TOWARD SIMPLICITY

TOWARD SIMPLICITY

A number of progressive groups recently put out a plea for support. If people voted to make them the most highly supported, they would win a total of $600,000 from the Pepsi company. The groups involved in the effort are Center for Progressive Leadership, the White House Project, Young People For, ProgressOhio Education, Campus Progress, Elementz, and the American Constitution Society.

This group reads like mom and apple pie, and not to support it feels almost criminal. But yet I demure. I've been letting the request to vote every morning to support this consortium settle in my mind, and, for the moment, I have decided that there are higher priorities for my woefully underproductive and disorganized brain.

The problem I see is the incessant "chatter" of the Internet. Everybody has a good cause and needs help, but there is very little strategy or measurable progress on any front. The dolphins are saved in one place only to be gobbled up by an accelerated consumerist culture elsewhere. Economic growth, aligned to population explosion, is BY NATURE, destructive to the planet.

On speaking with realist artist Tony Ryder today, I felt a sense of corroboration. Tony is one of the nation's leading draftsmen, and is featured on the cover of the latest "The American Artist Drawing" magazine. He believes that "within mundane visual reality dwells the holy, transcendent presence of God." It is not typical artist talk. And with this big truth he is firmly rooted in his practice of making light, and nothing else, dictate the outcome of his drawing. He is not moved by fashion and the buzzwords of the art world. He is dedicated to celebrating--in his teaching and his own practice--the miracle of light

My big truth is the land. It is similarly dependent on the acknowledgement of a great moral truth. Like light in its totality of scope, land, including the seas and the rivers, is the unified whole that defines the marble in space called Earth. Just as Tony will not be distracted by this, that and the other fashion--seductive as they might be--I am unimpressed with any movement that does not rest on the acceptance of the unified field of Earth's landscape.

What I advocate is an artist-led program to promote ORDER. All the fractured efforts out there need to coalesce into an orderly, coherent and systematic whole. I'd like to get behind a national infrastructure program that addresses all the million issues that scatter about like space junk. An infrastructure program connects one place to another in an orderly way. It also connects issues. Infrastructure is at once quantitative and qualitative.

The unity--the common landscape--should come BEFORE fractious groups get to play on it The unified-landscape determinism is totally different (and takes place at a different level) from the fields of endeavor taking place on it. If a benevolent, all-powerful dictator were to prescribe this unity, then various groups would have to think about something they don't begin to consider now. I think it would change the status quo. If it is clear that what happens in one corner affects what happens in the opposite end, the dolphins saved in one place won't be gobbled up elsewhere. I throw out a sprinkling of issues--infinitely preliminary, like an "envelop" in which a drawing, with all its details, will later be contained. Below, are a few areas of activism that could be subsumed and synchronized under an ambitious infrastructure program.:

Energy: an intra-national circulation system, promoting walking and bike trails, and maybe some rail, would get people moving around more where they live and depending less on driving or flying to distant places. (While I don't support big-grid energy distribution, I can compromise around it as an infrastructure issue.)

Animal Welfare: See a huge system of highway and road underpasses for animals, to drastically reduce road kill and enable animals to migrate as they need in order to survive and thrive in the wild.

Environment: Billions of trees are planted along circulation paths and elsewhere, absorbing CO 2, preventing erosion, etc., etc.

Education: See kids researching the ecology along trails.

Jobs: Every individual who doesn't mind breaking a sweat gets work.

Immigration: If the vision behind the infrastructure is grand enough--like the interstate highway project of the 1950's--the horrible bigotry against a guest worker program to help
build it might be (politically) neutralized.

I could continue, but won't bore the reader further. This is only meant to point the way to discussion and thought.