On our way back from Detroit a few nights ago, Kristin, Ethan, Marwa and I got into a discussion about something that has come up time and again over the past two years: What does it matter whether or not individuals do anything about the problems we face? For, if things don't happen on a larger scale, nothing matters in the end.
I have written about this many, many times before, as have others on this blog, but each time I think about this particular issue, I feel as if I am thinking about it anew. It seems that with each passing day, the power of taking matters into our own, individual hands--not in the sense of doing whatever we want with our world to destroy it, but imagining new possibilities for our own lives--seems more and more complex, yet more and more compelling.
When it comes down to it, the only way in which possibilities of any kind are envisioned is if someone actually does something, if someone brings the possibility into the world. Take, for example, new technologies. Radically new technologies can have the capacity of outmoding older ones, depending on who backs them. We grant all sorts of protections to such "entrepreneurs" and "innovators" who "invent". They get intellectual property rights and patents. They can make money off of their ideas by selling them. They are seen as visionary, and they are seen as essential to creating a utopian world. It doesn't really matter, though, what one does as long as there are social structures and institutions that support what you do. Our social structures, as they stand, cheer and laud such people.
Many people would claim that the lives that we live are based on all that we know. I disagree. There are things we know that fundamentally question everything we do--from driving to work, to eating food that has travelled fifteen hundred miles before arriving on our tables, to being able to buy the latest electronics from China by clicking a mouse in Ann Arbor. So, what about imagining possibilities that are counter to the grain of culture? First of all, most social institutions that exist in this culture are not built to accept their demise. (Take, for example, corporations, which are social institutions and organisations that we think must grow ad infinitum.) But more fundamentally, my sense is that people are fearful of new possibilities because they will make outmoded what they have held on to dearly--we have built our entire lives on assumptions; on "experts" that know what is "best" for the economy, for the environment, for public policy; on stories and myths about industrialism, growth, and efficiency that we have to tell ourselves to make us feel good about what we are doing in our day-to-day lives. Therefore, for someone to come along and question all of these foundations will make most anyone throw up their guards.
The uncertainties of large scale policies on our daily lives make people uncomfortable with accepting them. What would it mean if everyone had to have health insurance? Well, there are a group of people that are scared of such possibilities because they think "government will take control of Medicare", that there will be loss of "freedom" and "liberty". Their opponents may think that these fears are unfounded, but actually, they are real, for they are felt and voiced. And so when it comes down to actually doing something new, in creating a fundamental change, it cannot start from anywhere else but our own lives. Understanding the scale at which new possibilities much be introduced is essential. The scale of individuals, of our daily lives make possibilities more tenable. Talking about possibilities and trying to live them openly allow others to be engaged in shaping these possibilities. For example, when Rowena said that learning primitive skills made her feel more peaceful, it was very easy to accept this, because I could feel and sense her peace. This made learning primitive skills more compelling to me, as I am sure it did to anyone that spent any amount of time around her. It was clear that she wasn't a "hippie" or "crazy". She was just doing something new. She was imagining new possibilities.
Showing posts with label possibilities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label possibilities. Show all posts
Friday, May 4, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Experience and possibilities
As an experienced engineer, one can easily look at a proposal for something, parse out the important details, and point out flaws and oversights in design. An experienced psychologist can recognise depression by looking at someone's face. An experienced cook will know just how much water to add to rice, not a drop more, not a drop less. It is with age, with awareness, with an openness to the world, that comes experience--experience that allows us to see the world as it is, experience to understand why, and hopefully, experience to change what is not working.
Yet, experience that is not a positive force can also close off possibilities, for many times, all that we know comes only from what we have experienced. Such experience can ward off imagination. If we cannot imagine, how do we move forward given many of the messes we've created? How can we get past the same old, same old (neoliberal economics, utilitarianism, capitalism, communism, socialism, competition, World Trade Organisation, World Bank, United Nations) that many elders are stuck in? How can we reclaim the possibilities of envisioning a fundamentally different world, and acting on those visions? It is clear then that experience and possibility share a complex relationship.
Grace Lee Boggs, the most youthful ninety-six year old philosopher and activist from Detroit, points out in a conversation with Krista Tippett (embedded in this post below) that first and foremost, we must recognise that,
Many, especially those that are so embedded in the way things are, might view these words as romantic and idealistic. They are right, for that is the goal. What comes before being able to see new visions of the world, though, is the ability to overcome the fear of leaving behind what we've created so far. And to do that...
Yet, experience that is not a positive force can also close off possibilities, for many times, all that we know comes only from what we have experienced. Such experience can ward off imagination. If we cannot imagine, how do we move forward given many of the messes we've created? How can we get past the same old, same old (neoliberal economics, utilitarianism, capitalism, communism, socialism, competition, World Trade Organisation, World Bank, United Nations) that many elders are stuck in? How can we reclaim the possibilities of envisioning a fundamentally different world, and acting on those visions? It is clear then that experience and possibility share a complex relationship.
Grace Lee Boggs, the most youthful ninety-six year old philosopher and activist from Detroit, points out in a conversation with Krista Tippett (embedded in this post below) that first and foremost, we must recognise that,
[w]e have so much to rediscover. There are so many creative energies that are part of human history that have been lost because we've been pursuing the almighty dollar. We haven't recognized at what expense we've done that, expense not only of the earth, not only of people of color, but of our own selves. We no longer recognize that we have the capacity within us to create the world anew. We think we are only the victims.What possibilities open up for us with this new mentality? Only experience can guide us, says Gloria Lowe of We Want Green, Too!:
Ms. Tippett: So I think, when you tell those stories of working with these guys who are so broken, right, I mean it's just layer on layer on layer of grief and loss and tragedy, it sounds debilitating to work with that, right? It sounds like you would lose hope.
Ms. Lowe: Oh, not at all, not at all. Part of my own personal transformation — I think it's probably the transformation that anyone who has a brain injury goes through — is that you lose contact with the things that you've been taught and, in doing so, you become like the birds. You start to do things instinctively. So you know about the human spirit. So all I did was transfer what I already knew and these guys did what was in their spirit to do. They rose up, they rose up, you know, just by, oh, yeah, I've been doing this for years...
...This floor is laid by a guy who had two head injuries in the military, two. I mean, he's lucky to be alive and just the perfection to see him pull a line all the way from the kitchen to the living room, he's so focused. In their art, in their creativity, and laughing, and they were like a family. So the big to-do is really upstairs. People need to see possibilities once you've begun creating them because then the questions come. What is the advantage of doing this? And it's a very real advantage if the law firm that I worked for did Social Security. If a person hasn't worked, their check is $674.
A house this size was roughly 2,000 square feet. The heating bill in this house, heating and light, was $510. So that leaves you $160? It's very difficult to survive off of that. The heating bill in this house now is like $272 after doing a lot of baking and stuff on the holidays. It's a big difference. That $300 allows me to do something else. I talked to Wayne and Myrtle because the field over here, we're going to take that and we're going to create a garden where kids have raspberries and some fruit they can eat and fruit trees and they'll create their own benches and we'll do things so that they can see a different kind of world, a different kind of life. These kids don't know butterflies. I mean, come on. That's kind of — you don't know butterflies? You know, so this was a part of rediscovering who we are as human beings.
Many, especially those that are so embedded in the way things are, might view these words as romantic and idealistic. They are right, for that is the goal. What comes before being able to see new visions of the world, though, is the ability to overcome the fear of leaving behind what we've created so far. And to do that...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
A market for everything
When I was in Montreal for the ICAO Sustainable Alternative Fuels in Aviation, I met man, who I will not name, who is very influential, especially in the financial world and the powerful (and old school) Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He told me something that I believe is both arrogant and unimaginative at the same time: "Look, the world economy is at around $60 trillion right now, and it needs to be [emphasis added] at $300 trillion in fifty years. In order to achieve that, the concept of waste cannot exist in fifty years; waste will not exist in fifty years. Every output of one process will serve as an input to another process."
I can admire such a statement, and can be repulsed by it. On the one hand, who likes waste? No one, really, apart from those who make their earnings from waste. On the other hand, it is an argument for continued technologisation of our world (something that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger would gladly accept), and it signifies something that I've been feeling for a long time--that in our control of nature, we have continually striven to recreate nature itself, or create our own "nature", as autonomously operating as possible. But, I digress. This isn't the main argument of this post. I want to go back to what this man said, that the concept of waste doesn't exist.
I can understand that cultures change, and that things that existed fifty years ago no longer exist today, and things that exist today might no longer exist fifty years from now. But I find the issue of waste (and trash) fascinating, especially because there is a market for something that we are all repulsed by. As I have said previously, regardless of your politics, trash and waste are things that most all of us want to be away from, and therefore, we do send it away. But at the same time, as Vanessa Baird has argued, maybe our economy is based around the generation of waste itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, for waste is big business in this country, and likely the same abroad.
It's true that we have made efforts to lessen "waste" and "trash" by doing something termed "recycling". But this doesn't fundamentally change the fact in our efforts to be less ecologically degrading (one can argue whether recycling is less harmful on the whole), we still have competition from landfills. When I visited the Ann Arbor materials recovery facility with Caroline, where recyclable materials from many neighbouring communities arrive to be processed, the good many that was giving us a tour of the facility said that because of the recently increased capacity of the facility, and because the facility started accepting #4, #5, and #6 plastics, that the amount of trash going to the landfills has now decreased, so much so that the fees associated with dumping trash at landfills has gone down, creating an "incentive" for communities and townships to send material to landfills, rather than paying more for recycling. There is indeed a market for trash, and a powerful one at that. How do we fight the market? Hope that "consumers will change their minds"?
When we create markets for something, we (at least for a while), accept the presence of something in the world. And with something has unwieldy, large-scale, and commonly produced as trash and waste, the larger the market, the larger the power. (A similar analogy can be made for oil and gas.) But I think that this points to something deeply fundamental and flawed in our thinking, and that is that if money can be made, even by doing something bad, someone will do it, create or coax a market for it, and then say, "Let the market dictate its presence in the world. If the market says that it shouldn't exist, then so be it." Such thinking fails to recognise that some things are inherently degrading. It is based off of the same secular, amoral thinking that has resulted in massive ecological crises and the possibilities of things degrading. We seem to confuse the possibilities of our mental capacities with real, actual, physical existence and implications in the world. The creation of options and possibilities (a market) is thought to be amoral an not value laden, and responsibility is quickly dumped on politics to messily figure out (or not) whether something is acceptable. For example, only because there is a "market" for acts like war do the possibilities of war exist. If the atomic bomb can be created, Why not it be created? many think. Why not then let the political decisions be made off of the actual presence of nuclear weapons in the world? The fact that nuclear weapons have been used "only" twice in the past sixty five years doesn't take away from the fact that nuclear weapons have been used twice, and that they have created an arms race the world over. Again, the same analogy can be made for most all of the possibilities that have been introduced into the our world because of such thinking.
I believe that such thinking can be extremely harmful. It implies a blind faith in "possibilities". People will always say that with the "good" of these possibilities comes with the "bad". But then again, this doesn't change the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world a single iota. Some things, some behaviours just do not exist in an ecologically sustainable, just world. For us to think otherwise, for us to be lead down the path of blind possibilities, means that we have not gained any wisdom from the knowledge we have; we do not learn from history and our mistakes.
I can admire such a statement, and can be repulsed by it. On the one hand, who likes waste? No one, really, apart from those who make their earnings from waste. On the other hand, it is an argument for continued technologisation of our world (something that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger would gladly accept), and it signifies something that I've been feeling for a long time--that in our control of nature, we have continually striven to recreate nature itself, or create our own "nature", as autonomously operating as possible. But, I digress. This isn't the main argument of this post. I want to go back to what this man said, that the concept of waste doesn't exist.
I can understand that cultures change, and that things that existed fifty years ago no longer exist today, and things that exist today might no longer exist fifty years from now. But I find the issue of waste (and trash) fascinating, especially because there is a market for something that we are all repulsed by. As I have said previously, regardless of your politics, trash and waste are things that most all of us want to be away from, and therefore, we do send it away. But at the same time, as Vanessa Baird has argued, maybe our economy is based around the generation of waste itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, for waste is big business in this country, and likely the same abroad.
It's true that we have made efforts to lessen "waste" and "trash" by doing something termed "recycling". But this doesn't fundamentally change the fact in our efforts to be less ecologically degrading (one can argue whether recycling is less harmful on the whole), we still have competition from landfills. When I visited the Ann Arbor materials recovery facility with Caroline, where recyclable materials from many neighbouring communities arrive to be processed, the good many that was giving us a tour of the facility said that because of the recently increased capacity of the facility, and because the facility started accepting #4, #5, and #6 plastics, that the amount of trash going to the landfills has now decreased, so much so that the fees associated with dumping trash at landfills has gone down, creating an "incentive" for communities and townships to send material to landfills, rather than paying more for recycling. There is indeed a market for trash, and a powerful one at that. How do we fight the market? Hope that "consumers will change their minds"?
When we create markets for something, we (at least for a while), accept the presence of something in the world. And with something has unwieldy, large-scale, and commonly produced as trash and waste, the larger the market, the larger the power. (A similar analogy can be made for oil and gas.) But I think that this points to something deeply fundamental and flawed in our thinking, and that is that if money can be made, even by doing something bad, someone will do it, create or coax a market for it, and then say, "Let the market dictate its presence in the world. If the market says that it shouldn't exist, then so be it." Such thinking fails to recognise that some things are inherently degrading. It is based off of the same secular, amoral thinking that has resulted in massive ecological crises and the possibilities of things degrading. We seem to confuse the possibilities of our mental capacities with real, actual, physical existence and implications in the world. The creation of options and possibilities (a market) is thought to be amoral an not value laden, and responsibility is quickly dumped on politics to messily figure out (or not) whether something is acceptable. For example, only because there is a "market" for acts like war do the possibilities of war exist. If the atomic bomb can be created, Why not it be created? many think. Why not then let the political decisions be made off of the actual presence of nuclear weapons in the world? The fact that nuclear weapons have been used "only" twice in the past sixty five years doesn't take away from the fact that nuclear weapons have been used twice, and that they have created an arms race the world over. Again, the same analogy can be made for most all of the possibilities that have been introduced into the our world because of such thinking.
I believe that such thinking can be extremely harmful. It implies a blind faith in "possibilities". People will always say that with the "good" of these possibilities comes with the "bad". But then again, this doesn't change the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world a single iota. Some things, some behaviours just do not exist in an ecologically sustainable, just world. For us to think otherwise, for us to be lead down the path of blind possibilities, means that we have not gained any wisdom from the knowledge we have; we do not learn from history and our mistakes.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Reflections on the year: The importance of the journey
There has been much to write about for the past two days, and I apologise for not having done so. I am on a small trip to Georgia Tech for a conference, a trip which Paul and I decided to do by car; we decided not to fly.
We arrived in Atlanta last night, after taking a couple of days to do the drive through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Georgia. Along the way, we stopped in Dayton and had sandwiches in the Oregon district. We stopped in Lexington and explored the University of Kentucky; the campus was quiet because all of the students were on spring break. But Paul and I decided to throw a Frisbee around and see where the Frisbee took us; it took us to little nooks with wooden benches and daffodils, large expanses of lawns, and a beautiful wide pit in front of the library. As we continued to drive south through Tennessee, we saw weeks of spring progress in minutes and hours right before our eyes.
I feel like Paul and I could have missed all of this very easily had we decided to fly down to Atlanta. Yes, we would have "saved" six hours of travel time each way and we could have "gotten on" with our lives. But it seems nowadays we have become so accustomed to flying over small and vast expanses of the country, rather than exploring it and observing the gradients and differences. The drive gave me a better understanding of the landscapes this country is made of. The journey is as important as the destination.
The drive made me think about this past year. We live in a world where many want answers and solutions now, and to do that, we build ever faster computers with greater and greater computing power, we try to maximise the efficiency of everything we do. The challenges that face our world socially and environmentally, however, have no quick fixes. It would be nice if we were to come up with quick and easy ways to empower people everywhere to put all of these problems behind us. We may be able to cope with top-down approaches to solving these problems and understand them. But maybe not. Any durable change that fills our lives cannot come from anywhere else but from within. I feel that if people aren't involved in the journey of struggle and learning, any quick fix will not be a durable one. The journey allows a deeper understanding of the fundamental issues that can be easily overlooked when we look for quick fixes. We shouldn't forget that our quest to make each one of our lives less impactful is a journey. What is more important to realise though is that such a journey doesn't require being an engineer or doctor or social worker. We have all been endowed with all we need - hearts and minds and souls. All we need to be is open to the possibilities that will present themselves along the way.
I can't believe it has been three hundred and fifty-eight days since this my project started; it has been the start of a wonderful journey, a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain (one thousand points to the person who figures out which movie this is from).
We arrived in Atlanta last night, after taking a couple of days to do the drive through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Georgia. Along the way, we stopped in Dayton and had sandwiches in the Oregon district. We stopped in Lexington and explored the University of Kentucky; the campus was quiet because all of the students were on spring break. But Paul and I decided to throw a Frisbee around and see where the Frisbee took us; it took us to little nooks with wooden benches and daffodils, large expanses of lawns, and a beautiful wide pit in front of the library. As we continued to drive south through Tennessee, we saw weeks of spring progress in minutes and hours right before our eyes.
I feel like Paul and I could have missed all of this very easily had we decided to fly down to Atlanta. Yes, we would have "saved" six hours of travel time each way and we could have "gotten on" with our lives. But it seems nowadays we have become so accustomed to flying over small and vast expanses of the country, rather than exploring it and observing the gradients and differences. The drive gave me a better understanding of the landscapes this country is made of. The journey is as important as the destination.
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| Oregon District, Dayton, OH |
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| Where will you take us? |
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| University of Kentucky |
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| Spring in KY |
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| Library, University of Kentucky |
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| Beautiful tree |
I can't believe it has been three hundred and fifty-eight days since this my project started; it has been the start of a wonderful journey, a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain (one thousand points to the person who figures out which movie this is from).
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