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The
techno-narcissism flowed like a melted Slurpee this torrid weekend at the
annual Aspen Environment Forum where scores of scientists, media figures,
authors, professors, and policy wonks convened to settle the world's hash -
at least in theory. The trouble started Friday night when Stewart Brand, 74,
impresario of The Whole Earth Catalog, and an economic cornucopian
these days, exhorted the skittish audience to show a little goshdarn optimistic spirit about the future instead of
just griping about climate change, peak oil, imploding global finance, and a
few other vexing trifles. The audience's response was to not line up and buy
a signed copy of his latest book.
The
Aspen Institute is supported by a bizarre array of corporate donors and
individuals ranging from the secretive, devious, extreme right-wing Koch
brothers to Goldman Sachs, to Michael Eisner to Duke Energy. The mission of
the Environment Forum is divided about equally between publicizing the
gathering horrors of climate change and promoting an ethos of wishful
thinking that all the problems of mankind will yield to technological rescue
remedies.
It's
a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of
crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling
and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly
fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension
that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and
its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia
can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly
impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White
House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every
other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might
be considered valuable.
Another
strange notion permeating this forum - and probably the entire Progressive
intellectual class in America - is the belief that if you can measure things,
you can control them. Thus, an endless regurgitation of statistics, which,
after a while, resembles liturgical incantation and, pretty much, serves the
same purpose, namely an obsessive-compulsive ritual aimed at calming the
nerves. If it was, after all, techno-magic that led us to poison the oceans
and upset the calibration of the earth's atmosphere, then maybe fresh
applications of magic can make all those bad things go away, fighting fire
with fire, shall we say.
Speaking
of fire, there was one burning up the valley from Aspen, which made the whole
town smell like barbeque Sunday morning while six other wildfires blazed all
around Colorado. One of them, the High Park fire, has been going for two
weeks and burned over 82,000 acres so far with no sign of petering out.
Temperatures in the high Rockies soared over 90 degrees all weekend and there
was practically no snowpack left up in the elevations - a spooky development
this early in the summer.
The
odor of empire's end also hangs over Aspen these days, despite the sheen of
spectacular wealth visible around the little town and the emanations of
glowing health in the buff and tanned population of exercise freaks.
Everything that makes the town tick is in danger of unraveling. The ski
industry can't possibly survive the eventual effects of peak oil, and the
collapse of commercial aviation will put an end to the conveyer belt of
tourists. The villas of the Wall Street and Hollywood kingpins that decorate
the ridge lines above town give off a desolate vibe of futility, as if the
foregone disaster of a global banking meltdown had already sent their
once-proud owners to bankruptcy Palookaville. The
place gave off eerie intimations of a ghost town in-the-making.
Anyway
you looked at America from the vantage of Aspen, Colorado, everything we do
and stand for looks out of kilter. Our intellectual resources look spent, our
prospects seem grim, and our assets are going up in flames. Maybe there's
some consolation that we're not Europe. That said, I
have never been to a conference in all my vagabond years where so many
magnificent buffet spreads and overflowing gorgeous snack tables were laid in
never-ending succession. It almost persuaded me that the old Right Reverend
Malthus was too Malthusian.
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