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.
