Well, I'm back from Florida, teaching a three-week public speaking course, and dreaming of a swell 2014. David Terry and I are burrowing through revisions of our DPRK essay, and I have hopes that an internationally co-authored book project is finally coming to fruition. This year's travel plans range from Baton Rouge to Finland (with a possible side trip to St. Petersburg, Russia). Of course I'll also be tackling new lecture projects for the honors humanities program. This semester's topics:
Industrial Society: Capitalism and its Radical Critics
American Transcendentalism and the Beginnings of Environmentalism
The Depression, the New Deal, and pre-World War II America
Totalitarianism and World War II: the Holocaust and Inhumanity in the 20th Century
Modern and Post-Modern Art
Equal Protection of the Law: Excluded Voices and the Rhetoric of Multicultural America
Vietnam, Watergate, American Politics and Society
I presented the arts lecture during my last sabbatical; all the others will be written new from scratch. As ever, I anticipate a constant hybrid of exhaustion and exuberance. Building these presentations will draw from time I'd otherwise devote to blogging - but the results, I hope, will be worth the hassle.
The following is a guest post from "Eddy," a friend I met while attending my fourth Salzburg Global Seminar. As you’ll shortly see, "Eddy" offers a practical, personal, and thoughtful form of engagement with the sometime overwhelmingly complex realities of global capitalism. When he shared these notes with me, I asked for permission to repost them here.
I’m currently staying/participating at a squatted site called Grow Heathrow. It is proving to be quite an important time for me. Politically affirming. I came here to learn skills, connect with others who have similar ideas about how we provide for ourselves, and give my support to a cause/project I’m passionate about. The squat originated from a need to confront the proposed plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. The government in the UK has been looking at airport expansion for a while now – there’s still talk as to where this expansion will take place. If they opt for Heathrow, they’ll have to remove the squatters from this land and tarmac over the village of Sipson; one of the principal aims of the project is to instill community resistance in Sipson against Heathrow Airport Holdings (formerly British Airports Authority), if they come knocking.
The attitude here is great. People are focused. It's a working squat. People arrive for many reasons. I'm here to work. That’s where my head is at the moment - I want to be productive, to be useful. Other visitors are here to enjoy themselves, relax and talk with others. This is a haven for free thought - a space to breathe for those disillusioned with materialism.
Here there’s no room for the workings of capital - no pressure to work the 9 to 5. It is a kind of political expression that directly challenges labour, the 9 to 5 grind. It is this kind of political expression that interests me at the moment, as opposed to attending the monthly anti-war protest/demonstration. Protest is important, but we must also set the agenda. ‘If all we do is oppose what they are trying to do, then we simply follow in their footsteps’.[1] We need to carry on with our activity that isn’t determined by money. We must dedicate ourselves to what we consider necessary or desirable. We must live the world we want to create.[2] Besides, protesting wipes me out (as I recently experienced at the protest against Fracking at Balcome). Not sure I want to devote my time and energy to protests, where we shout, confront police etc. It's not in my nature to use physical force against other humans. Probably too middle class. It's not in my nature to shout about things, sing chants, etc. Perhaps if it's a cause that really riles me up, then I might reconsider.
At the squat there is a non-hierarchical, anarchistic set up. No one is instructed to work. People work when they feel ready to. There are always tasks to be done. People wake up, a group gets together, starts talking - momentum starts to build and we work on a project. And we work hard. But it doesn't feel like work. Because we’re there at our own will, because it’s a cause we believe in, there’s such camaraderie in our collective work. It’s fun and social. What great conversations emerge during work. Working together on something, where there’s a common goal, an objective, sometimes sparks more interesting conversations than assembling with the intention to socialise. During the summer there seems to be a huge flux of international travellers who have heard about the project. The squat reminds me of travelling in hostels – spaces to socialise, unwind and talk idealistically.
A working mind is a healthy mind. People are happy when they're productive, when they're being useful. Their self-esteem grows, their self-confidence and sense of value to the group benefits. During this first month, I have easily forgiven those who have not managed to work and contribute fully. There will be a long history of reasons as to why some are able to contribute more than others. Those that don't, we should have sympathy for and try to understand why, rather than resent them. I guess I am just grateful I have this working mind, this motivation. I've only been here for a month, and my feelings on this may change. Without special resolve and grit, I imagine it is easy to lose patience over time.
The experience thus far is fulfilling a personal need to experiment with new forms of social relations outside capitalism. Grow Heathrow is an open project with plenty space for people to join the site. Contrary to other squats, it is the project that brings the inhabitants of the site together, rather than a group of friends. This kind of experiment in communal living has its rewards and challenges. There are those that use this space as some kind of refuge from some torment in their lives outside the squat. Although they are often unable to contribute to the collective in a variety of ways, the space must try to accommodate their distress. The community must do its upmost to prevent looking inwards. One older lady, who was previously in a mental institution, has benefitted immensely from gardening, working outdoors and being with people. She tells me how lonely she gets in the evenings on her own in her flat. Living communally trumps any discomfort from sleeping without a mattress.
The squat relies on solar panels and a wind turbine for its electricity, has no running hot water from the tap (although an impressive warm shower wood burner has been built) and there’s a compost toilet on site, minimising water usage. Almost all the food consumed is either grown on site, taken from bins outside supermarkets, or from food wholesalers giving away waste food. I must say, I do get a sense of gladness as I walk about doing my daily activity without barely any ecological footprint.
After 5 months in Salzburg (or rather a lifetime) of talking about the problems of the world, and what needs to be done, I am finally in a living and working arrangement that satisfies my political need to get to grips with the ‘doing’. When I wake up in the morning I feel as though I’m in the right place. At least for now. We’ll see how it goes this autumn.
The land that the community is occupying is up for eviction. So there is that added insecurity that for some residents makes long term-commitment/planning difficult. Indeed, their innate instability and transitory nature is a key criticism of squatted social centres. I seem to forget that bailiffs could start breaking through the gate any minute. Part of me doesn’t believe it will happen: Who would break-up such a peaceful, well-meaning, environmental project? I come across as naïve to some of the old-time squatters, who tell me I’ll soon understand what we’re fighting against when I see the State use its might to destroy any dissenting activity. Property is king. I wonder where I’ll be, what I’ll do when we’re being evicted. I probably won’t know how I’ll react until it’s happening. Can physical force ever be successful against the State? History shows that violence and aggression is what it often does best. Why play them at their own game? But if someone is evicting you from your home - if I develop some emotional attachment to this place - there’s no knowing how one might react.
Imagine that you live in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood blocks away from the downtown of a major city and you see your neighbor watering his lawn outside the period allowed by local conservation ordinances. How would you react? Maybe you'd talk to the guy, try to convince him that watering restrictions, while a hassle, are necessary to help fight drought. Perhaps you'd share your observations with friends and coworkers, hoping to discover effective strategies for persuading him to consider something beyond self-interest as a guiding principle. Anne Marie Todd pursued these options, and then she wrote a book. Professor Todd is a good friend; we teach together in the Communication Studies department at San José State University, and we have co-authored two essays. So I surely bring some bias to this review. Nonetheless I propose that anyone who takes environmental activism seriously, anyone looking for persuasive strategies to help heal our planet, should read Communicating Environmental Patriotism (Routledge). This book offers a thoughtfully procured assessment of twentieth century milestones of American environmentalism. While Todd's project is historical, her focus is rhetorical. Analyzing campaigns that tackle such seemingly disparate topics as tourism, conservation, smoke abatement, and scrap metal collection, Todd argues that environmentalists must leverage patriotic appeals to connect personal sacrifice with sustainable living. To advance this broader narrative, each chapter marshals exhaustive archival research and compelling detail. Thus we learn that the “See America First” movement was launched by men who had never visited Europe, we catch conservationists meeting Teddy Roosevelt in a room adorned with a dozen stuffed game animals, and we are inspired to wonder if Adolf Hitler really did blame his battlefield losses on American housewives who hauled kitchen grease to their neighborhood butchers. Along the way Todd explains the rise and fall of American communitarianism before offering a rhetorical strategy for its return. The book is reasoned in its claims but unsparing in its critique of the obstacles to environmental patriotism. Those claiming to be conservatives today would be surprised to learn that Teddy Roosevelt once uttered, “[t]he freedom of the individual should be limited only by the present and future rights, interests, and needs of the other individuals who make up the community." And this is precisely the point of Todd's book, comparing that conservative sensibility to the consumer-society that followed World War II. The struggles to sustain environmental patriotism, as illustrated by presidents who espoused scientism over sacrifice, suffered for ill-fated fashion choices, and responded to national disaster by pitching trips to Disneyworld, are aptly summarized by Todd's appraisal of Americans who have asked “what their country could do for them rather than what they could do for their country.” Her book is a well-crafted piece of scholarship, bulging with endnotes and references to justify her claims. At the same time Todd’s monograph is succinct, accessible, and surprisingly personal. She augments her prose with a fascinating set of artifacts, including a reproduction of artwork that conveys the American sublime, ghastly photographs of Pittsburgh citizens caught under a pall of smoke, and World War II posters that persuaded farmers to fight fascism with scrap metal. And there is detail piled upon detail. You may learn more about Gifford Pinchot's mother, J.P. Morgan’s nose deformity, and the deadly elevators of Madison Avenue than you ever wanted to know, but you will also learn an effective strategy for confronting our globe's environmental exigencies. Communicating Environmental Patriotism concludes with a call for today's sustainability advocates to deploy prewar rhetorics of conservation, stewardship, and democracy to promote a new kind of American Exceptionalism, a progressive spirit in which "Americans are exceptional in their ability to heed the call for conservation." Todd's ultimate goal is to propel a grander "planetary patriotism," but she knows that quick action requires us to focus first on the national dimensions of our global problems. Toward that end she reminds us that pithy slogans such as “Think globally, act locally” are insufficient for the crisis at hand. We can no longer disconnect thinking from action. So I certainly encourage you to read Professor Todd’s book, as long as you remember her advice that reading is merely the first step.
Over the weekend I attended a lovely gathering of folks dedicated to globalizing our campus. Just the day before, I worked with colleagues helping to plan an international trip, trying to make sure students get a clear sense of their possible leadership roles in an increasingly connected world. Of course my thoughts could never stray from the images and sounds pouring in from Japan. The 9.0 quake threw another sad but essential dimension of our global conflation into sharp relief: nothing more than a flat screen monitor separates us from the pain of others.
When the initial reports began streaming in Thursday night I could hardly sleep. The quake was bad enough, but the subsequent tsunami was worse, wrecking a broad swath of northern Japan and racing toward Hawaii and western North America with the speed of a jet plane. It was about 2 in the morning when newscasters were reading the estimates of impact, just hours away. Eventually I settled into nervous slumber - not expecting waves to crash into my house, of course - but rattled with the anxiety that more bad news was on the way.
I stayed home that Friday (no meetings "over the hill," thank goodness) and I'm glad I did. Pals described an epic traffic jam on Highway 17, a soul-sucking slog exacerbated by gawkers who gathered at the summit to watch the waves roll in. Hawaii was generally spared, but the ports of Crescent City and Santa Cruz (yep, just a few miles away) were hammered. Back in Japan, international shipping container units - that perfect symbol of global modernity - had been tossed around Sendai like Legos. The airport was devastated, and thousands of lives were snuffed out throughout the region.
Then we heard about the nuke plants.
Perhaps four are facing various stages of meltdown. So far we've witnessed one "hydrogen explosion" (a horrifyingly ambiguous term, if you ask me) - and fear that another could be imminent. Experts promise that Japan's nuclear woes do not portend another Chernobyl. But hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated anyway. As a last ditch effort to contain the damage, at least one two reactor cores have been flooded with seawater. Just in time, because seismologists predict that a 7.5 level aftershock will further shake Japan in a day or two. Oh, and just for good measure, a volcano has erupted in that country's southern region.
Those of us who live in California know that our state is due for similar wreckage (well, maybe without the volcano). Our own customized Big One is deemed a virtual certainty within the next thirty years. One day our friends in Japan will watch, horrified, as we suffer a pain they know all too well. Our two countries are bound together, and they will help us then - even as we try to help them now. That's the face of globalization, too. More than malls stocked with exports, more than movies with globish dialogue, our expanding international network means that we suffer together when bad times come.
Last night's Oval Office address about the BP Oil Spill had the right rhythm and hit the right notes, but it ultimately fell flat.
President Obama delivered a speech geared to address pundits' concerns about his alleged lack of passion concerning the horror this spill has unleashed on the ecosystem, the economy, and our national sense of well-being. Though he projected his personal encounters with shrimpers and fishermen who watch as their livelihoods roll out with the tide, a Feel-Your-Pain moment long sought by the commentariat, President Obama missed the opportunity to change the dynamic of this crisis.
Jenny and I enjoyed a wonderful Florida vacation during the last week of May. Our trip served no real purpose; it was just about time that we return to our favorite Sunshine State haunts. We go about once a year, tucking into meals at Sonny's, noting the transformations of buildings and roadways, and gathering with friends and family to retell old stories and share new ones.
In those hot and inhospitable climates, plants demonstrate the kind of adaptability necessary to catch and store water, making them remarkable survivors in terrains seemingly unsuited for life.
The Saguaro Cactus, for example, uses its shallow but lengthy root system to gather water in a barren climate, encircling underground rocks to help keep itself upright.
Moreover, its trunk expands and contracts like an accordion to store water in preparation for the frequent droughts that punish the land.
Finally, its buds appear slowly -- the first arm forming after more than five decades. In this way, the Saguaro demonstrates patience, waiting until its root system is extended broadly enough to keep potentially 5,000 pounds of cactus upright in the wind.
Flexibility, outreach, and patience allow the Saguaro to stand between 35 and 50 feet tall and live 200 years, sometimes longer.
We can learn much from these desert survivors in today's arid climate of constraint. But first we must unlearn some long-taught lessons about scarcity.
Thriving amid Scarcity
Hamlet exclaimed, "I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space" -- if only, he added, one could be freed from one's many lamentations.
A modern lament that might surprise Hamlet is not our paucity of options but rather our excess of choice.
And, troublesomely, many of us presume that more choices are always better, that any constraint somehow harms us.
Research, however, suggests otherwise. Indeed, a number of fascinating psychological and economic studies suggest that too many options lead to paralysis.
As one researcher put it, “It is not clear that more choice gives you more freedom. It could decrease our freedom if we spend so much time trying to make choices” (See NYT article, Too Many Choices).
Shakespeare suggested in Hamlet that our lamentations mingle with our limitations to place us in a nut shell, to "drive us nuts," one might say.
Yet those very limitations -- restrictions in budget, limits of power consumption, moral boundaries to our actions -- actually compel us to thrive.
A blank canvas, after all, forces us to deploy the infinite space of our imaginations, to think our ways out of the problems that bind us.
Look again at the picture of the person staring at a blank canvas. Perhaps this kind of thinking makes artists of us all.
Even so, as artists, what do we train ourselves to see?
What counts as real?
Think for a moment about the modern world -- what it means, what it does, what it costs...
When you close your eyes and fill an empty frame with the modern world, what do you see?
An Age of Artificiality
For me, an explosion of iconic images appear, each pulsing with the rhythm of Paul Simon's song, "Boy in the Bubble."
It was a dry wind,
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth...
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires...
When I see the modern world, I see handheld computers that possess a power once contained in rooms, but I also see teeming masses of people crushed into urban slums. I see the simultaneous expansion and contraction of potential, and find it floating on the surface of killing paradox.
Perhaps that is the unsustainable reality of the modern world, how the real is lost amid the winds of unreality.
Today a tiny sliver of humanity imagines themselves living in a sailboat, one like Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel, a fantasy in which you can play tennis while teetering in the air.
This blessed portion of people -- and you might consider yourself one of them -- floats upon the roiling waters, seeing only blue sky and endless promise.
The Desert of the Real
Occasionally though, fortuitously, we see things as they are. And we shiver, even in the growing heat, as the sky turns orange.
We know something meaningful is happening, oddly, frighteningly, because we cannot tell whether the light portends a dawn to the new world, or the gloaming of its imminent nightfall.
Beyond our brilliant and optimistic cities, the desert expands, kicking up hot breezes and hurling the dust at the gates: a barbarous future with which we cannot reckon via the anesthetizing balm of abstraction.
Modernity meets its end, William Butler Yeats wrote this in The Second Coming, when "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."
In Beijing, another sandstorm, one of an increasing number produced by decades of environmental degradation, recently dumped tons of dirt and grit into the capital city of a nation foretold by some futurists as the capital of the 21st century.
It's a cruel irony that a nation with so many resources and resilient people, looking ahead to tomorrow from the gleaming towers of Beijing and Shanghai, must also look backward to the words of an author we in Silicon Valley know well, John Steinbeck.
Dustbowls, we find, aren't merely a thing of 1930s Americana.
An article from The Huffington Post states, "China's expanding deserts now cover one-third of the country because of overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought." And that dust is not limited to a distant land. It flies all over the world on the winds of commerce and war and microsecond thinking.
China turns away from the desert, but the desert advances on us all.
In his book, Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard imagined the desert in a way we recognize, not only as engineers or artists, but as citizens of a world that seems increasingly covered with the dust and grit of modernity, the detritus of mental maps that no longer represent the world in any meaningful way.
We survey our horizons along electronic grids and layout endless cities of fantasy. These are sustainable to the extent that the current of power flows up and down the spines of people and cities.
But upon what, really, do we stand? How long can our cities endure on foundations of sand?
Of this world, Baudrillard writes:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory -- precession of simulacra -- it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
Sustainability
The desert can teach us something about the fate of the modern world. Walking upon its hot, dry surface, we learn that sustainability is not simply about technology; it is both an expanse and an expense of the imagination.
Yet as we constrain our gaze to the cities we build, we kill the lifegiving reality upon which all human inventions are founded. Our cities grow and our minds shrink.
Our mental canvases must stretch beyond the limits of the world that we know. We must visualize an age no longer defined solely by our cities, which are parched and dying at the desert's edge. We must re-imagine ourselves with more permanent things.
After nightfall, Polaris appears to us, fixed in the northern sky. Stars pinwheel, the universe turns, and things change. But survivors stand tall in the dark, amid all transformations.
The North Star in the firmament and the cactus in the desert speak to us in different ways, even though they share the same message. They have something to teach us here.
The kind of sustainable thinking calls upon us to rethink our values...
... starting first with what lasts.
Photo Credits: Sunset flora in Saguaro National Park, Tucson, Arizona: Photograph by Andrew Wood. Person staring at a blank canvas: Photograph by Johnny Mobasher Street Photography. Burj Al Arab Hotel next to sailboat on the water: Photograph borrowed from ETF Trends. Burj Tennis Court: Photograph borrowed from Travel Around the World. Orange dust covers Beijing: Photograph by Markus Källander. Megadunes of sand that resemble waves: Photograph by NASA. Children play on computers next to a huge window upon a city: Photograph borrowed from The Librarian's Guide to Gaming. Stars pinwheel over Saguaro cacti: Photograph by Jenny and Andrew Wood.
Here's another article about how climate change-induced melting of polar icecaps is creating a 21st Century "Great Game" among the industrial powers seeking to tap oil and gas reserves said to be waiting in places that were once inaccessible to drilling.
The Telegraph reports that Russia is planning to occupy a large chunk of arctic territory, even sending a submersible to plant a flag in the deep. Here's a snip:
"Global warming has stepped up the fight for the disputed Arctic, believed to be laden with vast reserves of oil and gas. Russia has pitted itself against Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States to fight for a greater part of the region, arguing that most of it is Russian territory since an underwater ridge links Siberia to the North Pole's seabed."
With all the discussion these days about the increasing costs of energy, it's cool to hear about a new idea that is both good for the environment and our economy: space-based solar power. Here's a snip from today's New York Times:
"A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.
Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid."
Read the entire piece: O. Glenn Smith (New York Times, July 23, 2008, registration required): Harvest the Sun -- From Space
Former Vice President Al Gore on efforts by some politicians to alleviate our current economic woes through off-shore drilling: "Going back over and over and over again to the old ways of the past just puts off the reckoning with the opportunity that we need to seize now, to shift over to renewable sources of energy."
I intend to learn more about the Pickens Plan in the future. I recommend that you do as well.
As the Dallas Morning News (July 12, 2008) notes, "Yes, America's infatuation with oil made Mr. Pickens rich. Yes, he has significant investments in natural gas and wind power. But the United States must make different and better energy choices. Who better than Boone Pickens to champion this crusade? Sometimes, when money talks, it makes a lot of sense."
Learn More
T. Boone Pickens (Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2008): My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil: "How will we do it? We'll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the 'Saudi Arabia of the Wind'? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker."
USA Today's Dan Reed: Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens wants to supplant oil with wind: "Critics could easily accuse Pickens of advocating a major new public policy initiative that will line his own pockets. He is, after all, a big player in both the wind power and natural gas businesses. Pickens says while his hedge fund will earn money for its investors, earning more money personally is meaningless: 'I'm 80 years old and have $4 billion. I don't need any more money.' He's more concerned that his efforts to make reducing foreign oil dependency the No. 1 issue on the national agenda will be dismissed by the public and, therefore, by Washington. So he says he's carefully steering his plan clear of partisan bickering."
The Independent's Leonard Doyle: The texan oil baron and the winds of change [Quoting Pickens]: "This is not about Republicans versus Democrats, he said. This is about saving our country from the ruination of spending $700bn a year on oil imports. Ninety days after the oil hits our shores, it's all burnt up, and we've got nothing to show for it. But they [foreign oil producers] still have our money. It's killing our economy."
Tonight Vienna and I will watch 12 Monkeys (again), and once more I'll likely be struck by that image of a high-ceilinged department store filled with customers fading into a post-apocalyptic future devoid of human life.
Movies like 12 Monkeys call forth a nagging modern fear that we're all sitting precariously atop an edifice ready to collapse into ruin. We keep shopping, keep driving, keep building, and we hope that we're wrong to feel that the center of civilization simply cannot hold.
Then comes a documentary like Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, and a far more substantial degree of confidence begins to give way.
Crude Awakening gathers together an impressive array of experts ranging from oil geologists and historians to a former secretary general of OPEC, a former energy adviser to the president, the mayor of an oil boomtown-gone-bust, and even a Hummer car salesperson, all to consider the possibility that the world has reached an era of Peak Oil, that we've reached the summit of our production of oil and gasoline and now face a steady decline in our quality of life as demand exceeds supply.
Watching this film, I found it compelling to consider that the creation of oil was a rare and relatively brief set of geological events that, for most of human history, was no more relevant than the birth and death of dodo birds. From this perspective, our oil-based economy, largely born in the 20th century, is a blip destined to fade.
During that blip, though, we've witnessed the explosion of our global population as cheap energy allowed the birth of automobiles, suburbs, interstates, and global trade, the creation of the modern world (and its environmental discontents). Crude Awakening dares us to imagine the fate of the world once the oil runs dry.
In this world, shaky economies propped up by petrodollars collapse and we face the true price for our profligate ways. Prices spiral beyond imagination as the production of once-cheap products, luxuries we take for granted today, become unsustainable. The result is a new Great Depression, but a different one than the struggles we faced in the thirties. This is a Depression built on natural limitations not artificial speculations.
Even more frightening, the film marches through the alternatives to which many of us cling, those bridges to the future of more cars, bigger cities, and unchanged values. With hybrid cars, we hope we can continue to carpool two kids around town in mammoth SUVs. Maybe hydrogen technology will save us, or cleaner nuclear power. And then there's solar!
Crude Awakening argues that these technologies, some of which are genuinely promising in the long-term, are insufficiently developed to make a sizable dent in our energy needs for the next generation, and that the price of peak oil will ravage our societies sooner than that.
Already we're used to gas prices that have spiraled to crazy heights over a matter of months. And we know that it's going to get worse. What we don't know, what we can hardly imagine, is the harrowing reality of a world whose nations must wage perpetual war to secure dwindling oil supplies. We know that Iraq was really about oil. But are we prepared to invade Iran? Saudi Arabia? Iraq now wants us to plan our exit. Will we? With no more validity to our claims that our wars are meant to democratize the middle east, just what kind of country will we become?
And then there's the even bleaker future presented by Crude Awakening: a foreseeable world in which air travel and even auto travel reside beyond the means of those who enjoy those privileges now. How then can we sustain our global economy, our far-flung suburbs, our daily lives? This documentary suggests nothing less than the end of modern civilization, what James Howard Kunstler calls The Long Emergency.
Another piece of dystopian pop culture from my early years, a book by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka called Nature's End, refers to the last 25 years of the twentieth century as the "joyous sunset." I always found that image to be potent, suggesting as it does the obliviating pleasures of excess and disregard before the night falls.
We soon thereafter got a glimpse of life after those happy years on September 11th. And today our sunsets (in California, at least) are often particularly lovely due to the fires burning throughout the summer. I hope that these images portend only to a momentary fear-mongering that is due a fan of sci-fi such as myself. But a documentary like Crude Awakening calls forth quiet but urgent questions before I head off to sleep.
Can you imagine? Cities built to float atop oceans swelled from melting icecaps, crossing the oceans in search of mild weather. The shape of the island city is perfect for collecting rainwater and allowing for a diversity of recreational activities that even include mountain climbing. Vincent Callebaut calls them Lilypad Cities.
Wall•E is a remarkable movie. And while it deserves to walk away with Oscar nods for its animation prowess, it also merits a close look for Best Picture.
For me, much of Wall•E's power comes in its gift of images that I've never before seen. I'm thinking of the desolate landscape of future Earth whose majestic skyscrapers stand alongside ziggurat towers of rubble, with little distinction between the piles. I'm thinking of humanity sailing the stars in a giant luxury liner, its people pampered into blubbery obsolescence by ubiquitous machines and corporate anesthesia. And I'm thinking of that ambitious closing-credits narrative that portrays the planting of a new human civilization through an evolution of art forms that sweep across millennia, a story that connects the future and past in mind-bending ways. Mostly though, I'm thinking of the moment in which our audience stood up in a darkened room, stretching bodies in varied degrees of decay, some folks hefting Big Gulp-sized soda cups from their armrests, and reminding me all too closely of the tomorrow foretold by this film. Wall•E is no mere cartoon.
And yet a number of folks dismiss the film as being "too preachy," as some sort of castor-oil message of environmentalism and anti-Bushism. Certainly the creators of Wall•E are making a point. But good for them, I say. These points need to be made. We may look back onto the Bush-years as historians now look back onto the Pierce and Buchanan years before the Civil War or the Hoover years before the Depression, periods in which history seemed like a freight train barreling down upon us, only to be ignored by people lacking vision or courage. In this era, as traditional media of public discourse seem to be derailed by privileged interests, artists are right to use their media to sound the alarm. Wall•E rightly sends us past the movie marquee and into our own thoughts, asking us to consider just what the hell is happening to us.
Nonetheless I plan to see the movie again for more than its "poignancy." I have enough civic homework piling up; I don't need to see a movie out of duty. I'll see Wall•E again (and surely again) to enjoy its collection of clever and humorous moments that create an improbable love story between a garbage compactor with a penchant for Hello, Dolly! and a plant retriever who happens to possess nuclear firepower. And I'll surely return to savor the glorious images of human wit that provide fertile ground for new productions of my own imagination. I'll see Wall•E again because it is a great movie, one that does what all great movies can do. Wall•E amazes us by revealing the fantastic and the ordinary together, showing just how connected they are.
The Guardian describes an upcoming movie called Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash that depicts a global crisis following the time in which oil production passes its peak and begins to decline, even as developing economies in China and India demand more and more.
In this article, I was struck by a particular line:
Oil companies say that there are still major reserves to be exploited. In particular, Arctic and Antarctic fields - which are being freed of ice and snow as the world heats up - are being sized up for their reserve potential.
One may find better examples of "vicious cycle," but not today.
In May while writing about mobile phone etiquette, my post concluded with a sarcastic proposal that I might one day write a rant about littering. How silly, I thought, because along with reminders not to kick kittens or slap the elderly one would assume that we need no more calls to end littering. When I was a kid in the seventies, I remember the television PSA about the "Crying Indian" and thinking even then: Do people actually toss their stuff from moving cars? Yes. They did then, and they still do now.
In fact when Jenny, Vienna, and I drove into California in 1998 I remember how embarrassed I was to see the freeways covered with litter. I was ashamed because I'd taken a job in San Jose and was bringing my family to our new home. Their first glimpse of California's west coast was mile after mile of trash-strewn interstate. I imagined their unspoken question: We're going to live in this place? Nine years later we love California. We own a home here and plan to stay for a long time. But we still are amazed by the trashing of this beautiful land. And we see much of the same in other parts of the country. It seems that many Americans have no problem with litter.
Why do people litter? One response to that question on Why Do You Do That? mentions a combination of laziness and rebellion. I certainly understand the first part of that answer. It really can be inconvenient to keep a piece of junk until you find a trash can. And I imagine that some folks feel no particular love for their surroundings. There are so many ugly places in America that one more piece of detritus must not seem so awful. Yet I still have no patience for littering. My thinking is that a person willing to toss a cigarette butt out their car rather than fill their ashtray isn't just disrespecting the physical environment, they're disrespecting the people who share that environment. And that includes me.
Looking back, I think the "Crying Indian" PSA inspired me to think this way. But it wasn't until the last year that I began to develop a small but daily response to the problem of littering. It does not call for confrontation or bellyaching. And it only takes a moment. Every day, no matter where I am, I pick up at least one piece of trash. Sometimes it's a fast food wrapper. Sometimes it's a discarded newspaper. One day my choice was a box of moldy doughnuts. It doesn't matter, as long as it's trash. I usually choose my daily trash pick-up while I'm walking in a public place. There's no announcement, no posing. But if someone sees me picking up a piece of trash that's clearly not mine I figure that other folks might get the message.
And that's the real point of this blog post. Because you know that one person picking up one piece of trash per day will accomplish pitifully little. And believe me, the momentary feeling of a good deed is insufficient to the problem we all face. No, what we need is for everyone, everyone to pick up one piece of trash every day. And that means you. Imagine if you made that commitment and stuck to it, and imagine if you asked your friends to do the same. Just imagine how easy it could be to make our public places just a little nicer.
Certainly we need much more than litter pick-up to clean up the junk that clogs our society. All of us, myself included, need to think much more carefully about the things we purchase that merely produce more junk that must somehow be thrown away. Each of us can think of ways to buy smarter, buy less, or get by without. And we can find ways to tell producers and retailers that we won't participate in an economy that junks our planet. There's much more to be done than one moment of trash cleanup. But we must start somewhere, so I propose we begin with the next piece of trash. Remove or recycle one piece today and one piece tomorrow and one piece every day thereafter. It must be something that is "not yours" because the consequences of this problem do indeed belong to us all. Don't think of it as empty symbolism. Think of it as a first step. Make it a habit and take it from there.
