The human connection to nature is looking pretty frayed these days, to say the least. Whether the claim that the current generation of kids can identify 1000 corporate logos and only 10 plant species is accurate or not, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of us would fail Environmental Science 101. You can go on for days about why this is the case – from the creep of advertising into our private lives, to the dominance of market logic in everyday thinking, to our love affair with digital screens over time spent walking around the real world.
But that’s another post.
What’s interesting is the increasing potential for some of that same distracting technology to actually help us increase our ecological literacy. The iPhone, the handheld universe that would have looked like magic 10 years ago, can run a bunch of new applications that can connect users with real time information related to their local, physical world. One application, called Locavore, feeds readers a list of what foods are in season in their region, and which nearby markets are currently carrying them. A knowledge set that in generations past had been culturally embedded and practically necessary now might be carried forward digitally – and accessible externally, online, much like entries in an encyclopedia.
Another application, AlertMe, is a kind of pocket-size smart grid for your house, letting you review, adjust and customize home energy use on the move. Unplug the microwave when you’re away, ramp up ambient temperature when you wake up and come home from work, and monitor your personal energy use data anywhere, anytime. We’ve never had so much raw data and micro-control over individual energy impact before. It’s pretty unreal, and might give us as much facility and understanding regarding energy flows as we already have about Google searches and global current events.
IBM, to its credit, is all over these ideas. If you read magazines or spend much time online, you’ve probably bumped into ads for their “Smarter Planet” campaign, which looks to be an umbrella name for the inroads they’re making into software that connects managers and urban planning-types to data about energy, infrastructure, water, public health and more. It’s a great idea. As resource constraints close in on us, operating without any intelligence about our interfaces with the environment isn’t going to fly.
I think all of this speaks to the power of technology to change the game, so to speak, about what is deemed possible to know about the world. And an ironic twist too – because, as some environmentalists have bemoaned for decades, technology is frequently the arbiter of environmental damage – the arms that do the dirty work unwittingly baked into our cultural and economic systems.
These newer uses of technology, as a means for connecting us to our physical relationship with the world, throw that whole talking point into question, I think. Technology seems like an extension of ourselves, reflecting the soundness of our own agendas but also influencing the new alleys our creativity travels down. In the new issue of Orion magazine, a fascinating interview with renaissance man and Wired founder Kevin Kelly, asks the question, “Is technology spiritual?” Kelly seems to think so.
Without trying to answer any of those thick questions, I think it’s safe to say that technology will play a starring role in the move toward sustainability – but maybe not for the reasons usually cited. The traditional environmentalist’s anti-tech stance isn’t imaginative enough, I don’t think. But the reminder that it’s ultimately the real, physical world that ought to be the ends of technology is still totally relevant. I’m betting the Butterfly Generation, then, will be shaped just as much by technology as it will by a renewed engagement with the natural world.
What do you think? Is technology a valid, if ironic, way of reconnecting with nature?
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January 12, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Scott
And one of my favorite bloggers, John Ehrenfeld (author of Sustainability By Design – a recommended read taking the concept of sustainability in a fresh direction) has weighed in on the Kevin Kelly interview about the holyness of technology, here: http://www.johnehrenfeld.com/2010/01/ipods-and-other-holy-machines.html
Eherenfeld disagrees with Kelly, saying “Technology is a powerful force, perhaps now the most powerful force in shaping cultures. Yes, it affects who we think we are, but hopefully in my way of thinking, only conceals our humanness and leaves it there to come forth some day.”
I agree with Ehrenfeld in that I think that Kelly mistakes a wonderment of technology with the *ends* of technology – it’s the ends that matter. If tech. makes us strangers to the natural processes that undergird our whole existance, then that, to me, seems unquestionably bad. But there’s the possibility that, like in the examples above, tech. could ironically make some reconnections happen, too.
I guess I’m still in the “technology is neutral” camp: the soundness of the user’s agenda is what makes it good or bad. I do think Kelly is on to something in placing the evolution of technology as an extension of ourselves, but I think it’s an ability to be in touch with our humanity (human relationships, physical activity, laughter, etc) and with nature that is really what matters at the end of the day. Technology is an expression of all the amazing things people can do – but I don’t think we should get so caught up in being impressed with ourselves that we forget about the stuff that actually matters – and makes us happy in a deep way.