Clinton St. Quarterly: Where does space fit in this? JR: It doesn’t fit in anywhere as far as I’m concerned. First, on an energy level, it is absolutely ridiculous. We can’t afford the energy cost of transporting something from the Imperial Valley in California to Washington D.C. How are we going to finance the energy and material costs on this planet to catapult a tremendous amount of machinery and material up in outer space and to use it as our resource base to feed four billion people on this planet? It cannot be done. CSQ: What about trying to com- ' municate with other life forms? JR: Well, that’s fine. It will give us a little bit of humility from our hubris if we can do that. My feeling about the pioneering mentality in space is that it is the ultimate deceit. It basically says that this planet is just a launching pad, just loose material. We have no relationship to it; it’s just a temporary sojourn for us here. And once we have raped it and destroyed it and used it up, we can now move on to somewhere else. I think that’s a particular philosophy of life that leads nowhere, because it assumes the ultimate alienation; that we are not part of a larger community. We are just alone in the universe. If we feel that we are not a part of a community here, will we be any more of a community when we go to outer space? What I’m suggesting is the ultimate alienation, and we can never rejoin the community of life as long as we think we’re invulnerable and separate and detached. I think that this planet was designed as an entire framework. We are part of that design, and that design, in turn, is part of a larger matrix, the solar - system, and that it makes a lot more sense to see this planet as an organism and see the larger solar system as the community that organism functions in. Now that would require that we take our proper place in the “natural order” as we can experience it in our day-to-day life. If one were to adhere to that particular approach to life and existence, one would not even think about exploiting other systems out there. CSQ: With the decline of a religious point of view, that there is life after life, space provides an option that there is an alternative out there. JR: I found that when people read Entropy, they have two options, They either hate it or it confirms some The pioneering mentality in space is the ultimate conceit, it basically says that this planet isjust a launching pad, just loose material. Once we have raped it and destroyed it and used it up, we can now move on to somewhere else. basic experience. And that experience is duration, finitude, mortality, limits. There has been a long history in Western consciousness. ... I don’t know much about the East, but in the West, at least, we believe that there are no limits, that we can overcome time and space, that we can use our technology to extend ourselves beyond our natural limits. So for that mentality, not only do we never get a sense of how we belong, because one can only belong within a community where there is mortality, and there is duration and there is finitude, not only do we estrange ourselves from life by not accepting its ultimate end, but we estrange ourselves from community and from continuity. As long as we maintain the idea that there is always an alternative or substitute or reversal for everything we experience in life, then no experience has any cherished moment. If everything becomes a throwaway along the long march to find some improved thing to replace it, then I suspect that those of us who experience life that way never respect any moment and never really enjoy life itself. That’s the mentality in our civilization as well. CSQ: Bringing it all home, what do you think we can do to turn things around in our state and region, which is rapidly becoming the Appalachia of the West? JR: My own feeling is that the industrial age is moving into its final stages over the next few decades. We’re running out of non-renewable resources in the sense that it’s becoming too expensive to locate and process a dwindling resource base. Once realizing this, there are many options open. One is to ignore the fact and try and recharge the old industrial engines. It will be more expensive, both to locate resources and to absorb the waste of past economic activity. That’s a no-win course. If one decides to embark on a new course, it would have to be moving from a non-renewable to a renewable resource economy. There are two choices available for long-range economic planning for a renewable resource economy. One is an ecological approach, in which a state or region develops an approach to its local resources so that they can be sustained for future generations. The ultimate proposition for an ecological approach would be what I call the “big balanced budget.” The big balanced budget is always between society and nature. What the the state or region would have to do is decide that society could not consume faster than nature can reproduce the goodies, and if consumption grows faster, then it’s a big deficit and a collapse in the local resource base for the economy here. The ecological approach to a renewable resource base would put a premium on not only self-sufficiency but decentralized living patterns, cities that were smaller in scale, more emphasis on labor-intensive skills, an introduction of organic and bio-dynamic farming methods, development of a whole host of appropriate technologies that will allow the state to use its material resources and energy resources commensurate with nature’s own rhythms so that the technologies were in line with the environment. There is another approach that could be taken for developing a base for a renewable resource economy. It’s called genetic engineering. Senator Hatfield recently told me about a group he calls the “Atari Democrats.” They believe that we should go for renewable resources, obviously, because that’s all that’s left. But they feel that the ecological approach is too slow. It would require sharing our resources, redistributing our wealth, living a more frugal lifestyle, slowing down the pace of life, and these kinds of costs, according to some people in this country, would probably be prohibitive. So the idea behind a genetic engineering approach is to engineer the biology of the local resource base in order to convert it into utilities faster than nature’s own tempo . . .to bring engineering technology into all living organisms and create a cornucopia of biological utilities. These two approaches are diaRELIEVE STRESS! 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