Easter Oratorio

Here's a verse from the Tom Wright written Easter Oratorio that I always find helpful when life gets a wee bit busy, or I feel like things get a wee bit overwhelming, like it's done this week:

The sea is too deep
The heaven's too high
I cannot swim
I cannot fly;
I must stay here
I must stay here
Here where I know
How I can know
Here where I know
What I can know

Khazzoom-Brooks!

Following on from the last post, someone has brought to my attention the existance of the Khazzoom-Brooks postulate. As far as I can understand this points out one of the irrational behaviours that humans show. When referring to energy efficiency, the more efficient the system becomes, the more folk begin to use said system. Obviously this has implications for the Carbon output into the atmosphere.

For instance, if the car we drive becomes more fuel efficient, that is is goes the same distance for less fuel, it is going to save the driver money. The driver, realising the money they've saved is now more likely to go on extra journeys that they wouldn't have before because of this. Indeed, the Khazzoom-Brooks postulate states that the driver will now use their car so much more that they end up being responsible for more Carbon than before the new technology was in place. If we apply the same principle to heating of the home, energy generation, etc. we can see that the more efficient we become the more we actually consume, producing more carbon than before.

So, yesterday I was saying that technology may not be the answer. Today, with the Kazzoom-Brooks postulate, it looks as if technology might actually cause us to produce yet more carbon.

Unsustainable sustainability

I've been thinking recently about the way 'sustainability' is conceived in the media, or amongst conversations I've been having with vaguely eco-minded folk. This is a huge area, and one that encompasses so many different areas (recycling, consumption, ethical consuming – if that isn't an oxymoron). Mainly though, the focus is on energy. We talk about creating far greater renewable energy sources of power. What this doesn't solve though, is the fact that sustainable energy creation just isn't sustainable, at least not on the levels we currently consume energy/electricity. Even the most up to date solar panel, for instance will use many rare elements. Hypothetically, if all our energy were to be created in this way, well, I doubt it could - given the scarcity of many of the earth's resources needed in the building of the solar panels (to take but one example – there are similar unsustainable aspects to building wind turbines, wave stations…).

Sustainable energy generation is unsustainable. Certainly at current levels of technology, and this brings me to my second point: technology in the media is blamed as the cause of our current eco-crisis. The focus is usually put on the coal-fired power station, the poorly insulated home or the travel taken by the goods we consume. Heat, warmth, light and food, we in the rich West, all experience these to a far greater extent, and with far easier access than ever before. Technology has made this possible and technology takes the blame. Whither technology is to blame or is not, I'm unsure. What I am critical of here though, is that technology, while on the one hand being blamed, both for our abstraction from the natural, and our poorly managed over-consumption, is also being heralded as the cure. A panacea for our ills. What we need is more wind-farms, greater energy efficiency, to fast track better technology for our solar panels. But, if technology is the problem, how can it be the cure?

What this puts me in mind of, is old Jacques Derrida. When advocating constant humility, and also being aware of the precautionary principle – he pointed out how utterly impossible it was for any of us to understand anything in the world, or even another person. He stated that "the condition of the possibility, is also, that very same condition of impossibility." That is, the thing that brings me closer to understanding something is also the very impediment to understanding that something fully. So, I see on a map a particular place. However, the map is not the place, and the very description or representation can often act as an impediment to fully 'grasping' a place in all its glory. Likewise, God. When God is revealed in the world, we get closer to understanding the ineffable. Yet what is ineffable will ultimately be unappreciated when put in the small box of one own revelation. Neither of these examples is saying the attempt to understand is futile. But what it does recognise is that we must continually shed our preconceptions, even those that have brought us great understanding if we want to get closer to whatever it is we want to understand. There's the old stories of high-school Physics students having to shed previous analogies conceiving of the ways atoms move, in order to progress and learn yet more complex subatomic details. I think this is the sort of thing Derrida was getting at.

How does this link in with what went before? Well, technology has been both the cause and potential salvation to our current environmental crisis. I don't want to say that new technologies can't play their part, but a major part of what need to be done to aid the UK's society into one that's more sustainable has to be a realisation that technology won't save us. We might have to shed our old way of thinking, which has brought us so far, if we want to understand more fully our role in this world, this environment.

Sustainability can be sustainable but, to paraphrase Einstein, not by using the same thinking that created the problem.