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An Eastern Exposure on the West
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17730 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
207 Words |
| Author
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Jeffrey Robbins
Jeffrey Robbins is an independent consulting engineer in
electronics and computer software who recently worked on the
development of a software test plan for the future NASA Space
Station control gyroscopes. He has published a book, On
Balance and Higher Education, and a number of papers, both on
technical subjects in cryogenics, thermodynamics, and
electronics, and on the impact of advanced technology on
society. From 1970 to 1985 he taught at the New School for
Social Research in New York, where he lives with his wife and
daughter. |
There is a deep irony in our Western industrial civilization. Our technology has multiplied naked human powers many orders of magnitude, but at the some time it has, in significant ways, reduced our powers. Our Western perspective has generated innumerable marvels of invention. It has expanded our sphere of understanding to embrace the entire universe, as it really is and how it really works. But as we have succeeded in channeling and harnessing the world's mental and physical resources, we have incurred a growing cost: pollution of the biosphere on a planetary scale; wholesale destruction of tropical rain forests; the exponential rise in the extinction of species; the raping of the oceans' marine life; the growing threat of the greenhouse effect; the destruction of the ozone layer; chemical and radioactivity produced cancers--all can be reckoned as the price we have paid for progress.
The destructive imbalancing of the biosphere as a result of self-interested, irresponsible, large-scale industrial activity has generated powerful counterforces. Unfortunately, the equally, if not more serious wasting of the human environment, as an unintended byproduct of Western technological success, has not.
Two Different Ways
Historically, there are two very different ways to meet life's challenges.
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