Read this article, and please let me know what you think. If there's enough interest, we can talk about this on Friday. It's hard to accept what he's saying, but he's right. It's not enough to just ride your bike or encourage others to be more sustainable and ride their bikes. Further action to challenge the system head on is required. Let that fuel your project's momentum forward and seek ways to charge your project with this spirit of engaging and battling the system, not just advocating for carbon emissions reductions per mile.
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| "More than 1,000 London Cyclists Stage Die-In to Call for Greater Road Safety" (Inhabitat) |
Thanks for posting this awesome article, Melissa. In a city like Santa Cruz, I feel his analysis of solution by personal consumption is especially relevant. So often, I hear people refer to Santa Cruz as an "enlightened" city because so many have personal accountability for their individual impact. The city is swimming with "die-hard simple-living activists" searching for a sustainable lifestyle in the bottom of a clothes bin at the Bargain Barn or between the eggshells and orange peels in their personal compost bins. I am no exception. I don't mean to discredit this mentality, but Jensen gives us a crude reality check. Personal accountability assumes personal fault. While it is important to be mindful of individual impact, Jensen's figures make it very clear that it is not the individual who is at fault. He makes it painstakingly obvious that our efforts have been "systematically misdirected."
ReplyDeleteThis article got a strong reaction out of me. Many of the figures were shocking and forced to take a critical look at my own efforts to live with conviction. In some respects, it is discouraging to hear that my efforts are futile. In other respects, I feel relieved of my individual guilt. Most of all, I am inspired to challenge the double-bind, redefine myself and my methods of resistance aside from capitalism, and imagine myself and humanity engaged in a positive relationship with the planet.
I think it would be useful for us to examine what inhibits us from actively opposing injustice, be it fear, uncertainty, obligation, or apathy. This would be necessary first step in the transformation of theory and discussion into action.
I just started watching a lecture by Derrick Jensen on his book "Endgame". I haven't finished it yet (it's an hour and a half long) but it pretty much goes over the reasons why civilizations are destined to drive themselves into destitution. His tone is really dry, sarcastic, and it's really entertaining to watch despite how amazingly depressing it is. His call to action was pretty much for civilized humanity to voluntarily stop taking resources which, in my understanding, equates to killing off mass amounts of people (not murdering them, but denying them the resources to live). That way, the remaining humans could revert back to a stone-age way of life with the resources that are left. Jensen pretty much argues that the collapse of humanity (and probably the world along with it) will be messier and messier the longer we wait to stop taking resources. Obviously, it would take a huge shift in consciousness and a lot of cooperation for humanity to just stop taking resources. In this way, Jensen's view of humanity and the world is quite futile. I agree with Maryam that riding a bike or growing your own food or composting relieves individual guilt, but gosh, how far can that take us? I really urge everyone to watch Derrick's lecture.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtuxHVD4Srw
You make a great point. Changing the infrastructure so that it enables low-carbon transportation is crucially important. That picture reminds me of the protests in the Netherlands from the early 1960s, before they had proper bike paths - Yes, there was such a time, and yes, they had to fight hard to get those paths. Before that thousands of children were killed in traffic accidents because the number of cars mushroomed in the 50s and there were no separate bike paths then.
ReplyDeleteMy take on what makes bicycling work in the Netherlands here: http://www.cellomomcars.com/2012/08/how-dutch-got-their-bicycle-paths.html