The Gift

The Gift

The gift
And the feeling behind the gift
The character of the giving
The process and action
Which presented this gift.

A dance around the question
Of selfishness
And selflessness
An attempt to act
In a way which is ‘Right’

To offer each action up
As some recompense
Or sacrifice
For my no doubt myriad other sins?
Failures to take it
To stand where I am
Speak what I think
Not lie
Nor circumvent
Look for easy paths
Short cuts
That avoid a necessary journey.

And in this search for ‘Rightness’
I sense a ghost
Of lost romance
Broken eros
Trying to reform as agape
Afraid of eros
Afraid of breaking.
In a woman
In Love
There was a bridge
out of an isolated sense of self
Love is the Magick
But now where does the bridge lead?

A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants

This assignment has led me to reflect on my creativity in a number of ways and also to consider the role that an artistic attitude and creative engagement might play in a human ecology perspective. I will explore this through personal narrative, thoughts around my poem The Gift (which itself reflects on creativity) and interaction with the texts of others.

Over the years I have engaged with creativity in a number of ways, and I remember how as a child I enjoyed the play of art making. Around the time of adolescence my relationship moved from being primarily a producer of creative activity to becoming a receiver and commentator. I studied literature for three years at university and later studied cinema for a year. In between I worked in the art school’s library surrounded by volumes of artistic expression and by creative artists themselves – painters, sculptors, weavers, and performance artists, artists exploring time, space and materials in a thousand different ways.

I had (have) friends who were (are) poets, painters, musicians and my brother makes his living designing clothes. I read and read, I have visited art galleries around the world, worked in cinema archives, maniacally bought and consumed recorded music, seen music performed live innumerable times. Through out much of this time I attended little to my own creativity. In many ways I was like the ‘shadow artist’ described in The Artist’s Way (Cameron, 1995) “Shadow artists often choose shadow careers-those close to the desired art, even parallel to it, but not the art itself”(p.27).

But I was not completely cut off from my own creativity – I wrote poetry, furtively, not for general consumption; and I scribbled, doodled, sketched on hundreds of pieces of scrap paper. I took photographs; I took a class in photography.

As I grew older, I became more confident in expressing myself in these ways – though that expression remained largely without an audience, and while I didn’t hide away what I did neither did I make any effort to share my output. I remained caught in a problematic conception of art and creativity. The need for me create and the value I felt in creativity was tempered by a perceived sense of the low value of my creative output.

I recently encountered the work of psychologist Guggenbühl-Craig on creativity and this formalised a lot of my only partly consciously thoughts. Guggenbühl-Craig divides the concept of creativity into three distinct manifestations, which he describes as: personal creativity, collective creativity and transcendent creativity.

He is dismissive of the first kind, writing that (Guggenbühl-Craig, 1995) “we should not refer to personal creativity as creativity at all”; we should in fact refer to it as “self-development, self-expression or something similar” (p.7). By collective creativity he meant the work of the advertising and fashion industries that attempt to follow and shape the zeitgeist. Finally, in transcendent creativity he identifies what we conventionally consider ‘high art’ – the work of ‘geniuses’ Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo etc.

For several years I had been dismissing my creativity as not really “creativity at all”, and thus of little value. I was in fact devaluing my self and my actions, looking back on this now it is easy to see both that this mirrored my sense of political agency and that many others seemed to be trapped by this same dynamic. In placing a low value on what I could personally achieve, and deferring value to others I was handing away my own power. I felt so dwarfed by the attempt to reach that transcendent creativity, the only art in which I was socialized to find value that I tended to not act at all. This is what Cameron (1995) describes as debilitating perfectionism “Part of the game here is lining up the masters and measuring our baby steps against their perfected craft” (p.121).

This inertia, the sense of being daunted by the scale of the task immediately resonates for me with my own and others’ feelings about global ecological problems and issues of social justice. I wondered if there might be support from artists and radical politics that might suggest routes out of this way of thinking.

Audre Lorde (1984) in a perfect challenge to Guggenbühl-Craig’s value division of creativity writes “yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference-between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” (p.58).

I found that the surrealists spoke of a ‘communism of genius’, and that the situationists made a revolutionary call for an ‘art made by all or not at all’ (Debord, 1957). Similar sentiments to Lorde’s were evident in the Fluxus movement (Higgins, 1984) “They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants "” (p.87).

The therapist Thomas Moore (1994) offered another take suggesting the association of creativity with “lofty fantasises of exceptional achievement’” (p.198) is a juvenile romanticization of the creative act. He suggests we bring our idea of creativity down to earth and realise the role of creativity in our everyday lives. He proposes that human creativity is “a participation in the act of God creating the cosmos”, but this lofty claim is rooted in quotidian practice “As we do our daily work, make our homes and marriages, raise our children, and fabricate a culture, we are all being creative” (p.199).

The artist Joseph Beuys formulated an idea of artistic practice he called ‘Social Sculpture’, in which all humans are seen as ‘artists’ responsible for the shaping of a democratic and sustainable social order. He wrote that we are all, everyday working with “invisible materials”:

Thinking Forms - how we mould our thoughts or

Spoken Forms - how we shape our thoughts into words or

SOCIAL SCULPTURE - how we mould and shape the world in which we live:
Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.
(Harlan, 2004)(p.9).

These ideas are all rich to me, fertile with possibilities of how I might live life and how creative practice might play a role in social engagement.


To thine own self be true

As I was considering the creative element of this assignment I was reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. In this book Hyde (2006) makes the case that “the art that matters to us – which moves the heart or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience – that work is received by us as a gift is received” (p.xiv). In considering the transactions of art as gift exchanges he writes of other gift economies – a modern one referred to by sociologists is blood donation (Titmuss, 1971).

While I pondered creativity and what this gift quality might mean, I also thought on the importance of these convivial actions that form a sense of world. So I made an appointment and a few weeks ago I donated blood. The session took place in Conway Hall a “hub for free speech and progressive thought” (Anon. 2007).

I took a place on a bed and a phlebotomist examined my left arm. Unable to find a vein, she said she would need to try my other arm and had me turn about head to tail. She quickly found a vein on my right arm but it was close to the surface, it would likely bruise she said, but this might elicit sympathy for me. Calling a colleague over, they considered another vein – one that was deeper, less accessible, reaching which might cause more discomfort.

They successfully punctured it and left me reclining, right hand gripping and releasing to act as a pump – hand become another heart at the extremity of my arm. Now, as I had been turned about, I faced the stage of the main hall and I found myself staring directly at a legend painted upon the proscenium arch:

“TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE”

It was the only thing available to read for the 10 minutes of the session, and filled my attention. I remembered it being from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius’s advice to Laertes. In this period of contemplation two words stood out from the others: “SELF” and “TRUE”. The Human Ecology course has led me to consider anew questions of identity, and my recent reading and thoughts have constellated about ideas of the transpersonal. These ideas have challenged me to think about where my sense of self begins and ends, to consider an expanded sense of self. Now this line also challenged me, forcing me to ask: what I considered “self”, what constituted my “own self” and what was/is “true” to that self? How could I be true to an expanded sense of self? In any creative expression how could I speak truly?

In The Artist’s Way, Cameron (1995) writes of synchronicity, the attractive force of action in the world, that when one acts, one draws towards oneself what one needs (pp.62-67). Although dubious about this idea I was struck in the following week to find the line “to thine own self be true” again: in Cameron (1995) (p.80) and then in Carol Gilligan (1982) (p.135). This question of a true self seemed determined to be confronted.

In not going for the shallow vein, the phlebotomist’s decision to first choose my right arm, my writing arm and then to go for the deeper vein that would be more difficult, possibly painful seemed like a message to deepen my own enquiries. So in writing for this assignment I felt the need to explore in poetry what the creative act might mean to me, how it might function in my life, and what it might serve.

I was aware that my past writing had often been born of emotional turmoil, out of the fracturing of romantic love. Applying more thought to the issue I noticed how questions of love and creativity had become entwined in my imagination.

I realised that, for me, both art and love were a ‘bridge’, a pathway out of a purely individual conception of self toward a communion with other – be that a lover or a more abstracted sense of ‘audience’. When this link had been the bridge of romantic love – the destination had been one other person – but in making a leap from oneself a connection to everything outside the individual self was made possible. The creative act was in itself an act of love because it was about the formation of relationship.

I wondered in The Gift whether perhaps a bridge toward community and a “more-than-human”(Abram, 1997)(p.22) world would require a different kind of love – not eros (romantic love) not even what the ancient Greeks called philia (familial, brotherly love) but something of what Christians understand by the term agape (unconditional ‘divine’ love). I discovered that Lorde (1984) also wrote of this bridging quality of love, but without the need to divide up love she simply expanded the conception of the erotic. She writes that the spiritual and political are connected and “the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings” (p.56).

I believe that by engaging with our creativity we participate in forging a better world, that an artistic approach to life might form a cornerstone of activism, I feel inspired by these words of Robert Sardello (1999) “Beauty, which will be here defined as the act of living artistically, is love made visible in the world. Artistic living consists of the ability to display, through our actions and attitudes, the power of soul and spirit in the world” (p.209). Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, indirectly, inspired much of my thinking here, has been seen as a core text of the birth of individualism in humanistic thought – a form of consciousness that encouraged an isolated self perception, a separation of what we consider ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ ourselves (Bloom, 1998)(Johnson, 1991)(Lane, 1996). That powerful line “To thine own self be true” also seems to contain the beginnings of another conception however, that of a truer vision of selfhood. Creative engagement, considered as an act of love, of giving, seems a way that I might find that a truer self.

References

Abram, David (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, Vintage.
Anon. (2007) A Brief History of Conway Hall [online]. Available from: http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/conwayhallhistory.htm [Accessed 13th February 2008].
Bloom, Harold (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York NY, Riverhead Books.
Cameron, Julia (1995) The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self. London, Pan Books.
Debord, Guy (1957) Report on the Construction of Situations In: Ken Knabb (Ed. and Trans.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf (1995) From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Psychology. Woodstock CN, Spring.
Harlan, Volker (Ed.) (2004) What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Forest Row, Clairview Books.
Higgins, Dick A Child’s History of Fluxus In: Charles Bernstein et al. (eds) (1984) Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press.
Hyde, Lewis (2006) The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. Edinburgh, Canongate.
Johnson, Robert A. (1991) Transformations: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness. San Francisco CA, HarperCollins.
Knabb, Ken (Ed. and Trans.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Lane, John (1996) A Snake’s Tail Full of Ants: Art, Ecology and Consciousness. Dartington, Resurgence).
Lorde, Audre Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power In: Audre Lorde (1984) Sister Outsider. Freedom CA, The Crossing Press.
Moore, Thomas (1994) Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. New York NY, HarperPerennial.
Sardello, Robert (1999) Freeing the Soul from Fear. New York NY, Riverhead Books.
Titmuss, Richard M. (1971) The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London, George Allen & Unwin.

Imagine No Possessions

To Have Or To Be

Erich Fromm

Jonathan Cape, Great Britain, 1978

We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse

James Hillman & Michael Ventura

HarperCollins, USA, 1992

_______________________________________________________________

As the global situation deteriorates in the face of resource depletion, climate change and ecological destruction it is becoming increasingly apparent that the roots of our problems may not be primarily scientific, political or economic but rather psychological and spiritual. Change toward a sustainable and equitable society will require a paradigm shift in our conception of the world and an expansion in our sense of self if our actions on other levels are to be truly effective. These two books by eminent therapists provide psychological approaches that offer a diagnosis of the global situation, reading back from the symptoms and the “presenting issues” to find the underlying causes and a process that offers a means of healing. To differing degrees they advise how we might think differently so that psychological and spiritual inquiry might be fed back as engaged action into the scientific, political and economic spheres.

Erich Fromm's book is an academically rigorous, referenced work aimed at a wide popular audience, and is written in such a way as to communicate easily. His theme in To Have Or To Be is set out concisely by his title, that humanity faces a choice between two modes of existence: that of having (ownership, possession, domination, an experience of the world as a collection of objects) and that of being (belonging, reciprocity, becoming, a relation to the world as a communion of subjects). Human society has been pursuing the first mode up to the point of our current crises; Fromm considers the second mode to be the necessary base for our salvation from them.

Crucially, however, Fromm also believes that switching modes alone is not enough to produce effective action. Social change results from a transformation in what he calls the ‘social character’, a blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socio-economic structure of which the individual is part. To alter that socio-economic structure we require new social forms ‘that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary and what is possible’. Sadly the more detail Fromm provides as regards action, the more apparent the historical distance between the period of authorship and the present becomes. The existing socio-economic structures he discusses have already gone thorough a series of changes. While the ‘fake socialism’ of the USSR he decries has fallen with that state, the capitalism he bemoans has proceeded, as he feared, to even greater triumph in dictating the direction of the world. Also, when he espouses the ‘energizing attraction of a new vision’ he states it with the caveat that the chances of a change in the mode of existence of the global population ‘remain slim’. Three decades on from its initial publication I found it difficult not to assume the disempowering stance that those slim chances will have attenuated to extreme emaciation, if not impossibility across the intervening years.

James Hillman and Michael Ventura's book We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse plays off the interaction of two voices - the learned sagacity of Hillman and the New Journalism of Ventura. The resulting tone is populist, informal, conversational and determinedly in your face, an instant contrast to the structured prose of Fromm. The statement late in Fromm's book that ‘[p]urely psychological change... has been completely ineffective’ is however at the core of the Hillman/Ventura dialogues. In fact, as their title reveals, their book exhibits anxiety about the solipsism of the current therapeutic mode, of a psychological inquiry that only looks inward not outward at a worsening world. The authors counsel that we have become a little too obsessed, possessed even, by “our” problems. Hillman pointedly notes that ‘[p]ersonal growth doesn't automatically lead to political results’. He also poses a question to Ventura: ‘could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?’

Ventura relates an exchange with his son about agency in the world in the face of ‘ecological disaster’ and the authors offer him and us a look at the worst and a challenge in how to act. The purpose of concerned souls, they propose, is found in ‘trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important’. They suggest these might be ‘ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people’. This is a call to build resilience in what we cherish, to maintain what is valuable in being human, and to support hope. Hillman and Ventura’s choice to share authorship and to present their ideas in this discursive form provides a literal example of dialogic relating and a conversation I certainly felt we were invited to join.

What both books propose is an expansion of our sense of self, of soul - beyond the skin of the individual to include the flesh of the world, the world soul, anima mundi. This transpersonal sense of self would end divisions, dualisms such as man/nature or world/self and extend our essential concerns across the entire ecosphere. Hillman writes ‘I would rather define self as the interiorization of community’ that is: include within the sense of self that which has previously been considered outside self. This is where the psychological gains a spiritual dimension, as this expanded non-dual conception is akin to the ‘you are that’ of Vedanta or Martin Buber’s call for the boundless relationship of an I-Thou rather than an I-It attitude towards the world. But the authors of both books stress the necessity of turning insights outwards; the psychical and the spiritual must drive action in and with the world. Effecting global change cannot be programmatic, domineering - the problems we face cannot be solved at the same level we were at when we created them. Our solutions must be creative, participatory and dialogic. In facing the challenges ahead it is clear that our heads and hearts must share the task of our hands, we need a praxis bold as love.

Orphic Trinity - Orphic Resonance

Last night I attended the first of the Gaia Foundation’s 2007 evenings, this one with Brian Goodwin, leader of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher college (and thus a close colleague of the previous speaker Stephan Harding’s whose talk I covered here).

As you would expect there were many parallels with Stephan Harding’s talk, and both were based around new publications – in Harding’s case Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, in Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Both speakers made the case for holistic versus reductionist science and for a reappraisal and acceptance of animism – the belief that a “soul” or “spirit” existed in every object, even if it was inanimate.

Goodwin asked us to reconsider the stories of science, by telling different stories we find a different path. Following a Jungian, archetypal model Goodwin identified a “new” story that has emerged in our culture, which is actually the re-emergence of an old story – which alters our perceptions on science and opens up through animism a new connection with nature. This story is the myth of the Orphic Trinity – Chaos, Gaia and Eros.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim
Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros,
fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and
overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men
within them.”
Hesiod, Theogeny (c.700 BC)

Goodwin posited the era of the 1960’s as the genesis point of this archaic revival, first with the re-emergence of Chaos in the work of mathematician Edward N Lorenz. Lorenz attempting to apply mathematical modelling to meteorological phenomena and weather prediction discovered that apparently small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. These variations in initial conditions could be so numerous and so slight that they made accurate prediction of future effects impossible. What he described as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow has become better known as Chaos and has become an important part of mathematical and scientific enquiry. It would appear, as some anarchists and magickian’s claim: that “chaos never died”.

"Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Edward N. Lorenz, paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972)

“For the mass of practicing scientists... the change did not matter immediately... But they were aware of something called chaos... More and more of them realized that chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data... chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science.”
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

The second element of this archaic revival was the re-emergence of Gaia in the pioneering earth systems science work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This work finally gained its crucial nomenclature as a result of a conversation between the neighbours Lovelock and novelist William Golding in 1969.

“Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.”
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”

The final element of the trilogy is Eros, the force of love, also known as Eleutherios, "the liberator" and through that shared role connected with Dionysus – god of intoxication, music, peace, the civilizing urge – and thus also connected with Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries (I wrote about some of this previously in The Rebirth of Orpheus over at Rubedo). Goodwin asked the audience “who here lived through the 1960s? Can you recognise anything familiar here in the aspects of this deity?”

“THE COURT: "Erotic," did you say?
THE WITNESS: Erotic.
THE COURT: E-R-O-T-I-C?
THE WITNESS: Eros. That means love, your Honor.”
From the Court Testimony of Timothy Leary at the trial of the Chicago 7 (1970)

“Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.”
Lennon/McCartney, All You Need is Love (1967)

Goodwin indicated that we are still in the process of integrating these archetypal forces into our science and into our culture, with the attractive force of Eros suffering from most neglect.

The discovery of DNA by Rosalind Frankin (Crick, Watson, Wilkins etc.) in 1953, with its beautiful double helix formation began a quest in the biological sciences to decode the organism and gain some total understanding of life. Goodwin quoting Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene presented the case that the completion of the human genome project had, rather than bringing such a total understanding, in fact revealed how large the gap is between genetic information and biological meaning. How the particular structure of organisms develop largely remains a mystery, there is some embodied meaning in the cells which is inaccessible to consciousness. Goodwin posits that the development and organisation of form by cellular DNA occurs through the action of a kind of language – and that particular forms are the stories told in that language.

Thus herbalists may develop the ability to read the story of a plant as manifest by its form and intuit the qualities of that plant. The holistic enquiries of wise women and cunning men from the era before reductionism took hold may have genuinely born a “shamanic knowing” that is not only dismissed by our modern science but is beyond its conception. Goodwin stated that meaning is “immanent” not “transcendent” – when science attempts to de-particularise and abstract, it in fact moves further from rather than close to meaning.

So Goodwin asked, how do we engage with this? How do we go about re-integrating this sense of nature in our science and culture? How do we achieve harmony with our fellow entities? Relating this back to the Gaia Foundation’s work and the influence of theologian Thomas Berry, Goodwin suggested that by beginning to change our conceptions we participate in a greater change in consciousness, that this is part of “engaging in the great work” – the alchemical transformation of ourselves and society – the paradigm shift which might be understood as the Magnum Opus.

Slumming It

"The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it'll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway."

Mile Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt in “Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities”

On Monday evening I went over to RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) to see a talk by Mike Davis, the American cultural historian, political activist, social commentator etc. (you may remember me linking to his piece on Dubai in a post last year). Davis is in London all week doing a series of events on different subjects ranging from the future of the “New Left” to his new book: Buda’s Wagon: A Brief. History of the Car bomb.

The RIBA event was billed in different places as being about “Architecture and Climate Change” or his earlier book Planet of Slums. I was happy to hear about either, and it actually turned out to be about both and about much more. The issue of climate change was neatly folded back on to and revealed in the light of the economic hegemony of neo-liberal globalisation.

Having become pretty disillusioned with “leftist” politics and generally feeling that, while the intellectual analyses and critical techniques of Marxist and Socialist thought were still valuable, close association with these as part of a political programme was an ideological trap that kept us in a dualistic dead end – it was amazingly invigorating to be shaken about a bit by a serious hardcore mind from the Left.

The social and ecological strands met in an examination of the emerging “landscapes of inequality”, where resource depletion and climactic change are already causing the migrations and tensions over migration which many see as an unavoidable part of the global future. Davis focussed on the American South West, especially the US/Mexico borderlands – the area he is most familiar with – but also referred to the analogous spaces of the Mediterranean, and the near Middle East.

I went to the talk imagining that Davis would be outside the energy descent sphere and that I would be taking what he said and doing my own mental associations and analysis to assimilate what I learnt there with what I’m learning from elsewhere. It quickly became apparent that I wouldn’t be required to make the connections alone – “peak oil” and “peak water” rolled off Davis’ tongue with familiarity, he referred to suburbanisation and Kunstler, he could see what was coming.

When it came to the environmental issues, Davis reinforced what I’m increasingly learning: that the necessity for consensus in the IPCC report, and the lead in time on the data it is produced from mean that it reflects a “moderate” view far from the beliefs and predictions of many serious and significant climate analysts, and that new information is already radically reshaping our view of what might be currently occurring. Most significant is the rising body of opinion and data indicating rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves, concomitant sea level rises, the passing of several significant tipping points, and the possibility that, as Lovelock suggests, the Earth is adjusting to a new hot state – that we could be seeing the end of the Holocene.

After years of it being on my list of “to reads”, Davis’ compelling prose style has finally led to me picking up his “LA book” City of Quartz, which is excellent and I think that pretty much everything else he has written is going to have to follow… One thing I am especially interested in following up on, is encapsulated in the quote at the top of the entry. A lot of my current thoughts are about the possibility of Transition Cities - a scaled up version of the Transition Town idea. My gut feeling was that a city the size of London (let alone one the size of Bombay or Karachi say) could not effectively and sustainably function in a state of energy descent. Recent conversations and other inputs (not least Stewart Brand's "City Planet" lecture at the Long Now Foundation) have encouraged me to re-examine this supposition. I will return to this issue as my ideas develop.

Weary of Time

Last Sunday the Renoir Cinema had a screening of “Ah! Sunflower” a 1967 documentary on Allen Ginsberg in London originally shot for WDR Television in Germany (now available on DVD from The Picture Press). The screening was introduced and later discussed by the novelist psychogeographer Iain Sinclair who had participated in the films production. The programme also included some short films, loosely gathered under the sobriquet “Beat London”.

In the introduction Sinclair read from Kodak Mantra Diaries, an account of the period which formed his first prose work (recently republished by Beat Scene magazine). Forty years old, some of Ginsberg’s words at the conference The Dialectics of Liberation sliced through the intervening period. Prescience or a further record of how long we have had knowledge and not action?

We can leave the planet
We can destroy the planet
We’ve never had history with those possibilities
We’ve had little wars in Asia
Or wars between America & Europe
But we never had a whole planet that could blow itself up
Or could destroy itself WITHOUT even blowing itself up
By destroying its forests
& changing its weather
& making carbon dioxide all over
Raising the temperature of the earth
Melting the polar ice cap
Causing a flood again

Art (not just) for Art's Sake

Last year I read the revised edition of Suzi Gablik's 1984 book Has Modernism Failed which dealt quite a lot with how divorced from the "world" art was becoming in the 20th Century - disappearing up its own fundament in a post-modern frenzy of self-congratulation and self-flagellation.

Well here we are in the 21st Century, I wonder if anything is different? I think there is a movement towards more meaningful engagement - but perhaps that is because I don't really look to the art world "greats", the largely male celebrity figures of the art world for my artistic fix. I'd rather stick with the marginal figures, the unknowns, the gallery system rejects and refuseniks. I don't really want some totalitarian style social realism, neither am I normally turned on by agit-prop - nevertheless I do sometimes enjoy an art piece which actually says something.


I've recently seen a few things that "say something" which I've quite enjoyed. Graphic work by James Joyce for the Stop Climate Chaos campaign - some of his work is currently on display at The Social. Photo-montages by veteran trouble maker Peter Kennard (sadly I missed his recent exhibition). Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher's installation at the Gillespie gallery last year. In these works the politics, while central, do not take over to the denigration of their artistic appeal. That is to say that the aesthetics and the politics are in symbiosis, rather than one being in service to the other.

But for some reason I still find Mark Wallinger's Tate Britain installation "State Britain" a bit wanky. Not that I have seen it in the flesh, but the whole idea seems to be to take a political act and turn into an artistic one. I think maybe I'm looking for something going in the opposite direction?

IMAGES: Santa's Ghetto (2006) by Peter Kennard; Dump the Dinosaurs (2006) by James Joyce; the sound of stones in the glass house (2006) by Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher; and Brian Haw's Protest (2006?) photographed by Mark Wallinger.

A Day of Permacultural Fun

Anybody out there in the London area thinking about Permaculture, but feeling they need to know a little more about it before committing to an Intro course or full Design course? Then this may be the event for you:

A Day of Permacultural Fun

* Ever wondered about Permaculture?
* Wondering where to take your garden's design next?
* Want to be more involved in active sustainable solutions in your
neighbourhood?

Join us on the 13th Jan 2007 for introductions and celebrations from 2-5pm @
the Hornbeam Centre, 458 Hoe Street, E17 (nr Bakers Arms junction).
The cafe will be serving up South Korean vegan fayre, coffee and cake from 11-4

Regular weekly organic fruit and veg stall from 10-3pm selling wide range of
fresh produce and including seasonal specials.

2-3pm: Introduction to permaculture. Designing for people, communities and
the environment. Find out about weekend courses in North London - guaranteed
to make you view problems and solutions differently.

3-4pm: Video showing 'The Power of Communities'. Your chance to see this
inspirational video documenting Cuba's experience of Peak Oil and
trasformation to a low-energy society. Followed by short discussion about
local opportunities for action.

4-5pm: Exclusive 'book launch'- Earth Writings by Graham Burnett. 3 decades
of 'earth right' articles and artwork from punk to permaculture - with
readings and discussion.

Brought to you by:
Organiclea Community Growers www.organiclea.org.uk
Naturewise www.naturewise.org.uk
Spiralseed www.spiralseed.co.uk

for more info contact 07786657713

Animating the Earth

One of the advantages of moving back to London this year has been the proximity and frequency of interesting events one could attend. In fact it can be overpowering at times and in fact lead to a profound inertia. Also it can be quite expensive, so it’s always good to find events that one is both interested in and which are free. All of which is a preamble to saying that after the Pugwash event on Tuesday, I went to a Gaia Foundation event last night – 2 things in 2 days!

The Gaia Foundation is another organisation which is new to me, but probably not to all of you as it has been working for over 20 years “to protect and enhance biological and cultural diversity”. Amongst its activities are regular Gaia Evenings with visiting speakers, which last night featured Dr Stephan Harding.

Dr Stephan Harding is the resident ecologist at Schumacher College and the coordinator there of the MSc in Holistic Science. Earlier in the year he published the book Animate Earth, which I greatly enjoyed – so it was a great pleasure to be able to slip up the road from Golders Green to Hampstead and hear him speak.

And what a speaker! He is extremely funny, a great communicator and carries the bearing of a man who really know his subject. He was also a wonderful palliative to the doom of the Pugwash event the day before. He did not avoid the darkside though and began his talk with a look at the “bad news” showing a large series of graphs indicating the enormous growth in various undesirable factors between 1750 and 2000. I tried to note all these down in some autistic flurry of fact gathering: population; damming of wild rivers; water usage; artificial fertilizer usage; decline in ocean ecosystems; loss of biodiversity; incursion of farmland into wild nature; paper usage; number of McDonalds “restaurants” (this one has really taken off since 1750); CO2 in the atmosphere; CH4 in the atmosphere; ozone depletion; motor vehicles…. That’s not all of them either. He continued the “bad news” section with the IPCC’s infamous hockey stick graph; a chart showing declines in the Living Planet Index between 1970 and 2000; and the News Economics Foundation’s national eco footprints (For the global population to reach UK levels of consumption would require 3.1 Earths, US levels 5.3 Earths).

All of this reflects a crisis in out world view, as we have effectively made “A War on Nature”, with destruction apparently an emergent property of our culture. The war analogy reminded me of part of Lovelock’s talk in which he compared the current global situation to the situation of the UK in 1940 awaiting the invasion of the enemy. Now, Lovelock said, we are at “war with the Earth”. Harding suggested that there were a number of points in time which we might focus on as the beginning of the crisis moment. In passing he mentioned the idea that the agricultural revolution could be that moment (the movement from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic which Anti-Civ thinkers dwell on), but instead chose to talk about the 400 year old mistake kicked off by the scientific revolution.

Harding sees the mistake of the scientific revolution to be the privileging of the quantitative over the qualitative. He characterised this viewpoint with three quotes:

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” – Galileo Galilei

“I have described the Earth and the whole visible Universe in the manner of a machine” – Rene Descartes

“[We must] endeavour to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe” – Francis Bacon

Harding spoke of how this reduction of what is real down to mathematics, the mechanistic, and the quantitative - denied the value of appearance, of feelings. The scientific method demanded that qualitative reactions be ignored, that in fact scientists – like biologists performing live dissections - were under pressure to overcome their revulsion to their actions in order to “join the tribe”. Harding views this schism to have produced a kind of global schizophrenia – the opposition of quantitative and qualitative; facts and values; culture and nature. In order to heal this schism, we need to reassess our relationship with nature and to expand our mechanistic world view.

In order to do this, Harding suggest we look back to an old idea from Western culture that of Anima Mundi or Psyche Cosmu. Harding sees the tradition of animism or pan-psychism that has continued in Western though through Leibniz, Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead to offer an opportunity to bring a new sensibility to culture and science. Here the archetype of Gaia has an important role to play.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Gaia, the ever-sure foundations of all” Hesiod, Theogony

The re-emergence of Gaia as an archetypal image in western culture after thousands of years of exile through the scientific work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis – has provided a way of understanding the world which can re-associate ourselves with a healthy holistic view of life and the Earth.

Harding went on to present how the Gaia hypothesis turned over the conventional view of the relationship between Earth’s biota and its abiotic environment. He presented some of the science that demonstrates how life on the planet modifies the atmosphere and uses positive and negative feedback loops to keep a balance. However rather than sticking to a dry scientific presentation, he presented the material in the form of a story – applying characteristics to the elements. So Oxygen was the passionate Italian of the period table, Carbon the placid Swede, Calcium the entrepreneur – and in his story Carbon was a prince, Calcium a Princess and the chemical reaction that brought them together was officiated by priestly water, that allowed their previous bonds to be broken and a new union to occur. So in this story carbon was removed from the atmosphere and locked into chalk. The story was an action in practice of applying animistic principles to science – revealing its value in altering our perception of the world; of developing understanding; and as a pedagogical device.

Harding finished with what he believed was the challenge facing our culture, the move from the conventional viewpoint which made the biosphere beholden to the “economy”, to an ecological viewpoint which makes the economy beholden to the biosphere. All this was a pleasant change from the business as usual paradigm I sensed at the Pugwash event. On reflection I don't suppose any of the speakers at the Pugwash event could really believe that we could continue with our current globalised capitalist economics - but didn't they have a duty to make that explicit? I understand from conversation with Stephan Harding after that talk that Lovelock uses the term "sustainable retreat" in favour of "sustainable development" which he considers impossible. The other great factor of Harding's talk in comparison with the Pugwash event, was how it showed science could serve a more integrated purpose, its radicalism was its greatest feature.

In the questions period after the presentation there was conversation about the absolute importance of localisation and community building, and also about the kind of global economics/politics that could best effect useful change - this quickly got into a conversation about TEQs (tradeable energy quotas), cap and trade, contraction and convergence and I have to admit useful as these schemes may be I always see these as more "market" solutions - and I'm not sure the market can truly solve this mess.

All the global economic tinkering -that's the 'big' stuff, the 'little' stuff is what we need to be getting on with - building those local networks, those communities - so shop local, get to know your neighbours start particpating in the future you want.

The 5 Questions

I’ve been reading a fair bit of Derrick Jensen’s work recently (as have my compadres Mark and Keith). It has been an interesting mind bath, that’s taken off some dirty thinking I’d missed earlier and revealed some sores that are sensitive to the hot water of his thought.

Keith has had some interesting thoughts on Jensen and his attitudes towards religion (is his tarring of all faiths with one brush a weakness in his usual incisive analysis?), and of course the question of violence is an ever present one. Jeff Vail’s “Derrick Jensen vs. the Dalai Lama” is a good starting point for that discussion.

A comment from Keith on the availability or no of video showing Jensen (we feel the need to see someone, to hear them) sent me off to find the above clip on YouTube/GooTube, and this and this on it’s daddy Google Video. The GooTube clip has Jensen asking you 5 questions and is part of the series put out by Dropping Knowledge.

Also some audio of Jensen available here.

Chasing the Perfect

My thoughts of a while back on Modernism in architecture and elsewhere, were rekindled today when Keith forwarded on an article by Natalia Ilyin from Adbusters.

In “The Birth of Modernism” Ilyin considers how the First World War impacted on the shape and style of Modernism. She makes a brief but strong case for how Modernism is an architectural style born out of fear rather than love – using the biography of Walter Gropius as evidence in proof.

The idea could certainly do with a lot more fleshing out, but that fleshing out would be a worthwhile project and I think that she is on the right track already. Apparently this article is excerpted from her book Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Design in Our Time (Bellerophon Publications, 2006) - so I guess it's fleshed out there. If I didn’t already have a modernist skyscraper of books beside my bed to read, this would surely be added to the reading list (I’m banking on downtime at Xmas as my only hope now of getting this pile under control).

The Omnivore's Dilemma

My most recent read has been the excellent book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.

Jeremiad

Just back from Barcelona, living the good life for a while. How many more years will that be possible? Not that I think that life will be "bad" per se, but it's difficult to be entirely optimistic. And this kind of week long city break using cheap airlines is almost certainly in its final days. I read Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words while away, which is a truly great book - and I'm now started on Book 1 of his new Endgame opus. Dig the pic? I do, it accompanies a new interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the latest Rolling Stone in which he adds his voice to the peak oil debate "What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum". You can read some of the piece "Vonnegut's Apocalypse" online. Squeezed out another maudlin poem "Jagged Mountain" while away, you can read it over at Rubedo.

I-man satta at the mountain top Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot

One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that the empty socket bled. And the prince inquired of him, “What has befallen you?” And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob the money-changer's shop, and as I climbed in through the window I made a mistake and entered the weaver's shop, and in the dark I ran into the weaver's loom and my eye was plucked out. And now, O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.” Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed that one of his eyes should be plucked out. “O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just. It is right that one of my eyes be taken. And yet, alas! both are necessary to me in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave. But I have a neighbour, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in his trade both eyes are not necessary.” Then the prince sent for the cobbler. And he came. And they took out one of the cobbler's two eyes. And justice was satisfied.

“War” from The Madman; His Parables and Poems (A.A. Knopf, 1918) by Kahlil Gibran.


Without comment or critique, here are words and image from two Lebanese artists in these dangerous times. This post is mirrored at Rubedo.


IMAGE: after 19 says i started to cry (2006) by Mazen Kerbaj taken from his Kerblog entry for Sunday July 30th 2006.

Then Kill Caeser

“It’s a corrupting thought, you know, she said when the laughter faded, the idea that they deserve the worst of what they do. It’s so easy to become everything we hate. Their phallocracy toppled by our machismo.”
Bill Ayers in Fugitive Days

Well it’s “7/7” today, and working in central London I’ve seen the police on foot and I’ve seen the police on horseback and there’s been a helicopter in the air circling threateningly – It didn’t make me feel safe. Not that I was scared of terrorists, its guys with guns in uniforms that scare me.

Anyway, here’s an extract, pretty much straight, from yesterday’s diary entry written out of a whole other chain of thought and following on from recent Rubedo meditations:

“Bought three new books yesterday – The Game of War, a bio of Guy Debord, Risen – an occult novel by Peter Whitehead the 60s film-maker and Fugitive Days by Bill Ayers – the memoir of a guy who was in the Weather Underground, the US terrorist (?) group – I guess they were terrorists… Political violence is interesting, elusive – not violence – direct action? Very direct action? At what point does one take up arms against an oppressor? How pacifist are you? To the point of your own death? Go ahead and kill me I will not fight you? Kill my friends and family I will not fight you? Kill the planet and cause megadeath I will not fight you? This is all more complicated than “just wars” and acceptable forms of defence. But once you take up the sword – where does it end? Every moral conscience must be tuned to what is “right” - impossible.

Blowing up dams, tearing down adverts, breaking into arms factories and smashing up the machines, ceramic nails in trees, blowing up banks…

I don’t like the whiff of machismo inherent in these kinds of revolutionary action – but I do stare at my own passivity and wonder if the peaceful path leads anywhere at all. Looking back from the otherside of WW2 – almost any “terror” action against Hitler, the Nazis, fascists in the 1930s seems right and just – nobody would demonise the “terrorist” who threatened Hitler’s Germany. So after which rubicon will we look back see any actions made to halt the destruction of biodiversity, corruption of the biosphere, pollution of the atmosphere as holy justifiable acts – up to, and including, the assassination of the President of the United States?

As I write this I feel like its one of those diaries that security services produce to demonstrate the state of mind and evil intent of the defendant. The kind of police state nonsense that implies guilt through the publication of a select bibliography of your bookshelf. If I want to read and possess the Koran, Mein Kampf, Ted Kaczynski,Valerie Solanas, Trotsky, Ayn Rand, Collected Speeches of Usama bin Laden, Ho Chi Minh, Qaddafi, whoever – then I will – fuck you and don’t make out I’ve got an evil mind ‘cause I read evil books and… Not that I’m in this position of course, but whenever I read about the police arresting someone and somehow, “somebody” leaks to the tabloids the arrested person’s select reading list as part of an exercise in swinging public consciousness into a mode of pointy finger, knowledge of guilt a priori of the facts – then I worry about these things.

It’s too easy to overlook or forget situations like the police raid on Genesis P Orridge and not consider it important because Gen is weird, some gooky transvestite into piercings and weird shit I don’t want to know about etc. Hell, I don’t like a lot of what Gen does – but so fucking what? That’s up to him, and say what you like, he is not another unit of Western slave mind – weirdness is not guilt.

Every day the apparatus for the construction of a police state seems to silently be increasing its presence. The general hope is that British fair play and common sense will restrain it. Let’s hope so.”

I wrote this, thought about putting it up here, and then thought – could this get me into trouble? I have never thought that before in my life and it is pretty fucking scary that I should think it now.

A love that’s love - not fade away

Picked up Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge last week and read it in a few days, and now all of a sudden I’ve read all his novels. I’ve got to say that Fup is still my favourite, and I’m not sure whether this book or Stone Junction

should be coming in at number two. I think the only other thing out there is a book of poetry and I might get that before too long. What Jim Dodge does with the rest of his time I don’t know, I kind of surfed about the other day and gathered from skimming not reading interviews that he lives a woodsy kind of life, similar to Gary Snyder and the character who frames Not Fade Away’s narrative.

Gary Snyder… now his last book was good. Did you read it? Danger on Peaks. After I read it, I thought it kind of fitted in with some other recent-ish senex work from America’s grand old men – Burroughs’s Last Words, Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear, Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country , maybe Heller’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, Mailer’s Why are we at War?, Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War, Ram Dass’s Still Here (or that great documentary about him Fierce Grace – which also puts me in mind of Maybe Logic – the Robert Anton Wilson documentary…). So, anyway if you prefer the sage advice of your elders to whatever some radical young buck is telling you – there’s some elders for you to check out.

This reminds me of Neil Young’s comments in the LA Times recently about how he had to go out and speak against Bush with his Living with War album, because “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up, I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the 1960s generation.” I’m not sure how aware old Neil is that there are plenty of voices in the younger generations as vitriolic as him about Bush or the war, but if he’s looking to hear them on MTV or Clear Channel stations or the Billboard charts then he’s looking in the wrong places. The 60s youthquake that opened up a seam in mainstream culture that could be entered by contrary voices got sewn up a long time ago. Neil may not notice so much sitting on top of the seam there; he’s going to have dig the underground again to hear what he wants to hear.

But I love these old guys, and these old guys love and loved and helped manifest LOVE, so as they age and die off, I think we should listen to their final words.

a love that’s love - not fade away

Other People's Lies

Well loneliness and depression, isolation from my friends and hellish commuting have certainly done wonders for my reading. Even fiction has sneaked its way back in, as you’ll have noticed from previous entries on Valis and Ecotopia. Two other recent reads from the non-factual section of the bookshelf have been the novels Sideways by Rex Pickett and Thinly Veiled Autobiography by James Delingpole. Both funny, both very male – perhaps this aspect of them appealed somehow to my new monadic self. I felt some alienation from some of the ‘masculine’ attitudes presented in both books (but perhaps, again, this is just my hang-up).

I’ve not seen Sideways the film, although I’ve long wanted to, without ever realising there was a novel preceding it. Well now I’ve successfully achieved the tick in the box to denote ‘read the novel before seeing the film’ I can feel relaxed about renting the DVD. Renting the DVD… Where have all the video stores gone (long time passing by)? Everyone just seems to buy the things now (suckers!) or apparently renting them via the net is trés populaire. But I always like to avoid anything with a monthly direct debit attached to it if I possibly can. Modern life seems to full of these things that come with monthly direct debits attached – mobile phones, Sky, broadband, plus-accounts, gyms etc. etc. – You know that shit job you hate? Well if you weren’t whacking out £££ on all this useless crap every month – you could afford to go and do something else.

Anyway, rent the DVD – mind you it’s the sort of thing you see in Megastores for £4.99 these days – and how much less than that does it cost to rent a DVD in 2006?

Perhaps the film is better than the book? Write in if you’ve done both and let me know. It certainly made me want to learn more about wine. We could all do with more food and drink awareness – bring back taste!

Thinly Veiled Autobiography has no associated film, does include wine (but informs you little about it) and has the great advantage of being set in the UK and being written by a proper Britisher. So if you’re the same you can relax in its un-exoticness. Mind you its written by/about a public schoolboy who went to Oxford and wrote for the Telegraph and hung out with loads of posh rich people (its also about his anxiety about not being posh and rich enough to fit in) – so explained like that it hardly appeals and frankly you’d have had a hard time selling it to me with that write-up – but its also goddamn bloody funny. Humour is the great redeemer – and its the comedy of embarrassment to boot!

I only picked it up in the first place because I read Delingpole’s review of Shroom in Literary Review. In his author blurb, it talked about his preference for mushrooms over acid – since during a LSD trip he’d had his soul stolen by a man at the end of his cigarette called Mr Migarette. You can read all about that in Thinly Veiled Autobiography – reason enough surely?

Grow Your Own Hope

It’s a truism that speculative fiction tells the reader more about the present it was written in than about the future – a fact born out yet again by two pieces of this week’s reading.

If this fact is more evident in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia than it is in the “Ecopolis” articles in this week’s New Scientist (17/06/2006) then that only reveals our blindness to the conventions of our own time.

In Ecotopia the pungent reek of the early Seventies issues from practically every page. The fashions, the sexual politics, the marijuana usage – all speak of a particular hippy moment and now tend to detract from the deeper intention of the book to present a vision of a sustainable society. It’s easy now to fault Callenbach for this, but equally easy to see how important it was for him to present some vision of how a change in social mores could parallel and allow a change in the wider society. For me personally a degree of uneasiness was brought on by the louche promiscuity of Callenbach’s utopia. I’m prepared to accept that this could just be my hang-up – but it also seemed wrapped up in a vision of liberated womanhood more to do with male fantasy than female emancipation. The admirable intention of presenting a more feminine society, female leadership and sexual equality felt somewhat tainted by the air of a free-wheeling Lothario who really ‘understands’ and ‘digs’ women. Again, perhaps these are just my hang-ups.

If I’ve gone on at length about these aspects of the book that didn’t gel with me, that’s only to precede my declaration that I felt pretty down with most of the rest of its vision. Ignoring the conceit of the Pacific North West seceding from the USA, much of the novel seemed to present a realistic vision of a future society.

What is interesting comparing Ecotopia and Ecopolis are the similarities of vision presented 31 years apart (that very little has been implemented across the span of most of my entire life thus far - which that 31 years also personally represents - is rather depressing.)

The proposed new Chinese suburb-city of Dongtan is pedestrianised with electric vehicles, trains, urban greenery, urban food production, mass recycling and alternative energy generation. Not at all dissimilar to Ecotopia’s San Francisco. Peer a little deeper however and the cracks appear – both in the divergence of Ecotopian and Ecopolitan visions – and in the sustainable vision of Dongtan per se.

Dongtan is a new build – an entirely new satellite city for Shanghai “20 minutes drive” away. It is thus a very different beast to the retro-fitted San Francisco in Ecotopia. In this way the city sized debate mirrors the eco-home debate. One can start from scratch and build a brand new eco-home to the highest standards possible – but not everyone can do this. Our existing buildings also represent decades if not centuries of embodied energy that we are likely to waste (which we can ill afford) if we reject them, demolish them to build anew. If we could do it all, we could only do so by exploiting even more excessive amounts of the global energy supply –and this vision is clearly not sustainable on a local or global scale. We must follow a more earthy path of converting our existing housing stock to greater sustainability – retro fitting.

To the great credit of New Scientist it makes a critical analysis of Dongtan’s eco-credibility. The Dongtan vision proposed as a possible model for China’s future cities aims for a per-resident carbon footprint of 2.2 ha. This both exceeds the current footprint of the rural Chinese population (1.6 ha) that are migrating to become the new city dwellers (thus increasing China’s total footprint) and the “idealised global per capita footprint” (1.8ha – based on 2006 population levels). Dongtan is therefore not as bad as our conventional cities – but does not present in itself a sustainable vision. We could perhaps hope that developments like Dongtan will be bridging solutions to ever more sustainable implementations – but would we be correct in doing so? Retrofitting Shanghai for sustainability may have been a more useful activity. In fact, given that so much of Shanghai is itself new-build, one wonders where the true vision for sustainability lies. That Dongtan is perceived as having value as a tourist attraction perhaps indicates something of its showcase function.

The ecological problems faced by China will inevitably lead them towards some lower energy solutions, and the world can usefully benefit by learning from them. But will China put sustainability before growth? If it does not, can anything it does be truly sustainable?

Ecotopia is a steady-state economy that has sloughed off the demon driver of ‘growth’ – that totemic bugbear of capitalism eating away the world like a necrotic virus. It is the vision of capitalism, its modus operandi and belief systems which are the contemporary conventions permeating the speculations of Ecopolis. We can only hope that 31 years hence those seem as amusing and of their time as some of Callenbach’s seventies-ism. Otherwise we are well and truly screwed.