The Harrows of Spring question

I didn't know there would be a fourth part to the story. I enjoyed the first three, with some reservation, and will probably read the fourth. As well as being a pretty good storyteller, Kunstler is a futurist and social critic a la Bill McKibben, but rather than a champion of activism I think he favors a future in which today's technological hierarchy has collapsed under its own weight, and the survivors rebuilding a community-based agrarian society are discovering, against odds, the benefits of this, cleaner, purer relationship with the earth. As I understand it, he fed a computer as much data about our current political/ecological/financial circumstance into a computer and came up with the scenario that became the basis of his four novels. Another social critic, Derek Jensen, has taken this cause one step further, advocating that we deliberately sabotage the infrastructure of our current malaise to bring about its demise and usher in the new post-technological era Kunstler envisions in his novels.

Other futurists take a different approach, insisting that the innovative spirit of technology will eventually find a solution to all the problems we have created for ourselves. On the extreme end we find Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil and the singularity movement, but really, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates belong in this category as well.

I for one continue to be alive and enjoy good health due to medical technologies that didn't exist before I was born, technologies that have required a great depletion of natural resources and would no longer be available if the predicted infrastructure collapse were to happen. So I would be a hypocrite to say I long for such a future and a self-defeating fool if I were to advocate Jensen's crusade of sabotage. I have to sit on the fence here, and take comfort in knowing that the future will happen regardless of what I do. I will continue to recycle, support local businesses, and above all, treat everyone I meet with as much love and forbearance as I can muster up.

And I will no doubt read The Harrows of Spring.