RAIN Architecture Alive! Bookchin On The Ecology Of Freedom Kirk Sale Weighs Human Scale Volume VIII No. 6 $1.50 No Advertising
Page 2 RAIN April 1982 ACCESS EDUCATION Teach Your Own, by John Holt, 1981,369 pp., $13.95 from: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, NY 10017 Inspiring and thoughtul: how people learn what they need to know, the exuberance of learning, exploring and participating in the world, being all we can be. For over a decade Holt has been writing about children and schools. Gradually he has come to believe that people learn best when they are involved in the real world, exploring their own interests unfettered by time schedules and disciplinary rules. In his newsletter Growing Without Schooling (308 Boylston St., Boston, MA02116; $15/6 issues) Holt publishes letters from people who have taken their children out of school and are teaching them at home. What stories! In this book Holt systematically tells us the why and how of unschooling. For parents willing to take on the responsibility, resource lists and information on the support network are included. Holt, and the parents who have unschooled their children, know that schools make children dull. Children who like to read at age five are poor readers after a few years in school, but resume their enthusiasm once removed from school and allowed to pursue their interests. Schools have such an insidious influence because the most important question any thinking creature can ask itself is, "What is worth thinking about?" When we deny its right to decide that for itself, when we try to control what it must attend to and think about, we make it less observant, resourceful, and adaptive, in a word, less intelligent, in a blunter word, more stupid. And how else do we learn but by figuring things out on our own? —Tanya Ku- cak A Book ofPuzzlements; Play and Invention with Language, by Herbert Kohl, 1981,287 pp., $14.95 hardcover, from: Schocken Books 20 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Any lover of language, child or adult, will be instantly enchanted by this treasure trove of riddles, puns, linguistic paradoxes and palindromes. Even doubtful readers, still ruing their exposure to grade school grammatical drudgery, will quickly discover that what they have long believed to be odious can actually be fun. Readers are invited to write their own stories using only hieroglyphics or excluding certain letters of the alphabet. They are shown how to construct a variety of crossword puzzles, invent their own cipher systems or create their own obfuscating but impressive titles for common items (such as "pocket propellant personalized neutralizer" in place of "portable field shower"). The book provides scores of games suitable for young people and tips for teachers on how to turn English into a living language in the classroom. And, as John Holt, author of Growing Without Schooling, has observed, A Book of Puzzlements is especially suitable for home learning. —John Ferrell From a Book ofPuzzlements There are certain words (or sentences) that read the same backward and forward. They are called palindromes. An old joke claims that Adam's first words to Eve were in the form of a palindrome. He was supposed to have said, "Madam, I'm Adam."... Here are a few classical palindromes: Was it a rat I saw? Live not on evil A man, a plan, a canal—Panama! No evil, live on! Global Education Resource Guide, compiled by Sandra Graff, 1981, 71 pp., $4.00 from: Global Education Associates 552 Park Avenue East Orange, NJ 07017 The theme of this wide-ranging resource book is global interdependence. Access is provided to 1,000 books, articles and films which either address existing issues of global interdependence or explore alternatives for creating "a just, peaceful, more human and ecologically balanced world system." Topics include economic and social justice, energy, futures perspectives, hunger, lifestyle alternatives, peace, population, spirituality and human rights. Special emphasis is placed on the need to familiarize children with the rapid changes occurring in these areas and many of the resources listed are oriented toward use in elementary andsecondary education. —John Ferrell Vol.VIIINo.6 RAIN April 1982 Journal of Appropriate Technology RAIN Magazine publishes information which can lead people to more simple and satisfying lifestyles, help communities and regions become economically self-reliant, and build a society that is durable, just, and ecologically sound. RAIN STAFF: John Ferrell, Mark Roseland, Carlotta Collette, Laura Stuchinsky, Steve Rudman, Nancy Cosper, Steve Johnson, Lisa Conrad, Ann Borquist, Bruce Borquist. Linnea Gilson, Graphic Design. CONTRIBUTORS: Gail Katz, Elijuh Mirochnik, Dawn Wicca,Kevin Bell, Tanya Kucak, RAIN, Journal of Appropriate Technology, is published 10 times yearly by the Rain Umbrella, Inc., a non-profit corporation located at 2270 N.W. Irving, Portland, Oregon 97210, telephone 503/227-5110. Copyright © 1982 Rain Umbrella, Inc. No part may be reprinted without written permission. Typesetting: Irish Setter Printing: Times Litho Cover Photograph: David Brown
April 1982 RAIN Page 3 Whalesong, by Robert Siegel, 1981,143, pp., $9.95 hardcover from: Crossway Books 9825 West Roosevelt Rd. Westchester, IL 60153 The waves shone emerald, with frothy caps; the sky, blue and sun-drenched. Now that 1 had made the decision and given the pod hope, I felt exhilarated. My despair was entirely gone. Sun glinted from the whitecaps. It was a fine morning on which to die. I felt a tremendous defiance of steel ships and cruel men rise up within me. The lust of battle was upon me—the joy of the terrible Leviathan who haunts the dreams of men. I could do little to stop those steel prows—that I knew—but perhaps I could dent one, and the decoy action would save cow and calf. For this I had been made. I felt rise within me the joy of being, and with it a cry from my whole nature—a wave-shattering bellow to rattle the heads of men listening in the ships. Then I began my death song. A lyrical look at the life and death of whales from the whales' point of view? It's natural to expect a sort of deep sea Bambi— just another anthropomorphized animal story for children. But Whalesong is much more than that. This beautifully written epic tale of a great species' struggle for survival deserves to be widely read by adults as well as children. Its special ability to elicit empathy and provoke outrage from readers could prove as powerful as all the voyages of Greenpeace in assuring that the whales will continue to sing their song. —John Ferrell The Oceans: Our Last Resource, by Wesley Marx, 1981352 pp., $13.95 hardcover from: Sierra Club Books 530 Bush Street San Francisco, CA 94108 While troublesome problems like pollution, overpopulation and diminishing resources tempt some people to dream of building colonies in space in lieu of sustainable communities on earth, others turn seaward and conjure visions of Aquapolis—a carefree colony set down amidst a boundless, if somewhat soggy, cornucopia of seabed mineral nodules, oil platforms and protein-rich life forms. Wesley Marx warns of the self-deception and ecological danger inherent in viewing the oceans as humankind's resource (and garbage dump) of last resort. In so doing, he familiarizes his readers with the technology of seabed mining, the history of beaches as recreation areas, the role played by kelp in complex marine ecosystems, the problems arising from nationalist approaches to fishery management and a host of other topics relating to human impacts on oceans, sealife, and shorelines. For those of us whose attention tends to be focused inland, this book is a good introduction to the problems and promise, the power and fragility, of the watery 71% of our planet's surface. —John Ferrell Finned Gandhians Resist Slaugher In early March [1980J, some 4,000 dolphins staged what appeared to be a protest swim-in, surrounding a small island off southwestern Japan one day after fishermen slashed and stabbed about 200 of their comrades to death. The fishermen say the dolphins threaten their livelihood by feeding on schools of fish they must catch for a living. They have recently been herding the dolphins into a bay and killing them, selling the dolphin meat as fertilizer or as food for pigs. The mass action by the dolphins temporarily prevented futher killing and forced the fishing boats back to port. Craig Van Note, a Washington, D.C. environmentalist, suspects that the fishermen may have planted the story to gain sympathy for their plight. But Van Note reports that the dolphins were "screaming and crying" during the "bloodbath" and that he "would not doubt that the dolphins [who escaped! were smart enough to see what was going on and to communicate with their fellow cetaceans." —reprinted by permission from May 1980 issue of Sojourners, 1309 L Street, Washington, D.C. 20005.
Page 4 RAIN April 1982 Kirk Sale Weighs Human Scale Human Scale, by Kirkpatrick Sale, 1980,558 pp., $8.95 from; Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale is a whale of a tale! In it. Sale (author of SDS and Power Shift] shows how our society's headlong rush to giantism for the sake of efficiency, economy and better ways to serve human needs has actually produced inefficiency, waste, unnecessary expense and damage to the body and spirit of the people. In sum, the myth of size has failed its promise. The remedy for our megaturmoil, as one might guess from the title, is human scale decentralization of government, cities, education, agriculture, and the economy. Provocative and well-written. Human Scale supports its conclusions with evidence from history, architecture, government, industry, media, and countless other sources. The resulting 600 page volume, just released in paperback, has been aptly described by Lewis Mumford as "encyclopedic." It hardly seems "human scale" to the busy reviewer! So we were pleased (and somewhat relieved!) to have Kirk Sale visit us a few months ago to share ideas on bioregions and community self-reliance. Kirk and I reversed roles in back-to-back interviews. We talked first about Knowing Home (which was later broadcast on radio station WBAl in New York), then about Human Scale in the conversation printed below. -Mark Roseland RAIN: What led up to writing Human Scale ? Sale; It represents the gathering of things I've been thinking about for 15 years—the failures of socialism, the failures of capitalism, the disjunction between all the things I learned in school about America as a democracy and the real life of America which was no democracy. But I had no way to put a handle on these things. My second book was a history of the SDS. "Having control over the decisions that affect their lives" is a line from the Port Huron Statement. That became a way for me to see politics. If you could get politics to a scale where people could control decisions, they could decide what land of governance and what kind of economics they wanted. I started writing Human Scale in 1975.1 really wanted to talk about how communities, cities and regions can control their own lives. There doesn't need to be a federal government at all and
April 1982 RAIN Page 5 we don't need the power of the state. The human scale is the level at which people have a vote and can say what is to be done with the food, resources, products and energy of the region they live in. I wanted to write a book that talked about anarcho-communalism without saying "anarcho-communalism." RAIN: Isn't anything that human beings do human scale? What makes a solar collector more human scale than a nuclear reactor? Sale: Because a solar collector is controllable by a human. RAIN: So you are saying there are measurable dimensions to human scale? Sale: Yes. That is what much of the book is about. You can find out the optimum size for anything. The optimum size for a city is 50,000 to 100,000 people. When you get a city of seven million like New York, there is no democracy at all, and it is unmanageable. RAIN: What would be your ideal vision of human scale, if the majority of people in this country or the world were to embrace the idea? What would the world look like? Sale: America would be decentralized. The population would be dispersed into self-sufficient communities. I've just written a novel that described a human scale future, what America looks like in 2050 after the 20-year transition period that took place between 2000 and 2020 when it was decided we had gone wrong, that pollution was killing us, that we had no topsoil because it was all eroded. RAIN: That sounds like Ecotopia. Sale: Yes, it is. Mine is somewhat more of a novel. In the book, some people want to live in cities. Some want to live in communities of 10,000, which I find the optimal community size. The hero lives in that kind of community. There are some communities which are capitalist, some which are virtually monarchical, some which have no money at all. But they are all basically self-sufficient. That is my vision of a future America. I don't know if it will come so soon. It better, or else we may not survive. In this future, everyone would understand, because they understand the bioregion, that they have to be self-sufficient and non-polluting. But aside from that they could live any vision they chose. The other basic principle would be free travel. If you didn't like the community you were in, you could find one that was more congenial. Instead of making everyone try to believe goodness, it would be better to let communities be evil if they choose. RAIN: What is to keep one community from waging war on another? Sale: That's what the whole second part of the book is about. There is a war threat by one community which wants a river access. A community downriver has a dam, built 50 years before. They need the dam. I chose a river because all through history people have fought over rivers. What prevents war in this instance is heroics by the hero. What had prevented war up to that point was an alliance of communities in the bioregion, 13 communities allied for defense of each other and to control any disputes within. As the story explains, there had been a bitter war in Southern California when it was determined that the Los Angeles bioregion could support 200-300,000 people, but certainly not eight million. The people of Colorado kept their water. RAIN: They forced them out? Sale: Part of bioregional self-sufficiency means people have control over their own water. I see such a world struggling with lots of problems. RAIN: Other problems have been mentioned. Are you really going to have culture in a town of 10,000? And what is to prevent the worst side of decentralism, everybody hoarding and going back to parochialism? Sale: The first question is answerable by saying that throughout history small places have created wonderful culture. Look at the cities of the Italian Renaissance. They were all 50-60,000 in size. Today what you have in places like New York is cultural colonization. People are brought from all over the country for the entertainment of a few rich people. I find that odious. About parochialism, there is no way to prevent it. I would take my chances. I think it is better to let people solve their own problems in their own way. Any self-regarding community will move toward democracy and a consensual system simply because it is the most efficient. If you have a "prince" the information going up to the top is always skewed by hierarchy and orders coming down are always skewed by that same hierarchy. RAIN: So you're envisioning that there will be all these little communities, that if in my community there are some people who are Ku Klux Klan members, they will leave and form a community where they are the predominant group. Sale: Yes. We should allow for the existence of evil. Any system that tries to make everybody into a good person is bound to fail. RAIN: How do communications technology and microcomputers fit into your vision? Sale: Computers are the product of a rapacious capitalist system. I cannot believe they can be used neutrally. If computers just arrived out of the blue one day then you might say a rational citizenry could take them and use them properly. But computers came as part of a very complex technological-political system. They are not benign. They are part and parcel of the system that has produced them. Technology always expresses the values of the system that creates it. This notion of Alvin Toffler's, that simply by sitting "We should allow for the existence of evil. Any system that tries to make everybody into a good person is bound to fail." back and using these computers we will be able to solve all our problems, seems very much like the notion of "Consciouness Three" that Charles Reich had—if we simply all put on blue jeans we will change America. Toffler's is a more sophisticated version of the same thing. It says you don't have to do anything structurally; just use the computers and they will create the decentralized future we want. The whole image of The Third Wave suggests that we just have to lie back and let the wave overtake us. We don't have to do any work to create a world we want. This is the reason the book sold so well. It has this comforting message. But it is no truer with The Third Wave than it was with The Greening of America. RAIN: Back to your decentralist vision, do you suggest that even in a capitalist system people will develop a democracy? Sale: In the ideal community, the citizens select what it is that will be made. They will have control over the products that are produced and the way they are produced. But it seems you could have exchange of goods through capitalism with profits going to individuals, a steady-state capitalism. At a small scale it's not going to do anyone any damage, even at a city level. When things get too big, everything changes exponentially. When something is just a little bigger than it should be, all its systems are affected. That is why scale is so important. DO
Page 6 RAIN April 1982 ACCESS COMMUNITIES Design Resourcebook for Small Communities, edited by Anne Smith Denman and the staff of Small Town, 1981,96 pp., $10.00 from: Small Towns Institute P.O. Box 517 Ellensburg, WA 98926 this Design Resourcebook is to Small Town magazine what Knowing Home is to RAIN. The staff of Small Towns Institute has had this baby in the works for about three years. The format includes articles and case studies, a compendium of areas of design interest (from downtown plans to historic preservation to public art), and a resources section, all of which combine to make a publication that towns-people and, especially, planners should find valuable—particularly in conjunction with Knowing Home. Of note is Marilyn Dulfey-Armstrong's article, “Environmental Design Implications of Energy Technologies at the Community Scale," in which she discusses the visual implications of community-scale energy from wind, geothermal heat, biomass, water thermal, solar thermal heating and cooling, and district heating and cooling (cogeneration). For instance, did you ever consider how much glare might be caused by an abundance of solar panels? At any rate, there's no excuse for ugly windmills—we need to give esthetics as much priority as efficiency. — Mark Roseland Journal of Community Action, published bimonthly by the Center for Responsive Governance, $18/yr. individuals, $24/yr. institutions: P.O. Box 42120 Northwest Station Washington, D.C. 20015 Anyone working or seriously interested in the broad field of community action should read this highly-informative new Journal. It does the best job I've seen in a long time in bridging the gap between researchers and local and national practitioners involved in addressing and reassessing the role of citizen action and neighborhood development organizations in modern society. This is not lor the casual observer. Though its style is a bit dry and academic, the issues and policy perspectives examined by leaders in the field are timely and provocative. I look forward to reading the Journal because it helps me gain a richer appreciation of my own work and of the importance and potential of community action in America —Steve Rudman Neighborhood Organizing Kit, by Conserve Neighborhoods, 1981,50 pp., available free from: Conserve Neighborhoods National Trust for Historic Preservation 1785 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 I've been waiting and hoping for a ray of community light to break out of Washington's current dark age. I found it emanating from the Neighborhood office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It's a well- packaged "Organizing Kit"—a practical, easy-to-read guide for anyone interested in improving his or her neighborhood or developing fresh ideas for community projects. The Idt is a potpourri of good stuff, from tips on organizing a neighborhood group and fundraising to working with city hall and planning special events. Also included is a directory of useful national organizations and a bibliography for neighborhood leaders. Conserve Neighborhoods is a bimonthly publication of the National Trust. Very down-to-earth, the newsletter gives local citizen groups access to ideas, projects and experiences pioneered by other groups around the country. Believe it or not, both the kit and the newsletter are available free to neighborhood and preservation groups. So don't agonize— get hold of this kit and organize! —Steve Rudman Neighborhood, The Journal for City Preservation, $7.50/4 issues from: New York Urban Coalition 1515 Broadway New York, NY 10036 Neighborhood is the very slick publication that is trying to give the citizens of New York City a little history and a lot of hope. Each issue focuses on one of that city's neighborhoods in an "up with people" style that is pretty hard to shake cynicism at. I have never thought of Times Square for example, as a neighborhood, and yet to read the January 1982 issue not only does Times Square qualify, but it might even survive the Midnight Cowboy image of 42nd street as the deepest pit of depravity conceivable. You may not want to walk down those streets in daylight, but some people live there and they've got plans. It helps to know how a community goes from being the Broadway of "give my regards to" fame to "a lawless arena where innocent newcomers . . . were fresh meat for a gang of inhuman hustlers and cheap criminals," so each issue includes a lengthy, well- written piece of the past. Then there are samplings of the kinds of problems each neighborhood faces, and the sorts of solutions being proposed and often applied. Often these analyses cover such topics as energy use and alternatives, waste disposal, the role of senior citizens and of youth, and the cultural options and activities specific to that neighborhood. You don't need to live in "the Big Apple" to appreciate this Journal. New York belongs to all of us in a way, and if it can be saved from itself there may be a future for the rest of America. —Carlotta Collette From: Neighborhood, The Journal for City Preservation
THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM by Murray Bookchin This article has been adapted from Chapters Ten-Twelve of The Ecology ofFreedom, © 1982 by Murray Bookchin. Reprinted by permission of Cheshire Books. The Ecology ofFreedom, by Murray Bookchin, 1982, $9.95 plus $1.50 p&h (add 6% sales tax in California), from: Cheshire Books 514 Bryant Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 Shortly after the monumental occupation of the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear plant site in 19771 remember hearing Anna Gyorgy, a founder of the Clamshell Alliance, say that Murray Bookchin provided “the political vision that a lot of us have, at least implicity, if not explicitly." Murray Bookchin may be the most important—and least recognized—social thinker of our time. And The Ecology of Freedom, his magnum opus a decade in creation, will provide coherence, insight and inspiration to our efforts to achieve a truly ecological society for many years to come. Bookchin is at once the conscience, the critic, and the visionary of our most ecological and human sensibilities. When he describes a free, ecological society, how our world could be, how we could be, one becomes suddenly aware of just how far the sum total of each of life's little compromises has taken us from fully realizing our human role as the conscious voice of nature. Yet at the same time, he makes apparent what kinds of attitudes and actions may genuinely lead to more harmonious relations between society and nature. For thirty years Bookchin has written extensively on social ecology. Two years ago in these pages (RAIN Vl:6) we published his "Open Letter to the Ecological Movement," written at RAIN’s request. Appearing on the tenth anniversary of Earth Day and the . "official” birth of the environmental movement, it was reprinted rapidly and widely around the world. Today, on the twelfth anniversary of the movement, we are pleased to present the following excerpts from The Ecology of Freedom, to be published this month. The Ecology of Freedom, unlike many of Bookchin's earlier writings, is neither suitable nor possible as bedtime reading. Historical and theoretical, it challenges the intellect to critically examine the most difficult issues of modern society and the conditions that create them. Those with any kind of theoretical interest, no matter how mild, will quickly find the style quite readable and their efforts amply rewarded. With this landmark work, perhaps Murray Bookchin will finally get the recognition he so rightfully deserves—and we all so assuredly require. —Mark Roseland It is difficult for us to understand that political structures can be no less technical than tools and machines. In part, this difficulty arises because our minds have been imprinted by a dualistic metaphysics of "structures" and "superstructures." To dissect social experience into the economic and political, technical and cultural, has become a matter of second nature that resists any melding of one into the other. But this tendency is also partly due to an opportunistic political prudence that is wary of confronting the stark realities of power in a period of social accommodation. Better and safer to deal with technics as tools, machines, labor, and design than as coercive political institutions that organize the very implements, work, and imagination involved in the modern technical ensemble. Better to deal with how these means achieve certain destructive or constructive forms on the natural landscape than to explore the deformations they produce within subjectivity itself. An environmentalist technocracy is hierarchy draped in green garments; hence it is all the more insidious because it is camouflaged, in the color of ecology. A liberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the "inversion of tools" is impossible without a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships. To speak of "appropriate technologies," "convivial tools," and "voluntary simplicity" without radically challenging the political "technol- gies," the media "tools," and the bureaucratic "complexities" that have turned these concepts into elitist "art forms" is to completely betray their revolutionary promise as a challenge to the existing social structure. What renders Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship" mentality and the design mentality of the "how-to-do-it" catalogues, periodicals, and impresarios of the "appropriate technology movement" particularly unsavory is their readiness to make "prag-
Pages RAIN April 1982 matic" compromises with the political technologies of governmental and quasigovernmental agencies that nourish the very technologies they profess to oppose. The recent emphasis on “limits to growth" and "appropriate technology" is riddled by the same ambiguities that have imparted a conflicting sense of promise and fear to "high technology." I must emphasize again that terms like "small," "soft," "intermediate," "convivial," and "appropriate" remain utterly vacuous adjectives unless they are radically integrated with emancipatory social structures and communitarian goals. Technology and freedom do not "coexist" with each other as two separate "realms" of life. Either technics is used to reinforce the larger social tendencies that render human consociation technocratic and authoritarian, or else a libertarian society must be created that can absorb technics into a constellation of emancipatory human and ecological relationships. A "small," "soft," "intermediate," "convivial," or "appropriate" technical design will no more transform an authoritarian society into an ecological one than will a reduction in the "realm of necessity," of the "working week," enhance or enlarge the "realm of In equating "living well" with living affluently, capitalism has made it extremely difficult to demonstrate that freedom is more closely identified with personal autonomy than with affluence, with empowerment over life than with empowerment over things... freedom." In addition to subverting the integrity of the human community, capitalism has tainted the classical notion of "living well" by fostering an irrational dread of material scarcity. By establishing quantitative criteria for the "good life," it has dissolved the ethical implications of "limit." This ethical lacuna raises a specifically technical problematic for our time. In equating "living well" with living affluently, capitalism has made it extremely difficult to demonstrate that freedom is more closely identified with personal autonomy than with affluence, with empowerment over life than with empowerment over things, with the emotional security that derives from a nourishing community life than with a material security that derives from the myth of a nature dominated by an all-mastering technology. A radical social ecology cannot close its eyes to this new technological problematic. Over the past two centuries, almost every serious movement for social change has been confronted with the need to demonstrate that technics, "hard" or "soft," can more than meet the material needs of humanity without placing arbitrary limits upon a modestly sensible consumption of goods. The terms of the "black redistribution" have been historically altered; we are faced with problems not of a disaccumulation but of rational systems of production. Post-scarcity, as I have emphasized in earlier works, does not mean mindless affluence; rather, it means a sufficiency of technical development that leaves individuals free to select their needs autonomously and to obtain the means to satisfy them. The existing technics of the western world—in principle, a technics that can be applied to the world at large—can render more than a sufficiency of goods to meet everyone's reasonable need. Fortunately, an ample literature has already appeared to demonstrate that no one need be denied adequate food, clothing, shelter, and all the amenities of life. The astringent arguments for "limits to growth" and the "life-boat ethic" so prevalent today have been reared largely on specious data and a cunning adaptation of resource problems to the "institutional technics" of an increasingly authoritarian State. It is social ecology's crucial responsibility to demystify the tradition of a "stingy nature," as well as the more recent image of "high" technology as an unrelieved evil. Even more emphatically, social ecology must demonstrate that modem systems of production, distribution, and promotion of goods and needs are grossly irrational as well as antiecological. Whosoever sidesteps the conflicting alternatives between a potentially bountiful nature and an exploitive use of technics serves merely as an apologist for the prevailing irrationality. Certainly, no ethical argument in itself will ever persuade the denied and underprivileged that they must abdicate any claim to the relative affluence of capitalism. What must be demonstrated—and not merely on theoretical or statistical grounds alone—is that this affluence can ultimately be made available to all—but should be desirable to none. It is a betrayal of the entire message of social ecology to ask the world's poor to deny themselves access to the necessities of life on grounds that involve long- range problems of ecological dislocation, the shortcomings of "high" technology, and very specious claims of natural shortages in materials, while saying nothing about the artificial scarcity engineered by the corporate capitalism. Anything that is not renewable is exhaustible—this is a philistine tmism. But confronted by such tmisms, one may reasonably ask: When will it be exhausted? How? By whom? And for what reason? For the present there can be no serious claim that any major, irreplaceable resource will be exhausted until humanity can choose new alternatives—"new" referring not simply to material or technical alternatives but above all to institutional and social ones. The task of advancing humanity's right to choose from among alternatives, particularly institutional ones, that may yet
April 1982 RAIN Page 9 offer us a rational, humanistic, and ecological trajectory has not yet been fulfilled by "high" or by "low" technology. In sum, "high" technology must be used by serious social ecologists to demonstrate that, on rational grounds, it is less desirable than ecological technologies. "High" technology must be permitted to exhaust its specious To create a society in which every individual is seen as capable of participating directly in the formulation of social policy is to instantly invalidate social hierarchy and domination. claims as the token of social "progress" and human well-being—all the more to render the development of ecological alternatives a matter of choice rather than the product of a cynical "necessity". . . . We share a common organic ancestry with all that lives on this planet. It infiltrates those levels of our bodies that somehow make contact with the existing primordial forms from which we may originally have derived. Beyond any structural considerations, we are faced with the need to give an ecological meaning to these buried sensibilities. In the case of our design strategies, we may well want to enhance natural diversity, integration, and function, if only to reach more deeply into a world that has been systematically educated out of our bodies and innate experiences. Today, even in alternate technology, our design imagination is often utilitarian, economistic and blind to a vast area of experience that surrounds us. A solar house that symbolizes a designer's ability to diminish energy costs may be a monument to financial cunning, but it is as blind and deadened ecologically as cheap plumbing. It may be a sound investment, even an environmental desideratum because of its capacity to use "renewable resources," but it still deals with nature merely as natural resources and exhibits the sensitivity of a concerned engineer—not an ecologically sensitive individual. An attractive organic garden may well be a wise nutritional "investment" over the quality of food obtainable in a shopping mall. But insofar as the food cultivator is preoccupied only with the nutritional value of food on the dinner table, organic gardening becomes a mere technical strategem for "foodwise" consumption, not a testament to a once-hallowed intercourse with nature. All too often, we are flippantly prepared to use hydroponic trays as substitutes for actual gardens and gravel for soil. Since the object is to fill the domestic larder with vegetation, it often seems to make no difference whether our gardening techniques produce soil or not. Such commonplace attitudes are very revealing. They indicate that we have forgotten how to be organisms—and that we have lost any sense of belonging to the natural community around us, however much it has been modified by society. In the modern design imagination, this loss is revealed in the fact that we tend to design "sculptures" instead of ensembles—an isolated solar house here, a windmill there, an organic garden elsewhere. The boundaries between the "organic" world we have contrived and the real one that may exist beyond them are strict and precise. If our works tend to define our identity, as Marx claimed, perhaps the first step in acquiring an ecological identity would be to design our "sculptures" as part of ensembles—as technical ecosystems that interpenetrate with the natural ones in which they are located, not merely as agglomerations of "small," "soft," "intermediate," or "convivial" gadgets. The principal message of an ecological technics is that it is integrated to create a highly interactive, animate and inanimate constellation in which every component forms a supportive part of the whole. The fish tanks, "sun tubes," and ponds that use fish wastes to nourish the plant nutriment on which they live are merely the simplest examples of a wide-ranging ecological system composed of a large variety of biota—from the simplest plants to sizable mammals—that have been sensitively integrated into a biotechnical ecosystem. To this system, humanity owes not only its labor, imagination, and tools but its wastes as well. No less important than the ensemble is the technical imagination that assembles it. To think ecologically for design purposes is to think of technics as an ecosystem, not merely as cost effective devices based on "renewable resources." Indeed, to think ecologically is to include nature's "labor" in the technical process, not only humanity's. The use of organic systems to replace machines wherever possible—say, in producing fertilizer, filtering out sewage, heating greenhouses, providing shade, recycling wastes, and the like—is a desideratum in itself. But their economic wisdom aside, these systems also sensitize the mind and spirit to nature's own powers of generation. We become aware that nature, too, has its own complex "economy" and its own thrust toward ever-greater diversity and complexity. We regain a new sense of communication with an entire biotic world that inorganic machines have blocked from our vision. As production itself has often been compared with a drama, we should remember that nature's role is more than that of a mere chorus. Nature is one of its principal players and at times, perhaps, the greater part of the cast. Hence, an ecologically oriented technical imagination must seek to discover the "Way" of things as ensembles, to sense the subjectivity of what we so idly call "natural resources," to respect the attunement that should exist between the human community and the ecosystem in which it is rooted. This imagination must seek not merely a means lor resolving the contradictions between town and country, a machine and its materials, or the functional utility of a device and its impact on its natural environment. It should try to achieve their artistic, richly colored, and highly articulated integration. Labor, perhaps even more than technics, must recover its own creative voice. Its abstract form, its deployment in the framework
Page 10 RAIN April 1982 of linear time as a res temporalis, its cruel objectification as mere, homogeneous energy, must yield to the concreteness of skill, to the festiveness of communal activity, to a recognition of its own subjectivity. In this broad revitalization of the natural environment, of work, and of technics, it would be impossible for the technical' iniagination to confine itself to the traditional imagery of a lifeless, irreducible, and passive material substrate. We must close the disjunction between an orderly world that lends itself to rational interpretation and the subjectivity that is needed to give it meaning. The technical imagination must see matter not as a passive substance in random motion but as an active substance that is forever developing—a striving “substrate" (to use an unsatisfactory word) that repeatedly interacts with itself and its more complex forms to yield variegated, “sensitive," and meaningful patterns. Only when our technical imagination begins to take this appropriate form will we even begin to attain the rudiments of a more "appropriate"—or better, a liberatory—technology. The best designs of solar collectors, windmills and watermills, gardens, greenhouses, bioshelters, "biological" machines, tree culture, and "solar villages" will be little more than new designs rather than new meanings, however well-intentioned their designers. They will be admirable artifacts rather than artistic works. Like framed portraits, they will be set off from the rest of the world—indeed, set off from the very bodies from which they have been beheaded. Nor will they challenge in any significant way the systems of hierarchy and domination that originally reared the mythology of a nature "dominated" by one of its own creations. Like flowers in a dreary wasteland, they will provide the colors and scents that obscure a deaf and honest vision of the ugliness around us, the putrescent regression to an increasingly elemental and inorganic world that will no longer be habitable for complex forms of life and ecological ensembles. One can cite an almost unending variety of biotic alternatives to the costly and brutalizing mechanical systems that drive modern industry. The problem of repladng the latter by the former is far from insurmountable. Once human imagination is focused upon these problems, human ingenuity is likely to be matched only by nature's fecundity. Certainly, the techniques for turning a multitude of these substitutions into realities are very much at hand. The largest single problem' we face, however, is not strictly technical; indeed, the problem may well be that we regarded these new biotic techniques as mere technologies. What we have not recognized clearly are the social, cultural, and ethical conditions that render our biotic substitutes for industrial technologies ecologically and philosophically meaningful. For we must arrest more than just the ravaging and simplification of nature. We must also arrest the ravaging and simplification of the human spirit, of human personality, of human community, of humanity's idea of the "good," and humanity's own fecundity within the natural world. Indeed, we must counteract these trends with a sweeping program of social renewal. Hence, a crucial caveat must be raised. A purely technical orientation toward organic gardening, solar and wind energy devices, aquaculture, holistic health, and the like would still retain the incubus of instrumental rationality that threatens our very capacity to _______ . ....... ..._ _______________________ .. develop an ecological sensibility. An environmentalistic technocracy is hierarchy draped in green garments; hence it is all the more insidious because it is camouflaged in the color of ecology. The most certain test we can devise to distinguish environmental from ecological techniques is not the size, shape, or elegance of our tools and machines, but the social ends that they are meant to serve, the ethics and sensibilities by which they are guided and integrated, and the institutional challenges and changes they involve. Whether their ends, ethics, sensibilities, and institutions are libertarian or merely logistical, emancipatory or merely pragmatic, communitarian or merely efficient—in sum, ecological or merely environmental-will directly determine the rationality that underpins the techniques and the intentions guiding their design. Alternative technologies may bring the sun, wind, and the world of vegetation and animals into our lives as participants in a common ecological project of reunion and symbiosis. But the "smallness" or "appropriateness" of these technologies does not necessarily remove the possibility that we will keep trying to reduce nature to an object of exploitation. We must resolve the ambiguities of freedom existentially—by social principles, institutions, and an ethical commonality that renders freedom and harmony a reality. We must try to create a new culture, not merely another movement that attempts to remove the symptoms of our crises without affecting their sources. We must also try to extirpate the hierarchical orientation of our psyches, not merely remove the institutions that embody social domination. But the need for a new culture and new institutions must not be sacrificed to a hazy notion of personal redemption that makes us into lonely "saints" amidst masses of irredeemable "sinners." Changes in culture and personality go hand in hand with our effort to achieve a society that is ecological, but that also recognizes the existence of a universal humanity and the claims of individuality. Guided as we may be by the principle of the equality of unequals, we can ignore neither the personal arena nor the social, neither the domestic nor the public, in our project to achieve harmony in society and harmony with nature. To create a society in which every individual is seen as capable of participating directly in the formulation of social policy is to instantly invalidate social hierarchy and domination. To accept this single concept means that we are committed to dissolving state power, authority, and sovereignty into an inviolate form of personal empowerment. That our commitment to a nonhierarchical society and personal empowerment is still a far cry from the full development of these ideals into a lived sensibility is obvious enough; hence our persistent need to confront the psychic problems of hierarchy as well as social problems of domination. There are already many tendencies that are likely to force this confrontation, even as we try to achieve institutional changes. I refer to radical forms of feminism that encompass the psychological dimensions of male domination, indeed, domination itself; to ecology conceived as a social outlook and personal sensibility; and to community as intimate, human-scaled forms of association and mutual aid. Although these tendencies may wane periodically and retreat for a time to the background of our concerns, they have penetrated deeply into the social substance and ideologies of our era.DQ
April 1982 RAIN Page 11 ACCESS FOREIGN nepali aama, Portrait of a Nepalese Hill Woman, by Broughton Cobum, 1982,169 pp., $9.95 from: Ross-Erikson Publishers 629 State Street, Suite 207 Santa Barbara, CA 93101 Nepali aama (Nepalese mother) grumbles in the way old people often do; about the kids who have no respect, who smoke and gamble and throw stones; about the population growing too fast, "When I first moved up to this village there were only eight houses. Now there are eighteen. Everywhere you turn you run into someone;" and about the economy, "Interest rates for borrowing money have gone up from ten percent a year to ten percent every five months. When you need money you don't have any choice but to pay." Like most old people, she's full of advice; "We have a rule for health. First thing in the morning, even if you don't have to crap, you should at least go out to the field, squat, take a pull on a cigarette, fart and come back." And she can spout the sort of philosophy you have to live about a century to get away with, "They say if you work too hard you'll die early and if you sleep too much you'll die early. I do both too much and can't understand why I'm not dead yet." She can tell you the medicinal uses of rhinoceros horns and the importance of pierced ears to prevent deafness in women. She still climbs trees (when she can find any), farms her land, and goes on pilgrimages to stock up on spiritual security. Mr. Coburn wisely lets his candid photos and nepali aama's words speak for themselves, adding only a few historical and cultural details to link these together. His book is clearly an offering of love and respect to the woman who has adopted him into her home and will in turn be welcomed into yours. This is a very special book. —Carlotta Collette Villages, by Richard Critchfield, 1981, 388 pp., $17.95 hardcover from: Anchor Press/Doubleday 501 Franklin Avenue Garden City, NY 11530 "Our grandfathers were villagers," Richard Critchfield reminds us, "and so our grandchildren may become." Yet for many of us who invoke traditional village values like cooperation, self-reliance and sense of place in our efforts to make our own societies sustainable, the billions of our fellow human beings now living in villages are little more than population statistics or faces staring out From: nepali aama from newspaper photos of the latest Third World famine. Critchfield is uniquely qualified to help us overcome our cultural isolation. For the past dozen years he has lived in a dozen villages in Asia, Africa and Latin America and he introduces us to people he has known as friends and almost as family. Whether they speak Arabic or Portuguese, live in the tropics or the Himalayas, these villagers seem at first glance to have much more in common with each other than with us, but through Critchfield's eyes, we quickly recognize and relate to their hopes and fears, their wisdom and folly and their concern for their parents and children. "When you go to a village," the author observes, "you can't go too far wrong if you assume that everybody is just like you." Critchfield is optimistic about the future of the Third World. He notes dramatic changes taking place in the attitudes of his village friends toward family planning and scientific farming. His assertion that we in the more developed countries are prone to underestimate the common sense, ingenuity and tenacity of villagers is a point well taken, but his uncritical enthusiasm for Green Revolution agriculture (with its heavy dependence on fertilizers and pesticides) and his rather light attention to ecological constraints and to institutional barriers that hold back change should cause us to approach his optimism with considerable caution. Still, his wonderful, firsthand accounts of life among the world's rural poor majority lend considerable credence to his conclusion that the sum of countless decisions and actions now being taken in villages could well turn out to be "the greatest story of the late twentieth century." —John Ferrell HONEY VS. SUGAR The following was inadvertently left out of Nancy Cosper's "Good Cooks in Their Own Write" article, in our Feb./March issue. It is an argument of central importance to the "honey vs. sugar" issue and the way that issue relates to the politics of self-reliance. It is in the question "honey versus sugar" that the answer of local self-reliance appears the strongest. Sugar is a multi-national product produced from beets or cane grown largely in Third World countries, whose land could be put to better use growing food for its people. Unfortunately, honey has also become a big business, and much of the commercial honey in the U.S. is imported. However, it is possible to buy local honey from a small-scale producer. That choice is not possible with sugar.
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