Organization & Environment

Regarded as a contemporary prophet of the new technology and economy, Kevin Kelly argues that the realms of nature and human construction are becoming one. Human-made things are becoming more lifelike, and life is becoming more engineered. In this future world, control is dispersed in highly pluralistic, open, and decentralized systems. Natural, technological, economic, and social elements of the system coevolve toward a superior, neobiological civilization that will foster bottom-up control, coordinated change, and cooperation among all elements. The authors contest Kelly’s metaphysics of the new economy and technologies, arguing that he illicitly collapses technology and the economy into nature, using nature metaphors to legitimate the new forms of economy and organization. The authors argue that Kelly fails to factor in the logic of capital into his scenario and fails to explore the consequences of the new organization of economy and new technology for the environment and society.

This article provides an analysis of one of the most ecologically and socially destructive strip-mining techniques, mountaintop removal, in one of the poorest regions in the United States, West Virginia. It is argued that West Virginia has become an environmental sacrifice zone, providing efficient, low-sulfur coal to the centers of accumulation and consumption at the expense of its own environment and community. Feeding this process is a system in which the owners of the coal corporations control the core technological forces and labor power that are used to extract this nonrenewable resource—a resource over which they also exercise ownership rights. Although the coal industry is regulated by the state and national governments, the regulators, it is argued, have been captured by Big Coal. The result is one of the most egregious and little-known instances of environmental degradation taking place in the United States today.