Listening to a podcast conversation between Derrick Jensen and James Van Lanen (anthropologist), I was intrigued by their discussion of the “five worst” inventions. This would get anyone’s gears turning. But I was particularly energized because in the day or two before, I had considered for the first time the terrible power of one invention that I had previously never questioned as being anything but fantastic. I employ it constantly…right now, in fact.

I was excited enough to contact Derrick about this “dark horse” candidate to get his reaction, and he, too, was energized enough to suggest our own conversation on the matter, which has since been recorded and is available on Resistance Radio.

In this post paralleling the podcast conversation, I define what makes an invention bad in my view, preface with a trigger warning about inevitable attachments and fondness, and offer a few provisional “worst” inventions before getting to five that are less ambiguous in my book.

What is Bad?

Before placing an invention on the “worst” list, we need to know something about the driving criterion. For me, it’s simple. The sixth mass extinction that appears to be underway is bad. Maybe it fully develops, and maybe it doesn’t. I would rather it not.

Yes, nature is what it is. Mass extinctions happen sometimes. Humans and our inventions are every bit as much a part of nature as rocks are. Total nuclear annihilation, should that happen, would still be part of nature. But that doesn’t mean we shrug and exempt any part of nature—therefore everything—from the possibility of being considered as good or bad. Values emerge in a living (social) species for a reason, and I—among many others—value biodiversity and the living world. I think its ignorant destruction would be a terrible outcome.

Given my bias toward my own species, I would hope that humans are still present on Earth in 100,000 years. I would also hope that the newt and raccoon and quail and platypus and dragonfly all persist in a biodiverse world, rather than be extinguished by human activity.

Thus, any invention that—on balance—facilitates a mass extinction is something I call bad, in this framing. I especially focus on inventions that greatly amplify biodiversity loss, or inventions without which a mass extinction is unlikely to “succeed.” In other words, I want to focus on the central players. I’ll surely miss important ones (arbitrarily limiting to five, after all), but feel free to add to the list—which quickly gets quite long (while inventions that promote biodiversity and restore ecological balance are rather thin on the ground, yeah?).

Trigger Warning

We—embedded in and raised by modernity—only know one way of living, and it’s a way of ultimate failure. Nonetheless, we have fondness and attachment to many of modernity’s trappings. Even those who agree with the diagnosis that modernity is a cancer that we would prefer be rooted out will have warm fuzzy feelings about some of the items on this list. I know I do.

In this world of living color, few elements are pure good or pure evil (not black and white). Every item on the list offers good things: attributes or outcomes we treasure. Defense of the items on my “worst” list could offer boatloads of “good” attributes. I don’t deny that.

What I am interested in is the net effect vis-à-vis mass extinction. The fallacy is pretending that the good and bad are separable. Strumming a common chord in my posts, what a brain decides in a few seconds of consideration is of no consequence set against the actual, fully-contextualized, interactive reality spanning millennia. Our brains are very good at picking something out and isolating it, but doing so fabricates an internal (partial) “reality” having only tenuous connection to the actual situation.

Provisional Entries

I don’t myself subscribe to these first two provisional entries to the “worst-of” list, but include them for completeness. They might very well belong, and no one can truly be certain.

Humans

Recall that the question is: what inventions lead to a mass extinction? Well, humans—as an invention of evolution complete with intelligence, language, and opposable thumbs—are clearly to blame for the current trajectory. Without humans, this particular threat of mass extinction would not be alive right now.

I’m not a fan of this entry because while humans are clearly capable of initiating a sixth mass extinction, we have three-million years of evidence that they are also capable of not doing so. That’s not nothing. Some people still live on the planet today in a way that does not appear to have mass-extinction potential, actively resisting the allure of modernity. I happen to be persuaded by arguments of determinism and inevitability (opposite counterfactual fantasizing), but by the exact same token it is rather possible that humans are “destined” (by whatever foggy path) to live the next million years in something more closely resembling the bulk of the previous million than the anomalous period of modernity.

Humans living in pre-modernity ways did cause some animals to go extinct—largely as a result of migration as species lacking any co-evolutionary history were brought into contact. This by itself puts a red flag on humans. But even a few hundred species out of ten million does not come close to mass-extinction levels (in which a majority of species disappear).

As alluded to above, it is possible that humans were bound to develop the inventions below that do lead to mass extinction, but the jury is out whether it fully “succeeds” in the end. In any case, the “bad” quality of humans in this regard has more to do with a recent cultural turn than something intrinsic to our DNA. Humans are not modernity. But we made modernity. The jury will continue to argue on this point until the cows stop coming home.

Fire

Like the previous entry, control of fire may or may not mark a distinct-enough departure from the rest of the Community of Life to spell inevitable runaway capability. While fire occurs naturally, and some life is critically-dependent on its periodic appearance, routine use and control introduces a whole new context.

Fire expanded the human menu (ecology takes note), allowed flushing of game in a radically new trick that came on too quickly for evolutionary adaptation, extended the range of humans to colder climates, and was used to clear land of brush very quickly (in regions that may have gone centuries without fire otherwise).

None of this is to say that control of fire per se necessitates a mass extinction. Having used it for 1.5 to 2 million years, this technology has a hell of a lot more track record in terms of demonstrated compatibility than items on the “real” list to follow.

Again, the jury is still out. Having over a million years of proven performance may let it off the hook. But maybe fire made the list below inevitable as a gateway drug. If modernity is a one-time, fling, though—owing to rapid exhaustion of one-time non-renewable resources—maybe fire can be used “safely” in the future without causing mass extinction. The question becomes whether fire is “bad” in-and-of itself. We can’t know for sure. Thus, the provisional status, here.

The Worst Five

I will present these in chronological order, as each built on the previous, and each accelerated the ill effects.

1. Agriculture

What Daniel Quinn calls Totalitarian Agriculture had its beginnings about 10,000 years ago. That’s only 0.3% of human history on Earth, and 3% of Homo sapiens’ time. It’s a new development that radically changed human relation to plants, animals, and our perceived place in the world. No longer seeing ourselves as integrated members of a Community of Life, we sought mastery and control over an ever-increasing zone of influence. Human supremacy was an almost-guaranteed outcome. Once a master race is convinced that the world belongs to them, watch out!

The items downstream from this one all flow from what agriculture enabled (see River post). It is the “original sin” that some have recognized in the story of Genesis.

Does agriculture provide some perks we like? Absolutely? Can we have these perks without all the negative consequences? What evidence possibly suggests so? Being able to separate likes from dislikes in your head has little to do with a much messier reality.

I’ll return to some exploration of agriculture’s role and consequences at the end of the post.

2. Writing

The first records of cuneiform writing show up in Mesopotamia around 3500–3000 BCE (just over 5,000 years ago). Writing takes our spare mental capacity (not as impressive as we imagine) and allows us to preserve thoughts in an “external,” non-volatile super-brain repository, so that we might array in front of us a much larger set of durable fragments than is possible to hold at once in our meat-brains. We thus amplify greatly this spare capacity and accumulate knowledge (often for purposes of control/power) in ways that were impossible before. This item was the “new” epiphany that rippled into the associated podcast conversation, also elaborated in the posts on Spare Capacity and The Writing on the Wall.

Writing was first used for accounting in the context of grain agriculture (thus the direct heritage to the previous entry). Not too long after this, written law became a thing. Humans began to rely more heavily on these novel, artificial, and rigid structures (strictures?) than on the actual world—and Community of Life—they lived within. A paper deed asserted ownership over land and everything in it, as if even possible.

Do good things come from written language? For sure! And I utterly depend on it. But in a sense, what we like most about it is what makes it extinction-level-dangerous: it amplifies human mental capacity tremendously, setting us well outside the evolved Community of Life and giving us super-powers. The central question becomes: would we have been capable of fostering a sixth mass extinction without written language? It’s possible that the expansionist, controlling, separatist practice of agriculture would have been sufficient on its own, in due time, but written language doubtless enhanced our effectiveness and speed at getting “the job” done. The complementary question is: can one have writing without triggering mass extinction? It would not appear so.

3. Money

Money came quickly on the heels of written language, as both relate to accounting. The “fictional” construct of money had the ruinous effect of objectifying—commodifying—pretty-much everything. In the hands of human supremacists (perhaps a pre-requisite for the invention of money in the first place), this objectification of living beings and the land supporting them all gets ugly. Decisions are based primarily on money. Since valuation is necessarily narrow and short-sighted, decisions become unsurprisingly narrow and short-sighted—using dollars as a deeply-flawed crutch for more complete ways of evaluating worth.

Today, financial considerations dictate many (or all) of our biggest decisions in life. No one is faulted for making their hardest choices primarily in economic terms. Countries look to GDP as the defining metric of how well they are doing. Most devastatingly, people make money by exploiting and destroying healthy ecological communities. Virtually every economic gain is connected to ecological loss somewhere. Money is at war with life, and usually wins—because we place such tremendous value on money and its “optionality.”

Would the sixth mass extinction happen without money? Maybe, but not as assuredly. Most importantly, money is likely as much a symptom as it is a cause of objectification. A culture thoroughly opposed to objectifying their ecological community would never dream of instituting a monetary system. Agriculture (and writing) set the attitudes that ushered in money.

4. Science

I know: Oof. With the possible exception of writing, this one hurts the most. Humans—as keen observers—have always been natural scientists, but the powerful methodology of modern science really emerged about 400 years ago, and therefore is frighteningly recent. Science extended our mastery and control by orders-of-magnitude over what agriculture and writing had done. It was a total game-changer. The ecological record can attest.

Science exposed many of nature’s subtle and hidden secrets, opening up new lines of manipulation, control, and exploitation (lubricated by money/profit). Techno-apologists are fond of saying that science/technology is neutral, which is basically the same argument that guns (or nuclear weapons) don’t kill people. Such logical statements can be true in an isolated mental playpen, but in practice…in the real world brimming with context…it is very far from true.

This relates to a favorite point about intent. If a man rushes at you with a hammer, intent to do you harm, the technology is of secondary importance to the intent. Science in the hands of a human-supremacist, ecologically-ignorant, egregiously-objectifying culture is a devastating implement.

While seeming to support the “neutral” argument for the technology itself, the actual, realized technologies of modernity are oozing the intent in which they are marinated. Importantly, science is pursued and developed completely within this context. Most science is performed with the intent of improved manipulation and control for human (only) benefit. Most science is not aimed at tearing down modernity and the science that enables it. Far from being neutral, its team is abundantly clear. A solar panel is not aiming to save the planet, but to power modernity’s engine. Ask yourself: “what science/technology does the Community of Life applaud?” A truly neutral balance would produce plenty instances of applause.

Has science produced some good outcomes? Absolutely. Where’s the net effect, though? So far, it’s been a tool of ecological destruction, on balance. Forgetting or ignoring that damning fact is a fatal mental flaw.

5. Energy

The universe has always operated on energy, so here I mean “mechanical” energy of modernity rather than the energy crucial for all life: I speak of fossil fuels, dams, wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, etc.

Like science, these energy technologies have made many human lives comfortable (temporarily, while contributing directly to misery and death of many species, including many humans). But within the entire Community of Life the effect has been catastrophic. Not only does the acquisition of the energy (and/or the materials required to capture energy flows) do direct damage, but the purposes to which we apply energy are even worse. It is access to substantial energy that drives rapacious global material extraction, transport, manufacturing, pollution, disposal, and all the ills of modernity. Pull the plug and much less harm to the natural world would ensue. The sixth mass extinction becomes much harder (though not at all impossible) without the enormous leverage supplied by industrial energy.

Matter of Opinion

I offered two provisional and five explicit “worst” inventions, in chronological order. Where one draws the line in terms of mass extinction will vary by individual, and no one is either demonstrably right or wrong. Some would say that all these are fine, and biodiversity loss is overblown: talk of mass extinction is hyperbolic. Maybe, but I ask such folks to consider timescales, and look at this nosedive plot. Is there any reason other than wishful thinking (or short-term extrapolation) to believe we could continue recent practices for timescales that stretch centuries or millennia?

Others may sense that humans—the fire apes—are fundamentally incompatible with ecology, and may be correct. I myself take millions of years of evidence seriously: the experiment ran for a long time without calamity. Was a calamitous modernity inevitable? That’s a somewhat separate matter, when it’s the future we’re talking about. The real question is whether all future modes of human living are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability, and I very much doubt we can make such a strongly definitive statement.

I put my own line at (totalitarian) agriculture. This is so novel on the planet and ruins land in such a flash (thousands of years or far shorter) that it strikes me as an unambiguous ecological loser. It also results in dangerous mental shifts and a sense of separation from the Community of Life. These are untested waters. Would agriculture alone (somehow without the later developments) lead all the way to a mass extinction? Possibly: that’s when a runaway positive feedback process started. As detailed elsewhere, the rate of human population growth initiated by agriculture would still put us at 8 billion people within another 10,000 years—which is ecologically short—and may well be all that is needed to trigger ecological collapse. We don’t know.

As I keep hinting, another consideration is whether the other items on the list essentially must follow the first. Could one grow the agricultural enterprise for 10,000 years without developing writing, money, science, and mechanical energy? It’s a tough counterfactual to argue. The same can be said for fire or the human animal, which is why I put them on the list. Maybe this had to happen. Again, I take millions of years of it not happening as a reason to be more circumspect on these two, especially when considering the viability of a post-modernity phase involving humans (and fire).

Microcosm

Maybe shrinking to an ecological microcosm is a useful way to evaluate items on this list. Start with a small hunter-gatherer tribe in the rain forest, who would ordinarily follow ancient cultural practices (using fire) and live in approximate ecological balance as long-standing members of the local Community of Life, essentially indefinitely.

Now give them the control of agriculture: no longer dependent on or caring explicitly about the forest community, except insofar as to eliminate opportunistic forest-dwelling thieves of “their” food. Surplus, storage, and increased land “productivity” allow the tribe to swell in numbers. The tribe now replaces biodiverse forest with planted mono-crops and has a radically different relationship to the forest: no longer appreciating its gifts but bemoaning its resistance to conquest. How will the forest ever survive this expansionist force operating outside of ecological norms? The forest and its denizens lack the evolutionary tools to keep agriculture at bay.

Add written language and the tribe now has even more dangerous mental capacity to manipulate and control. Will the forest fare better, or accelerate its march to oblivion?

Add money, formalizing an existing attitude of objectification and moving decision making farther from asking what works for the Community. How will that go for the forest health?

Bring in science, so that the tools of control and exploitation carry tremendous power. The forest already stood little chance, and now seems utterly hopeless.

Arm this band with weapons of mass energy and forests are leveled with impressive speed and efficiency. This day was already coming, but now far sooner than anyone anticipated.

It’s like giving an adolescent ever-increasing powers and expecting them not to be put to use.

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