On Thu, 4 Sep 1997, Neil Rest wrote:
> I read it quite a while ago, so my impressions are clearer in my memory
> than details. I recall, for instance, the use of foams for things like
> housing. The combination of characteristics, chemical and phusical,
> necessary for a substance to be used for fast-setting foam houses is long
> and complex. There is nothing anywhere near the combination of cheap,
> easy, not-too-high-tech, and environmentally innocuous taken for granted in
> the book. Disciplines like chemistry, materials engineering, process
> engineering are extremely complex.
So maybe he just didn't set it far enough in the future? The point here
is surely as much to do with the social context of sci/tech research, and
the social choices 'we' make (hmm, right) about which avenues are pursued
as the complexity or difficulty of the particular science involved? I
mean, I suppose, can we distinguish between scientific and social
(im)possibility?
By the way thanks for clarifying and sorry to pick up on it after so long;
my e-mail access is limited to work and I'm not here all that often.
>
> Of course. It is impossible for me to walk up the side of a building. It
> is impossible to light a mtach on a bar of soap. It is impossible to state
> a logical argument, or a truth, in such a way that everyone will agree to it.
>
> (On the other hand, I've been vigorously recommending _Ecology and
> Revolutionary Action_ [if I got the title precisely right!] for decades,
> just about since Murray Bookchin wrote it.)
Good - Bookchin is my favourite green guru too. I'm re-reading _Woman on
the Edge of Time_ at the moment and I'm really noticing how much Piercy's
ideas run parallel to Bookchin's brand of social ecology; she seems too to
intuitively grasp the connectedness between domination and subjection of
peoples and that of nature to culture without reducing either one to the
other.
Thanks!
Lisa
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