A recipe for respecting nature and technology’s limits— and another for exploiting them

Recipes are works-in-progress. Adjust and season to taste.

To respect nature and technology’s limits:

1. Abide by Herman Daly’s principles: Do not take from Earth faster than it can replenish, and do not waste faster than Earth can absorb the waste.

2. Acknowledge that we’ve not abided by these principles for centuries. We each struggle here, do our best—and have lots to learn. 

3. Ask questions. Listeners can receive.

4. Prioritize the ecophere’s health. If bats, honeybees and coral reefs (for examples) are not healthy, every living creature is affected.

5. Get your hands in dirt. (Connecting with dirt can help reduce desire for new things.) Grow herbs on your windowsill. Grow vegetables and share your produce with neighbors. Interview relatives about your ancestors’ connection to land.

6. Compost your kitchen scraps. Use less plastic.

7. Learn about your watershed. (The U.S. has six main and about 2100 smaller watersheds.) Trace your water supply from precipitation to tap and back to precipitation. Learn about the minerals, fuels and food within your bioregion. Learn how mining and manufacturing impact your watershed.

8. Move toward living within your watershed’s offerings.

9. Notice that covering land with roads, parking lots, data centers and utility-scale solar PVs disrupts soil structure, water cycles and Earth’s cooling mechanisms. Build healthy water cycles and soil structure. Care for your bioregion so that in 100 years, it will care for your offspring.

10. Do not give children an electronic device at least until they master reading, writing and math on paper—and can cook a favorite meal. No Google maps until you can read a map on paper.  

11. Invite every computer user to study the supply chain of one substance in their computer—and share their research. Recognize that while the vast majority of waste occurs during manufacturing, end-of-life e-waste is also devastating.

12.   Make do with what you’ve got. Celebrate old things. Celebrate people who alter clothes, fix plumbing, repair broken electronics and can find older cars’ replacement parts. Enact right-to-repair laws.

13. Recognize that no technology is safe until proven safe—whether or not this decreases profits. Buy devices and services only if a liability-carrying expert has issued a sealed report that they are safe.

14. Don’t buy products or services labeled “green,” “clean,” sustainable, “renewable,” “zero-emitting” or “carbon-neutral,” unless the manufacture can prove its claim from the product’s cradle-to-grave.

15. Lobby local authorities to require a subject-matter expert’s certified report that all hazards (including fire and collapse) have been evaluated and mitigated before they permit a new technology, including telecom access networks, utility-scale solar facilities, wind turbines, power lines, battery energy storage (BESS), data storage centers and EV chargers.

16. Reduce electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emissions. Keep Wi-Fi off at night. Do not charge electronics while you sleep. Get wired Internet access and a landline.

17. Challenge engineers and manufacturers to design biodegradable electronics. Challenge them to design electronics made only from materials available within your watershed.

18. One day each week, refrain from using anything with a screen.

19. Build libraries. Lend books, tools, vehicles and special-occasional clothes. Distribute vegetable and flower seeds. Distribute unused goods for free.   

20. Recognize that we share the Earth with nearly nine million other species. Each of us belongs to the Earth. Say thanks for its gifts.

21. Reduce your consumption by three percent per month. Where will you start?

Recipe for exploiting nature and pushing technology’s limits:  

1. Ignore Herman Daly’s principles. Go ahead and take from the Earth faster than it can replenish, and waste faster than it can absorb.

2. Believe that new technology—new products—can solve the problems that come from ignoring Daly’s principles.

3. Consider the product or service that you want “a necessity.” Assume that it generates no hazardous ecological or public health consequences from its cradle-to-grave. Remain unaware of the people who grow your coffee and food and make your electronics, appliances and vehicles. Remain unaware of their ecosystems’ degradation. Keep unaware of manufacturing’s impacts on ecosystems and indigenous communities. Believe the advertising.

4. Maintain corporations’ personhood rights.

5. Prohibit nature’s rights to exist—other than as property or a resource for manufacturers.

6. Enact laws that prohibit local authorities from denying a permit to install telecom infrastructure based on environmental or public health impacts. Do not require industry to prove that their products are safe, including for pregnant women, infants or children. Allow advertising of harmful products. Dismiss scientific studies that demonstrate that exposure to radiation emitted by telecom devices and infrastructure harms health.

7. Permit manufacturers to deploy technologies without proof that they’re safe from fire and collapse hazards. Allow PFAs—forever chemicals—which cause multiple health problems at very low levels in fracking, Teflon pans, waterproof clothing and dental floss.

8. Remain unaware that covering land with roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers and utility-scale solar PVs disrupts soil structure, water cycles and nature’s cooling mechanism. 

9. Subsidize manufacture and installation of solar photovoltaics (PVs), industrial wind, battery energy storage (BESS), electric vehicles (EVs) and nuclear power. Promote the idea that using these technologies will cool the Earth’s temperatures and allow our society to continue indefinitely. Ignore that manufacturing and operating solar PVs, industrial wind turbines, battery energy storage systems and EVs involves fossil fuels, extractions, extreme water use and toxic waste. Ignore that like all electronics, these technologies do not biodegrade. Focus on their decreasing cost. Repeat their marketing terms: “green,” “clean,” “sustainable,” “renewable,” “zero-emitting” and “carbon-neutral.”

10. Invest billions of dollars in A.I. to prevent rising temperatures, improve medicine and battery technologies, and fight wars. Ignore A.I.’s extractions, energy consumption, water consumption, “hallucinations,” privacy issues and soul-lessness. Award the Nobel Prize in chemistry to scientists who use A.I. to create entirely new kinds of proteins for vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.

11. Dismiss the Jevons Paradox. It clarifies that “efficiency” increases energy consumption, water consumption, extractions and toxic waste—since manufacturing one million units of an “efficient” product requires substantial energy, mining and water. Likewise, use “conservation” efforts to justify building new developments.

12. Do not reduce production or consumption of industrially-made goods. Do not ask or discuss how our lifestyles might impact ocean temperatures, hurricanes and wars. Do not ask, What’s within our control to cool ocean temperatures, reduce hurricanes and wars?   

13. Increase the number of humans who expect electricity, electronics and their own vehicle…by the billions.

14. Mine land, mine the deep-sea, smelt, refine, continue. Fine people who protest mining’s impacts on pristine ecosystems. Sue them.

15. Forget the Hippocratic Oath, First, do no harm.

16. Genetically modify seeds. Take the DNA from “products” like breastmilk, lemon and ginseng, synthetically engineer them in a lab—and market the products without labeling. Direct A.I.s to generate new DNA sequences and new proteins.

17. Do not teach children to grow vegetables, save seeds, preserve food, compost, heal wounds and diseases or resolve conflicts between their ears.

18. Give children smartphones before they have speech. Teach them to read on a screen.

19. Depend on food grown and medicine manufactured far, far from your bioregion. 

20. Encourage shopping and dependence on international supply chains.

21. Make everything—food, water, communications, education, transport of goods, transport of people, money, medical care, medical records—dependent on electricity and digital systems.

Questions to share

Where do you connect with nature’s cycles?

When/have you noticed technology’s harmful consequences?