Events in Japan have, unsurprisingly, re-ignited the nuclear debate. Alongside genetic modification and perhaps nanotechnology, it is among our most controversial and high-stakes technologies.
As I’ve read the different sides in the papers this week I’ve been reminded of E F Schumacher’s critique of industrial society. He identified four trends at work, and they underpinned his philosophy and gave him the title of his book, Small is Beautiful. Summed up, those four trends are these:
1. Giantism – everything gets bigger and bigger. This is praised under the logic of economies of scale, but it also results in monopoly and centralisation. Banks that are too big to fail spring to mind. Nuclear power plants epitomise the problem, as vast structures that everybody needs and nobody wants.
2. Complexity – nothing is simple any more, and while much technology is liberating, too much of it is oppressive and de-skilling. I’m thinking of the little desktop computer that has been designed to only open with special tools, so that only an expert can fix it or upgrade it. At the scale of a nuclear power plant, the dangers of something going wrong become absurd.
3. Expense – Following on from the above, there is a tendency for things to become “so capital-costly that you have to be already rich and powerful before you can really do anything.” Big, complex systems leave no space for smaller, simpler producers, and they are excluded.
4. Violence – Schumacher suggested we “widen the concept of violence beyond human warfare”, and include the environment and social wellbeing as well. Loss of community and of place would be included, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. Nuclear power is a visceral example.
If the march of industrial society is towards ever-bigger size, complexity, capital intensity, and violence – “then it would seem to follow” says Schumacher, “that the cure must be sought in the opposite direction.”
The Earthbound Report 