Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There is a task that needs doing: the conservation of essential cultural knowledge in non-digital
form. This task will require the sorting and evaluation of information for its usefulness to cultural
survival—triage, if you will—as well as its preservation. It may be unrealistic to expect librarians
to take on this responsibility, given their existing mandate and lack of resources—but who else will
do it? Librarians catalog, preserve, and make available accumulated cultural materials, especially
those in written form. That's their job. What profession is better suited to accept this charge?
The contemplation of electric civilization's collapse can't help but provoke philosophical musings.
Perhaps cultural death is a necessary component of evolution, like the death of individual organ-
isms. In any case, no one can prevent culture from changing, and many aspects of our present cul-
ture arguably deserve to disappear (we each probably carry our own list around in our head of what
kinds of music, advertising messages, and television shows we think the world could do without).
Even assuming that humans survive the current century—by no means a sure thing—another cul-
ture will arise sooner or later to replace our current electric civilization. Its cocreators will inevitably
use whatever skills and notions are at hand to cobble it together (just as the inhabitants of Europe in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance drew upon cultural flotsam from the Roman Empire as well
as influences from the Arab world), and it will gradually assume a life of its own. Still, we must ask:
What cultural ingredients might we want to pass along to our descendants? What cultural achieve-
ments would we want to be remembered by?
Civilization has come at a price. Since the age of Sumer, urbanization has been terrible for the
environment, leading to deforestation, loss of topsoil, and reduced biodiversity. There have been hu-
man costs as well, in the forms of economic inequality (which hardly existed in pre-state societies)
and loss of personal autonomy. These costs have grown to unprecedented levels with the advent of
industrialism—civilization on amphetamines—and have been borne primarily not by civilization's
beneficiaries but by other species and people in poor nations and cultures. But nearly all of us who
are aware of these costs like to think of this bargain-with-the-devil as having some purpose greater
than a temporary increase in creature comforts, safety, and security for a minority within society.
The full-time division of labor that is the hallmark of civilization has made possible science—with
its enlightening revelations about everything from human origins to the composition of the cosmos.
The arts and philosophy have developed to degrees of sophistication and sublimity that escape the
descriptive capacity of words.
Yet so much of what we have accomplished, especially in the last few decades, currently re-
quires for its survival the perpetuation and growth of energy production and consumption infra-
structure, which exact a continued, escalating environmental and human toll. At some point, this all
has to stop, or at least wind down to some more sustainable scale of pillage.
But if it does, and in the process we lose the best of what we have achieved, will it all have been
for nothing?
— OCTOBER 2009
