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].