One block at a time; one neighborhood at a time; one city, town or village at a time; one county, parish or district at a time; one nation at a time; one planet, everyone rowing in the same direction.
© Trevor Burrowes
1) Being the de facto head of world governance, the US president is concerned with the entire scope of major world issues.
2) There is a way to wrap world governance issues up into a ball and address them systematically.
3) The world governance ball of issues is the physical planet.
4) Our cultural traditions have taught us to see the world as fractured little fiefdoms, and not as a unified, physical whole. This needs to change.
5) Humanity must evolve to take in the whole planet as a single sphere of governance.
6) Climate change is the best catalyst for this evolution, since it is no respecter of geopolitical boundaries. More than any other issue, climate change affects all living beings in the world.
7) The discipline of planning (as in urban planning and city General Plans, which involve comprehensive land-based planning) is one through which the president can wrap his mind around the globe’s major challenges and opportunities.
8) Every square inch of the planet falls firmly or loosely under some planning jurisdiction or other. In the US, planning jurisdictions can be cities, counties, states, federal government, tribal governments, and overlapping jurisdictions like national parks, rivers, oceans, bioregions, metropolitan districts, etc..
9) Plans are also supposed to be internally consistent, so that one element of a plan, like open space, can be consistent with another, like community health, if open space encourages people to walk more.
10) We need an overarching policy from the federal government requiring that a) various plans lead to common sustainability goals, and that b) all plans within the nation be consistent with each other. Barring this, individual plans are largely ineffective in fostering big picture change.
11) Stimulus funding should apply to projects that are consistent with sustainable planning (economically and environmentally) in any given area.
12) Foreign aid and intervention should help direct international planning toward internal consistency and sustainability on a global level.
13) A survey of plans nationwide and globally is needed. The aim should be to assess the effects, benefits, deficits, gaps, and possibilities for international planning for global sustainability.
IMAGES:
Image 1: The world is a work of art in progress. It is like painting a picture on a grid. Each square of the grid represents a geopolitical area. For each geopolitical area there is a plan. But the image being “painted” comprises all the squares and all the plans, which must coordinate with each other to convincingly render the overall image.
Image 2: While the overall image of the picture is brushed in broadly, there are various other kinds of intervention such as details within squares, or glosses that cover many squares. It is the same with planning. The fine-detail level of a plan could be as small as a street block in scale, while an internationally agreed-to “gloss” could extend planet-wide.
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I find big things easier to comprehend than little things. Since most people (in the Western world at any rate) are just the opposite, I’m always going against the grain. I can’t find any corroboration for my view that it is very easy to correct Earth’s climate and other critical woes if we think big enough. And it’s tempting to go off in a corner and leave the world to its dealings.
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
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1 comment:
It's as good a plan as any I've heard. I hope it's not too late for the planet.
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