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Metaphysical Publication
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Technology for Re-Creating the Earth

by Stephen Wing

It's our intelligent use of tools that makes us human, some theorize. If so, does our increasingly UNintelligent use of tools make us steadily less human?

In becoming dependent on machinery, human society seems to have grown more and more machinelike. As machines dismantle living ecosystems to feed machines, sometimes it even feels like we live as slaves to our technology – tools of our tools.

In Arthur C. Clarke's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Hal the computer takes control of a space vessel and attempts to kill the humans on board. The educated guesses of futurists currently predict just such a mythic role reversal on Earth. They call it the Singularity: when the accelerating evolution of technology reaches a breaking point where human-made systems merge with or replace the living systems of nature.

My own psychic flash is that we're already there, since long before 2001. But the technology which has taken over our space vessel, fragile and lovely Planet Earth, is not a computer named Hal. It's an invention called the corporation.

A corporation is a machine for accumulating wealth, while protecting its owners from liability. It's a technology that works superbly for what it was designed to do.

None but a Stranger An interview with author Marguerite de la Haye. Click on image to find out more!

It's a machine made of human beings, who from the moment they swipe their cards through the timeclock are expected to behave not as people but as parts of a machine. The corporation's stock value measures how successfully the actors are playing their parts.

Since the Supreme Court declared corporations legally “persons,” with the same rights as people, the corporate machine has become our fourth branch of government' without the built-in checks and balances of the other three. Now our entire nation has begun to behave like a machine, maximizing corporate profitability at the expense of the human beings who live here.

The vulnerable heel of the corporate machine is its power-source: us. We all depend on it for daily sustenance. At the same time, it's just a tool we use to feed ourselves. Most of us do manage to eat, but it's difficult because the tool we're using is designed for something else' like trying to substitute a steam shovel for a spoon.

Not all corporations are out of control like Hal, however. Many smaller ones are still controlled by the humans who work in them. When choosing our tools for the task of re-creating the world, expensive high-tech items like solar panels and hydrogen fuel might be out of reach. But all of us can consider carefully which corporations we feed.

Other technologies that minimize our “ecological footprint” - the cumulative impact of our daily lifestyle' have been around so long that they're easily overlooked. Here are a few that are guaranteed never to need an upgrade:

Ecology article continued next page, click here!