Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Emily, what I'm trying to talk about when I bring up ecostalinism is
the deeper issue of the restriction of personal freedoms for
environmental goals. That's a real issue: businesses live with it every
day. "We'd like to use Solvent X to make Product Y, but the FDA just
banned it - downstream toxicity they say - so now what do we do, pull
the product?"

That really happens. Perhaps not often - there's usually a work-around
- but it does happen.

What you can or can't buy or manufacture is already restricted for
environmental (and other) ends: public safety, your own safety, etc.
China pushed that further, a lot further, and got results. I'm really
tired of people being unwilling to look at the relationship between
environmental regulation and personal freedom from perspectives other
than the knee-jerk responses of "REGULATION BAD" and "EARTH GOOD."

There's a real dialectic here, a real negociation between liberty and
security, just as there is for national security. An SUV is a product
which Other People want to buy. They are citizens like you and me. Why
should we feel the right to take it away from them?

If we say "it's bad for the earth" or "they should not want it" what's
the real moral or legal force of that argument? What if they reply
with "get your damn bicycle out of my street!"?

Negociations like this are real parts of the political process. If the
environmental movement can come up with some equivalent of Corporate
Personhood for the Earth, how much would that change legal battles over
the environment?

If we could find a really serious moral, ethical, legal and scientific
argument for simply taking worst-of-class inefficient products off the
shelf, how much of a difference would that make? Right now, if a
product is dangerous to people, it simply vanishes from sale and never
returns, but you can happily sell something which burns five times the
electricity of an identical-services product, bleches CO2 it's entire
life, contributes to global warming, and there's no restriction because
"a person is not harmed." - just all people.

That's a big deal. If we had the intellectual infrastructure to make a
rights-based argument for taking that junk out of service *today* how
much of a difference would it make to our bottom-line carbon emissions?

The foundation of the idea that the poor have rights, including some
access to the wealth of the rich - the foundation of the welfare state
and of trade unions - was hundreds of years of political thought about
the rights of human beings. We're at the very early stages of doing
that thinking about the earth, about the rights of non-human life
forms, or future generations, or the planet as a gestalt. I'm sorry if
I've offended you or sucked too much bandwidth into my own thinking
processes. It seems important to me to be willing to ask fundamental
questions, to look at the inevitable trade offs between individuals and
society, and between societies, individuals and the planet.

We all hope for the magic technical bullet. The $0.10 / watt plastic
solar panels, the ultra-reliable hydrogen-buffered wind turbines, the
two hundred kilogram car. But there are well over six billion of us
down here, most of us poorer than dirt, poorer than reliable access to
health care.

I'd like to think that the effort we put into finding answers actually
helps solve the problem for everybody. Deploying small steps without
an understanding of the overall goals will not help us much in the
final analysis. If we cut our impact by ten percent in the next two
decades, it really won't matter.

And that's not a prediction of doom and gloom. That's a challenge to
think big, to be willing to undertake the task of radical world
transformation. To envisage a world which actually works is the core
challenge of visioning new futures.

I'd like to think that we are excellently placed in both time and
space to do that work, to think about the biggest questions of the day
and propose new approaches. The culture is ripe for another bite at the
environmental cherry: after Bush goes, whether it be in 2004 or 2008
the pendulum will swing back, and there'll be a lot of renewed focus on
the things his administration has "neglected."

I, personally, would love WorldChanging to be part of the discussions
about "what do we do when the political will returns?"

I don't think the answer is an agenda of small steps, or an agenda
without serious measures. A 10% carbon emissions reduction helps
nobody. But if we shoot for developing the technologies which would
allow for a 50% reduction, we'd be helping to pave the path to the
future.

Do you see what I'm saying: I think we have to think more about basic
science, more about large scale changes, and more about fundamental
political processes if we're going to actually change the world. We
have to work both ends of the spectrum: cool new products and village
tool shops on one side, and basic science and political theory on the
other.
  

    
Using China as the example for *anything* ecological is driving your
truck out on the Spring ice, my friend. 

China is not only a complete friggin' mess -- deserts spreading,
forests gone (the "Green Wall" treeplantings are pretty much
acknowledged to have failed massively), dust storms blackening the
skies of Beijing, people dying by the hundreds of thousands from
pollution, almost none of the original ecosystems left (much less left
intact), driving quickly on the way to eclipsing the US as the world's
worst climate abuser -- but really smart people I've talked with who
work there question whether it *can* get better while it's the PRC.
Remember, this is a country that is still actively executing
dissidents, where science is completely controlled by the state and
where state corruption is massive.

Is its population lower than it would have been? Unquestionably. Is it
any sort of model for sustainability? Catergorically not.
  

    
Oops, slipped in there before.

Emily, you make a good point, there.

I don't think that it's helpful, even in this discussion, to lump in
banning a specific hazardous chemical with forced reproductive choices,
or to equate regulation with repression. In fact, I think it's BS, and
simply hands the worst people in our society ammunition to use against
sensible environmental decision-making.

Vinay sez: "I'd love to see us really put focus on paths which might
lead to those
Factor 10+ break throughs. If anything is going to save our collective
asses and allow all of humanity to live on this world in peace and
plenty, it's going to be a series of technological jumps of at least
that size."

I agree. I'd also argue that to get the F10/20/100 kind of leaps we
need, we need to think in terms of systems: not just improved cars, but
changed patterns of transportation and urban design, for instance.
  

    

Even gloomier is the experience of post-communist states elsewhere which
can become more corrupt as families and associations get a piece of what
used to be the state's action, and also control the new state.  Control 
of scientific initiative probably shifts to control by investment,
including foreign investment.  China's a sleeping giant in many ways.

Not that curtailing executions of dissidents isn't a good thing, natch!

So an image of a free and sustainable China is a challenge for me,
frankly, though I think Chinese culture needs such a mythic image.
I wonder if it has one, even as a subculture.

I would love to see roundups and research on the idea of sustainability
and where it fits into popular culture in different countries, come to
think of it.  I'd love to see what American and foreign researchers would
say about Americans and the idea of posterity.

Posterity isn't getting much lip service from politicians in the US
these days.
  

    
More slipping.  I was responding to the China post, of course!
  

    
<we need to think in terms of systems: not just improved cars, but
changed patterns of transportation and urban design, for instance.>

(This reminds me of the film Mindwalk.)

But how?? We have a population so susceptable to the media campaigns
of the corporations - how does one go beyond preaching to the choir???
  

    
Whoa, lots of posting going on. Yeehaw!

I'm probably the only one in this forum to have lived as a spiritual
communist for over a decade. Not really Stalinist, in that it was what
we called "a free will trip." Anybody could leave whenever they wanted
to. The hard part was getting in - you had to take a personal, literal
vow of poverty. Most of our efficiencies came from sharing resources.
The cars and trucks we used were polluters, but you had to schedule
access to them unless you needed them to do your job. Most of our homes
were very uninsulated and though we tried to design for solar
efficiency, it was all we could do to get all of us in shelter more
sophisticated than old school buses and glorified tents. Our cost of
living per person was a couple bucks a day.

We called ourselves Voluntary Peasants, and though many of had
advanced to the level of having electricity and running water after 12
years, our standard of living was not evenly or fairly distributed. I
believe that this inequality contributed greatly to the breakdown in
the Agreements that had held us together for so long. People who had
family off the Farm who would send them money lived better than those
whose off-Farm families didn't have money or had written them off as
kooks. 

When I lived in Guatemala with the Farm's charitable branch - Plenty -
our little commune was within the bounds of a Cakchiquel Mayan canton
named San Bartolo. We saw how the residents of SB cooperated on
projects like bringing running water and electricity to the village,
and how interwoven family relationships supported the trust required to
work for collective good over individual advancement. This was tribal
culture, still at work. People thought in terms of "us" as much as they
thought in terms of "I".

The extent to which people in any culture can commit themselve to that
collective view of sustainability will determine, I believe, their
effectiveness in achieving sustainable living over the years. The shock
of 9-11 did us a favor by showing us, for that brief period, that a
whole nation can share a realization. Unfortunately, that shared
realization fractured soon after with fear and defensiveness on one
side and determination to address root causes on the other.

I'm blogging my Farm life at www.socialchemy.com/farmie. It's a very
personal account so far; I'm still moving slowly through my "freshman
year". I'll certainly be reflecting on factors that can be generalized
outside of that time and culture, but it will take a while to get
there. A friend of mine has written a short history of the Farm and is
now teaching a course on collective lifestyle at Sonoma State. I need
to sit down with him and start a list of relevant learnings. I mean, we
were, mostly, Americans who chose to "think different." And some
people actually thought that was cool.
  

    
>So an image of a free and sustainable China is a challenge for me,
frankly, though I think Chinese culture needs such a mythic image.
I wonder if it has one, even as a subculture.

Taoism.  Potentially.  
  

    

You guys were a mythic force.  One way to create a new myth for cutural 
guidance is for a small group to live it out.  Of course, in my corner of
the counterculture there was a feminist suspicion of the culture of the
Farm, but for many people the heart of the experiment was still
deeply admirable. Myths have to have heretics and critics, too, in our
culture, and good myths survive with in counterpoint with them.  

Weird thought -- could a different flavor of "reality tv" show provide 
the means for such an experiment in this era?  Are there any other
cultural forms that could come into play to provide interesting models?    
  

    
Slipped post again.  109 refers to Cliff's Farm post and his great blog
project.  Emily, is Taoism exciting in China?  Do the young know much
about it, play with it?  How forbidden is it currently?  Any idea?  It's
weird how little I know.
  

    
<The extent to which people in any culture can commit themselve to
that collective view of sustainability will determine, I believe, their
effectiveness in achieving sustainable living over the years.>

!
  

    
">So an image of a free and sustainable China is a challenge for me,
frankly, though I think Chinese culture needs such a mythic image. I
wonder if it has one, even as a subculture.
">Taoism."

That's Gary Snyder's contention, that Taoism has been a 3,000-year
holding action against Confucianism and the Chinese instrumentalist
approach to nature. But remember, too, that Post-War Chinese culture
has been even more enamoured with The Future than American culture. I
wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Chinese Sustainable Future bloom
forth, if there were any kind of politically hospitable soil for it to
take root in.

That said, I've never seen any evidence of it.

"I would love to see roundups and research on the idea of
sustainability and where it fits into popular culture in different
countries."

This is a brilliant idea. Any grad students out there looking for a
thesis or dissertation topic that would actually prove useful?
  

    
Yes, I am a Gary Snyder disciple on this score.  

I cannot fully answer your questions without a bit of research, Gail
but: Taoist worship is banned in the PRC as far as I know, although
they do make use of puppet mouthpieces in ways similar to the
Chinese-seleted Tibetian Buddhist reincarnates; there are expat
communities in places like Taiwan and Singapore; no idea how young
Chinese might be "playing with Taoism" (but I'd love to find out).  I
imagine it would be enough to just let Taoist ideas
visibly/audibly/readibly influcence their creative work.  Taoism does
not evangelize; it persists. 
  

    
Oh my god, Fig, thank you so much for writing. The first place I came
to see in the states was The Farm. I wanted to know what had happened,
how it had worked, whether I could hope to live that way myself. It was
heartbreaking. It's also what launched me on the whole ecology trip:
the dome business, thinking about Buckminster Fuller, about big
systems, all of it.

I've been trying to explain to people for years What The Farm Was (and
Is) - that it really is the treasure trove of understanding spiritual
community, sharing, and what can go wrong, how important it is that the
books balance, that the agreements are clear. How important it is that
we have both accountants and gurus.

Thank you so much for what you guys did. It's been an incredible
inspiration for me.

WorldChanging indeed. I'm pointing the world at your blog. :-)
  

    
Alex, you're right, Communist and post-Communist countries
by-and-large have appaling local environmental records. Here in the US,
rather than simply forcing people to live next to our toxic waste
dumps, or stripping down forests to make quotas, we actually have
checks and balances to government power.

However, we're also consuming at a vastly faster rate than even the
most resource intensive communist regimes, and we're quite artful at
exporting the damage. The very liberty we enjoy, the freedom to protest
and dissent, makes it hard to move environmental legislation forward
because so much of it is "Thou Shalt Not" which goes against the grain
of both our people and government.
  

    
I guess it was "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" that had an "Access to 
China" section, no? (I have a copy of that somewhere.)
  

    

China is a huge conundrum.  We are all basically in agreement about how
important what happens in China is to so many things--and yet we cannot even
reliably communicate with the people there.  The gov't has banned Typepad,
for god's sake...
  

    
As I recall, Chairman Mao's philosophy of governance was something like 
this: keep their bellies full, and their minds empty. He thought the 
leaders in the U.S. were crazy, letting people think all the time. However 
in the U.S., leaders aren't threatened too much by the minds of the 
masses, because they figured out how to tell us what to think. Our minds 
may not be empty, but what's there is fair and balanced, and no threat to 
the status quo.

I think I'm trying to say that we're not much better off.
  

    
US consumption: I'm hardly arguing that our system is perfect. I think
the answer, though, is more democracy. Clean up the campaign finance
system and I think we could be 1/3 of the way there within a
presidential term.

China: the disheartening thing to me is that China appears to be more
or less single-handedly disproving the notion that capitalism = greater
political freedoms. The Party's been very astute in its ability to
both grow at an insane rate and still execute dissidents like it was
going out of style, um, so to speak.

That said, big changes is China would be big, global changes. A bright
green China would change the entire global equation...
  

    
I wouldn't be too downcast on the prospects for democracy in China, Alex.
Totalitarian regimes that embrace capitalism have (for all capitalism's
faults) swallowed the hemlock, and for all they might walk and talk for a
while afterwards, their authority will die away (Indonesia, S Korea).

More worrying in the case of China, big and divided as it is, is what might
happen during the transition.
  

    

jon, not to say things suddenly got better in America, but: half a million
people on the streets of NYC last Sunday.  There's hope!
  

    
I've failed to get this into english about nine times, so wish me luck
this time. Democracy in the sense you're using it refers to individual
choice, individual's control of their lives, right Alex? You don't
literaly mean more voting, I don't think, but individuals having more
power and control.

I see a real tension between that and EPA-style environmental
regulation. If the people simply decide to vote for SUVs, who's to stop
them? Right now they're "voting with their pockets" in some extemely
foolish ways, not because choices don't exist, but because they don't
choose them. This is what lead me to study ecostalinism and really
focus on the idea of the government protecting consumers from their own
choices.

We have models for this: EPA bans on toxic releases, drug laws against
things like crack cocaine and the whole FDA trip of the government
regulating medicine to prevent gullible consumers being poisoned by bad
doctors.

I don't think I'm at all anti-democracy. But I am *pro*regulation* for
green issues. There is a rights issue there: who is my government to
say I can't drive a sherman-tank sized SUV to work, and burn lead-based
paint in my own back yard? Who are these people?

And they answer should be "They are Us, and Us is saying No More Of
This."
  

    
China's getting a lot of pressure from Hong Kong, too.

Re. democracy, we really have to consider why we want it, and how we make 
it work. How do you define democracy? In Athens, it was governance by all 
the people... who were male citizens. The population of Athens was about 
one third that of Austin, Texas, and they were relatively consistent in 
their world-views and grasp of issues.

Democracy is tougher when you have larger, more diverse groups. Those tend 
to be mediated by some representative form of governance.

But I don't mean to go all democracy 101 on you. Getting to the relevant 
question - what do we mean when we way we want democracy? How does a 
democracy look, when it applies to 50 states and 250 million citizens? How 
do we structure governance so that we have maximum participation, and 
still make informed decisions, and get things done?
  

    
(Emily and Vinay slipped in while I was typing!)
  

    
Politically, I'm fairly sure the demise of American Democracy is
largely due to the political involvment of large corporations. They
were banned for the first 50 years of the Union for excellent reasons
and I'm fundamentally against the Government granting limited liability
to protect investors from loss. It might have been necessary once, but
at the moment the investor class rules the roost and needs no
protection from anybody.

Away with limited liability, I say. Let it be done with insurance.