Page 22 November 1977 RAIN Sim has been helping new ideas become realities for a long time. I first knew of his "Outlaw Building" courses when he was teaching architecture at UC Berkeley. He has also been known as "Captain Compost," designing privies, and as One of the founders of Farallones Institute. His current incarnaMy original idea for OAT was simple enough. Most government departments promote bigness, centralization, wastefulness and dep~ndency. Why not, then, especially with Jerry Brown as governor, have an agency whose mission is to promote smallness, coherence, decentralization, conservation and a greater degree of self-reliance? In short, a Department of Right Livelihood that could, within government, increase an awareness of what must be done to permit a transition to a society that can sustain us while cheap fossil fuels dry up, highly • entropic institutions falter, and a centralized economy propped up on cheap energy, high taxes and low-value dollars contin~es to slide. Certainly this is not a view calculated to warm the heart of the boosters of more-at,any-price, or the technofreaks with their latest dangerous diversions, whether they be breeder reactors or space coloni~s. On the other hand, in spite of our love of gadgets, the liberal dream of everything for everyone without responsibility and the frontier ethic of more to be run out of nature, I believe most Americans kn0w the merrygo-round ride will soon be over. Unfortunately, the elite who are normally in oharge of the carousel are not looking forward ' to being displaced, and they persist in announcing new lights at the end of the tunnel, new hubris-filled diversions from the biological reality that governs all. So I saw OAT as an advocate, a gadfly, a David poking at some over-stuffed Goliaths. It hasn-'t-all worked out that way. We have been an advocate for various forms of appropriate technology as you will see in this issue of RAIN. Yet California, the seventh largest government in the world, with 22 million people, is far too large for a handful of people to make direct contact with people out there, or to do as much as ,we need to about the maze of situations that need attention. The most important things the office can do is create a pattern and spread a vision and some new possibilities that local governments and groups can pick up. Most important is creating good working models of appropriate technology and following through on the projects we choose to do. Just being in Sacramento provides encouragement for a lot of people, but we can be here too long, for it is easy to be coopted by the very tendencies we wish to transcend. The first year and a half we stressed diversity, carrying out a variety of small projects and starting a communication network around the state and within state government. The style has been low profile, through direct communication in small groups rather than the creation of media images aµd the promo.tion of large events. • • ~-----------~ tion is as the California State Architect, where, acting as an enlightened bureaucrat, he is pushing the,mammoth California system to be responsive to the changes that are coming along. His is a special and important role. -LdeM GET THE RIGHT ROCK There is a Zen saying: "Move the right rock and you start an avalanche." As I see it, _now is the time for the appropriate technology mov.ement to find the right rock. For the first time in several generations, the culture has no powerful shared image of the future. Materialism and technology do ·not offer a vision. The notion of bucolic self-sufficiency-the image that created the suburbs 30 years ago and which sparked to the back to the land movement of the past 10 years-is not relevant to . our urban society. No image of the future moves Americans. Yet the outline of image is there, and o·ur task-OAT's task in the coming year-can be to give it form and substance. Our diverse skills need to focus on the complex task of bringing into being urban neighborhoods that are truly ~elf-reliant communities that declare their autonomy from the inefficient and alienating monoculture of today's life support systems. We can have neighborhoods that raise much of their own food by recycling streets into gardens and returning organic wastes to soil productivity for food and fiber. We can.restructure our housing and transportation to reduce the need for fossil fuels by 90 percent, reserv.ing petroleum and electricity for their highest potential uses. The home and the local community can become the locus of employment, aided by advanced information processing and communicat'ions technology. Resources can be managed on the basis of ecological boundaries rather than through arbitrary political and economic dependencies. 'rhe array of tools, knowledge and human energy to create integral neighborhoods exists today. What is needed is a lens to focus what we know in order to create some working examples whicH in their fully developed form can be whole systems of such mythic and logical elegance that they will replicate themselves. This is the challenge for OAT in the coming year: to bring into being an integral neighborhood bringing together design in its fullest human sense. ·Many of the first steps have been taken. In Washington, D.C., the Institute for L9cal Self-Reliance has experimented with bringing urban food raising and cottage industries into an inner city neighborhood. The Farallones Institute in Berkeley has developed a very complete model of the potential for a whole system at the household scale. New Alchemy Institute at Cape Cod and Prince Edward Island have brough_t habitation, energy and food production to a new level of synthesis. Pablo Soleri continues to refine _his vision of the new ecological city. The awareness of middle America's do-it-yourselfers of the potential ot localized food and energy production has been raised by mass circulation magazines such as 'I.' opular Science, Popular Mechanics and Organic Gardening and Farming. What we need now are functionii:ig examples that capture people's imaginations and turn their own skills towards building a decent human, solar-based, biotechnic society. That is the ·continuing vision. I hope it will emerge to fill the vacuum of today's quiet drift.
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