“many people loved each other.” The Bicycle Insight By the time I met Brice in 1970, he and his friends were slowly but surely on the trail of a new political paradigm. Actually, maybe it was only a vague yearning, but Brice raced around on h1s bicycle, meeting with people, always talking, talking. Having moved in with his girl friend, Brice let me live a couple of summers in his tiny book-filled room under the roof, so I followed his thinking through literature. Everything was there, but the newer stuff was often science, or science-fiction, or theory, like Thomas S. Kuhn’s wonderful The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Brice was working in those years in a series of printing plants and printshops, ultimately be- comina a proofreader, sometimes an editor, sometimes even an illustrator. It was during this time that he came to despise the automobile, as do many who live and work in the dense center of Paris. All of us, even those from foreign lands, watched aghast as the Paris urban planners built giant underground parking lots everywhere, under every monument, inviting more and more cars to thunder, herd-like, down the boulevards. Then came the greatest absurdity: President Pompidou announced that the city must adapt to the automobile. The Left Bank quay was to be made into an expressway. Very much a committed city-bicyclist, Brice looked towards the Socialist Party (his inclination at the time) and found no real position against the expressway. It was then that he happened to see, at The first time Brice ran for office was a great moment for the ecologists to try out all kinds of new and sometimes wild ideas. It was thus that France was first introduced to “pirate" radio. France has only two national centralized government-controlled radio networks and only two similarly government-controlled television channels. Many of those involved with the movement felt they ought to start a Radio-Verte (Green Radio) “to speak out against the silence and the noise of society," to seize the possibility of broadcasting their own point of view. So Brice took the kind of action his public career sparkles with. Invited to appear on France 1 TV just before the elections with all the leaders of all the other political parties, Brice took with him his “bodyguard," who was actually carrying a powerful radio transmitter — he could simply turn it on and begin beaming a live broadcast all over Paris. At a certain moment when he had the floor, Brice held up a radio out of which came his voice. Everyone was stupefied, so Brice said, “This is the first free radio broadcast live, right in front of you." And he went on with what he had to say while everyone was so amazed they didn’t think to stop him. The French love such “philosophical" acts and discuss them endlessly. his bakery, an amusing poster depicting the Cathedral of Notre Dame as a sort of center island between the two sides of a freeway. The caption read, “No honking during services.” Brice saw that the poster was from Friends of the Earth with an address on the very quay projected to disappear. Racing there, he found no one, left a note offering to help, and waited, quite a while, he remembers, before someone called about a meeting. Militant’s baggage in hand, Brice arrived at the ecologists’ door when the movement was new, its literature sparse, its concerns still unanimated by actions, with neither theory nor program. They decided to organize a bicyclist demonstration for which Brice designed a poster. Eight thousand people showed up! Shocked and exhilarated, the tiny group launched the successful popular effort to stop the Left Bank freeway. They, and Brice, began to understand they had found something to be serious about, something which made sense in relation to previous militancy but meant something new, too, by showing new power relations, by adding new stakes to what is known as a “civic” existence. Ecology at first was thought to mean conservation and rational use of resources, but with a generation of “sixty- eighters” on the loose, it should have been safe to assume they might seize upon such a movement and take it all the way to a full-blown politics. The largest problem, according to Brice, was “to invent a way to militate. Without always arriving too late. Ecology was always fighting symptoms, like a new expressway, or the removal of a forest, or some kind of pollution ... but to fight those objectives is to arrive too late. We had to find the axis, the paradigm, of all the diverse outrages.” In that period of struggle for a focus, Brice at first thought the automobile itself was an organizing principle of sorts; after all, it does hold sway over land use, travel, industry, and health, not to mention the imagination. But the idea of the automobile eventually came to seem merely the solution and choice of an era, nothing larger. The Nuclear Intrusion I n 1972, having heard of Friends ™ of the Earth’s success in banishing the freeway from the Left Bank, a group in Alsace wrote asking help in fighting the construction of a nuclear power plant ARCHANA RAJNEESH MEDITATION CENTER 3541 S.E. HAWTHORNE EXCELLENT SELECTION OF BOOKS AND TAPES MEDITATIONS REBIRTHING SESSIONS SAMADHI/ISOLATION TANK BUDDHAFIELD BOUTIQUE MONDAY-SATURDAY 11 Qm -5:30pm FOR MORE INFORMATION AND APPOINTMENTS CALL 239-8421 LOG CABIN HOME KITS three bedrooms $14,900 (models from $8,8OO-$24,9OO) installation and finish available. 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