Earth Day 2012, Part 2: Living Here, Living Now

 

 As an antidote to yesterday's depressing assessment of the State of the World, I thought I'd offer a second look. I seldom stay down for long, and it didn't take much to set me on a more optimistic track this morning.

After slogging though the Sunday edition of the Daily Poop, I picked up the February/March edition of Mother Earth News (in preparation for a day in the garden), and read this from the "News from Mother" column:

These days, if you find yourself feeling negative about the future of humanity, you may find some solace in looking at the past.

Well, looking at the past is something I do for a living, so the invitation is a natural for me.  In fact, my Art History 2 lectures just last week focused on conditions in nineteenth-century England at a time when folks like William Morris, John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites,  and other admirers of the Medieval world were all themselves looking to the past for better models of how to live.

As the Mom article pointed out, however, there are many aspects of human life that have actually improved since both the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century: life expectancies are way up, violence is (amazing, but true) way down, and we're generally kinder than at any previous moment in recorded history.  We don't hold slaves, we don't sanction cock fights, and we generally don't kill people we don't agree with (even though we might talk about doing so during election years).

The article ends with an acknowledgement that we've still got a way to go, but instead of throwing up our hands in despair (which is what I probably seemed to be doing yesterday) it notes that we actually have examples of how we've improved things in the past:

. . . looking at what we've achieved, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think we can solve present and future challenges. We can live on this planet in a sustainable way. We can preserve its health and vitality for future generations. And we can make the lives of future human beings even better than the lives we lead today--we have a track record for that kind of achievement.

So, instead of whining about what we haven't accomplished since 1970, perhaps it's time to note that some significant changes have occurred, and to relish them rather than keep complaining about what we still need to do. At least for today.

For example, when I first became a vegetarian back in the late seventies, I did so because I didn't like the way animals raised for food were treated.  I figured that if I couldn't take the responsibility for killing an animal myself, I didn't have the right to eat it.  Eventually, I relented when my kids started insisting that they were being deprived, but we still ate meat sparingly, and I did the best job I could in finding humanely treated animals.  Nowadays, we still eat meat infrequently, but when we do there are numerous outlets from which we can buy "happy" cows, pigs, and chickens.  I can buy eggs that are expensive but come from chickens raised more like the ones we had when I was a kid.  I'm quite willing to pay a premium to do so, even if it means that most of my diet needs to come from grains and vegetables (all organically and/or sustainably raised, some home-grown).  In truth, however, we could largely solve our national obesity problem by doing just that: changing our diets substantially, and weaning ourselves from overly-processed foods.

When I drive to buy my food, I can now do so in a fuel-efficient car that sips gas and causes far less particulate matter to enter the atmosphere than any car I've ever driven.  The good thing about high gas prices is, after all, that manufacturers are producing more and more automobiles with higher and higher levels of fuel economy and lower emissions.  These days I'm watching the highway fill up with hybrid cars, even though in this part of the world pickups will probably rule in perpetuity.

Advances in medicine, although expensive, mean that I got an extra twenty five years with my father, and have myself lived eighteen years longer than I might have done (and another three years than I might have from the valve problem).  New drugs have kept me essentially healthy, and will probably prevent my daughter from ever having to endure bypass surgery at all, even though she shares my crappy genes. Cures for various cancers are being developed, and we've already seen declines in occurrences based on improved ways of life; as drugs and diets and living habits improve, fewer people will have to suffer from them, and those who do may well see even more cures developed in the next several years. 

As much as I might rail against technology, I'm always aware of what I owe to innovation. We have lived in an old house (celebrating its 90th birthday this year) for the past twelve summers, relying on its solidly-built bones and dual attic fans to help keep us cool.  We've gotten by with three small air conditioning units for three rooms, and have stayed relatively comfortable.  This year, thanks to tax rebates and technological availability, we're hoping to install a geothermal heating and cooling system, in part to replace the aging gas furnace installed when we bought the house.  The plan is to wean ourselves as much as possible from fossil fuel consumption.  Of course, even ten years ago, this option would have been a mere pipe dream--so our fuel consumption options are improving rather rapidly.

These changes are, in truth, rather insignificant in light of the challenges that lie ahead.  Big Oil is still in charge, Big Consumption is still the economic model, and much of the world still has no access at all to any of the improvements we enjoy.

War, pestilence, pollution, and greed are all still there, lurking.  But we may be getting better at ridding ourselves of their threats--or we could be, if we can figure out how to meet the challenges of educating our kids well enough so that they can ensure their own futures.  As much as I complain about how little my students know, I can't help but think that they'll work it all out, as long as we can help them develop the tools. 

Image notes: this shot was taken facing east one evening last month with the Nikon D80.  We've had an abundance of rain this spring and the skies have been lovely.  Yesterday's post features a view west, probably taken later that same day.

Skywatch Friday: Seeing Trees

During this week's lecture in History of Art & Design, I emphasized the use of chiaroscuro, the play of light and shadow, in Baroque painting--especially in the works of Caravaggio, Artemesia, and other Italian masters of the moment.

While reviewing my slides for the lecture, even though most of the discussion would focus on figures, I started thinking about John Ruskin, and, in particular, the chapter in Modern Painters, "Of Truth of Chiaroscuro," and his description of how to see the configuration of branches on trees:

Go out some bright sunny day in winter, and look for a tree with a broad trunk, having rather delicate boughs hanging down on the sunny side, near the trunk. Stand four or five yards from it, with your back to the sun. You will find that the boughs between you and the trunk of the tree are very indistinct, that you confound them in places with the trunk itself, and cannot possibly trace one of them from its insertion to its extremity. But the shadows which they cast upon the trunk, you will find clear, dar, and distinct, perfectly traceable through their whole course, except when they are interrupted by the crossing boughs. And if you retire backwards, you will come to a point where you cannot see the intervening boughs at all, or only a fragment of them here and there, but can still see their shadows perfectly plain. Now, this may serve to show you the immense prominence and importance of shadows where there is anything like bright light. They are, in fact, commonly far more conspicuous than the thing which casts them . . .(Volume I Part II Section II, Chapter III--the guy was very organized in his thinking).

This must have been in the back of my mind all winter, because for otherwise inexplicable reasons, I've been taking a large number of pictures of bare tree branches against the sky.

I may also have been inspired by a dim recollection of one of Ruskin's drawing exercises, included in his The Elements of Drawing, a Dover paperback copy of which I picked up at Half Price Books a few years ago and once planned to go through systematically to test out Ruskin's teaching expertise (I've been a cocky broad all my life; why stop now?). In Exercise VI from the first chapter ("On First Practice") he suggests the following:

Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves, and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find the looking at it hurt your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you wll be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade; and the sky blue, or grey, or dull white. A wholly grey or rainy day is the best for this practice (pp. 39-40).

He then suggests following the lines of the branches and their interstices "as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of" (p. 40). Now this appeals to two of my interests: maps and trees, so it may well be behind this weird winter avocation.

Nevertheless, the results appear here, as this week's Skywatch Friday offerings.

A pecan tree in the foreground, with a vapor trail interfering.

A sycamore tree next door, with its little seed balls hanging down like ornaments, against a gloomy sky.

Pecan trees after an ice storm. The little bit of orange in the top center is fungus:

And finally, a sunset shot toward the west, with an admixture of our trees and neighbors':

There are many more; but I'm inspired now to go do some mapping. Ruskin's well worth a read, even if you're not much for Victorian prose. He's affected us more than we usually realize, and I'm happy to have a chance to bring him up.

Have a great Skywatch Friday.

Surviving Plutopia

Now here's a series of coincidences for you. My husband (who is usually spot-on in these matters; after all, he led me to Firefly) casually mentioned during our Sunday morning newspaper-read that "you might find this interesting; Alan Cheuse liked it," referring to Jeanette Winterson's newest novel, Stone Gods. Part of the novel takes place in ancient, pre-environmental-disaster Easter Island, which also happened to have been featured in the Sunday Travel section of the paper. Anyway, after reading the review, I looked her up on the web and opened up yet another window in my serendipitous world.

I read her biography, and discovered that she's another arrogant, cranky middle-aged writer (we should start a club!), but one long-published, with an interesting rep, and recipient of an OBE (now I'm really impressed). I read an excerpt from the new book--which is now on my to-buy list--and then wandered over to her essays, where I hit on "Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings." This, of course, raises a bright flag, because this is the organization William Morris founded in 1877 to prevent the wholesale tearing down of historically important buildings, and/or their cheap and nasty "restoration" or "modernization." Lo and behold, Winterson had purchased an eighteenth-century derelict in Jack The Ripper territory and restored it, complete with a ground-floor shop that now houses a Continental deli run by chef Harvey Cabaniss (of whom I had already heard). Moving on to an essay called "Good Housekeeping" I came across this gem:

We are eating too much and we are paying too little for our food. . . . My philosophy is to eat modestly and buy the best you can afford. In our crazy world a chicken costs less than a cinema ticket. Our obsession with cheap food has destabilised farming throughout the world, polluted our soils, driven small producers and small shops into the ground, allowed the supermarkets to monopolise our lives, and made us fat.

Had I "met" Jeanette Winterson before I had finished More News From Nowhere, I'd have pinched her for a character.

In an essay about Philip Pullman, author of the series His Dark Materials, she describes Pullman's attitude toward modern education:

For Pullman, the obsession with invented standards, pointless testing, endless form-filling and a moribund National Curriculum are killing the joy of learning, and driving the best teachers out of the system. 'I used to teach the things that excited me', he says, 'and when the teacher is excited, so are the children. What do we want to do? Stuff them with facts or open their minds?'

Had I read The Golden Compass (or, as it's called in the UK, The Northern Lights) and met Pullman before MNFN, he'd be in there, too. As it is, I've only read the one book, and seen the disappointing film based on it, but I'm already a lifelong fan.

Both of these writers share my disdain for two important constituents of "plutopia" (my new name for the greed-based economy in which the West now wallows. It's not wholly dystopic--yet--but our attitudes toward both food and education are symptoms of increasing intellectual and ethical impoverishment, portending further ill for the future). Our lack of education--of desire (in terms of what and how we eat), and of the mind (in terms of how we teach our young)--have helped to build plutopia, and only by addressing these failures can we hope to replace it with anything that even vaguely resembles a world in which everyone can be accommodated in some measure of fairness, justice, and peace.

Only by adjusting our own perceptions of "need" vs. "want" can we begin to understand the true nature of poverty. And I am getting sick to death of pundits who describe anyone who lacks electricity as "living in abject poverty." (For my perspective on the larger questions, see "Rethinking What it Means to be Wealthy" and "Rethinking What It Means to be Poor.") The line usually runs something like "They're so poor they don't even have electricity"--as if this particular technology is necessary to the very notion of civilization. But it's not. It's perfectly possible for people to work the land, provide sufficient food and clothing for themselves, and dwell in thriving communities without ever having seen a light bulb!

Although knowledge of electrical principles has been around since antiquity, and had come under serious study by the eighteenth century (remember Mr. Franklin's kite and key experiments), it wasn't until the nineteenth century that it became practical to bring electricity into commercial and domestic use. It may be "necessary" to modern life--hence the science fiction scenario of an electromagnetic pulse as the threshold of disaster--but it is certainly not necessary to life itself, nor even to "civilized" life. Plenty of civilization happened before the nineteenth century. Of course, that's also when things started falling apart, what with the industrial revolution, Blake's "dark Satanic mills," Ruskin's hated locomotive, and the end of pastoral life as we knew it.

But few people even know these things these days, because we're so intent on stuffing our children's heads full of factoids we can measure on standardized "assessment tools" that only test what they can memorize--not their ability to think, interpret, translate, imagine, create, or use what they've learned. "Irrelevant" information isn't taught because it doesn't fall into the current catchment basin of what education "experts" think kids need to know. Knowledge doesn't actually happen until the child has managed to integrate information into some kind of cultural context--so most of the information they commit to memory only long enough to spit it back on the exam is useless anyway. And of course the reason they need to know anything at all is in order to be successful in the marketplace.

We in the US complain bitterly and loudly about the price of gasoline and food, both of which cost more in the rest of the West than they do here. But if we truly understood what's involved--if we were better educated about economic realities instead of having been spoon-fed the pabulum we get predigested into sound bites from media sources--we'd be complaining that they cost too little. The true cost, in lives and life ways, is profoundly higher than most of us realize--or want to realize. But plutopia has taught us to think only in terms of monetary cost, and even the word economy doesn't mean what it once did, since it's now synonymous with "market economy" and any other use of the term is suspect.

I'd really like to spend Earth Day in my "nowhere"--without electricity or formal education. But since I can't, I'll keep prowling through Winterson's lively website, and dig into the second segment of Pullman's series (The Subtle Knife). I'll spend a couple of hours this morning in my little carbon sink, amidst the wild grasses and the primroses, and hope that the birdsong drowns out the traffic from the highway. There I can celebrate a smaller footprint, and be grateful for what I don't have.

Addendum (7 May 2008): This month's Orion Magazine contains an excellent and highly relevant article, "The Gospel of Consumption, and the Better Future We Left Behind." I'm encouraged both by the content of the article, and by the discussion that follows.

Photo: A lovely carbon sink at a bend in the Owens River, near Lone Pine, California.

The Gothic Critique of Modernity

I’m lecturing on Ruskin, Turner, and the Preraphaelites, along with Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement this week, and it seems time for a defense of what I have come to call the “Gothic critique of modernity.” This was actually dreamed up as a subtitle for my never-to-be dissertation, “Medievalism, Art, and Technology”—although I’d have also added “William Morris and” to it once I began to focus on his work and how it influenced later writers like Henry Adams and Lewis Mumford.

Instead of writing a book, however, I now devote a segment of my History of Art and Design II class to a discussion of the implications of medievalism for the development of modern art in Europe, and later in America. I begin with a reprise of the problem of Turner (whom I’ve already discussed in the previous class as a bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism), using his paintings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament to introduce the Gothic Revival, and Ruskin’s defense of Turner to connect the similar defense of the Preraphaelites. Into the mix go Carlyle and Pugin, and everyone always wonders why these guys were so fascinated by an era that produced the Black Death and immutable social hierarchies (they seem to forget about illuminated manuscripts and Gothic cathedrals momentarily; that was last quarter, after all). They’ve also apparently never heard of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” either, being much to young to have seen Chariots of Fire and thus not remembering the lovely rendition of “Jerusalem” used in the film.

This attitude seems to support my “veils of technology” theory (significant portions of which I probably stole from Gerald Holton, physicist, historian of science, and flat-out prophet). Almost every week in every class I encounter evidence that imagination today is wholly mediated by technological devices that increase the distance between human beings and the natural world. The thicker the veils, the greater the distance; they not only limit vision, but seem to extend from top to toe, insulating people from any immediate contact with anything that isn’t (in Wilhelm Dilthey’s words) “mind affected.” Just yesterday I watched a colleague slather on “hand sanitizer,” instead of running of to the Ladies to use water (made available through plumbing) and soap (machine-delivered). Much of this is further reinforced by the necessity of efficiency (it would be much less efficient to have bars of soap available next to faucets) and “the bottom line” (the porters would have to be paid more if it took longer to tidy up the loos). Having a bottle of hand-sanitizer handy probably also means that workers visit the facilities less often, and only for more urgent matters. Time on task, etc.

When I was younger, discussions of “labor-saving” devices were the staples of suburban cocktail party chatter. Or at least frequent feature articles in “Home” sections of newspapers made it sound as if this were the hot topic of the moment. Does a vacuum cleaner really make a housewife’s life easier? Does a steam iron lessen the onus of ironing day? Does an automatic washing machine and dryer leave time for a romance novel? These same feature sections now happily picture the latest versions of the same equipment, which prompt new questions: Does Martha Stewart really do her own house-cleaning, ironing, and washing using her state-of-the-art European vacuum cleaner (or is it Whole House vac?) in the beautifully-designed laundry facilities in each of her houses?

Picture this: A group of women gather up the week’s laundry (which doesn’t actually seem like a week’s because people actually wear clothes for more than one day, unless they fall while feeding the pigs) and collectively carry it to a communal trough, or down to the local river. They use washboards, brushes, and soap (made from fireplace ash and leftover animal fat) to scrub out stains and dirt, rinse it in the troughs (carrying dirty water over to garden plots) or in the river, and either hang the wash or lay it in the grass to dry. Their daughters and very young sons are with them, doing some of the work, listening to gossip, learning about laundry, being told stories, fishing in the river, being around adults. They’re out in the world, smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing, and none of this experience is masked by complex chemical concoctions, artificial perfumes, iPods, or camera phones.

I don’t mean to make this sound idyllic, but to me it almost does. I have lived in places where this scenario (or one close to it) was played out on a weekly basis (in rural Japan, in the post-war fifties, and in suburban Taipei in the sixties). Stateside, one grandmother owned the only washing machine in the neighborhood (an old Westinghouse wringer-job that was almost more trouble than it was worth), and three families did their washing on her back porch. My other grandmother owned a Laundromat in coastal Oregon, where the neighborhood did its wash, since nobody had room for a washing machine. In both of these cases, laundry was still a communal affair. Women would gather in the kitchen to talk, have coffee, sometimes bottle up the summer’s blackberries, and either hang the wash together, or take it home to hang. The café next to the Laundromat was the next best thing to a pub, and women would gather for coffee while the sheets and knickers spun in the machines, then carry home the wet wash to hang in the yard.

Nowadays, of course, we have our own private laundries in our homes, and we do it by ourselves. Women are no longer the sole practitioners of the science; in my house, my husband does a significant portion of the work—which is particularly welcome since he plays and coaches tennis in addition to teaching, and thus generates far more laundry than I do. I’m not sure how many men participate in this activity, but I suspect that they still lag behind women, so that it still falls within the traditional realm of women’s work.

For a long time I had no dryer, and one grandmother never did. To this day I still enjoy hanging out the wash whenever possible. The other grandmother's Laundromat eventually put in drying machines, and the clientèle gradually became more coeducational. Later, that grandmother sold the store and moved into a trailer park in Southern California, were they still did their laundry communally. But the rituals have since become more and more isolating and self-contained, and the wealthier one is, the further removed from the old scenario one becomes. I’m pretty sure that Martha’s maids and laundresses appreciate her fine facilities, and perhaps they get together for coffee during the breaks. But the community of women who once gathered by the stream has disappeared in the technologized West. And I’m not sure what we’ve gained except time—to spend on other technologically-imposed tasks.

Neither Carlyle nor Pugin, from what I can gather, gave a rat’s ass about how women did their laundry. Ruskin and Morris were actually concerned with all manner of work (although mostly men’s), and Morris even did some that was considered “women’s”—such as embroidery. And they all had servants to do the nasty bits. But all of these men saw in the Middle Ages some potential for a life richer than what was developing as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps only those who have lived on the shores of Love Canal, or along the Cuyahoga, or next to big nuclear facilities or industrial parks can really understand how the plague-ridden centuries before the Renaissance began to look good even to those who lived relatively well in the decades before the fin de siècle. It takes more effort than I care to admit to lift the veils, even for someone who didn’t live with a television set until 1962. And we’re now so blind to the consequences of unfettered technological acquisition that we can’t imagine life without it unless somebody writes an alternative into a science fiction novel.

My first thought experiment concerning technology started out with a question: What could we do without? In future posts, I’ll ruminate on the answers I came up with. But for now, I think it’s useful to consider the Gothic critique of modernity as just such a thought experiment. What if, mused Carlyle and Pugin and Ruskin and Morris, we had the will to resist the onslaught of technological innovation (steam engines, railroads, electricity), or at least to consider the consequences? What if we modeled possible results (they didn’t have computers, but they did have pubs, and that’s were the real philosophy had been done since the Enlightenment) and came up with alternatives? What if we examined the historical problems (disease, inequality, oppression) and used what we’ve learned to frame a different future that would incorporate what worked well (community, low environmental impact, artistic achievement)?

If we were to attempt what these men did, it would require a much greater effort, precisely because we are now so dependent on our technologies that the very idea of “losing” them throws us into paroxysms of post-apocalyptic angst. If all this went away, the new scenario goes, we would revert to mud-soaked, aristocracy-dominated, dreary, sunless, plague-ridden misery, just like those poor sods who succumbed to the Black Death and lived solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives. Never mind that these same folk gave us illuminated manuscripts, Gothic cathedrals, Gregorian chant, guilds, and the longest period of religious cooperation in history during what Richard Rubenstein calls the Aristotelian Revolution (in his recent book, Aristotle’s Children). I don't think it takes too much foresight to suggest that we might now be standing on a precipice similar to that on which Morris and his ilk teetered, or upon which late Medieval scholars found themselves poised. However, if we choose to look forward without remembering what our intellectual ancestors faced, perhaps the doom-sayers will have got it right after all. The old saw about forgetting the past and repeating its mistakes always seems to prove itself true, and without becoming more mindful about our technological choices we only seem to be laying a path toward yet another collapse.

If it's any comfort, Morris seemed to remain optimistic about the future, and in his post-apocalyptic vision England had become, once again, a green and pleasant land.