INDUSTRIAL AGE DEBRIS 

When any age winds down, the fall-out and debris that remain become a heavy cost to the emerging times. Problems created with industrial age thinking, will eventually be conquered, as new concepts and methods of solving the previously unsolvable become known. We are presently going through such a transition period.

Even as we watch, many companies are going bankrupt, leaving behind debris that accumulated during the days of industrial giants. Pollution, old useless buildings and antiquated machinery litter not only company property but also landscapes beyond.

Hundreds of kilometres of abandoned telephone lines and railroad tracks located far from what was head office cover the country. Sawmills, mining and lumber camps, oil depots and un-replanted clear-cut forest areas scar the land. Rivers and streams plugged with cutting debris washed down stream wait to be restored.

The economics of change, environmental pressures and the new marketplace no longer allow practices considered acceptable in early days of the Industrial Age. Neanderthal thinking that considered old ways adequate have brought down the mightiest of giants. The lumber industry will be hit hard by even stronger, winds of change sweeping the planet.

Fifteen American states now have legislation making it mandatory for newspapers published locally to contain at least 40 percent de-inked, recycled newspaper pulp. This wave will continue. Some jurisdictions are already calling for content levels up to 50 percent to be mandatory within a few years. It requires little math to see that this factor alone will soon reduce the wood harvested for pulp by 50 percent. Recycled content levels of paper in the future have nowhere to go but up.

Intergrated forest corporations that had various divisions producing logs, lumber and pulp, now see pulp, main leg of their operations, being knocked away. Ceramic homes, synthetic pulp, metalog building and spun-carbon fibre mixed with concrete allow curtain walls of minimum thickness to replace the heavy lumber and concrete walls of the past. The growth integration performance of the past becomes the disintegration by-product of tomorrow. Giants that no one ever thought would fail, have become weaklings in the face of global change. Nothing learned in an expanding market trained them to handle power when everything around failed to work as they had been indoctrinated to expect.

Governments that try to support such failing giants find themselves deeply embattled as other forces refuse to support them. The instant communications of today have become a solvent that dissolves both corporate and nationalistic power. It is amplified in direct ratio to the increased speed of communication. Corporate and national death, once considered impossible, now approaches on swift wings.

How can this all occur so quickly? What did these companies do that was so wrong? Plenty. But much might have happened even if they had done everything right. Today we are in a different location in time and space. Sometimes things change dramatically no matter what we do. Little wonder that many are seeking solace in religion and astrology. At times it does seem that the gods are being directed by the stars.

* * *

< previous | chapter index | next >
back to Main Chapter Listing
back to Home Page