Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ity” as the result of a series of disastrous miscalculations and blunders, including its invasions and
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Coal-fueled China is just now becoming the world's largest
with intractable and growing economic contradictions, pollution dilemmas, and resource limits.
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Society's superstructure is also subject to deepening rupture, with neoliberalism coming under
increasing criticism, especially since 2008. However, there is a more subtle and pervasive (and
therefore potentially even more potent) superstructure to modern society, one largely taken for gran-
ted and seldom named or discussed, and it is likewise under assault. Essayist John Michael Greer
calls this “the civil religion of progress.”
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As Greer has written, the idea of progress has quietly
become the central article of faith of the modern industrial world, more universally held than the
doctrine of any organized religion. The notion that “history has a direction, and it has to make
cumulative progress in that direction” has been common to both capitalist and communist societ-
shrinks, technology fails, population declines, and inventors fail to come up with ways of managing
society's multiplying crises? More to the point, how will billions of fragile human psyches adjust
to seeing their most cherished creed battered repeatedly upon the shoals of reality? And what new
faith will replace it? Greer suggests that it will be one that reconnects humanity with nature, though
its exact form is yet to reveal itself.
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All of these trends are in their very earliest phases. As infrastructure actually shifts—as fuels
deplete, as weather extremes worsen—tiny cracks in the edifice of business-as-usual will become
unbridgeable chasms.
Here's my last big takeaway message for would-be social changers: Only ideas, demonstration pro-
jects, and policy proposals that fit our emerging infrastructure will have genuine usefulness or stay-
ing power. How can you know if your idea fits the emerging infrastructure? There's no hard and
fast rule, but your idea stands a good chance if it assumes we are moving toward a societal regime
with less energy and less transport (and that is therefore more localized); if it can work in a world
where climate is changing and weather conditions are extreme and unpredictable; if it provides a
way to sequester carbon rather than releasing more into the atmosphere; and if it helps people meet
their basic needs during hard times.
It's fairly easy to identify elements of our society's existing structure and superstructure that
won't
work with the infrastructure toward which we appear to be headed. Consumerism and cor-
poratism are two big ones; these were 20th-century adaptations to cheap, abundant energy. They
justifiably have been the objects of a great deal of activist opposition in recent decades. There were
reforms or alternatives to consumerism and corporatism that
could have worked
within our indus-
trial infrastructure regime (or that did work in some places, not others): European-style industrial
socialism is the primary example, though that might be thought of as a magnetic hub for a host of
idealistic proposals championed by thousands, maybe even millions of would-be world-changers.
But industrial socialism is arguably just as thoroughly dependent on fossil-fueled infrastructure as
corporatism and consumerism. To the extent that it is, activists who are married to an industrial-so-
cialist vision of an ideal world may be wasting many of their efforts needlessly.
