(There ain’t no) green jobs

It is no wonder either that everybody’s political programs focus on how to create jobs. The communists want to create jobs by making everyone a civil servant of sort. The socialists want to create jobs by subsidizing them, but they presently can’t because they don’t have the money. The moderate right wants to give more money to those who already have a lot of it in the hope that it will somehow trickle down, not that it matters very much if it doesn’t. The National Front wants to hunker down behind barbed wires, which should somehow create jobs, Muslim people need not apply.

As for the Greens, they want to create green jobs, a lot of them, preferably through generous state subsidies. Make no mistake, those green jobs does not involve growing green things. The group the Greens represent, namely the enlightened upper middle class, wants reasonably well paid and prestigious jobs, and herding sheep in central Brittany definitely doesn’t qualify. - Damien Perrotin

Read the whole article here.

A real GREEN job! Photo: Ggia

Michael Huesemann on the Dangers of Technological Optimism

Source: Extraenvironmentalist

“Are you optimistic about technology? Let’s talk about why. Could the majority of our proposed technological solutions be doing little more than kicking the can down the road towards ecological collapse? Politicians and economists speak of the ability for technological innovation to boost and grow economies, yet where does their techno optimism come from? Do technologies hold intrinsic values or are they neutral tools that are misused by a species with the wrong intentions?

In Extraenvironmentalist #37 we discuss technological optimism with Dr. Michael Huesemann. Michael explains his fifteen year study into environmental science and philosophies of technology as outlined in his recent book Techno-Fix, co-written with his wife Joyce Huesemann. Is there an inherent reason that the United States is the most technologically optimistic culture in the world? We ask if he has advice for students who are thinking about careers in advanced science and about the value systems embedded in technological systems.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Related:

• James Howard Kunstler: It's Too Late for Solutions

Duncan Davidson: Why do we Hate Seeing Photos of Ourselves?

Relatert:

• Derfor hater vi å se bilder av oss selv

Another Lonely House

Architecture is Viewed as Irrelevant

It is reasonable to conclude that architecture is viewed as irrelevant. A society in which people routinely do something different from that which creates life or beauty, cannot be said to care much about life or beauty. - Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground, page 27

Himeji Castle, Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. Photo: Bernard Gagnon

Beautiful 1800 - Century Tourist Images from Norway

Ålesund in Western Norway

At my latest article in Kulturverk.com they illustrated it with a slideshow of 1800-century tourist images from Norway, please follow this link to see the show.

The images were all from Library of Congress, USA. Surely Norway was a beautiful country!

The sad thing is that this beauty doesn't exist anymore, only fractions of it.

Vårt entropiske samfunn

Mycket förenklat kan man säga att det finns två motsatta rörelser i världen. En mörk och en ljus. En som ödelägger och en som bygger upp. Den som förstör kallar jag här i boken för entropisk. Begreppet entropi kommer från fysiken, där det betecknar den förlust av energi som sker i stängda system till följd av varje form av rörelse. Överordnat skapar entropin en utvecklingsriktning i universum som med tiden kommer att utjämna alla skillnader till en jämn grå massa. De fysiska lagarna för termodynamik säger oss vidare att ju mer energi och därmed materia som omsätts, desto kraftigare är den samlade entropiska verkningen. Både metaforiskt och i praktiken utgör den industriella animaliska massproduktionen således ett våldsamt entropiskt kraftfält. Med centrum i djurens lidanden sprider den ut sig i världen som en självförstärkande spiral av förstörelse och avstympad känsloskuld. Det underminerar de ekologiska systemen och för oss längre och längre ut i standardiseringens och monotonins ödemark. Entropins motsättning finns emellertid i de krafter som frambringar livet på jorden. Genom att samla och fasthålla solens energi bygger livet upp en självförstärkande mångfald av former och skillnader. Sett i detta perspektiv utgör det ekologiska jordbruket en aktivt lysande motentropisk rörelse, eftersom det liksom livet självt främjar mångfald, gemenskap, mening och skönhet. – Skönhetens Befrielse av Morten Skriver, s. 45 (fri e-bok)

Tradisjonelt landbruk hadde ein avkastning på tre kaloriar for kvar kalori investert då varane kom til torgs. Moderne matproduksjon på andre sida forbrukar 7-10 kaloriar for kvar kalori produsert, i butikkhylla. Det gamle landbruket var eitt med den motentropiske krafta hjå fotosyntesen, grunnlaget for det meste av det vi kjenner av organisk liv, med unnatak av nokre bakteriar som livnærar seg av svovelbindingar.

Økologisk landbrukslandskap ved Ramme Gaard på Hvitsten

Ei anna motentropisk kraft, som diverre er mykje mindre kjend enn fotosyntesen, er dei femten livsverdiane. Desse er definerte av Christopher Alexander og er underbygde av vitskaplige observasjonar. Dei oppbyggande kreftene dei femten transformasjonane utgjer ligg bakom venleiken i naturen og kulturen, fram til moderniteten tok kvelartak på desse med ein altomfattande og mørk entropisk kraft. Det var berre ei tidsfråge før arkitekturen måtte koma opp med ein entropisk arkitektur i ”harmoni” med den industrielle kapitalismen og framandgjøringa av mennesket, som til då berre hadde gjort seg gjeldande i oppsplittinga av produksjonen, der den einskilde arbeidar endast kom i kontakt med delar utan å kjenne til nokon heilskap. Mennesket skulle endrast til ein maskin, eit abstrakt vesen der livet er lik ein grå masse heldt saman av konsumerismen sitt gylne ferniss.

Dei 15 eigenskapane hjå levande struktur:

• Levels of scale
• Strong centers
• Boundaries
• Alternating repetition
• Positive space
• Good shape
• Local Symmetries
• Deep interlock & ambiguity
• Contrast
• Gradients
• Roughness
• Echoes
• The Void
• Simplicity and Inner Calm
• Not-separateness

This tiger face is filled with centers. The eyes and the nose are the Strong Centers of this face. There are many Local Symmetries, starting with that of the whole face. There are Boundaries around the eyes or the nose. There is Contrast in the black and white colors of the fur around the eyes or the nose. There is Alternating Repetition of the stripes. There is Roughness in the fact that the stripes are not perfectly regular or symmetrical. - Tekst: Règis Medina - Foto: S. Taheri 

Eit av dei fremste kjenneteikna ved moderne arkitektur er fråveret av dei femten livsverdiane, dei som byggjer opp livet og held heilskapen i hop. I dag er desse arkitektane, den modernistiske staten og kapitalen sine lakeiar, i ferd med å leggje eit slør av død over fjordbyen Oslo, vår kjære hovudstad. Då hovudstaden har stor symboleffekt, er dette ein nærast ufatteleg tragedie for vårt fedreland.

Oslo hamn før Barcode. Måleri av John William Edy (1760 - 1820)

Raj Patel on Changing the Global Food System

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License and originally appeared at www.Bollier.org.

By David Bollier

Raj Patel has been tracking the pathologies of the global food system for many years. An activist and academic who teaches at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, Patel has just published a second, updated edition of his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

The problem with the food system is not that we don't produce enough calories to eradicate hunger, Patel notes. It's that the food system has its own priorities of institutional consolidation and profit, which means that more than 1 billion people in the world are malnourished and 2 billion are overweight – which is worse than when the first edition of Patel's book came out.

Patel has also been a serious student of the commons. His 2010 book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape the Market Society and Redefine Democracy, is a lucid overview of the fallaciious premises of market economics and its dismal performance. He also goes on at length about the ability of the commons paradigm to help ameliorate food sovereignty, environmental sustainability and social justice.

MST: The Landless Workers Movement

Recommended reading is a recent interview with Patel at Stir, the vigorous, commons-oriented British political journal founded by Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh. (Incidentally, Stir is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a print run of a book collecting some of its best articles.)

Here are a few excerpts from Stir’s interview with Patel:

On genetically modified crops & climate change: “We have an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agro-ecological farming systems will be able to feed the world in the future. The GM advocates are saying, “What about drought-resistance and climate-change-ready crops?” That seems to be nonsense! To have a crop that is climate-change-ready is ludicrous because change is precisely change — it is so many different things. It could be new pests, rains coming at the wrong time; it could be too much rain, or too much heat. It is impossible to have a single crop that is ready for those possible changes. We’ve already seen the limits of that because Monsanto has a product called ‘Drought Guard’ — a genetically-modified crop that performs no better than any conventional crop in resisting anything but a mild drought. The problem with this is that climate change isn’t about mild anything but extreme weather events.”

On fighting the food industry: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend any time asking the food industry to give us stuff — this is just a waste of effort. When you ask Coke, for example, to make their products more nutritious they will give us Diet Coke Plus (which I don’t believe was ever on sale in the UK). We already have regular Diet Coke which is a semi-toxic soup and then you add vitamins to it — and this is their solution. ‘You’ve asked for a more nutritious drink and we’ve added vitamins to it! What more do you want?’ This, of course, doesn’t answer any of the fundamental concerns addressed to the food industry and so I think the food industry will be brought along kicking and screaming. The answer then is not ask for a compromise but to demand the world that we want, whether this is the food world or any other. I think we often forget this.”

On the commons & the Rio+2- conference. "At the Rio Summit….what is being offered as a solution is the privatization of the planet in order to save it. The argument is that we have to sell off mother nature in order to protect her. This kind of market thinking is a catastrophe in the making and we have seen what happens when you commodify nature and business interests only want to profit from it. These are the same interests that caused the financial crisis."

"The mistake at Rio is thinking that the only way we can care about nature is through commodification and privatization. This is not true. The societies that are really good at managing resources, if we are given to the freedom to do so, through the idea of the commons are alive and well today. There is research produced recently that show that forest commons — communities that have enough freedom from government and corporations, and have enough land to survive a mistake or bad weather — are much better at sequestering carbon and looking after themselves. The understanding that privatization is not the answer and that we need to figure out other ways to value together is part of the solution."

Infolenker til Filippinene

Her er noen fine infolenker for Filippinene:

• Philguiden.com
• Philstart.com
• Batch2006.com
• Boholparadis.com

Øyriket Filippinene

Camouflaged Unnature

Bjerkebæk enterance building for the home of Sigrid Undset, Lillehammer. The mountain cabin this piece is about I didn't wanted to publish in case of copyright issues.

The same starchitect  that made the above building is now praised for making Norway's nicest mountain cabin, read the article here. 

This is of course camouflaged unnature using natural wood and stones. If the same cabin was made in concrete and steel most people would have revealed the trick.

Read my discussion on unnature and culture here.

Power to Which People?

Published Jul 12 2012 by Gaian Economics

by Molly Scott Cato

After years of claiming that resources were plentiful and that human ingenuity would find a way to replace those that were becoming exhausted, the capitalist elites have changed their tune. The McKinsey report Resource Revolution, which has already been discussed on this blog, was a clue to the shift in focus away from finance and towards resources, and today's ReSource conference in Oxford is part of the trend. The rich and powerful are lining up to ensure that they protect the unfair share of the earth's resources that they enjoy. Now that the finance scam has fallen apart they are adopting more direct strategies.

The clue is really in the doublethink of the conference title: 'Food Energy Water (for all)', just as the clue to the failure of Rio was in the deceptive title 'The future we want' rather than 'The future we want you to have'. The breathless publicity tells us that 'great thinkers and leaders' will converge on Oxford (where else?) and 'From politics to philanthropy, from the arts to the military, from business to academia, ReSource brings together the best in their fields'. Whether these people are representative of the world's population or representing anything other than their own self-interest is not questioned. These are global power players making decisions, economic decisions, about how resources will be allocated.

The conference is hosted by the university's Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and, in case you were sceptical about my claim about the link between resource control and finance, funded by the Rothschild Foundation. As nature proves to us daily that the scale of our economic activities threatens our future, those whose power depends on the existing economic model are using their considerable resources to manouevre themselves into a dominant position within the new paradigm. Having lately accepted that there are limits to resources, they now move to suggest that private interests are best placed to make decision about how those limited resources should be shared. This will ensure efficiency, we are told, while equity concerns are sidelined and the question of the appropriate forum for decision-making is entirely off the agenda.

On the green wing of the economics profession it has been an assumption for several decades that limits to growth must be taken seriously, the the earth's resources are limited, and that once we acknowledge this then we must move straight along to raise the question of how we decide a just and inclusive mechanism for deciding the allocation. This is at the heart of my proposal for a Bioregional Economy, which includes the suggestion that a participatory process of decision-making is vital to decide how we share the resources within the planetary boundary. The ReSource conference has entirely the opposite motivation: its very structure makes clear that the future sharing of the wealth of the earth is being decided by unelected elites in closed session.

Relatert lesing:

• Fra tapere til skapere – fra en global til en integral økonomi

Permaculture = Right-Wing Survivalism to Hardcore Socialists

My comment to David Harvey on the Fetishism of the Local and Horizontal:

"So, the solutions are going to have to be hierarchical to some extent and avoid the local fetishism I have been railing against before, whether it is called localism, local democracy or resilient communities (which looks often like right-wing survivalism to me)."

What this guy means is that permaculture = right-wing survivalism. I've come to learn lately that most classical socialists look upon permaculture this way.

Ironically I'm sure this guy will put A Pattern Language in the same category, in spite of its hierarchical structure. The hierarchy should be in the language, which is made up from the human hand of the people.

This guy also means, like Ross Wolf, that culture = unnature. Of course he then hates resilient communities, as in nature every part is resilient by itself, made up from a multitude of connections being part of a larger whole.

Capitalists and socialists are the same thing, as they both define culture as unnature, and permaculture then becomes like a read cloth in their face: http://permaliv.blogspot.no/2012/06/permaculture-nature-civilization.html

Right-wing survivalism according to David Harvey

My follow up comments:

Islamismen, en konsekvens av liberalismen

Min kommentar til artikkel hos Forskning.no:

Islamismen er et svar på liberalismen. Liberalismen har verdensherredømme i dag, og har i likhet med islamismen utviklet seg til en tyrannisk ideologi av tvungen "frihet" hvor ekspertene utgjør det moderne "presteskapet".

Selv har jeg akkurat plassert "The Tyranny of Liberalism" av James Kalb på nattbordhylla:

http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=382d08f6-153e-4eb3-ae56-c8c192d8050a&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Vi lever under en illusjon av frihet!

Islamismens raseri er en konsekvens av liberalismens tyranny

Anomie

This is the best essay I've read by Monbiot so far. Original article available here.

Enclosure and dispossession have driven us, like John Clare, all a little mad.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.

John Clare, 1793 – 1864

The land around Helpston, just to the north of Peterborough in Northamptonshire, now ranks among the most dismal and regularised tracts of countryside in Europe. But when the poet John Clare was born this coming Friday in 1793, it swarmed with life. Clare describes species whose presence there is almost unimaginable today. Corncrakes hid among the crops(1), ravens nested in a giant oak(2), nightjars circled the heath(3), the meadows sparkled with glow worms(4). Wrynecks still bred in old woodpecker holes(5). In the woods and brakes the last wildcats clung on(6).

The land was densely peopled. While life was hard and spare, it was also, he records, joyful and thrilling. The meadows resounded with children pranking and frolicking and gathering cowslips for their May Day games(7); the woods were alive with catcalls and laughter(8); around the shepherds’ fires, people sang ballads and told tales(9). We rightly remark the poverty and injustice of rural labour at that time; we also forget its wealth of fellowship.

All this Clare notes in tremulous bewitching detail, in the dialect of his own people. His father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days’ wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word(10). His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations onto the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale’s Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.

And then he sees it fall apart. Between 1809 and 1820, acts of enclosure granted the local landowners permission to fence the fields, the heaths and woods, excluding the people who had worked and played in them. Almost everything Clare loved was torn away. The ancient trees were felled, the scrub and furze were cleared, the rivers were canalised, the marshes drained, the natural curves of the land straightened and squared. Farming became more profitable, but many of the people of Helpston – especially those who depended on the commons for their survival – were deprived of their living. The places in which the people held their ceremonies and celebrated the passing of the seasons were fenced off. The community, like the land, was parcelled up, rationalised, atomised. I have watched the same process breaking up the Maasai of East Africa(11).

Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for Object-Oriented Designers

Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for Object-Oriented Designers

Two Growing Forces that are the Drivers of the Big Switch are the Commons and Occupy Movements

Two growing forces that are the drivers of the Big Switch are the Commons and Occupy movements. In this issue we celebrate their beautiful relationship. The concept of the Commons and the horizontal structure of the Occupy movement are two aspects of the same idea: as human beings, we share common resources (this planet, its air, water, soil and genetic diversity; our heritage of cultural creations—art, technology, ideas), and we share a common future. Put another way, focusing on the Commons is a way of articulating what the Occupy movement actually stands for: an open, horizontal, equitable, sharing of our social, economic, and ecological resources. - thefutureofoccupy.org

Photo: Diliff

A Nice Introduction to Alexander's Books and Theories

A very nice introduction to Alexander's books and theories from Project for Public Spaces (PPS):

Christopher Alexander

(follow the link)

Photo: Rob Hopkins

From the introduction:

Through these books and the PatternLanguage.com website, Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure have built a movement which, in their words, “lays the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will replace existing ideas and practices entirely.”

At the core of this movement is the idea that people should design houses, streets, and communities for themselves. This idea may imply a radical transformation of the architectural profession, but it emerges quite simply from the observation that most of the beautiful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. In 2002-2003 Alexander has pursued his interest in the community development through two projects in particular: the revitalization (redevelopment) of downtown Duncanville, Texas, and the creation of a new community in the hills near Brookings, Oregon.

“[Alexander is] one of the most influential people who has ever been in the design world. His influence on us, operationally, has been enormous.”
– Andres Duany, Founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism

“Alexander’s approach presents a fundamental challenge to us and our style-obsessed age. It suggests that a beautiful form can come about only through a process that is meaningful to people. It also implies that certain types of processes, regardless of when they occur or who does them, can lead to certain types of forms.”
– Thomas Fisher, Progressive Architecture

“In these postmodern times of distortional post-structural theories and cynical deconstructivist designs, Alexander’s work is a beacon illuminating a way to make the world more robust, beautiful, and kind… this vision and work may well inspire a new generation of practitioners and thinkers, and so a virtuous circle may proceed.”
– David Seamon, Professor in the Department of Architecture, Kansas State University

“Five hundred years is a long time, and I don’t expect many of the people I interview will be known in the year 2500. Christopher Alexander may be an exception.”

– David Creelman, Editor of HR Magazine

“[Alexander] is single-handedly trying to destroy the trillion dollar construction industry.”
– Joel Garreau, Author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

It's the 'Wanting' that Drives our Behavior, Not the 'Having'

Also, when I talk about expectations I mean in a brain/behavior sense. Our society - Europe and US and increasingly China and elsewhere - is habituated to high stimulation and high consumption. The key point I've learned from studying neuroscience and evolutionary biology is that it's the 'wanting' that drives our behavior, not the 'having'. And in our fast paced, gadget saturated world, our neural high water marks keep getting reset higher and higher. Every day we wake up expecting/needing a certain amount of dopamine/neural stimulation - and our culture has set us up to get these brain chemicals by consuming and competing for status using resource intensive ways. On a world with finite resources this is a problem as everyday people who already have everything they need, strive to get 'more'. This 'more' ends up being taken from other people, other species, and other generations. We have to find ways to get our evolutionary derived brain 'cocktails' in more benign ways. This, combined with the energy/credit constraints we face, is why I label our situation a 'longage of expectations', as opposed to a 'shortage of energy'. - Alexander Ač

Open Source Everything - Robert Steele

Robert Steele author of the book The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust joins us in an integrity inspired talk on his new book. "In the United States, where every form of organization from government to banks to labor unions has betrayed the public trust—is integrity. Also lacking is public intelligence in the sense of decision-support: knowing what one needs to know in order to make honest decisions for the good of all, rather than corrupt decisions for the good of the few.

The Open-Source Everything Manifesto is a distillation of author, strategist, analyst, and reformer Robert David Steele life's work: the transition from top-down secret command and control to a world of bottom-up, consensual, collective decision-making as a means to solve the major crises facing our world today. The book is intended to be a catalyst for citizen dialog and deliberation, and for inspiring the continued evolution of a nation in which all citizens realize our shared aspiration of direct democracy—informed participatory democracy. Open-Source Everything is a cultural and philosophical concept that is essential to creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for one hundred percent of humanity. The future of intelligence is not secret, not federal, and not expensive. It is about transparency, truth, and trust among our local to global collective. Only "open" is scalable."

As we strive to recover from the closed world corruption and secrecy that has enabled massive fraud within governments, banks, corporations, and even non-profits and universities, this timely book is a manifesto for liberation—not just open technology, but open everything.

http://www.phibetaiota.net/category/ose/manifesto-extracts/

CRESC Annual Conference, Sept 2011, Manchester UK - Nikos Salingaros