social commentary | The Practical Dilettante

“First World Problems”

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Seonaid

Today’s post is unabashedly meta.

That phrase, “first world problem” has been kicking around my social media streams for a while. I *think* it started out as a reminder that whatever it was that was bugging you, you should have a bit of perspective on it. “Can’t get my phone to connect to my internet and my library books are due so I’m going to have to phone to get them to renew in person.” “First world problem.”

But then it became (as these things are wont to do) dismissive. People started making up mocking fake “problems” and adding, “Wah!” to it. “Bought a latte this morning and they were all out of cinnamon so I had to use *already ground* nutmeg.” Things like that.

This seems like an ideal time to link to an xkcd comic:

This morning, I found myself standing in a partially disassembled kitchen, unable to remove the faucet, unable to get the faucet to stop dripping, (and by dripping, I mean coming out of the counter and spraying water in a never-ending fountain) and with the drawers removed so that I could reach the cut-off valve because they did something profoundly weird when they installed the plumbing. No running water in the kitchen, can’t find the o-rings, child hanging around saying, “Mummy!” every two minutes, and due to a strange choice of the previous home-owner, I can’t just replace the faucet because… oh, it’s a long and drawn-out story. And then I thought, “I guess this is still a first-world problem.”

This is, however, where I draw the line on perspective. That’s it, right there. Running water. Hot and cold. On demand. I demand running water.

Any solution to the world’s problems must include running potable water in the kitchens of the world. Heated, so that we can keep our homes sanitary without having to drag water from the pump to the stove. I add those as parameters to my “ideal world”.

***

A couple of weeks ago, I told somebody I was going to write a post and call it “First World Problems”. I was going to start it like so: “Dead of a stress-induced heart attack at 46 is still dead.” Because there are problems of the industrialized world that are real problems. Alienation. Disaffectation. Disconnection from nature and the life-giving aspects of labour. Chronic high levels of stress and anxiety. Diabetes. Pollution, loneliness, the industrialization of everything including love. You know. Problems.

This morning’s experience gave me (as all my experiences tend to) another moment of insight. “First world problem,” I thought, as I struggled to get the water running in my kitchen again. Meaning, “all my habits are entirely reliant on technology, and when the technology fails, my ability to cope with the world around me deteriorates rapidly.” I kept finding myself turning the tap even when I was in the middle of fixing it. “Right. Still no running water. Just like 2 minutes ago.”

This reality applies not only to our lattes and information technology, but also to our water, food, transportation, energy, and to our ability to heat and cool ourselves as necessary. During the 2003 blackout, we discovered that our phone didn’t work when the power went out, so I had no way of calling home to say where I was. Another first-world problem, caused by the fact that I was working 100 km from home on a daily basis. And the gas pumps in between were also powered by the missing electricity. And the traffic lights weren’t working, so traversing the intervening city was a major undertaking. Our “world” is full of these unseen systems that allow things to happen magically.

It comes down to this: We are entirely dependent for the basic necessities of life on systems that are incomprehensible, unfeeling, and entirely outside of our control. We have no direct relationship with our life systems and no back up plan. And then… our life systems and our lifestyle systems are entirely enmeshed. This is how my car gets all my money. Even though I know it isn’t my priority, I can’t get at the things that are unless I maintain it… but then I can’t afford to get at the things that are my priority. And on and on and on.

First world problem.

And when I thought of it that way, the levels of anxiety that these (even minor) failures cause become more transparent. We live in a giant black box with a zillion points of contact, and all we know about it is the stories we’ve been told. At any time, the machinations of strangers in suits, playing dice games with dodgy mortgages could strip us of our live savings and eliminate our carefully planned retirements. Our security is illusory, and we are enraged to discover the cracks. A good time to remind ourselves, but for perspective, not dismissal.

First World Problem redux (1)

One day a few months ago my mother was visiting. (Hi, Mom!) I don’t remember what the topic was, but we were sitting on couches in a heated room, and the lights were on, and the water was not disconnected. It was probably a money thing. And she sighed, and said, “Oh, it’s a hard life.” (2) And I thought about it a moment, and said, “No. A hard life is when you have to live on a garbage dump and spend your days digging for enough plastic to buy some rice to feed your children. This is just an irritating life.” Which she conceded. But whatever it was, it really was irritating.

Here’s the deal: we’re still living in these bodies, and these technologies we have come to rely on are the only way we really know how to take care of them.

Water? Tap!
Food? Grocery store! (or sometimes garden, but if you’ve been reading along, you know that when the zombies come, I’m still in trouble.)
Money? Uh. If you solve this one, let me know. (3)

So, let us not use the phrase to pretend that there are no problems in the first world. Because those problems, these problems, these are the things that are causing the BIG problems. (4) We have lost perspective, yes. But we are still alive, and we still have needs. So if you catch yourself saying, “first world problem” under your breath, check in. Is it really not a problem? Are you using the phrase to gain a sense of scale, reality? Or are you trying to dismiss a need of your body or spirit, because you think you “should be” better than that? You know, don’t be too hard on yourself. But you might be willing to concede the small points as just not worth getting your knickers in a knot.

But running water? I stand by my requirement for running water. Even in more than one room in my house. (5)

1. That means restored/brought back, not summed up. Because every good blog post should have a glossary.
2. One of my favourite mom quotes is, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” Hmmm… Things I learned from my Mom. Good blog post, no?
3. Traditionally, at least ’round these parts, it used to involve these things they called “jobs”, but those things are as scarce as hen’s teeth. I hear they were a recent (and apparently ephemeral) phenomenon, anyway.
4. That’s another entire post about consumerism as a balm for anxiety. Let’s not go there this time.
5. I also have a goal of donating at least $500 to UNICEF this year. Currently at about $105. Because I want safe potable running water for everybody, not just me.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: good-enough, social commentary, storytelling, water | 5 Comments »

The Elitism Question

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Seonaid

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan’s advice on what to eat from the New York Times, which has turned out to be surprisingly controversial.

Real food? Everybody knows that’s just for the wealthy elite… Berkshire pork and morels at $180 an ounce, right? Something like that… certainly no relevance to the average North American family. Completely ungrounded in any class analysis, exclusive purview of the Land Rover set.

But what if I told you that my focus on Real Food comes out of a Marxist and Weberian analysis of how “the elite” maintain their collective advantages in society? My concerns with the industrial food system start with the displacement of indigenous people to provide cash crops, increasingly for the purposes of providing animal feed for the developed world. I observe that the industrial agricultural system requires a perpetual resource war that perpetuates cycles of violence and repression in oil-rich but democracy-poor countries all over the world. And one of my central claims is that we don’t have the right to impoverish the entire rest of the world so that we don’t have to confront the depth of inequity in North American culture. Would you still weigh my piddly little excuse for a farm against the actions of Walmart, Cargill, and Monsanto and declare me the bad guy? You can if you want to; there’s nothing I can do to stop you. I just want to be clear what it is that you are rejecting when you slap the “Elite and therefore irrelevant” label on the entire movement for Real Food.

What we are doing here, at this stage, is rebuilding capacity. Social justice is a significant motivational component of the movement, but from my own perspective, it is becoming pragmatic. I don’t want this to come to revolution, and I don’t want to witness (or suffer from) mass starvation on the streets of North America. Famine is the normal state of human affairs, and we are not well-adapted, having grown larger than people in previous generations and requiring more to eat as a result. What is worse, many of us live in loosely-connected non-communities, with little resilience or self-sufficiency. We are catastrophe waiting to happen.

The industrial food system may be the crowning achievement of global capitalism, but it happens to also be utterly unsustainable. It does feed more people than ever before, but it does so only so long as the oil keeps flowing. It is capital intensive, and has almost entirely displaced labour, which makes it incredibly susceptible to economic “downturns,” and contractions, and depressions. The products are traded on the international commodity markets, making it into something that can be manipulated for profit, even while people are starving… sometimes the very people who grew and harvested the food in the first place… sometimes off land that they used to work for the benefit of their own families, who no longer have access to adequate nutrition. It is a system that asks us to weigh the needs of the North American poor against those of the global poor, and turn a blind eye to the consequences of its failure to adequately address any of those needs. It is the system that is corrupt and immoral; “The Poor” (as though this is some monolithic group) are largely powerless within it. Frankly, “The Elite” that are such common targets of this criticism are even pretty far down the power structure. Really, how many Ivy League English professors do you think sit on the boards of the major multinational companies? No, this is a situation in which the system can keep us fighting amongst ourselves, thus keeping us from doing anything to actually address the problems in which we are enmeshed.

And into this slow-motion disaster steps the “Real Food” movement. Because at the same time that our population has grown, and the individual members of it have become larger, and the overall flow of energy has increased, we have lost many of the basic preindustrial technologies that turn plants and animals into food, from putting seed in the ground, right down to cooking the final product. We (in large, giant, enormous chicken factories) don’t bother to keep roosters, and we’ve developed breeds of chickens that lay absurd quantities of eggs, but don’t have any mothering instincts, so can’t turn those eggs into a next generation without industrial levels of human intervention. We have no way of planting or harvesting grains that doesn’t involve house-sized pieces of heavy equipment. If any of us happened upon a bag of grain, almost none of us would be able to make something edible out of it. These are not just interesting hobbies for those with the time and energy to devote to them.

These are the tools of survival, and we don’t have them.

Which brings us back around to class. I am fully aware that we are talking about survival on completely different time scales. Most weeks in my house, the groceries aren’t an issue. We have those weeks where an extra bill comes due, or the car breaks down, or somebody needs a trip to the dentist or a prescription, but we have a well-stocked pantry to carry us through those things. I know that puts us in a lucky and rare category in the world. So when one of “us” (let’s say ‘food activists’) says that most of what is in the grocery store “isn’t food”, it can be taken as a purely aesthetic claim, that we are judging, dismissing the reality of those who have no choice but to purchase whatever is on cheapest sale this week. Believe me, I’ve been there. I’ve cried at the grocery store, and it wasn’t over fancy cheese. But it also wasn’t recently. I know that in this deeply and profoundly unfair world, I’m pretty near the top of the heap. I’m able to consider survival on the time scale of my lifetime, or the lifetimes of several generations, because my immediate needs are pretty much taken care of (at the moment).

So what do I use that for? I could simply claim that in some way the way things are reflects the natural order of things, take what I can and leave the rest to their own devices. I could use my education to make a lot of money. Really. I’ve got some pretty weird skills, some of which pay pretty well. But I’ve chosen to work for a better world, which includes access to real food produced in a way that doesn’t jeopardize our ability to have any food at all in 20 years. I try to figure out ways to allow more people to eat better without bankrupting the entire rural economy or outsourcing all our environmental contaminants to people still further down the power ladder.

Let me be perfectly clear: It is not the fault of anybody trapped in this system, but the system as a whole must be up for criticism. Because it is not morally neutral, and to claim that it is, is to ignore the suffering inflicted by these processes. This is a system that is violent from one end to the other, starting with the expropriation of land from peasants the world over, and ending with food deserts in North American urban centres, with stops along the way for poisoning the air, land, and sea, normalizing cruelty to animals, and marginalizing and impoverishing the few farm labourers that remain. It is an enormous fraction of our externalizing economy, which provides for the few at the expense of the many, including future generations. So, yes… feed your children, but please don’t demand that I do nothing to challenge the impacts. I’m trying to make sure that there is a planet for them to inherit.

I don’t get paid for this work. We break even (maybe) on the eggs and the veggies. The writing has all been done for free, along with workshops, and the work to keep the farmers markets going in a wet, cold, climate in one of the poorest parts of Canada. I do this in solidarity with the peasants of the global south as represented by Vandana Shiva and La Via Campesina. I do it to remember rural farmers trying to figure out how to do the right thing in the face of “get big or get out”, and urban farmers who are building local foodsheds in cities all over North America. We are quietly (or not so quietly) weaving a safety net beneath a culture that we fear is on the brink of collapse, in hope that the fall will be more gentle. And yes, I’m doing it on land that is paid for by my husband’s decent professional salary, in time that I can (sort of) afford to lose, on the back of more than a decade of post-secondary education. On land, I might add, for which the native population has almost certainly not been adequately compensated. But please, don’t look at my $4-a-dozen eggs (collected from hens that roam freely and for whom my partner recently vaulted a six-foot fence to chase off the fox), please don’t look and say, “That woman cares nothing for the poor.”

For more information on radical approaches to Real Food, check out the Civil Eats website, particularly the parts about food access. That’s where the link goes. Or Navdanya International, for a global perspective.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: ecofeminism, food, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency, social commentary, vandana shiva | 7 Comments »

Analyze This: On Not Giving Stuff Up

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Seonaid

This post comes with a caveat: It is an exploration of systems, the limits of agency, and the social constructs that preclude giving up my car… yet. I am not looking for sympathy, nor am I beating myself up over my limitations in the face of the myths of Western civilization. I recognize that I lead a profoundly charmed life, full of privilege and the leisure to consider these things. It doesn’t escape my awareness that I can only think about this because of the same education that leads to the rest of it all… it’s complicated.

The problem with giving stuff up is that we don’t want to. I mean we may want to, sort of, but it’s often more that we think it’s a good idea, or we think that we will be better people if we do it, or we think that we should (in all the various interpretations of that loaded word.) But to truly give something up, to stop doing something we enjoy merely for the greater good, without getting any benefit back for it… we don’t really want to do that. At least I don’t.

For me, my ideals keep running up against the car/house problem. My house is too far from the things we do. Or the things we do are too far from my house. Since “the things we do” include the work that pays for the house, I’m going to go with the first interpretation in this case. On a daily basis, we travel more than is justifiable, given the things that we know about the effects of that travel. But once I get to that conclusion, I am unable to take the next logical step…

The benefits of our house, even the environmental ones, are enormous. We have a huge food garden, soon to be updated with nearly year-round greenhouse production. We have chickens, and bees, and fruit trees, and berries, and asparagus (I’m still waiting for the first harvest, so the asparagus is surprisingly prominent on the list of things keeping me here.) At the end of our driveway, we have swimming, canoeing, kayaking, or skating, depending on the season. We can go fishing (which means standing on the end of the dock talking about fish, since no fish are silly enough to come in that close to shore.) It’s like being on vacation whenever we get home, or like living at the cottage. Actually, it’s exactly like living at the cottage, since our house is a winterized, converted cottage. This leads to a couple of quirks, like the fact that the master bedroom is in the basement, and the second bathroom is tucked behind the chimney and has no ceiling.

Back to the pluses of this property: We heat with wood, and we have a huge bank of south-facing windows. We have available wind in abundance and flowing water, so could probably be energy independent on this property with a smaller-than-average investment in renewables… There is also a second garage with apartment above it, and two sheds, one of which contains chickens, and one of which has my writing studio, at least in the summer. This place is awesome (which is why we bought it two hours after we saw it, the day the sign went up.)

But we keep coming back to the cars. There are currently three of them sitting in my parking space. Three! This is awful! (Now, it happens that we just haven’t managed to sell the van, so it’s not that we intend to continue to have three cars for two drivers. That would be silly.) When we get despondent about the house, and the driving, and the repairs, and entropy, and how all this work we are doing is for naught if we just do the opposite of carbon offsetting by driving back and forth to all our environmental and community events… we come around, eventually, to the cars and how else we could solve the transportation problem.

Can we switch to bikes? Well, for about half the days during the one third of the year it is not below freezing on a regular basis. For short trips not involving the 4-lane highway that is the only route to the aforementioned job, that pays the bills. So, not really.

Additionally, I looked at a couple of pedaled cars, since we usually have to take a couple of kids with us, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I am not willing to give up the enclosed roof. It’s not the time it takes me to get somewhere, or the effort involved that stops me. I would adapt, and change my habits to match up. It is the lack of seclusion from the elements that these vehicles provide. I need my stuff (children, car seats, groceries, towels, clothing) not to get wet, and my body not to get frozen. That’s the main thing that I require from my transportation device. It must protect me from the weather, which we get in abundance.

I think there is something more that underlies that, though. I’m not willing to give up the control over my schedule that would come from having to adapt so much more to the weather. As it is, our lives are much more weather-dependent than typical North American expectations. We change the way we heat and cool our house depending on the cloud cover and wind conditions. We must plant, harvest, and do laundry when the sun shines. It is only warm enough to sit outside of an evening occasionally, and I don’t bother to put away my mittens for July and August, in case I want to go for a walk after dark. I live with all of those things. I don’t even mind them. They add a certain… spontaneity to it all. I’m just not ready to start calling our friends and say, “Sorry, we can’t come over this evening. It’s raining.” So if we’re going to replace our cars with bikes, we’ve got to figure out ways to make our bikes drier and warmer.

It isn’t exactly a transportation problem. It’s a social problem. We don’t say, “Oh, my life would be so complete if only I could go those 30 km in the next half hour!” We say, “Stephanie invited us over for dinner. What should we bring?” It’s an entertainment problem: “Did you see that there’s a drama festival on all this week at the university?” It’s an education problem: “The tutor wants to meet us at the library this evening.” It’s a logistics problem: “We’ve got music lessons at 4 and rehearsal at 6, and they are 14 km apart.” It’s a work problem: “I’ve got to stay 45 minutes late to meet with a student who wasn’t able to make it to the exam and the kids have taekwondo before I’ll be home.” It’s a taking-advantage-of-the-weather problem: “It’s not raining! Who wants to go to the beach?!” At the end of it all, it’s a middle-class problem: “I have to. There are all these things I need to do. And what about the children?”

There’s something there to do with expectations. I don’t feel bad that I can’t provide a private jet or regular skiing trips to Europe; those things are so far out of my purview, they don’t even register. I also don’t feel bad about denying my kids access to the skidoos, jetskis, power boats, and ATV’s that are such common weekend activities for the other kids around here: those things are so obviously outside our value system that they exceed my compromise capacity. Also… expensive! Same reasons we have no lawn to speak of. But these activities on the boundary, when I have the ability to provide them, and the activity itself is something I value… they’re gateway activities. Gateway into the car, into the car culture, into fast food, (which I sometimes resort to when desperate for calories when logistics break down) into consumption. The events, the birthday parties, the obligatory gift giving, are all parts of participation in the broader culture, participation in the culture the children are immersed in by going to school. They already don’t get television, elaborate birthday parties, cell-phones, laptops of their own, or the newest gadget from Future Shop. The least I can do (so I reason) is take them to drama classes, taekwondo, and swimming lessons. And the library. And the theatre. And the farmer’s market. And the wildlife park. And the playground. And their friends houses. And… you see how this goes. It’s a good-mother myth, tied up in the package of a successful life, and topped with a bow of synthesized freedom. For the bargain price of $169 (bi-weekly), plus taxes, maintenance, and gasoline. Phew.

And I can analyze it. And I can realize it, and think it, and know it intellectually. But when it comes right down to finally saying, No? I can’t quite give it up.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: discipline, environment, PostADay2011, self, social commentary | 9 Comments »

Greenwashing of the Week

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Seonaid

I am hereby bestowing my illustrious “Greenwashing” award, which will be noted by at least 50 people, to the company Future Shop, for their not-quite-stated Earth Day flyer.

It is hard for me to write this, because they have pulled off the most creative and effective form of greenwashing, namely, making a significant financial contribution to one of my preferred environmental organizations. This is a get-out-of-responsibility free card, of sorts, since I find myself reluctant to criticize as a result. Nonetheless…

This is the most literal example of greenwashing I’ve ever seen; each page of the flyer has an actual wash of green in the background, even the pages with plain old consumer electronics. The cover features the statement, “It’s easy being green. (See inside for energy-saving tips and savings.)” This example of greenwashing is audacious, bold, daring! The BlackBerry PlayBook right next to energy saving tips? Genius! Completely unrelated, yet reassuring.

It does get better on later pages, with genuinely useful tips like:

Use a front loading washing machine, wash in cold and hang to dry whenever possible. This one I was surprised to see, since they don’t sell clotheslines. Although, since washers and dryers are usually sold in pairs, it probably wouldn’t significantly affect their sales. I might hang my clothes whenever possible, but in a damp cold climate, I’m reluctant to give up the dryer.
Also, if you are going to use your dryer, make sure that you run the spin cycle on the washer as high as possible to minimize drying time.
Turn off the power to your electronics when they are not in use. (They are kind enough to sell a power bar that will do it for you.)
Buy Energy Star appliances and TV’s.
Use a rechargeable Universal remote… only $229.99. Let’s you stop using expensive and environmentally unfriendly disposable batteries, apparently. I’m pretty sure that the remote for my 10 year old DVD player has only gone through two changes of rechargeables, actually, so this seems to be an expensive solution to a problem I don’t have.

Which brings me to my real point… green consumerism, and the idea that we can buy our way to sustainability. Don’t get me wrong: if you are planning to buy a new appliance or television, you should consider its power consumption. Keep in mind, however, that the Energy Star designation means that the item is more efficient than a target set for comparable items, not necessarily that it is a low power consumer in absolute terms. If you really want to make a difference, you should choose a smaller TV and watch it less. Or buy a smaller refrigerator.

More important, though, is not trading in those electronics that are still perfectly serviceable to get something newer with a couple more features. Yes, if you have a gas-guzzler, a power-sucking 15 year old fridge, or a computer that looks a lot like a 1980′s space ship, you might reduce your fuel or power consumption by trading in/up. But if you are replacing a working phone, you need to consider the embodied energy, and whether you actually need the new phone.

Need. Hard one, that. What does it mean to “need” when your job might hinge on having that BlackBerry? You might need it. We have expectations. Other people have expectations of us. During the discussion of the Wall Street Salary cap, I read a non-satirical article on how expensive it is to live in New York as an executive. The place of consumer spending was highlighted as a key to maintaining social status, and by extension, continued access to employment. “Each Brooks Brothers suit costs about $1,000. If you run a bank, you can’t look like a slob.” (Apparently they also “need” two $8000 vacations per year, and possibly a $4 million summer home. This is an extreme example, but we are all prey to it in our own ways.) “Going green is good,” says Future Shop. I’m the last one who is going to disagree with that. But I will say that in the face of all the social pressures to the contrary, it isn’t actually easy.

This is how the Future Shop flyer is a greenwashing campaign, no matter how well-intentioned or useful the tips may be. We need to keep in mind the order of these three-R’s: First Reduce. Then Reuse. Then Recycle. The electronics industry, of which the company is a retail arm, has a business model based on stoking/stroking our unknown wants: Make new(ish) technologies (Does the iPhone 4 really change everything. Again?), advertise them so that they become so pervasive that participation is part of the cost of entry to society (or is at least perceived to be). Turn wants into needs, and then sell people the same thing they already bought in a different form, rendering the previous solution that they bought from you obsolete, and therefore garbage. Don’t believe me? How many times have you replaced your movie collection? Was it because you hated your DVD player? Or your VHS? Or your BetaMax? Or your laser disc player? Or was it because somebody told you that they were no longer good enough? Or stopped making that format? On a related note, let me also ask, how much larger is your television than it was 20 years ago? Why is that, do you think? Were you sitting in your living room thinking, “This would be so much better on a TV the size of the wall?” Or was that idea planted in your mind, all unawares?

Before I sign off, I’m going to come back around to the original statement by Future Shop: I suppose that it can be easy being green, if we consider reducing our desires and expectations easy. There are a lot of green choices that are green by default, by inaction. Don’t go on that car trip. Don’t buy that new phone. Don’t buy more clothes than you can actually wear. Pass on the giant TV. (For the cost of the giant TV, you could get a smaller one, AND the solar panels to run it!) Make do with less stuff. Repair, pass things along, buy used if you can. All green choices.But remarkably difficult when a stack of flyers arrives at the end of my driveway every week reminding us how hopelessly out of date all of our stuff is.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, Science, WorldView | Tagged: discipline, environment, PostADay2011, social commentary | 3 Comments »

Slowing Down

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Seonaid

As I may have mentioned, I have been working on some writing about nuclear power. It started out as a post, and then it turned into a series of posts, but I think it is turning into an e-book in the end, because it is just too large. What I set out to write was a primer for people who were engaging in the nuclear power debate, questions to ask, values to consider. I tried to use my scientific background to be “objective”. Hah. The further I dug, and the more I found out, the worse an idea I found it to be. It turns out (for very well-substantiated reasons) to be a precise recipe for replicating the situation we are now in, 75 years down the road, only worse, because nuclear toxic waste is much, much more toxic than fossil fuel toxic waste. Since I set out with the premise, “I think that the technologies exist to make nuclear power safe, but there are other questions to be addressed, and I will document them,” this is a bleak conclusion, indeed.

If you want a whole stack of primary research documents to work along with me, I can recommend Mark Jacobson’s extensive list of papers. They are not all about nuclear, but a large fraction of them have considered the implications of a range of different energy options. For a weighty and comprehensive summary, you may want his 26 page “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security.” (Link to page on which the PDF and supplemental material, including his 9-page Scientific American article (pdf), can be obtained.)

If you would rather wait a few weeks, I should have something that summarizes only the nuclear components by the end of May.

***

In the meantime, I would like to propose a non-technological solution to much of our energy crisis: slowing down. This is not merely radical in our culture; it is heretical. The entire economy is built upon growth, and, by extension, speeding up. We must earn more, spend more, go faster, because we could be overtaken by the competition at any time. If you aren’t available to answer your email at 10 at night, you just might be replaced by somebody who is. You need that Blackberry, cell phone, iPad, daytimer, second car, bigger house, nicer clothes, more money than you made last year because if you don’t keep going forward, further, faster, you will be left behind. And we know what happens to the left behind; they become poor, and left out, and die friendless and alone under a bridge… come up gasping for air after that breathless rush from success to homelessness, and vow to work more, and harder, and longer, and anything just to keep from falling behind!

Or take a deep breath and pause. Maybe something else is possible. Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the only story. Maybe, just maybe, there are other possibilities. Maybe there are other people, making different choices, making something other than speed their highest calling. Maybe. Look around.

Maybe somebody builds a bicycle car, and maybe some people use it to commute to work. Maybe people have purchased smaller houses, scaled back intentionally, moved to the country, or the suburbs, or the city, and started growing food. Maybe some people are choosing to slow down. Maybe you could too.

And even, maybe, if a bunch of us did it together, it would be safe to drive our bicycle cars on the roads, because the roads would slow down, people would drive less, and we would use less energy. Maybe we wouldn’t need as many gadgets to manage our time, because we would have more time in which to manage. Maybe we could stop over-programming our children because we wouldn’t be afraid that they would be left behind before they even got out of elementary school. And maybe, if a lot of us slowed down all together, instead of races (to the top, or the bottom) we could have lives.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: discipline, good-enough, life, philosophy, PostADay2011, social commentary, storytelling | 5 Comments »

The Price Of Gas!

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Seonaid

Oh! It is time to run in circles and flap our hands! Gas is going up! Food will cost more! Who could ever have predicted this???

Here is one of the places where the division between structural analysis and the personal impact becomes glaring. It has become apparent to me over the last few years that I cannot actually afford to run a car. I certainly can’t afford to run two cars. And I really can’t afford to run a minivan which now costs $8 in gas alone every time we decide to go to town. Just to clarify the costs, gas is now (as of this morning) around $1.29 per litre, or about $4.87 per gallon. The van runs about 12 L per 100 km on average, but the starting, warming, and going up hills that we do around here takes a little more, so we basically go through 6 L every time we start her up (the round trip to town is about 30 km, so as soon as we do any scooting we’re up to 50 km by leaving the driveway). Then the two vehicles ran through about $4000 in repairs between December and February.

No. I cannot afford to keep doing this. We cannot afford to keep doing this. And by “we” I mean, “our entire culture,” not just my immediate family.

The price of gas is a shake up: we are not going to spend or subsidize our way out of peak oil, international conflict, and suburban sprawl (in which I am participating.) Even we in North America, even in the ostensible middle class, are going to have to spend a higher fraction of our budget on food. We will not be able to buy stuff, because we will need to feed ourselves. Our houses are too big; we will not be able to afford to keep them as warm/cool as we are used to. Our ability to isolate ourselves from the environment, and manipulate the world around us through the liberal application of fossil fuels is coming to a close. Probably. A miracle may occur. But we cannot bank our futures upon technologies that don’t yet exist. We must work sideways towards solutions, change our ways or perish. (I got that from a comedy routine(1), not a sign on a street corner.)

I look at my own situation, and the car problem in particular, and I come up with these possible solutions:

Move to town. Give up chickens, gardens, greenhouse, land, swimming, canoeing, apartment, garage, writing studio, and dreams. Break my children’s hearts (and my own) to be more fiscally responsible in the short term. Abandon hope for sustainability, buy back into the rat race. Give up… Wait. That doesn’t sound like a solution. (Yes, I know about Urban Homesteading. To get within walking distance of the university would cost me the same amount as we can sell the current house for, and would result in a reduction of about 3.25 acres of land.)
Strictly ration driving for “necessary” trips. Give up swimming lessons, meditation, tae kwon do, orchestra, drama, and social life. Resort to a utilitarian life and hope for redemption in the afterlife. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that I’m getting a reward at the end of all of this, so it doesn’t give me a lot to go on, other than a vague sense of moral superiority, which is just not enough to run a life on. I’m going to need more payoff than, “My life sucks, but at least I’m not fucking it up for everybody else.” Also, that’s not a solution that has much to sell it, and what I’m really looking for is scalability.
Get rid of van. Give up cargo space and the ability to spontaneously take other people places. Still need to purchase a replacement, because otherwise we will be giving up everything in number 2 as well. Also requires us to take two vehicles if we want to take our entire family somewhere. Probably can get $7000 for it, which could be rolled over to “new” smaller vehicle. Would need to replace the functions of the van by renting truck from time to time. The van was supposed to be a temporary solution, to be disposed of when we no longer required 3 car seats. We’ve been down to two car seats for about 2 years, but now the kids are starting to get big. Just last week I had to put my oldest in the front seat for the first time, since he no longer fits between the two seats in the back of the Echo. Can a family of 6 get around with a Honda Civic and a Smart Car? (Three adults, three kids, one about to go through his first teenage growth spurt.)
Get our friends to move closer so that we can still do everything in #2, or replace with equally fun activities. Ha ha ha. Rural village full of interesting, intelligent, and healthy people: good idea. Intentional community with people we already know? Pipe dream. But not one that I am alone in. Maybe it is the goal we secretly all yearn for. It is probably the solution for what ails us, culturally. Urban villages, probably, with walkability thrown in and a reinvention of The Commons. Transition towns for the Long Descent. (I haven’t read it. Have you?) But how to get there? How to get there? There’s the rub.It’s not going to work this way, one house at a time, one family (or two) at a time, with all of us tied to the places we happened upon. It certainly isn’t going to work with temporary jobs, no stability, and a constant threat of layoff hanging over our heads. We’re part way there, but of the four adults who live on our property, only one has been able to parlay his skills and knowledge into a paying full-time job. The rest of us patch things together, start micro-businesses which lose money (but only a couple of hundred dollars at a time), and pick up part-time teaching gigs when possible. We can’t save the world, or even ourselves, running scared.
Ah: here’s a bit of my own structural analysis. (Remember, structure does not imply intent or conspiracy.) It happens to have been beneficial for a large group of people/organizations to keep us “running scared,” making sure that we never feel like our “needs” are met. Keep up with those Jonses: if you let them get too far ahead, you will be so ostracized that your very survival will be on the line! This is a tremendously powerful message. We are tribe animals, we need belonging the same way that we need air and food, albeit on a slower scale. A solitary human being is actually in jeopardy, isolated from access to basic support systems for food and shelter. There is no such thing as true self-sufficiency, there is only interdependence.

But a truly functioning community of interdependence, working to meet its needs and trade the excess? One that includes a sense of personhood for its youngest and its eldest? One that values the life-supporting work that is traditionally done by women, and expects its men to contribute to the private sphere so that the women have enough space in their days and intellectual life to participate fully in the public sphere? There is a foundation from which we can start to rebuild a society that can deal with the price of gas… without flapping our hands and running in circles.

Too bad it doesn’t solve my immediate transportation problem.

1. Kevin and God. Radio Free Vestibule

Filed under: Essays and Musings, Family, Rural Living, WorldView | Tagged: environment, frugal, peak oil, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency, social commentary | 4 Comments »

Taking a Deep Breath

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Seonaid

On social media conflagrations.

OK. Yesterday, I was writing about the moral legitimacy of a particular trademark. Understandably, there has been a social media firestorm over this issue, as people feel that their contributions have been marginalized. In return, the owner of the trademarks has issued a press release accusing the bloggers of the community of being “slanderous” and “malicious,” and claiming that the whole issue is based on a misunderstanding and rumours.

As happens in these situations, the rhetoric keeps climbing, with some people ‘armed for bear’, seeking not only to restore the common use of the phrase urban homesteading, but to punish the Dervaes family. They really have been called all kinds of names, and some people have suggested a global boycott of their websites. Also, some of their… um. Let’s say, odder/adamant beliefs have been called into question.

So, in the midst of the conflagration, it is important to see the trees and the forest. I understand how, when we are angry, we sometimes want to destroy the object of our anger. But that is not constructive, and I, for one, would like to be very clear about my desires and goals. I do not want the Dervaes family destroyed, put out of business, or even maligned. Even though they implied that as a blogger, I was unconcerned with the truth… and that pisses me off a bit. You know. Just a bit.

I think that the analysis of the moral right of the Dervaes family to be the sole beneficiaries of the work of a movement is a perfectly legitimate part of discourse. The textual analysis of the documents being produced by the Dervaes family – also legitimate. Calling for their obliteration? Over the top. Expressing frustration that they don’t seem to be able to see that other people have contributed? Totally fair.

Unfortunately, they have lumped together all legitimate discussion into the category of unprovoked attack: “there has been a heated argument in the media against what should have been the Dervaeses’ normal rights to protect their trademarks.” Actually, what has been primarily up for debate isn’t whether they have a right to protect their trademarks. It is whether they had the right to register those trademarks in the first place. It is this claim in the press release that is in question: “While they did not come up with the name Urban Homesteading®, they defined its current, specific application.”

Then they have grouped us all together into a massive uninformed blob: “Whereas professional reporters substantiate their news before publishing stories and are careful not to make slanderous statements, bloggers have no editors and often demonstrate little or no interest in supporting their claims with fact.” I, for one, spent about 10 hours yesterday looking at the language of the letter that they sent, researching trademark laws and the in and outs, checking the stories out and double checking. I stand by my work.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: blogging, PostADay2011, social commentary, truth | 3 Comments »

How to Build a 1500 Follower Facebook Page in 24 hours

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Seonaid

It turns out to be rather simple: Trademark a common phrase that is primarily used by freethinking radicals. OK. It won’t be your page, but if you want to galvanize a movement and you are willing to be the common enemy, this could be an effective strategy.

There is a disturbance in the force today regarding the use of the phrase “Urban Homesteading.” It has been trademarked by one of the many people who have been using it in the recent decades, and he has issued letters to the other members of the movement telling them to figure out other ways to describe their activities. First there was boggling, and confusion. Then there was a moment of individual defiance: “Yeah. Try and stop me!” And then there was a Facebook page with a spelling variation, and 1700 (and counting) followers, and a discussion of the relevant trademark law and a question of how to reclaim the use of the phrase. Because in the end, it seems to have shifted from defiance, to resolve. “No, actually. You can’t stop us. This is a movement, not just your business, and you don’t get to call the shots.”

The person in question has been using the phrase online as a blog since the early 2000′s and he has a heavy brand investment in it. However, other people have invested in this concept, phrase, and “brand” (if we must) and have been using it at least since 1980. It is a common phrase among a certain subset of the population, and it is frustrating to see somebody virtually rope off a piece of the commons, slap a license on it, and call it property.

The family that trademarked it didn’t invent the term, and they aren’t using it in way that is distinctive and a significant departure from the movement as a whole. They are snatching a phrase out of the ether and declaring it theirs. It’s not that they haven’t been using it and it’s not that they haven’t been promoting the concept. They have an investment. But they are usurping the work that has been done to promote this idea by an international community of activists. People like Karin Kliewer writing for Wendy Priesnitz’s Natural Living Magazine. And K. Ruby Blume at the Institute of Urban Homesteading, who has been essentially told that she needs a new name for her business. By trademarking the phrase the “owners” were legally entitled to make Facebook take down all the pages that use the words Urban Homesteading, including Blume’s.

So, a brief diversion, because I want to talk about the concept of intellectual property. One stop on my speckled and dodgy career path was two work terms at the Canadian Patent Office, one in Industrial Design and Copyright, and one as a Patent Classifier. I was just a student and this was 20 years ago, so I am not an expert in patent law, the ins and outs thereof, so don’t ask me about case law. I don’t know. Details, shmetails; I want to talk philosophy. Because this disagreement isn’t really about law. Maybe in a twisted application of “first to file” they are legally entitled to do this. If so, the law might be… ahem… an ass. No, this can’t ultimately be about the law, because none of us have the money to reconcile it that way. This is about (shudder) optics.

In our training (Level 1 Patent Examiner, 1990) we had an extensive conversation about the contract between the creator and the public when intellectual property rights were protected. In essence, it was this: We will grant you exclusive rights to benefit from the fruits of your intellectual labour and the means to protect those rights for a limited time through our publicly supported courts. In exchange, having provided the benefit of public protection, after these rights have expired, the material cedes to the public domain. Trademarks, because they don’t expire, need limits around their use, either by locale, product type, or other specifications. You don’t get to have it all, baby. You can’t patent an idea, and you can’t trademark a concept.

It was intended to be a two-way exchange: we protect you, you give back. This feels like the opposite: the public (albeit a small portion thereof) builds a movement, gains mainstream voice, and starts to change the legislation in one municipality after another to allow small scale farming, livestock in cities, and the right to replace their lawns with food gardens. And then one person swoops in and scoops the right to the words, making the rest of us start over to build another set of language in its place.

That is why we are angry. And that is why since I started this post (an hour ago) the Facebook page has another 100 followers. (Edit: Now it has 2400 followers. Wow. It would have taken us years to do this normally. The power of the incensed!)

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Rural Living | Tagged: PostADay2011, self-sufficiency, social commentary | 5 Comments »

On scripts, social performance, and knowing your place in the world

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Seonaid

“We are all born naked. The rest is drag.” Rupaul*

We have these dual drives within, for Society and Self. Acceptance and Agency. We hear the messages: Strive… but not too high, or you will become vain. Succeed… within these boundaries. Find your tribe, and then stick with them. They know the ropes.

But we all secretly know: I am not my tribe. I am not even the sum of my tribes. There are things I want that fall outside these narrowly prescribed rules.

Within, and below, and beneath the striving to belong is a longing to be. To use the gifts, the talents, the knowledge and ways of seeing that are unique to you. To express the deepest yearnings of the heart, for beauty, for adventure, for authenticity.

How do you respond when the deepest yearnings of your heart don’t match the script that has been carefully developed for you over millennia of social conditioning? What if you were born in a body that doesn’t match your heart, if you don’t meet the expectations of masculinity, or femininity, or the standing or tradition you arrived in? How do you reconcile this longing to be with this desire to belong?

This is one of the hardest things I have to confront when raising children. My belonging, my be-longing, and those of each other member of my family sometimes come into conflict. How much am I willing to compromise to fit in? How much more am I willing to compromise to help my children fit in? How do I help my children negotiate the same problems?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece for the Natural Parents Network on how to respond when other parents say, in essence, “You’d better teach them how the real world works before somebody else does.” This translates, in my experience, to, “Why aren’t you making that kid act like all the other kids???” and particularly, like all the other boys. In that piece, I said, “

If we are going to undermine the assumption that power-over is the only way to live, and that self-repression for the comfort of others is the correct choice, we need to make different choices. If we really believe in our children and their right to autonomy, we need to support them and provide them with the resilience to stand up in the face of domination. [Edit: even our own] Which means that we need to help them think in extremely sophisticated manners, far before the age that they would normally be expected to.

Making my kids act like all the other kids is fairly far down my list of priorities, (even though I did promise my sister that I would camouflage them.)

Because I like to reason from the general to the specific and back again, let me give you an example. For several years, my eldest son had long hair – not Justin Bieber-like, shaggy, 1970′s Brady bunch hair. Long. Ponytail down his back, would be the envy of the girls in high school and beyond. And he regularly got flack over it at school, but he held onto it, insistently. “That’s their problem. I like it this way.” And he did that for years, but one day, it all became too much. He got tired of resisting the pressure, tired of being called a girl (another problem entirely), tired of having people link his hair length with his lack of athletic ability… and he came home and asked to have it cut short. He chose to conform, but he did so quite intentionally. He’s willing to concede on the hair issue, but he still insists on dressing his own way. His own way is relatively conservative, and tends to involve striped polo shirts and jeans. He has been quite explicit that he dresses this way because he doesn’t want anybody to think he might be cool. He isn’t interested in doing the ‘dumb’ things that make you cool. His words, not mine. He has figured out (some of) The Unwritten Rules.

***

There are things we know intuitively about fitting in. Dress a certain way, talk a certain way. Even our gestures are regulated by our gender, class, and social status. All is in aid of making it simpler for others to categorize us so that they know how to treat us. We don’t want to interact with human beings; it’s too much work. We want to interact with roles. I say this, you say that… we all follow our scripts, and the interaction goes smoothly. This is the tacit agreement of our culture. You must act appropriately so that people know how or whether to bother with you or not.

Which is where transgression comes into all of this. Answer the question, “How are you?” honestly and the script breaks down. It becomes an actor’s nightmare: Nobody knows their next line. The social lubrication of chit-chat is eroded as the set falls away. So we lie. Because we know that we aren’t really having a human interaction. We are playing our part in an elegantly designed scene.

I used to experience this daily as I went to my professional job in the city from a one-bedroom house that had bare studs and my (thrift store) suits hung on a dowel against an unfinished wall. My job costume didn’t match my ‘real’ life.

“How are you?”

I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown because my commute plus childcare costs over 80% of my monthly income but Social Services thinks I should be able to get to and from Toronto for $100 a month so they won’t give me any subsidy, and I don’t know how I’m going to make my next mortgage payment, let alone buy groceries this week.

“Fine, thanks.”

“Spare change?”

Don’t make eye contact, because the last time you did you burst into tears and the panhandler was even more uncomfortable than you were.

Head shake, averted eyes.

“How was your birthday?”

Please don’t look at me. My suit only cost $7, and I’m a complete fraud, and the computer in the laptop case belongs to somebody else, and I’m $50,000 in debt even though I stopped eating meat 4 years ago and haven’t had a glass of wine since my last anniversary.

“Fine, thanks. How was your weekend?”

This was the role I was trained for. Educated professional women do not have financial crises, and when they do, they keep it secret. They certainly don’t break down in public. They wear nice conservative suits in nice conservative colours, and show up for work every day no matter how bad things are at home. They play their script out as assigned.

***

What if I told you that I don’t know my lines any more? Here I am, “being” a soccer (taekwondo) mom, but I lack the motivation. I can dress the part, but I can’t even pretend to hold up my end of the social contract. I understand the drama, I’ve even read the script, but I see so many bigger problems that I just can’t take my role seriously. “How are you?” “Fine thanks.” Avert your eyes. End the conversation.

Frequently I wonder, what if I did this differently? “How are you?” “Oh. I’m concerned about global warming and the situation in the middle east. I’m a little worried about the fact that we only have three days worth of food on the island. I’m absolutely convinced that our use of technology has outstripped our wisdom as a species. And I think that the social contracts we have made with the corporate elite are breaking down in such a way that the long term sustainability of our entire economic system is in question. But I have a roof overhead and food on my plate, so I’m going along with things for now because I don’t really see another way out.” Actually, I suspect a lot of the other “soccer moms” think that, but it is considered rude to speak it aloud. Especially at a birthday party at McDonald’s.

So I fall back on, “Pretty good. Car broke down three times in the last month, though.” Murmurs of sympathy all ’round. Discussion ensues about mileage and the shocking (shocking, I tell you) price of gas. And thus is the status quo maintained, even by me. Yet I find myself more comfortable in transgressive spaces. I would rather have human interactions, and make things up as I go than keep playing these parts. I am less and less able to maintain superficial conventions, even if I am still appropriately attired. In an observation of extreme irony, I find that I primarily do it for the perceived benefit to my children in an immediate social situation. Even though by doing so I’m tacitly perpetuating the very systems of oppression that I wish to see broken down for their benefit.

In the end, I find I have no solutions. Not tonight. Not when the snow is coming down, and dinner hasn’t been made, and I still have banking to do, and the kids need some time with Mummy. But one of the things my partner and I have found very beneficial in making a more honest relationship is calling a weasel a weasel. And here I spy a weasel.

___

*Interestingly enough, I got this quote from the same English professor with whom I had the conversation about obviousness in intellectual exercises.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: discipline, philosophy, PostADay2011, social commentary, truth | 7 Comments »