A note on Futurism and Environmental Awareness
Posted on February 20 at 13.31, 2008 by Eric Mahleb
I am often asked whether a belief in progress and in the future is incompatible with environmental consciousness.
My reply is that I am always surprised at how easy it is for people to equate environmentalism with neo-Luddism and with a refusal to embrace growth, technology and development. Just as one can find conservatives who are against technology, many green liberals, a circle to which I loosely belong, embrace technology and have positive visions of a clean, coal and oil-free future where man will have learned to live in peace with his environment and in harmony with all fellow entities, biological or not.
It is naturally naïve to look at technology as the saviour of all of our current problems. After all, man’s decisions and use of past and existing technology is what started many of these problems in the first place. A double edge sword, technology has been both detrimental and beneficial to the human race.
Yet, a reasonable dose of realism tells us that there is no going back, that the only way to tackle these issues is to move forward, not backwards. Add a dash of optimism, and one can begin to argue that the detrimental aspects of technology are only part of a temporary period of adjustment during which Man has had to learn to live (after all, technology has been with us for only a very short time) with an ever-increasing rate of progress in a rapidly changing world. The Futurists and Extropists, although not all environmentalists, believe in a future where technology will have solved many of society’s problems, social and environmental, and will have allowed us to transcend our limitations as human beings.
To assume and make the statement that environmentalists tend to favour nature and animals over human beings and over growth and development is erroneous and is, unfortunately, conveniently used and abused these days as a means to counter the green wave that is sweeping across the globe. The favourite anti-environmentalist marketing strategy seems to be to depict environmentalists as either young, naïve, trapped in a 1970’s vision of the world and thus unable to face today’s harsh realities, or as middle-class bio-fools who seem more interested in following trends than in making a real difference. While we cannot deny the existence of these groups of people, they represent only a part, more or less independent, of an overall movement whose ideology is in fact consistent with a new type of acceptance and embrace of the possibilities offered by the merging of technology, progress and environmentalism.
www.worldchanging.com (and www.wired.com, to a lesser extent) is one of the best websites on the Internet in terms of quality of content, design and user experience, and it provides a perfect example of this desire to aim for a new global consciousness based on Bright Green, Techno-Optimistic Environmentalism, Techno-Progressivism and Technogaianism.
One Response to “A note on Futurism and Environmental Awareness”
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Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
July 22, 2008 at 13.59[…] a Democratic Transhumanist and Technogaianist who grew up absorbing large quantities of Science Fiction cinema and literature, i havenever felt anything remotely bizarre or ‘abnormal’ in the idea of giving human rights (and one day, equal rights) to non-human creatures. It is a very arrogant notion to think that only human beings deserve the right to not be tortured, beaten or imprisoned. Animals today deserve to be treated with fairness and in a similar fashion as we would treat human beings who, for one reason or another, are not in full control of their mental or physical capabilities. And the more intelligent animals become (through genetic engineering), the more rights they should receive. The same applies to robots. Many people continue to harbor negative feelings towards robots, and most cinematic or media representations of robots and artificial intelligences still tend to focus on dystopic visions and worse-case scenarios for the future, but as soon as you place these people in front of a little machine that makes cute sounds or starts to even remotely act human (Honda’s ASIMO or Sony’s Qrio for example), their fear begins to alleviate and the possibility suddenly arises that this machine might be worthy of our empathy after all. As machines become more intelligent and more human, we will learn to treat them with respect, and one day, we might even forget that they are machines. This process will not be easy and we can expect to meet many Luddites and robot-haters along the way, the type of narrow-minded and hateful people that Steven Spielberg portrayed in his film Artificial Intelligence: A.I (2001). But ultimately, old-style humans will become just one of several types of creatures existing on Earth and on other planets, and issues of rights will turn out to be increasingly relevant and important. […]