The Limits of Technology
PALMER, JAMES
The Limits of Technology Overskill: The Decline of Technology in Modern Civilization By Eugene S. Schwartz Quadrangle. 338 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by James Palmer Contributor, "Cosmopolitan,"...
...Take the matter of industrial refuse and sewage disposal...
...Unfortunately, though, the long-term effects of nta are unknown...
...Schwartz lists a number of these, among them that the universe is orderly, that the "good" life on earth is attainable, that "facts" are independent of the observer, and that the "scientific method" is the only valid means of discovering nature's plan...
...We now use 5 billion pounds of detergents annually...
...Taken together they constitute a philosophy based upon metaphysical presuppositions, although both the philosophy and metaphysics are denied by scientists...
...Man, he suggests, set out centuries ago to conquer nature, overlooking the fact that he himself was a part of nature...
...It's a bleak picture, and he is not sanguine about the outcome...
...One quasi-solution would be to get rid of the phosphate they contain...
...So much for waste disposal...
...I mean . . . who needs a cow any more...
...As a result the lakes and seas fed by them are rapidly undergoing eutrophication, the process by which bodies of water age and die...
...As Schwartz points out, we are beginning to understand that we live in a "closed system," where the need for gasoline to run our automobiles can produce an oil spill that destroys thousands of birds in California, where the problems we sweep under the rug today will return to haunt us tomorrow in new forms...
...In the Soviet Union, Lake Baikal, the world's deepest fresh water lake, is going the way of Lake Erie...
...Schwartz knows his technology too well to stop there...
...In the United States, that would mean 3.7 million acres?without allowing for increased water usage or population growth...
...But this would require 130 acres of land for every million gallons of waste water daily...
...The age of reason and its flowering in science and technology have been shown to be unreasonable...
...Isn't that marvelous...
...When these compounds are discharged into rivers and lakes, eutrophication recreates the same kind of noxious matter that the sewage treatment was designed to control...
...Because of this false dichotomy, he is now perilously close to destroying both nature and himself...
...Technology provided its first quasi-solution by turning the great rivers of the world into open sewers...
...That knowledge may be the first step toward a true awakening...
...Might we just as well forsake our equations and test tubes and go back to rain dances and burnt offerings...
...Just look," she will say, spooning up a glob of nondairy topping and swirling it into a cup of freeze-dried coffee, "it's exactly like real whipped cream...
...My aunt's naive delight in the self-sufficiency of man seems innocent enough...
...He goes on to prove his point again and again?applying it to industrialized agriculture, to mass transportation, to the production of energy...
...Summer blackouts, poisoned rivers and rancid air are ultimately philosophical, not technological, in origin...
...Ours is a generation," he writes, "that may not have a future...
...Such "quasi-solutions," as Schwartz calls them, only cause more problems...
...Since it can combine with metals, heavy metallic substances might infest the public waters—thereby requiring still another quasi-solution...
...Certainly she would be appalled at the suggestion that her attitude was in the least destructive or antisocial...
...At this moment the humane society, the inefficient society, seems impossibly remote...
...In the eutrophication process, phosphate acts as a fertilizer for aquatic plants, causing them to grow wildly, then decay, filling up the lake bed with organic matter...
...So are Lake d'Annecy in France, the Zurichsee in Switzerland and our own Lake Michigan, to mention just a few...
...Like all creeds, it has been a powerful generator of problems...
...In the author's view, our drive for mastery over natural forces has led us to exalt science and technology to a secular sort of religion which, no less than other religions, is founded on certain articles of faith...
...This is the stark fact that the younger generation perceives and the older generation denies...
...It is theoretically possible, of course, to establish a system of waste disposal capable of removing nearly 100 per cent of the nutrients that feed the eutrophying plants...
...One of the principal arguments of Overskill is that man can never surmount his technological crises by applying further technology...
...Today, in a time of troubles, we turn to our "religion...
...Yet the source of the world's ecological malaise may well lie not in Detroit, Osaka or the Ruhr but in warm and untroubled hearts like hers...
...If a true solution exists, it must be rooted, like the problem itself, in philosophy: "The present crisis is not one of techniques but of philosophy...
...There are other plans: for example, precipitating phosphates from waste water by use of ferric chloride, then incinerating the sludge...
...Each year the Rhine dumps 15 million cubic yards of waste into the North Sea, where it has already led to the extinction of trout, salmon and other marine species...
...Efficiency is for robots...
...Reviewed by James Palmer Contributor, "Cosmopolitan," "Saturday Review," "Show" I HAVE an aunt in Evansville, Indiana, who dotes on synthetic foods...
...Eugene S. Schwartz, a former senior scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, has written a strong, elaborately documented tract to support this contention...
...The humane society, not efficiency, is a fitting goal for man...
...will it also offer a solution...
...Experimental detergents in this country are now substituting sodium nitrilotriacetate (NTA) for part of the phosphate...
...Still, there is a ray of hope...
...This, however, would simply release phosphorus into the atmosphere, and it would come back to the land in rainfall...
...But treatment only breaks down sewage into nitrogen and phosphorus compounds...
...Axioms of this kind, he observes, "are the culmination of a distinctive Western philosophy grounded in the Judeo-Christian view of man and nature...
...We could embark on a large-scale sewage treatment plan...
...Does technology, whose solution for waste disposal caused the problem, offer a solution for the solution...
...Is the glittering edifice of modern science, then, simply an updated Temple of Osiris...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 14
