The End Of The First Industrial Age

          Rube Goldberg: remember to mail your wife's letter.

by Richard B. Simon


The collapse of the global finance system is scary -- but it is also very exciting. We are clearly at the end of the First Industrial Age, and at the threshhold of a new era. The choices we make now as a civilization will determine the fate of humanity.

The First Industrial Age ramped up slowly from the late 1700s, and began to peak in the wake of World War II, after nations that had industrialized heavily, and quickly, to kill each other's citizens began to put all that steel, oil, and grit to other uses -- chiefly the mass manufacture of products that were positive in their use value, and destructive in the impact of their manufacture and use on the soil, water, and air that plants and animals such as humans need to survive.

Unfortunately, the whole system ran as if it were untethered from the laws of physics and nature, a house of cards built atop a giant pillar of air, a Rube Goldberg machine that is also a Moebius strip and an Escher drawing. A complex impossibility.

Under the corporate model of the late twentieth century, the American economy became a system built not on making a quality product and selling it, but on making lousy products as cheaply as possible, and spending money instead on marketing that fools customers into thinking that substandard goods are worth purchasing.

It became a system based on planned obsolescence, so that no matter what you buy or sell, it breaks or becomes obsolete within a year or two, leading to the purchase of a new one -- generating an endless flow of millions of tons of natural resources like iron, wood, and oil into landfills, in the form of obsolete and broken products, furniture, wrappers, steel and plastic bits.

The purpose of McDonald's is not to sell great hamburgers, and the purpose of GM is not to make great cars.

These are corporations -- and the entire purpose of any corporation is to make a bigger profit in this quarter than in the previous quarter, so the stock price ticks up. That sole factor drives all decision-making in the corporate system that has dominated our economy since World War II. Point that out to any banker, anyone in the world of finance, anyone who works within the corporate system, and she or he will shrug her or his shoulders and admit, if sheepishly, that you're right.

That was even before the collapse.

This is a wagon pulled by a horse, where the wagon -- the corporate and financial systems -- gets bigger and more unwieldy and more full of people in a big hurry to get somewhere (the state of Great Wealth), who all ignore the signs that the horse can't possibly pull all that weight, because everyone in the wagon is worried that if they don't just keep going -- and fast -- everyone else in the wagon will get to their destination first.

Like the real estate developer in Seattle on the News Hour yesterday, complaining bitterly that new laws governing how new developments deal with toxic storm runoff into Puget Sound are unfair to his profit margin, because he has to compete on the market against houses that were built a hundred years ago.

Guess what? The horse just died.

The singer and guitarist David Crosby explained it well on an episode of Frontline about the collapse of the recording industry. He said that the worst thing that happened to the music industry was that the record companies, which had been founded and run by people who loved music, were bought up by "diversifying" corporations, which loved only profit. Suddenly, somebody in a suit who knows nothing about music walks into the studio where the Rolling Stones are working on their new album, and says, hey, Mick, you have to hurry it up with that album -- because we need to show the sales revenue on this quarter's earning reports.

The result is a lousy Stones album.

And that's how the whole system now works.

It was doomed for failure.

Think about it: we have an economic system in which the people who run it -- the people running companies and governments, our government -- reached the conclusion that we can not act to save life on earth from catastrophic damage to the climate system caused by our industry, because it would be just too expensive. And the rest of us have gone along, as if being dead were somehow more acceptable than being inconvenienced.

And we are talking about our own extinction as a species here, and failing to act, because it might cost a couple of points in the annual report.

It's literally the same as not getting treatment for cancer because if you take the days off from work, it will be more difficult to afford that big-screen t.v.

It is utter madness.

Raised in the warm light cast by the victory over fascism, the baby boomers grew up believing that America simply could do no wrong. There was nothing Americans could not do -- including consuming natural resources like a plague of locusts -- and still come out on top, no problem.

But now the desire for that level of consumption has spread to the rest of the world, now -- largely as the result of corporations seeking to "open new markets" -- and as a species, we are in serious, serious trouble.

India and China, with over a billion people each, are pushing hard to industrialize in the way that Europe and the US industrialized after World War II. That's good, because anything that lifts massive numbers of people out of dire poverty bolsters stability.

But the destruction of natural resources by that industrialization threatens life on earth.

The burning of fossil fuels turns the air we breathe into a garbage can; alters the natural processes by which the heat-trapping element carbon is removed from the atmosphere and buried within rocks, seashells, and soil; and therefore has led to a runaway greenhouse effect, in which we are careening toward a heat age more extreme than the last Ice Age, in which much of North America was buried under a mile of ice.

So, thank God that this untenable system is collapsing.

Thank God that the car in which you were asphyxiating yourself may have run out of gas before the garage ran out of oxygen.

This was an unsustainable system, built on dreams and idealism and natural resources, which outgrew -- and continues to outpace -- the planet's ability to refresh the natural resources that are its sole building blocks.

It was an unsustainable system, built on using phony resources -- imaginary borrowed money -- to build banks and insurance companies whose sole purpose was to move that imaginary money around from imaginary scheme to imaginary scheme. And we built entire brick-and-mortar economies on top of that imaginary financial infrastructure. We built our homes on top of it, our routines, and our lives.

And because we have built atop an unsustainable foundation, the house is crumbling. The hedge fund managers who thrived on the phony schemes are converting their investments to gold and cash. Analysts decry the very death of American capitalism. And the Russians chuckle with schadenfreude at the fall of Wall Street, just as Americans reveled in the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

And so here we stand, at the precipice of whatever comes next, hoping it's not freefall into a post apocalyptic tribalistic nightmare world.

It's not.

The financial collapse presents us with an unfathomable opportunity to rebuild the economic-industrial system that we need right now, to retool our entire system to thrive in the next century.

All the need, and all the opportunity, is in building the new sustainable economy -- the ultra-high-tech sustainable infrastructure of the utopia of our wildest dreams. Cars that run on air, on water, that run on pure electricity and extract electrons from hydrogen gas electrolyzed from sea water, using electricity generated by sunshine, wind, and the rolling of the tides. Waste streams that channel used resources back into the manufacturing cycle, so that we need extract very little from the overtapped earth.

We must convert to sustainable, organic agricultural production that does not destroy the ability of soil and water to continue to nourish life on earth by dumping pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and petrochemical fertilizers into the wellspring of our economy as if it were a bottomless garbage can. We must shift to local production of agriculture that nourishes local economies, instead of far-off bankers who bet that the margin on an apple grown in China and shipped on 50 tons of dirty bunker oil across an ocean choked by industrial runoff is one quarter of one percent higher than on one grown in your community, and driven five miles to the farmer's market across the street from your place of employ.

We must move to a sustainable-harvest method of fishing that does not cause the extinction of one fish species at a time, as we move down and down the food chain until we're eating jellyfish and plankton instead of swordfish and prawns. Today, we farm fish like chickens, in pens in ocean fjords, and feed them agricultural waste and antibiotics to prevent the infections that feeding animals agricultural waste causes. And we therefore spread disease to the wild fish on which the health of the ocean ecosystem survives.

We are killing ourselves with blindness, ignorance, laziness and greed.

Thank God that system is collapsing.

We must now build the ultra-high-tech, intelligent industrial economic system that underpins the Age of Sustainability.

It must be a new economic system that values the actual worth of not only of goods and services and the labor of humans, but of the natural resources on which it relies. It must incorporate the economic value of clean water and air, and productive, unpoisoned organic soil -- and also incorporate the cost of damaging those root resources on which the entire global economy is pinned. The price of burning a lump of coal or a gallon of gas must include the cost of the damage to the planet's atmosphere.

Only a sustainable economic system can run forever, turning resources into wealth at a steady, organic, sustainable rate, not at an artifical rate of growth that distorts the entire system, so that we are satisfied with unsatisfactory products, because even as they corrode the natural foundation on which our civilization is built, they remain illusorily, surficially inexpensive; and we bankrupt our planet's ability to sustain life in the name of short-term convenience.

Go ahead and taste-test an organic apple against one you buy in a corporate megabox store. Now do it with a tomato, a peach, a watermelon, a few leaves of spinach, a porterhouse steak. The ones you get at Costco, at Wal-Mart? They're huge. They're shiny. They're cheap. And they taste like water. The steak you bought at Foodtown or Safeway came from a steer fed industrial hormones so that it grows up faster, and can get to market faster, and turn a profit faster. Those hormones are why your children are obese and have premature breasts, and are at risk for cancer. It's why your health care costs are high, why you can't afford the bills or the insurance -- and it's why the health care system, too, is collapsing.

Now taste the organic apple, the range-fed steak. It's the most flavorful bite you've had in years. And while the price of a supermarket steak shipped from an industrial slaughterhouse in Idaho (that uses illegal immigrant labor to keep the price of production low and the margin wide, and displaces local labor to the unemployment rolls) is rising because of the price of gas, the price of the steak raised naturally at a farm within fifty miles of your house is staying the same.

That's the difference between the product of the late First Industrial Age, and the produce of the Age of Sustainability.

We've been led for years to believe that common-sense solutions like local, sustainable agriculture were the result of some sort of communist scheme to destroy the American economy, and that industry, unleashed from any sort of rules or any responsibility to society at large, was the answer to all our problems.

And look how it has turned out: it was Industry Unleashed that destroyed the American economy, and led to the communistic nationalization of the financial sector.

On the other hand, the hippie food co-ops are still in business. The price of a local-grown organic apple is roughly the same today as it was a year ago, as two years ago, as three years ago. That's because it doesn't depend on fertilizers that come from oil, or on long-distance shipping that relies on oil.

We have no time for small potatoes. We need big ideas, and real leadership that can tap the inexhaustible drive of humanity to better itself. We have no time for small-minded leaders -- in the public or the private sectors -- who put short-term political or financial gain over the long-term survival of the human species.

America needs to take the will and drive that it exhibited during the fight against fascism in World War II, when a backwater agricultural economy transformed itself into an industrial superpower that was the envy of the world, a magnet for talent, and a generator of innovation, and pour it into building the New Sustainable Economy.

The challenge is just as great, and the threat of inaction is greater. Even under the miserable rule of the fascists, the human race would have survived. That's not necessarily the case with the runaway greenhouse.

We can do this. We've done it before.

We have no choice but to succeed.