> technology : directions : return

spring 1998: the major airlines have reported new initiatives to cut down on the number and size of carry-on bags passengers can bring on the aircraft.

if we are going to live in a mobile culture, we have to travel light. sounds like a return to stone age economics!

there is a sense, perhaps a part of stasis, that through disaster or choice, we might return to values or even lifestyles far preceeding those of today.

there's ostensibly two ways for us to reach a point of return:

apocalypse/fallout/failure: the collapse of the technological civilization we've built up (alluded to by Tidholm below) will cause a return to a more primeval state of living.

occasional science fictions posit hunter-gatherer landscapes after some kind of ecological or nuclear/chemical disaster.

decision: after performing enough popular technology criticism, we collectively elect to return to less resource-demanding ways of being.

many utopians promote this sort of thing, and more practical humans like the Amish.

the power of growing things is confidence building - even environmental woes seem to be beyond anxiety if one only watches weeds take over any property abandoned just a few short years. it's somewhere between fatalism, that we will end up weed-fodder, and optimism, that the earth will recover from what we've done to it.

these sentiments are well echoed in these lines from Swedish poet Thomas Tidholm, from his poem "To lay a thing in the moss" (translated from the swedish by Gabriella Berggren):

"Something that you once owned lies
on the ground in the forest when you leave, something you would
have needed that you cannot do without, a part of life or a large part.
And moss will grow on it, and oblivion will take it.
And forest will grow and machines will come.
And forest will fall, and moss will be torn to shreds
and the country will get export income and
nothing will be left. In a hundred years
new forest will grow and all will be gone
and forgotten."

- Thomas Tidholm, "To lay a thing in the moss," Outdoor Life in Shoreland Terrain