I was not so friendly regarding the We.org “Free Us” ad in a previous post, but I like this one. So in an effort to offer some positive feedback, I’m pleased that Al Gore’s people are showing us an attainable goal that we can visualize: 100% clean energy in ten years for the US economy. The image of the big switch is kinda cool.
Archive for August, 2008
Give it to Banksy, he is the master of ironic juxtaposition. Trouble is, it’s one thing to be provacative and challenging as an outsider, it’s another to live with the output, i.e. the community is going to deal with the consequences of this kind of provocation. Could an image like this stir up enough hatred and anger to cause real physical violence? Hard to say because we’re not there to see what happens. Everything has a context, even street art.
Via Wooster.
For more info, go here.
From the author of Here Comes Everybody, some inspiring ideas…
A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism | Wired Science from Wired.com:
Wired.com: Can you talk about how social applications could help solve environmental problems?
Clay Shirky: There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it. [Compact fluorescent lightbulbs] are nice, but people going down and changing CFLs in a handful of fixtures isn’t going to cut it.
It’s a collective-action problem. The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is … what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn’t any additive solution to the problem. It will be both governmental and social because that’s the scale of the problem.
And this little zinger about Bill McKibben, who wrote The Age of Missing Information. I concur with Shirky about the book, but for slightly different reasons. I found the book problematic because it makes a false dichotomy between nature and media by using the logical fallacy of a straw electronic man. Of course sitting in a room for a weekend and watching nothing but cable is going to be benal compared to the experience of nature. But few people live in a prison cell watching nothing but TV (but thanks to Bush, that is a reality for more and more people). People’s lives are far more complex, and they don’t own a duck pond. (Still, 350.org may be a solution. More later.)
Wired.com: What do you think about organizing efforts like Bill McKibben’s 350.org?
Shirky: I sort of reflexively dislike McKibben. He wrote a book with a section about the value of a duck swimming around a pond and contrasting that with the vast wasteland of television. But he made a whole point of not telling people about where it was. It’s private property. He owns it and he’s able to go there. Any solution that doesn’t work for cities doesn’t work. McKibben’s natural splendor argument is so unfit for the 21st century. That said, I haven’t seen 350. Maybe his thinking has changed.
PS If you haven’t read Here Comes Everybody, you really should. Along with Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, it’s required reading of understanding the emerging media paradigm.
45 years later, still worth revisiting.
Does this ad really qualify as ecologically sound thinking? I agree that the folks in power need to shift course, but the assumption here is that only they have the power to change. Unfortunately I found the message rather disempowering because it disregards us as the source of true power.
One of my most favorite human beings and a media lit colleague, Kathleen Tyner, organized a really cutting edge media literacy conference at the University of Texas at Austin in June. Thanks to the new tools available to us, we can all be digital flies on the wall. We can be there now by clicking through to the conference Website, which offers vodcasts and powerpoints of the presentations, including the super awesome Multimedia Mandala above.
Image source
After a five-week odyssey throughout the US, I’m again in my Roman kitchen and back in the blogosphere. Among the many things on my travel agenda was the commencement of a new chapter in my life: the start of a four-year PhD program in Education and Sustainability at Prescott College. This is an exciting adventure into a very cutting-edge interdisciplinary, self-directed program that will no doubt influence what I think and write here.
After reading about American economic woes from afar, I expected to arrive to a Depression-like US, but found things oddly like business as usual, with the exception of astronomical food and gas prices. And I thought Italy was expensive! Yet, it’s clear that catastrophe remains a potential for the car-centered universe.
Among the many things we examined during my program’s initial colloquium is a system’s theory approach to social change. To oversimplify a complex process, one observable pattern during a time of crisis is a watershed point where people can choose to reinsert themselves into a snowballing cycle of social madness, or consciously choose to change their behavior to solve a crisis, i.e. evolve or die. A cursory view of election ads on US television shows that, in rhetoric at least, McCain and Obama are offering these kinds of choices: more of the same, or some kind of limited change. I’m skeptical that Obama represents enough significant transformation to get off the oil treadmill, but judging from McCain’s ads, I’m quite surprised that there are enough Americans out there who believe changing behavior is too dangerous a course to follow. McCain’s more-of-the-same marketing strategy leads him to ridicule the idea of conservation, which makes me think that simple things like properly inflating your tires is ideological heresy because to promote conservation is to acknowledge the limits of growth, which is utterly antithetical to the utopian world of consumerism. An examination of what motivates people to stick to beliefs that are so self-destructive is warranted. I suspect the mentality of an alcoholic in denial is closely analogous. In the vary least, greed and delusion are ancient human tendencies, but the likes of which on this scale have never been encountered before. We can thank corporate media for at least reflecting this, albeit in a very illusory manner that mocks sanity.
After cursory look at the Quad-City area that comprises Prescott Valley in Central Arizona, one can see a quintessential example of denial in the form of a creeping, virus-like oil-dependent development along highway corridors that extend beyond Phoenix. Having spent significant time in Arizona over the past 25 years, I’m still shocked by ravaging car-driven development growing completely out of control. I just find it impossible to understand why suburban track house expansion continues its viral growth in the desert sand without a hint of ecological consciousness. While driving through these megacity corridors, one can only imagine the ghost towns looming on this horizon, for none of these places can be sustained without cheap oil, something we know is a thing of the past. Even the most dim-witted economist should sniff trouble down the line.
I remain convinced that humans are better off living in sustainable designed, densely populated mixed-use urban centers that can thrive on local and pedestrian traffic. Perhaps in its own strange way, Rome has survived and evolved with this model, which may account for its 3000-year longevity (granted it was founded on similar principles that now drive the US economy, but Rome survives, and that should give some level of optimism for the rest of us). As for America, the business-as-usual exburb landscape will be dust sooner than later, and it will be the result of poor human imagination, or at least a lack of creative problem solving that changes from the mental center of gravity of resource-driven empire building as depicted in the cartoon above to something more reasonable on a biological scale. To re-state the obvious, our dysfunctional economic metabolism threatens to out-consume and foul the nest. Economy and ecology both come from the etymological root for home. This is worth considering. Deeply.
I remain encouraged by the forward-thinking people and communities in the US (and world) who are taking the 7th generation longview of a petroleum-less dependent future, a model of which is embodied by the experiment of Arcosanti (ironically in the Quad-City are) and my program at Prescott College. I only hope that it comes sooner than later.
In my summer reading list I forgot to mention this awesome little book of selected quotes on nonviolence by Gandhi. But the best part is the opening introduction by Thomas Merton who deconstructs the Western mind to reveal our most significant operating system errors.
Even though I haven’t been online that much this summer, I have still been pretty mediated, albeit old school style with books. I thought I’d share during this brief blogging pause what I’ve been reading.
“The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape” (Harm De Blij)
So far so good, The Power of Place uses geography to remap how we think about globalization. This is a myth buster.
“Spook Country” (William Gibson)
I didn’t like this one so much. Shallow characters and uninteresting plot, but Gibson has such an interesting mind that many of the book’s concepts and commentary save it.
“The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living” (Fritjof Capra)
I wish I had read this before writing my book. What a powerhouse of ideas and inspiration for relating cell structure with how societies are constructed. Super scary stuff on GMOs as well.
“The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift” (Andres R. Edwards)
If you don’t know much about what sustainability is, you’re not alone. Most people who were polled in the US couldn’t define or recognize the term, “sustainability.” No matter, the book gets under the hood by providing a wealth of definitions from various ecological organizations and schools of thought.
This is the best pedagogical overview you will find that filters education through an ecological paradigm. Again, I wish I had read this before I wrote my book.
“Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (Clay Shirky)
Worth all the buzz. Shirky translates in simple language the emerging paradigm of social networks and activism.
As I blogged previously, I found this book to be a good breakdown of how economic control and imperialism is actually practiced. This was probably the most interesting summer read for me because at times it’s like a spy novel, but it’s all true.
And finally my book. I’ve been reading it here and there and still feel good about it.
Written by a former Economic Hit Man, John Perkins‘ The Secret History of the American Empire takes you on an inside journey of “corporatocracy” empire building. The book is fairly simplistic when it comes to history, but it confers with all the more academic sources I’ve read about the subject. What is great about the book is that makes the material accessible to a wider audience, especially concerning how important financial institutions (such as the World Bank and IMF) are for keeping the system in place. The book has a really good definition of empire, and also offers several alternative approaches to counteract what may seem like an inevitable process of control, but actually is highly dependent on our ignorance and complicity through consumer habits. If we are going to have an ethical approach to media production and analysis, we must acknowledge that the US government acts and engages in the world as an empire. To deny this fact is to distort the nature of how corporate media filters the world.
H/T to Scud for recommending the book.
OK tree huggers, time to learn from the YouTube masters of viral: gags and physical comedy make the word go round. Here’s a nifty one that encourages saving energy. From the “Buy this attitude” campaign out of Madrid.
