligate growth (i.e. global warming, desiccation of potable water, diasporas, viral vectors, etc.) reflects a state of denial within the dominant culture, as well as a casuistic rationalizing for the way the dominant culture behaves toward the very planet that miracled us into existence in the first place. It is vitally important that we begin to implement the steps needed to adjust our cultural behavior with regard to our personal limits alongside the laws of nature. Our holistic health, as well as our interrelations, domestic and foreign, is commensurate with the condition of the land beneath our feet.

Starting in Vermont

Vermont provides the intact land bases that can provide for us as a community. CSAs (community supported agriculture), farmers’ markets, organic farming and gardening fare well for the state’s communities. To bring to fruition a sustainable community, on a state level, relocalization is imperative. Initiatives such as worker and producer cooperatives, neighborhood and community associations, collective kitchens, unemployed worker mutual-aid organizations, and more – all working holistically together – are essential to have in a functional community. If we wholly embrace a functional model espoused to cooperation rather than competition in every sector, then immediately everyone on board is working together to build a sustainable community. Eventually, we could even transcend ‘state’ and ‘sector’ and just be a community again.   

We owe ourselves a pat on the back for being a step ahead of most of the country. Farmers’ markets, co-ops, community gardens in Burlington’s North End, the Intervale, Pete’s Greens, High Mowing Seeds and the rest of the folks involved with the High Field’s Institute, among others, having done a lot of great work to put Vermont’s foot on the right path.

But there’s still much to be done, and we have to be wary of “mistaking motion for change” e.g., waxing exuberant over $60 recherché quarts of interior finish made of soy whey while 20,000 Vermont children go without food every winter. There’s no excuse for childhood hunger in a state that is quickly becoming defined by its sustainable agriculture endeavors. Poverty is a social deformity largely caused by the market. It’s time we say fuck the market – we’re a community.  Vermont can embrace a true cooperative community ethic; it just means we need to preserve the health of our land bases, and engage with them reciprocally (put back that which you take out, if not more), enrich rather than extend, and perhaps proselytize all of the technocratic capitalists back into real human beings with real human emotions (or if that is to no avail, well, let them all play Monopoly™).    

Perhaps Wendell Berry has touched upon a crucial point, which is that we must reevaluate not only our relationship with our habitat (Earth), but the way we engage with Earth as well. Perhaps the dominant, concerted view of expedience, tools, and appliances that beguiles so many will be transformed by the concept of craft into a more sustainable and pragmatic notion of our vocations and avocations; and then the concept of technology can be replaced by the practice of art; blossoming a new praxis of engagement through arts and crafts.    

I’ve been thinking lately about the word “revolution.” And I’ve been thinking about the response that word often conjures up in many folks: sometimes fear; sometimes a laugh; sometimes a smile. The truth is, we’re in need of a serious revolution, and the sooner we recognize this the sooner we can begin. And it should be known that the bulk of any revolution is the time spent building a community. The Black Panther Party worked and advocated for community schools for children, free health clinics for the poor, and other community projects. The Zapatistas believed that the most important work to be done during revolution was the nonviolent work, the education, community gardening and so on. Harvey Milk, despite an urge toward rebellion, worked much harder building safe communities for homosexuals and pushing for legislation that broadened equal rights.    

During revolution it is most important to congeal as a community, and to educate, to write, to garden, to relocalize, to de-industrialize while creating a replacement model that is sustainable and safe. It’s okay to be angry over current conditions; how else would we know that those conditions don’t suit us, never did suit us, won’t ever suit us?

But more important, we must love the land beneath our feet, and every being, including ourselves and each other, if we want a sense of peace and sustainability. For we will defend with all of our hearts and might all that we love.

Frank Joseph Smecker is a student, writer, and social worker from Richmond. His work has appeared in Toward Freedom, Counter Currents and Dissident Voice and other publications; he is a regular contributor to the radical Thomas Paine's Corner, and is currently writing on mountaintop removal for The Ecologist magazine.