Technological Nature: How Deep Can We Go? Response to Review of Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life

Abstract

324 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 22 No. 1 (Spring 2012) ISSN: 1546-2250 Technological Nature: How Deep Can We Go? Response to Review of Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life Peter H. Jr. Kahn University of Washington Citation: Kahn, Peter H. Jr.. (2012). "Technological Nature: How Deep Can We Go? Response to Review of Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life." Children, Youth and Environments 22 (1). I appreciate the reviewer’s positive stance on technology. I, too, am keen on it. All of us are, for we are a technological species. For tens of thousands of years a technological mind has been adaptive, and selected for in human evolution. I develop this point extensively in Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (2011, e.g., chapter 3). I write of the boon of the printing press, telephones, eyeglasses, refrigerators, espresso machines, medical technologies that keep our babies from dying, and that this “list could go on for many pages” (32). I write: “Perhaps my point is obvious to the reader, but I say it anyway, to be clear, that I am for technology” (32-33), and I offer a design methodology (valuesensitive design) that helps people design technology to support human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. But I also emphasize that I am “keenly aware that with almost all technologies we not only gain but lose” (33). And there’s the rub. As we increasingly build and inhabit urban landscapes, destroy nature, and try to create substitutes with technological nature, we destroy the wellsprings of human flourishing. We have lost so much already. And if we don’t understand what we’ve lost, and change our ways, we’ll lose more and more. Who has experienced the joy of swimming in a free-flowing river? Who has slept under the night sky, and woken at night to the Big Dipper 325 as it circles the North Star? Who has dug into soil to harvest food? Who has sat around a campfire and spoken of the day behind and of the day ahead? We need still—as our Paleolithic ancestors did—to walk, climb, kill, and walk the edges of nature. We need to encounter a nature that can hurt us, and have our minds sharpened and hearts enlarged by it. We need to experience the periodicity of nature: cold weather, hot weather, ocean waves too big, sunshine too hot. We need to experience more wild nature, which often involves that which is big, untamed, unmanaged, not encompassed, self-organizing, and unencumbered and unmediated by technological artifice. These are ideas on which I elaborate in Technological Nature, and in two forthcoming volumes with my collaborator Patricia Hasbach (Kahn and Hasbach, in press). The reviewer writes of growing up in the heart of Manhattan, and that “trips to Central Park were about as far as I got from a humanengineered environment.” As a species, we can adapt to Manhattan as we can to Mexico City, Tokyo, and Seoul. We can and will adapt to even more dense urban environments. In turn, some people believe that since adaption is how we evolved, we’ll adapt and be fine. But we won’t be fine. Not all adaptations are good for us. Imagine if we were put into San Quentin prison. If we did not die straight out, and most of us would not, we would adapt to our new environment. We might get fatter from lack of exercise. We might become more violent. We might shut down emotionally as a way to cope, and hardly be aware of it. Consider a caged elephant in a zoo. It survives for years in the space of a small parking lot, while its biological programming and its ancestral self wants and needs the wild and vast spaces of its origins. We are like animals in a zoo. We are caging ourselves. What I am saying in Technological Nature is that humans flourishing matters just as much as humans existing. Toward that end we need to re-envision what is beautiful and fulfilling and often wild in essence in our relationship with...