Youth Voice: Rethinking our relationship to technology

By MARYGRACE KENNEDY

My high school teachers assign summer work. One assignment included reading an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s collection of essays, “What are People For?” In this excerpt, Berry, writer and environmental activist, claims technology has had a negative impact on the world because the reason for technology—making life easier for mankind—has made us lazy and greedy. The assignment was to analyze the argument.

At first, Berry’s argument seemed polemic—technology is bad and has ruined the natural world. But as I read more deeply, I realized Berry wasn’t criticizing technology itself. He was talking about the ethics of our relationship to technology.

In America, we value convenience. We value having our own cars, so we haven’t focused our technological know-how around better, more efficient public transportation, even though we realize how much pollution and carbon that contributes to global warming would be reduced if we did. As teenagers, our general mentality is we deserve the newest and best technology. Advertisements constantly hammer that idea into our heads. We “need” cell phones; if a teenager doesn’t have a cell phone, he or she feels deprived. But we don’t generally consider what impact all those phones have on the earth when they’re made, and when we dump them for upgrades.

TRR photo by Sandy Long
Bill McKibben and Marygrace Kennedy

Don’t get me wrong—like Berry, I’m not trying to say technology is bad. We are not going to get out of the environmental mess we’re in without it. I’m just saying we need to think more about our relationship with technology.

I recently traveled to Europe, and spent 10 days touring Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Solar panels were everywhere, windmills lined the hills, everyone recycled, and in the heat of summer, people rode bikes instead of driving cars. In these countries, people were embracing technology that was designed specifically to help the environment, even if it made life a little less convenient. It seemed that the Europeans were more committed to doing something about the harm human technologies have caused the earth.

About a month after I returned, I was given another tremendous opportunity. At Barnfest, a fundraising event for Catskill Mountainkeeper hosted by actor Mark Ruffalo, I heard famed environmentalist Bill McKibben speak. I later met McKibben to ask him some questions. I spoke to him about Wendell Berry and told him about my observations in Europe. I asked him why he thought our country was falling behind the rest of the world in the effort to stop global warming. He told me that after WWII, our country kept gas prices low and failed to consider the consequences. In America, we seem to focus on instant gratification, without thinking about how our now affects everyone else’s future.

As a nation, we need to reevaluate our relationship to technology. If we have the ability to harness the wind and sun, why has the Gulf of Mexico been turned black? If we have hybrid technology, why do people still feel the need to drive an army vehicle to pick up groceries? McKibben is working hard to unite the world in an effort to stop global warming. Through his program 350.org he has brought together 181 countries. All around the world, people are making serious efforts to get their politicians to make climate change a number-one issue. But, in the United States, the public has let climate legislation die on the Senate table.

McKibben told me that coming to understand our environmental problems and making the changes necessary to our way of relating to technology would be a naturally slow, gradual process. The only problem: we don’t have that kind of time. We need to join the rest of the world in a campaign to reduce the effects of global warming now. We will need technology to end our dependency on fossil fuels, but we will also need to learn to value our planet, not just our cell phones.

[Marygrace Kennedy will be a junior at Delaware Valley High School in Milford, PA].

An issue worth acting on

By MARYGRACE KENNEDY

Natural gas drilling. Those words are everywhere in Northeast PA. In newspapers, in community meetings, in conversations taking place in local businesses. The issue surrounds me as a citizen of this region, but I hadn’t thought about it deeply enough until I saw the movie, “Gasland.” This documentary, made by Milanville, PA native Josh Fox, brought the sheer magnitude of the “natural gas issue” into focus for me.

“Gasland” wasn’t made by some big-time director, written by a team of award-winning writers, or laced with special effects. “Gasland” was made by a guy with a movie camera. A young person who, like me, has lived here his entire life and who is passionate about conserving his home—the land he loves. He is devoted to illuminating what natural gas drilling means to the communities who are experiencing it.

Fox was one of hundreds of landowners offered a large sum of money to sign a gas lease that would enable gas exploration and drilling on his land. He was informed it was a low-risk procedure; gas drilling would not disrupt his life or his land. But before signing the lease, Fox did what many others didn’t do. He decided to investigate natural gas drilling where it had been occurring already. What he discovered was astonishing.

Fox traveled across the United States interviewing different people who have been negatively affected by natural gas drilling. He found that the process called hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—was not clean or safe or low-risk as the gas companies claimed. Fracking does so much more than destroy the landscape. The chemicals used in this process pollute the ground water and air. These pollutants are capable of making not only animals sick, but people also.

I saw “Gasland” at my high school, Delaware Valley. A panel of experts was there to discuss the film, and Fox himself attended to take questions. The auditorium was full, but few teenagers were in attendance. Our world is technological. We have the Internet, cell phones and Facebook. We’re caught up in reality TV, but we ignore reality. More and more people—young and old—neglect their physical world. Maybe we don’t care. Maybe we are intimidated or scared of problems that seem too huge or too inconvenient to think about.

When I left the auditorium, I felt scared. Scared of what might happen to these Pennsylvania lands I love. I don’t like imagining the tremendous impact that gas drilling will have on the life of my community. But worse than imagining these effects would be ignoring them. This is not a nightmare that will disappear if I just tune it out. This is an issue that needs to be acted on now.

What does action mean? We can’t just say “not in my backyard.” We use too many fossil fuels; until that changes, they will always need to drill in someone’s backyard. So in one sense, action means what it always has: learning about an issue and getting involved with others to make your voice heard. But action has to mean something else; it has to mean self-reflection. We have to ask ourselves why does living so often go hand in hand with destroying? Why aren’t we inspired enough, even as we witness everyday the damage fossil fuels do to the earth, to do what it takes to turn to renewable energy? Conserving, simply living with less, like smaller cars, smaller houses, less stuff, less running around, doesn’t have to be synonymous with sacrificing. It could actually mean living fuller lives more connected to the rich, beautiful planet that supports us. Action means changing our thinking. When we do, we will transform the world.

[Marygrace Kennedy will be a junior at Delaware Valley High School in Milford PA.]