What historians call the Golden
Age of Greece—which ran from about 500 to 300 BC—spawned
the foundational Western philosophers Plato and Aristotle; mathematicians
such as Euclid whose geometry is still taught in schools today; classical
Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose plays
are performed even now; an architecture so grand that it has been imitated
in our own time, especially in government buildings; and the practice of
democracy, a form of governance that would go into eclipse for over 2,000
years until the American and French revolutions.
What most people don't know is that the ancient Greeks who lived through
that era did not think of themselves as being in a golden age. Instead,
they thought of their society as a
much degraded version of the heroic age that preceded it, an age
described in such works as Homer's Illiad
and Odyssey
and Hesiod's Works
and Days. How utterly difficult it is for most people living
today to imagine a society whose members believed that the future would
only bring further degradation and decline perhaps until civilization
itself disappeared. History
was to them cyclical with dark and golden ages—golden ages that
start out with great vigor and hope and then grind down to dark eras that
destroy the progress of the past.
Today, most modern people think of time as linear and history as merely
a story of the gradual and now rapid rise of technological, social,
political and cultural progress. Since time is linear, the trajectory is
always forward and expected to be up. We humans will never again fall prey
to the civilization-ending mistakes of the past. Our technology has no
equal. Humans have decoupled from the limits nature previously imposed on
them. They may even soon live and thrive on other planets. And, when
limits or difficulties seem insurmountable, human ingenuity creates new
technologies to overcome those perceived limits or difficulties.
Whether our not you agree with today's linear view of perpetual progress,
that view gives us permission to create technologies that will have
consequences for people living thousands, even tens or hundreds of
thousands of years in the future.
Perhaps most consequential are nuclear technologies, both for military
and industrial purposes. If our civilization were to disappear today, who
would take care of the nuclear power plants, the fuel processing
facilities, the nuclear waste dumps, the nuclear cores of warheads, and
the myriad facilities that handle nuclear materials? Even if the
facilities mentioned were shut down and locked up, after only one
or two centuries of neglect they would almost certainly degrade to the
pointing of leaking into the environment and contaminating land, water and
air.
A rough but not entirely parallel story of such a process was outlined in
Alan Weisman's The
World Without Us. Weisman imagines that humans disappear all
at once everywhere and leave everything running. I'm imagining a gradually
declining civilization, the infrastructure of which degrades over time
from neglect resulting from the lack of resources and/or competent people to
fix it. That leads to neglected chemical factories and oil refineries and
chemical waste dumps. It leads to biological research facilities
improperly cared for containing perhaps novel viruses that when stored
properly, say, in cryogenic chambers are inert, but when released could
ravage human and animal populations.
We humans are having a hard enough time today managing the facilities
mentioned above as tons of chemical wastes are released into the
environment every day. The
record so far on the 59 so-called "level 4" biological research
facilities does not foster confidence on that front either. Nuclear
power is now being touted as the best way to address climate change and
fossil fuel depletion. Any usefulness a rapid build-out of nuclear power
plants might have for us today, however, could end up being catastrophic
for generations far in the future who must live with the results of this
experiment as its many facilities deteriorate and leak into the
environment.
For many humans alive today who have access to the latest technology,
this may seem like a distant and foolish worry. First, it if does happen,
it won't affect those of us living today. Second, our continually
advancing technology will allow us to deal with any problems before they
become big. Third—and most important—our technologically advanced
civilization will persevere and continue for centuries and even millennia
into the future. This last statement MUST turn out to be true in order to
justify morally the use of technologies today that will become extremely hazardous to humans in the future if there is no complex,
energy-intensive society with suitably trained experts to care for those
technologies.
When civilizations in the past fell, they were regional affairs. The
world was simply not connected as it is now. And, those dying civilizations weren't leaving behind vast quantities of chemical, biological and nuclear wastes and contaminates. When our civilization falls,
as Joseph Tainter, author of The
Collapse of Complex Societies, wrote, it will affect the
entire globe. That's because we are one civilization now unified by
worldwide communications, transportation, logistics, and trade and
increasingly a world culture propagated by film, television and especially
the internet.
That culture spends a significant amount of effort convincing us that
our way of life will last forever. Often this comes in the form of science
fiction such as the many Star Trek related films and television shows that depict the push-button future of a space-faring society in which
poverty and war have been eradicated—at least within the confines of the fictional United Federation of Planets.
When our civilization will fall and what comes after it are imponderable
questions. But whatever it is, the people of that next age will be
severely handicapped by all the nuclear, chemical and biological hazards
we've left for them to deal with because we thought our civilization would
last forever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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