A famous motivational speaker these days says “you’ve got to spend 95% of your time on the solution.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this–how our dominant American society focuses on solutions. A pragmatic, “this is how the world is, and we need to deal with this” point of view. Protestantism in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
But, for example–the fossil fuel industry is a result of focusing on solutions. We needed fuel for machines; an accidental discovery led to a circular path of explosive growth and total dependence. For the first 50-75 years, few asked “is this the right thing? what are the implications of using this? is there a better way? do we even need all these gas-powered machines anyway?”
In urban design and planning, there’s a real optimism that we can solve problems better with each passing year, despite an astounding lack of proof. Planners and policymakers in the early 20th century thought that they could transform the world by building highways and freeways to encourage automobile travel–really, to encourage mobility. To get people to go places.
They were right–people did go places, but it transformed the country and landscape in unimaginable ways. Unimaginable to planners of 70 years ago, anyway. And that’s the point–they couldn’t foresee the impact of their decisions, but did it anyway.
Now, we spend billions of dollars and millions of hours trying to fix that “solution” proposed so long ago. In fact, when you examine urban design today, we spend most of our time attempting to “fix” tremendously bad past decisions. Fossil fuel. Automobiles. Pollution. Coal-fueled power plants. Nuclear power. Cigarettes. Cheap, mass-produced handguns. Selling arms to Iraq in the 80s.
Some might retort “but look at all the good we’ve accomplished.” My answer is–at what cost? And, “good” outcomes are a matter of perspective I suppose, because several million cars sure seemed like a good idea in 1945. Concrete sure seemed like a great building material until we realized making it produces a stunning amount of pollution.
Politics works this way in America too–a near-constant state of emergency, contingencies, dealing with complexity that results in us being a jack of all issues but a master of none. We want to grow, or else we fear our cities/states/nation will die. We want convenience, all options to be open, to consume as much as we are able to get our hands on.
This isn’t always the way it was. This belief in a cycle of inevitable growth, that innovation and technology will (eventually) solve our problems is a very recent social phenomenon. By recent, I mean within the past 300-500 years.
We’ve trapped ourselves in this cycle. Nobody wants to look up from the business of “progress” long enough to see that, in fact, there’s not much progress going on, only change.
In Portland, we’re watching this all happen on a local scale. Portland, once an affordable, friendly city that wasn’t too overtly focused on growth, has become a forest of condo towers, with overall one of the least affordable home markets in the nation. A filthy river that was once pristine but now you can’t even swim in. Growing crime. Disappearing middle class, like much of the rest of America. Growing poverty and hunger.
Yet despite all this, Portland is touted as a “green” city, a model of urban planning, a model of how cities should work. Organizations like SustainLane heap praise on it, praise that is telling in it’s glaring omission of what is fundamentally wrong, what fundamentally makes Portland unsustainable and ever more difficult to live in.
I believe we need new standards. Not based on what technology is capable of providing but, as Wendell Berry says, standards derived from “the nature of places and communities.†And, I believe we need new standards of design. Those standards must place human and ecological health first, always. Not fads, not efficiency, not cost, but health.
This means limiting growth, of course, probably severely. Living on a much smaller scale, and doing all that that requires. Living up to those standards and not deviating when a big-box retailer demands concessions to locate in your city, for example.
1 response so far ↓
1 pet cow // Apr 1, 2007 at 11:28 pm
so i’ve always wondered; whenever i read, or hear someone suggest that we need to limit growth or stop growth, exactly what do you mean by that? and, can you explain how you might do it?
when i hear “limit growth” i associate that primarily with population growth, and perhaps secondarily concerning economic growth/development. but that is me, and along those lines i can’t think of a way to do it it without some tyrannical policies. rather, i’d love to hear what it means to you.
perhaps a topic for How to Act in Ignorance, Part III?
Leave a Comment