Udopeia

I have many ideas for my utopian society.  Briefly recalling the soma and sex as proposed in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, I thought, Hey! that doesn’t seem too bad… But I can’t remember why that sophomore year of high school novel is dystopian.  Too much soma…  Maybe, it’s that one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia. 

The utopia I have been giving most thought to lately given my growing interest in ancestral health and the original human diet from the Paleolithic era 9000 B.C., would be tribes running around barefoot while spearing wild game and falling asleep under the stars.  But this would be more of a watch over your own hide free market, I guess.  And after witnessing those Ron Paul zealots tonight I’m not interested in writing about the free market. 

Instead I’ll pen my progressive democratic utopia without straying from the bulk of the political structure.  In my utopia I envision the 1950’s middle class without the racism and cold war crap.  Corporations hardly exist, except to make cool things like iPhones and Xbox’s.   The government is by, for, and of the people.  The biggest problem in politics today that dirty corporate money has infested democracy.  Politicians should be a direct representation of the people in their district, not the business and money.  Also the senate blows.  Fuck a filibuster. 

I believe 90% of people are good.  And the 10% of bad people have the power and dough in this country.  In my democratic utopia they only have as much power as the next voter.  I want an egalitarian country where everyone has an opportunity to live the middle class life.   This is a tough concept for many people.  We all want to be billionaires and greed is ingrained in the American psyche.  I think that by bringing the extremes of the poor and rich to the middle class it changes some of the preset notions of greed and wealth. 

I think it is difficult to think about the environment and care for it when we are so entrenched in the global, multi-national economy.  By limiting the corporate money influence and promoting local economies, I think that environmental compassion will thrive.  Localism makes the world smaller and more manageable.  With a stronger democracy without that outside money influence I believe that people would vote to preserve the environment.  

The Ark

For the past month, Scott Russel Sanders A Conservationist Manifesto had become a mantel piece on my nightstand.  I figured this mellifluous and trying prose to be excellent bedtime reading.  My reservations for not cracking open this manifesto until recently included me always wanting to sleep when I get in my bed and me forecasting his philosophies to be lacking pragmatism.

In part one Sander’s weaves this conservationist themed tale through local stories like the tree hippies who want to preserve the Brown’s Woods from development and the redefinition of common words like commons.  He makes the case for building arks not to protect us from the flooding rapture of God, although he notes the rising sea level due to global warming as an indirect benefit of building an ark, but as this quote from p.14 best defines an ark as, “any human structure, invention, or collaboration that preserves the wisdom necessary for meeting our needs without despoiling the planet.”  As ark-builders we need to preserve the natural earth, life, and knowledge in its many natural forms while consuming less. 

This ark concept really resonates with my passion for permaculture.  Permaculture is a way of raising plants and animals in a self-sustaining environment that fosters symbiotic relationships between all plants and animals involved.  For instance, an example of permaculture on a farm could be cows grazing on a prairie where they can trample their cow pies (fertilizer) into the earth to create a rich soil humus that sustains a verdant mixed salad of grasses.  The symbiosis continues with the chickens who follow the cows and pick out all of the bugs and insects out of the cows manure while clawing the fertilizer deeper into the earth.  An egg carton would lead you to believe chickens are vegetarians with their claims of 100% vegetarian fed but really there are foragers whose favorite food is bugs.  Eggs from pastured chickens with access to bugs have deep orange yolks loaded with beta-carotene (the vitamin A in carrots that makes them orange) while conventional eggs and even organic eggs have pale, lifelessly yellow yolks.  I could go on about this cycle and biodynamic farming forever but the main point is that man, with proper knowledge, can design organic systems in accordance with nature in a way that enhances biodiversity. 

Here are the three girls hanging out, eating bugs in the backyard:

The swelling flood Sanders warns of could take the forms of global food shortages, an energy crisis, or war.  In any case the solution is localism.  Eating local, buying local, and consuming less are his resolutions.  If a crisis were come to root, I feel that my arc would be decent.   This past summer at home I tended a garden of spinach, lettuces, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and many herbs.   For the first time we hosted three chickens in our backyard who would lay about 3 eggs every morning.  I dried my clothes in the sun when I could and kept a lively compost.  At school I shop exclusively at Bloomingfoods and am also a farmshare holder at Maple Valley Farm located northwest of Bloomington.  Although these are effective ways to subvert our global economy that ails the planet, they are not easy, convenient, nor affordable which are the criteria for Americans to implement meaningful change.    

As much as I am ostensibly entrenched in the localism dogma as the panacea to the “American way of life”, I am still conflicted.  In Sanders characteristically beautiful way with words, the American way of life is, “an infantile dream of endless consumption, novelty, and endless play.”  Even though I am more environmentally conscious and in tune than most Americans, I would be lying if I said I didn’t dream often of flying in my private jet across the English Channel while eating caviar and looking at my reflection.  The Scott Russell Sanders objective is to change the American narrative of excessive consumption and private wealth to that of simplicity, conservation, and community.  For this ambitious indoctrination to work, I would be a good place to start.  But private planes and good food are pretty cool too.

Loose Change

So Barack Obama isn’t the progressive that liberals championed for.  Get over it.  It's painful, I know.  I got swept up in Obamarama too.  But do you know what Barack Obama was?  He was the winner.  He was the one that defeated the Republican army who dismantled and rigged America for eight years.  He flipped race on its head.   He inspired a whole new legion of young democrats for generations to come. 

He came to Washington with an audacious agenda and a wave of support.  Washington met him with massive deficits and a Republican party that is unanimously opposed to everything.   Being the conciliatory character that he is, Obama reached across the aisle for bipartisanships sake and ended up bargaining away and watering down much of the policy that his base had envisioned to become change.  During the campaign we progressives drummed up this FDR like narrative for Obama when really a more accurate depiction would be that he is the consummate centrist.  I believe that it is not in Obama's character to pass fully effective progressive policy like the public option because it has never been in his plans to change the big industry paradigm in health, wall street, and energy.  Rather, Obama has always believed in his ability to ingratiate himself with the interests and bring them into his pragmatic yet not forward enough vision of compromise.  His policies and actions taken to pass them certainly reflect this.


President Obama passed an economic stimulus (half the size it should have been but all in all, saved us from a depression).  He huddled with the AMA, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance firms to make sure they were on board for the weak health care reform (without the public option,*shreik*).  Next was Wall Street reform where Obama's idea was to surround himself with Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke who are all intimately involved with the financial crisis (no ulterior motives here!).  Here is a fascinating NYT Book Review about Obama's psyche and his conciliatory character.

Now it’s your turn environment.  The “Change We Can Believe In” campaign certainly captivated environmentalists.  Obama preached for investing in renewable energy and green technology for the future.  His other initiatives included a focus on public transportation and a moratorium on offshore drilling.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a big step forward in the green future as it was a large investment in alternative energy like solar and wind power.  That's all good and great.  Where it got sticky was with the moratorium on new offshore drilling.  Weeks before the oil spill in the gulf, he lifted the moratorium and proclaimed it was safe technology.  Well it wasn’t.    The administration acted swiftly with holding BP accountable for the mess.  Obama could have really used this tragedy as a catalyst for a climate bill but he really fumbled on the issue.  Not allowing media access to the clean up continued to stupefy environmentalists.  As far as I am concerned the greatest environmental tragedy in the gulf isn’t just the oil, it's the dispersant. Dispersant toxicity and hoax information.   The energy industry including BP were some of Obama’s biggest political donors making me particularly wary of the administrations environmental policy.  Obama crafted the sell-out healthcare bill with regular meetings with the AMA, large pharmaceutical companies, and the insurance companies.  Why would the climate bill or environmental policy be any different?

I do believe the climate bill is important to Obama and he is the only person in America that can get it passed.   Congress won’t pass such controversial, wide-ranging policy without it being Obama’s number one issue that he is campaigning for.  Unfortunately, I don’t see this bill being passed until after the 2012 elections and it will be bloodier than the health care fight that lasted a year.  I wish he didn’t punt on the climate bill this summer.  The oil spill and the environment were at their most salient.  Now that the oil stopped gushing and all the oil has been dispersed into smaller, more dangerous particles, Americans have moved on.  Any time I go on a critical diatribe on Obama the centrist, I try to cool down and remember that even though I’m not totally supportive of his policies, he is the right leader for America and it’s certainly not an easy job.   I guess I find myself forming a compromise.  Damn he's good.   

Rules of the Game

I have a favorite analogy I like to use when it comes to talking about government regulation in business and environmental matters.  Throwing a football around with a friend is like the free market.  I have the ball and I want to throw it--my friend wants to catch it--so we make an exchange.  Throw and catch is fun for only so long.  We want to play a game so we gather some people to play against us.  With a pickup game there is lots of variation with the rules to which you play.  Tackle, two hand touch, QB sneak, one blitz every four downs, pads and helmets, clock or score finish etc.  Even though you may have rules in place it doesn’t mean they will be enforced or the game played fairly.  This type of game requires voluntary action between the competitors and this is often ineffective because it requires honesty and good faith.  But many competitors take an unscrupulous “by any means necessary” approach to winning the game as a corporation would to their bottom line.  Just as someone lying about being touched in a two-hand touch football game, a chemical plant could easily lie about the previously agreed upon amount of chemicals they were polluting in the river because no one was there to hold them accountable but themselves.  Enough of this conservative ideology analogy. 

On the light side of the force is the liberal pro-regulation point of view.  There is no better representation of this than the NFL, or National Football league.   When the league was formed 50 years ago the players wore leather hats impersonating helmets and the field goal post was at the front of the end zone.  Every year since Super Bowl I the league has added new rules and regulations like unnecessary roughness penalties, drug testing, and the salary cap to create parity and fairness.  Anytime they added a new rule, say pass interference, it was always met with objection by a portion of players and fans who thought that it was unfair to the defense who couldn’t be as physical.  The great thing about regulation is that it forces change and innovation.  In the case of pass interference, the change and innovation came from the cornerback, the player who guards the receiver, becoming a smaller, more agile player that was able to keep up with the quickness of the receiver while not having to use brute force, which required a heavier and stronger cornerback, to knock the receiver off his routes.  Innovation thrives on constraints and environmental regulation certainly creates constraints. 

California has long been a leader in progressive automotive pollution control standards because they have been able to leverage car manufacturers to create new and environmentally friendly technology like the catalytic converter by restricting company’s access to their giant car market unless they meet the standards set by the state.  Environmental regulation needs to be lead by the federal government because pollution is such a transboundary problem.  Although in most cases I believe that the states also have an important role in regulating their own point-source pollution, many of the individual states interests are entrenched with the industries creating the pollution such as natural gas drilling which I believe is the most frightening pollution in America.  An excellent documentary premiered on HBO this summer on the paradox of natural gas.  Gasland Trailer 

To my dismay as a stout pro-(strong)regulation, it seems the direction America’s environment policy is headed is the market-based instrument like cap and trade.  To an environmentalist like myself the cap and trade is not nearly aggressive enough to curb pollution and the idea that you can buy up permits to continue polluting is maddening.  This seems overly complicated and easy to rig for the multi-national corporations like everything else is.  Some MBI’s I believe in that have had success are those that offer tax breaks to technologically innovative companies or individuals who buy Hybrid cars.  What I want to see is new rules, not a new game.  

Philosophically Speaking

While my intractable environmental philosophy needs some time to set, I’ll start with my social and economic ideology which is much more concrete.  I grew up in an extremely liberal town called Oak Park which is the first suburb west of Chicago, Illinois.  Oak Park is connected to the CTA’s green line and blue line train granting us “Chicago” status when asked about where we’re from.  Know for Ernest Hemmingway and Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park has an excellent public school system and I went to one of the most racially diverse high schools in Illinois in terms of ratio of White and Black.  Oak Park was named “Gay Town USA” a few years back and the high school, Oak Park and River Forest HS frequently headlined as “Smoke Park and Reefer Forest.”

My parents are progressive and the years of brainwashing me with the progressive radio likes of newly Senator Al Franken and Thom Hartmann has pushed me pretty far left.  My mom grew up on a large farm in central Illinois two hours from our place in the city.  They farm Monsanto’s poison and raise naturally raised grass-fed beef.  Spread throughout the farm is hundreds of acres of natural Illinois prairie and forests the government pays us to keep intact.  Almost satirically, they also pay us to grow the excess killer corn and soybeans.  Growing up I was a weekend farm boy and a school week city kid.  My grandparents on the farm always tended a healthful garden, pickled everything, and were self-subsistent three seasons out of the year.  They surely influenced my passion for organics, cooking, gardening, and raising animals.

These intimate experiences with the natural environment, living in a diverse urban community, and my penchant for natural food have significantly shaped my liberal social and economic ideology.  I believe in a strong democracy with a government by, for, and of the people without the intrusion of business and special interests.  I believe in a strong government intervention and regulations in the economy, specifically dealing with multi-national corporations.  I believe in the middle class, high taxes on the rich, a social safety net, a vibrant public works, and the protection of the commons.  I’ve been quite satisfied with the government services provided for me in my life like my public education and public transit.

Here’s where I jump on the Libertarian tracks. I don’t like the government telling me what to eat or do in my bedroom, pasteurizing my milk, or subsidizing commodity crops.  I don’t agree with the government privatizing the public works or hanging out in the middle east.  But I have faith in a true, uncorrupt democracy of the people and not the corporation.  I think people identifying with Libertarian positions are often critiquing the results of facism.  I feel that libertarians  open their mouths after the roads have been laid and social safety nets have been woven into our culture, and then in self-serving fashion they spout t their singular anti-social diatribes.  I won’t even waste my breath on republicans.

My thoughts and practice with environmental philosophy clash.  My thoughts identify with the holist perspective in its most elementary definition that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts and there is an interdependent unity of humans and non-humans.   I believe our planet and its many ecosystems to be greater than the individual life they sustain.   Although I find this to be agreeable, it is far too simplified and there are critiques of holism and deep ecology to note.  There is no scientific evidence to give mountains, streams, and grass intrinsic value so one has to be a little out there for this philosophy. I’ve spent plenty of time in the natural wilderness to reflect on my relationship with nature crafting my belief that I’m a part of nature. Because as a human I have intrinsic value and nature is a part of me, nature also has intrinsic value.  Another hole in the holist philosophy worth addressing is whether or not holders of intrinsic value posses equal amounts of it.  Just because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts does not mean that there isn’t a hierarchical structure of the parts.   Sentience trumps rocks and trees, and of all the sentient creatures on earth man is king.  As king of all sentient life on the planet we have a responsibility to preserve the biodiversity of the planet.

As I mentioned above that the philosophy I believe in is not necessarily the one I practice.  At school surrounded by 40,000 thousand other humans it becomes difficult not to think in anthropocentric ideology.  While with society I seem to borrow their conservationist principles.  I use red plastic cups and paper towels frequently.  I don’t have the same compassion for non-humans and the environment while at school.  When I’m with nature I operate in the holistic philosophy.  It will be fascinating to keep track of this ideology in the future.