In Protagoras’s retelling of the ancient myth of Prometheus, the god Prometheus stole fire to give to mortals.
The fire Prometheus presented to humankind represents techne, the godlike skill to manipulate one’s surroundings—fashion tools, shelter from the cold, and, eventually, construct machines.
While most of us recall Prometheus paying for this gift with an eternity of torture, Protagoras’ retelling had a happier ending.
According to the Sophist, simply having techne was not enough for humankind. The cleverness that evoked technical skills enabled mortals to make war, cheat, lie, and treat others with cruelty.
Since mortals were ill-suited to wield the gods’ techne and were at risk of wiping themselves out, Zeus resolved to grant one last gift to humankind—a sense of reverence.
Graced with reverence, humankind learned to live peacefully (more or less) with one another and construct complex, artistic, and imaginative cultures across the globe.
In the book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff, my beloved late philosophy professor, explained that reverence is a quality that “…begins in a deep understanding of human limitations” and can be defined as “…the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.”
In April 2023, I traveled to my old home state of Texas, to a lonely spot in the middle of the Permian Basin’s oil patch, to view the groundbreaking ceremony for Stratos, the 500,000 ton-per-year direct air capture plant under development by Occidental Petroleum.
Since then, I have watched one news story after another describe progress at the site. Each time, I think back to Protagoras’ story of techne and reverence.
Our civilization is built entirely on a foundation of fossil fuels. Everything we do today—everything we eat, drink, wear, and touch—relies on hydrocarbons and their energy, thanks to Prometheus’ gift of techne.
We have known for a few generations that the exploitation of the magical, sticky black liquid trapped in fissures below our feet is destroying our biosphere’s capacity to sustain the abundance and variety of life that we take for granted.
Shocked by this realization, forward-thinking scientists, engineers, and businesspeople have used the fire of techne to fight fire, resulting in enormous direct air capture machines that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it in fissures below our feet.
When I began investing more time and money into climate technology start-ups, I thought, “The capital markets incentivize people to solve problems; all we must do to solve the climate problem is allow the capital markets the chance to solve it.”
Over time, I have come to realize that our climate problem is a manifestation of a lack of reverence rather than a deficit of techne.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current is one leg in a global conveyor belt of heating and cooling seawater known as the Thermohaline Cycle that, start to finish, takes around 1,000 years to complete one turn.
The most ancient permafrost on earth, a muck of permanently frozen organic matter and soil that represents around 15% of land surface in the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere today, is 700,000 years old.
When I consider these timescales, I feel a sense of reverence.
I am struck by the limitations of a single human life and feel a sense of awe and respect for geological processes of unfathomable duration. I also feel a sense of shame for my personal exploitation of the earth’s natural resources, paired with my embarrassing lack of a concomitant return of anything approaching equal value to the biosphere that sustains me.
What is lacking in the discussion of climate technology today is not a lack of technical know-how; it is an appreciation that humans are integral to the system being destroyed, not an incidental, external force that can save or destroy the system through free market incentives.
In his 2022 book, The Need To Be Whole, author, farmer, philosopher, and (if your correspondent had any say in the matter) living national treasure Wendell Berry suggests balancing techne and reverence with an institution that he calls the University of the End of Nowhere.
The university will have one course of study, called Local Adaptation. Berry explains,
“There would be no division into semesters. There would be examinations and grades…but no “finals.” Students would be graduated from the course and the university upon their demonstration of competence in addressing questions raised by the human inhabitation of specific places: natural regions, watersheds, ecosystems, mining districts, shores, forests, farms, towns, cities…The ruling and ordering question would be: How can human beings live on and from any specified place on earth without diminishing its life and their own?”
Berry’s Local Adaptation course seeks to inculcate an important lesson that those enamored with technological advances would do well to heed: We mortals are a part of the land on which we live, not apart from it.
Intelligent investors take note.
