Reading the English newspaper The Telegraph, the picture of what would happen to our planet with a large-scale nuclear event appears: “Enough smoke and soot in the atmosphere producing a ‘nuclear winter’ in which sunlight would be partially blocked for years,” says Paul Ingram, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
This scenario would involve “widespread crop losses, which would exacerbate the plight of irradiated survivors of the war,” and a change in eating habits in the citizenry due to the low rate of sunlight: migration to insects, “because they are a great source of protein and more resistant to radiation, as well as seaweed, potatoes, canola and beets, which are usually grown in low-light environments and would likely be viable in a nuclear winter.”
This is the image of the future, latent and possible, thanks to nuclear technology. One of the many technologies imposed in a hierarchical and patriarchal way, established as “normal” or acceptable, with decisions made from the top down, and that enjoy large state subsidies (that is, our taxes), despite having significant opposition, controversy, public debate and being questioned, as the English scholar Anne Baring says, as “crazy”. Well, we have to start naming things by name: the use of energy and nuclear weapons is “human madness.”
One way to contribute to the deconstruction of our patriarchal culture, which is sustained by arms development, the exacerbation of technological-industrial culture, hierarchy, control and polarization, is to stop participating in narratives, groups and communications that strengthen stereotypes and sides (Cold War culture) and reject all kinds of political indoctrination, scientific or trenches.
From this perspective, we can, for example, instead of pointing the finger at the sole culprit of the crisis in Ukraine, look at our blind spots that nourish this crisis. Well, literally, we are all responsible for sustaining the arms industry. Each of us works for, or votes for, organizations that support it. Well, many times, individually or as a nation, we have invested our savings, funds and pensions in the arms industry, in the same way that we sustain the oil and fossil fuel industry, our “two normalized follies”, despite knowing their impact.
We are also the ones who, year after year, have been strengthening with our investments, propaganda and fanatical, almost religious attitude, all kinds of technological advances without putting limits and without consultative processes to the community. Collaborating with a process of overwhelming technological cultural conquest that is practically impossible to oppose, and whose impact on people’s mental health must be considered.
These technologies are not just great platforms, inventions or applications to save lives and facilitate processes and relationships. They also involve highly sophisticated weaponry, biological and space weapons, genetic manipulation, genomic deterioration, biological risks, nuclear radiation, electromagnetic pollution, etc. Many of them with strong evidence of damage to the health of people and ecosystems, but equally developed without consultative democratic processes. Follies that we accept as “normal” and part of the “advances” of our scientific-technological-patriarchal culture that has become dogma.
It is essential to initiate in our country a serious debate on bioethics, sovereignty of people and ethics of care in relation to the risks and regulation necessary to the wave of dominant scientific-technological ventures. Do we all want to go there?, can we choose to participate or not of these?, is it our right to be consulted? There are many of us who question this, and we want to participate in decision-making on how to take care of this scientific-technological-industrial tsunami.
Never before in human history have we had such deteriorated mental health, and rates of depression, stress, anguish, suffering and suicide so high. This is the shadow of several of our supposed “breakthroughs.” All this must be forcefully raised and debated.
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
