For years my friends have been saying to me: “You’re living in the Ice Age” with regard to my refusal to accept and embrace computers and the new online technologies that have invaded our landscape at the pace of a runaway glacier retreating, unchecked, from its pleistocene prison of frozen snow. My seemingly unretractable stance has had as much to do with principal and ideology as it has with the fact that I am physically incompatible with this world, the feel and the look, of these new machines. But, it wasn’t merely a snobbishness born of ineptness in dealing with machinery that was the genesis of my stubbornness. I truly have believed that this new unquestioned fascination with information and speed is a threat to my genetic coding - the agrarian and environmental sympathies and sensibilities that are ingrained in me as part of who I am. This attitude, more than anything, played a major role in my taking the unpopular stand of refusing to become a rider on the Information Superhighway. To be and to remain cyber-free. The last Luddite.

As a writer, in many ways, by remaining true to my love of organic simplicity whereas the writing process is concerned, I have been gradually putting myself out of work as the rest of the writing field has embraced computerization almost to the complete exclusion of anything else. “What’s the rush?” has always been my reactionary battle cry when confronted by hyper-active editors who demand submission of floppy disks or text transferred to them online. Until recently, I’ve been able to accomplish my own personal needs as a self-supporting writer without having to give in to the God of Speed. In the literary world, I am the tortoise, not the hare.

But for the sake of clarity, let’s go back to the beginning. I was raised in the woods. Surrounded by national forests, wilderness refuges, wild and scenic rivers. There was a seemingly infinite amount of natural space that surrounded me no matter which direction I might have wandered forth from my boyhood home in Graham County. The woods and the wilderness were my playground and my source of entertainment. The deep woods was where I built my made-of-dead-limbs, moss-covered forts and clubhouses, as well as a place where there was an endless horizon of potential for exploration and discovery. The branches, streams and creeks were my swimming pools and sources for many a miniature beaver-like dam. The fields, slicks and balds were the gridirons, ballfields, and tracks - where my friends and I congregated for group games and sports. It was a veritable gymnasium of the out of doors.

With this as the stage for my upbringing and the profound experience of my formative years, is it any wonder, then, that I would be discontented in replacing it with anything else? My subsequent years, following my departure from the mountain South, were spent in large towns and then in cities of ever-increasing size and population. While stimulating in terms of things first encountered, these places were, in the end, a disappointment. Claustrophobia set in quickly and permanently after the novelty had worn off. Nothing else, it seemed, could fill my need to be surrounded by space. Lots of space. Space full of things that were wild and green.

As our wild spaces are increasingly becoming the domain of urban and suburban sprawl and landfills are created to house the trash of this sprawl, we find ourselves faced with certain choices, certain decisions. These decisions carry with them the questioning adage of “to do or not to do” as we choose sides between the inalienable rights of the environment vs. those of human progress.

In much of Europe there are already strict recycling laws in place. Germany, for instance, has made recycling mandatory for everyone. Computers, with their short lifespans and with the endless attachments and software that make up the “nuclear family” of the technology age have become one of the biggest problems of the landfill debate as everyone’s used computers end up in the landfills. With the tremendous boom in the computer business, there are literally mountains of computers and their offspring filling the limited space that’s been set aside for trash. But Germany has seen the light and has written and enforced a law against the throwing away of computers. Computers are, instead, mandatorally recycled back into the industry and emerge, reincarnated, as newer models, racks of reinvented software, isles of nouveaux modems and printers.

While we’re on the subject of the“impact of the computer on the environment, let’s go back again to my earlier insinuations concerning the impact of new computer technology on human health. My “environmental impact statement” on this subject includes recently-documented findings from studies (including a couple of single-sample blind study experiments of my own). These say that the cumulative time spent in front of a computer terminal has significant negative impact on the general eyesight of users; that there is potential crippling muscular and neuro-muscular residual effects from keyboard use; and that attention span and reading (book reading) capacities are diminished and/or dramatically compromised from chronic computer usage. There is also a direct correlation to attention deficit and increased memory loss (especially in the area of what I would call “common sense memory” or genetic memory in relation to survival in the natural world) in as much as there has been a shift in the ways in which we use our memories because of our use of the new chip and cell-based technologies that have become so dramatically mainstream and a part of our daily lives.

Not to mention the fact that I personally question the safeness of sitting a foot or more from a screen that is emitting potentially harmful low-level radiation!

So, from where I sit, here in Little Canada in the Tuckaseegee community of Jackson County in the waning days of winter 2001, there would seem to be some very real questions that haven’t been answered (or even asked in many cases - not unlike questions concerning the nuclear energy and power industries that were never asked nor answered at their inceptions) as to whether or not this new computer technology is, in fact, more a threat than an asset (at least in the long run whereas the welfare of human and environmental health and evolution is concerned) as we, collectively, distance ourselves farther and farther from nature and our natural inheritance (if we are to believe Darwin) as evolving animals.

Ah, but like every tragedy worth its salt, there is a denouement and a fall from grace. My personal fall from grace was born of the mother of invention: necessity. And it was a fall from a great height that was accompanied by much pain. It was reminiscent of the experience I had in coming out of the woods in late 1982 after living a wild and self-sufficient back-to-the-land lifestyle for almost four years. When I left, I was met with a tremendous wall of popular culture, the result of which was a to-be-predicted shock. A similar cautionary tale was played out in reverse when I sat down in front of a computer after a period of instruction and neophyte use to become one of the converted. This, too, was a huge shock to my system. And even though I knew that I needed this technology to do what needed to be done (namely to organize and produce an enormous public relations event on behalf of the fight in the Western North Carolina mountains for clean air), I fought it tooth and nail. While waging the not-so-silent inner battle for the imagined preservation of my soul - much as an exorcist might have fought a demon in one possessed - I was, all the while, listening consciously and devotedly to the recorded music of Rage Against the Machine, as if their name, alone, would serve as protective garlic around my threatened neck.

As I logged hour upon hour on the keyboard of my Hewlett Packard, gazing into the monitor like it was a crystal ball, I was, on the inside, beating myself up. “You hypocrite!” “Wimp! “Sheep!” “Turncoat!” “Jezebel!” I wondered, and still do, just how far over the “buffalo jump” edge of no return I’ve gone, and whether I have, like so many millions of others, been duped into thinking that all this technology is inevitable and that it’s necessary to our future, while all the while alterations are occurring in the mind that render us even incapable of making the kind of clear and objective associations and conclusions necessary to a healthy sense of critical awareness. Am I just another victim of the illusion of this inextricable need?

Just in time to save me from committing some sort of cyberspace hari-kari, my Indiana friend Johnathan Watson sends me an email, reading my mind and saying, “You won’t compromise your Thoreauvian stance by using these machines. You can have your cake and click it too.” Clever, I thought, but is it true?

Ecologian Thomas Berry, writing on humanity, technology and the environment in his monumental book The Great Work, says: “Through the Internet an extensive range of human transactions will be carried on without travel or physical presence, yet this will not remedy or remove the waste heaps, polluted waters, sterile and eroded soils, forests devastated by clear-cutting, toxic chemicals, radioactive waste, the thinning ozone layer. We see all this, yet we continue creating these chemicals, clearcutting the forests, polluting the waters, piling up enormous waste heaps, destroying wetlands. We do this even though the industrial bubble is already dissolving. This physical degradation of the natural world is also the degradation of the interior world of the human. In considering the soul of the future, I am concerned with the inner vision that we need if we are to make the intellectual, social, economic, and religious adjustments required for a viable future.” I can’t say it any plainer and more succinctly than that.

Well, the beat goes on, as the song says, and after sending 150 e-mails, transposing a novel, a translation manuscript and a collection of poems face to face with the monster that is “the machine,” I’m truly, now, a bona-fide member of the Information Generation, albeit a middle-aged and often-raging one. That “Ice Age” I was accused of living in has, in quick order, melted into some sort of virtual past, and I am hardly the hold out, renegade or outlaw I once was. But, like the Lone Ranger must have felt, I, too, have experienced the loneliness and the pathos of being the “last” Luddite. And I want you to know that there are still days when I am only a squeeze of my hair-trigger away from sending my monitor to Boot Hill and returning to my friends in the Hole in the Wall gang, where I’ll again be cyber free, where life goes on amidst natural surroundings, moving slow, the way the old-timers say it ought to be.

(Thomas Crowe is a regular columnist of the Smoky Mountain News and lives in the Tuckaseegee community of Jackson County.)

 

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