In nearly every case, my efforts have failed. I've seen the National Environmental Protection Act disregarded. I've seen Section 704 of the 1996 Telecom Act applied. (It prohibits legislators faced with a permit application for transmitting cellular antennas from considering the antennas' environmental or public health impacts.) Corporate aims have prevailed. New tech has gone up.
What does this land want from me?
The late ecological economist Herman Daly said, "Don't take from the Earth faster than it can replenish; don't waste faster than it can absorb." Alas, it's not possible to email, watch a video, drive a car, run a fridge or attend an online conference and abide by these principles. While we ravage the Earth for unsustainable technologies, we also lose know-how about growing and preserving food, communicating, educating, providing health care, banking and traveling with limited electricity and web access. (Given what solar PVs, industrial wind, batteries and e-vehicles take from the Earth to manufacture, operate and discard, we cannot rightly call them sustainable.)
What does the land want from me?
If I want accurate answers to this question, I need first to know what I take from the land. Because my tools are made with internationally-mined-and-processed materials, I need to know what they demand not just from New Mexico, but also from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Chile, China, the Tar Sands, the deep sea and the sky.
Once soil or water or living creatures have PFAS in them, for example, the chemicals will stay there forever. Once a child has been buried alive while mining for cobalt, they're dead. Once corporations mine lithium in an ecosystem that took thousands of years to form, on land with sacred burial grounds, it cannot be restored.
One hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner observed that because flicking a switch can light a room (and the wiring remains invisible), people would eventually lose the need to think.
Indeed, technologies have outpaced our awareness of how they're made and how they work. Technologies have outpaced our regulations for safety, environmental health and public health.
Calling for awareness of tech's consequences and calling for limits have become unwelcome.
In the last session of We Will Dance with Mountains, a host invited us to share what we'd not had a chance to discuss. AI put me in a breakout room with another New Mexican. I said that we've not discussed how our online conferences ravage the Earth. I said that I don't know how to share this info creatively or playfully. I want to transition not toward online living and "renewables" (a marketing term for goods that use fossil fuels, water and plenty of mining for their manufacture and operation and discard) but toward local food, local health care, local school curricula, local banking, local manufacturing, local community.
I also don't want to lose my international connections.
Bayo Akomolafe says he's learning to live "with confusion and make do with partial answers."
My New Mexican friend aptly called what I know a burden. When he encouraged me to say more, I wrote this piece.
What does the land want from us? Does the Earth want federal agencies to create and monitor regulations that decrease our digital footprint? Does the Earth want users aware of the petroleum coke, wood, nickel, tin, gold, copper and water that every computer requires or does it want these things invisible?
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