What does green mean?

A recent conversation accidentally ventured into the idea of profound and utter sophistication on which much of contemporary imagery is based vs. how thin the pictures and whathaveyou actually are. Digital images generally are especially vulnerable to this, but you could, and I will, say the same for a host of supposedly higher end work that includes output by Koons, Hirst, Tracey Emin and many others. ‘Output’ seems the most charitable way to characterize their work.

In the case of the latter grouping it’s not just that their work is commercial, but that this aspect is also woven into the work itself as a part of its overall sophistication. In Actuality™, there’s really very little there – it’s trickery straight out of the tube: the blues are just blue and the fake-out itself is faked, all toward building a greater supposed sophistication that is more of an idea than the idea that would ostensibly have been alchemized onto the canvas or wood, emerging as an enigmatic indicator lacking fingerprints or guile.

The image above, from a Scientific American article on art as visual research, is an easy target in this regard, and therefore not a target at all. Though artful, I don’t consider that stuff art. Just as others might, I don’t feel the need to – and that’s not because I reserve that term as a higher-order descriptor. Digital multi-media installations and giant cast-aluminum balloon poodles let themselves off of that hook. They’re mostly commentary, and I let them roam as such. Like my own actual dog who also knows where his next meal is coming from, they won’t go far.

I bring all this up here because the lack of sophistication in our art that leaves us cold bears a striking resemblance to the scrum that is green advertising. Everything and the kitchen sink is being crammed into showing how green your printer or my cleaning product is… but the sophistication and complexity that would even attempt to explain the sustainability of either is just not there. Like it or not, sustainability is a complex issue. Can one problems be solved without directly creating another? That’s what’s called a serious conundrum, one awaiting our attention deficits on many fronts, and no amount sharks in formaldehyde or filling a city street in three feet of green jell-O is going to illuminate, much less alter, potential routes out of these situations.

It is a change in thinking – one that includes a fight against falling back into a mere nostalgia for meaning. That itself is a trap, a false-floor cop-out nullified as a enabler of the some the artfulness described above. Apathy about society’s arc masks its general lack of sophistication on major issues. It’s fashionable, sure, but at some point seeming as though you’re throwing your hands up (or seeming as though you’re doing something about the problem) is going to largely affirm the succumb the pose was meant to signify in the first place.

According to wikipedia,

is a philosophical concept of the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, therefore moral agency is a distinct concept.

As we watch the slow-motion burn of the centralized economy, a few things to keep in mind.

The tide of resource scarcity is drifting us away from the island of business-as-usual for good (in both senses). Although there is a lingering, intentional misunderstanding of sustainability as just another way to make money off of money. Oh well, old habits die hard. I think the Nordic Sustainability Index might be a step in the right direction, if we are going to extrapolate greenery as another way of rating companies.

But the dissonance is rattling. At some point we’ll have to begin to reconcile what it means to be globally sustainable; that is, there’s no such thing. You can be one or the other, but not both. Not yet and not without major force projection ability. Whenever AIG(!) and UBS exhaust their advertising budgets for network television, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, maybe the networks can devote the free holiday airtime to bringing out some philosophers to tell us how to have it all by having nothing, which may unite such formerly disparate groups such as former Citigroup employees and workers from the construction trades.

But there might be a way to put them both back to work. Now that would be green.

The Ninth Elegy, (Die Neunte Elegie), from the Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away as laurel, a little darker than all surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border of every leaf (like the smile of the wind): -oh, why have to be human, and, shunning Destiny, long for Destiny?…

Not because happiness really exists, that premature profit if imminent loss. Not out of curiosity, not just to practice the heart, that could still be in the laurel….. But because being here amounts to so much, because all this Here and Now, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once, though only once, having been once on earth – can it ever be canceled?

And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it, trying to contain it within our simple hands, in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart. Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We’d rather hold onto it all forever…. Alas, but the other relation, – what can be taken across? Not the art of seeing, learnt here so slowly, and nothing that’s happening here. Nothing at all. Sufferings then. Above all, the hardness of life, the long experience of love; in fact, purely untellable things. But later, under the stars, what then? th emore deeply untellable stars? For the wanderer doesn’t bring from the mountain slope a handful of earth to the valley, untellable earth, but only some word he has won, a pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps, just here for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Olive tree, Window, – possibly: Pillar, Tower?….. but for saying, remember, oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose of this sly earth, in urging a pair of lovers, just to make everything leap with ecstacy in them? Threshold: how much can it mean to two lovers, that they should be wearing their own worm threshold a little, they too, after the many before, before the many to come,…. as a matter of course!

Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home. Speak and proclaim. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and their place being oustingly taken up by an imageless act. Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline. Between the hammers lives on our heart, as between the teeth the tongue, which, nevertheless, remains the bestower of praise.

Praise the world to the Angel, not the untellable: you can’t impress him with the splendor you’ve felt; in the cosmos where he more feelingly feels you’re only a tyro. So show him some simple thing, remoulded by age after age, till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves. Tell him things. He’ll stand more astonished; as you did beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt. Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours; how even the moaning of grief purely determines on form, serves as a thing, – to escape to a bliss beyond the fiddle. These things that live on departure understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all. Want us to change them entirely, within our visible hearts into – oh, endlessly – into ourselves! Whoever we are.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible re-arising in us? Is it nt your dream to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible! What is your urgent command, if not transformation? Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need your Springs no longer to win me: a single one, just one, is already more then my blood can endure. I’ve now been unspeakably yours for ages and ages. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration’s Death, that freindly Death. Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future are growing less…. Supernumerous existence wells up in my heart.

Translated by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender

UNESCO has unveiled this excellent atlas of hidden water around the world, in the service of providing a “legal framework for nations to manage water resources.

The increasing reliance on aquifer groundwater – because there is more of it and it tends to be less contaminated by industrial run-off – has been called the “groundwater revolution”.

But it is a revolution with worrying environmental consequences. In many parts of the world, around the Mediterranean for example, but also in the US and the Middle East, water tables are falling and aquifers are being infiltrated by seawater as agricultural practices pump water out faster than it can be replenished by rain.

This blue aspect of green weaves the scientific and political challenges into the sustainability conundrum, which is largely why it is a conundrum in the first place. After all, if we did not have limits and constraints to work within, there would be little reason to be worried about conservation or preservation. The prospect of significant resource limitations has usually meant one thing – war. UNESCO is attempting to head this off and good for them, especially because I’m not so sure that the prospect of significant resource limitations doesn’t still mean one thing. I mean we’re camped out in Mesopotamia for some reason, right?

But it’s utility of limits that I’d like to focus on; without them, we do things, like suburban sprawl, that are of course not sustainable resource-wise but they are bad for many other reasons. They are wasteful on a host of levels, from time and space dimensions to the spiritual realm in that we actually feel bad (depression, anyone?) from living in them. Go ahead and dispute this but there’s even a point of diminishing returns in which the suburban model of wanton nihilism is useful in the creation of counter-correctives like punk rock. I mean, really.

I’m just kidding and mean those dudes no ill will – they were just easy to find and their record label has a funny name. But limitations can be good and they are definitely green; working within them is an encapsulation of living against the rabid idea of freedom and exploitation toward every thing, person and place we see. Space and time constraints were indicative of every civilization that has come before us, and we should begin to realize some shared affinities with the best of the these, before we are overcome by our similarities to the most famous.

And while we’re at it, we should start looking for some of those hidden RR tracks that are buried all around us.

This rundown of the end of Wall Street as we know it, by the guy who wrote Liar’s Poker, is gross. He and many of the people involved were/are absolutely revolted by what was going on, and in many cases, what they themselves were actually doing.

Danny Moses, who became Eisman’s head trader, was another who shared his perspective. Raised in Georgia, Moses, the son of a finance professor, was a bit less fatalistic than Daniel or Eisman, but he nevertheless shared a general sense that bad things can and do happen. When a Wall Street firm helped him get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, he said to the salesman, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to screw me?”

Heh heh heh, c’mon. We’d never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don’t just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I’ll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade.

The thing is, and he elaborates on this, you couldn’t even make this cautionary tale required reading in business schools because all of the droolers there would take from it the exact opposite message. To them, green means one and only one thing.

And here we are.

New Flagpole column is up.

In which I attempt to savor the moment that was last week and use it to pivot toward talking about what better living means.

It’s become somehow intuitive that employment or inflationary statistics showing gains for workers are bad for business, bad for the economy in general. This is, of course, a reflection of the allegiance to shareholders and only to shareholders as the most important actors in the economy. It is also patently absurd. But this is how most business news is presented – from the perspective of business.

Similarly, we have negative externalities like pollution that have for so long gone unpriced – as though protecting some inherent right to pollute (freedom!) is the baseline from which all discussions about pollution must spring. As long as this right is free and unregulated, the logic follows, it will continue unabated and in the near term appear to be an intractable problem to be managed delicately with the appropriate tone and language – much like workers making too much at the expense of shareholders.

So now that Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is making noises about replacing John Dingell (D-Mich.) as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position from which Waxman could and likely would push for more aggressive greenhouse emission limits, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is, of course, signaling how “scary” that would be.

Yes, there would be implications for U.S. automakers and other manufacturers if we adopted a more responsible, perhaps incentive-based approach to how much and what kinds of pollution we spew into the air and with which we salt the earth – but shouldn’t there be? Who are we trying to mollify here?

The same questions apply to ‘saving’ the auto industry with suggested bailouts. From what are they being saved? From making horrible investment and design decisions about the products they offer? There is only one thing which can save them from that. It’s the same dose of reality that saves a worker from thinking that she will continue to have a job in an industry sector which has ceased to exist or moved to more ‘labor-friendly’ environs.  Confucius say:

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Image: Confucius presenting the young Gautama Buddha to Laozi

So, I always think there are way less of these than there probably actually are. Not only parks per se, like the champs du Mars above, but public, community gardens that are a combination of available land and whatever the local residents want them to be – fruit trees, vegetable patches, sports fields – whatever. There was an article in Harper’s from a while back (referenced here) about the community gardens that were springing up all over that blighted city, we’re talking row crops and feeding people in an urban environment. It didn’t seem so much to be the kind of idyllic Utopia you might imagine; just places where people could become re-attached to the land.

Some of the gaps in (my) perception come, of course, from living in the south, where ‘public’ anything is a kind of semantic variable meaning lesser and/or vulnerable – as in scary, as in, other people might be there.

But living other places, like the above, where space is at more of a premium, I’ve also seen the magnified role public space plays in people’s lives – and the enhanced meaning that derives therein precisely from sharing with so many others.

He probably doesn’t want word to get out but, in the first link, 50 Cent is behind the funding of the garden in Jamaica, Queens. Bette Midler’s got skin this game, too.

One thing maybe not so green – I only saw this article because I got a copy of the paper paper. Hmm.

Start here, and make sure you make it all the way.

Andrew Bacevich on the end of one particular form of arrogance.

From Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco:

As it was two thousand years ago, so today also life is again in a process of decomposition. But the problems that are destroying the equilibrium between the heart and mind today are crueler and more complicated, their solution more difficult and bloody. A simple message of utmost sweetness was discovered in those times, and salvation shone splendidly on earth, like springtime. No simpler, sweeter message exists. (1964a: 294)

and

We ourselves must bear the blame if we are villains, cowards, or liars, for although we have an all powerful force inside, we dare not use it for fear it might destroy us… How terrible not to know that we possess this force! If we did know, we would admire our souls. In all heaven and earth, nothing so closely resembles God as the soul of mankind. (1964a: 427-428)

This is funny, not least because it shows how sensible the guy is:

When he was preparing for them (debates) during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

via.

This also brings up a great point about the costs associated with going more sustainable: mainly, that they are huge and we’ve got to get creative. I won’t even get into the weeds about the car-buying precipice upon which Mrs. Green and I have recently perched. Suffice it to say that while the options for hybrid, diesel, mpg and room (sedans only) are truly pathetic, fortunately they are also all ridiculously expensive.

So think about doing something to your house, like installing solar panels, or even roofing it with nano-solar material. You might as well double-plate your house in copper. But as others point out, there’s always room outside of the box.

it’s worth checking out what the city of Berkeley’s doing: As the mayor’s former chief of staff, Cisco DeVries, explains over at Grist, the Berkeley FIRST initiative, which gets underway next week, will let property owners install solar systems without paying the hefty upfront cost—instead, the city will issue a municipal bond to cover the installation, which is then paid back over 20 years via a new line item on the property owner’s tax bill. (If the property is sold, the tax is just transferred to the new buyer). The beauty of the thing is it’s entirely voluntary—no taxes, no mandates; it’s just that, if you do want solar power, it’s easier to finance. If Berkeley’s scheme ends up being popular, I’ll be curious to see if the private sector starts cobbling together similar offers.

I’m always thinking local, local, local in terms of our food and where it comes from. But switching our energy sources – directly using the sun for power in your house – will also be about scale, as the materials become commonplace, and public/private innovation on making the transition sufficiently affordable that it’s use can become widespread. A massive scale is necessary for all sustainability measures in concert – conservation, innovation, imagination. It’s only a paradox when we try to fit it into the way we have been doing everything.