Considering Alternatives
This past week was spent at the College Art Association conference in Boston. Every year, art practitioners gather to present panels on every topic, from gender metaphors in fourteenth century illuminations to how to teach activist art. This unfolds over the course of several days. It is a high pressure time of competition for jobs and other opportunities. It is also a wonderful chance to see and hear new ideas, new images and connect with old and new friends.
It is exhausting by the second day. By the end of the week, most of us are walking from panel to meeting to the bar with glazed eyes. Our zombie bodies are on automatic control, even as our pocketbooks shrink from hotel charges.
On the train, on the way home, the landscape was white with snow as twilight fell. I was in a trance of intellectual exhaustion. I alternated between the book I was reading, gazing out the window and dozing.
Two of the most moving panels I attended were from North Eastern Native Americans. The first was of contemporary practitioners. The second was artists continuing to work in traditional modes. In both cases, they emphasized that they are present, alive and vital. Too often, the public pigeonholes Native American artists in sentimental or outdated frames.
Whether individual artists were working in the mainstream of ideas or adapting the old to present times, the context of connection to Native American culture in our times was apparent and profoundly moving to me. Globally, Indigenous Peoples are suffering disproportionately from global warming. Indigenous Peoples are tied to particular geographical and ecological experiences spiritually and practically.
But land is being transformed and lost. Remaining Indigenous lands are used as toxic dump sites, where cancer rates are astronomical. Keystone species of animals and plants are going extinct, diseased, scarce.
A particular smoke effect essential to creating an artifact depends on the availability of herring for example. Once one could walk across the water on the backs of herring. Now, herring are bought frozen, caught by others.
As I write, NPR is interviewing an administration spokesperson. That expert tells us THEY have no understanding of how they are responsible to do anything about global warming. Who then does? At a conference for the Society for Ecological Restoration last year, speaking to scientists from several European countries, I asked them if every country in the world did all possible to cut back on emissions that cause global warming, would that offset how the USA contributes to the problem. After a very brief reflection, they said, no.
So my question today is, what alternatives are available when power over a situation is held absolutely?
It is exhausting by the second day. By the end of the week, most of us are walking from panel to meeting to the bar with glazed eyes. Our zombie bodies are on automatic control, even as our pocketbooks shrink from hotel charges.
On the train, on the way home, the landscape was white with snow as twilight fell. I was in a trance of intellectual exhaustion. I alternated between the book I was reading, gazing out the window and dozing.
Two of the most moving panels I attended were from North Eastern Native Americans. The first was of contemporary practitioners. The second was artists continuing to work in traditional modes. In both cases, they emphasized that they are present, alive and vital. Too often, the public pigeonholes Native American artists in sentimental or outdated frames.
Whether individual artists were working in the mainstream of ideas or adapting the old to present times, the context of connection to Native American culture in our times was apparent and profoundly moving to me. Globally, Indigenous Peoples are suffering disproportionately from global warming. Indigenous Peoples are tied to particular geographical and ecological experiences spiritually and practically.
But land is being transformed and lost. Remaining Indigenous lands are used as toxic dump sites, where cancer rates are astronomical. Keystone species of animals and plants are going extinct, diseased, scarce.
A particular smoke effect essential to creating an artifact depends on the availability of herring for example. Once one could walk across the water on the backs of herring. Now, herring are bought frozen, caught by others.
As I write, NPR is interviewing an administration spokesperson. That expert tells us THEY have no understanding of how they are responsible to do anything about global warming. Who then does? At a conference for the Society for Ecological Restoration last year, speaking to scientists from several European countries, I asked them if every country in the world did all possible to cut back on emissions that cause global warming, would that offset how the USA contributes to the problem. After a very brief reflection, they said, no.
So my question today is, what alternatives are available when power over a situation is held absolutely?
1 Comments:
The Absolute Power Company
“What alternatives are available when power over a situation is held absolutely?”
It’s darn sure hard to be a pundit without ever invoking Lord Acton’s line about “absolute power corrupting absolutely”, but I’ve quite often found the inverse to be just as true.
Non-hereditary tyrants have to come from someplace, and it’s often from a powerless slum or perhaps some deeply-aggrieved, although not unearned, mental spider hole of weakness—a gnawing sense of being left out of society’s equations for prosperity and justice. The pursuit of happiness can be chased by impure actors. Arrogant corruption can be ever so humble or humiliated at its point of origin. Even innocence can be occasionally deadly.
If there ever was or is a borderless “commons” to our planet then I guess it would be in the air (so to speak or so to breathe) and the future of emissions will most likely depend on the only two types of economies and politics that matter in the end: global and local. Every emission begins at some specific tailpipe or chimney (or the north end of southbound cow) before it drifts out to, or thermally impacts the everywhere. The sins or smoke assignable to any one nation state, even the great Satan, may prove to be irrelevant.
Would global warming be cured by the sudden drastic removal of the USA and her economic engine from the atmosphere? Probably not. Should conscientious individuals try and reduce their footprint in the sky? Arguably and ethically yes.
But let’s work with a few statistics:
The baseline for the Kyoto protocols is arbitrarily 1990; these following data reflect the increase in CO2 emissions through 2002 according to International Energy Agency (IEA): Global +16.4%, USA +16.7%, France +6.9%, Italy +8.3%, Greece +28.2 %, Ireland +40.3%, Netherlands +13.2 %, Portugal +59%, Spain +46%, while Germany (-13.3%) and Great Britain (-5.5%) declined.
But even these few reductions are probably a statistical one-off, because the reunification of Germany incorporated the demise of a moribund smokestack industry of the former communist East and the British had re-engineered their power plants from coal to natural gas during that decade.
Now in all fairness to the guilty miasma of those Irish, Spanish and Portuguese, their economies went from poverty to boom-time in the 90s. They participated in Europe’s wealth after centuries of being sequestered outside it.
So although it aggravates his many enemies to apoplexy, when George W. Bush described Kyoto, as “fatally flawed” he was essentially correct. Not virtuous, but correct nonetheless. This dream of the stovepipes was dead on arrival.
But things can still get worse before they get better. The next (and final) target dates for Kyoto are 2008-2012. It appears those signed on to the agreement are just as likely to miss the coming theoretical objectives as those who did not. So far Canada, which hosted the recent global warming conference is up 23.6%, and Japan, which has hosted the city of Kyoto for a few millennia, is up 18.9%. It’s only an “agreement”, one that comes to an end soon enough with less gravity than the air it speaks of.
But the real deal is and the real “culprits” of the 21st century will be in and of the “developing” world. “We expect CO2 emissions growth in China between now and 2030 will equal the growth of the United States, Canada, all of Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Korea combined,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. In India, he says, about 500 million people lack electricity; worldwide, the figure is 1.6 billion.
It is highly unlikely to happen and ultimately immoral to suggest that the “developing” should not develop and it’s going to happen regardless of any green wish list. The “power” in this world lies with those billions who yearn for and could use electricity, jobs, and transportation as much as it does it the hands of those who already have wired, bourgeois, exurban lifestyles, and are occasionally willing to use a bicycle.
An additional irony in all this is that “pollution”, if pollution is thought of as particulate matter and toxic gasses, is something that has been quite successfully abated (and yes we should do some more abating) in the good old USA and in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe as well. France does it with nukes.
The luxurious conscience of prosperity and the will to legislate and then enforce government regulations are working antidotes to smog and black lungs. The book on successful international agreements for limiting greenhouse gas during the rising economic tide and ecological stress of global development, however, is still an open one. It’s a harder problem to solve without catastrophic, potentially violent, and economic disorder (and few rising tides of the seawater itself).
Move inland.
So even after “pollution” is remediated, the CO2 problem remains, and since it’s a “persistent” gas, climate change is going to be very much with us in any future under any scenario. We’re going to have to adapt and cure simultaneously. The only choices being made at present seem to be between burning biomass versus burning hydrocarbons. Both ultimately bad.
So it appears we better come up with a third wave of technology to combine with the will to just prudently conserve. Even then, the science may remain behind the curve of the problem for a long time in a shortened window of opportunity, not that science alone is ever an answer.
It therefore appears that attaching a sense of urgency to all these efforts would not be out of order. But the cost of Kyoto compliance alone has been estimated at $150 billion a year. Could that kind of money be used to buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education for the poor half of humanity? Could the world community attack AIDs, malaria, hunger, or perhaps even the possible coming avian flu? Adding in religious and tribal chaos, and bit of genocide, well … many things can provoke the urgently-inclined to cry out loud. Zero-sum and three dimensional games are not always fun to play, nor as simple to critique as heroes and villains, oligarchs and victims. But they can be fatal if blithely ignored for therapeutic reasons.
So to answer the question far above, without really answering it, there are thousands of alternatives, not all bad or universally good. This posting and this post man is has neither the time nor expertise to explore those thousands of things on this chilly Sunday afternoon. But if one begins by thinking that the power over any situation is absolute or held uniquely by some elite conspirators, or if it’s simply just another thing America is to be blamed for—well my afternoon thought might be to think that thought through again. Life on earth is a system of systems (and their dysfunctions).
Not that complexifying things still unanswered makes me either less depressed or more joyful than I was an hour ago.
But I’m still breathing furnace-warmed air and it’s icy cold outside my February storm window here in Illinois. Spring come soon.
-Paul Challacombe , 2-26-2006, 7:27pm - Chicago
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