DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

One of the things I remember most clearly about my first visit to Nashville, thirty-five years ago, was seeing an outhouse in the back yard of a home about a mile south of downtown. I don’t know if it was still used—in fact, I doubt that it was; but that’s a keynote for the Nashville that used to be. I remember when Old Hickory Boulevard’s southern loop was a rolling two-lane road through fields and woods, and friends of mine lived in the funky, low-rent neighborhood that used to stand where Vanderbilt’s athletic fields now lie. My wife went horseback riding on the old railroad bed that is now I-440. It was a great place for a kid to have adventures.

All that’s gone now, and it ain’t coming back. What is left of an older, slower, less crowded Nashville must be consciously and conscienciously preserved from the economic fundamentalists who understand no value that is not short-term financial. The latest example of this is a proposal to build a 19-story hotel/condominium in the middle of Nashville’s historic lower Broadway district, with a thin veneer of historic facade left on Broadway to preserve the appearance of preservation. The proponents of this building say it has to be that big in order to pay back the money they are laying out for the land.

Now, I am not a devotee of the religion of economics, as most of our politicians are, but, like the devil, I know how to quote scriptures when it serves my purposes. So, let’s look at some economic facts about this proposal and its context that, I think, have not been seriously enough considered in the debate.

First, let’s look at the developer’s claim that he needs to build a nineteen-story building on this site to repay his investment. It turns out that Westin paid “several times the going rate” for the property, according to the Nashville Tennessean, in an article citing Metro Historic Commission Director Ann Roberts. Ms. Roberts pointed out that this inflation of property values is likely to have a domino effect, raising assessments, taxes, and rents in the neighborhood, and making it financially much more difficult for the small businesses—music stores and cheap bars—that give lower Broadway its character. Now, I am not a big fan of cheap bars, but I believe people who want to engage in relatively harmless behavior ought to have place to do what they like to do, and I’m a great believer in locally owned businesses, so I don’t think it would make Nashville a better city to start to undermine this reason for people to go downtown. Opryland couldn’t make it, but lower Broadway is still functioning as a tourist destination, so why mess with it? Setting a precedent by granting this variance will just open the door to more exceptions, and there goes the neighborhood—which is kind of a funny thing to say about a semi-red light district, but I think there’s a time and a place for everything. Lower Broadway is honky-tonksville, and it should be allowed to stay that way.

OK, the tourist thing—I have strong doubts about the long-term viability of tourism as a revenue source. I think that over the next ten or twenty years, it’s going to get harder for people to move around, because the infrastructure is going to go downhill. We will see higher fuel prices, poorer roads, no money to develop large-scale public transportation—and fewer people will have the financial means to undertake travel of any sort—including business travel. The backers of this hotel are also backers of a new, larger convention center here in town, a project which I think is also sadly misguided. Nobody wants to look at the long-term trends, because they’re so scary. It is not going to be business as usual any more, people, and it’s time to drop the denial and get ready for a future that’s going to be local and hands-on rather than global and high-tech. That’s what I think. I’ve been hollering about peak oil and climate change for a long time, now, and you’ve had to admit those wild-eyed hippie visions turned out to be on the money, after you blew me off for so long. Those were just topic sentences. Now, take a deep breath and start paying attention to the details. “Think globally, act locally,” right? Well, this is the local skinny. Heads up!

Now, it turns out that the Westin project is one of at least five new hotels planned for the downtown area. Five or more new hotels. Now, the local hotel biz has actually been pretty good lately, even without Opryland, with occupancy rates running high and a going average price of about $125 per night per person, but I think five more luxury hotels might just saturate the market, even at our current level of prosperity.

I am a member of the economic class that finds the idea of paying $125 a night for a place to sleep, shower, and stash my suitcase simply bizarre. Unfortunately for the builders of the Westin, my kind of people are on the increase in this country, and their clientele is barely managing to reproduce itself, let alone grow. Where do they think all these rich suckers are gonna come from? They’re waving around impressive revenue and tax projections, but they will have no money without people to spend it, and I think they’re living in a deluded dream if they think the future is going to be just like the past. The roller coaster does not go up and up forever, guys. Don’t the dark, closed carcasses of Planet Hollywood and the NASCAR Cafe tell you anything? The party’s over. Do you think I’m a jerk for saying this? Too bad. We need to be thinking very differently about preserving Nashville if we’re going to have a liveable city in another twenty or thirty years.

The first thing we need to do is to encourage urban and suburban gardening, especially projects that feed more people than just the gardeners. Tax credits for vegetable gardens, guys. And let’s repeal the zoning ordinances that prohibit people from keeping household livestock. Yeah, feedlots suck, but if folks want milk and eggs they oughta be able to keep a cow or goat and a few chickens around without getting hassled. And, while we’re relaxing zoning laws, let’s not be so fussy about the home/business divide. Making it easier for people to work at home cuts down on automobile traffic and increases neighborhood cohesion. And parking lots…we got too much parking space in some parts of this town. I look at that colossus by the river and all the flat space around it, and I think, “Cumberland River bottomland….used ta be fertile as a foot up a bull’s ass ( as an old Tennessee farmer I knew liked to say)…how ’bout some farmland restoration?”

Professional sports is such a waste of time and energy. Excuse me, do I sound like a hopeless Puritan? No, I just appreciate direct pleasure more than voyeurism. If you like football, get out and play football, dammit, don’t sit on your fat ass and watch somebody else do the work for you. But, I digress.

I will give the Westin developers some points for green building design, but green building design, for me, has to include the context of the building, and this proposal is out of context. If they want to try their luck with a 19-story hotel near downtown Nashville, there are other locations, some very close to this site, that wouldn’t hang anybody up. And that overpriced land they bought? Caveat emptor, as the Romans used to say. And good luck. It’s a free market, guys. Nobody guaranteed you a profit.

music:  James McMurtry, “The Old Part of Town“

In the Canadian Arctic, a chunk of ice the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island, where it has been frozen for at least three thousand years. This actually happened in the summer of 2005, but wasn’t noticed until just recently, when somebody studied the satellite photos and said, “omigawd!” Up until 2005, there had been constant sea ice pressure against Ellesmere’s north shore, which is only about five hundred miles from the North Pole, but open water that year gave the coastal ice a chance to break loose. It took about an hour for the 120-foot thick chunk to go from “same as it ever was” to floating free, and then a day or two for it to cross a few miles of open water and become enmeshed in the sea ice offshore. There is a possibility that in the next few years this 27-square mile giant iceberg’s course will cause it to collide with oil platforms in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, which are built to withstand normal sea ice and storms but not a monster chunk like this. Just what we need, another Arctic oil spill, eh? Canada has lost about 90% of its shelf ice in the last hundred years, according to Wikipedia. Ah, the myth of global warming….

And, speaking of sudden collapse, researchers in Alaska have found that much of the permafrost there has warmed to nearly the freezing point. When permafrost thaws, massive quantities of methane and carbon dioxide are released, and the ground collapses, which is a real problem for areas with western-civilization-style infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and modern buildings. Of course, this is happening all across the Arctic, and its ramifications are being felt in Europe, for example, where last year was the warmest year on record—not just by a little, but by record amounts, according to researchers.

While this isn’t the first time this has happened, research into the last time it happened is not reassuring. The last time our planet endured such an abrupt swing in climate was fifty-five million years ago, when some kind of carbon or methane burp heated the planet up about nine degrees for nearly a hundred thousand years. Nine degrees may not sound like much, but it was enough to make the North Pole “just like Miami, “ according to one scientist. Hey, there’s some great beachfront property on Ellesmere Island that’s just come open…but seriously, it caused mass extinctions, albeit ones that resulted in us being here as we are today. The next roll of the dice may not be so lucky for us.

music: Waterboys, “wind in the wires”

Comments

Very frightening… (A very well-written post, btw.)
Posted by lonna on 01/14/2007 10:23:16 PM

The Bush junta continues to show that they are undeterred by the results of the November elections. I have before me two examples of truly 1984-style manipulation. One is almost silly; the other has deep ramifications for the health and welfare of every American.

The silly one is also the better known of the two, because it was splashed across the editorial page of the New York Times in big, bold, black bars: an editorial about US-Iranian relations, with major chunks of it “redacted” (that’s a technical word for “blacked out”) not by the CIA review board, which acknowledged that everything in the article was part of the public record, but by the White House, which intervened to prevent open, fair discussion of its Iran policy. They want to act as if some things just never happened—mostly instances of US-Iranian co-operation to stabilize Afghanistan, and explorations of the possibility of resuming diplomatic relations.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, y’know? Eurasia has always been our ally….oops, no, Oceania and Eurasia have always been implacable enemies, and Eastasia has always been our ally….Evidently, Rove and Cheney read 1984 and thought that Big Brother was cool and Winston Smith was a dumb sucker.

In a similar vein, the Bush junta has instituted a “cost-cutting move” and closed down the EPA library network, which is not just a repository of environmental information but a vital resource for researchers seeking to rein in polluters. Getting sued or legislated into cleaning up after themselves costs those industries a lot of money. Those must be the costs our pro-business junta is trying to cut, because the EPA’s own internal studies show that the libraries (and their all-important research librarians) save the federal government alone three times their total budget just in research costs. But hey, we can’t allow piddly little things like science and the public interest to get in the way of business’s freedom to make profits, can we?

The EPA is mumbling about how “rising demand for online services” is making brick-and-mortar libraries obsolete, and promising to put as much of its collection online as it can—someday, when they have the funds to do it. But they will not be digitizing books, scientific journals, or non-EPA studies, and will keep only one copy of each for inter-library loan. How generous. And of course, the thing about online documents is that they can be modified so easily.

The Democrats, including Tennessee’s own Bart Gordon, have had the sense to raise a fuss about this, but, being Democrats, they are all too likely to lose interest or compromise away their demand that the libraries be kept open. In any case, like the move to increase troop strength in Iraq, the junta is moving ahead on this without asking for Congressional input. Hey, the unitary executive crowd doesn’t have to answer to the electorate anymore, so screw us, they’re gonna trash the place.

“An informed citizenry is the cornerstone of democracy”—was it Thomas Jefferson who said that? With every means available—from these EPA library closings, to censorship of the New York Times, to further media consolidation, our current government is doing everything it can to dumb down America. An uninformed citizenry is the cornerstone of fascism, and that’s what they want. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they don’t get it.

music: Frank Zappa, “A Lie So Big”

It’s kinda old news by now, but when he was sworn in, Bush’s new Reichminister, excuse me, Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said, “we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come.” I have news for you, Mr. Gates: We have already failed in the Middle East, and the calamity WILL haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come. Did you know that “Baghdad” is Arabic for “Stalingrad?” And we’re playing the role of the Germans?

And now Bush has called for a “surge” in troop strength to reinforce Stalingrad—I mean Baghdad. He fired Generals Abizaid and Casey (who were running the Iraq war, in case you didn’t know) when they told him it wouldn’t make any difference, and demoted “Intelligence Czar”John Negroponte for saying it wouldn’t make sense. He’s ignoring the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which was hardly a group of flaming radicals—and now it turns out that the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, far from being a response to the overwhelming popular rejection of his policies demonstrated by the election, happened because Rummie was starting to question the very policy he has been shilling for all these years. The only question I have about the current resident of the White House is how much of his behavior is intentionally criminal, and how much of it is sheer raving lunacy.

Oh, by the way, Mr. Rumsfeld gets our truth in strange places award this month for this suggestion from his memo questioning whether the war was going as well as he’d been insisting it has: “Set a firm withdrawal date to leave. Declare that with Saddam gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people can govern themselves. Tell Iran and Syria to stay out.” thanks for saying that, Don….now, about your war crimes trial…and Joe Biden says he thinks even Cheney’s getting a little fried on the conflict…maybe he’ll invite Dubya to go duck hunting….

The much-ballyhooed Iraq Study Group report did confirm the real motive for this war, although it was politely ignored by big media: the ISG affirmed Der Furher’s goal of turning Iraq’s oil supplies over to his supporters in the oil biz , and our puppet governor there in Stalingrad, I mean Baghdad, has taken steps to comply with our wishes in this matter. That’s why we must insure the stability of the Iraqi government, even if we have to do a New Orleans and either kill or chase away enough Iraqis so that the ones who remain are compliant with our wishes. After all, the Russians thought they had an oil deal with Saddam, and that was torn into itty-bitty pieces when the US invaded. We’re not gonna let that happen to us, nossir. We’re gonna hang on and push for victory in Iraq through the rest of Bush’s term of office, come hell or high water, so that then the Republicans can blame the next administration for our defeat in Iraq. Smells like Rove spirit, don’t it?

Which brings up the truth in Herr Bush’s notorious statement, “They hate our freedom.” They hate our multinational corporations’ freedom to make money at their expense. That’s the freedom the US army is stretched to the breaking point to protect. That’s the freedom we’re going to “surge” another twenty thousand troops into the country for (if we can find them). It’s not about Stalingrad—I mean Baghdad. It’s about those oil wells. Herr Bush is calling for “sacrifice”…not here at home, where the American Way of Life is Not Negotiable, but the sacrifice of more young Americans’ lives in Iraq. He is proposing human sacrifice…to protect and increase the wealth of the corporations that sponsor him—and yet he calls himself a Christian. Sounds like Mammon-worship of the most perverted kind to me.

Meanwhile, the US has conducted a highly provocative raid on an Iranian consulate in Kurdistan (can you say, “causus belli,” boys and girls?) and the US Navy has dramatically increased its strength in the Persian Gulf, possibly getting ready for a “Gulf of Tonkin incident” to precipitate war with Iran—or to help cover for a rumored, possibly nuclear Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, which would be sure to bring the already fevered pitch of the Middle East to full riot stage. Yeah, let’s turn a bunch of radiation loose on them ragheads! That’ll learn ‘em! If this is what’s going to happen—and a round of meetings between Bush, Olmert, and Blair suggest it may be—those twenty thousand new bodies in Iraq will be needed to keep the Green Zone from being overrun, if they can—this once-secure domain has lately been subject to the occasional mortar attack.

But what makes me think that Bush could “get away” with widening this already unpopular war?

The Democrats.

Last Summer, when Israel invaded Lebanon in what was widely regarded as a proxy war with Iran and Syria, the Democrats almost unanimously voted with the Republicans to support Israel.

Last Fall, every Democrat in the Senate and all but 21 House members voted for the “Iran Freedom Support Act,” which lays the groundwork for meddling in Iran in the same way that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which also passed with strong bipartisan support, began the process that has ensnared us today.

The Democrats are not the good guys, they’re just the “good cops”–and you know what good cops are good for. They are not “the party of the people.” They use liberal cultural trappings to attract popular support just as surely as Republicans wrap themselves around the Bible for theirs, and their lust for wealth and power will drive them to betray the common people just as surely as the Republicans have betrayed their evangelical base. Have you noticed Nancy Pelosi’s not talking about repealing the “No More Bankruptcy” bill that so many Democrats voted for when Bush pushed it?

It’s way past time for a truly popular movement in America to channel the frustration and disempowerment felt by so many of us and create a workable world. Green Party, anyone?

music: Jackson Browne, “Soldier of Plenty”

Ethicist Peter Singer read the UN’s Millenium Development Plan, which calls for an additional fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year in order to halve world poverty and hunger and offer an education to every child in the world, among other things. This plan has been stalled out for lack of funding—the US finds it’s more important to take that kind of money and burn it in Iraq, just for openers. We could end world poverty, but we’re too busy fighting the poor. We could end our dependence on fossil fuels, but we’re too busy making sure we’ve got all the fossil fuels we can glom. But, I digress…. Dr. Singer did a little math, and found that raising the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans so that they paid the same ten to thirty-five percent of gross that the rest of us have to give up —leaving them ninety to sixty-five percent of their breathtakingly high annual income–would generate…over four hundred billion dollars a year. Enough to fund the UN anti-poverty program about seven times over. Noblesse oblige, anyone?

Such a change would do more to end terrorism in the world than burning money and bodies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it doesn’t even propose cutting off money to the military/industrial blackmail complex. We could pay those people to sit around and do nothing and we’d all be better off. My old friend and teacher Stephen Gaskin has been saying since the seventies that “there’s plenty to go around,” but nobody believed him. Kudos to Mr. Singer for actually doing the math. Now all it’s gonna take is some political will.

Somebody in the DOE did some math and figured out that there’s enough off-peak power going unused in the US electric grid to substitute plug-in electric vehicles for about eighty-five percent of the gas burners on our highways today. That’s a good news/bad news situation all by itself—it means that our current, disgusting level of urban sprawl just might be sustainable—but the air would be cleaner, especially as more electricity comes from the sun and the wind. Meanwhile, it would encourage the continued strip mine rape of the central Appalachians and encourage the ghouls who are pushing nuclear power. This old curmudgeon would like to see America radically restructured, not just staying the course in electric cars.

I think that one of the most peculiar assumptions of our society is the assumption that everyone who wants full economic citizenship must own a car. Think about that, especially as real wages continue to fall (raising the minimum wage is unlikely to do much for the rest of us) and the “American dream” becomes ever more unattainable for ever more of us, for ever more.

But, just in case you think we’ve got it bad over here, consider the Chinese occupation of Tibet, which continues its genocidal course. The railway into Lhasa is now open, bringing thousands of tourists (and potentially thousands of troops), although it will take much more than passenger fares for the line to show a profit; current projections are that the tracks will sink into Tibet’s melting permafrost before the line pays for itself. Meanwhile, the Chinese are forcing Tibetans to demolish their homesteads and move into Chinese-designed dwellings that do not incorporate room for the livestock that are a necessary component of Tibetan household economies, impoverishing the Tibetans and forcing them into the unsustainable, import-everything, Chinese mode of dwelling on the Tibetan plateau. These are the people we’re trusting with our manufacturing capacity, although they are devious and amoral enough to make all but the most hard-hearted US corporations seem like the very picture of benevolence. What does this bode for how they will treat us when it comes time to call in our massive, mounting debt to them?

The Chinese have adopted our western religion of economics and turned it on us. Cheap is everything, graceful is nothing, and they are better at being ruthless than we are.

I think that one of the things we can do about the macro-economic quicksand we are trapped in, i.e., our declining purchasing power, is to spend our money very carefully, and give as little of it as we can to the vampiric multinational corporations that have gotten so very good at sucking our blood. Buy gasoline, if you must, from Citgo and give your money to Hugo Chavez, not Exxon-Mobil. Buy “consumer goods” from friendly neighborhood yard sales (and get to know your neighbors) and from thrift stores—and if you can’t find it locally, there’s all those virtual yard sales on the internet: eBay, Craig’s list, free- and cheap-cycle. More and more of us taking these steps (hell, our financial circumstances are forcing us, so we might as well!) will begin to starve the Walmarts of the world and their Chinese vampire cohorts. Do you really need cable TV? Haven’t you got something better to do with your time? Tell Comcast to get lost! Learn to work in metal or wood or clay, learn to spin and weave and sew. Learn to garden and cook, for chrissake! Learn to play an instrument and sing and tell stories! Learn to listen to other peoples’ stories! Creating post-consumerist, post-oil, post-corporate, post-industrial culture is a collective enterprise that is being created by you and you and you and me and the network of people we see every day. Let’s get to work and enjoy ourselves!

music: Adrienne Young, “Plow to the End of the Row”

And finally, I would like to remember the recent death of Robert Anton Wilson, who has for over twenty years been one of my inpirations, for his ability to merge spirituality, psychology, and politics—and never lose his sense of humor. This excerpt from his 1980 book, The Illuminati Papers, is typical of his advanced thinking.

“If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. ‘A cure for unemployment’ is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left.

“I would like to challenge that idea. I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

“What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. A Work Esthetic will have to arise to replace this old Stone Age syndrome of the slave, the peasant, the serf, the prole, the wage-worker — the human labor-machine who is not fully a person but, as Marx said, ‘ a tool, an automaton.’ Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity — as an outlet for their creative potential.

“(’Creative potential’ … refers to the inborn drive to play, to tinker, to explore, and to experiment, shown by every child before his or her mental processes are stunted by authoritarian education and operant-conditioned wage-robotry.)

“As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, ‘What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?’ The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show. “
This is the kind of creative thinking that I would like to foster in contemporary politics. Given the current decrepit state of our economy, is such utopianism still possible? Well, as Peter Singer pointed out, there really is plenty to go around; and Wilson himself said, in one of his last interviews, “My optimism rests on the fact that, historically, in emergency, people often mutate in unpredictable and creative ways. As John Adams said, the American Revolution took place ‘in the minds of the people in the 15 years before the first shot was fired.’ I suspect a similar revolution is occurring in the minds of educated people worldwide.”

That means the revolution is over, and we have won; all that’s left to do is to implement our program. Let’s roll!

music: Kate Wolf, “Friend of Mine”