Green Blowjobs

EcoGeek - Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi

This guy is just fantastic. I've largely stopped reading scifi in recent years, but scifi authors generally have the ability to look sharply at our own culture by exaggerating it and setting it just far apart that we can look at it from a perspective we can rarely turn on ourselves. Ursula LeGuin is a great example of that. I haven't read any of this guy's books, but from what he says in his interview, I think I'm going to have to. I'm going to be eternally indebted to him for inventing, to my knowledge, the term "green blowjob." That just about sums up my opinion of most of the green products being pandered to us on the market these days.


I just want to quote this section:

"One of the things I dislike intensely about technological fixes is that they often involve payment in order to replicate a natural service that once was provided free of charge by nature. Don't have clean water? One techno-fix is a water filter. Let's give a huge shout out to Brita filters, right? But then we all have to buy one.

"In India, middle-class households all have water filters... the poor go without. The other option would be to protect our water sources. But that's just not sexy. Using a technology almost automatically means we have to hire and pay a technology creator, which in turns creates an economic interest that does not actually care to remedy the core problem. If I sell water filters, I'm not going to be interested in clean water for all. That would kill my market of clean water for the ones who want to buy it from me. Once there's an economic interest, you end up with corporations lobbying tooth and nail to keep us from simply taking the most simple long-range planning steps.

"So no, basically, I think trying to find another tool to fix what we've already done with our tools, generally works out poorly. This has partly to do with the narrow way we approach environmental problems and our lack of foresight over cascade effects. And partly from seeing how talk of techno-fixes almost always defaults to a circle-jerk that's really focused on how we can keep enabling our ongoing stupidity. Another drink doesn't help an alcoholic, another toy doesn't fix our environmental problems. Either we deal with root causes, or we pay down the road. None of the ways we make, sell or trade objects are sustainable. The longer we deny it, the harder it will hit us."

-Paolo Bacigalupi

Amen to that. Nothing to add.