Gautam John wrote, [on 4/22/2008 10:54 AM]:
Is a good read but it boils down to how I value my time, IMHO.
Division of labour can be a good thing, yes?
Certainly. However, part of the point Pollan's making is that some of
that choice may no longer be available (at least, not in the form it is
today) going forward.
The relevant bit:
Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first
place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant
others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve
our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to
accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you
suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and
including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure
causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger
in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it
possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon
into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.
Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters
precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our
own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no
longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or
law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs
because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more
challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t
imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers
and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids
and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.
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