Here is an excerpt from an interview of Doug Tompkins
Doug Tompkins Remembered [https]
Douglas Tompkins [https]
Douglas Tompkins [gemini]
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PK: [...] I get into these arguments all the time about these huge wind power stations going up all over open land, and many environmentalists have this unquestioning acceptance of this. They just think, oh it’s wind, it’s a renewable technology, that’s progress, we like that, anyone who doesn’t is a friend of fossil fuel or the nuclear industry. And they’ll be out there arguing for the mass destruction of open landscapes in the name of getting “clean energy” for a purpose they haven’t identified yet. And you get all these spurious arguments, all these people saying, “but these things are beautiful, they’re so elegant! You have to learn to love them. My heart leaps up every time I see a five-hundred-foot wind turbine on a mountain!” And that’s mainstream environmentalism today, and if you’re against that you’re a reactionary and a romantic. And it’s astonishing to see how quickly this has happened, and how unquestioningly – and how the progressive narrative that environmentalism used to challenge has been dragged in to the argument to support this case.
DT: Oh yeah, I’ve had a thousand arguments like this too. You know what I say? Well, I say first of all, it’s important to develop an aesthetic sense and make aesthetic judgments. So when you see one of those huge pylons with those enormous turning blades on it, what do you see? What does that mean to you? And they say, what are you getting at? That sounds like a loaded question! And I say, well I’ll tell you what I see, and then you can tell me what you see.
When I look at one of those giant turbines, I see the icon of techno-industrial culture. I see the contemporary expression of the Enlightenment, of Cartesian logic, the scientific revolution and then the Industrial Revolution and then the information revolution. I see this as all symbolised there, as if it were a logotype. I see it as the iconography of all that. And that whole techno-industrial society that we’ve created as an expression of the Enlightenment, you can go back and see how that whole worldview has been channelled over five hundred years. What is it? It’s global climate change! That’s the result. The way of thinking that could create those windmills is the same way of thinking that caused climate change in the first place. Just imagine for a minute, just step back and imagine ruining the whole climate! That’s the result of the techno-industrial culture which these Big Wind turbines symbolise. And I know that it requires the whole enchilada of techno-industrial culture just to produce one of these things. It requires all the mining, all the alloys, all the computers – the whole scaffolding of civilisation. And that scaffolding is undoing the world. That’s what I see when I see your big windmill on the mountain. And for that reason, I don’t think it is desirable.
PK: And then they go a bit quiet, do they?
DT: Well, if you can express that well, and if they want to listen, then you can say, I don’t want to demean you or to insult you, but there is a whole level on which you haven’t been thinking, and which you should explore. And when you do, I think that you won’t see those windmills in the same light you saw them in before. And that process, that little exercise, you can extend that to many many things. You can say, you see that cell phone in your hand? It doesn’t look good. It symbolises that huge scaffolding of civilisation that is undoing the natural world. And we should not be looking favourably on that, or on the icons of the civilisation that is doing that, and those icons are symbolised to me in things like the big windmill or the cell phone or the laptop computer or anything from combustion engines to agrochemicals.
This is fundamentally a technological critique, and you have to learn that and understand what it means, and you have to learn about the autonomous nature of technology, and what it is and as an activist articulate this to society and to culture. And you really have to understand that the technologies you use will dictate how a society is. I mean look at all these kids around now walking around with their phones in their hands, looking at their little screen, oblivious to anything. They’ve all got their heads down, they’ve lost track, they’ve unplugged themselves from the real world and put themselves in the virtual world. I used to have these fights with my old friend Steve Jobs, the Apple guy, and it infuriated him.
PK: I bet it did!
DT: Well, it was like telling a Catholic that there’s no God.
PK: So how did he answer this critique of yours? He must have had a worldview to come back at you with.
DT: No, he couldn’t. It infuriated him. I’d say to him, Steve, these computers you’re inventing here, they’re destroying the world! They are devices of acceleration, they move at the speed of light, they speed up and amplify production and economic activity. I used to really get on his case about it. He once made this gigantic ad campaign about twenty five years ago, where they had “1001 things that the personal computer could do”, and of course all the things were great, you couldn’t argue with any of them. But they only added up to about 5 per cent of what the bloody personal computer actually did. The other 95 per cent he left out, and that was the massive acceleration in the conversion of nature to human culture. Oceans, healthy water, soil, healthy atmosphere and forests: those five major components of life were all being converted that much faster – five times faster, ten times faster, a hundred times faster – because of the pace of computers amplifying economic activity. I’d say don’t give me all this shit about all the wonderful things your machines do, that’s just the cherry on top of this shit cake!