We will have to wait till January to read the English translation of “Slow Down,” a runaway bestseller out of Japan by Kohei Saito, but I’m not sure we can wait that long for a new manifesto.
We’ve got to slow down now or else we won’t have the choice.
Our planet, a living thing, has got a serious infection. And it’s looking increasingly likely that a devastating fever of heat, fire, and drought will be the medicine to cure it.
I love humanity too much to say it deserves this fate, but I can’t say the same for the industrial machine that got us here.
It does crazy, thoughtless things that make zero sense.
It destroys prime agricultural bread baskets with a $16 billion dam and then proposes using half the power to mine cryptocurrency, a complete parasitic waste.
No sane person would do that. But a completely insane system would.
It would also tell us hand fallers and five-axle logging trucks and hand-stacked 2x6 off the green chain just aren’t good enough for us anymore. Humanity has to be displaced with heavy iron and computerized supermills, all so the abstract zeros can add up in someone’s bank account a little quicker.
Now the industrial forestry machine gobbles up the same amount of wood, with about half the work force, and so the logic is that we create more machines to avoid economic ruin. So we are pummelled with proposals for hydrogen plants, plastic plants, natural gas pipelines, cryptocurrency operations, and the list goes on.
Had we maintained our rattle trap old mills, none of this would have been necessary.
Lewis Mumford kind of wrote about all this decades ago. He called this prison a “megamachine,” a technological, economic and bureaucratic trap that grinds up humanity for no real human reason whatsoever other than to stroke our collective egos with some kind of symbol of its greatness. It started with the pyramids in Egypt, carried on with the race for the moon, and now, well, I don’t think we’re so sure.
Our excess productivity, incessantly squeezed out of us by a duplicitous, numbers-obsessed bureaucracy devoid of any ethical criteria, goes not to great feats of civil engineering anymore but to the billionaire class, their yachts, their privatized spaceships, and their obscene wealth.
Lurking somewhere in the background is the understanding we are all biological creatures that depend on biological systems and a few inches of well-watered topsoil for our ultimate survival.
It’s easy to forget that with all the modern distractions and plastic-wrapped food that shows up at your doorstep in the blink of an eye, but if “Slow Down” is the book I think it is, it could help us remember otherwise.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
