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On Technology, Agriculture, and the Arts
Tools with a Life of Their Own
From: Peak Everything
$1.70
In assessing and understanding technology and its effects on people and nature, it is at least as important to pay attention to the energy that drives our tools as to the tools themselves and the surrounding political-ideological matrix. In short, we who have been criticizing the technological society, using the tools of historical analysis, have missed at least half the story we are attempting to weave when we fail to notice the energetic evolution of tools. This chapter is a brief attempt to make up for these oversights. It will also discuss why the impending peak in global oil production will pull the plug on the kind of “progress” we have come to expect, providing an historic opportunity to reshape humanity’s relations with technology and with nature.
Contributors
Richard Heinberg
Richard Heinberg is the author of eleven previous books including The Party's Over, Powerdown, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. Heinberg has given hundreds of lectures on our energy future to audiences around the world. He has been published in Nature and other journals, and has been featured in many television and theatrical documentaries.
