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Going medieval: Live like Bess of Hardwick
Lucy Worsley, Guardian
Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it. I spend much of my time working as a curator in Britain’s historic royal palaces. But recently, for a television series, I’ve visited a lot of normal homes dating from the Norman period to the present day, and I’ve concluded that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like those of our low-tech, pre-industrial ancestors.
… Windows will grow smaller again and houses will contain much less glass – not only because of the high energy costs of glass but because it’s thermally inefficient.
… The return of the shutter is also likely: it’s the best way of keeping heat out of a house. And with a hotter climate we’ll probably experience water shortages. Our daily water consumption is about 160 litres; the government expects us to get down to 80 – the equivalent of a deep bath – by the end of this decade. We’ll eventually need to grow as water-thrifty as the Victorians, with an average use of 20 litres a day. The Victorian cook was also a terrific recycler of food; the earth or “midden” toilet has already been revived in the form of the ecologically sound composting loo.
More significantly than the return of shutters, chimneys and middens, there’s a revival in the use of natural building materials, substances with small environmental footprints like wood, wool insulation and lime mortar.
… But we also need to think about what makes a community. Today’s builders and town planners believe people inhabit “places”. Yet medieval towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities in which people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.
(13 April 2011)
Food Raves Gain in Popularity
Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
They Gather Secretly at Night, and Then They (Shhh!) Eat
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SAN FRANCISCO — Along with big-wave surfing and high-altitude ultramarathons, eating is an extreme sport here. Which explains why, on a recent Saturday night, Tipay Corpuz, 21, a technology specialist for Apple, took a break from blogging about her obsession with fried chicken and waffles to join 2,500 fellow food geeks at the Underground Night Market.
At this quasi-clandestine monthly event, a tribal gathering of young chefs, vendors and their iron-stomached followers are remaking the traditional farmers market as an indie food rave.
At midnight, the smell of stir-fried pork bellies was wafting through the Mission district. There was live music, liquor, bouncers, a disco ball — and a line waiting to sample hundreds of delicacies made mostly on location, among them bacon-wrapped mochi (a Japanese rice paste) and ice cream made from red beets, Guinness and chocolate cake.
In a sense it is civil disobedience on a paper plate.
The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmers markets. Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become “members” (free) and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.
… Amateur cooks around the country are pushing to have the right to sell unlicensed goods directly to consumers. So-called “cottage food” laws that allow products considered nonhazardous, like pies and cookies, exist in 18 states, with five more considering similar legislation.
(14 April 2011)
Great issue for bringing together Greens and Libertarians. Suggested by Chris Dumas (nepotism alert!)-BA
William Cobbett: a Green guru?
Jonathan Kent, Guardian
The 19th-century chronicler of rural England displayed a similar mix of radicalism and conservatism to modern Greens
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… Cobbett is usually remembered as a sharp-eyed chronicler of rural England with Tory leanings. We forget too easily Cobbett the radical, the eternal outsider, the scourge who could not be bought off.
Cobbett was a patriot, a lover of the English (and Scots, Welsh and Irish) countryside, of tradition, of bacon and beer, of good plain grammar, of honest chopsticks (the country labourers he saw as the backbone of English prosperity), of the pleasures of the farmer and smallholder.
He was also the enemy of humbug and corruption, of bankers, stock-jobbers and financial sleight-of-hand, of the smug political consensus (he detested Whigs even more than Tories because he saw their hypocrisy as all the greater), of what we call “the system” and he termed “The Thing”, of the disenfranchisement of working people, of poor wages and poor diet, of the Poor Laws that he believed bred poverty.
… The Greens often display that same mix of radicalism and conservatism; championing greater democracy and civil liberties, social justice, the preservation of countryside and community life, small enterprise and self-sufficiency, finance that serves the people and not vice versa.
(12 April 2011)
Cobbett’s “Cottage Economy” is still a good read. The late champion of the countryside and old ways, John Seymour, was a fan of William Cobbet and his bracing style. -BA
Energy and Equity
Ivan Illich, book via Clever Cycles
El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta. [Socialism can only come on a bicycle.]
—José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
[Chapters]
The energy crisis
The industrialization of traffic
Speed-stunned imagination
Net transfer of life-time
The ineffectiveness of acceleration
The radical monopoly of industry
The elusive threshold
Degrees of self-powered mobility
Dominant versus subsidiary motors
Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology
This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as “energy crisis” had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to industrial society—namely, low-energy, convivial modernity—has gained defenders. In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology. … .
—Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978
The energy crisis
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.
The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.
(1973, 1978)
Online text of Ivan Illich’s classic book. Also posted at Preservenet and Ecotopia. Also online is Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich, the influential thinker and unorthodox priest, needs to be rediscovered. See Wikipedia for a brief biography of this remarkable man.
Suggested by RW via BH. RW writes:
“Nikiforuk [in Japan, Oil and the Fragility of Globalization] cites Illich: “No society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.” i.e.: At a certain threshold, energy growth undermines social equity. He uses traffic as a perfect example.
“For those who have not read Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity, it is a classic treatment of the problem, and one of the most important essays of the 20th century, of course ignored by the status quo.
“Virtually every sentence of this essay provides insight and appears visionary and almost unbelievably prescient. How did Illich so completely understand all this in 1973? I suppose because he was paying attention and had liberated himself from conventional ways of thinking. i.e. He was a free thinker who could see and understand the data. This essay would be earth-shattering if written today. He’s not only talking about the ecological limits of energy, he’s describing the social catastrophe of unrestrained energy growth.
“It seems ludicrous and cruelly ironic that we are still fumbling in the dark with our “energy policy” discussions without understanding what Illich was saying so clearly; or what William Catton wrote in Overshoot, or Nicholas Georgescu in The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, or Donella Meadows & colleagues in Limits to Growth. Compared to this work, most of the present debate is still in kindergarten, and making all the stupid mistakes that these people warned us about.
“In any case, check out Illich’s essay if you haven’t already. He used to say that the bicycle was the peak of optimal transport engineering. Beyond that, the negative returns start piling up.”
-BA
Interstates and States of Grief
Phil Rockstroh and Angela Tyler-Rockstroh, Common Dreams
… Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.
The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.
When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.
… Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel — we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive. Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.
Even the landscape itself of the US is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars. As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks — the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past — the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.
… It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity — or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.
… “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”–Carl Jung.
What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job — until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall … clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one’s jowls. Aint that the life — or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.
This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life … Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.
Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase … But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …
(14 April 2011)
