A case for technofix - industry and environmental depravation - Industry

American Forests, July-August, 1993 by Wallace Kaufman

If this decade is indeed the critical one for deciding how to save the earth, we'd better start choosing our villains more wisely.

Suggesting that industry and technology will solve environmental problems can evoke a response like saying the Hells Angels should chaperone the senior prom. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution some 300 years ago, nature lovers have focused hard on industry's destructive power. Poet William Blake penned the phrase that is still used to characterize industry--"dark Satanic mills," For novelist Sherwood Anderson, industry turned rural citizens of Winesburg, Ohio, into greedy industrialists and robot-like workers. Thoreau retreated from industrialized New England to the woods and wrote the phrase that has become an environmental battle flag, "In Wildness is the preservation of the World."

Despite ever-improving living standards worldwide, the bias against industry grew stronger, not weaker. Through guilt by association, science and technology became accessories to industry's crime. In 1977 Friends of the Earth attacked the industrial notion of progress in its treatise Progress As If Survival Mattered. On the cover a railroad track forks, one line leading to skyscrapers in a cloud of black smog, the other to a grove of trees under a shining sun. That image summed up an increasing and deliberate polarization.

The debate, of course, has simmered since the creation of cities. The Roman poet Horace 2,000 years ago upheld rural virtue against urban corruption. Now, however, if this really is the critical decade for deciding how to save the earth, environmental bias could lead us to reject the means of salvation. At the very least, it could slow down environmental progress in ways that would be fatal to the very nature we want to save and maybe to other residents of the planet.

I am reminded of a meeting of nature writers I took part in at Williams College a couple of years ago. Everyone talked about consuming less and living more simply. So I took a quick poll. How many of us lived in homes smaller than the American median size of some 1,700 square feet? How many of our cars parked outside the old Rockefeller mansion conference center got better mileage than the average fleet vehicle? No homes qualified, and only two of more than a dozen cars. Since none of us had large families, the per-capita hypocrisy was all the more shameful. It was obvious to me that if this group of distinguished and widely published environmentalists could not live more simply, cutting back on technology and consumption wasn't the answer. I will now argue that in a real world of six billion people headed fast for 12 billion, more technology, science, and industry is the answer.

Environmentalists who call for a simpler lifestyle are exhibiting typical human behavior--trying to atone for all-too-human imperfection by worshipping an impossible ideal. They also require sacrifices: Too often these are science, technology, industry, and the system of individual freedoms in whose shelter they survive. And yet, a clear look at how industry is using technology shows us that real solutions are blossoming all around us, partly because the moral indignation aroused by environmentalists has created a market, and partly in spite of that indignation.

While pundits everywhere decry the decline of social values, many American businesses are responding to a rising tide of consumer morality. As economists say, consumers vote their values with their dollars. More and more, those votes are guided by moral concerns about the environment. Recent research by the Western Wood Products Association (WWPA) revealed that by a two-to-one margin "adults would sacrifice economic growth to keep the environment clean." WWPA also says that some 30 percent of its customers now worry that by buying wood products they may be harming the environment.

Perceptive business experts have asked industry for products that respond to these concerns. Business has the ultimate responsibility of turning science into technology, and technology into new products and services, and it has begun to answer environmental demands. Motives range from pure profit to a love of nature. Let us admit the general imperfection of human motivation and move on to what's happening.

The response is moving quickly on three fronts:

* Making more things with less material.

* Substituting new products for old.

* Inventing new, kinder, gentler technologies.

MORE EFFICIENT PRODUCTION

Ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, producers have tried to make more products with the same or less raw material. The debate over clearcutting has consumed the media's attention and conveyed the impression that America's forests are disappearing. They are, in fact, expanding. The reasons are simple, and all result from more complex technology:

1. Log cabins and post-and-beam yielded to the two-by-four and the frame house, using smaller, more plentiful second-growth softwood lumber.

2. Producers of wood products have used technology to produce more with less.