CEMENT TRUCKS
Cement truckers have numerous incentives to break laws or quasi laws in order to make a living. This is produced by a system of silo thinking where dots are not connected. For instance, the cement is being transported from Tijeras to the south end of Santa Fe (Cerrillos Rd and 599 corridor?) Since the county, city developers, DOT,and the city don't communicate with each other, the problem of cement trucks falls on ordinary people who face risks from a system that is not accountable to them. It's just a case of power and money dominating what gets attention and what does not. A more strategic level of planning that brings city, county, state and communities together in one room and a resulting coordinated effort to address the underlying system pressures and gaps MIGHT result in some stable improvement. Leaving the problem of cement trucks to time and business-as-usual is clearly a non solution.
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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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