After the Fall
Two vaguely related links.
First, a fascinating post in Harper's reproducing testimony delivered on March 12 before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce by Jonathan Rowe, codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group, in California. It deals with the GDP, and raises a ton of interesting and important issues for how we measure our collective well-being. I am left with the impression that, given the nature of our economic system, we need to find a way to assign value to things like the environment, or community health, so that market forces can act upon them. As it stands, we are measuring all the wrong things—that is, if the end goal is "happiness" and not simply blind, uncaring, indiscriminate "growth."
Next up, a post from BoingBoing that touches on how to plan for the apocalypse (in the sense of major disruptions or the outright collapse of our complex civilization). Rather than building an isolated ranch, forming a militia and shooting to kill, they write:
"What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.
"Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip."
We need more of this kind of thinking.
Posted: July 14, 2008 11:09 pm | 0 comments
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