If I Am a Teacher

If I am a teacher, I will never so much as whisper that that more education might not be The Answer to all of the world’s problems.

If I am an auto worker, I will never ask people to drive less – or not drive at all.

If I am a construction worker, I will never admit that Wisconsin can’t afford to maintain our current inventory of highways, much less construct more of them.

If I build houses or shopping malls, I will vehemently deny any suggestion that we already have far more residential and commercial space than we need.

If I am a machinist at an arms manufacturer, I will never ask people to disarm.

If I work for the Department of Transportation, I will never recommend downsizing my department.

If most of my customers drive to my business, I will fight anything that might impede their driving.

If I work for a fossil fuel company, I will never urge people to wean themselves from coal or oil or natural gas.

If the shut-down of fossil fuel companies would decimate the value of my pension fund, I will fight any law or policy that threatens their profitability.

If the end of Economic Growth would shrivel my Social Security and Medicare payments, I will close my eyes to evidence that Earth cannot sustain Business-As-Usual for much longer.

 

If I am Hans Noeldner, I will not ask you to not listen to me…or not support the causes which burn in my heart.

I too am afraid of not being chosen.  Are you?

"Street" defined

Street: A covenant among users of a public thoroughfare that the greatest deference and encouragement shall be shown those who move slowly, those who share, and those who travel with modest amounts of personal tare.  Good engineering and infrastructure are necessary but not sufficient for proper functioning.  The real foundation of “street” is commitment to human access.  Accommodations for the movement and storage of automobiles and other bulky private property rank a distant second in allocation of space, time, and the hearts of the people.

Scarcity of Will

The most pressing scarcity we face in the United States today is not a scarcity of things – energy, food, natural resources, or manufactured items.  It is, rather, a shortage of will: of willingness to allocate a sufficient portion of our discretionary spending[1] to labor inputs into the production and delivery of goods, services, and infrastructure.  This lack of will is manifest in a shortage of employment opportunities for those among those of us who require employment income to purchase the necessities of life.

Needless to say, our ongoing adoption of labor productivity[2] only makes matters worse.  Highway spending, for example, does little for local employment when the lion’s share of spending goes to fuel purchases and payments on giant earth-moving machinery.  Yet we consistently describe ourselves as unwilling and/or unable to resist labor productivity[3].

Persisting unemployment leads to social unrest, and high levels can lead to societal breakdown and violence.  Therefore we believe we must increase acquisition of wealth, consumption of luxuries, construction of infrastructure, emissions of wastes, and aggregation of military power at a cumulative rate which matches or exceeds the rate at which we adopt labor productivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lebow

I see little evidence that this is recognized in our contemporary political discourse – and to the extent that it is, it is invariably drowned out by the heated rhetoric of opposition-blaming.  We-the-people cannot yet imagine the power inherent in choosing the labor of a man over the work potential of a gallon of gasoline.  It does not yet occur to us there could be too much of a good thing called “productivity”.

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[1] Including taxes, credit, and money creation

[2] By labor productivity I mean technologies, methods, and inputs of non-anthropogenic energy which reduce or eliminate human labor input per unit output). 

[3] For some persons this is true: no corporation engaged in producing commodities in competitive, price-driven markets can afford to employ people for the sake of employing people.  But many working-class Americans – and virtually all in the middle-class and above – have significant discretion to choose more labor-intensive goods and services over capital- and non-anthropogenic-energy-intensive ones. This even includes choices to use one’s own labor for such things as walking and bicycling (rather than driving), entertaining one’s child (rather than using TV), pushing a human-powered lawnmower (rather than sitting on a motorized one), growing some of one’s food (rather than employing 300 HP tractors and 200 HP harvesters

Damage Report

Yesterday when I was getting some coffee in downtown Madison, I saw a flier about two Progressive/Leftist friends who had scheduled a debate on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. At issue: whether Capitalism or Imperialism causes more damage. I thought about going, but somehow I was not in a receptive frame of mind. So I pedaled home instead, and thought about what bothered me along the way. It’s about 12 miles to my house in nearby Oregon (Wisconsin), and that allows me a bit of time to think.

One thing I pondered was all the damage I see right in front of my eyes every time I ride my bicycle in the suburban and exurban municipalities which surround Madison. Very few people in these locales walk to go from “a” to “b” if the distance exceeds one or two blocks. Almost no one rolls a wheelchair, or pushes a baby stroller, or rides a bicycle as a mode of transportation either. We have school bus service for children, but other than that there is little transit. Our public thoroughfares are dominated by motorists and most land uses are configured to make life as easy as possible for people who drive. When I bike and walk outside of downtown Madison I am painfully aware that I am not part of a 99% – indeed it is seldom that I am part of a 1%.

When I am in this frame of mind, the recent eruption of middle-class outrage against a privileged 1% rings hollow in my ears.

If one is (in) a car, this “ecosystem” says, “Welcome! Our streets are wide; our highways are uncongested, and there is plenty of free parking everywhere you go!” If one is not (in) a car, this ecosystem says, “You don’t belong.” And yet within my own municipality – the Village of Oregon, population 9,231 – I suspect it is not the distances or a lack of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure which are the primary deterrents – it is the lack of other people! It feels terribly alien to be a small, slow, unarmored biped in most places most of the time.

I do not claim that anyone here intended this – indeed, I sincerely doubt anyone did. However, in the final analysis intention doesn’t matter: it “happened”. But most here seem loathe to acknowledge it – and it is this I find inexcusable. (More on this below.)

I believe this man-made state of affairs is grossly discriminatory; perhaps no less evil than Jim Crowe and other forms of institutionalized post-Reconstruction racial discrimination. Moreover it’s stupid, if for no other reason than that it cannot possibly continue. Earth will never sustain 7 billion people living as we do here, and the chances are remote that 6.7 billion other Earthlings will much longer tolerate 0.3 billion of us helping ourselves to the outsized share of Earth’s dwindling resources we “need” to keep our tanks full.

I also cannot imagine that a functional representative democracy can be founded on “consumers” speeding by one-other, each shut off from his community within his own motorized suit of armor. I am convinced that the physical isolation and socio-economic segregation we have managed to establish with our automobiles are inseparable from the cultural alienation and political bipolarization which afflict our times.

Yet when I consider the conversations which prevail among my friends and acquaintances – especially during this "Year of Our Walker" (footnote 1) – I see no will to meaningfully grapple with the evils of automobile addiction. If we can’t blame the Right; if we can’t blame corporations or capitalism; we ain’t gonna talk about it!

I am coming to the conclusion that the prevailing narratives among liberals and progressives about causality and power are a severe impediment, especially as regards automobile dependence.

Here is another kind of story we might tell ourselves – one which could prove far more effective in producing results.
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Our instinctive reactions to the presence of other motorists in our midst, repeated countless times over many decades, have added up to what systems engineers would call an enormously powerful “positive feedback loop". Stated in layman's terms, the more that we drive, the more that we force driving on everyone else who lives in our community. Thus does a highly coercive phenomenon emerge from a great many "small" actions of ordinary people.

No conspiracy, no planning – indeed! No malicious intent – are required to produce a state of affairs very few among us desire and many now wish to remediate.

We-the-people will get precisely nowhere by continuing to indulge narratives which lay the blame for our automobile addiction on the shoulders of transportation department bureaucrats, zoning boards, and municipal officials; architects, real estate developers, and highway builders; auto companies, tire companies, and oil companies. Truth be told, most of these guys are either dead or have long since retired, and many of the businesses (GM, Chrysler) and institutions have gone bankrupt or are now defunct.

The inconvenient truth is that we drove ourselves into this mess – and we will have to do something other than continue to drive everywhere to get out. The solutions are waiting…on the other side of the windshield. All we need to do is…start…stepping…out.

(1) I refer to Scott Walker, the highly contentious governor we elected in November 2010.

Solidarity

If the consumer has not the will to make common cause with the worker – specifically, the willingness to spend more in acquiring less when such transactions are necessary to ensure that workers are able to earn sufficient wages to feed and shelter their families – then no other force on Earth can protect labor. A poverty of self-governance is no foundation for a popularly-elected government to build the onerous restrictions on business and trade that would be needed.

Is there any other delusion so cruel as imagining that reform of democracy – or worse, revolution – could compensate for a so basic a failure of brotherhood? Perhaps yes: the belief that free markets among selfish men might yield a condition of virtue.

Treading Lightly

The quest for “sustainability” is a continuing challenge we pose to ourselves: “What shall I do – what shall WE do – to welcome those who would tread lightly on Earth into our community?”

Thus we would ask, “What do those who tread lightly need from me and my neighbors?”

First we should recognize that “treading lightly” is not merely a figure of speech – it has everything to do with how much stuff, how much land, and how much energy one demands. Indeed, “treading” is all about motion: mass, speed, size, momentum, displacement, kinetic energy. The more one takes, the faster one goes, the further one travels, the heaver the treading. There may be no better indicator of our footprint on Earth than the odometer reading in our car multiplied by the aggressiveness of our driving.

Offhand we might think those who demand little in the way of stuff, land, and energy would need little else from their neighbors, but this is not so. Why? Treading lightly is by nature a fragile undertaking – one which cannot take root and thrive where the swift, the powerful, and the heavily armored dominate the landscape. It is no overstatement to say that “Light Treaders” are an endangered species in this nation, and that we-the-people continue to degrade and destroy suitable habitat for them. If you are wondering whether this pertains to zoning codes, sprawl, self-segregation, and automobile dependence, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

I will end with a specific challenge. Children – left to their own devices – are some of the Lightest Treaders still extant. What, my friend, are you doing where you live to make it safe, practical, and pleasant for children to walk to school, ride their bicycle to soccer practice, run over to their friend’s house to play?

I would suggest there is nothing they need more from us than our feet…on the ground…with them.

Am I my Brother's Keeper?

I would say that two worldviews currently dominate our public discourse about political economics in these United States. One holds it is the responsibility of Government to ensure that people have jobs and that their basic needs are met. The other holds that an unfettered Free Market will provide sufficient employment (and other means of livelihood), thereby ensuring that people can take care of their own needs.

As divergent as they might first appear, they have much in common. Both assign responsibility to abstractions. Both relegate human behavior to the realm of mechanics. Both trivialize (or worse, ignore) issues of scale in human relationships. One usually demands more taxes (albeit from someone else) while the other invariably demands fewer, but neither demands much else in the way of citizenship. The difference between “The Government is my brother’s keeper” and “The Market is my brother’s keeper” pales to insignificance when compared to “I am my brother’s keeper”. Our tendencies to outsource responsibility are staggering.

One might think the tremendous political turmoil which has seized us in Wisconsin would have shifted our public debate beyond these two worldviews, but thus far I see little evidence of it. The sustainability and Transition movements are still “fringe” – and perhaps for good reason, given how new and as-yet ill-defined they are. Most on the left, many in the center, and an astonishing number on the right instinctively reject traditional religious prescriptions for the public realm. One might be forgiven for concluding that Ayn Rand and Paul Krugman span the entirety of economic philosophy.

As for me, I find myself returning to the words of Edmund Burke, which I will paraphrase here:

“We are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites…it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Our passions forge our fetters.”