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Lost in Transition
Kentaro Toyama, The Atlantic
While I was in India, there was a year when the price of some basic foods rose by as much as 40%, due to international shortages. It hardly affected me, but for the low-income communities I interacted with, it was a life-constricting squeeze. Families skipped meals and everyone had to find more work. Hikes in global oil prices were equally painful. Gasoline is subsidized in India, and because the Indian government had no choice but to raise prices, there were strikes and protests. But, what could the government do? The problem was global.
Every gallon I consume is one less gallon on the market. By some estimates, resource consumption among North Americans is 32 times greater than it is in the developing world. As the global population grows and resources become scarcer, the poorest people in the world are hit first and worst. As a person from a rich country engaging in international development, I’m part of the problem that I’m trying to help solve.
So, when I returned to the United States, I looked for organizations that were addressing the issues here. Transition was one. The movement’s basic premises are that the consequences of peak oil and climate change are imminent; that governments and entrenched powers are not yet taking necessary action; and that the most practical response is for local communities to transition to resilient, localized communities that wean themselves off of fossil fuels and long-distance trade. Though every community is encouraged to find its own solutions, the dominant activities are to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, to start gardens and otherwise grow food locally, to experiment with local currencies, and so on.
… Hopkins’s genius with Transition was to start a movement that is incremental, grassroots, and optimistic without being moralizing. The allure of Transition is that it seeks to find a more meaningful, connected way of life that is ultimately happier than the lives that many of us lead on our achievement-oriented hedonic treadmills. Joining the movement isn’t as much about doing the right thing as it is to aspire to a more satisfying life.
Transition Towns might be considered the latest in a history of intentional communities that have experimented to find more enlightened alternatives to modern economically driven urban life. They have something in common with some religious monasteries, hippie communes, Israeli kibbutzes, artist colonies, meditative ashrams, Gandhian villages, and other communities that have deliberately sought alternatives to mainstream society. But, unlike communities that isolate themselves, Transition Towns seek to evolve existing cities, towns, and villages, transitioning them gently from oil-addicted materialism to sustainable community.
(2 April 2011)
Natural Disasters?
Bill McKibben, The Guardian/UK
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales
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At least since Noah, and likely long before, we’ve stared in horror at catastrophe and tried to suss out deeper meaning – it was but weeks ago that the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was “divine punishment” for excess consumerism. This line of reasoning usually fails to persuade these days (why are Las Vegas and Dubai unscathed by anything except the housing meltdown?) but it’s persistent. We need some explanation for why our stable world is suddenly cracked in half or under water. Still, over time we’ve become less superstitious, since science can explain these cataclysms. Angry gods or plate tectonics? We’re definitely moving towards natural explanation of crises.
Which is odd, because the physical world is moving in the other direction.
… We’re now moving into a new geological epoch, one scientists are calling the Anthropocene – a world remade by man, most obvious in his emissions of carbon dioxide. That CO2 traps heat near the planet that would otherwise have radiated back to space – there is, simply, more energy in our atmosphere than there used to be. And that energy expresses itself in many ways: ice melts, water heats, clouds gather. 2010 was the warmest year on record, and according to insurers – the people we task with totting up disasters – it demonstrated the unprecedented mayhem this new heat causes. Global warming was “the only plausible explanation”, the giant reinsurer Munich Re explained in December, of 2010’s catastrophes, the drought, heatwave and fires across Russia, and the mega-floods in Pakistan, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere were at least plausibly connected to the general heating. They were, that is to say, not precisely “natural disasters”, but something more complex; the human thumb was on the scale.
We still have plenty of purely natural disasters – though scientists can posit reasons climate change might make the world more seismically active, tectonic and volcanic forces seem beyond our reach; the great wave that broke over Sendai really did come out of the blue. But even in Japan, of course, the disaster was not entirely “natural”. The subsequent fallout was… fallout, the invisible plume streaming from one of our highest-tech marvels, a complex reduced in minutes into something almost elemental, a kind of utility-owned volcano.
(2 April 2011)
Speak Out, Fight Back!
Michael Yates, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue
We spent six weeks in January and February in Ford City, Pennsylvania, my hometown. We stayed with my mother, in the house in which I grew up, and slept in the twin beds in my old room. Fifty years ago, I would pull up the covers and listen to faraway AM stations on my father’s Hallicrafter shortwave radio. I’d think about girls and baseball games and fall asleep while the train whistle blew in the distance. I never thought, much less worried, about the future. It was a hopeful and prosperous period for the white working class, and I couldn’t imagine anything but good times ahead.
Today the good times are all gone. The population (a little over 3,000) declined by nearly 10 percent in the last decade, and it has been falling since the 1970s. It is half what it was when I was a teenager. Jobs are scarce; drug and alcohol abuse are rampant (there were two heroin overdoses in one evening); wages are shockingly low; and homeowners, including one of my relatives, are selling out to the Marcellus shale companies for ridiculously small sums of money. The glass factory and the pottery that once paid union wages are shuttered. Every day, the local paper lists a slew of arrests, jail admissions, and fines levied. The sad affects of the shoppers at the Wal Mart and the crowds in the store at midday—retirees and younger men and women who would be at work in a more prosperous area—are paradigmatic of what has been happening.
We took frequent trips to Pittsburgh, about forty miles south, traveling occasionally on back roads that went through some other small towns. They all looked poor and rundown, victims not only of the demise of local manufacturing and mining but also more than two years of deep recession. Pittsburgh, itself, was dreary and dirty, with roads chock full of deep potholes. Gang violence and murders are appallingly common; public services are getting ever more scarce; and the city’s finances are in disarray. Given what we saw, we were stunned when the Economist rated Pittsburgh one of the most livable cities in the world. My guess is that if you gave the magazine’s editors a choice of cities in which to live, none of them would choose Pittsburgh.
Western Pennsylvania may have features that make its economic misery unique, but I think in most respects it is not that much different than scores of other regions in the country.
… Readers sometimes ask me what I think should be done to reverse the collapse of the labor movement and the one-sided class struggle Warren Buffett and his ilk have been waging. I usually hesitate to answer, arguing instead that the people themselves will figure out what to do as they fight to improve their circumstances. Let me make an exception here and issue a call to arms.
Educate yourselves so that you can learn what is going on in the world. Do not be taken in by the mainstream media, whose owners are more interested in making money than in telling us the truth. Do not fall for the hatemongers who would have us believe that immigrants or Muslims or the Chinese are to blame for what is happening. They are not. It is the economic system and those who control it that bear responsibility. We must make common cause with all exploited people, no matter their race, ethnicity, or religion. We have more things in common than not.
We must stop believing that this or that election will make much difference. It will not. President Obama says he is a man of the people. He is not. He is a war maker. He cares little for democracy and a lot for Wall Street. When he and his opponents tell us that taxes on the rich must not be raised, that deficits must be immediately cut, that we can’t afford Social Security and Medicare, that public services must be cut or privatized, that money doesn’t matter when it comes to quality schooling, that Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and all the new wars being planned are necessary to protect our freedoms, that all the things we think are good are really bad, remember that they are lying. Remember that it is better not to vote than to vote for the lesser of two evils. Fight politically for programs not for people. Build an independent party for workers.
Organize your workplaces. You have no chance otherwise. Your employer does not have your interests in mind when it makes decisions. You are not “associates” or “team members” or valuable and cherished human beings. You are costs of production; the harder you work and the lower your wage, the more valuable you are. You will be scrapped like worn out machinery whenever more money can be made with other workers in other places.
(1 April 2011)
