Renewable energy can be seen as a last-ditch attempt to retain
materialism. As with all technologies, a technocratic society is
unwilling to delve deeply into renewables’ potential harm.
The jury on the embodied energy costs of renewable energies is still
out. Many renewable energy devices exceptionally concentrate toxins
for example, and the cost of diluting these toxins back into the earth
from whence they came at the end of a device’s life tends to not be
calculated.
The issue of an environment crisis goes deeper than materialism to the
tendency of humans to be easily habituated. At a world level, some
Chinese engaged in foot-binding, some Africans in clitorectomy, some
Burmese in neck elongation, some Ethiopians in lip disk insertions,
and all of the West in materialism.
At a local level, without the blindness of habituation, wastes from
van parking can be buried with a spade by van users and the community
could allocate this as a spot in future for a preferred plant. Just
takes organisation.
Probably most people reading this will laugh at the idea. The laugh is
the response of habit. The habit humans currently have as a society,
despite the amazing technologies, is to not be able to return shit to
soil to maximise the resource! The plaintive cry of the hippie, ‘I
gotta get my shit together, man!’ needs to be taken more literally and
prophetically by the wider society.
The Tardis toilets in Byron stand as memorials to the easy addiction
of humans to irrational and nonsensical habits.
Geoff Dawe, Uki
