Sustainability

1. Class 24: Localization Sustainability POLI 294 Fall 2012

2. Blessed Unrest: Attack on Coke • Coke/Pepsi: • Highest pesticide residue of any soft drink • Heavy metal content of processed sludge distributed to farmer • Consuming mass quantities of water and producing waste • Violation of basic human rts • Health issues: diabetes, obesity • Waste stream  landfills • Marketing and misleading ads/press reports • Highlights concerns of a rts of a community and consumers vs. the rts of a corporation

3. Blessed Unrest Main Point • Demonstrates deep systemic issues that perpetuate “endless injustices and hurts endured by the earth and its people” • Largest social mvmt to counter these issues (unnamed movement)  combines shared understanding globally around • Social justice • Environment • Indigenous culture • Fundamentally about civil rts, human rts and and democratic mvmt • Hope is found in an “assembly of humanity that is representative but not centralized, because no single ideology can ever heal the wounds of this world.”

4. Blessed Unrest  Conclusion • “To come together we must know our place in a biological and cultural sense, and reclaim our role as engaged agents of our continued existence…We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our genes and lymphocytes, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are.”

5. Vids • Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest • Hawken, The High Cost of Cheap Food

6. Inhabiting Place -- Thayer • “Whereas many forces of modern society feel like ‘something that is being done to us’ and out of control’, localization is internal to our place and something we can indeed influence.” • Need to “reinhabit” place to its benefit • “the newly globalize and highly specialized society in which we now find ourselves embedded is not the evolutionary norm; rather, what sustains us are finite natural territories inhabited by small bands of humans. We establish groups working on behalf of river basins or mountain ranges simply because it feels quite natural.” • Critique: Most people (Americans) do not connect with Natural space anymore. Connecting with each other may be a better option. Also, no longer “small bands of humans”…

7. Ecovillages and Deep Community -- Litfin • Studied 14 communities around world • Conclusion: no unified ideology or culture, but unified in their “commitment to affirmative politics—rather than a politics of protest...Many ecovillages are ‘dynamic nodes of global engagement’ not isolated enclaves of extreme localism.” • Ecovillages are based on radical interdependence and holism—contrary to modern society • “rather than waiting for the ‘revolution’, they are prefiguring a viable future by creating parallel structures for self-governance in midst of prevailing social order…and based on culture of abundance.” • Linked in many pragmatic ways to Hawken’s argument in Blessed Unrest about overlapping synergistic movements.

8. Concepts: Permaculture and Ecovillages Ecovillages Permaculture • 1. Design from nature • 2. catch and store energy • 3. make the smallest intervention necessary • 4. use small and slow solutions • 5. apply self-regulation and accept feedback • 6. produce no waste • 7. use and value divesity • 8. integrate rather than segregate • 1. Take care of earth –for all life systems to continue & multiply • 2. Take care of People – need to access resources necessary for existence • 3. Share the surplus – by governing our own needs we set aside resources to meet 1&2

9. Litfin “Holism Linking Self to World • “serves as a source of meaning for the individual…Rather than becoming lost in the whole, which from the atomistic perspective of modernity would be the inevitable fear each indiv inhabits the center of a series of concentric circles beginning with home and extending to community, ecosys, nation and planet. This holism challenges the possessive individualism of modern consumer culture by integrating person and planet within the context of community. Recognizing their own complicity in replicating social structures that threaten to unravel Earth’s life support systems, Eco villagers accept responsibility for their own lives even as they seek to invent alternative social structures.”

10. Critiques • Some view eco-villagers as “self-indulgent, escapist, and ineffective responses to the powerful global forces that perpetuate global socioeconomic injustice and enviro degradation.” • Difficult to scale UP. Part of critique #1. • Requires individuals in community spaces to lead the charge AND to be then strategically linked to global spaces, institutions and processes.

11. Ecological Democracy - Dryzek • “Discursive Democracy” > alternative governance models for issues based on ecology, particularly for responding to “limits” • There is no guarantee that democracy, properly understood, will produce an ecologically benign substance. • However, the tenets of grassroots participatory democracy (based on decentralization and community self-control) would have decidedly “anti-ecological substantive consequences…look at the US West (unsuccessful)…decentralization will only work to the extent local recipients of authority subscribe to ecological values, or, alternatively, the degree to which they must stay put and depend for their livelihoods solely on what can be produced locally.” • Therefore political structure matters less than the adoption of “green values” or the occupancy of key positions.

12. Ecological Democracy • Because of liberal democracies embeddness in neoliberal capitalist structures, they are limited. • Communication is critical when thinking about relations between nature and humans…”the key here is seeking more egalitarian interchange at the human/natural boundary…[where] ecol democratization is a matter of more effective integration of political and ecological communication.” • Discursive democracy is based on the content and style of interactions, NOT the aggregation of interests or preferences of a well-defined and well-bounded group. • Local entities understand the boundaries and limits of local – and are better placed to deliberate over them (rather than an aggregate of interests). This can lead to the “dismantling of what is perhaps the biggest political boundary: that between the human and nonhuman world.”

13. Discursive Democracy • “A capacity for effective and egalitarian listening is an essential component; it is also helpful in undermining unequal power distributions.” • Allows us to “listen to feedback from natural signals”  about the regulative ideal (differs from aggregative liberals, deliberative democrats and green democrats). Green democrats the regulative ideal is “effectiveness in communication that transcends the boundary of human world” (not aggregate interests or free discourse about issues/interests) • This communication moves us from a politics of presence to a politics of ideas. • “The construction of democracy should itself be discursive, democratic, sensitive to ecological signals—and open-ended. Need to be institutionally experimental and variety/diversity across different contexts”

14. Global Problems, Local Solutions - Hess • The primary “hope is based on an assumption that technological innovation can be rapid enough to compensate for the environmental impact that accompanies increased econ growth, and that gov’ts can provide adequate policy solutions before the catastrophic enviro effects of ongoing econ growth and ecological collapse are widely felt.” • Too many conflicting forces at work at too many scales…as a result, “too many corps benefit from enviro degradation, and solutions that emerge from the political process, are likely to be piecemeal and watered down.” • The current “greening process” is too slow and this dilution and unequal power distribution will lead to “an ongoing enviro crisis and an uneven, decades-long, historical transition to societal collapse.”

15. Localist Alternatives -- Hess • Address the problem behind the problem – the “failure of political and econ institutions to respond adequately and rapidly to the enviro crises.” • Localist movement—support of gov’t policies and economic practices oriented toward enhancing local democracy and local indep ownership of the economy – in juxtaposition with corporate-led globalization.” • Small is Beautiful 2.0  historic localism combined with an “economic base in preexisting economic class and with greater concern for indep ownership (than with appropriate technology)” • Localism is different than socialism, communism or anarchism – because it emphasizes diversity, where different types of coalitions drive the system  where the bluest of Democrats may find themselves agreeing with the reddest of Republicans, at least on strategy of local economic control as a means for improving environmental, health and quality of life of their shared, placed-based communities.”