Techno-capitalists think innovation can save the planet. But that same thinking is what got us here

An upside-down mindset is emerging around the world. We have to rethink our relationship with the environment and the technology that's caused it harmGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAldous Huxley's Brave New World describes a society in thrall to the values of science and technology. It is set in the futuristic World State, whose citizens are scientifically engineered to fit into a hierarchy. Eugenics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals and classical conditioning are employed to maximise stability and happiness. Huxley's novel does not describe a conventionally authoritarian system, but one in which the desire for freedom and dignity has simply been eliminated. The World State is a radical technocracy. It's a satire on the consequences of importing scientific thinking into the realm of social policy. The Controllers of the World State preside over a society that has rationality and efficiency as its guiding principles, and when those principles conflict with human nature, it is human nature that is required to give way. Rather than building a society that engenders happy human beings, the Controllers seek to design human beings that can function in the society into which they are "hatched". The idea that we would invert our relationship with the world in this way strikes us as sinister, as antithetical to what it means to be human. And yet something resembling this upside-down mindset is now emerging across the globe, particularly in the debate around climate change.Having built a system that is destructive of the environment that surrounds and sustains us, we are now proposing to change ? the environment! In his dystopia Huxley imagined a society that only worked when the humans within it were made into something not quite human. Today, many scientists and engineers imagine a planet that has been similarly transformed: nature itself must yield to the system. We need a technological fix. Continue reading...