[D66] High Tech Holocaust (1989)

[R.O.]

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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-16-bk-2580-story.html


  Eco-Eschatology : HIGH TECH HOLOCAUST<i> by James Bellini (Sierra Club
  Books: $10.95, paper; 256 pp.; 0-87156-686-9) </i>

By Kirkpatrick Sale
April 16, 1989
12 AM
</i>

Straight out, I have to tell you I am an apocalyptic: I believe that 
most of the life forms of the planet Earth, and the workings of the 
planet itself, are seriously imperiled and may not survive the next two 
or three decades.

That should put me solidly on the side of “High Tech Holocaust,” since 
its somber conclusion--the next-to-last sentence of the book, 
highlighted in 18-point type on the back cover--is that “if the scale of 
the assault on our well-being is not reduced . . . then humanity will 
itself become the species facing a slow, but inexorable, journey to 
extinction.”

And, well, I suppose I /am / on its side, for the most part. This is the 
sort of message that must be heard--and taken deeply, deeply to 
heart--if there is any chance to avoid the holocaust.

And yet, I somehow doubt that a book like this, which is essentially a 
catalogue of all the perils we know the industrial culture has unleashed 
on our environment in recent decades, will really help anyone to hear 
and heed that message. Not only is it depressing, as it moves from toxic 
wastes to nuclear accidents to acid rain to poisoned foods to 
contaminated waters, but its collection of horror stories and horror 
statistics is eventually numbing to the point of insensibility.

I mean, you can open to any page and be overwhelmed by the awful lethal 
ailments provided by our industrial age. Just at random--and I assure 
you this is totally unplanned--I open to:

“Scientists drilling the Greenland icecap have discovered that lead 
levels in the air we breathe have increased two thousand percent since 
the start of the industrial revolution. . . . Lead too is a poison; 
there is mounting proof that our brains and nervous systems are being 
steadily eroded.”

“In practically every area of toxic pollution, mankind has reached a 
cross-over point, beyond which the natural balance of the Earth’s 
chemistry becomes seriously distorted.”

“All nuclear plants produce waste products . . . radioactive substances 
. . . that are beyond the capacity of man to destroy. And so long as 
they exist, these substances present a mortal danger.”

“After Chernobyl, we can now have no doubts about the inability of man 
to control our nuclear technology.”

“Acid rain is destroying our forests, contaminating our water supplies, 
changing our climate, eroding irreplaceable historic buildings and, we 
are now discovering, causing the slow wasting of mankind through 
corrosion of our own body chemistry.”

I suppose it is true that Bellini--a free-lance “forecaster” and adviser 
to British TV projects--might well say that the only way to show people 
how horrible the world has become is to pile up horror stories. And yet, 
there is nothing really new here, nothing that is not derived from 
rather well-known scientific or popular materials of the sort that have 
become increasingly common since “Silent Spring"--with not much 
perceivable alteration, either, in the conditions they condemn. (They 
banned DDT, you will say; but “Silent Spring” was not about DDT but 
chemicalization, which has increased sharply since 1962.) Having all 
this information together in one place certainly serves some 
encyclopedic purpose, but it is not really calculated to invite the 
skeptical or uninformed, and it simply overwhelms the sympathetic.

There is another similar danger, too, to this book, and it has to do 
with its doomsday tone that “we have five years to make the choice” 
between “a cleaner, safer world” and extinction. As an apocalyptic, you 
understand, I can’t exactly disagree--but nowhere is this proven, or 
even addressed in fact, nowhere is there any justification for such a 
time-line. It is simply not convincing, certainly not to the 
unconverted, and it is the sort of wolf-is-coming exaggeration that has 
served in the past to discredit ecological critics. And it may also be 
quite off-putting even to the receptive reader, since it is fair to say 
that the chances of our achieving radical environmental changes in the 
next five years are remote in the extreme.

Which brings me to what I regret to describe as the fundamental flaw of 
this book: its failure to identify the root cause of our eco-crises and 
thus to have any intelligent suggestions for any real remedies. Bellini 
does, from time to occasional time, put forth “a devil called industry” 
and “the high-tech age.” But he is really quite placid about it, quite 
happy with its “wonder drugs” and “skyscraper cities,” and all he really 
seems to worry about (though I must say this is not dealt with very 
clearly) is its scale and its secrecy, and all he can think of by way of 
remedy is for industry “to establish a climate of open business” so as 
to become “more accountable” (ditto) and for the public to have a “more 
acute recognition of the biochemical threat that confronts us” (ditto). 
Puerile pap, that--thin gruel for an apocalyptic menu.

The culprit, and how desperately we need to come to realize it, is 
nothing less than modern Western culture and its 
attitudes--exploitative, utilitarian, hostile, competitive, 
self-aggrandizing--toward the Earth. Bellini is quite wrong to think 
that this culture simply reflects “man’s insatiable desire to 
manufacture” and that the search for “ways to conquer nature” is a basic 
and unchangeable characteristic of the human animal. *_It is precisely 
in its alienation from nature, its desire to “conquer” it, that this 
culture differs so starkly from those healthy cultures of the past 
(including those first on this continent) that sought harmony with, not 
dominance over, the precious systems of the living Earth, and for whom 
its creatures and its habitats were sacred. It is precisely among such 
non-industrial cultures, if anywhere, that we may find the wisdoms that 
will help us avoid our eco-catastrophe._*

This American edition is taken directly from British proofs complete 
with British spellings, phrases, punctuation, tone, and often, focus. 
Its notes are woefully thin and its index non-existent.

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