Energy
Modern living took an enormous amount of energy, both for the individual who was plugging in, using and servicing machines, and from the earth that provided the energy to make the machines go. For the individual, the machines provided convenience and opportunities such as greatly increased movement. They also intensified and accelerated the moments of life. The slow, abiding engagement that a hand demonstrated was very different from the instantaneous and steadily efficacious power of a machine. A hand could only make so many of anything but as part of the human body, it had its own particular energy. It worked how it worked; no two were alike. The disparity between machine time and human time created stress for human beings. Modern people were always trying to catch up and never getting there. Their fabled vacations offered a way out from that cycle. Then the millions of workers were at it again, using the earth’s energy to suit their needs, wants, desires, and compulsions.
This brilliant spectacle of heedlessness, as if the earth’s finite resources were infinite, could dazzle any onlooker. Modernity announced the thrill of each day—so Technicolor, so Dynaflow, so Interfaced, so High Fidelity, so New and Improved. To argue against that thrill, to propose some older sense of time that was both generational and geological, that spoke to the conservation of energy and resources, that wasn’t about more and better, seemed perverse and dull. In the race of each individual against each individual, there was no room or incentive to stay still. To allot a certain amount of anything to anyone and say, “That is your share. Use it accordingly” flew in the face of every restless tenet of material desire.
The freedom that underlay the great indulgence of energy—my car and, by extension, my earth—are likely to seem to later generations little more than irresponsibility. It is one thing to say that human beings do not know what they are doing here on earth. It is another to use up the earth and say that somehow science and technology will make up for the depletion of assets that took billions of years to accrue. In that sense, modern times seem a binge, a long weekend replete with smash-ups galore, occasional bursts of excitement, and an underlying uneasiness. Where the petroleum, coal or electricity came from was somehow someone else’s business. Where the spent nuclear fuel rods with their half-lives of 159,200 years were going to be stored was someone else’s business too. How the relentless exploitation of every last geological stratum was going to turn out was part of humankind’s vaunted freedom. How lucky it was for humankind to have discovered the likes of fracking.
“Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy,” wrote William Blake. The earth is the primal body. When something is removed from that body, that body is not what it was. Reason would argue that such diminution is literally immaterial. The earth’s vast resources fall under the aegis of human dominion. There is nothing in that regard to think twice about; everything can be rationalized according to the exigency of need. If however “energy is the only life,” there is everything to think about because the use of energy is the quintessence of life and the distinctions are enormous: caring and wasting are two different things and have vastly different impacts on how human beings spend their time.
Among the more frightening sides of increased energy use was the increasing irrelevance of the energy of the human body. Much like the tailings left from coal mining, human beings could be placed in various “homes” to live out their last days. They were used up and had no purpose in the efficient scheme of the society. To organize the society first around the needs of human beings from birth to death seemed impractical compared to digging deep in the earth and extracting whatever could be extracted. People found themselves in the deeply uncomfortable position of giving up on their parents and loved ones because there was nothing else to be done. The energy that might have gone into caring for them was needed elsewhere. A fluorescent light could shine day and night in the hall for those old people. That was their pitiful due. Caring was an add-on.
Modern times believed that exploitation and compassion could somehow be balanced, one for the public realm and one for the private. Any native of any colony could have explained how such an equation did not work, how use could, at the drop of a “discovery,” suborn feelings. Taking was never a form of giving, much less caring, yet to match the human body with the body of the earth was considered idle fancy. The official story was that energy lifted people out of drudgery, which meant that industrial drudgery was better than agricultural drudgery. The unbelievable amounts of energy that such factories consumed were beside the point. Modern times were always about liberation. Energy consumption stressed the collective inconsequence of using more—“fill it up.” And “fill it up” again.
To propose a story of people and the earth other than dominion was to propose a very different plane on which life might be lived. Linking the primal feeling for the spirits of the land with the sophisticated logic of advanced technology could seem something like impossible. Power was literal and figurative: political power was based on energy power, a situation to which numerous wars and regime changes testified. Energy, for all its materiality, is, as Blake understood, a spirit concern. For native people around the planet, every “resource” comes with its stories. Often the stories have warnings.
Once again, you have exposed the lie of modern human life. We’ll said, and so terribly sad.