1.      QUESTIONS

 

2.      *Ask him to tell us about the thinkers we read;

         a.      Paul Shepard, Theodore Roszack, Langdon Winner, Wendell Berry

 

3.      Trying to get clear on cause of problem

         a.      " Marriage of science and capitalism that has produced modern industrial civilization"

         b.       As Shepard and Rozack claimed, problem not tech but industrial tech?

                   i.       Is the problem modern industrial economy or science and tech?

         c.      Capitalism?

         d.      Or unsustainable growth

                   i.       Growth and employment. Stop economic growth but how to sustain and grow employment?

 

4.      *So if improvement of human condition not via exploitation of nature and acquisition of material goods, how is it to be achieved?

         a.      Cultural myth-- that promoted the idea of regular and eternal improvement of the human condition, largely through the exploitation of nature and the acquisition of material goods."

 

5.      Would you have us go back to the Pleistocene? Are you a primitivism?

 

6.      Appropriate technology: How do you think humans should live with tech for fulfilling and just human lives?

         a.      Your positive guide to tech use is: Only use tech in an apprenticeship to nature and to enhance bio needs

         b.      "Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines."

         c.      "Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them."

         d.      What are examples of this use?

         e.      What does it mean to be an apprentice to nature?

         f.       How is nature suppose to guide us?

7.      Are there tech solutions or aids to moving in right direction?

         a.      e.g., Can env friendly tech help

8.      Do you use computers? How can you justify this when you have called them "the devils work?"

9.      Tell us what you like about the Amish?

 

10.    Growth and employment. Stop economic growth but how to sustain and grow employment?

 

11.    Are we threatening our existence as a species or rather the quality of our lives.

12.    What is your prediction for the lives of these students and their children?

 

13.    Humanity as a whole not progressed

         a.      Can you make the case that even the rich of the world are not better off due to industrial civilization?

         b.      But what about moral progress: human rights, treatment of women, minorities, colonialism abandoned?

 

14.    Why is decentralization so important? E.g., in bio regionalism.

15.    Secession movement

         a.      Really favor secession? How hook up with your other commitments, like env, Luddism, objections to idea of progress

         b.      "The virtue of small government is that the mistakes are small as well"


 

16.     Is individual action important or effective in solving env problems? 

         a.      "We can recycle, which I do. We can be careful of our use of resources. You try to live as lightly as you can on the Earth. You try to buy local, eat local. But in totality, it’s not going to change the world ... but it’s simply the right thing to do. I don’t do it to save the world, but that it’s the right thing to do. That’s good enough."

 

17.    What was at the core of the 60s radicalism? SDS. What were objectives? Can you make the ideas powerful for these young people today?

18.    Elections don't make any difference?

         a.      Even on env?  Car mileage, tougher env of env laws, climate change rhetoric, green energy?

19.    Why don't like Bob Dylan.....


SALE'S FIVE FACETS OF A MYTH

20.    Problematic nature of progress

         a.      Progress not inevitable, but a cultural construction to support capitalism

         b.      “Cultural myth-- that promoted the idea of regular and eternal improvement of the human condition, largely through the exploitation of nature and the acquisition of material goods."

                   i.       *So if improvement of human condition not via exploitation of nature and acquisition of material goods, how is it to be achieved?

         c.      How can we take seriously the devastating env harm our economy causes and think it is headed in right direction?

         d.      Not progress when billions live in adjective poverty and only a relatively few really live comfortable lives and when the distribution of wealth is so skewed

         e.      And even those in first world supposedly leading comfortable lives suffer from "affluenza: heart disease, stress, overwork, family dysfunction, alcoholism, insecurity, anomie, psychosis, loneliness, impotence, alienation, consumerism, and coldness of heart."

21.    Car example: Deaths, injuries, life of assembly line workers, nature and towns paved over, env affects of getting and burning gas

22.    Since enlightenment "Marriage of science and capitalism that has produced modern industrial civilization"

         a.      Has it been, on the whole, better or worse for the human species? Other species? Has it brought humans more happiness than there was before? More justice? More equality? More efficiency? And if its ends have proven to be more benign than not, what of its means? At what price have its benefits been won? And are they sustainable?

         b.      The record is mixed, at best. On the plus side, there is no denying that material prosperity has increased for about a sixth of the world's humans, for some beyond the most avaricious dreams of kings and potentates of the past.

         c.      And for maybe a third of these humans longevity has been increased, along with a general improvement in health and sanitation that has allowed the expansion of human numbers by about tenfold in the last three centuries.

         d.       On the minus side, the costs have been considerable. The impact upon the earth's species and systems to provide prosperity for a billion people has been, as we have seen, devastatingly destructive -- only one additional measure of which is the fact that it has meant the permanent extinction of perhaps 500,000 species this century alone.

         e.      The impact upon the remaining five-sixths of the human species has been likewise destructive, as most of them have seen their societies colonized or displaced, their economies wrenched and shattered, and their environments transformed for the worse in the course of it, driving them into an existence of deprivation and misery that is almost certainly worse than they ever knew, however difficult their times past, before the advent of industrial society.

         f.       And even the billion whose living standards use up what is effectively 100 percent of the world's available resources each year to maintain, and who might be therefore assumed to be happy as a result, do not in fact seem to be so.

                   i.       The "misery quotient" in most countries has increased, and considerable real-world evidence (such as rising rates of mental illness, drugs, crime, divorce, and depression) argues that the results of material enrichment have not included much individual happiness.