Technology accelerates the liberation
of resources, yes, but it is not creating them; it is finding
them and using them up, then looking for the energy to repeat
the process with progressively poorer materials, moving them
faster, making them into smaller, less recoverable fragments
for a diminishing proportion of the earth's growing masses of
people. Wisely used, technology should enable us to do more with
less, but the change to such use has barely begun. We have not
yet learned to ask,before undertaking a vast project, what does
it cost the earth?
One thing it costs is wildness; and
wildness itself, we are just perceiving, holds answers to questions
man has not yet learned how to ask. In obliterating wilderness,
the physicist J.H. Rush points out, man repudiates the evolutionary
force that put him on this planet and in a deeply terrifying
sense is on his own. By merely letting our present momentum sweep
us on with it, we can grind through the world's last wild places
swiftly. Just the undisciplined dash for energy sources can by
itself obliterate wilderness. Eventually the sources will be
gone -- the damsites, the fossil fuels, the places to isolate
atomic waste if we ever find them -- so we will learn to use
less energy, not more; to live within the earth's income instead
of exploding and spilling our way through the capital the earth
took thousands of millions of years to acquire.
The insistent question remains: Do we
return to ways the earth can sustain while the earth still has
wildness in it, or do we postpone the inevitable until we have
severed outright and irrevocably those unbroken living connections
to the beginning of life that wilderness has preserved? Dare
we repudiate the evolutionary force?
Better goals are desirable, worth predicting
now, worth the struggle to make the predictions come true, far
superior to acquiescence in forecasts we have been getting lately
of a world devoid first of charm, then of love, and finally of
life. . . .
DAVID
BROWER