Daniel Mikhailovich

The monster we’ve created

We mix ourselves with the environment in everything we do, and not every composite is poised to annihilate us. Gardens represent perhaps the most optimistic example of a negotiated plenty in which we can do some things but not others. Yet this is just the kind of humility that is lacking throughout our own culture. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, now among the largest ever, covering (as of this writing) 10,000 square miles, looks accidental, rather than inevitable, only if we deny that technical complexity combined with greed and arrogance breeds catastrophe. As a survivor of the oil-rig explosion told 60 Minutes: “All the things that they told us could never happen happened.” The only way to neutralise our most fearsome hybrid—our warming atmosphere—is to suspend the rules in much the same way the authors of Leviticus did. Think of a carbon tax as a kind of jubilee: like the sabbatical fallow, it would break a pattern that threatens the social order. Making it law demands that we reform our dependence on machines as well as our market behaviour; it demands that we circumscribe to this and other hybrids as much as possible. Setting an artificial price on emissions might not sound like the timbre of a ram’s horn announcing the jubilee, but it would signal that we know how to stop feeding the monster we’ve created.

- Steven Stoll, ‘Agrarian Anxieties’, Harper’s, July 2010, p. 9