Clay and Wattles

I’ve been feeling very, very tired this week. I suppose it comes from running for City Council. It isn’t that I’m working so very hard – it’s the anxiety keeping me up at night. Anxiety about whether I’m doing enough, whether I’ll be elected, and whether I’ll do a good job if I eventually am elected.

I feel like an impostor. Here I am, just a regular citizen, with no special expertise in land use planning, or zoning, or property assessment, or public accounting, or engineering, or social services, asking to be put partially in charge of a forty million dollar budget and a couple of hundred million dollars in assets. I’m interested in these issues, and it isn’t as if I have no relevant expertise at all, I guess, and, of course, the City employs administrators to help manage all that vast expanse of services, staff, and assets. Perhaps there are few people who are truly masters of all these domains and I’m as likely a candidate as anybody else.

I know one thing: since the usual suspects seem unable to steer this municipal ship in the right direction, I have no choice but to put my all into getting elected. I have a responsibility, as a regular citizen, to stand up for my values against the usual tide of political self-interest and venality. But still…

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it’s dangerous (it’s almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it’s solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It’s that five miles out in the woods you can’t buy anything.

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

I just returned home from seeing the film Barnyard with my niece and her friend. The film wasn’t the worst kids’ movie I’ve ever seen, but far from the best either.

The film’s symbolic message is a bit weird, alluding as it does to homeland security (the barnyard which must always be protected) and American military unilateralism. The bad guys are coyotes, who are truly, truly evil, posing an assymetric threat to the noble “party animals” on the farm. The cows and their friends commit fairly horrible crimes, like joyriding and destroying a stolen car, but are portrayed as “cool” Harley-riding good guys. Nothing very unusual about all that, but still disturbing. I’m also not sure what to make of the vegan farmer who treats the animals so well – surely, kids must be a bit confused by him and his place in the story.

The reason I’m writing about the film here is the curious fact that its principal characters are male cows. Male cows with udders. One of the male “cows” falls in love with a female cow. (In spite of this confusion, the male and female characters are just as stereotyped as in every other American children’s film). The farm is also home to a bull (complete with nose ring) who appears as a background character, though he doesn’t seem to have any more in common with the male/female cows than the horses, pigs, or dogs have. It is entirely unclear whether the filmmakers are aware that bulls and cows are two genders of the same animal.

This film is a textbook example of Bill McKibben’s arguments in The Age of Missing Information. What do children learn from watching it (aside from the usual message that America is great and won’t “cut and run”)? Coyotes are scary, evil monsters which we should fear – even their howls are made out to be terrifying. Cows (both male and female) and bulls are unrelated species living in a world unlike any real farm (even an old-fashioned one). Farmers are kindly, stupid men who love animals.

How will the children who see this film ever grapple with the reality of where our food comes from? How will they cope at raising food themselves someday?

In an original, thoughtful film (yes, lots of kids’ movies fit this description), a few odd liberties with reality are forgivable (Porky Pig cartoons ain’t exactly documentaries either), but here they just seem sloppy and negligent. Is this the best Hollywood can offer?

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
by E.F. Schumacher
HarperPerennial, 1973

Available at the Yellowknife Public Library (Call Number 330 SCH)

Before reading this book, I knew of Schumacher by reputation only. Last week, I found a used copy of Small is Beautiful at Squatterz Books and Curiosities and decided to give it a try. I’m very glad I did. Though he wrote the book to solve the problems of 1973, Schumacher’s ideas are absolutely relevant today.

The book is a collection of essays on various topics in economics. The connecting thread is Schumacher’s willingness to question all the grand assumptions of his discipline. From third world aid to corporate taxation to world peace, Schumacher’s incisive analysis surprises on every page. I found myself underlining nearly every paragraph in some chapters, such as the one about “Buddhist Economics”:

From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale.

This goal, for instance, is familiar to us from climate change and peak oil arguments, but Schumacher gives a more metaphysical reason for pursuing it. He writes that “the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character” and “since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

Schumacher is not entirely concerned with economic philosophy. He proposes practical measures for reforming our economic system and improving the lives of impoverished people. He proposes the idea of “intermediate technology” for the developing world – choosing technologies that can be produced and maintained locally from local resources by local people, rather than dropping alien technologies suited only for export products into the middle of pre-industrial societies. He writes about how to organize corporations to ensure they continue to serve the interests of society rather than a select group of shareholders. He proposes shifting from our current system of corporate taxation to a system of mandatory public shares in large enterprises. Radical? Yes, but also an eminently sensible way to ensure that everyone wins in our economic system.

I cannot deny that some of Schumacher’s proposals seem utopian: for example, he approves of placing limits on the ratio of highest to lowest salary within an organization – the highest-paid employee must not make more than X times what the lowest-paid employee makes. Our economic system has strayed so far into libertarian territory that such an idea seems ridiculous – but is it? Likewise, it feels sort of quaint when Schumacher talks about the advantages and disadvantages of nationalization of industries versus laissez-faire corporate capitalism – it is hard to remember that nationalization was ever practiced or discussed by the political and economic elites in the western world. It sounds like bolshevism because we’ve allowed our very range of possible economic models to be truncated by corporate interests in our society.

Schumacher is wrong about a couple of things: in spite of holding extreme faith in the ability of all people to attain the highest levels of enlightenment, he suggests that “women, on the whole, to not need an ‘outside’ job” because they should be home looking after the children. His underlying point is valid: society should allow parents the “luxury” to look after children as a matter of supreme importance; his error is in assuming that only women can nurture those children. Another of Schumacher’s errors is in his implicit assumption that religious faith is a necessary precondition for an equitable, evolved society. Schumacher takes his own Christian faith and uses its principles as the basis for a more sensible economic system. He himself recognizes that these principles are universal, liberally adopting parallel concepts from Buddhism, for instance, but never quite sees that such universal values don’t need the existence of a supernatural supreme being to be true.

Small is Beautiful is an extremely valuable book. It’s primary theme is that small, local, and practical are better than large, distant, and theoretical. For me, the book’s major contribution is the way it connects our economic system with our values: we already know that small, local, and practical measures are the solution to our environmental and social problems – Schumacher reminds us that the real reasons for doing these things will still exist even if our climate change and peak oil problems disappear tomorrow.

CNN is filled with the pictures of dying elephants and of a dozen other creatures. This is perhaps the ultimate loss of information – too sophisticated to burn books, we burn the planet.

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

I love Tom the Dancing Bug, a comic by Ruben Bolling. This one is my new favourite.

Do we appreciate dolphins for the tricks they can perform, for being like limited humans?…Do we appreciate them as an economic and recreational “resource”?…Or do we begin to understand again what was once common knowledge – that they’re marvelous for their own reasons, that they matter independently of us?

That piece of information can come only when you accept nature and its component parts on their own terms – small and placid and dull and parts of systems, as well as big and flashy and fierce and soulful.

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which is the fruit of a sinister plot by media companies to control what we see, hear, and read. Companies embed code in media files which prevents the user from using the content except under very narrow conditions. Complicit software companies build defective products which won’t play anything which hasn’t been coded. Sony recently released CDs which actually installed virus-like software on users’ computers, compromising privacy and damaging the operating system. This type of “broken” media is very prominent in the music industry at the moment, but other kinds of media may also be crippled in the future.

DRM is a tool used to make money for multinational media companies like Microsoft and Sony, not to benefit artists. In Canada, many artists have publicly opposed the record companies on this issue (for example, Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies). My biggest concern is the anti-democratic way that DRM puts our access to information even more firmly in the hands of corporations (for why this is bad, please read my previous post on Creative Commons). When DRM becomes standard, it will become more and more difficult for you and I and other activists to get our message out.

What can I do about it?

• Learn more about the issue.
• Write a letter.
• Read more ideas for action.