Wolfgang Sachs: Why Speed Matters

I.
It was the German aristocrat Friedrich von Raumer who, while travelling in England, mailed back home the first eye-witness report on what amounted to a revolution in the history of mobility: the first railway line at Liverpool. 'The fiery dragon in front', he wrote in 1835, 'the fiery dragon in front, snorting, groaning, and roaring, until the twenty cars are fixed to its tail and it moves them, light as a child, over the level tracks at an extreme rate of speed. A path has been broken through mountains, valleys have been raised; the dragon throws sparks and flames into the night of the arched tunnel. But despite all the violence and despite all the roars, a human being turns the monster to his will with the touch of a finger.'

Raumer's account still betrays the excitement and bewilderment he must have felt watching the train running and running across valleys and mountains powerfully and incessantly, yet without any sweat and fatigue. Comparing the locomotive with the horse, he and his contemporaries immediately were struck by the effortlessness and apparent indefatigability of the railway. After all, horses as well as humans, when moving fast, are threatened by exhaustion and weakness. It is their bodies which set a limit; they become tired, get hurt, need a rest, and are not terribly reliable in any case. Living beings can be fast only in proportion to their organic powers. Not so the railroad. It bursts the bounds of organic nature, appears to race tirelessly over mountains and through valleys, hindered by neither its metabolism nor the landscape. The force of fuel and energy by far outstrips bodily powers, just as rails out of steel remove most of the resistance offered by the countryside. In the machine age, neither the body nor the topography define any longer a natural measure for speed. As a consequence, the modern notion that human motion was set on an infinite path towards ever increasing acceleration could take hold in the popular mind. The rush for higher speeds is a cultural fall-out of the steam engine.

Like a projectile, as the 19th century perception saw it, the train shoots through space; the passenger, however, sits calmly as forests and villages are flying by outside, blurring into a stream of fuzzy images. What happens outside is of no concern to him. For the traveller, the space between departure and destination fades into a mere distance to be covered as quickly as possible. The railroad raised enthusiasm because it brought distant goals within easy reach; in people's minds it established a map of accessibility superimposed over that of the muscle-powered world. In 1843, the German poet Heinrich Heine captured that new experience in his famous remark: 'I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep.' Thus, he put in a nutshell a sensation of giddiness which, until today, has not entirely left successive generations. Speed makes distant places rush towards you, it abolishes distance and finally annihilates space.

In effect, a new layer of reality, a new perceptual space emerged with the railroad. Consider the famous painting Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway of William Turner. The railway engine comes towards the viewer like an iron projectile cutting through space. But the surrounding landscape has lost all contours, evaporated into cloudy spots, vanished into flurries of brownish colour. Just the carriers of movement stick conspicuously out: the rails, the locomotive, and a bridge. Only what serves to overcome distance appears to deserve figurative reality. In fact, the painting depicts two different orders of space, the static one of the fading landscape and the dynamised one of rails and engines, designed to overcome the first. It suggests what indeed happened with the arrival of the railroad: the speed of engines supplanted the speed of bodies, a vehicular space gradually settled upon the natural space.

This was a radical break which inaugurated the age of acceleration. Between Caesar and Napoleon there had been - except perhaps through harness and sail - not much progress in speed. Only since fossil energy reserves deep under the surface of the earth have been tapped in order to obtain fuel for the propulsion of vehicles, have the gates to the new age been thrown open. The combustion engine made possible a transformation of the earth's treasures into vehicle speed. In subsequent decades, innumerable railways, automobiles and airplanes along with huge infrastructures of rails, highways and airports have been lined up against the resistance offered by time and space. While in the natural space, movement is constrained by fixed duration and fixed distance, in the vehicular space duration and distance turn into variables which can be manipulated. In that sense, the mission of successive armies of transport technologies was nothing else than the reduction and gradual abolition of duration and distance. However, it was the mobilisation of coal, iron and then oil which made the mobilisation of time and space possible. The vehicular space is based on a robber economy.

II.
For the modern mind, as the philosopher Guenter Anders once in ironic allusion to Kant's 'basic forms of cognition' suggested, space and time are the basic forms of hindrance. Anything that is away is too far-away. The fact that places are separated by distances is seen as a bother. And anything that lasts, lasts simply too long. The fact that activities require time is seen as waste. As a consequence, a continuous battle is waged against the constraints of space and time; acceleration is therefore the imperative which rules technological innovation as well as the little gestures of every-day life.

However, any social system can be likened to a body which is sustained by a metabolism that makes it dependent on the environment. Just as no living body can exist without intake of food and the excretion of waste, no social system can survive without consumption of nature and the elimination of residues. Neither a body nor a social system is isolated from nature; both are linked into the biosphere and the geosphere. Modern society, as everybody knows, weighs very heavily on nature; its metabolism has reached a volume and a velocity which threatens to throw into disorder the very ecosystems it depends upon. In that secular predicament, what matters is less the fact that nature is utilised, but how much is used in what way to what end and - above all - at what speed. Generally speaking, the ecological crisis can be read as a clash of different time scales; the time scale of modernity collides with the time-scales which govern life and the earth.

Consider, for instance, a rather simple example: the depletion of non-renewable resources. Every year, the industrial system burns as much fossil fuel as the earth has stored up in a period of nearly a million years. Within a second, in terms of geological time, the planet's reserves are about to vanish in the fireworks of the industrial age. It jumps to the eye that the rate of exploitation of non-renewable resources is infinitely much faster than the processes of sedimentation and melting in the earth's crust. Industrial time is squarely at odds with geological time. It is probably not exaggerated to say that the time gained through fuel-driven acceleration is in reality time transferred from the time stock accumulated in fossil reserves to the engines of our vehicles.

For another example, take global warming. The transport of CO2 from the surface of the earth up into the atmosphere and back is part of the global carbon cycle. Under natural conditions, the absorption of CO2 through the vegetation and the oceans is about in equilibrium with the release of CO2 through respiration and decomposition. But with the enormous additional production of CO2 in particular through the burning of fossil fuels, the absorption capacity is overstressed and too much CO2 remains in the atmosphere, threatening global warming. In other words, the faster speed of industrial emissions outstrips the slower speed of assimilation. Should, however, the greenhouse effect occur, nature is again bound to become a victim of acceleration. For instance, a certain species of trees on both sides of the US-Canadian border, though they have been used to migrating as they followed the shifting temperature zones after the most recent ice-age, will nevertheless be outrun by the speed of global warming. While the trees are capable of moving at a speed of about a half kilometre a year, a rise in atmospheric temperature of 1-2 degrees within 30 years would require them to run at a speed of 5 km a year in order to follow the advancing climatic zone. Not having enough time for adaptation, they will perish. Outdistanced, exhausted and finally defeated, they are condemned to become victims in the unequal race between industrial and biological time.

Furthermore, the collision between industrial and biological time is most tangible in agriculture as well as in farming. It is often the same story over and over again: the natural rhythms of growth and maturation are considered much too slow by the industrial (and post-industrial) mind. An enormous amount of resources and ingenuity is brought into position against the times inherent to organic beings to squeeze out more output in shorter periods of time. Cows and chicken or rice and wheat are selected, bred, chemically treated, and increasingly genetically modified in order to accelerate their yield. However, the imposition of industrial time on natural rhythms cannot be achieved without a staggering price. Animals are kept in appalling conditions, disease spreads, pollution advances, soils degenerate, species diversity is narrowed down, and evolution is not given enough time to adapt. A host of ecological problems in the area of agriculture derive from the fact that the rhythms of nature are kept hostage for the high-speed economy of our time.

These examples are sufficient to suggest that speed is a critical factor in environmental destruction. The speed regime of modern society drives up the rate by which nature is being used as a mine and as a dumping ground. The throughput of energy and materials occurs at a speed that often leaves no breath to nature's ability to react to the recurrent attacks. Natural systems change according to inherent time-scales; processes like growth and decay, formation and erosion, assimilation and regeneration, selection and adaptation follow rhythms of their own. Pushed along under the fast beat of industrial time, they are driven into turbulences and simplify or destabilise. The rates of interest and discount are at odds with the rate of natural regeneration. Nature is shaky because we take from her too much and too fast.

III.
Speed is fascinating because it confers power. The pleasure to feel like a master over time and space - driving a fast car or sending electronic impulses around the globe - is one way in which Descartes' affirmation of man as the master and possessor of nature has been turned into reality. However, this power is deeply ambiguous. The writer C.S. Lewis in his 1947 essay with the ominous title 'The Abolition of Man', asking himself in what sense man can said to be the possessor of increasing power over nature, called attention to the seamy side of this power. Man, he says, speaking about the bomb and the radio, is as much victim as possessor of power, since he is not just its master, but also its target. 'Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument....Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.' And that power is yielded in two directions. On the one hand, each generation exercises power over the following generations, conditioning the shape of future lives, and on the other, the possessors of power will exert their influence on those who do not have it, conditioning the shape of present lives. Power always throws up questions of justice with respect to present as well as to future generations.

From that point of view, the victory against distance and duration carries a heavy cost. Speed does not come gratuitously. Obviously enough, the mobilisation of space and time requires the mobilisation of nature. Fuels and vehicles, roads and runways, electricity and electronic equipment, satellites and relay stations, call for a gigantic flow of energy and materials. On the one side, the earth is cut open to obtain resources like oil, gas, coal, iron, zinc, magnesium, silicon, bauxit, while on the other, it is used as a refuse dump where polluted waters, broken rocks, oil-spills, toxic substances, and greenhouse gases, are left behind. Certainly, this throughput can be reduced through technologies and innovative design strategies which aim at minimising the use of nature at each step along this cycle. But gains in eco-efficiency will never cancel out the basic law which governs the physics of speed: to beat friction and air resistance requires disproportionally growing amount of energy. An average car which consumes 5 liters of gasoline at a speed of 80 km/h needs 20 liters when it runs up to 160 km/h, not just 10 liters. Or take the much-acclaimed high-speed trains, the French TGV and the German ICE. For the jump from 200 to 300 km/h they consume not just 50% more energy, but 100% more, also twice the energy. The increase in resources is not just proportional but disproportional to the increase of speed. In general, the more speed outdoes natural time-scales, the more environmental resources have to be expended.

It seems, however, that with the advent of electronic communication the era of resource-heavy speed has been surpassed. Indeed, quite a few champions of the information society proclaim that electronic impulses, travelling at the speed of light, will finally square the circle: simultaneity and ubiquity without any cost to nature. They are, more likely than not, mistaken. To be sure, the data highway can be travelled without noise and exhaust fumes, but the electronic networks require quite a lot of equipment. Preliminary results of a study undertaken by the Wuppertal Institute on the resource use of desktop computers show that electronic equipment is environmentally much more expensive than usually assumed. What counts is less the electricity used, as one would expect at first glance, but the amount of nature to be moved for the production of the hardware. In particular, numerous components require the use of an array of high-grade minerals which can only be obtained through major mining operations and energy-intensive transformation processes. As it turns out, no less than 15-19 tons of energy and materials - calculated over the entire life-cycle - are consumed by the fabrication of one computer. Comparing that figure to the one of an average car, whose production requires about 25 tons, reveals that the ecological optimism which surrounds the on-line future is misplaced. On the contrary, there is no reason to believe that mass computerisation will weigh much less heavily on nature than mass motorisation.

At any rate, the power gained through speed today will most likely leave less power to the generations to come. For it is the generations of the 20th century who are cornering today resources that might be indispensable to steer the boat of mankind through the rapids of the next centuries. The excitement about speed - among other things - tends to blow the chances of posterity to lead flourishing, let alone high-powered lives. Moreover, what is true with regard to future generations, holds also with regard to present generations. The amassing of power over nature by the high--speed population forecloses opportunities for the low-speed populations, i.e. the large majority of contemporaries. After all, just about 8% of the world population have a car at their disposal, and presently only around 3% have access to a personal computer. A tiny, privileged fraction enjoys levels of speed which contribute to depriving most of the world's people of their fair share in the world's resources. The conclusion is inevitable: whatever virtues justice might require in the world of today, the search for selective slowness surely figures among them.

IV.
Looking back into the history of transport and telecommunication one remains even uncertain if the Herculean battle against the shackles of time and space was really worth the noble effort. True, nothing is more frustrating than waiting in the slow line, but is faster always better? Does more acceleration make our lives richer? There is obviously no straightforward answer to this kind of question, but it would be a possible point of departure to wonder why it is that despite the ever expanding number of time-saving machines we feel more pressured and driven by the lack of time than ever before?

The automobile can serve as a case in point. Right from the beginning, it had been hailed as the ultimate time-saver, marvellously shortening the time to reach a desired destination. What has happened to that promise? Indeed, contrary to popular belief - and this is proven by a multitude of studies from many countries - car drivers do not spend less time in transit than non-drivers. Nor are drivers more frequently on the move; they leave the house slightly less often than non-drivers. Where has the time gained been lost? Those who buy a car don't take a deep breath and rejoice in extra hours of leisure, but they travel to more distant destinations. The powers of speed are converted not in less time on the road but in more kilometres. The time gained is reinvested into longer distances. And as time goes by, the spatial distribution of places changes and long distances become the norm. People still go to school, to work, to the cinema, but are obliged to travel longer routes. As a consequence, for instance, the average German citizen today travels 15.000 km a year as opposed to only 2.000 km in 1950. The automobile is no special case. Across the board, from mobility to communication, from production to entertainment, time saved has been turned into more distance, more output, more appointments, more activities. The hours saved are eaten up by new growth. And, after a while, the expansion of activities generates new pressure for time-saving devices - starting the cycle all over again. Time gains offer only temporary relief, because they encourage further growth of all kind; acceleration is therefore the surest way to the next congestion.

However, as acceleration drives growth and growth in turn drives acceleration, speed permeates society. Speed impulses have an epidemic effect; they spread across all social worlds and into the individual sphere. Under the beat of acceleration social and individual time-scales begin to tremble, just as industrial time collides with bio-physical times on the macro level. Because social worlds, particular situations and individuals, also often have times of their own; in society different time-scales and rhythms always co-exist. These inherent times get easily unsettled by the spread of speed. Examples abound. Children have to hurry up, students should learn faster, no breaks during work, sickness has to be suppressed, and even orchestras are supposed to condense their performance. Most conspicuously, the gap between the so-called productive sectors on the one side and the reproductive sectors on the other widens. The times inherent to activities like studying and researching, caring and helping, growing up and growing old, cultivating friendships and doing art, are at odds with the speed of the economy. Acceleration, therefore, at the same time enhances and undermines the good life.

Also on the level of personal experience, the shady side of acceleration makes itself felt. If pursued thoroughly enough, acceleration will cancel itself out. One arrives faster and faster at places where one stays for ever shorter periods of time. With all the effort concentrated on quick arrival and departure, we are tempted to disregard the stay. The attention devoted to moving seems to reduce the attention devoted to staying. Moreover, the more people are on the move, the more difficult it becomes to meet them; efforts at scheduling and synchronisation come in the wake of increased circulation. Especially the harried classes in society feel that acceleration, beyond a certain threshold, generates counter-productive effects which undermine the very goal to be achieved. The goal - coming together - is threatened to be overwhelmed by the means of acceleration; he who wishes to protect that goal, will have to opt for selective slowness.

V.
In the 19th century, when society was still slow-paced and settled, it was only natural that speed and acceleration appeared to promise a bright future. At the end of the 20th century, however, as society has become restless, utopia changes its colour. Desires are cropping up which define themselves in contrast to the dominating model of time. Where hustling mobility rules, there can grow a taste for calm; where acceleration is the everyday norm, there slowness becomes a non-conformist adventure. What long had been taken as a measure of progress - that improvement always means reducing the resistance of duration and distance - gradually comes into question. Countless bridges, tunnels, highways, cables and antennas are the heredity of that belief. Instead, the suspicion grows that progress could also imply leaving deliberately the resistance of time and space unchanged, even increasing it if suitable. No battle against the hindrances of time and space at any cost, such a change would prove that our society has outgrown the compulsion to carry the 19th century world of desires right into the 21th century.

It is unlikely that a society which always moves in the fast lane can ever be environmentally or even socially sustainable. It is therefore not going to be up to the challenges of the next century. Before that background, in our recent study 'Sustainable Germany' we have called attention to the need to consider a reduction in speed levels for traffic if one wants to move towards a sustainable future. Given the fact that peak levels of speed consume a disproportional amount of energy, we suggest cars and trains which are deliberately designed for lower top speeds. More specifically, we envisage a moderately motorised automobile fleet where no car by virtue of its construction can go faster than 120 km/h. As materials, weight, comfort and design would follow that criteria of construction, a new generation of gentle cars would be in the offing. A similar logic holds for trains. We propose to design fast trains for speeds not higher than 200 km/h, a limit beyond which the disadvantages of speed accumulate much faster than its advantages. Reduced speed levels for physical transport could be an example for a politics of selective slowness, which is born out of an appreciation for a plurality of social times and aims at a lean consumption of resources. The utopia of the 21th century that we might be capable of living with elegance inside limits, finds its technical expression in the design of moderately motorised engines.

Above all, well-measured speeds for physical transport are the condition for a sustainable information society. True, electronic transmission will sometimes substitute for physical transport, but the high-flying hopes that on-line communication will eventually solve the transportation problem are probably illusions. As experiments show, scepticism is in order and one is well advised to expect ambivalent effects. As the history of the telephone demonstrates, technical communication on the one hand substitutes for traffic, but on the other hand stimulates new traffic resulting from the extended network of contacts. It will not be different with the telematic infrastructure; both effects, substitution and expansion are to be expected. The latter, however, will wildly outrun the former, as long as high speed remains an unquestioned dogma. For it can be taken for granted that electronic interactions in real time across the globe will, on balance, sooner or later lead to an explosion in physical traffic, as closer electronic contacts extend the radius of action and evoke eventually the desire to physically meet the persons involved. Therefore, avalanches of new traffic are to be expected, if the easiness of physical travel remains unchecked. Without slower speeds and shorter distances for the transport of people, the on-line society will turn into a traffic nightmare.

Slow, it turns out, is not just beautiful, but often also reasonable. Even we as users of the Internet are well-advised to join an association which has been recently founded - where else? - in Austria, the association for the deceleration of time.