Shane, I'm not an opponent of mechanised society, in fact I fully support it (most of your points are fairly obviously valid based on common knowledge and are long-closed debates, but your condemnation of pesticides I find questionable). I feel, however, that the mark of real technological civilisation is not the power it can bring to bear, but the efficiency with which it does so. Power without efficiency is, I think, a good working definition of decadence (when, that is, greater efficiency is actually attainable).
The fundamental problem is that our society is one which lives for the present or the extremely short-term future, like an animal, and when one does that, all that matters is indeed how much power and how many resources can be supplied for immediate consumption; how much of either will be left tomorrow, and what we'll do then, doesn't come into it. As soon as one looks to the future, sustainability becomes crucial, and efficiency is the way to achieve it.
This is an expression of what many would agree is the greatest evolutionary accomplishment of man, that of conscious self-determination extending an arbitrary distance into the future (some would even say that, fully realised, this would mark the obsolescence and cessation of our natural evolution), guaranteeing the species' survival indefinitely; and yet our current society and many of the individuals in it, if they ever were capable of this, do not do so, forgetting or never learning how or even preferring not to, regressing to the level of dumb beasts living by instinct moment to moment, looking ahead to merely a fraction of their own lifetimes, if at all, let alone as far as the lifetimes of their descendants. (The fundamentalist religions are largely a close variant of this - they puport to look to the future, moreover with perfect accuracy, but declare that everything has been decided and preset and nothing need be done, and god makes all the long-term decisions for us anyway, so the effect is largely the same - complacency, and concern only with the simple and immediate, even though it may typically, paradoxically be done in the name of eternal life!)
