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 A year later, the Times was still avoiding the limits of biofuels, encouraging Congress to continue subsidies “as an important part of the effort to reduce the country’s dependency on imported oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”[6] Identifying the problem as dependency on imported oil leads away from a focus on the core problem of -- to borrow a phrase from the social/ecological analyst James Howard Kunstler -- a “living arrangement with no future”[7] on which the United States is structured. The Times is hindering, not helping to advance, the conversation needed.
Another example of the technological fundamentalism of journalism is the steady flow of stories about new products that that are little more than free advertising for the gadgets that are central to our dead-end living arrangement. The reviews of this endless flood of products celebrating the culture’s child-like obsession with shiny things -- everything from hulking SUVs to tiny electronic devices -- are much the same; even when a specific product is criticized for its shortcomings, the assumption is that such products are part of a sensible life and consistent with a sustainable future. The idea that journalists might inquire into “our larger purposes and prospects” -- who really needs these things, and what are the costs to the planet of the manufacture and disposal of them -- would be seen by most journalists as inappropriate editorializing, while avoiding those questions is a sign of objectivity. Journalists’ instinct to fall in line with the dominant assumptions of the culture is hardly surprising. In the contemporary United States, the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. Those who challenge this dogma are routinely ignored or dismissed as naïve, such as in this story in Wired magazine: Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naïve at best.[8] Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely, which is at the heart of the technological fundamentalists’ delusional belief system. With that writer’s limited vision -- which is what passes for vision all around this culture -- it’s not surprising that he advocates economic and technological fundamentalist solutions: With climate change hard upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces environmentalism’s concerns but rejects its worn-out answers. Technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future. An alternative would be to question the technological fundamentalism and think about how we might reorder our world. If one central role of journalism is to raise the difficult questions that citizens should confront in a democratic society, journalists are not doing their jobs. An honest assessment of the culture’s technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Wes Jackson’s call for an “ignorance-based worldview” is so important. Jackson, a plant geneticist who left conventional academic life to co-found The Land Institute to pursue projects about sustainable agriculture and sustainable culture, suggests that we would be wise to recognize what we don’t know. His point is that whatever the advanced state of our technical and scientific prowess, we are -- and always will be -- far more ignorant than knowledgeable, and therefore it would be sensible for us to adopt an ignorance-based worldview that could help us work effectively within our limits. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in the ways humans can act stupidly, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don’t know. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed -- out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night’s sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for thousands of years, most dramatically in the 20th century when we ventured with reckless abandon into two places where we had no business going -- the atom and the cell. On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe -- such as fossil fuels and heavy metal uranium -- is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through traditional selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene -- the foundational material of life -- takes us to places we have no way to understand. These technological endeavours suggest that the Genesis story was prescient; our taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil appears to have been ill-advised, given where it has led us. We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps. As key storytellers in the culture, journalists can either help or hinder the process of coming to terms with living arrangements that are not only profoundly unjust but also unsustainable. Journalists think of themselves as progressive (in a non-partisan sense), helping steer the culture toward a progressive future that improves the lives of ordinary people. [originally published in Media Development (http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/publications/media_development), No. 3, 2008.]
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 Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org. His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). http://www.southendpress.or/2007/items/87767&Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
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[1] Wes Jackson, “From the Margin,” Orion Online, 2001. [2] David W. Orr, “Technological Fundamentalism,” Conservation Biology, 8:2 (June 1994): 336.
[3] Statement on the Precautionary Principle, issued by the Wingspread Conference convened by the Science and Environmental Health Network, January 26, 1998.
[4] For a succinct summary of lunacy, see “The Many Problems with Ethanol from Corn: Just How Unsustainable Is It?”
[5] Editorial, “The High Costs of Ethanol,” New York Times, September 19, 2007.
[6] Editorial, “Rethinking Ethanol ,” New York Times, May 11, 2008.
[7] Remarks by James Howard Kunstler, Second Vermont Republic meeting, October 28, 2005. [8] Alex Nikolai Steffen, “The Next Green Revolution,” Wired, May 2006, p. 139-141.
[9] Remarks by James Howard Kunstler, PetroCollapse conference, New York, October 5, 2005.
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