The painful decline of modernist optimism
Posted by Steve Welzer on 10/09/05-------------------------------------------------
New York Times 10/9/05
How the City of New Orleans Sank
“On a desolate street in Mid-City, I saw a row of
elegant 1920’s-era bungalows that had recently been
prettied up, part of a Potemkin-like gentrification
effort. Caked with mud and sewage, the houses are
once again a picture of urban blight. In other
neighborhoods, the damage from the floodwaters
seemed like a final insult to houses that were
already crumbling under the weight of poverty.
Amid such debris, the brick forms of the pump
stations, sheltered under their dark copper roofs,
seem like ghosts from another era, emblems of a
time, and a spirit of optimism, that now seems
as distant as the early flights to the moon.”
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The prognosis for New Orleans - and many of our most unsustainable cities - is not good. And I don’t think we’ll ever “get back to the moon” (as Bush has proposed within a timeframe of 15 years) ... or back to a spirit of optimism based on technological / industrial expansion.
The human adventure is about to go in another direction. We’re at the cusp of a profound transition of thought and spirit - though the current deep-seated attitudes, goals, and expectations will only change slowly. It will take decades and centuries for this turning point in consciousness and lifeways to fully transpire.
It will involve a gradual - sometimes bewildering and painful - disillusionment with the direction our civilization has been going in for a very long time. And for years people will continue to fight for the old “common sense.”
Progressive movements based on modernist sensibilities will continue to put forward demands like: “Build stronger levees! Fight to fund infrastructure!” For some time this will have more resonance in our society, even in our own movement, than the new paradigm counsel: “Forsake the folly. Learn to live ecologically.”
It’s a prospect of devolution going forward for centuries. It will seem to most people like degeneration. I think the task of our movement is to show how this inevitable transition can hold the seeds for regeneration into a Green world of stability, sustainability, bioregionalism, and what Ted Trainer calls The Simpler Way.
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Ted Trainer:
It is increasingly being understood that industrial/consumer society has entered a critical phase, a period of rapidly accelerating difficulties which will lead sooner or later to the emergence of a quite different society. For centuries there has been a steady advance towards greater productive capacity and technical sophistication, “development,” economic wealth, and “higher living standards.” Until the 1960s, few questioned the assumption that the pursuit of growth and affluence could continue forever.
But since then a convincing “limits to growth” case has emerged which argues that industrial/consumer society is grossly unsustainable and that it is generating very serious problems of resource scarcity, ecological degradation, Third World deprivation, conflict, and social breakdown. The way of life taken for granted in the rich countries is only possible for a minority of the world’s people for a short historical period; depletion of resources and ecological damage will inevitably, sooner or later, constrain hyperconsumption. Nonetheless, a commitment to constant and endless increase in production and consumption remains the hallmark of economic policy in almost all countries.
Recent “ecological footprint” analysis shows that it takes at least 4.5 hectares of productive land to provide food, water, energy and settlement area for one person in a rich country. If the expected 9-10 billion people (by 2100) were to live as we do in the industrialized countries, the area of productive land required would be about eight times all the productive land on the planet! Our society is not “somewhat unsustainable,” it is far beyond sustainability.
Possibly the most disturbing problems being caused by the commitment to growth are the deprivation and underdevelopment of the Third World. Those in affluent countries are getting 80% of the world’s resource output, consuming resources at 15-20 times the per capita rate of the poorest half of the world’s people. The globalized economy allows global market forces to determine how resources are distributed and what is developed. The inevitable result is that the rich take most of the resources and goods produced while the poor are deprived, and the development that takes place in the Third World does little more than commit their land and resources to producing exports to enrich local elites and multinational corporations.
There is no escape from the conclusion that a just and sustainable world order can only be achieved through a transition to a Simpler Way; i.e., to a society based on less affluent living standards, highly self- sufficient and cooperative communities, and more equitable economic relationships.
Some of the other crucial elements in an ecologically sustainable society would be: permaculture design principles, local production of most food and basic staples, decentralization, humanly scaled technologies, local employment, community credit unions (replacing for-profit banks), local currencies, shorter working hours. The role of nation-states should decline as the locus of most economic and political activity shifts to self-governing localities. We can only solve the big global problems facing us if, in rich and poor countries alike, we move toward settlements, lifestyles, and economic relations which enable sustainable praxis.
The transition required is vast, yet, not only do we now have a considerable literature on the form that a sustainable society must take, in the last two decades we have seen increasing numbers of people begin to adopt sustainable lifeways. There is a movement for “voluntary simplicity,” whereby people are realizing that by reducing their dependency upon the consumer society and the work-intensive treadmill economy, they can improve their quality of life. There is a related movement promoting the establishment of ecovillages. Eventually it would be beneficial to transform existing towns and city suburbs into highly self-sufficient ecovillage communities.
The fate of the planet depends on those who are pioneering the transition to a Simpler Way, developing and demonstrating alternative lifestyles, settlements and systems - so that as consumer society runs into increasingly serious problems, people will be able to see that there is an alternative path, one that is more sane, workable, attractive, just and sustainable. We need to build and inhabit settlements which have a smaller ecological footprint. We have to try as hard as possible to get the mainstream to recognize the need for dramatic lifestyle alterations. One of the best ways we can do this is through the construction of living examples.
Under current conditions, subject to the globalized market system, around one billion people regularly do not get enough to eat. We need to put more emphasis on community economic production. The most difficult task ahead of us is finding out how to slowly transform the existing towns and suburbs; intentional communities are in a good position to work on this crucial task within their surrounding regions.
We must take up the enormous challenge much more energetically than we have to date, and with an explicitly political focus. We should be going out to the mainstream asserting that its ways are catastrophically mistaken, that they are degrading the ecosystems of the planet and impacting severely on the lives of billions of Third World people, that the global economy is outrageously unjust, and that a satisfactory world order cannot be built unless there is transition to sustainability.