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Conservative MP: Small is Inevitable after oil runs out
Anthony Steen MP, Herald Express via Transition Culture
Rob Hopkins of Transition Culture writes:
How’s about this? Anthony Steen is the Conservative MP for Totnes, and isn’t the first person you would necessarily think of when looking for a green leaning thinker. He has recently undergone what one might call a climate change conversion, and now, seems to have also really grasped the Transition Town thing in a big way. He helped with the launch of the Totnes Pound, and last Saturday, in his monthly column in the local paper, the Herald Express, wrote a piece which was staggering in its enthusiasm for the work that TTT is doing (see below). How this translates into other areas of policy and so on remains to be seen, but credit where it is due for openeness to new ideas.
How do you wean a nation off its addiction to oil? Transition Town Totnes is an experiment trying to do just that and find the answer using a small, historic market town of 4,000 people as its model.
‘Peak Oil’ is the phrase used to identify a high point, probably reached this year, when the world’s conventional or crude oil production rate will reach its maximum output only to then fall into decline. Whilst this gloomy picture may be seen as scare-mongering it contains one vital and indisputable truth: that the world will face a ‘supply crunch’ around 2012 when reduced output will collide with ever-increasing demand.
…Is it possible that a future with less oil could improve the quality our lives resulting in a renaissance in agriculture and small businesses? Could Peak Oil help change attitudes and rebuild ‘social capital’ by bringing people and disparate groups together to cooperate and focus on a common goal. Peak Oil could well be the amber light warning us that there is a major obstacle on the road ahead.
…So what is happening down at the grass roots? Transition Town Totnes has already published its first food directory in which local growers, food producers and caterers are listed with the aim of encouraging people to ‘buy local’, reducing food miles and therefore oil consumption. Last March I launched the Totnes Pound, together with Rob Hopkins the inspiration and initiator of the scheme to offer an incentive to buy locally.
(17 July 2007)
Capital ideas (Robert Putnam and social capital)
Madeleine Bunting , Guardian
His latest research shows ethnic diversity reduces social solidarity, trust and happiness. So why is Robert Putnam so optimistic we can all get along?
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Robert Putnam is variously described as looking like Abraham Lincoln or an Amish preacher. The 66-year-old American social scientist bears more than a physical resemblance to such figures; his wisdom has earned him a wide audience – from the White House (under both presidents Clinton and Bush) to the bestseller lists, while still managing to maintain an unequalled academic respect in his field.
“Social capital” – our networks of friendship, neighbourhood and trust – was an obscure sociology concept until Putnam managed to draw out its political implications and write about it accessibly in his book Bowling Alone.
(18 July 2007)
An audio interview is available at the original.
Designed Deterioration
Khoi Vinh, Subtraction
If you buy yourself a piece of high quality luggage from Rimowa – and I’ve daydreamed about it, but have never been able to justify the exorbitant expense – you’re getting a structurally and aesthetically pristine object that’s going to get beaten up.
You know how airlines and luggage handlers can be; the vagaries of travel can be unkind to luggage of all kinds, including thousand-dollar, aluminum frame suitcases. The state in which a bag tumbles out of the chute onto a conveyor belt at baggage claim is never quite the same state in which you handed it over to the airline at check-in.
The thing with a Rimowa, though, is that those scratches, dings and dents are part of their aesthetic. A new, unspoiled Rimowa suitcase is actually the least desirable kind of Rimowa suitcase in that it is, to paraphrase something I once heard Jasper Johns say, an ‘ignorant’ suitcase. Unused objects are ignorant; only the ones that have been put to use, that have traveled, that have been tossed around have accumulated knowledge. That knowledge and familiarity, if it’s worn properly, can make an object desirable. A beaten, worn, scratched Rimowa then is actually a point of pride.
The Iron Giant in My Kitchen
Similarly, I have a US$20 cast iron skillet that I bought several years ago from a restaurant supply shop in downtown Manhattan. I’ve cooked hundreds of meals with it, and over time it has developed a coating from oil and food – the manufacturers call it ‘seasoning.’ It’s a little unbecoming when you think about it; in fact, though I clean it, it’s a dirty piece of cookware, and it resembles its original, store-bought state not at all.
But it’s also a beautiful piece of design. After cooking in it and cleaning it up, I’ve spent a lot of time just looking it over, marveling at how its very deterioration has been incorporated into the design of the object, at how it’s gotten more attractive – less ignorant – the more I use it.
Designing for Deterioration
I mention these things because I’ve noticed recently that the concept of what we might call designed deterioration is fairly anathema to digital hardware. The objects we purchase from purveyors of digital technology are conceived only up to the point of sale; the inevitable nicks, scratches, weathering, and fading they will encounter is not factored in at all. The result is that as they see more use, their ignorance may recede, but they wear it poorly. They don’t age gracefully.
(16 July 2007)
Author Khoi Vinh is a NYTimes.com designer
Recommended by Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian, where she has more comments.
Argentina: Where Jobless Run Factories
Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis, The Nation
… we, like so many others, had been drawn to Argentina to witness firsthand an explosion of activism in the wake of its 2001 crisis–a host of dynamic new social movements that were not only advancing a bitter critique of the economic model that had destroyed their country, but were busily building local alternatives in the rubble.
There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighborhood assemblies and barter clubs, to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in “recovered companies.” Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It’s an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: “We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”
The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale–some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country’s other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country’s deeply unequal “recovery.” Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: This is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.
Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the traditional script for how change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone’s ten-point plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory–at least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyze what is already in noisy production.
(16 July 2007)
