by Bill McKibben
Pg 17.
TV is a pipeline to the modern world, and a convenient shorthand for some of its features. Still, that does not mean that TV merely reflects our society. By virtue of its omnipresence, it also constantly reinforces certain ideas. It is less an art form than the outlet for a utility -- like the faucet on a sink that connects you to the river, the TV links you to a ceaselessly flowing stream of information, and that very ceaselessness makes it different from a play or a movie. TV is the chief way that most of us partake of the larger world, of the information age, and so, though nine of us owe our personalities and habits entirely to the tube and the world it shows, none of us completely escape its influence either. Why do we do the things we do? Because of the events of our childhood, and because of class and race and gender, and because of "human nature" -- but also because of what we've been told about the world, because of the information we've received.
Pg 22.
Set aside the question of whether it's a worthwhile trade-off to be able to fax your Aunt in Australia ... simply realize that an awful lot of people have come to see this "information ecology" as a sort of substitute for the other, older, natural ecology.
... Against such a tide of opinion it sounds a little romantic to say: If you sat by a pond beside a hemlock tree under the sun and the stars for a day, you might acquire some information that would serve you well. I don't fret about TV because it's decadent or shortens your attention span or leads to murder. It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons -- small lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of its inhabitants -- that natures teaches and TV can't. Subversive ideas about how much you need, or what comfort is, or beauty, or time, that you can learn from the one great logoless channel and not the hundred noisy ones or even the pay-per-view.
Pg 24:
And these particular skills, in and of themselves, may not be so important. However, in the course of performing them, one could not help accumulating a large store of what you could call "fundamental" information, and it is precisely this kind of information I want to rediscover in this book.
Pg 25:
Marshall McLuhan recounts a conversation he had with an executive at IBM. "My children," the man told McLuhan, "had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one."
Which, basically, is nonsense. While McLuhan's idealized youth may have reams of data unavailable to the wisest adult of a few generations earlier, they had much less access to precisely the kinds of fundamental information we most sorely lack. Even the dullest farmer quickly learns, for instance, a deep sense of limits. ... This sense of the limits of one particular place grants you some sense that the world as a whole has limits, a piece of information we've largely forgotten, in part because being a successful businessperson involves constantly breaking through limits. ... Losing this sense of limits matters -- one reason we're so blithe about doubling the present population of the world must be that we think some such device will double the amount of food we grow.
If we're ever to recapture these fundamental kinds of information, it's necessary to start by remembering just how divorced from the physical world many of us have become.
Pg 30:
There are other paths to this kind of deeper understanding of the world, but they too are overgrown and hard to find; a day of watching TV makes it obvious that farming is not the only skill we have lost. ... Money supplants skill; its possession allows us to become happily stupid.
Pg 34:
The great push is always away from individual skill and engagement -- a horse took al sorts of information and insight to handle, and a Model T a little, and a Honda Accord virtually none.... In truth, though, we usually learn a new way of doing things at the expense of the old way. In this case we've traded away most of our physical sense of the world, and with it a whole category of information, of understanding. We have a new understanding, reflected most ubiquitously by television, which in many ways is sophisticated and powerful. And democratic -- TV's obvious virtues, that it is cheap and always accessible -- should not be overlooked. But there's much that it leaves out, that it can't include.
Pg 40: This is by no means all to the bad -- she [the earth] is a fragile world, and more and more we must learn to take some responsibility for the planet as a singular whole. But in the thrall of our new insight we forget that the planet also consists of diverse localnesses. Now that we are told each day that the earth is round, we've forgotten that it's also flat -- local, small, particular. TV tells us we have everything in common. But we don't. And as we lose our particularly we lose prodigious amounts of information.
Pg 48:
Since we must restrict our conversation to what we have in common, our global-village campfires are not as productive as the old tribal ones. We can find subjects of interest to all only by erasing content, paring away information-- the things that interest me may not interest, or even be comprehensible, to you.
Pg 51:
... But the fact that the same ad can appeal to someone in a New York apartment and an Iowa farm and an African village does not prove that these situations are alike. It is merely evidence that the people living in them have a few feelings in common, or can be made to have a few feelings in common, and it is these barest, most minimal commonalities that are the content of the global village. The incredibly rich accumulation of lore and practical knowledge and custom, subtly different from each of the millions of villages on earth to the next, erodes in the tide of a few primal pieces of information -- this tastes sweet; fashionable people dress like this. The definition of a valuable, working village is a place where it would be very difficult for an outsider to fit in because there would be so much to learn, to know, to understand. So many customs, techniques, rituals, orders, stories -- so much information. The definition of TV's global village is just the contrary -- it's a place where there's as little variety as possible, where as much where there's as little variety as possible, where as much information as possible is wiped away to make "communications" easier. ... The global village of which we all speak carelessly is at most a global convenience store.
Pg 53:
If my endless day of television reminded me of anything, it's that electronic media have become an environment of their own -- that to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add TV as a place where we live. And the problem is not that it exists -- the problem is that it supplants. Its simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom.
Pg 84:
... Or do we begin to understand again what once was common knowledge -- that they're marvelous for their own reasons, that they matter independently of us?
That piece of information can come only when you accept nature and its component parts on their own terms -- small and placid and dull and parts of systems, as well as big and flashy and fierce and soulful. Alone on a mountain you do start slowly to learn this lesson -- it's inevitable if you lie on your back for hours and watch the hawks just circle, or lie on your stomach and watch the ducks just swim. They are not there for you -- they are there because the world belongs to them too.
Pg 85:
But the world is losing them -- CNN is filled with the pictures of dying elephants and of a dozen other creatures. This is perhaps the ultimate loss of information -- too sophisticated to burn books, we burn the planet. Each day information leaks away -- some branch of life that evolved for millions of years is gone, and the next day two more, and six the day after that. The world grows stupider, less substantial. And those of us who would fight have little ground on which to stand, for the tug at our hearts from the sad picture on the screen is no substitute for the deep and lifelong understandings we've let slip away.
Pg 87:
... But everyone knows about TV preachers. They are greedy hypocrites. They get volume discounts at hot-sheet hotels. They rob their flocks and they cheat the IRS. They are unctuous and self-righteous, oozing greenish smarm the way decent folk sweat.
Pg 97:
... Still, there is a way that science has helped to amputate our understanding of the world as a sacred place. Not through explanation -- that only illuminates the real wonder. But inadvertently, through the inventions its finding make possible. New technologies have removed from most of us in the Western world any need to spend time in contact with the physical, and hence erased much of the chance to experience the divine in its grandest manifestations. Consider the car. ... Through our windshields we see road signs and tail-lights -- technology has blinkered us. Convenience always carries costs -- this one may be worth paying, but it is high.
Pg 157:
But the worst disasters move much more slowly, and thereby sneak past the cameras. Consider two of the grinding glaciers that are slowly, patiently, methodically changing the topography of the world around us -- the decay of the global environment and the wicked, miserable poverty that traps so much of the country and the planet. Everyone, including people who produce news programs, recognizes the seriousness of these problems, and yet TV fails to get them across -- not to solve them, merely to make them understand.
This is in part because they happen on time scales that defy TV's relentless dailiness. Covering global warming, for instance, obviously matters more than covering a flood in Texas -- its effects are a million times greater, and since we can take steps to prevent it there's reason to cover it. It's a little more complicated than the water rising till it goes over the top of the dam, but not a lot more complicated -- any sixth grader can figure it out. The trouble is, the greenhouse effect doesn't change from day to day. The only points of entry for the story are heat waves and new scientific studies, and so this behemoth of stories pops up from time to time and lets out a growl. But we need to hear it roar. TV's vaunted immediacy is here a curse, and even newspapers can't help much -- you need a book, or at least a documentary, to see time unfold over decades. Something that happens constantly and all around lulls the camera. You don't dash off in a helicopter to track down global warming -- you need to sit calmly in a chair and think.
The story of poverty and its attendant sadness presents a slightly different problem. Here is a no shortage of hooks for stories. Every unemployment report or new set of data about infant mortality rates in the inner cities or fresh footage of famine in Africa offers another chance for a feature on young men who've never held a job or young mothers who've never been to a doctor or babies with swollen bellies. And TV tries to provide these stories -- the criticism that it's interested only in "feel good" stories is simply wrong. But the medium is so big that each of these stories has to be about a class of people -- young mothers and their problems, the woes of the chronically unemployed, the starving in Africa -- instead of particular people. As a result, they dramatically understate the idiosyncratic and inherent messiness of human lives, especially lives lived under grinding stress.
Pg 162:
The relentless flood of information we receive, then, does not necessarily equal an understanding of our situation. The principal boast of electronic communication is speed, and speed doesn't help much in grasping these situations -- it doesn't matter if you learn about the greenhouse effect this week or next week or next month. What matters is that when you do hear about it you understand it so deeply and thoroughly that you begin to question the way you live. It doesn't matter if you hear constantly, night after night, about poor children or abused elders. It matters that you hear about them in some way both deep enough and complicated enough that you'll go out and do something useful.
Pg 163:
Here's one way of asking the question -- if instead of watching the news each night on television, or devouring the newspaper each morning, you heard only one newscast a week, or read every third or fourth issue of Newsweek. If you reflected carefully on what you did read, I think in some ways you'd understand more about the planet. You'd still be more familiar with what was going on than almost any human being in history -- you'd know about the gap between the rich and poor, about ecological threats, about styles and trends, about political shifts and disasters. You'd know from re petition what really counted. And anything you didn't find out about -- anything that flared up for just a day or two and then died out -- couldn't matter much.
Pg 185:
By accepting the idea that we should never limit our desire or choose from the options our material and spiritual liberations give us, we ignore similarly pressing facts about our larger community. In a different world perhaps we'd never need to limit our intake of goods, to slow down our consumption of resources, to stop and share with others. But we live in this world -- a world approaching ecological disaster, riven by poverty. A world of limits, demanding choices. TV gives us infinite information about choice -- it celebrates choice as a great blessing, which it is, and over the course of a single day it lays out a nearly infinite smorgasbord of options. As much as it loves choice, though, it doesn't actually believe in choosing. It urges us to choose everything -- this and this and this as well. And it does nothing to help us create communities that might make wise choices possible on a scale large enough to make a difference.
Pg. 195:
The difference between comfort and pleasure is enormous, though hard to set down in words. Albert Borgmann says "comfort is the feeling of well-being that derives from an optimally high and steady level of arousal of positive stimulation, whereas pleasure arises from an upward change of the arousal level. Since there is a best or highest level of pleasure that constitutes comfort, one cannot indefinitely obtain pleasure by rising from comfort to more comfort... Hence pleasure can only be had at the price of discomfort."
Pg 236:
I've tried, in the preceding pages, to describe some of the information that the modern world -- the TV world -- is missing. Information about the physical limits of a finite world. About sufficiency and need, about proper scale and real time, about he sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the elements, about the human need for community and for solid, real skills. About the good life as it appears on TV, and about the other, perhaps better, lives. As I said at the outset, human desires count. I think the signals the natural world sends us -- the seven warmest years on record all occurring in the last decade, for instance -- are signals that our desires need to change.
Pg 245:
All the information offered by the natural world suggests that somewhere between the meaninglessness of lives lived in destitute struggle and the emptiness of life lived in swaddled affluence there is daily, ordinary life filled with meaning. Kohak, who lives in a small cabin in rural New Hampshire, writes: "A life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be in on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the inner-most human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing the truth, doing the good, worshipping the holy."
Pg 247:
And we live at the curious moment when this choice matters -- when aesthetic notions about the good life and community and sufficiency and so on, long the province of moral philosophers and preachers, coincide with interests of atmospheric chemists. You can look at our environmental problems like this -- almost everyone on the planet is causing friction, some because they have too much and consume it wastefully, some because they have too little and must abuse the earth. Some drive Oldsmobiles and some chop down rain forests, but the life of each harms the planet, perhaps irreparably. Somewhere there is a mean. On the mountaintop you see it constantly in action -- see life in balance, rolling on imperturbably, not growing, not shrinking. Over geological time it may change violently -- these mountains once were volcanoes. But we don't live in geological time. This is the information nature whispers to us in biological time, in our time -- it's the information drowned out by the familiar mocking laughter of TV. We can't go live in the woods by the lake -- but we can go there long enough to listen, to hear. And come back not chastened but uplifted. So that we bike to work not because we have to but because it's the richest alternative. So that we live with less not because an economy in recession forces us to compromise but out of a distaste for the insulation from the real that "too much" ensures. That we grow some of our food not because we couldn't buy it but for the meeting with nature it affords and the sweetness of corn fresh picked.
...I grew up rapt with attention at the words and images on the screen. ... I assumes unconsciously that the information that poured from the TV into my quite similar suburban world was all the information there was, except for stuff about sex, which back then they couldn't show. But there's another world real world. A realer world, maybe -- certainly an older one. This world is full of information, information that grows inevitably in you the more time you spend there, the stiller you are. It is accessible to anyone anytime ... That's the one great hopeful possibility; this other world broadcasts round the clock, and in stereo and sensurround and smellavision. Its signal grows steadily fainter, and the noise of the modern world makes it ever harder to hear. But it's still there.