Knowing no boundaries

Today, while working on my experiment with Scott, we listened to The Story (as is the daily ritual), and heard a wonderful little one produced by Roman Mars for his radio show 99% Invisible. His story was about "the national public art competition held in 1989 to create a monument that would honour the Free Speech Movement, which began on the campus of University of California-Berkeley in 1964." The winning monument, by Mark Brest van Kempen, is a sixty-thousand foot column of air, six inches in diameter, in Sproul Plaza, at the University of Berkeley...sixty-thousand feet tall because that is the height to which the airspace is American. The inscription surrounding the monument reads:

"This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction."

Free speech monument at UC-Berkeley. Photo by Eric E. Johnson.

The ironies of this monument are beautiful. It itself is boundaried, yet it belongs to no one. van Kempen needed to set aside space that is common to us all. Juxtaposed with this boundaried space is that it is made of something we all share--air. And I believe what is lacking characteristic in the environmental and sustainability movement is exactly that notion of commonality, of being shared. Indeed, the environmental movement itself is boxed in, is boundaried, unfortunately. There is no common goal for everyone to move toward a sustainable world. And that is why Avik said that we are preaching to the choir; that is why  that the middle class just doesn't care about the environment, really, that is why

I cannot blame the environmental movement for that, but rather this culture, in which we have made people into robots, mindlessly doing their own thing, without concern or greater imagination of the larger world. I have written a lot about the boundaries we've created in our minds--boundaries between people, boundaries between people and the environment they live in, boundaries of specialisation, boundaries in action--and how these fictitious boundaries, while potentially powerful in teasing out what is important to address, are nonetheless damaging to everything we should be striving for. Boundaries that are created because some people think they are "right" and the others are "wrong," and we dismiss what the other side has to say, creating false dichotomies. Boundaries are created because we live in bubbles of "civilisation" with the larger world "out there," and we end up with broken cycles of waste and trash and ecological degradation. We have people that spend their entire lives thinking about and acting on single things, not understanding how their actions affect their local watershed, their neighbourhoods, their states, their regions. We tend to reduce the intricacies of our world by limiting the scope of actions and reactions we think about.

While demolishing the boundaries in our minds and in our politics may be an existential challenge for some people, I believe however that it can lead only to a greater connectedness, with people we have continually misunderstood, misrepresented, or derided, and with the Earth, which continues to support our lives.

Reflections on the year: Who I am surrounded by

Experiences come in two forms, shared and personal. Yet it seems to me that unless you live in solitude, even the most personal experiences are necessarily shared. There is no way to stop all of the external forces that influence your thoughts and your actions. There is also no way to stop your influence on those around you. In some sense, no experience is personal. To me, the only experiences worth having are those that are common, shared and mutual.

I started this project close to a year ago with little idea of what it might mean to me. I undertook it solely as a way to see how far I could go in walking my talk, or to see how much further I needed to go; I thought this a personal project. But the credit for the birth of this blog goes to others - Andrew and Margo, who convinced me to start writing late last spring during a conversation on a beautiful day on the Diag. Furthermore, most of what has been written about has in some way been sparked by conversations with other people about at times seemingly unrelated things. I can therefore in no way take credit for everything that you may have read - the people that surround me that have provided constant encouragement and meaning and provocation. Clearly, there is much further to go in though and action, because I realised things and learned about things that I didn't think existed. Writing about this project has really made me more aware of my surroundings, and the ways in which humans influence their environment.

If you are thinking of a project of your own, don't hesitate to get it underway. You will be surprised by the enthusiasm others will share with you.

I am hoping that you will continue to share your thoughts with me and with others. And thanks.