Thinking Globally: September 2018

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

HOUSING

A lot of what seems to be needed is housing with electricity on a planet-wide basis. This will require manufacture of building materials and energy to make electricity. Where, for whom and how this housing is installed could be so varied as to make the term "houses" very confusing. It will use a lot of oil (and coal), but not in a way that I would expect to clearly known. A great many people who could be engaged in related industries are in schools learning nonsense, or otherwise doing useless things. Meanwhile, there is too much of an assumption that how we do housing now is the only economic way to do it.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Fabian Stewart

7 hrs

A typical Jamaican Country House with Verandah and Gingerbread Eaves.

Image may contain: house, sky, tree, outdoor and nature

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Gloria Shakespear This house reminds me.of the house of my great grand father,passed on to my grand father.
It was much higher and the Cellar at the bottom was used to store saddles,hampers,large containers for produce.Was as large as the upper.floor where we lived Cellar was also used as living space for.workers years ago.It was destroyed in one.of.the Hurricanes in the 1950s,not so sure of the name.Was a very big house.

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A.j. Johnson replied8 Replies2 hrs

Celia Whittingham Love it..me too, reminds me of vrandparents home on Mobtego Bay..

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Laura McGregor Memories

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Sue Weis Herbst beautiful love di tin roof

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Paddy Evelyn Ellis My aunt used to live in a house like this

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Tyrone Patrick Chin I lived in a house like this in Moneague. Best time growing up.

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Emil Wade Dawkins My Grandparents had a similar design.

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Bobby Mills Used to love listening to the rain on the roof at night...

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David Taylor Love the little roof over the living room!

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A.j. Johnson I think that's where had lath be and gablin I only remember my Granny using the words laths are wooden beams that I know Gablin???

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Trevor Burrowes I found it hard to read (situate) the roof from this angle. Your post now clears it up. The deepish tray of the roof would cool the living room. Got it!

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Wynston Scott A.j. Johnson , a gable roof. A roofing style added to the roof?

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A.j. Johnson Wynston Scott I had an idea but it was so long because old time hang things up there then but thanks again for solidifying my thoughts once again

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Mary Espeut-Campanelli So beautiful

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Clover Bell there's just something warm and homey about these dwellings

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Human scale is one factor maybe. But there's so much else. They figured out how to make the best of the breeze perhaps. Verandah, roof, cellar. Kindness to the land by elevating the building off it. Wood. Wood is warm and comforting, and wood carving stayed in our genes even if it had to be transplanted from shamanic images to architecture instead ...

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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?

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Fabian Stewart

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