/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14698493]

Do you agree with bookchin? Is he superior to kaczynski? With which of his books should I start

[Anonymous No.14698920]

Kaczynski's just a meme

[Anonymous No.14699421]

Bump

[Anonymous No.14700202]

>>14698493
>Here, I shall try to show how the new technology can be used ecologically to crystallize man's sense of dependence upon the natural world into the human experience, we can contribute to the achievement of human wholeness.

> In short, augermatic-feeding can be placed in the service of the most abusive kind of commercial exploitation or the most sensitive applications of ecological principles.

>This holds true for the most of the farm machines that have been designed (in many cases, simply redesigned to achieve greater versatility) in recent years. The modern tractor, for example, is a work of superb mechanical ingenuity. Garden-type models can be used with extraordinary flexibility for a large variety of tasks; the light and extremely manageable, they can follow the countour of the most exacting terrain without damaging the land.

>Barns, feed pens, and storage units have been totally revolutionized by augers, conveyor belts, air-tight silos, automatic manure removers, climate-control devices, ad infintium. Crops are mechanically shelled, washed, counted, preserved by freezing or canning, packaged, and crated. The construction of concrete-lined irrigation ditches is reduced to a simple mechanical operation that can be preformed by one or two excavating machines. Terrain with poor drainage or subsoil can be improved by earth-moving equipment and by tillage devices that can penetrate well beyond the true soil.

In short, no, I do not agree with Bookchin; his ideas tend toward the sort of radical change that I usually emphasize with, and though its obvious that his philosophy tends toward a system of ecological defense, he continues to prop up these systems of rampantly produced technology, in a world where the resource extraction technology used to produce these systems is responsible for "half of all carbon emissions" and "80% biodiversity loss". He frowns upon deep ecology, seemingly upon the idea that nature should be allowed to regulate itself with man in his natural place, and in terms of the ecology of technology says this:

[Anonymous No.14700248]

>>14700202
>When we reach the next technological horizon it may be possible to extract highly difused or diluted minerals and chemicals from the earth, gaseous waste products, and the sea. Many of our most valuable metals, for example, are actually very common, but they exist in diffused or trace amounts...About five per cent of the earth's crust is made of iron. How to extract these resources? The problem has been solved, in principle at least, by the very analytical techniques chemists use to ditect them. As the highly gifted chemist Jacob Rosin argues, if they can be detected in the laborator, there is every reason to hope that eventually they will be extracted on a suffieiently large scale to be used by decentralized communities.

>For more than half a century, already, most of the world's commercial nitrogen has been extracted from the atmosphere. Magnesium, cholorine, bromine, and caustic soda are acquired from sea water; sulfur from calcium sulphate and industrial wastes. Large amounts of industrially useful hydrogen could be collected as a large by-product of the elctrolysis of brine, but normally it is burned or released in the air by chlorine-producing plants. Carbon could be rescued in enormous quantities from smoke and used economically (actually, the element is comparatively rare in nature), but it is dissipated together with other gaseous compounds in the atmosphere. The problem industrial chemists face in extracting valuable elements and compounds rom the sea and ordinary rock, centres around sources of cheap energy. Two methods-ion exchange and chromatography-exist and, if further perfected for industrial uses, could be used to select or separate the desired resources from solutions; but the amount of energy involved to use these methods would be very costly to any society in terms of real wealth. Unless there is an unexpected breakthrough in extractive techniques, there is little likelihood that conventional sources of energy-fossil fuels such as coal and oil-will be used to solve the problem.

These, in an essay entitled "Towards A Liberatory Technology", are frankly ridiculous. To me, it seems as though they continue the dependence of man upon dangerous, climate-breaking methods of building and enhancing technology, armed only with the optimistic preconceptions found in "could be used", "if further perfected", "could be rescued", and so and so forth. He is too idealistic on the matter; this is not even getting into the primitivism vs communitarian distinction, one where I personally value the former, as I prize autonomy above all else and primitivism allows, enables, and teaches freedom and self-reliance, focusing on the power to "decide with one's feet" and emphasizing voluntary connection over forced wrangling. Bookchin himself seems to believe in administrative communalism, an obvious departure from the aforementioned.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.14700279]

I’ve started with The Next Revolution and it’s pretty good. Will definitely read Ecology of Freedom next