Category: environment

A call for global everything specialists

I hate feeling at the mercy of other specialists.  I am not thinking so much about my occasional visit to the doctor’s office.  I am thinking particularly of the specialists who trade in information about the state of the world, the whole world that is.  How does one become such a specialist?  How does one negotiate the perspectives coming from the humanities, social and natural sciences as well as economics?  All this to say that I have been sitting with an article from last Saturday’s Winnipeg Free Press in the back of my mind for the last couple of days.  It is an op-ed piece entitled “The world is not running out of natural resources” (May 28) by Brian Lee Crowley.  As the title suggests the article outlines the false notion that there is an imminent crisis in global resources.  The main thesis of this position is that most accounts do not take seriously the ongoing capacity for humans to innovate and change course when necessary.  This is the reason why past prophecies of collapse and destruction continue to miss their mark.  This thinking reflects the first half of the article.  I suspect this sort of voice is necessary to counter the type of mindless hysteria that may actually serve advertising firms more than other ‘good’ causes.  But even here I really have no good idea.  I trust soundbites and articles such as these.  It is in the second half that my reservations begin to intensify.

The second half of the article makes a dramatic shift to the economic in stating that since 1800 global economic product has increased 50-fold and “this increase in human wealth has improved the state of humanity throughout the world.”  This is of course patently false as I think it could be argued that it has not improved the state of the First Nations community in Canada (I will not try and speak beyond my borders).  His point however is proved by statistics.  Yes, I suppose statistical improvement is difficult to deny as it has the power to ignore the cost of the marginal who literally do not figure in.  I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on statistics near the end of Stages,

With the help of statistical tables one can laugh at all of life. . . . After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he can just look at a collection of statistical tables, see how many die every year of hunger – and he is comforted.

Sorry.  Off track.  As Crowley begins to conclude things really come off the rails in my mind.  Crowley holds wealthy nations as the beacon of what direction the world should be moving in.  “The richer countries become, the cleaner their environment.  So economic growth is the key factor allowing us to reduce most of the problems facing humanity. . . . [T]he right human institutions, such as private property, the rule of law, contract, incentives and human intelligence all work together reliably to solve those problems.”  Is it just me or should it be hard to make such statements (at least without some gag-reflex kicking in).  I have no doubt that I would be quickly silenced under the statistical ‘facts’ that Crowley would load on me if I tried to refute this thinking.  And again, I have little hard evidence with which to enter this conversation.  However, take the statement of correlation between wealth and environmental cleanliness.  Is this not simply a matter of a nation’s ability to bring in and then off-load undesirable content and processes such as manufacturing, recycling and disposing of the junk wealthier nations desire for temporary pleasure?  Can Crowley continue to say these things under the tenuous economic conditions that still (seem to) exist in the US?  Is it possible to speak of an ‘improved state of humanity throughout the world’ by statistics?  Seriously, I am no expert.  Does it even make sense to enter this argument using the same methodology?  I mean Crowley moves from the natural sciences to economics to existential well-being without any necessary transition, they are all seamless in his conception.  Is this just the worst of ‘ivory tower’ thinking that does not live alongside those whose lives have gone from okay to shit while some larger global trend tracks in a rising graph according a ‘human well-being index’?  Again, I don’t know.  Any global everything specialists out there that can help me?

Organic theology . . . no, wait, don’t click to another site!

The term ‘organic’ seems to be moving quickly into disfavor among many philosophers and theologians.  The impression I get is that the term is most often evoked with a sense of nostalgia and naivete with respect to how we can best understand and respond to situations (and the co-option of the term for less than desirable purposes cannot help).  Whether this reaction comes from the pushback against ‘localism’ over at AUFS or the apocalyptic theology of Doerge, Kerr, Siggelkow et. al. it seems that ‘organic’ is not the right mode of engagement.  This is a reductionistic preface but a preface that should indicate our ongoing desire to find the next and better mode of inquiry.  That is fine and I am not looking to go back.  I am just setting this up for one simple observation.

I was given a plant.  It is in my office.  This plant seems at once to be both dying and regenerating itself.  At times it has beamed with robust health and at other times it teetered and I have not known what will come of it (though I know what should come of a plant).  More often than not I do not know what to do.  At one point branches were snapping.  The giant leaves seemed too heavy or was it that the branch was too weak or was it that they had simply grown to completion.  I would grow anxious.  Too much or not enough of any number of things can spell the end.  I rushed to the Sunday School supply room and came back with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks trying to create splints to see if they could heal.  But I had to let them go.  Out of the three only one sprouted a new leaf.

This all reminded me of my childhood on the farm.  I could not farm.  In my bones I despised farming because I would work an already too wet field and see dark clouds roll in from the West miles away on the prairies bringing more rain.  It made me ill.  So I left the farm unconsciously thinking there were places where I could have more control.

And I found these places in regular paychecks and relatively clear job expectations.  But now several times a day I look over at that plant and I do not know its fate.  Again, I am trying to be very conscious of nostalgia or paternalistic tendencies in my thinking.  I suppose the only point I am trying to make is that if someone wishes to move beyond the organic metaphor they should have made sure they sat long enough with it in all its precariousness and anxiety . . . and beauty.

The Good Neighbourhood

My wife and I recently purchased our first home.  The house is located in a neighbourhood of Winnipeg in which I have spent the vast majority of my adult Manitoba life.  Moving back from Ontario it was like coming back home.  I am referring to the Spence Neighbourhood in the West End of Winnipeg.  I have lived on Spence St, Young St and I now reside on Langside.  What is clear to me is that everyone, everyone from Winnipeg somehow knows this is a ‘bad’ neighbourhood.  This is so implicitly ingrained in my psyche that when I tell people where our house was I began to rationalize or justify or downplay our decision.  The truth is that I am not sure I can think of a more desirable neighbourhood to live in (maybe the Exchange District).  I love it here.  So I have decided to stop making any additional commentary when I tell people where our house is located.

What I have noticed (after the pause in conversation when I tell them) is that people are now filling in the justification for me or making explicit the public perception (One person actually asked, Isn’t that a scary neighbourhood?).  What is going on here?  Are people actually concerned about my safety?  Maybe.  Do people have a clue what this neighbourhood is actually like?  Probably not.  I would like to propose that maybe part of the need to react to my choosing and (of all things) embracing this neighbourhood is that it subtly questions dominant cultural motivations for home owning . . . namely fear.  In as much as people choose homes out of desires and preferences for this-that-and-the-other I found that house hunting played as much on my fears as anything else.  Will this place retain its value?  Is this a safe neighbourhood?  How will our house and neighbourhood reflect how people view us? These can quickly become dominant motivations as cities have driven for decades now away from the depraved city centres to faux Edens with green lawns, no sidewalks and high fences.

I recognize that our house purchase does not give me any moral high-ground in this larger conversation but our decision has exposed something in myself and seemingly in others.  Our decisions are caught up in a larger system in which we are all participants.  We affirm each other in our decision in live in a ‘good’ neighbourhood.  What defines a good neighbourhood?  I would venture the definition of a good neighbourhood as one in which I do not need to think about anything outside my immediate concerns.  A ‘bad’ neighbourhood then in is one in which outside concerns run in conflict to my own pattern of living.  Living in a ‘bad’ neighbourhood then becomes a call in itself to question our existing pattern of living.  It demands that I make explicit and conscious choices about the things that our world and society are being confronted with and how I am responding to them.  A good neighbourhood then is the capitalist dream.  It caters to my choice and provides the goods and services that will maintain my flow of interests and desires without obstruction.  So what is it again that is good about a good neighbourhood?

Why Environmentalism Will Fail

At the corner of St. James St and Portage Ave in Winnipeg is a building which has provided the canvas for some massive murals for Winnipeg Hydro. As I passed by the mural today I saw two kids laying back on the grass at the edge of a lake. They were looking up into a blue sky made lighter with the presence of distinct white clouds. It was the classic scenario of seeing ‘something’ within the unique and random shapes that pass by. The clouds, however, betrayed the clear and unmistakable shapes of an energy-efficient light bulb and washing machine.  There are many critiques out there of how capitalism continues to entrench itself within environmentalism providing the therapeutic opportunity to buy and consume your way to a cleaner world and therefore feel good about yourself without having to change anything.  This mural, however, struck me as even more sinister.  Instead of offering a simple sedative to the problem of whatever our environmental crisis may be this mural actually attempts to co-opt the very possibility of imaginative alternatives.  Go ahead and dream of what is possible but the game is fixed, we now the posses the material of your imagination and can mould it out gain.  Am I wrong?  There is a cult growing around environmentalism that I am having little faith in.  It seems disinterested in and detached from the larger issues of equality and social restoration.

I found the image online and as I looked at it again it keeps getting worse.  The lightbulb and washing machine are actually placed as the exclusive variables for a mathematical equation the sum of which equals a green tree.  This is a blatant lie.  The variables in this equation are no different then the variables of an old bulb and washing machine (perhaps with a slightly lower numerical value).  This ad is trying to tell you that these new products are of a fundamentally different order and composition.  They no longer add to disaster but now add to salvation.  This really is bullshit.