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‘John Deere and the Bereavement Counselor’, by John L. McKnight is an essay which focuses on how mechanization and the infusion of service technologies has not always been fruitful. According to McKnight sometimes technologies impediment the purpose they were created for, rather than enhance it. He takes two important examples to establish his point.
First is the invention of the steel plow by John Deere, which happened when the first European settlers occupied the Sauk prairie area in America. This steel plow which replaced the traditional agricultural methods of the native Sauk tribe, though gave good yields in the initial years, gradually converted the whole place into a desert, because Europeans did not use the traditional methods which ensured the replenishing of soil through the regenerative powers of animal manures and ground crops. The second example he takes is a possible introduction of a bereavement counselor for helping people mourning the death of their loved ones. This according to McKnight will create a social desert, whereby death which is an occurrence where communities gather to console each other, will be turned into a corporate affair, whereby only the bereaved counselor will be called upon to assist the family of the deceased.
McKnight says that before introducing a technology it should be scrutinized based on four aspects. The first is the monetary costs involved, the second is the inverse effects associated with it, the third is the assessment whether any loss of knowledge is involved, and the final aspect is whether it develops an antidemocratic consciousness. He takes many other examples of how certain technologies and commoditization measures have caused more harm than good, like the side effects in medicines and the cultivation of medicized notion of living, with closed living rooms having immobile adult bicycles. He says, like the European settlers who introduced measures which was driven by technology and replaced the methods of the native tribes’ which were tuned to achieve harmony with nature, today’s world is moving towards accepting technology as their new God.
There are many instances where man’s technology choices has turned out to be wrong decisions because most of this technologies, like Deere’s steel plow, are based on short –term goals without taking into account the holistic view of their long term repercussions. Only 6% of the raw materials used for powering our technology are turned into actual consumer products, the rest being converted into harmful wastes. The industrialization witnessed in the nineteenth century, changed the fundamentals of many disciplines and one such area is the building construction. The various technologies used to create buildings today consume monstrous amount of energy and raw materials.
Earlier to the eighteenth century, buildings were not so energy consuming and were built with the best possible resources suited to the climate and environment. The best examples of the architecture principles followed those days can be got from the Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture. The trend of building structures that are not eco-friendly started at the later part of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the industrial revolution, many buildings where constructed with what we may call ‘unsustainable’ architecture. Because of the many new technological innovations that flooded the market during that period, mechanical systems were used almost for every basic purpose such as ventilation and heating.
Modern buildings account for almost forty percent of greenhouse gas emission in the United States alone. Buildings basically consume three types of energy. The embedded or production energy is the energy consumed for the construction process of the structure. It involves energy utilized for actions such as demolition, assembly and production. The operating energy is the energy needed for the upkeep of the building and maintaining the comfort level for its inhabitants. The energy utilized for ventilation, heating and lighting etc., falls into this category. The induced energy is the energy utilized indirectly for either construction or upkeep of the building. For example, it includes energy used for processes such as transporting building and commuter traffic. Today 25% of the world’s population lives without electricity. But basic electricity requirement of these people, for their fundamental needs such as light at night and pumping water, would amount to just one percent of the entire energy demand that prevails today. In this age of dwindling fossil fuel it is of paramount importance to use energy efficient solutions in almost all walks of life and thus modern day buildings are a major environmental concern.
Thus today there is an increased call for Green buildings, which is a concept of developing environmentally responsive building. Modern technologies utilize the resources in an unplanned manner and thus forcing us to find a quick transition plan and newer methods to harness energy from available resources.
