by Stacy Mitchell
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
published by
The Preservation Trust of Vermont
1. Local Character and Prosperity
In an increasingly homogenized world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centers, linking neighbors in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.
3. Local Decision-Making
Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.
5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low wage jobs and into the middle class.
7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers—which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Technofix or Human Scale?
By Kirkpatrick Sale, Global Brain, no. 149, 14 January 1998
Human civilisation, particularly that of the West and more particularly still that of the United States, is at a momentous turning point. It is not in simply one or two dimensions that our world is changing, but in all of them, and synergistically. It seems clear that future historians will mark a new age beginning somewhere within our lifetimes.
The Question then is: 'What kind of new age will it be?' There are, in truth, only two answers to that.
Technofix
It could be an age of bigness continuing certain obvious trends of the present towards large-scale institutions, multinational corporations, centralised governments, high-technology machinery, large cities, high-rise buildings, luxury cars, and all that is implied in the American (and European) ideology of unimpeded growth.
That would seem to have to entail the expansion of the present corporate-governmental alliance, leading to a fully mixed system of state and private capitalism, government regulation of scarce resources, increased corporate conglomeration, some greater degree of social regulation by the organs of government, further consolidation of political power within the executive branch, and corporate-government encouragement of the arts. ... BIG would be better, PROGRESS our most important product.
Essential to this future is a belief in ... technofix: that is, that our present crisis can be solved, or at least ameliorated, by the application of modern technology and its attendant concentrations of science, government and capital.
Human Scale
The other possibility for the new age to which we are moving lies in exactly the opposite direction: toward the decentralisation of institutions and the devolution of power, with the slow dismantling of all the large-scale systems that in one way or another have created or perpetuated the current crisis, and their replacement by smaller, more controllable, more efficient, people-sized units, rooted in local circumstances and guided by local systems.
In short, the human-scale alternative.
Human civilisation, particularly that of the West and more particularly still that of the United States, is at a momentous turning point. It is not in simply one or two dimensions that our world is changing, but in all of them, and synergistically. It seems clear that future historians will mark a new age beginning somewhere within our lifetimes.
The Question then is: 'What kind of new age will it be?' There are, in truth, only two answers to that.
Technofix
It could be an age of bigness continuing certain obvious trends of the present towards large-scale institutions, multinational corporations, centralised governments, high-technology machinery, large cities, high-rise buildings, luxury cars, and all that is implied in the American (and European) ideology of unimpeded growth.
That would seem to have to entail the expansion of the present corporate-governmental alliance, leading to a fully mixed system of state and private capitalism, government regulation of scarce resources, increased corporate conglomeration, some greater degree of social regulation by the organs of government, further consolidation of political power within the executive branch, and corporate-government encouragement of the arts. ... BIG would be better, PROGRESS our most important product.
Essential to this future is a belief in ... technofix: that is, that our present crisis can be solved, or at least ameliorated, by the application of modern technology and its attendant concentrations of science, government and capital.
Human Scale
The other possibility for the new age to which we are moving lies in exactly the opposite direction: toward the decentralisation of institutions and the devolution of power, with the slow dismantling of all the large-scale systems that in one way or another have created or perpetuated the current crisis, and their replacement by smaller, more controllable, more efficient, people-sized units, rooted in local circumstances and guided by local systems.
In short, the human-scale alternative.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
They oughta ...
Statements that start with: "The government oughta ..." are extremely annoying unless they conclude with: "... stay out of it!"
Main Stream Media and the Homogenization of Society
The Daily Reckoning (Australia)
Posted by Bill Bonner on Jan 1st, 2007
“It is largely a matter of scale…in fact, it could all be reduced to a matter of scale,” said a visitor yesterday.
We were talking about the way things work…and why there is such a big difference between the way people are able to function reasonably well in small groups and the way they seem to blow themselves up in large ones.
“Yes,” our friend went on, “Once you get beyond what is usually known as the ‘human scale,’ things lose all their meaning.”
It is a question that has puzzled us for years: how is it that a reasonably intelligent man can perfectly well drive through traffic without killing himself, but ask the same man his thoughts on global warming, the war on poverty or public education…and what you get is such preposterous nonsense you can barely believe your own ears?
We have mentioned many times that there is a world of difference between a New England town meeting and the U.S. federal government. The size of the New England town meeting is one that the human brain is prepared to deal with. At the town meeting, a man can know which of the people he is dealing with is a moron and which is a self-interested hustler.
But when it comes to national politics, the same man is totally ill-equipped…like a mechanic who shows up with a pair of pruning shears…or a veterinarian with a wrench in his hand. He is ignorant of the facts…innocent of the procedures…and completely helpless in front of the controls. He can’t tell the connivers from the honest bumblers. He has lost the points of reference that are meaningful to him. He is like a driver who looks ahead and sees only fog. He turns the steering wheel to the left…but the car lurches to the right. He puts on the breaks and the car speeds up!
What can the poor fellow do…but resort to lies and such uber-simplifications as take your breath away. “If we don’t fight the commies in Vietnam,” he said in 1965, “we’ll have to fight them in California!” “If you want better educated people, you have to spend more on public education,” he said in 1975. “If we don’t stand up to the Evil Empire, it will take over the world,” he said in 1985. “If you invest in a balanced portfolio of stocks, you will always make money over the long run,” he said in 1995.
What can he do? He replaces local knowledge and experience with empty slogans. He replaces the detailed evidence before his own eyes with broad categorical generalizations. Meanwhile, the precise figures and intricate calculations that he would make on his own give way to statistics and averages.
The world on TV becomes the woodcutter’s world too…a world where the local details are washed out and replaced by caricatures and national averages. It gives rise to a whole new understanding of things. Standards are set, not according to local custom or individual experience…but according to the great wash of national broadcasting and advertising in which particularities are bleached out…. local colors faded. Everything comes to be seen through the grayish, white light of national broadcasting.
Instead of speaking his local dialect, he is soon speaking the lingua franca of the nightly news. Instead of wearing the clothes he likes, he is dressed to suit The Gap or Brooks Brothers.
As the scale of his world increases, local nuance and particularities lose their appeal. The man begins to see himself and his world in new terms. It no longer matters whether his house is comfortable and attractive on his terms; now it has to be acceptable in national terms. He comes to realize that many people are lodged in ’substandard’ housing. Of course, the whole idea makes no sense whatever without a standard. And the standard is hardly one that the man can set for himself. Instead, it is a standard set by people with no detailed knowledge whatsoever. It is a standard based on averages…generalities…and public information. How many square feet per person? How much heating? How much air-conditioning? Then, to make sure that all houses meet their standards, rules are imposed - building codes…zoning rules…materials standards. The owner can no longer ask himself - ‘is this house safe enough for me?’ Now, the question is: does this house meet modern safety standards? By the new standards even the Sun King, Louis 14th, probably lived in ’substandard’ housing.
Education, too, takes on a new look. It is not enough to learn things; in any case, the busybodies are incapable of organizing real, individual learning. What they can organize is education… with the learning removed or standardized to fit into some new larger national standard. ‘Educators’ can’t be bothered with individual students as they actually are, nor even with local curricula. Everyone has to learn the same thing. And they have to learn it the same way. The world may be infinitely complex and detailed but in the national educational program, the details have to be knocked off…like the fine detailed trim work from an old house…so that all that is left is measurable, standardized space, which can be quantified and allocated by bureaucrats, who may have never met a single student in their entire lives. Are educational standards falling short? Spend more money to increase the space!
Who cares if anyone is actually learning? The critical thing is that all students get the same claptrap pounded into their poor heads, so that they leave the machinery with the same prejudices and illusions.
The woodchopper from New Hampshire may soon discover, too, that he lives not only in a ’substandard’ hovel, but that he is ‘poor.’ Poverty is always a relative measure, but relative to what? A man may be perfectly happy with his lot in life. He may have no running water, no central heat, and no money. Imagine him tending his garden, feeding his chickens, and fixing his tattered roof. Out in the woods, he may even have set up a still for refining the fruits of the earth into even more pleasurable distillates. In fact, by all measures that matter to him, he could have a rich, comfortable and enjoyable life. But as the scale of comparison grows, the details that make his life so agreeable to him disappear in a flush of statistics. He finds that he is below the ‘poverty line.’ He discovers that he is ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘under-privileged.’ He may even be delighted to realize that he has a ‘right’ to ‘decent housing.’ Maybe he will qualify for food stamps.
The idea of being ‘poor’ may never have occurred to him before. He may live in a part of the world where everyone is about as poor as he is…and all perfectly happy in their poverty. But now that the spell is on him, it sits like a curse. Poverty seems like something he has to escape…something he has to get out of …something that someone had better to do something about!
His new scaled-up consciousness has turned him into a malcontent. The poor man, previously happy in his naive particulars, is now miserable in his role as a poverty-stricken hick.
But the worst thing about it, TV and popular opinion twist him towards thinking that it is the public view of himself - not his own private view — that really matters. In a matter of months he has forgotten how content he really is. He might as well be a stock market investor; the public spectacle has turned him into a chump. He sees himself on television…as an unfortunate hillbilly. The national newspapers say he needs help. They even make fun of the way he talks. And now the revenuers are in the woods looking for his still!
All over the world, local customs, styles, manners, accents are disappearing. As the scale increases, with the expansion of the globalized market economy, people are being homogenized, leveled. Their food, their music, their clothes - all are becoming standardized, mongrelized.
While it is true that regional variations hang on in vestigial, folkloric form, whether you go to New Orleans, Nashville or Vienna, you will hear about the same music, find the same fashions in the same shops, and be able to eat the same McDonalds’ hamburger.
An investor in Bombay speaks the same language as one in New York. Yet, it is the particularities of investments that make the difference between investment failure and investment success, the very things the world financial media cannot be bothered with - the kind of precise, detailed, particular, local knowledge that you really need for investment success. Instead, what you get is the standardized imprecise broadcast news. And what the investor gets is the equivalent of a public school education; he knows nothing much…and thinks he knows everything.
And since all investors know pretty much the same thing - which is to say, they all share the same illusions and take them for wisdom - the markets tend to reflect the popular fashions as if they were the season’s latest blue jeans.
A man knows perfectly well that he needs to be able to defend himself. Around the hills of New Hampshire, he may judge the risk of attack so slim that he goes unarmed. But walking through the back alleys of Manchester he may wish he were packing heat.
But as the scale increases, he is unable to judge the risk. Give him a little TV news and he is ready to go to war with people he has never met, in places he has never been, for reasons he will never understand. Here again, the scale of the thing makes a mug of the man. He cannot know the facts, the people, or even the theory; he doesn’t know what he’s buying, but he’s ready to pay with his life.
Even in matters as personal as health, a man soon finds himself the victim of scale. The state of his health scarcely matters. What matters is statistics. He is overwhelmed by the slogans and prejudices of the national media. Does he weigh too much? Does he get enough exercise? Does he eat enough seafood? Should he have a check-up every year; what do the statistics say? What do the papers tell him?
The large-scale chatter doesn’t even stop at the bedroom door. He may have enjoyed a perfectly satisfactory sex life. But now he is confronted with comparisons…with averages…with the statistical expectations of the national press. Is he doing it often enough? Is he doing it well enough?
Before, these matters were personal and private. In the company of his wife, the two of them set their own standards. But now, there is no such thing as a private matter. There is scarcely anything that is so private, so personal, so detailed, so local, and so important that it does not yield to large scale standardization.
No longer does he know what really matters except by reference to the public spectacle, from how frequently people make love to what kind of misgovernment they have in Iraq.
We are now all equal…all the same, all the time. We live in the same houses…we eat the same food and suffer the very same illusions as every one else. If we are unhappy, it is because the TV says we should be.
Bill Bonnner
The Daily Reckoning Australia
Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons).
In Bonner and Wiggin’s follow-up book, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an empire built on delusions.
Posted by Bill Bonner on Jan 1st, 2007
“It is largely a matter of scale…in fact, it could all be reduced to a matter of scale,” said a visitor yesterday.
We were talking about the way things work…and why there is such a big difference between the way people are able to function reasonably well in small groups and the way they seem to blow themselves up in large ones.
“Yes,” our friend went on, “Once you get beyond what is usually known as the ‘human scale,’ things lose all their meaning.”
It is a question that has puzzled us for years: how is it that a reasonably intelligent man can perfectly well drive through traffic without killing himself, but ask the same man his thoughts on global warming, the war on poverty or public education…and what you get is such preposterous nonsense you can barely believe your own ears?
We have mentioned many times that there is a world of difference between a New England town meeting and the U.S. federal government. The size of the New England town meeting is one that the human brain is prepared to deal with. At the town meeting, a man can know which of the people he is dealing with is a moron and which is a self-interested hustler.
But when it comes to national politics, the same man is totally ill-equipped…like a mechanic who shows up with a pair of pruning shears…or a veterinarian with a wrench in his hand. He is ignorant of the facts…innocent of the procedures…and completely helpless in front of the controls. He can’t tell the connivers from the honest bumblers. He has lost the points of reference that are meaningful to him. He is like a driver who looks ahead and sees only fog. He turns the steering wheel to the left…but the car lurches to the right. He puts on the breaks and the car speeds up!
What can the poor fellow do…but resort to lies and such uber-simplifications as take your breath away. “If we don’t fight the commies in Vietnam,” he said in 1965, “we’ll have to fight them in California!” “If you want better educated people, you have to spend more on public education,” he said in 1975. “If we don’t stand up to the Evil Empire, it will take over the world,” he said in 1985. “If you invest in a balanced portfolio of stocks, you will always make money over the long run,” he said in 1995.
What can he do? He replaces local knowledge and experience with empty slogans. He replaces the detailed evidence before his own eyes with broad categorical generalizations. Meanwhile, the precise figures and intricate calculations that he would make on his own give way to statistics and averages.
The world on TV becomes the woodcutter’s world too…a world where the local details are washed out and replaced by caricatures and national averages. It gives rise to a whole new understanding of things. Standards are set, not according to local custom or individual experience…but according to the great wash of national broadcasting and advertising in which particularities are bleached out…. local colors faded. Everything comes to be seen through the grayish, white light of national broadcasting.
Instead of speaking his local dialect, he is soon speaking the lingua franca of the nightly news. Instead of wearing the clothes he likes, he is dressed to suit The Gap or Brooks Brothers.
As the scale of his world increases, local nuance and particularities lose their appeal. The man begins to see himself and his world in new terms. It no longer matters whether his house is comfortable and attractive on his terms; now it has to be acceptable in national terms. He comes to realize that many people are lodged in ’substandard’ housing. Of course, the whole idea makes no sense whatever without a standard. And the standard is hardly one that the man can set for himself. Instead, it is a standard set by people with no detailed knowledge whatsoever. It is a standard based on averages…generalities…and public information. How many square feet per person? How much heating? How much air-conditioning? Then, to make sure that all houses meet their standards, rules are imposed - building codes…zoning rules…materials standards. The owner can no longer ask himself - ‘is this house safe enough for me?’ Now, the question is: does this house meet modern safety standards? By the new standards even the Sun King, Louis 14th, probably lived in ’substandard’ housing.
Education, too, takes on a new look. It is not enough to learn things; in any case, the busybodies are incapable of organizing real, individual learning. What they can organize is education… with the learning removed or standardized to fit into some new larger national standard. ‘Educators’ can’t be bothered with individual students as they actually are, nor even with local curricula. Everyone has to learn the same thing. And they have to learn it the same way. The world may be infinitely complex and detailed but in the national educational program, the details have to be knocked off…like the fine detailed trim work from an old house…so that all that is left is measurable, standardized space, which can be quantified and allocated by bureaucrats, who may have never met a single student in their entire lives. Are educational standards falling short? Spend more money to increase the space!
Who cares if anyone is actually learning? The critical thing is that all students get the same claptrap pounded into their poor heads, so that they leave the machinery with the same prejudices and illusions.
The woodchopper from New Hampshire may soon discover, too, that he lives not only in a ’substandard’ hovel, but that he is ‘poor.’ Poverty is always a relative measure, but relative to what? A man may be perfectly happy with his lot in life. He may have no running water, no central heat, and no money. Imagine him tending his garden, feeding his chickens, and fixing his tattered roof. Out in the woods, he may even have set up a still for refining the fruits of the earth into even more pleasurable distillates. In fact, by all measures that matter to him, he could have a rich, comfortable and enjoyable life. But as the scale of comparison grows, the details that make his life so agreeable to him disappear in a flush of statistics. He finds that he is below the ‘poverty line.’ He discovers that he is ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘under-privileged.’ He may even be delighted to realize that he has a ‘right’ to ‘decent housing.’ Maybe he will qualify for food stamps.
The idea of being ‘poor’ may never have occurred to him before. He may live in a part of the world where everyone is about as poor as he is…and all perfectly happy in their poverty. But now that the spell is on him, it sits like a curse. Poverty seems like something he has to escape…something he has to get out of …something that someone had better to do something about!
His new scaled-up consciousness has turned him into a malcontent. The poor man, previously happy in his naive particulars, is now miserable in his role as a poverty-stricken hick.
But the worst thing about it, TV and popular opinion twist him towards thinking that it is the public view of himself - not his own private view — that really matters. In a matter of months he has forgotten how content he really is. He might as well be a stock market investor; the public spectacle has turned him into a chump. He sees himself on television…as an unfortunate hillbilly. The national newspapers say he needs help. They even make fun of the way he talks. And now the revenuers are in the woods looking for his still!
All over the world, local customs, styles, manners, accents are disappearing. As the scale increases, with the expansion of the globalized market economy, people are being homogenized, leveled. Their food, their music, their clothes - all are becoming standardized, mongrelized.
While it is true that regional variations hang on in vestigial, folkloric form, whether you go to New Orleans, Nashville or Vienna, you will hear about the same music, find the same fashions in the same shops, and be able to eat the same McDonalds’ hamburger.
An investor in Bombay speaks the same language as one in New York. Yet, it is the particularities of investments that make the difference between investment failure and investment success, the very things the world financial media cannot be bothered with - the kind of precise, detailed, particular, local knowledge that you really need for investment success. Instead, what you get is the standardized imprecise broadcast news. And what the investor gets is the equivalent of a public school education; he knows nothing much…and thinks he knows everything.
And since all investors know pretty much the same thing - which is to say, they all share the same illusions and take them for wisdom - the markets tend to reflect the popular fashions as if they were the season’s latest blue jeans.
A man knows perfectly well that he needs to be able to defend himself. Around the hills of New Hampshire, he may judge the risk of attack so slim that he goes unarmed. But walking through the back alleys of Manchester he may wish he were packing heat.
But as the scale increases, he is unable to judge the risk. Give him a little TV news and he is ready to go to war with people he has never met, in places he has never been, for reasons he will never understand. Here again, the scale of the thing makes a mug of the man. He cannot know the facts, the people, or even the theory; he doesn’t know what he’s buying, but he’s ready to pay with his life.
Even in matters as personal as health, a man soon finds himself the victim of scale. The state of his health scarcely matters. What matters is statistics. He is overwhelmed by the slogans and prejudices of the national media. Does he weigh too much? Does he get enough exercise? Does he eat enough seafood? Should he have a check-up every year; what do the statistics say? What do the papers tell him?
The large-scale chatter doesn’t even stop at the bedroom door. He may have enjoyed a perfectly satisfactory sex life. But now he is confronted with comparisons…with averages…with the statistical expectations of the national press. Is he doing it often enough? Is he doing it well enough?
Before, these matters were personal and private. In the company of his wife, the two of them set their own standards. But now, there is no such thing as a private matter. There is scarcely anything that is so private, so personal, so detailed, so local, and so important that it does not yield to large scale standardization.
No longer does he know what really matters except by reference to the public spectacle, from how frequently people make love to what kind of misgovernment they have in Iraq.
We are now all equal…all the same, all the time. We live in the same houses…we eat the same food and suffer the very same illusions as every one else. If we are unhappy, it is because the TV says we should be.
Bill Bonnner
The Daily Reckoning Australia
Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons).
In Bonner and Wiggin’s follow-up book, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an empire built on delusions.
Urban way of life purchased at great cost to environment
By Jeremy Rifkin,
Published Tuesday, January 02, 2007
The coming year marks a great milestone in the human saga, a development similar in magnitude to the agricultural era and the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings will be living in vast urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more, according to the United Nations. We have become “Homo Urbanus.”
Two hundred years ago, the average person on Earth might meet 200 to 300 people in a lifetime. Today a resident of New York City can live and work among 220,000 people within a 10-minute radius of his home or office in midtown Manhattan.
Only one city in all of history – ancient Rome – boasted a population of more than a million before the 19th century. London became the first modern city with a population exceeding 1 million in 1820. Today 414 cities boast populations of a million or more, and there’s no end in sight.
As long as the human race had to rely on solar flow, the winds and currents, and animal and human power to sustain life, the human population remained relatively low to accommodate nature’s carrying capacity: the biosphere’s ability to recycle waste and replenish resources. The tipping point was the exhuming of large amounts of stored sun, first in the form of coal deposits, then oil and natural gas.
Harnessed by the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine, and converted to electricity and distributed across power lines, fossil fuels allowed humanity to create new technologies that dramatically increased food production and manufactured goods and services. The unprecedented increase in productivity led to runaway population growth and the urbanization of the world.
No one is really sure whether this turning point in human living arrangements ought to be celebrated, lamented or merely acknowledged. That’s because our burgeoning population and urban way of life have been purchased at the expense of vast ecosystems and habitats.
Cultural historian Elias Canetti once remarked that each of us is a king in a field of corpses. If we were to stop for a moment and reflect on the number of creatures and the amount of Earth’s resources and materials we have expropriated and consumed in our lifetime, we would be appalled at the carnage and depletion used to secure our existence.
Large populations living in megacities consume massive amounts of the Earth’s energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity. The Sears Tower alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly40 percent of the net primary production on Earth – the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis – even though we make up only one half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet. This means less for other species to use.
The flip side of urbanization is what we are leaving behind on our way to a world of hundred-story office buildings and high-rise residences, and landscapes of glass, cement, artificial light and electronic interconnectivity. It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild. Rising population; growing consumption of food, water and building materials; expanding road and rail transport; and urban sprawl continue to encroach on the remaining wild, pushing it to extinction.
Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today’s children, the wild will disappear from the face of the Earth. The Trans-Amazon Highway, which cuts across the entire expanse of the Amazon rain forest, is hastening the obliteration of the last great wild habitat. Other remaining wild regions, from Borneo to the Congo Basin, are fast diminishing with each passing day, making way for growing human populations in search of living space and resources.
It’s no wonder that (according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson) we are experiencing the greatest wave of mass extinction of animal species in 65 million years. We are losing 50 to 150 species to extinction per day, or between 18,000 and 55,000 species a year. By 2100 two-thirds of the Earth’s remaining species are likely to be extinct.
Where does this leave us? Try to imagine 1,000 cities of a million or more just 35 years from now. It boggles the mind and is unsustainable for Earth. I don’t want to spoil the party, but perhaps the commemoration of the urbanization of the human race in 2007 might be an opportunity to rethink the way we live.
Certainly there is much to applaud about urban life: its rich cultural diversity and social intercourse and its dense commercial activity. But the question is one of magnitude and scale. We need to ponder how best to lower our population and develop sustainable urban environments that use energy and resources more efficiently, are less polluting and better designed to foster human-scale living arrangements.
In the great era of urbanization we have increasingly shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that we could conquer, colonize and utilize the riches of the planet to ensure our autonomy without dire consequences to us and future generations. In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures.
Rifkin is the author of “The Age of Access” and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends. He wrote this commentary for the Washington Post.
Published Tuesday, January 02, 2007
The coming year marks a great milestone in the human saga, a development similar in magnitude to the agricultural era and the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings will be living in vast urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more, according to the United Nations. We have become “Homo Urbanus.”
Two hundred years ago, the average person on Earth might meet 200 to 300 people in a lifetime. Today a resident of New York City can live and work among 220,000 people within a 10-minute radius of his home or office in midtown Manhattan.
Only one city in all of history – ancient Rome – boasted a population of more than a million before the 19th century. London became the first modern city with a population exceeding 1 million in 1820. Today 414 cities boast populations of a million or more, and there’s no end in sight.
As long as the human race had to rely on solar flow, the winds and currents, and animal and human power to sustain life, the human population remained relatively low to accommodate nature’s carrying capacity: the biosphere’s ability to recycle waste and replenish resources. The tipping point was the exhuming of large amounts of stored sun, first in the form of coal deposits, then oil and natural gas.
Harnessed by the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine, and converted to electricity and distributed across power lines, fossil fuels allowed humanity to create new technologies that dramatically increased food production and manufactured goods and services. The unprecedented increase in productivity led to runaway population growth and the urbanization of the world.
No one is really sure whether this turning point in human living arrangements ought to be celebrated, lamented or merely acknowledged. That’s because our burgeoning population and urban way of life have been purchased at the expense of vast ecosystems and habitats.
Cultural historian Elias Canetti once remarked that each of us is a king in a field of corpses. If we were to stop for a moment and reflect on the number of creatures and the amount of Earth’s resources and materials we have expropriated and consumed in our lifetime, we would be appalled at the carnage and depletion used to secure our existence.
Large populations living in megacities consume massive amounts of the Earth’s energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity. The Sears Tower alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly40 percent of the net primary production on Earth – the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis – even though we make up only one half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet. This means less for other species to use.
The flip side of urbanization is what we are leaving behind on our way to a world of hundred-story office buildings and high-rise residences, and landscapes of glass, cement, artificial light and electronic interconnectivity. It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild. Rising population; growing consumption of food, water and building materials; expanding road and rail transport; and urban sprawl continue to encroach on the remaining wild, pushing it to extinction.
Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today’s children, the wild will disappear from the face of the Earth. The Trans-Amazon Highway, which cuts across the entire expanse of the Amazon rain forest, is hastening the obliteration of the last great wild habitat. Other remaining wild regions, from Borneo to the Congo Basin, are fast diminishing with each passing day, making way for growing human populations in search of living space and resources.
It’s no wonder that (according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson) we are experiencing the greatest wave of mass extinction of animal species in 65 million years. We are losing 50 to 150 species to extinction per day, or between 18,000 and 55,000 species a year. By 2100 two-thirds of the Earth’s remaining species are likely to be extinct.
Where does this leave us? Try to imagine 1,000 cities of a million or more just 35 years from now. It boggles the mind and is unsustainable for Earth. I don’t want to spoil the party, but perhaps the commemoration of the urbanization of the human race in 2007 might be an opportunity to rethink the way we live.
Certainly there is much to applaud about urban life: its rich cultural diversity and social intercourse and its dense commercial activity. But the question is one of magnitude and scale. We need to ponder how best to lower our population and develop sustainable urban environments that use energy and resources more efficiently, are less polluting and better designed to foster human-scale living arrangements.
In the great era of urbanization we have increasingly shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that we could conquer, colonize and utilize the riches of the planet to ensure our autonomy without dire consequences to us and future generations. In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures.
Rifkin is the author of “The Age of Access” and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends. He wrote this commentary for the Washington Post.
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