 - Last login: 6 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.
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- Member since Aug 08, 2005
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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Low-tech Magazine: Is ecotech the new asbestos?
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May 21, 3:03pm
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•http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/0...
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Is ecotech the new asbestos?
in Low Tech Magazine by Kris De Decker
It's hard to keep track of the soon-to-be-implemented technological solutions that will solve our energy and environmental woes by means of nanotechnology - the science of manipulating individual atoms. ... Unfortunately, more and more research indicates that nanomaterials might become a severe health problem and an environmental nightmare.
 Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine
Carbon nanotubes that look like asbestos, behave like asbestos in EurekAlert
Image/Low Tech Magazine
Observing the reality that modernity has unleashed upon humanity one can't but be stunned at the systemic impasse it has landed us in. What is even more stunning is to observe the religious like belief that has overtaken the rationality based community whose members are carried away by the absolute belief that science and technology are destined to solve all the problems unleashed by modernity forgetting that rationality and science and technology, as its functional instruments, have been driving modernity since its inception and are thus largely responsible for the numerous side-effects of modernity that we are confronted with today.
With much fanfare, the last few years, nanotechnology has been erected on the pedestal of the ecological, of the sustainable, and its applications have been presented as the solution to the energy crunch, climate change, the food crisis and so on. And one sees the same mechanism at work with other new scientific approaches as genetics for example. The potential of new sciences and technologies are always presented as worldchanging, never is there a thought for non-intended consequences. The implementation of the technology eventually is followed later by such consequences as has been the case along the last century with CO2 and all kinds of poisons that have crept into our food chain and the materials used in the manufacturing of our toys, tools and instruments.
The apologists of science and technology would want us to believe that these are founded in the absolute truth opened to us by rationality. But believing that rationality is the absolute in terms of access to the truth is a kind of fundamentalist belief in par with any religious fundamentalism. This kind of belief in rationality is simply making abstraction of history. How did rationality emerge? After merchants had been obeying the logic of capital for a few centuries that logic extended its influence among the academics. The understanding and application of the logic of capital was indeed conferring richness and power to the merchants. It was thus only logical that its influence would gradually be felt in the other fields helping thus displace religious belief as the ultimate access to the truth. This historic detour lets us understand that rationality is no more than the leading belief about truth that is gradually adopted by all societies entering modernity.
In late-modernity we start to understand that the truth about reality is something unattainable to humanity. We are indeed such extremely tiny particles in the whole that encompasses us that the whole remains out of our field of vision and out of our field of understanding. Once we accept our limitation we start to understand that we are interconnected with all the other particles in the whole. We start to understand that we are in a bind with all particles around us. We start to understand that the harmony between ourselves and with all the particles around us is the condition of our reproduction as a species. That's when we start to understand that we have to reduce drastically the footprint of our species for humanity to survive in postmodernity.
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