Page 8 RAIN July 1980 TIDD~ £ill©ffiD@JJ~ IP~£©~(§@IBIP~- a modest proposal to explOit - humble foreigners ' . . by Ianto Eyans That Boring Old.Energy Crisis Again There's nothing new about the energy crisis. There has been an energy shortage for most of humanity in every culture through all of history. As long as energy was hard to come by, humanity used it as any :;;carce resource, with cai:e and deliberation. So in most cultures, techniques evolved slowly for conducting life along paths . of least resistance; in general, ways didn't survive which involved any but the most conservative use of energy, re_;;ources and force. Technologies followed their own evolutionary paths and the unsuited ones died by a kind of Darwinian-selectivity when it was clear they couldn't be sustained. Above all, societies' evolved inbred cultural constraints to limit the rate of change: inbuilt change valves that could hold the flow of innovation to a rate at which it could be assimilated. The Petrochemical Flash Our culture and our time are aberrants. It is only in the past 50 or 60 years that·the dim flame of our hard-won fuel supply has flared up bright and dazzling, so much_so that we have used piledrivers to .crack peanuts and lit forest fires to fry eggs; in a wild and childishly •exuberant potlatch of waste. And in these two or three generations all of the native ingenuity, the cai::efully accumulated heritage of skills passed down through the centuries,,has been forgotten in a buzz of silly toys. Who knows now the basic skills of our grandparents-who can milk a cow, dig a neat ditch, lay elegant brickwork? Most of us have forgotten even the primary basics like how to • maintain a small cooking fir~, ho.}V to grow food, to wake without an alarm clock, or beat eggs without a blender. When I ask my neighbor to lend me a saw he emerges with a chainsaw; his children have forgotten how to walk three blocks to our f).eighborhood store and his wife is appalled that I wash my clothes by hand. Astonishingly, we have scrubbed even the language clean of the words we once used. Do you know the meaning of hod, coulter, cooper, to darn, toted I to tup, or:what a sagger-maker's bottom , knocker is? These were common parts of our language even in 1920. We have replaced basic skills with mechanical tools, smallscale with big, and local self-reliance with dependence on the vague and uncontrollable manipulations of a worldwide consumer society. And the whirlpool of our own accelerating technical change sucks us down into places we don't want to be but see no way 01.g of. Now as the American belt starts to cinch up again, we're frantically racing to salvage what little we have left. All over the country we'rie writing Foxfire books, recording the voices of the aged. And what ten years ago seemed a dilettante interest in cataloguing 'the past now has a new urgency. If we really want to deal gracefully with a more labor-intensive future, we can see that we must remember again how to do things for oµrselves with less oil, fewer chemicals and more human care. For the great majority of the world's population, the 6% of us who live in these United States offer a confusing example. We never cease to rub in the irritating message that we are still the richest nation on earth, as we flaunt our affluence before them.. The U.S. is stereotyped a~ immensely wealthy, w.isteful and arrogant. People in the poorer countries (and that's almost all of them) have little firsthand experience of us. They watch our worst TV, read of our worst politics, see our worst tourists. .. ·-- ~ --::: .. fr~mMinka •Together, these create a composite picture ~fa country few of us would recognize: a land of.continuous violence where-'brash insensitives devote their lives to getting richer with an aggressiveness and machismo that would disturb a Mexicali truck driver. Everyone .lives in penthouse apartments connected by 10-laned freeways. They know we all drive 100 mph through the streets of San Francisco {Steve McQueen to blame for that one), that the government buys you everything for free (personal conversation with a- Costa Rican peasant), and that.we throw away everythittg continuously to make way for the new waves of sh~ny fresh goods (hmm . : . that one's not so far off ... ). , • • Despite all the help we gave them, much of the worl~ neyer really took a liking to us. Bite the hand that feeds, lock up our loyal embassy folks ... When we tell them that small is beautiful and that there is no way we can all make it with two cars.and a power boat they get strangely resentful. • How can we expect them to settle for "second rate_" smaller technologies when they see us happily getting bigger and richer all the while? . ( • • Foreign Aid and Cocacolonisation ., . Well, for a little while now we've had an edgy feeling that all is not well out there. We live a life of privilege yet there a,re tho~e disturbing photos of thin kids in Africa or somewhere and we've been sending them help. I mean, the government gives away all that foreign aid; it must go somewhere, right? For a long time the na-
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